The times are hard at Microsoft, and it’s disappointing they couldn’t release betas of their online Office. There’s a lot of products like that at Microsoft, they just keep lagging behind and being one-upped by other companies, most particularly Google. While Office Online is a response to Google Docs, and while Microsoft can’t even get a beta out by now, Google is removing the beta mark on theirs.
The same thing is happening to a lot of other products. Microsoft just seems to be answering constantly. Take a look at Microsoft Azure. It’s still in a very limited preview. On the other side, Google is adding its 2nd language (Java) to its App Engine platform that already supports a comprehensive payment system. Azure isn’t even ready to a public beta yet.
Before Google started attacking Microsoft directly, we used to see Microsoft constantly answering Apple. For a lot of stuff, Microsoft did have the idea before, like Indexed Search, but the other companies just implemented it faster, so it doesn’t matter who had the idea first. Look at Google Chrome OS. Microsoft doesn’t even have an answer to that.
Even Silverlight is constantly being one-upped by Flash, which supported H.264 earlier, as well as desktop apps with Adobe Air, which have just recently been answered by Silverlight 3.0, but still in a lesser complete manner.
So, yes, Microsoft has a really promising platform. Truth is, developing for Microsoft products is a compelling experience. Their environment is so tightly integrated. But can they keep up? I don’t know if waiting on for Microsoft to launch Azure while your competitors are making strides with App Engine is a good business decision. The same goes with every other products. You could wait for Microsoft to come out with an Online version of its more complete Office Suite, or use Google’s right away.
All in all, only time will tell. If Google is able to catch up on Microsoft’s integration quality while keeping up with the alluring speed, there’s very few chances for Microsoft to strive in the new cloud computing world, even as a back-end (ASP.net) and application front-end (Silverlight) provider. Arguably the only real reasons I’d see that enterprises still want to use Microsoft products is the privacy issues related to having all your back-end hosted externally.
