Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

It would seem that Microsoft is more than a little worried about competition from the software cloud, and especially from the likes of Google. They are worried enough, in fact, that they are enlisting a relatively untested technology, application streaming, which shares some key precepts with the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm, as well as having some key differences.

Essentially, Microsoft is seen as moving toward this concept for the first time because they have decided to make application streaming a key part of Office 2007 for at least a period of a year, in the form of a trial. This move will allow Microsoft partners to offer the Office suite as  a part of their Web hosting options. It is unclear exactly what functionality is to be offered within this strategy. As yet, the online offerings of both Microsoft and Google (and others) have been less than satisfactory in terms of application functionality.

This is seen as a fairly radical departure from the line the Redmond giant has taken in the past. It is in line with its recent decision to offer some components of office to subscribers via subscription on the Web, and the introduction of more and more products such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

There are a lot of technical and practical questions about the application streaming model, including speed, functionality, what code lives where, security issues, and a host of other problems that need to be resolved. We are a long way yet from having the marketplace declare a winner in any of the cloud computing technologies. In our opinion, these technologies will be very useful, and may form key components of the New Web, once these questions (and others) are answered.