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Computerworld -
ORLANDO -- Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer last week said the software vendor plans to give all of its applications an “Internet-style simplicity” as part of a move to offer them in hosted environments to corporate users.

The company’s goal is to provide users with software that has “click-to-run characteristics” inside their firewalls, Ballmer said during a question-and-answer session with Gartner analysts at the consulting firm’s Symposium/ITxpo 2006 conference here.

Ballmer discounted the competitive threat posed by software delivered over the Internet free of charge by vendors such as Google. “Most people, for the foreseeable future, are still going to want to run enterprise IT as enterprise IT,” he said.

Nonetheless, Microsoft is developing its own online offerings, such as Windows Live and Office Live. Greg Barkee, director of technology at Providence Health System in Beaverton, Ore., said it will be interesting to see where Microsoft and rival vendors take the concept of Internet-based applications.

“We’re still pretty fat-client-centric,” Barkee said. “Anytime you can improve speed [and] efficiencies, it’s a good thing, especially in the enterprise. [But] from what we continue to see, Microsoft’s products seem to get bigger, fatter, [with] larger disk space and larger memory requirements.”

While Ballmer talked about improving applications, one conference attendee said what Microsoft needs is improved software licensing.

“They need to get better on licensing,” said S-E. Haugen, vice president of IT at Strohl Systems Group Inc. in King of Prussia, Pa. “You can’t address licensing in a short session, and it’s definitely nothing [Ballmer] wants to talk about, because it is a sore point.”

Haugen said Microsoft’s products are “sold in so many flavors and fashions” that it’s hard to keep track of them. For instance, he said he has been unable to get consistent answers from resellers about license fees, such as the cost of licensing the SQL Server database to run on a Windows server with four processors.

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