BioSensorAB » S+S: Real or have I drunk too much Kool-Aid? :)

BioSensorAB » S+S: Real or have I drunk too much Kool-Aid? :) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:31:18 GMT

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re: S+S: Real or have I drunk too much Kool-Aid? :)

jab — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:46:36 GMT

There's no denying that client software is still going to be with us for a pretty long time and there will be plenty of opportunities in the S+S sphere for years to come. But things are moving fast in many areas of software development. Everybody knows of the success to salesforce.com and Google's applications. For instance, Google's online rss reader is now so good that it is almost impossible to imagine client software doing the same.

And ultimately Microsofts S+S strategy (I recently spoke to a Microsoft Director and he constantly corrected my reference to "SaaS" with a "S+S") could make Microsoft's technology a less attractive platform for developing SaaS applications. Why?

- Partnership models. Even if the company I work for is running a pretty big, MS technology based SaaS application with 6-700000 users we're not even a MS partner. Since we're not bundling MS software with every client installation we're just not interesting in terms of revenues...

- Lack of technology. It seems that everything that comes out of the high scalability community these days are related to "LAMP". Where's the integraded grid technology to let us faster scale out our MS applications? distributed file systems? Technologies like MapReduce to do distributed computing of very large datacollections?

- Cost. When you build large SaaS solutions the price of OS and server licenses suddenly becomes much more significant. (Just imagine the cost of setting up a SQL Server Enterprise installation on 200 CPUs...)