With the addition of Ray Ozzie to the Microsoft culture, there was a giant shift toward services. Microsoft wasn’t abandoning the selling of products, but it was expanding its expertise and portfolio to offer its products as services. Every product team at Microsoft was asked if what they were doing could be enhanced and extended with services. They wanted to do much more than just put Exchange in a data center and rent it to customers. This became a fundamental shift in how Microsoft developed code, how the code was shipped, and how it was marketed and sold to customers.
This shift toward services wasn’t an executive whim, thought up during an exclusive executive retreat at a resort we’ll never be able to afford to even drive by. It was based on the trends and patterns the leaders saw in the market, in the needs of their customers, and on the continuing impact of the internet on our world. Those in charge saw that people needed to use their resources in a more flexible way, more flexible than even the advances in virtualization were providing. Companies needed to easily respond to a product’s sudden popularity as social networking spread the word. Modern businesses were screaming that six months was too long to wait for an upgrade to their infrastructure; they needed it now.
Customers were also becoming more sensitive to the massive power consumption and heat that was generated by their data centers. Power and cooling bills were often the largest component of their total data-center cost. Coupling this with a concern over global warming, customers were starting to talk about the greening of IT. They wanted to reduce the carbon footprint that these beasts produced. Not only did they want to reduce the power and cooling waste, but also the waste of lead, packing materials, and the massive piles of soda cans produced by the huge number of server administrators that they had to employ.
Source of Information : Manning Azure in Action 2010
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