We're dog-fooding the cloud

I first spoke with Tony Scott in 2003 when he was CTO of General Motors. Then, the obsession of the day was Web services, which Scott wryly called "an excuse to get people to talk at the same time" about business processes, a role many grand IT initiatives fill.

Today Scott is CIO of Microsoft, a position he's held since Feb. 2008. When I interviewed him just earlier the holiday, the main excuse for us to talk was the tech industry's current obsession, cloud computing -- and how Microsoft is leveraging its own vast cloud computing infrastructure to serve its employees. We as well touched on the consumerization of IT and how he is supporting a glut of new mobile devices.

Tony Scott: Then, now it's no different than at home. [laughs] Everybody is getting used to this world of having innovation at their fingertips, and there's a belief that what scales at my house should scale in the corporate world. I find it fun and endlessly challenging in terms of how we're going to solve some of these big problems where people want access to everything all the time, in a very convenient way on whatever device they happen to be on or in or around.

The example of Windows 7

In the example of Windows 7, by the time it reached its beta phase, we had virtually every employee in Microsoft all around the world on the beta release. Virtually every product that we sell into the enterprise follows that pattern. The world of services, whether it's the business productivity stuff or Azure or whatever, we treat no differently. I have many large projects underway however that are on our cloud infrastructure and will be delivered over the then couple of years.

Knorr: So how do you reconcile dog-fooding beta software with supporting your users? You have to test products for the business, however you as well have to keep your users happy and make sure everything works.

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