Sitting on a trove of data, Microsoft intends to provide services designed to spot bugs and improve performance on corporate networks, a company executive said on Monday.
Microsoft has made its Live online services a major focus for product development, particularly for consumers. But company executives at this week's Microsoft TechEd conference in Boston are providing clues on the hosted services they expect to offer their business customers.
The company already offers traditional application hosting services, such as a hosted edition of its Exchange messaging software. But some of the services Microsoft intends to offer business customers may be informational, said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools division.
Muglia said Microsoft plans to share with partners and corporate customers the mountains of data coming into the company. Applications, such as Office and Windows, use an automated system called Watson to "phone home" and send bug information to Microsoft.
"We can get a real understanding of how our customers use our products, and by getting that understanding we can really improve what we're doing in really substantial ways," said Muglia.
For example, Microsoft could collect and correlate information that indicates "best practices" on how to manage or configure a company network in certain scenarios, he said. Corporate customers would opt-in for any kind of data-collecting service to protect privacy, he added.
Microsoft could also provide third-party partners, such as device manufacturers, where bugs occurred in great detail to improve products, Muglia said.
"We're opening up those channels of data to the (partner) ecosystem, and the next step is really opening it up to customers," he said.
He added that Microsoft's management tools will act as the vehicle for collecting information.
There will be a fee for these services, which will likely be combined as part of an enterprise contract, he said.
Talkback
How long until some security updates shows up with a pop-up EULA that contains lines like "you agree that data collecting services will be permanently activated detailling your every move for the rest of your natural life and that of your children and making such data commercially exploitable however Microsoft sees fit"?
Next you can agree to that or opt not to install the security update. Abuse of monopoly powers? Surely not.
Thrustworthy computing indeed. You must have a lot of thrust to allow such exploitation of privacy.
Thanks law makers for granting so much power to an electronic EULA (everybody knows 99% doesn't read or understand) mandatory to a security update. And also thanks for keeping realistic liability at an all time low.
Unfair business advantage built on unethically obtained data by a convicted monopoly.
This is absolutely disgusting. I hope the pending antitrust suit (yes, there will be one, I guarantee you, if this service eventuates) burns the company to the ground. What a cheek. Exactly what antitrust, anti-monopoly laws are designed to prevent.
This knowledge that they have obtained from spying on cutomers systems, if it is to be disseminated, should be done so in ways that credit and benefit the sources -- in this case, society as a whole, since their software is installed everywhere.
So by rights, if this goes ahead, it should be in the form of a Socialist state. And I for one don't really trust any business oriented socialist system .. based purely on historical grounds.