IDG: Talking about Google in particular, what do you think people should have learned from the City of Los Angeles' experience with Google Apps?
Muglia: That it's not so easy. The City of Los Angeles is an indicator of how complicated an enterprise and a business environment is. It speaks to one of the most fundamental differentiators that Microsoft has in this space, which is that we are the only company in the industry that has 20 years of experience working with enterprise customers and really understanding their needs, and 15 years of experience building massive-scale consumer services. Go through the industry. You can't find anyone that has both of those. IBM has more than 20 years' enterprise experience. I'll give them that, but really no consumer experience. Google has big consumer services, no industry experience in terms of the business.
I think what the City of Los Angeles found out was really some of the issues that come about when a provider doesn't have that experience of working with enterprise customers and understanding the complexity of that environment. One thing I think is really important -- if you look at the classic enterprise competitors, you know, the Oracles, the IBMs, the VMWares -- is that you gotta run this stuff yourself. And, you know what? Your engineering team has to run it. IBM says they're running these clouds, but it's their services organization that's running these things and building these things. That's really an outsourcing. It's a hosting sort of circumstance and an arm's-length thing. It's my own engineering teams that are running the clouds. It's my engineering teams that are getting called when there's a problem. It's my engineering teams that are dealing with and understanding what happens when you're running a service, day in, day out for a customer. I can't even imagine how a provider can deliver a cloud service unless they're operating that way.
To be fair, Google operates that way, an Amazon would operate that way. The consumer service companies have that experience. They know that. But they don't know the enterprise. They don't understand the needs that the enterprise has in terms of the complexity of their environments, the lifecycle associated with their applications. You see things with these consumer services guys. They release something and customers build apps and they say, "Oh, we're going to change that API in the next version completely." And customers have built and made investments. We've come to learn what sort of expectations an enterprise customer has. It's that balance of understanding what it means to run these services at scale and actually have your engineering teams live with it, and understand the complexity and the expectations in the enterprise.
IDG: What other big shifts is Microsoft focused on with major corporate customers around collaboration, mobility, and business intelligence?
Muglia: There are some great things that are happening. We see a strong emergence of a wide variety of devices and connecting those sets of devices. Obviously, we're highly engaged in building those things. We're excited to see Windows Phone 7 launching this fall. That's really a huge step and I think we'll start to see a lot of success there.
You mentioned business intelligence. I think that's an example of one of the major opportunities that emerges in this sort of this crunch time where we have this combination of business systems and sensors that are being deployed. I was just in China not that long ago, and the utility companies [there] are going to have smart meters sending this massive amount of data back associated with the usage of electricity. There's a massive amount of information that's coming into these systems. How can we actually make use of that and put it in a form that people can digest and actually make better business decisions?