Guest post by “InfoWorld’s Woody Leonhard uncovered the fact that Microsoft is paying some organizations to adopt its Office 365 cloud service, mostly in funds that Microsoft earmarks for their customers’ migration costs and other required consulting. Although this raised the eyebrows of some bloggers – and I’m sure Google wasn’t thrilled – I think this is both smart and ethical. Here’s why.”
They write articles like this that correctly cover the business angle of technology, while totally ignoring the technology in question.
Office 365 stinks. There is no point in “migrating” to it, as the service can’t really do much.
Businesses would be better off waiting till version 3.0
Edited 2011-07-13 23:36 UTC
“Microsoft benefits from subsidizing the switch because it can capture a customer that will use that product for many years.”
That’s called lock-in and is a common tactic by monopolies like MS. It’s BAD for customers and the public in general. It’s clearly unethical, and sometimes illegal. Just MS up to its old shenanigans.
That just shows how “both smart and ethical” David Linthicum is on this point.
I mean, using the word bribe and ethical in the same context is just not right.
The good thing about current state of the “cloud” systems are they usually come with an easy to use API. Actually there are already sites compiling thousands of them:
http://www.programmableweb.com/api/dropbox
Thus as long as we have access to a reasonable API, switching to another provider would be a possible, by means of a custom migration software.
Edited 2011-07-14 06:03 UTC
That’s wishful thinking but history has already taught us that not to be the case when comparing desktop software. Despite the abundance of APIs, many cool features are kept secret.
Besides (and from a personal perspective), what’s the point in switching from one cloud to another if you’re only going to use the same APIs? Effectively you’re still dependent on the same originating service. Thus pretty much all you’re doing is changing your applications skin.
no thug life rap music in the office please
There is no such thing as a free lunch with Microsoft. You know they will make their money one way or the other.
Yeh that was a bit harsh, I mean it is capitalist society after all.
I’m happy Microsoft is not restricting Office 365 to Internet explorer.. Linux users will thus for the first time be able to use MS Office without running wine.
I was also surprised by the low monthly fees that start from $6 a month.
And also on MS commitment to make JavaScript a major platform on windows 8. This would surely make apps a lot more portable.
You can argue that this is not altruism but because market demands it…it’s nonetheless very good news.
I am not bashing Microsoft because they want to make money. They have a long history of anti competitive behavior and this is pretty much on par with that. They are paying to get customers. Thats pretty much in line with charging more for Windows to OEMs who sell other OS’s on their computers. If it was a decent product, they wouldn’t have to bribe people to use it.
got me wrong, did not mean you where harsh.
agreed to what you said and referred to my own talking smack joke.
I thought there were laws against ant-icompetitive behaviour?
microsoft cloud means homeland security can copy and read everything even european documents and files