I’ve been going on quite a bit recently about the changes in the economics of delivering software as a service, particularly relating to Cloud Computing – which leads me to a great article that came out this weekend from the New York Times, on the impending battle between Google & Microsoft.
SynthaSite launched our Alpha on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, and it held up perfectly – although it was not easy to scale the application architecture and we’re going to work on that – so in the interim we’re using some standard servers while we build out our virtualization infrastructure.
The future of the software is certainly in the cloud and delivered through the browser – Microsoft is not arguing about that – but they would prefer to ensure that it’s tied to the desktop in some way (and obviously IE). With the fragmentation that’s occurring as a desktop level (Linux, Mac, Ubuntu, etc), I doubt that this is a good long term strategy (in fact, they’re actually missing the plot totally) – especially given what a flop Vista is. That said, the article above is a great read!
The thing that really concerns me, is that if Microsoft really believes that applications should live in the browser – then why do they build IE only applications (such as Office Live). It’s really frustrating to not have cross browser compatibility – the browser is the new operating system, believe it or not…
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