Microsoft last month launched US availability of its Online Services (Microsoft-hosted email and collaboration software, available on subscription). I snuck into a blogger roundtable held at the event and felt privileged to witness the spectacle of a team of Microsoftees celebrating the benefits of moving applications to the cloud. Of course they maintained the official mantra that customers have the choice whether to stay on-premise or go to the cloud. But hearing how delighted customers are to bypass the horrors of on-premise implementation and the upfront costs of conventional licensing, I wondered aloud how many are ever likely to choose to go back on-premise once they’ve experienced a cloud deployment.

Privately I wondered also whether even Microsoft has the cash to fund large numbers of its customers moving to the cloud model — in which the vendor, rather than the customer, takes on all the upfront cost of building and deploying the computing infrastructure. In a keynote at the SIIA OnDemand conference the following day, Omniture’s CEO Josh James highlighted the horrendous cash demands that weigh on pay-as-you-go computing providers. It struck me that, if SaaS and cloud really do take off — and many people are saying, supported by anecdotal evidence of rising sales this past month or two, that recession will accelerate rather than delay uptake — then the entire industry could face a cash crisis in a few years’ time.

Estimates vary, but the global software industry probably generates annual revenues of about $500 billion. Industry analysts are saying that up to 25% of new software sales will be delivered as SaaS within the next few years. That implies a shortfall of some $100 billion of license revenue that won’t be collected upfront any more, along with whatever it takes to buy and set up the infrastructure to operate it — maybe another $100 billion?

These are scary numbers, and others can do a better job than I of validating them, but let’s say they’re even half accurate. Will the industry have enough nerve collectively to fund that revenue gap, not just for a year, but over a period of several years as the big switch to cloud and SaaS accelerates? Especially if such a huge financial shortfall coincides with the tail end of what is starting to look like it will be a deep, traumatizing recession?

The best route out of that recession, of course, will be to encourage investment in the technologies and industries that will fuel economic recovery. I believe Web-hosted applications and business services will play a huge role in stoking growth and profits as we enter the next upturn. But today, the US federal government is being urged to spend money propping up the past — as governments often do — rather than investing in the future.

Of course there’s a social obligation on government to do what it can to avert the economic destruction of entire communities. But real jobs come from forward-looking, innovative industries. Instead of bailing out inefficient (and speculative) auto makers, the US taxpayer might be better served by providing tax breaks to the cloud providers who will have to risk so much capital to fund the coming shift to SaaS and cloud computing.

The Internet has been the genesis of countless useful business innovations over the last several decades. These include a globally unified e-mail network, the advent of search engines, the rise of rich user experiences and SaaS, and most recently cloud computing to name but a few. But perhaps one of the most far-reaching [...]br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=e800c26806a5a3058d919fe04683d316p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=e800c26806a5a3058d919fe04683d316p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=e800c26806a5a3058d919fe04683d316" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/zdnet/Hinchcliffe/~4/474931813" height="1" width="1"/

Troisième et dernier jour à “Milan la grise” et c’est déjà l’heure du départ… et dans la foule celui de faire un bilan sur ce séjour.

Milan la grise

Premier constat : Une dangereuse tendance à la complexification de l’offre avec toujours plus de logiciels pour la création graphique (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks), l’animation (Catalyst, Flash) et le code (Flex Builder, ColdFusion). Il y a donc un écart important entre le discours (simplifier la vie des designeurs / développeurs) et la réalité (une offre toujours plus dense et de nombreuses licences à acquérir). Même si visiblement l’argument massue avancé par Adobe semble être la parfaite transparence du langage FXG qui permet d’échanger des fichiers projets en toute simplicité, il n’empêche que la lisibilité de l’offre et de quels outils ont besoin les équipes va rapidement être problématique.

Deuxième constat, toute cette débauche de bonne volonté (plus de productivité, de confort...) ne semble concerner que trois métiers : designeur, intégrateurs et développeur. Les concepteurs et chefs de projet sont toujours ignorés. Étrange dans la mesure où se sont deux fonctions-clés dans la chaîne de production et où le chef de projet joue justement un rôle central dans l’animation de l’équipe projet et surtout dans la circulation de l’information. Mais où sont donc les outils de supervisation ? Où alors peut-être que les équipes d’Adobe évoluent dans un univers parallèle où un projet de site web débute avec une maquette de site sous Photoshop qui est déjà toute prête et où les équipes de production n’ont qu’un seul projet à gérer à la fois… Comment fait-on SVP pour rejoindre cet univers ?

Idem pour les concepteurs, même si Flash Catalyst apporte un début de réponse, nous sommes encore très loin d’un produit réellement exploitable pour pouvoir concevoir des arboresences, des cas d’utilisation, des scénarios de navigation et surtout des maquettes fonctionnelles qui soient rigoureuses. De plus, la vision d’Adobe est encore bien trop tournée vers les RIA alors que jusqu’à preuve du contraire… le HTML n’est pas mort (enfin il me semble).

Je pense qu’une des clés serait de compléter l’offre avec un service d’espaces projet collaboratifs. Ce type de solution existe déjà mais rien n’est spécifiquement étudié pour les projets web. Adobe aurait ainsi toute légitimité à proposer ceci en l’intégrant aux environnements de création (Creative Suite) et en l’adossant à une plateforme SaaS comme Acrobat.com.

Troisième constat : La course à l’armement avec Silverlight pour les capacités vidéo et 3D. Visiblement les contenus vidéo HD, le dynamique streaming et les casual games en 3D sont en centre de nombreuses attentions et les prochaines versions de ces deux players (Silverlight 3 et flash 11) devraient élever la barre encore plus haut (pour la plus grande joie utilisateurs).

Voilà, il est maintenant tant pour moi de faire mes valises et de rentrer.

Si vous croisez d’autres bilans de ce type sur la conférence, merci de mettre l’URL en commentaire.

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Nearly 90% of organisations in major markets across the world expect to maintain or grow their usage of software as a service (SaaS), putting enterprise software vendors such as Oracle...

Posted by Dennis Sellers

The growth and acceptance of Software-as-a-Service and/or Cloud Computing is understandable. What’s not is the bewildering number of web-based services that aren’t compatible with all browsers —especially Safari. 
 

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