Dennis Howlett calls Microsoft Office 365 “a dud”.

The Register points out that “Office 365 …  been designed to complement desktop Office rather than replace it“.

Mary-Jo Foley, normally a Microsoft fan, posts that “Sorry, folks. This is not Office in the cloud“

Meanwhile their acquisition of Skype has been slagged off as too expensive with no synergy and the dying act of a company desperate to be seen to be still relevant, the Windows line get worse and worse press, and some investors are calling for CEO Steve Ballmer to be replaced.

Poor Microsoft! I’m not a fan of their products, although I used to be and I use many every day, but I do really sympathise with their problems.

Addressing the Office 365 issue first, it is almost impossible to move a traditional (try not to call them legacy!) application to the Cloud. Cloud applications behave differently, so trying to both be a Cloud application and retain some look and feel of the old product is impossible. Microsoft is torn between wanting a decent Cloud product, yet not killing off the revenue stream from the old product (and killing their traditional route to market, the channel). So many traditional software companies have this problem, trying to both produce modern Cloud applications yet tied by existing user base, channels and revenue streams: SAP, Sage and even Oracle to name but a few.

Meanwhile competitors like Google Apps, Zoho, Open/Libre Office eat Microsoft Office’s lunch and open source (ie, free) software products like Linux and MySQL make inroads into their server based product line. Really Simple System’s Cloud CRM product is gradually moving off Windows Server onto Linux boxes for a myriad of technical (performance) and commercial (price) reasons. Windows Mobile is being killed by Android and iPhone. The only bright spot is that as yet there is still no credible threat to desktop Windows, although Macs are doing well and a few technologists like me are moving to Linux based desktops such as Ubuntu.

And Steve Ballmer? I’m continually drawn to the parallel between the handover of the British Prime Ministership/Labour party from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown: charismatic but tarnished leader hands over to gruff company man just before the ship goes down. Something I’ve noticed over the years is that when the original software company founders leave, the product vision goes and the company becomes just another money making business, milking revenue off the locked-in user base, until the old user base gradually drifts away. The names of Sage, Infor, Oracle and good old Computer Associates come to mind. No wonder Apple investors are worried as to what happens after Steve Jobs goes. Microsoft’s user base and revenue streams are so large that it will take a decade for that to happen, but happen it will.

Meanwhile I predict we’ll see Microsoft taking the traditional software vendor death spiral: ·

• Short term investors force Steve Ballmer out, replaced with bottom line focussed CEO.
• New CEO cuts swathes of costs, profits recover, share price is talked up, short term investors sell at healthy profit, new CEO pockets huge bonus and leaves. Products struggle on directionless.
• CFO takes over as CEO. User base gradually moves on, more costs are cut, products languish.
• Rinse and repeat until nobody cares any more.

But last week I came across another twist in the data protection saga. We had a customer checking that their data was not stored in the US, not because of data compliance issues (they were not in the EC) but because their own customers would be unhappy if their personal (and financial) details would be stored in the US. Every since the USA passed the Patriot Act any government agency can demand to see any data stored on a computer in the US, or any computer anywhere in the world owned by a US organisation, and they can demand this without the inconvenience of a court order.

It is a well known fact that any law intended to be used for one purpose ends up being used for many other purposes not intended when the law was passed. The UK’s Anti-Terrorist laws being one example, having been (ab)used to eject hecklers from political conferences (the Labour Party) and threaten friendly countries (Iceland) who might not compensate UK savers in their failed banks.

So it is with the Patriot Act, and the concern of this customer’s customers was that agencies like the IRS might use such data to try and extend their tax reach beyond the shores of the USA.

If you think they are paranoid, coincidentally ZDNet posted a blog on the same theme this very day.

So when The Economist covered Amazon’s and Sony’s problems last week, it was proof that cloud computing (and its teething problems) had broken out of the IT world and into general business consciousness.

Interesting to note that The Economist main recommendation was that SaaS vendors should not rely on just one hosting supplier, as I prescribed in my last blog.

Meanwhile, let’s just check the maths again on what needs to happen if you want the magic “five nines” of uptime:

36 hours down a year=99.59% uptime
53 minutes down a year=99.99% uptime
5 minutes down a year=99.999% uptime

No matter what Amazon does to learn from this outage, and no matter what SLA you negotiate you them, there is no way that EC2 is going to get to 99.999%. In fact, there is no way ANY one hosting solution will achieve 99.999%. The only way to get to 99.999% is to have (at least) two hosting solutions from different suppliers and to be able to fail over automatically, be they PaaS or your own servers.

This blog post is not about schadenfreude, rejoicing in Amazon EC2′s two day outage that has taken a swathe of major cloud applications down, including some of our competitors. This is a plea (yet again!) for simplicity in IT design.

It is a truism that the more complex a system, the greater the chance that something will go wrong. The more firewalls, load balancers, routers and software layers between the customer’s browser and your application, the greater chance that something will fail, be it as simple as an engineer in the datacentre pulling out the wrong cable (as happened to us a few months ago).

The other reason we like hosting our own servers is that, if they go down, we have a team of our own people working flat out focussed 100% on getting our system back and not 1,000 other systems at the same time. Which is a lot easier job, especially as we’ve made sure that we have as few layers between our boxes and the outside world.

We also have a backup system on standby with real time data sync so that if our main datacentre does go down, we can fail over in about 20 minutes.

So, cloud developers! Rack your own boxes and keep the IT simple. Maintaining servers is not that hard, you’ll get much better scalability and efficiency by specifying your own software and hardware platform. And your customers won’t be left without an application that they have paid for.

Just make sure there are no Armenian old ladies near the building.

But having installed Windows 7 on my brand spanking new high-spec PC, I’ve wiped it off and am going back to XP Professional (well, as soon as the 64 bit version I bought off eBay arrives, that is). I thought I had better have a go rather than be accused of being a grumpy old man, but there are just too many bugs (IIS hangs, installed programs get dropped, network printers vanish, you can’t grant yourself Administrator permissions), too many incompatibilities (Office 2000 won’t work and Open Office is good but not quite as good) and my nice super fast PC doesn’t seem to run any faster than my 4 year old PC as Windows’ showy interface seems to have gobbled up all the extra power.

Now I’m back to a nice clean PC, with sharp minimalist screens that fire up instantly. What a relief.

While I’m waiting for my 64-bit version of XP Pro to arrive, I’ve loaded Ubuntu Desktop on the box. Its nice! Loaded up fast, detected all my network cards (more than Windows did), boots up instantly. When XP dies, I’m going Linux.

The PR company chose to focus on the social marketing results of the survey (“62% of small companies are using social networking in everyday business”), and Dennis Howlett picked up on the fact that despite general confidence in cloud solutions, accountants were not so confident in SaaS solutions.

But the original point of the survey was to see how confident people were in cloud applications, and CRM applications particularly. The survey shows that 66% of respondents were confident in Cloud CRM, and in fact 45% were already using a Cloud CRM service.

Which is great progress. I suppose it is a measure of how far we have come in the acceptance of Cloud CRM that nobody finds it remarkable any more!

With a traditional software escrow a trusted third party, such as lawyer or specialist escrow like the NCC, would hold a copy of the source code in trust for subscribing customers. If the escrow was triggered, by the vendor going out of business or even simply ceasing to support the product, the  customers could apply to the escrow company to release them the source code. All this made sense when the software product cost 100k or more, the escrow subscription cost the customer a few hundred and the customer had a large in-house team of programmers who could, in theory, maintain the inherited code. In practice I can’t think of a single example where an escrow was triggered, and I pity the poor programmer who would have had two million lines of COBOL dumped on him or her and told to update the system for a new tax rate.

But for SaaS the story is more complex. SaaS customers purchase a service, not a product, and what they would ideally like to know is that should the SaaS vendor go out of business then their application will keep running. To deliver the service you need the whole hardware & software stack: servers, firewalls, load balancers, operating system(s), web server, backend databases, plus a whole pile of add-ins for charting, pdf generation etc. And of  an up-to-date copy of the data, ideally sync’ed in real time. To make sure that all this would work in the event of an escrow being triggered the whole stack would have to built and tested, otherwise the chances of it working on the day are minimal. And, just to make life more interesting, whereas traditional software worked on a six month or yearly release cycle, SaaS systems get updated much more frequently, almost every day in our case. So what you end up with is a replicated datacentre that has to be tested every week to make sure that it still works. Which is basically what we at Really Simple Systems do, keeping a complete system on hot standby for instant switchover.

Doing all this is a lot more work than keeping a CD in a safe, and that cost would have to borne by either the SaaS vendor or their customers. As most customers are paying very little for their SaaS solution (because that’s the point!), paying the same again for an escrow protection doesn’t seem great value. And as customers aren’t clamouring for such a protection, it is hard to see why SaaS vendors would stump up a lot of money for something that their customers’ don’t see the value in.

A better solution is for SaaS vendors to put in their contracts that should their businesses fail, then the data legally belongs to the customer. After all, it is the data that is the most important asset in most systems – once you have the CRM data, then moving into another CRM system is not such a large task and could be done within a few days, even for the largest systems.

Which (he said smugly) is exactly what we do here at Really Simple Systems.

The decision to launch a Freemium product was driven by three issues:

1. We weren’t really making any money from one or two user systems by the time we had run through a pre and post sales process
2. We wanted to get a larger market share in the US, where we have some customers but nothing like the numbers we have in the UK, and we don’t have $1m to throw at offices and marketing
3. If we didn’t do this, somebody else would

We could have probably sorted out 1) by streamlining our sales process. The traditional solution to solve 2) is to raise cash from venture capital but in my experience VCs add a huge amount of pain and cost to small companies and no strategic value, and then walk away with a disproportionate amount of cake at the end. And as to 3), there isn’t an alternative but to be there first, if you believe, as I do, that cloud software will become a commodity offering with correspondingly lower and lower prices.

There is also the challenge that to offer a free product, it really has to be easy to use as we can’t afford to talk people through how to use it, and as the whole ethos of the company is to make CRM really simple, doing this would force us to improve the ease of use of the core product, which would be good for everyone.

So, it will be a learning process for us. We need to work on the documentation, help videos and data load process to help people pick up the product more easily. Our target is to sign 10,000 users in twelve months which will make us the largest (bar none) supplier of cloud CRM systems in the world. All we’ve done so far is put the product on our site and issued a press release and we’re signing up 15 users a day so far, so I think the 10,000 might if anything be on the low side.

As we said in the press release though, “We’re going to make life tough not just for conventional CRM vendors, but for Cloud vendors with high prices and high cost bases.”

Watch this space!