As a partner I'm not especially worried. I don't expect I'll be recommending software as a service until fibre or other high speed reliable internet access is in place for the majority of businesses.

All partners should expect to have to adapt over the years to work with in the ever changing industry.

Microsoft doesn't have partners. it has business aquaintances it's yet to either aquire or stomp on.

What's the value add in delivering software boxes?

Partners who deliver hardware (or vast realms (sic, but true) of paper for the paperless online office) have nothing to fear from a world that has Intel inside and Microsoft somewhere far off in the distance.

Industry solution providers will make out like gangbusters from the ability to join the online document sharing groups of their clients.

The big losers (other than the customers who get their private records posted on Wikileaks and etc) will be the internal IT staffs who will be found quite redundant when the information isn't kept in house anymore.

Also Microsoft is slitting their own throats by making online shared documents more fashionable to the pointy haired bosses who have yet to consider Google.

-HJC

Disintermediate India

So when your ISP has connection issues the entire business shuts down and everyone may as well go the pub.

Hmm, not sure if thats a bad thing or not.

Probably depends on whether your pub's running Windows for Watering Holes (tm) or not.

No more beef. We eat whales now. Apparently far better for the environment. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/04/2178926.htm

Any large enterprise worth it's salt will have multiple redundant connections to the internet and public phone system, allowing for the occaisional failures not to stop connectivity.

As the You Tube incident showed, the Internet itself can be a single point of failure.

Microsoft can hose their own systems (and have) or their DNS records could be misplaced (or poisoned), but I think the vast majority of Microsoft's new (advertising supported?) customers will be small enough to not have an IT department and so won't have multiple links anywhere.

BTW: apparently rancid butter is the preferred condiment for whale these days.