Soup-to-nuts, but Microsoft must market it right

The publicity image attached to the latest Microsoft announcement of Windows 10 suggests that the target really is a soup-to-nuts solution that aims to provide a complete, seamless, no-differences environment from the smallest usable mobile device through to the most powerful desktop workstation.

If it really is the full dinner – a decent Prosecco to start, a light but tantalising aperitif, a rich and memorable entre, perhaps a dessert (I don’t really do desserts), cheese and nuts, all washed down with some good, honest wines – then the company may be in for a renaissance in its fortunes and image that hasn’t been seen since IBM’s $4 billion one-year loss some 20 years ago.

And if it is successful it could even be the last `version’ of Windows to ever appear.

If it fails, however, this will almost certainly be its last hurrah, and while it may not `crash and burn’ it is very likely to fade away till it can be acquired by a private equity shop to be broken up for what can be salvaged.

Only time will tell the final outcome, of course, but the ball is very much in Microsoft’s court. It still has a great deal of `legacy’ rolling in its favour, particularly with Office in the business world, and it now all depends on how the company is not only planning to exploit that legacy, but also how it executes. The one thing it has to do, at the highest corporate level, is shake off once and for all the assumption that the cloud is just another way of shifting applications `boxes’.

Microsoft is certainly not alone amongst the established software vendors in making this mistake, but nothing could be further from the truth. The cloud is about delivering services to end users in a form that they can exploit with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of value. To that end, a soup-to-nuts work environment (and to call it an `operating system’ is – or damned well ought to be – now a grave misconception) has the opportunity to provide one of the most important services of all.

That is the ability for businesses to run their known, trusted and valued applications on any class of platform that is suited to the users’ needs, be that mobile, tablet, laptop, desktop, super high-end desk-side workstation or virtualised instances run back at the datacentre. The choice must not restrict the user from doing what is best for them and the tasks confronting them. And the actual choices here, in the end, not about the platform but about the application, for that is what the tasks are built upon.

Here is something I wrote in Cloud Services World over a year ago, when it was announced that Microsoft was acquiring the mobile phone business of Nokia.

“Such a package could bring a real solution to the dilemma on BYOD that many businesses express – `damned fine idea but the organisational, operational and security issues involved are still far too scary for us to seriously contemplate it’.

Here is a way of delivering solutions to most of those problems in one hit – something that appeals to the natural conservatism of business users.”

Those problems have not really gone away yet, and now the CIO’s desks are cluttering up with exultations to buy an increasing range of point solutions to the problem. So, if they know that the business is, and has been for years, geared to running Microsoft Office applications and other tools well-integrated to the Microsoft environment; and if those applications, in their latest iterations, run on Windows 10 and in the cloud on services such as Office 365, Windows Live, Azure or any of Big M’s service provider partners; and if they just run on any form factor that suits the individual end users’ needs and requires no `engineering’ to get that form factor integrated into the corporate environment…..?

If the engineering costs of moving to the cloud can be slashed, if the user education/training costs can be slashed (because it is the same app on everything/anything) and if the data formats etc are either the same – or any differences are automatically accommodated and therefore invisible – this could be a significant godsend for many CIOs and IT managers. It can be a very significant task that they don’t have to think about and plan for, and the operational continuity with the here-and-now could make them a hero with the business managers.

Another cost-saving – OK defraying from one budget to another – is a possibility I also raised last year. This is the notion that as part of the overall service, Microsoft would work with service provider partners, especially the bigger Telcos, to provide users with devices, the cloud services and additional applications as part of a single contract.

In other words, just like with mobile contracts today, businesses and users would not need to buy their hardware, they just get everything they need as part of `the service’.

And lastly, that remark about it being `the last version of Windows’? Coupling a cloud-oriented, soup-to-nuts environment with the coming of Continuous Delivery (CD) of software upgrades – where tweaks, adjustments, additions and, yes, removals of code are uploaded to end user systems as soon as they are ready – means that everyone can always be on the latest version. And because it is a `drip-feed’ of upgrades the bouts of dread and nerves that accompanies Patch Tuesday can be set aside.

With early reports of Windows 10 suggesting it is stable and `works properly’, everything now is likely to depend on how Microsoft goes about the marketing. If it tries to sell this as a `product’ it will almost certainly be doomed.