This
is one of those press releases that tried to make a new technology offering
sound like a dramatic tale of love and deceit set during the Crimean War. If
you can figure it out, let us know what it's about.
Seriously, dig this: "If data is the lifeblood of an organization, the
applications are its heart."
It just sort of goes on from there.
Posted by Lee Pender on 02/06/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Let's not even pretend that there's going to be a bigger story this week (or
maybe this year). Let's just get right to some links:
Microsoft's earnings per share would -- get this -- break
even for the next couple of years if the Yahoo deal goes through.
Congress would look
into the deal, too, according to one intrepid news source. Oh, really? A
$46 billion deal involving Microsoft might get some attention from Congress?
In other news, Bill Gates has a lot of money. (Sorry, we're still kind of bitter
here about the Super Bowl.)
And here's some other non-Yahoo stuff worth reading but not necessarily expounding
upon:
Linus Torvalds says that Microsoft isn't
likely to launch those Linux patent suits.
And Gartner's top-ranked business intelligence vendor in terms of "ability
to execute?" It's based
in Redmond!
Posted by Lee Pender on 02/06/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
We love how software vendors
call
their products "robust," as if they're describing a bold wine
with a heady palate. Robust, but not arrogant...
Posted by Lee Pender on 02/06/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Some of the things that Microsoft has been promising for a while are coming
to fruition. This week, Redmond
released
to manufacturing Windows Server 2008 (formerly "Longhorn") and
the first Vista service pack.
Posted by Lee Pender on 02/05/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
"I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down, tumbling down"
-- from "I Feel the Earth Move" by Carole King
We've had a little bit of both the last few days -- moving earth and tumbling
sky. (And, yes, RCPU apologizes to our more macho readers for quoting an artist
as...uh, sensitive as Carole King two days after the Super Bowl. Hey, we're
feeling introspective.) First, the earth moved on Friday, as Microsoft (finally)
proposed a $44.6
billion buyout of Yahoo. Hey, that much money in that many briefcases hitting
a boardroom table would make anybody's floor shake.
Then, of course, the sky tumbled down -- at least here in New England, where
the local football eleven, the Patriots, will not come home to a celebration
of a perfect season but rather to slate-gray skies and a renewed Bostonian sense
of inferiority toward New York thanks to the Giants' Super Bowl victory. Oh,
well. At least we still have the Red Sox here in Boston, although it feels right
now as though they won the 2007 World Series approximately 437 years ago. Collectively,
we're all a little down around here.
Anyway, given that this is RCPU and not ESPN.com, we'll focus on the moving
earth of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo -- the name of which, as always, we mention
here sans obnoxious exclamation point. Redmond's bid to take on Google (with
which, as you might imagine, Google is none
too pleased) is the one story that has competed with the Super Bowl and
Super Tuesday for newsprint and online eyeballs the last few days.
Fortunately for Microsoft, government regulators on both sides of the globe
seem, for now, uninterested
in blocking the potential deal. As for everybody else's reaction, the takes
have ranged from the ridiculous
to the sublime
to the indifferent,
and pretty much everything
in between.
Casually canvassing the Redmond Media Group cognoscenti, RCP Editor
in Chief Scott Bekker wondered not just whether Microsoft and Yahoo would ever
be able to integrate, but also how much sense it makes for two companies that
are both losing ground to Google to combine with the goal of catching Google.
Can the blind lead the blind? Ed Scannell, industry veteran and editor of Redmond
magazine, RCP's sister magazine geared toward IT types, posited that Microsoft
might need to change its hostile attitude toward open source if it plans to
buy what is essentially an open source company.
Here at RCPU, we're mindful of a couple of things. First of all, the proposed
takeover isn't a done deal. Let's not forget that -- especially given news this
week that Yahoo might
not be so excited about a Redmond takeover after all. Beyond that, let's
not forget to note how staggering Microsoft's offer really is. The company would
likely have to borrow
money for the first time ever in order to pull off the deal, and the price
tag, at upwards of $40 billion, dwarfs that of Microsoft's biggest acquisition
to date: that of online
ad firm aQuantive.
We're also wondering to what extent the Yahoo bid plays into something we've
discussed before -- Microsoft's attempt to move
the market to Web services rather than be moved by the market. Steve Ballmer's
still talking about Windows,
Office and servers as major revenue producers, but Microsoft's recent executive
hires and the potential $45 billion cash outlay for Yahoo seem to scream that
it's time to start thinking about the end of desktop software as we know it
and move to -- not just imagine -- a world in which most computing is delivered
via some sort of service.
Of course, for Microsoft, that would mean seriously downplaying the model and
the products that made the company what it is today -- and playing catch-up
to Google, a nimbler, more established (in Web 2.0 world, anyway) competitor.
None of that will be easy. Just ask IBM, which had considerable trouble shifting
its core business away from mainframes years ago.
But if anybody can pull it off, Redmond can. Windows and Office, while they
might not be the products of the future, are still cash cows in the present.
They could cover the cost of snapping up Yahoo, loans and all. And with new,
Web-savvy blood coming in to run things -- think Ray Ozzie and Stephen Elop
-- Microsoft seems serious about weaning itself off of a reliance on old, standby
technologies.
So, what does all this mean for partners? Well, we're not sure yet. Nobody
is. It might be time, though, to start thinking of what your place in a Microsoft
SaaS universe will be and what kinds of transitions you'll have to take your
business through to get there. Then again, you probably should have been thinking
about that for a while, anyway.
Of course, a potential Microsoft-Yahoo deal could turn out to be a disaster,
or just a flop. But it could also be the catalyst to jumpstart a rivalry with
Google that could actually end up doing both companies and the industry as a
whole a lot of good.
That is, of course, if the deal happens. Like the Pats in the Super Bowl, nothing
is a sure thing.
How do you think a Microsoft-Yahoo deal would affect your business? Sound off
at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 02/05/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
RCP Editor in Chief Scott Bekker
digs
deep into Microsoft's most recent earnings statement and uncovers some things
that the rest of us hadn't yet discovered.
Posted by Lee Pender on 01/31/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Call it a hat trick, as Bekker serves up a tidbit on how the Southeaster...
uh, sorry, not that SEC...the Securities and Exchange Commission
might
be able to help you, partner.
Posted by Lee Pender on 01/31/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Despite what you might have heard, nobody in France actually says "Sacre
bleu!" as an expression of surprise. Maybe people did at one time, but
they don't anymore. These days, "oh la la!" (yes, just like in the
old
Sassoon commercials) is the expression of choice. So, if you're going to
react with shock to the fact that the French national police force has
dumped
Microsoft for Ubuntu Linux, please, use the proper French expression.
Over the next few years, the gendarmerie -- remember, there's a national police
force in France, not a collection of local police entities like what we have
in the U.S. -- is going to shift its 70,000 desktops from Windows to Ubuntu,
which, incidentally, is far and away the operating system with the name that's
most fun to say.
Les flics ("the cops" in French) say that they'll save more than
$10 million a year in license fees. And they're already using OpenOffice and
Firefox, so there shouldn't be too much of an open source culture shock inside
the organization. What we're wondering, then, is whether it's really true --
as Microsoft claims -- that running Windows is actually cheaper than running
Linux despite the cost of Windows license fees. Sure, there might be some issues
with integration somewhere, and there aren't as many experts trained to service
open source applications as there are to service Windows, but still...$10 million
a year? Oh la la, that's a lot of money.
We kind of wonder, too, whether, the European Union's regulatory war on Microsoft
might be having a ripple effect on government IT departments overseas. (Oh,
by the way, the U.S. will keep an eye on Microsoft for another
18 months, too.) We've read that some major European cities have also started
to ditch Redmond's wares, and Europeans -- especially those who work in the
public sector -- are sometimes more prone to listen to their governments than
Americans are. (Actually, that's also true for people who don't work in the
public sector. Your editor distinctly remembers reading and hearing during his
time in France about how public service announcements about safe driving actually
worked over there -- and fairly quickly and impressively, too. Then again, some
of them were pretty disturbing.)
In any case, we're not going to jump on the alarmist, Microsoft-is-dying bandwagon
that probably has one or two fewer seats today. Remember RCPU's rule: No matter
what happens, Microsoft makes more money. But, the more Linux penetrates enterprise
and government settings on the desktop, the more Microsoft had better think
long and hard about what its partners and customers need Windows to be -- maybe,
to start with, lighter, cheaper, more flexible and less like Vista.
Do you run into competition from open source on the desktop? Is running Windows
really cheaper than going with Linux in the long run? Let me know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 01/31/2008 at 1:21 PM1 comments
Dig the lead of
this
story:
"Cisco Systems Inc. introduced on Monday a new data-center switch
that the company says can copy all the searchable data on the Internet in
less than eight minutes, or run 5 million concurrent high-quality videoconferences
between New York and San Francisco."
Wow. That actually sounds...pretty impressive.
Posted by Lee Pender on 01/30/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments