A Lack of Traction with Microsoft Online Services?
It's always interesting to scan through the comments at the infamously anonymous employee blog Mini-Microsoft when there's a major executive shakeup in Redmond, like Ray Ozzie's pending departure. Reaction to the Ozzie news is mixed over there. But more specifically, there's an anonymous post from a commenter claiming to be on the corporate sales force that's relevant to partners and the Microsoft Online Services effort. You can never tell, but there's enough detail in the post to make it seem credible. Money quote:
The company's commercial Online Services offering has nowhere near the traction that the executives and others would like everyone to believe. In FY09 and FY10, the sales force gave away BPOS, so we could hit one of [Microsoft COO Kevin Turner's] scorecard metrics. Customers took it because it did not cost them anything. In the last two years, the vast majority of these customers have not put it in production either. Now we are trying to figure out how to get our partners to help get it deployed.
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 20, 2010