Microsoft Wants to Focus on Social Aspects of Online Life

As an analyst I often get asked the question from vendors and end-users, "What should we be looking out for? What's the next big technology boom?” There is no doubt we are in the middle of such a boom right now with the “virtualization” of our data centers, but for fun let’s assume for a minute that commodities rule the data center, including servers, hypervisor, networks, and storage components. Ultimately, what are left are the applications that are used to run the business.  This is really where we should be focusing the majority of our efforts to run a successful business. It isn’t the company with the fastest CPUs and biggest memory pools that is going to win, it is the company that has been able to accelerate application development by delivering applications to end-users and customers that scale to exceed business demand and ultimately generate revenue.

I think the focus on applications, and in particular, Web 2.0 applications, is going to quickly make its way to the front page. On the drive into work this morning I heard that Microsoft is opening a brand new, first of its kind lab on the east coast in Cambridge, MA that will focus on both computer science and social sciences. The shift is taking place to focus less on the technology and to bring in social scientists to analyze the social behavior of people and how they interact with one another. If we think the online world plays a big role in our lives today, Microsoft is apparently determined to figure out how to draw us deeper into social networking and online communities as a routine part of our daily personal and business lives.

I’m all in favor of their efforts. I’ve experienced how the online world has simplified day to day activities and in many cases it has actually been able to buy me back a piece of time – a very difficult task in today’s fast-paced society.  I’m sure Microsoft will do a fine job drawing upon some of the smartest people in the Boston area as they research ways to enhance our online experience. It’s important that we spend some time today focusing on the infrastructure that will be needed to support these new applications so that when they do come to full fruition we can focus our time and effort on the applications and the end-user experienc rather than on the underlying infrastructure. Now all Microsoft needs to do is figure out how to get our 2 month old baby boy to sleep through the night :-)