Windows 7 Serial Office 365 The productivity supe

Last week we announced Office 365 - always-on productivity that spans your desktop and the cloud. I couldn't resist the urge to tell everyone what this means to me.

If Office is your productivity supermarket, then Office 365 is like a productivity superstore. If you are ever in Salina, Kansas you should stop in at the Super Dillons on Planet Ave (right near I-135 at Magnolia Rd). For all you know I could be writing this blog in the store restaurant with the free Wi-Fi, just after mailing a package at the in-store post office. Plus, my car has a full tank of gas because I filled up outside. If I'm looking for the best shopping experience, where I can get all of my most important to-do items checked off my list, I'll hit the Super Dillons.



Of course, superstores are not a new phenomenon.


Kroger was building them back as early as the 1970s. (A great history can be found here thanks to Dave Aldrich who is,Windows 7 Professional, apparently, quite a retail historian.) For us, super productivity is not new either. Since the introductions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Office Communication Server (now Lync) we have been adding the post office, the restaurant,Windows 7 Home Premium, and the cell phone store to the overall Office experience.

Two aspects of Office 365 excite me most:

As an Office user, you get the full experience we designed for. I love working at Microsoft - one of the great things about working at the company that makes the best software is that we get to use all of the best software. (Aside: Even when it isn't even yet up to "the best" in terms of standards. We call that 'dogfooding', as in eating our own dog food, as in the product might be in the state where it more resembles dog food than the delicious meal it's destined to be. But we eat it, and we eat it some more, and we find all of the bad bits we can find so that customers don't.)


I often speak to customers in briefings, at conferences, or even one-on-one in a variety of circumstances (like on a plane on the way to New York to be a part of the Martha Stewart show). Being a superfan of our products, I try to find opportunities to sneak in a quick demo whenever I can. And the most common response my demo audience gives me is "how can I get that?" It often seems to a customer that we at Microsoft work in some kind of magical spaceship where our SharePoint servers allow for self-provisioning of sites by any end user; where our voicemail, email, and SMS messages all land in the same Outlook inbox; where our office phone rings our computer even if we're sitting at Starbucks (which I am right now - here - so it turns out I'm not in Kansas anymore); and where we can take complex data and build elegant, compelling documents to make our case. We have the latest and greatest of everything, and we've stitched all of the pieces together as they were designed to be.

Honestly though, our productivity software stack is pretty complex. To have the best productivity experience, the one we built and enjoy at Microsoft, you would need SharePoint, Lync, Exchange, Office Pro Plus, and all of the core OS and supporting bits to underlie them (SQL Server, Windows Server, Windows). As great as all of these products are to use, and as powerful as they are in functionality, they are fairly complex to install and configure. Our IT department works closely with the product teams to learn how to best set everything up, and they produce tons of documentation that tries to explain best practices. But we know it can take a while for our customers to get to the same place. First, you really can't get there if you don't have an IT department. Second, your IT department has to be perfectly tuned to take on simultaneous deployments of desktop software and server software.

Enter Office 365.The story goes that one of our big customers told Steve Ballmer "you guys seem to be able to run all of this stuff well for your company, why don't you run it for ours?" And thus,Windows 7 Ultimate Key, BPOS was born. BPOS stands for Business Productivity Online Services and it was the foundational building block for Office 365. This is exactly what we are trying to do. We want to run it all for you, so that your experience in using it is as good as we designed it to be. Your experience in using it should make you feel like we do as productivity users at Microsoft. The next time I do that demo, you should tell me "that's really cool Chris, but let me show you my favorite scenario."

As a business owner, you get to play like the big boys (and maybe even beat them). The web was a great leveling ground for businesses. You can be a two person company and put up a virtual storefront that looks just as good as, if not better than, that 50k person company across town. Small businesses could have instant broad credibility on the web. You could begin to reach far outside your locality and service customers hundreds if not thousands of miles away, just like you do for the guy next door. Unfortunately it was only one small part of the total puzzle.

Big companies can afford more infrastructure. Chiefly they can afford it because they can realize the return on the investment. If you buy a server that has capacity to service 1000 users but you only have five people in your shop, it's a lot harder to feel like the investment is worth it. It's like buying a Costco-sized one-gallon jug of teriyaki sauce when all you need is to make one meal. So it's no wonder why we don't see many small businesses buying SharePoint servers. Of course there are people out there who host servers for small companies. They are like IT shops run as mutual funds - pool all of the investments together to buy at bigger scale. But you are relying on the fund manager to make the investment choices you would make. And even for those guys, stitching together all of the pieces is tricky and takes time.

So if you are a two-person company and want to buy two seats (not two servers) of Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office,Windows 7 Serial, now you can with Office 365. Office 365 scales as you do. And you can get the same grease in your productivity wheels that the Formula One boys can afford for their souped-up productivity race car. With a virtual store front that belies your size, and a productivity jet engine running in the back,Office Enterprise 2007, you will certainly compete more clearly on the basis of what you do instead of how you can afford to do it. And that is why I got into this business in the first place - democratizing productivity so that people can produce, deliver, and compete on their merits.

The Productivity Superstore is open. And even if you aren't wearing shoes or a shirt, you are still welcome to service.










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