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LOS ANGELES
— All this week at the
Professional Developers Conference
,
Microsoft
has talked about cloud computing, what many consider the
next frontier.
Bob Muglia
, president of the company's Server and Tools business,
sat down to talk more about the cloud and the
opportunity ahead for
Microsoft
.
Even
among tech geeks, there is confusion and debate over
what cloud computing is, even as many consumers are
already well schooled with cloud services such as
Hotmail,
Facebook
, iTunes or Flickr.
Over
time, more companies will build similar Web-based
services that live on remote servers, rather than being
stored in a personal computer.
Microsoft
launched Windows Azure for developers this week, hoping
the operating system for the cloud draws them over
competing offerings from
Google
,
Amazon.com
,
Yahoo
and
Salesforce.com
.
Poking
fun at the confusion around cloud computing, Muglia
appeared in a video during his Tuesday keynote at PDC.
Called
"
Bob Muglia
. Life Coach," it depicts Muglia helping a man
dressed as a cloud with an identity crisis. At the end,
the 22-year
Microsoft
veteran jumps around,
Steve Ballmer
style, exhorting the cloud to "Soar! Soar!
Soar!" The cloud then jumps off the side of the
building.
Here are
edited excerpts of the interview with Muglia:
Question:
So what was the thinking behind you playing a life coach
to a man in a cloud suit?
Answer: I
think the cloud is fairly confusing to people — what
it really is, the nature of the cloud and the way it's
been defined. I've watched it evolve in the industry. If
you look at definitions from 18 months ago, it's hard
for everybody to keep up with it.
Q: Let's
say your child's schoolteacher asked you what the cloud
is. What would you say?
A: A
cloud is a whole broad way to provide an array of
services to people of all types and companies of all
types.
If you
look at the way consumers work with (online) services,
it is almost all cloud driven: e-mail, Twitter,
Facebook
, online shopping. ... Businesses are (also) looking at
how to bring their applications up internally.
As people
first built applications and hosted them on the Web,
we've learned an awful lot about what it means to
develop this next generation of applications that lowers
the cost of running them and improves the effectiveness.
I do my
home banking on Sunday morning most of the time. About
once a month or every other month, that's when they
update it (and I can't access it). ...
That
happens all the time and it shouldn't happen. ... You
don't expect to see Bing or
Google
down. They're supposed to not be down.
The other
thing is the promise of this: You've got unbelievable
amounts of computing power that are becoming available
from hardware. ... I'm a very strong believer that the
opportunity to actually do useful things with useful
data exceeds the speed of Moore's law. The business
opportunities to work with that (available) information
are unbelievable.
You can
do simulations that can be done around drug discovery
and understanding genetics as an example or in
scientific research or market and trends and analysis.
All of those are examples that can include vast amounts
of computing power.
Cloud
will make it available to companies at a fraction of the
cost and will put it in the hands of even the smallest
company.
Q: What
is the size of the opportunity here for
Microsoft
?
A: Cloud
computing is the future of how software will be
delivered. Software you install on PCs, that's not going
to go away, but that software is going to be connected
to cloud services.
If you
look at what we create for customers, almost all of that
will have components of the cloud, in some cases it will
be entirely on the cloud. Over time the services will
become bigger and bigger part of
Microsoft
.
It's not
like tomorrow half of
Microsoft's
revenue is going to come from the cloud. If you look out
10 years, that's very reasonable to assume that (it
will).
Q: What
investment has
Microsoft
made in this?
A: It's a
fairly large (research and development) effort on our
part. We're building these gigantic data centers around
the world.
Microsoft
has already become the largest purchaser of servers made
by OEMs (hardware manufacturers). It's a very, very
major investment for us both in terms of R&D efforts
together with the data centers.
Q: What
happened with the plans to turn
Quincy, Wash.
, into a data center for Windows Azure?
A: The
reason it's actually in
Chicago
is because
Quincy
filled up. We're out of capacity in
Quincy
. We still have room in
Chicago
. Right now
Chicago
still has reasonable capacity and it's being used
reasonably, but we're buying a lot of servers to take on
Yahoo
(if the Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership is approved).
Q: Is
this new revenue going to replace existing
Microsoft
business?
A: We'll
continue to sell software. The cloud will very much
augment that.
There
will be times when people will choose to sell the cloud,
there will be other times that people run things in
both.
Q: Other
thoughts?
A: The
most important message is
Microsoft
is committed to delivering major innovations that will
help the whole industry moving forward. We'll continue
to work the way we've always worked; we'll work with
partners. We are fully embracing this new world.
We know
it's going to change the way software is delivered and
Microsoft
is right there and we're going to help our customers
move forward to the cloud.
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