Microsoft, Split Yourself Up—Or Your Enterprise Customers Are Going To Walk – ReadWrite

This is an extra-ordinary interesting read with thoughts on the Microsoft strategy and the planned acquisition of the phone business from Nokia:

The message to enterprise customers and channel partners to date has been pretty straightforward: let’s move everything to the cloud. Running apps on Windows server? Move it to the Windows Azure cloud. Building docs and spreadsheets with Office? Migrate yourself right over to Office 365. …

There are two big problems with that line of thinking. First, there are a lot of enterprises that are not entirely convinced that cloud is the way to go for them, even private clouds. Second—and even more troublesome—there are a lot of businesses who have spent years and millions of dollars building an IT support infrastructure that is centered around the client-server model. …

The push to cloud services is especially ironic. For the past couple of years, Microsoft’s marketing team has had loads of fun taking potshots at Google Docs, deriding it in ads as Google’s attempt to „beta test“ productivity services. Now, Microsoft is asking companies to forget all those points about security, stability and regulation compliance and trust Office 365 in the cloud anyway. …

I am not alone in this line of thinking. Since the Labor Day announcement of the Nokia buy, there have been a lot of rumors from people in and outside of Microsoft that foresee a day coming soon when Microsoft will have to split itself in two.

One company will carry the Devices group that includes the recently picked-up Nokia, as well as other device services like Xbox. Call this the „digital lifestyles“ company.

The other company will be the „enterprise“ company, which will hold the Windows Azure, Windows, Office and SharePoint businesses and anything else that faces business users. …

Because there are a lot of services companies out there, and by pivoting to become another such service vendor, Microsoft has thrown the door wide open for competitors to step in and show nervous enterprise customers the services they have been doing all along, sometimes at a better price and with better results.

If Microsoft does not do something along these lines to assure enterprise customers it has their best interests at heart, then it will have effectively abandoned them to chase a dream many businesses are not yet ready to follow.

via Microsoft, Split Yourself Up—Or Your Enterprise Customers Are Going To Walk – ReadWrite.