Microsoft’s head in clouds

Grazed from ChinaBusiness Daily. Author: Chen Limin.

Microsoft Corp could be excused for being somewhat ambivalent in its attitude toward the Chinese market. The country is the world’s biggest personal computer market but the US software giant has failed to collect due revenues in the past two decades because of piracy. The company, however, has been trying to take another approach – cloud computing – hoping to improve its performance in the Middle Kingdom.

Last month marked the China launch of its Windows Server 2012, an operating system used for cloud-based services. The move came after it announced an increase in staff by 1,000 to its approximately existing 4,500 employees in China in the current fiscal year and boosted its research and development spending by an additional $500 million, with a considerable part of it going to cloud computing…

Zhang Yaqin, chairman of the company’s Asia-Pacific research and development group, said cloud computing, which provides storage and computing capacity to customers via the Internet, could very possibly be the biggest source of revenue for Microsoft in China in the future. However, he added that the US company will find it challenging to change its business model from licensing software to providing services. "It’s very painstaking to make the transition but compared with last year, there are changes happening this year," Zhang said.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has been talking about the company’s change from a software company to "a devices and services company". He wrote in a shareholder letter earlier this month: "The full value of our software will be seen and felt in how people use devices and services at work and in their personal lives."…

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