Holy Macaroni YOU have to READ this!!

Microsoft's radical new business plan is hidden in plain sight | ZDNet

Oh my GOSH!

It is not news to may of us.

Obvious from the business perspective - Office 365 for example.

Also obvious for the consumer market.

MS filed patents about this stuff quite a while back.

You can see them forcing Metro in the client o/s, exhorting people to go to the MS clouds

The entire point is to lead people to their cloud based services.

It might seem like a good idea at the time to the average consumer - Oh, OK I'll get an app. , Oh, OK I'll sync my devices - etc.

Pretty soon they are so far gone it is hard to get out.

All sorts of issues with that - Privacy and cost to name just two.

Microsoft also has a huge history of "Going all in" then a few years later "Pulling completely out". The Kin, the Zune etc. It's really hard these days to bet on something radical with them because you don't know if it's just going to be abandoned in a heart beat later, no matter WHAT they say up front (Or tell their stock owners). Google is no better about that either...

The cloud WAS the new bandwagon a few years ago and so far most people are pretty much failing at it. There may actually not be anything there, or it may take another decade to slowly transition over. (Maybe not till 100Mbps or faster fiber to the door for 90% of the world exists)

Microsoft may be both coming in too late and coming in too strong at the same time here...\

Course only time will tell, Win8 Will either take off like a rocket or explode and burn on launch.

So Fseal, if I have you right, you're saying that Microsoft will pull the same thing with Cloud that they did with Push?

FSeal said:

Microsoft also has a huge history of "Going all in" then a few years later "Pulling completely out". The Kin, the Zune etc. It's really hard these days to bet on something radical with them because you don't know if it's just going to be abandoned in a heart beat later, no matter WHAT they say up front (Or tell their stock owners). Google is no better about that either...

Click to expand...

Yes, Microsoft certainly has a history of this. Mostly things that they came to the market late with and experienced almost no market success.

FSeal said:

The cloud WAS the new bandwagon a few years ago and so far most people are pretty much failing at it. There may actually not be anything there, or it may take another decade to slowly transition over. (Maybe not till 100Mbps or faster fiber to the door for 90% of the world exists)

Click to expand...

Without a doubt, the upload speeds are the things that make cloud based "storage" a slow-go or no-go for many people. As far as the cloud goes and using it, I wouldn't say it's failing across the board. Many people use services like yahoo, gmail or hotmail for email and have no local copies of that data. (I'm one of them). And I'm using sync features of Google Chrome to store all of my bookmarks in the cloud without having copies of them locally. I've started using the Amazon cloud for my MP3 purchases and playback my music from the Amazon MP3 cloud player more than anything else. My downloads go immediately to my cloud drive and from there, I can (and do) download to my home server for storage as well. < - But my point, is that I"m using the cloud.....

If adoption is below their targets (Which have to be awfully high to endure the infrastructure cost) then they could just completely pull it.

As i nthe Kin case: “...the Kin did badly enough in its first month that Microsoft decided to destroy two years of work costing hundreds of millions of dollars just like that.” Some estimates put it at a full billion dollars they vaporised with the stroke of a pen that day.

I think that the app store would likely stay but a lot of the other cloud services may stay or go or change radically over the next version or two of windows. It depends on adoption rate which at this point is a complete unknown. Given the so-so adoption rate of wholesale cloud offerings by anyone else so far, it's hard to "bet" on this being something to rely on.

I think my favorite foolish move was the "Plays for Sure" campaign to help alleviate concerns that a DRM encoded track could actually be able to play back on your device of choice. However, they launched their own player and software (ZUNE) and wouldn't you know it...it couldn't play back the "Plays for Sure" tracks. Zune Plays for Sure. Sure? | Ars Technica