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Navigating Your IT Career A career in information technology usually has its share of ups and downs. Download this Internet.com eBook to learn where the jobs are in IT, how to negotiate a salary, and helpful advice on job security and how to deal with a layoff. »
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November 20, 2001: In this week's commentary on ASP industry news: Microsoft cans bCentral applications — begging this question: Does it know what it's doing?
(Continued from Page 1)
Microsoft's inability to turn its bCentral accounts into paying customers was the subject of a previous column. (See Microsoft Can't Give It Away) As signalled then, the vendor's focus is turning to the delivery of Web services components as a more promising future revenue-generator. Now it seems to have turned its back completely on the concept of replacing established offline applications with online equivalents.
There are, I think, three conclusions we can draw from Microsoft's decision:
Microsoft never took its online applications seriously and made sure they were never in a position to threaten its lucrative revenues from conventional shrinkwrapped apps. As a result, takeup was low, since savvy online users turned to more full-featured alternatives from competitors. Microsoft has decided it's not worth the bother any more.
Yes, given the choice, small businesses do indeed prefer richer applications. Especially if it's possible to pick them up for little more than the cost of a few months' rental of a less functional online alternative — one that performs more slowly and has no third-party support or training ecosystem.
Internet computing isn't about taking existing applications and delivering them online — neither existing products, nor existing packaged-application categories. An entirely new form of computing will inevitably give birth to an entirely new class of applications. Ultimately, Internet applications are going to be built on the fly by bundling together online Web services components. The most fertile breeding ground for the first generation of those components will be in supplementing existing offline (i.e., "on-premise") applications with online functionality.
It's interesting to note that the two leading small business accounting software vendors, Intuit (owner of QuickBooks) and Sage (owner of Peachtree), seem to have reached at least two of the above conclusions long before Microsoft. People close to Microsoft often say how much they admire the software giant for the forward thinking they detect in its strategy for hosted applications and the entire .Net architecture. Certainly it's true that Microsoft has made some smart moves. But I'm not sure it's always due to foresight.
Microsoft has a whole load of very smart people on its payroll, and if you put enough smart people in a confined space and rattle them around for long enough, eventually
they'll start making enough mistakes to be able to start learning from their errors. It's just a more sophisticated version of the old routine where you put a million chimpanzees on a million typewriters, and sooner or later one of them ends up typing out the complete works of Shakespeare.
You just need to make sure you've got sufficient resources to keep the right people on payroll long enough, and Microsoft certainly has that. But will it find the right script before savvier competitors start making their plays? That is the 64 billion dollar question.
This review of the week's news highlights is by ASPnews.com founder and consulting analyst Phil Wainewright. A comprehensive news digest is published every month in the ASP News Review newsletter, available exclusively to subscribers.
Do you have a comment or question about this article or the ASP industry in general? Speak out in the ASP Discussion Forum.
Phil Wainewright founded ASPnews.com in 1998 and is the publisher of Loosely Coupled. He can be contacted at
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