After a few years of letting his company slowly but steadily morph from an indispensably strategic IT leader to a B-list supplier of dependable products, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has fired a lightning bolt into the very heart of the company with a sweeping and unconditional promise to transform Microsoft into an end-to-end cloud-computing dynamo.

This is more than one of Ballmer's bits of showmanship, and it was more than an attempt to string together some sound bites in order to be perceived as on board with the latest cool thing. This is something other than a superficial attempt by Microsoft to buy a little time in the hope that it could somehow find a shortcut and appear once again to be competitive.

This is a fundamental repositioning of a big, great, and potentially indispensable company at a time when the entire software industry is seeing long-time business models stumble, long-time technologies wither, and long-time customer relationships turn sour. This is, as Ballmer himself said, nothing short of a bet-the-company move.

It's Ballmer's chance to step outside of the long and potentially crushing shadow of Bill Gates by offering customers new types of products, services, and value that Gates no doubt dreamed of but did not deliver. It's Ballmer's chance to restructure the company to fit his vision for the cloud-centric IT world we are entering, instead of trying to retrofit the Microsoft of the past to what has become a very different worl

To read the full, original article click on this link: Global CIO: Ballmer's Cloud Commitment Makes Microsoft Relevant Again -- InformationWeek

Author: Bob Evans