I’ve never thought of Microsoft as an innovator in whatever market space they enter. That could simply be my groundling, mainstream view of the company, as it seems to be shared by the Googlites and iPhone bandits of the world, an ever growing group of what used to be 20-something ruffians.

And every once in a while, Microsoft comes back and impresses me with some adaptation of their current technology. I’ve been using Windows 7 for several months, and find it to be sleek, sexy, and high performing.

More important along this line of thought was my recent introduction to the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Very ‘Microsoft’ in its naming convention, the usage of the tools therein are decidedly foreign to the Microsoft way of doing business. In short, they’ve put Exchange services, along with SharePoint and LiveMeeting into a package of cloud-hosted services at a flat, per user fee starting at $10 per month.

Traditionally the kind of functionality inherent in these services came with a several thousand dollar price tag, from the time a company bought a server and paid an IT company to install it and maintain it. Microsoft handles it now, and there are lots of firms ready and willing to help migrate.

I was tipped off to this by some friends over at Apparatus. You should check out their take on the BPOS offer at:

http://www.apparatus.net/bpos

And, if you’re tempted to look at something new and shiny that Microsoft put out, their cloud-based Storage beta called Mesh looks to sync things up in an interesting fashion. Looks to be a cross platform DropBox that I’ll check out when I have lots, and lots of free time.

Posted in Technology
1 Comment Posted by agouty