Some very provocative comments from Randall Kennedy regarding Microsoft’s possible intentions?
Microsoft’s Virtualization Endgame
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With SoftGrid, Microsoft has the technology portfolio to enable its SaaS endgame strategy. The first salvo was fired at the VMworld conference when Microsoft announced it was decoupling the SoftGrid Virtual Application runtime client from the back-end streaming server (see my review of SoftGrid 4.2 for more on this development). By doing so, Microsoft is positioning the SoftGrid environment as a distribution mechanism on par with its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format. Soon you’ll be able to "test drive" Office, et al, via this new, highly portable medium.
But test drives and demos are only the tip of the iceberg. Once Microsoft has successfully driven the SoftGrid format into the mainstream expect the company to slowly begin phasing out traditional delivery modes. That means no more Office CDs/DVDs with a thousand installed components – an MSI-wrapped SoftGrid OSD file is the future distribution model for virtually all of Microsoft’s non-server applications. It’s the perfect segue towards the "holy grail" of software development: Uninterrupted, subscriptions-based usage, i.e. utility computing.
Don’t expect the move to a hosted, subscriptions-based model to signal the end of Microsoft’s annoying anti-piracy technologies; the likes of the universally loathed Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) will live on. As the folks over at Thinstall are happy to point out, SoftGrid is far from a secure distribution platform. In fact, once an application has been cached locally it’s almost trivially easy to isolate the bits and extract a working copy. For Microsoft to protect its intellectual property, it will need to employ some sort of validation logic beyond a simple subscriber login. However, the implementation will likely be more granular than the current WGA model, possibly woven into multiple components within the virtual image. Suffice to say that Microsoft won’t be releasing a hosted offering until it has worked out how to effectively secure it against piracy.
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