This ties in rather well with a blog post I just wrote on this subject:

http://delimiter.com.au/2012/08/24/bpos-holdouts-have-head-in-the-sand-says-mvp/

It was > 7 days since the migration, so Microsoft refused to assist. I’m now dealing with Telstra directly and the experience isn’t exactly instilling any confidence in me that they know what’s going on.

We’ve seen plenty of examples in other fields over the past few years of cloud-based services shut down or substantially modified without a lot of user consultation. In the consumer space, it could be something as simple as a redesign of Google Apps which most people don’t like (and would have preferred not to be forced to use), or Apple forcing customers down a certain path with upgrades. Another example might be the way Microsoft forces you to continually upgrade your Xbox 360 on demand — or else you won’t be able to connect to Xbox Live.

In the enterprise space this is clearly going to go a lot slower — large vendors like Microsoft and Salesforce.com, when they do enforce changes on users, tend to give those users a lot more notice — at least three to six months, if it’s a minor change, longer if it’s a change as substantial as BPOS to Office 365. But it seems clear that in some cases there is going to be no way out of that change — you either adopt it, or you lose access.

As you say, Steve, this will require customers to be more flexible in adopting change as it comes through, with regular small iterations.

I think many customers can handle this in general. What I would be more concerned about, however, if when third-party developers or even large customers themselves start building things on top of these cloud platforms. We’ve seen in the desktop space, for example, that Windows XP and IE6 continue to stick around because so many other systems were built on top of them. Will this happen in cloud computing as well? Will Microsoft gradually lose the ability to make major innovations as third-party additions get ladled on top of platforms like Office 365? I haven’t seen many examples yet, but I’m sure this is already happening with some of the Salesforce.com platforms out there — Database.com and Force.com, for example.

Interesting times.

Renai

The iterative evolution, however, is indeed “remorseless”. Cloud services providers have no interest or motivation to maintain access to ‘old’ versions of their services. The deal is, “we are running fast into the future, come along with us if you also want to run fast and can keep up. We can’t afford to carry you though if you aren’t fit enough, so think about it”.

Two things are required for cloud services to work. The first is good cloud services with all of the attributes that characterise what I call the Cloud Innovation Edge: large operational scale, focused R&D and skills, multi-tenant architectures and operational models, high resiliency, configurability, iterative functional evolution, genuinely services-oriented architectures with published interfaces, integration with social and mobile platforms, Internet-age authentication and security, user self-service, usage-based charging, transparent performance reporting and the creation of platforms for the integration of ecosystems of other vendors and service providers. This will take time to evolve …

The second thing that is required, however, is intelligent customers that are prepared to adopt a new set of expectations, behaviours and skills for how they source and manage ICT capabilities. This will take time to evolve …

Cloud services can end in tears if either of these things are missing … so keep your eyes open people.