08 May Microsoft to Take a Stab at Pay to Play Software
Microsoft, the company that has made its fortune selling software, has finally accepted what the rest of the technology world has seen coming for quite some time. The future of software is SaaS (Software as a Service) – pay as you go use of software as opposed to paying expensive up-front costs for static boxed software.
Well, sort of. The company is still clinging to the desktop model, trying to redefine SaaS as “a combination of desktop software and web-based widgetry” and referring to it often as “software plus service.”
Some of today’s most successful players in the world of Software as a Service are progressive companies like SalesForce.com, the CRM giant, and 37 Signals, creators of Basecamp and other shared project management applications.
Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (the competitor of Adobe Flash) is the first of what they say will be other SaaS-type applications. Steve Balmer says that Microsoft’s SaaS strategy may include a new round of acquisitions – potentially very large ones.
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