The Sinofsky Deal: Or How Microsoft Is Terrified Of Losing The Cloud Race

If you needed any more evidence Microsoft is truly, madly, deeply desperate to keep up in the cloud race, look no further than its restrictions on who ex-Windows leader Steve Sinofsky can work for. According to a filing with the SEC, Sinofsky can’t gain employment at any of the following vendors until the year is up: Amazon, Apple, EMC, Facebook, Google, Oracle and VMware.

It’s clear Microsoft also cares about its mobile endeavours from that list, but given cloud is something all those rivals are “going big” on, it would appear the cloud is where the Redmond giant’s concerns really lie.

It’s already behind Amazon in the infrastructure-as-a-service space, is locking horns with Apple on personal clouds, sees EMC and VMware as a direct threat to its Azure services, is waging war with Oracle over SaaS and now IaaS products too, and pretty much hates Google for a whole host of reasons, one of them being Google Apps’ cloud productivity offerings (no one seems to care much for Google’s IaaS stuff though, so I doubt Microsoft is quaking in its booties over that).

No Salesforce? And why Facebook?

One surprise omission was Salesforce. Your reporter has seen Microsoft carry out some pretty ostentatious marketing campaigns during Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference (in one case it carried ads surrounding the Moscone Center saying a customer had moved from Salesforce’s CRM to Microsoft’s, but Salesforce fired back by paying the actor to come on stage and say he had gone back to Salesforce again – oh, the gross corporate hilarity that ensued!). So I would have thought Marc Benioff’s firm would have been on the hit list. Salesforce’s moves into the PaaS space really should worry Microsoft, even if they do partner a lot.

The most perplexing addition though is Facebook. Microsoft isn’t running a social network, not a consumer-facing one anyhow. Is it really that much of a threat? If we consider Facebook to be as much a content hosting platform as a social media site, then yes. If Facebook can build up datacentres filled full of its custom-designed, hyper-efficient boxes based on its Open Compute designs, it could well get ahead of Microsoft in terms of offering a more scalable hosting environment. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Facebook then moved into the SkyDrive/Dropbox/iCloud space anyway, would it?

You could argue Microsoft has just covered off all of its core competitors in its Sinofsky agreement, but you’ll note the absence of Xbox rivals (remember Xbox One uses the Windows kernel so Sinofsky would have had some part in the gaming operation – not to mention how seamlessly Microsoft has tied its desktop and mobile operating systems to the Xbox over the past few years).

The fact it didn’t name Sony, Nintendo or other competitors in the gaming market indicates it isn’t worried about losing ground there. But in naming all those cloud-heavy companies, it is clearly more than a little concerned about losing out in the various cloud markets in which it dabbles.

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