I'm advising my business clients not to buy any app they will use in their business from an app store where the owner of the store can kill apps already purchased. No business in their right mind should want any applications -- especially applications that are or might become "business critical" -- that someone can kill switch at any time. That's like giving someone a kill switch for your business. I really don't think Microsoft has thought a lot of this stuff through given that a lot of their income comes from sales to businesses.
-rssapphire
I love this quote because it DEFINES my problem with "cloud computing". My only caveat is that it should be person instead of business. :Thmbsup:
Point is, if Microsoft goes that route, it's far easier for enterprise customers to go along than it is for them to retool over to a new OS and a new set of core applications. Especially since Microsoft has already announced plans to allow big corporate users to run what amounts to their own app store in-house.
-40hz
I have to agree here, primarily because of the last statement. If they are allowed to "own" their own app store and download the bits (not unlike the current licensing scheme they are allowed to implement), then there is no need for them to worry much about it. IT already is the stop-light for software distribution, this is just another tool to make it easier for IT to do what it already does.
The problem with the argument about custom software is two-fold in my opinion. First off, custom is expensive. It costs a lot to develop and orders of magnitude more to maintain. Moreover the knowledge and experiences gained cannot and will not ever be fully captured. Documentation only takes you so far. I work on a mainframe that was developed in-house in the 80's. Today we have 2nd and in some cases 3rd generation personnel working on these systems. Many times, they don't even know what it is doing, and even if they do, they don't know all the details. As often as not, if an obscure or rarely failing piece fails to work, they try restarting it. If it truly is broke, they apply patches that are essentially error catches that tell it how to function now, because they don't know how to fix the original code or in some cases even where that code resides.
The second problem with the argument is that more often than not (due to time & other cost considerations) the "custom" code is little more than glue-scripts that exchange data between two packages. It is rare that any software is fully customized, even in large corporations, unless there is no other alternative or it IS the product. Can it be done? Of course. Will it be done? Only if there is NO other reasonable solution.