Microsoft Announces Plans To Migrate Software To The Web

Microsoft executives met with financial analysts yesterday, as they do regularly. They wanted let the market folk know after many seasons of shrugs and grumblings that they do in fact notice Google, among other competitors, making significant inroads to supply businesses and individual consumers alike with feature-rich Web-based products and that they intend to transition a number of their own solutions to the Web, as well as offer new services which complement existing localized utilities like those found in the company’s Office suite.

It’s about time.

The analysts’ responses, unfortunately, were nothing to write home about. Microsoft’s audience Thursday didn’t quite latch onto the news as openly and as energetically as the software giant might have hoped. The New York Times’ John Markoff wrote that “the strategy did not immediately ignite enthusiasm among the more than 100 financial analysts who follow the company,” noting the subtle drop in MSFT shares throughout the remainder of the day.

The most telling sign of all that Microsoft is no longer the apple (no pun intended) of many peoples’ eyes is that the company’s stock value fell a bit even after it announced that it had sold 60 million copies of the Windows Vista operating system, noting that it was “the strongest initial sales performance of any of its operating systems, and that it expects a dramatic increase on that figure within the next year.

Either the analysts and traders have their eyes focused almost solely on more compelling fish – Apple, Facebook come immediately to mind – or they’re simply not impressed by the moves Redmond has made and continues to make. I presume it’s the latter. My reasoning is this:

Microsoft has maintained such a staid, clinically utilitarian presence in the tech world for so many years that any new plans the company contrives is met with a collective yawn. The feeling that “it’s been done before” is very palpable at present. Things aren’t terrible for the company, mind you. They’ve just lost their mojo. And investors fear that it’s not coming back.

Of course, there’s no other road to travel than the one Microsoft is now seen lumbering down, so regardless of what people make of the company, it’s going to have to make changes.

However old and gray everyone takes Microsoft to be – in some ways those characterizations are completely warranted – it’s simply going to have to put up with the naysayers and the constant stream of junk mail sent to its inbox asking, “Isn’t it time you retired?” in order get it to where Ray Ozzie, the company’s replacement as chief software architect, wishes it to be. (Ray Ozzie takes the position from Bill Gates, who will disembark from the steady role he’s maintained at Microsoft for decades come 2008.)

You’re probably wondering when Microsoft will actually get down to making the transition to Web-based software in a significant way. The answer: 3 to 10 years. That’s the time frame Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s noticeably insane chief executive has outlined for the future.

That means that by Q3 2017, “nearly every Microsoft software application will be transformed with the addition of a Web-services component.” What that means…well, that could really mean anything, really. And the fact that they aren’t being bold and tell the world flat out that it will be creating a Web-based Office suite, does put off Web 2.0 fans. Of which there are many, by the way. Only a lot of ‘em just don’t realize it. Yet.

Something tells me Microsoft is going to be traveling across some pretty rough waters in the next several years.