Microsoft's Web 2.0 vision for business
April 2, 2009, 11:50am PDT | Length: 00:03:42
At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, explains how Microsoft plans to apply Web 2.0 technology, such as self-service and groups of people contributing to applications, to the enterprise. In an interview with Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Elops also details Microsoft's plans to release ad-supported programs.
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Speaker: Web 2.0, as we've come to think about it, is very much about the social interactions and everything that you can do amongst people and large groups of people. And it --it's also a certain statement on architecture. What is happening right now is those same principles of 2.0 that we've been seeing so publicly, Wikipedia, you know, Amazon, ebay, so many other examples out there, that's now being translated. Those lessons that have been learned are being brought into the enterprise, into a business setting. And as they come into the business setting, those same principles, combined with the corpus of information that's inside an enterprise, which is your email file -- and not just the information, but the social graph that comes with that, the business connections and so forth, the address book, all of that information out there on file shares, all of that is being brought into an environment that's very much about the social computing environment within an enterprise.
Speaker: So -- but one of the things that social networks have done -- you know, this -- one very simple way to describe one aspect of Web 2.0 is -- is user self-service.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: You know, if you think about the typical CRM system, for example, the sales person maintains records on all their contacts.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: In a social network, people maintain their own records, so it's user self-service. It's kind of like the Craigslist of CRM.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, you know, how are you seeing those two worlds converge? You know, you actually have a CRM product, and you have, you say, this sort of, in your unified communications group, you have this focus on personal CRM, if you like.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: How does that tie together with that public social networking aspect?
Speaker: So I think that what's happening behind the firewall is identical to what has happened beyond the firewall, in the public Internet. And what people are doing, the concepts of self-service, of large groups of people contributing to a corpus of information and developing that environment, all of those pieces are happening within the enterprise. The difference in the Enterprise, through, is that you can translate that value into something customers are willing to pay for. So all of a sudden, there are new business models. For example, SharePoint, which is essentially a social computing platform for within the enterprise -- portals, Wikis, blogs, you know, all sort of things like that for the enterprise environment -- is a business that stated not too many years ago, and already, it's a billion dollar revenue stream growing at double digit percentages. And for every dollar that we're earning on that, our customers are getting tremendous value. And for every dollar we earn, there's seven dollars being generated in the community around people building applications for that environment. So what people are seeing is that while some of the Web 2.0 platforms and applications in the public Internet space are having a hard time figuring out how to build a sustainable business model, that model is becoming clear in the business context, and some really magical things are happening as a result.
Speaker: Right. So these -- so this is the software for sale is a subscription? Is it -- how are the business models changing?
Speaker: It's all of the above, because --
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: -- what's happening right now is -- in part because of Web 2.0, we're going through a big period of disruption. So -- it used to be, for example, you just paid a license fee for a perpetual license, installed some software. What's actually happening now, of course, is software is available on the web. It's available for download. It's available on a subscription basis. You're seeing complete diversity. The way we deliver those products today is with that same degree of diversity. So we have companies like Nokia and Coca Cola and others who are actually subscribing to a service from us to deliver email, collaboration, Wiki blog, all those capabilities to them from our data centers. We'll have other services available, which are ad supported.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Techologies ====
