Microsoft may be the king of software that runs on personal computers now, but, according to its top dog, the cloud is where the company sees its future. Addressing an audience at the University of Washington, CEO Steve Balmer said Microsoft was "betting the company" on the cloud. About 70 percent of the software maker's employees are working on cloud projects now, he revealed, and by year's end that number is expected to reach 90 percent.
Following his speech to the computer science students at UW, Ballmer sent a memo to all Microsoft employees urging them to deliver the "full benefits of the cloud to our customers."
"Other companies have defined the cloud in a narrow, one-dimensional way," he asserted. "Although these companies provide some interesting components, Microsoft is uniquely delivering on a wide range of cloud capabilities that bring increasingly more value to our customers."
Ballmer declared that there are five dimensions to the cloud as Microsoft sees it.
- The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities
- The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action
- The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions
- The cloud wants smarter devices
- The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud
"This view fuels our investments across the entire company, from data centers to cloud platform technologies to cloud-based development tools and applications," he told his employees. "Today, nearly every one of our products has, or is developing, features or services that support the cloud. As I said today, when it comes to the cloud, we are all in. We are all in across every product line we have and across every dimension of the cloud.”
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