Microsoft plans to spend a staggering $9.5 billion on R&D this year - $3 billion more than its closest competitor – COO Kevin Turner has announced.
A large portion of the spending will go towards the development of cloud services, he added in a keynote at the CeBIT trade show.
“We're going to change and reinvent our company around leading in the cloud,” he said, as quoted in Computerworld UK.
Turner boasted that Microsoft has more cloud services on offer than any other company, from consumer email to hosted enterprise products, and even its Azure cloud OS.
But he added that Microsoft is not planning to abandon its non-cloud offerings any time soon, stating there will always be demand for richer-featured client software.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer voiced similar sentiments at last week's Cloud Expo, the Cloud Computing Journal said.
“As I like to say at Microsoft, for the cloud we're all in,” he said. “Twenty million businesses and over a billion people [already] use Microsoft cloud services.”