Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting – future plans to dominate cloud and business

At its annual financial analyst meeting today, Microsoft announced its ambitious future plans for dominating technology markets and cloud computing.

Specifically, Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, outlined a four-point plan to the 200-odd financial analysts for increasing profits:

1. Cloud computing – Emphatically and repetitively, we have heard Microsoft say they are “all in” on cloud computing. Turner believes that Microsoft not only can be, but is “by far the market leader” of the cloud. Microsoft has been quietly developing cloud support for its business solutions, and only now in 2010 has been busting them out.

2. Windows 7 and Office 2010 – in the meantime, Microsoft’s standard software product line will be chugging along. The steadfast popularity of both of these products will drive predictably massive sales.

3. Customer satisfaction. Simple enough of a business objective.

4. Grow market share. Similarly simple.

Microsoft gives every impression of utmost confidence in its IT goliath standings. They believe in their edge over every other cloud competitor out there: Salesforce and Google fall “far short of what [Microsoft is] doing from an Azure perspective” (Google also has laughable productivity applications in comparison to Office), Amazon provides only “a limited set of platform as a service capabilities,” and VMWare is losing to Microsoft’s “better and less expensive virtualization offering.” Turner also noted that the shares for Microsoft servers and databases are growing faster than those of Linux, IBM, and Oracle. Clearly, these are children among one large-headed man.

Microsoft still views itself as a spry, innovative corporation. In regards to cloud computing, the company is in it for long term development. Turner says, “This is going to be a multiyear journey. We’re not going to accomplish this in the next twelve months.”

New Microsoft products are also rolling out: the Windows Phone 7 OS and the Kinect video game motion sensor for the Xbox. Now my tongue may be stuck in cheek, but one will enter the market outclassed by Apple and Google, and the other is foiled by gamers who enjoy lying down.

But don’t mind me. You go win those investors, Microsoft.

A webcast of the whole affair is available at Microsoft’s website.

Tags: Cloud Computing