What does Microsoft’s top exec have up his sleeve? CEO Steve Ballmer gave a hint in his company-wide memo: many hosted services for SMBs are now waiting in the wings.
Microsoft Readies Its SMB Hosted Services
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I wish acronyms that mean something in the tech industry and in the biz arena should be expanded. When I read the topic, I was trying to figure out when MS started calling it SMB again, since the switch to CIFS and what kind of services could be tunneled through it.
YES there are quite a few people willing to rely to Microsofts security… especially since it’s on par with any Linux provider out there pretty much and Unix is to expensive to learn and get a grip on.
Therefor Microsoft is a natural choice. However I’m really skeptical about some of these services because MSN isn’t really what you wanna get into.
With all of the security problems with MS software and especially now that most of the security holes are now integrated into the OS, I can’t see how anyone would choose to use MS stuff for a SMB.
First of all, if your a SMB you wouldn’t want to have MSN or hotmail as your e-mail server now would you. If you want to look like a fool you might as well use AOL – [email protected] will look just as unprofessional.
Secondly, even if you did use it, you’re setting yourself up for disaster with the worlds most insecure, virus enabling e-mail client – Outlook. Let’s not forget that the SPAM blitz will make your msn/hotmail account unusable in short order anyway.
A SMB can get itself a business class DSL with a few static IP addresses and get its own domain. They can then have their very own DNS, imap e-mail server, web server, etc. And since we’re talking SMBs here, I would think they could save themselves a considerable amount of money on the software side by using linux all around.
As far as administration, they’re going to have to either hire someone or someone will have to, heaven forbid, learn a little about Linux. It’s not like it will be a full-time job. Using something like Webmin makes administration easy today.
In the end, however, the only question you have to ask yourself is do you really trust Microsoft?
That post was a bit funny. Ofcourse the hotmail.com issue may be valid the other part is just tragic. It’s KNOWN that security comes from A) a good system b) a good administrator.
Learning a LITTLE about Linux hardly makes you a good administrator, and the small business people might wanna do something else than learn a lot about computers (after all, it’s only a tool). So why not outsource it, and judging from many other things Microsoft has done, simplyfying is definitely one of them. Look what MS Office has done to the world of today… a brilliant software indeed.
Trusting Microsoft may be difficult, I sure as hell don’t trust ’em. But let’s think about it, who can you trust? Well not MS and even worse IBM??? Not a chance… Novell?? Maybe, but they’ve done some weird moves lately so not really a choice neither, Sun? Sure if you got the cash…. MS is not worse than the other biggies just that what they do have enormous effects on everything else…