This week marks the
HostingCon
2007 conference in Chicago, which, aside from serving as a forum for Microsoft
to show off its application-hosting technologies, also sounds like something
you might do if you invited a convicted felon over for dinner. (Get it? "Con,"
like convict? Never mind.)
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/25/2007 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Interesting
little story here in The Times of London, old chap, about how Microsoft
actually figured out how to profit from piracy in China. Leave it to Bill Gates
and friends to turn a sow's ear into yet another expensive silk purse.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/20/2007 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Commenting on earnings only a few hours after they come out (we're writing
this on Thursday afternoon, FYI) is a bit like
reading
the CliffsNotes for a great novel and then doing a book report. Earnings
reports from big companies like Microsoft are absolute monsters (seriously,
check
this thing out), and they're
full
of subtle nuances that press releases and a few wire-service stories can't
fully capture.
But for our purposes today, the CliffsNotes of Microsoft's earnings announcement
will be just fine. And the major character in this story is the forlorn Xbox,
the infamous video game console that Redmond now has to fix…to the tune
of more
than a billion dollars. Microsoft actually ended
up doing fine -- although not spectacularly well -- in its fourth fiscal
quarter despite the problems with the Xbox.
And its year-end numbers -- remember, Microsoft's fiscal year runs from July
through June, not that you didn't know that -- were fairly staggering: For the
first time, Redmond earned more than $50 billion in a single fiscal year. So
those Xbox repairs cost about one-fiftieth of the company's annual haul. Just
to put things in perspective.
Quarterly numbers seemed to be about what Wall Street expected, so it's hard
to say how this earnings report will affect Microsoft's stock price, which,
despite about a 6 percent rise this fiscal year, still trailed Oracle, Google,
Apple and the S&P 500 in terms of performance. The fourth quarter's final
tally could have been better, of course. For instance, the Xbox repairs showed
up as a one-time expense, but it fairly shaved the company's earnings-per-share
figure.
The Xbox debacle is all part of Microsoft's ongoing -- and, thus far, mostly
unsuccessful -- attempt
to be cool. The console hasn't yet made any money and has now surely cost
more than Redmond ever expected. Losses for the company's Entertainment and
Devices division were up 183 percent in 2007 compared with 2006. Microsoft's
Online Services Business division -- think MSN and almost anything called "Live"
-- saw losses expand, too.
But that's the bad news, and, as you might expect, there's lots of good news.
Vista
seems to be bumping along, sales-wise, mainly because -- as we see it --
people who buy new computers get it by default, not because anybody seems to
particularly like Vista. Still, while it might be a critical failure and a dud
in the enterprise channel thus far, it's raking in dollars for Redmond. And
Dynamics, Microsoft's enterprise software offering, showed up as a 24 percent
increase in customer billings in the company's fourth fiscal quarter.
So the story of Microsoft's earnings has a happy -- if not massively, spectacularly
happy -- ending, despite a few plot twists. Which leads us to wonder (again),
actually -- why does Microsoft try so hard to be cool? How much more money will
it cost Redmond before the company either turns its fortunes around with Xbox
and search or just stops pumping so much into both efforts? In Microsoft's case,
we suppose, money is no object.
What's your take on Microsoft's earnings? Are you pleased with the direction
in which the company is moving? Talk to me at [email protected].
Incidentally, there were lots of earnings reports this week, including numbers
from Intel and Google,
the latter of which missed Wall Street's expectations and took a bit of a hit.
Oh, and while we're adding footnotes, guess what's back? The Microsoft-to-buy-Yahoo
rumor!
We'll get back to running the loads and loads of reader e-mails next week,
so keep them pouring in to [email protected],
and thanks to all of you who have taken time to write.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/20/2007 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Mary Jo Foley tries to slice and dice
through
the confusion of exactly when the first Vista service pack is going to appear,
but even she is
having trouble
with her Microsoft
Ginsu
knife blade.
Incidentally, in the interest of balance, we've found a couple of fans of Vista.
(See, we couldn't lay off the reader e-mails after all.) Paul writes:
"I believe Vista has a lot offer to offer to users of all levels.
The pervasive search throughout is hands-down my favorite feature. It is very
well integrated, fast and accurate. Sure, you can have this experience today
with Windows XP through Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop, but with
Vista it is baked right in. A big thumbs-up to Microsoft on this point. Vista
does offer a lot more usability improvements in the overall shell experience,
too. I find that most people struggle with Vista simply because it appears
to be different from the XP experience. If you look closely, however, the
shell changes are more evolutionary than revolutionary.
"I would be interested to see your magazine and editorials highlight
the positive changes and how they can impact users of all levels. It is clear
that the sales numbers aren't matching expectations at present, but enough
of the negativity, please -- let's start focusing on the positive and the 'road
ahead.'"
But, Paul...the negativity's so much more fun! All kidding aside, we don't
actually want Vista to fail. So, in the interest of focusing on the positive,
we'll not run the negative Vista e-mails we got this week (even though they
do outnumber the positive ones these days). In fact, here's another e-mail from
a Vista fan, Eddy, who -- and this is the first time we've heard this -- doesn't
like Office 2007:
"Every workstation on our network is running Vista. We have no problems
or compatibility issues with it and love it. Now, Office 2007 is another matter.
Whoever made the decision to remove the traditional navigation menus and switched
to the new format should be shot on sight. Office 2007 has a huge learning
curve that was not necessary."
Shot on sight. Eddy doesn't mess around when it comes to productivity suites.
Have anything to add on Vista or Office 2007? Add it at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/20/2007 at 1:21 PM1 comments
Squarely in the "in-case-you-missed-it" category,
here's
a story on last week's Partner of the Year awards doled out at the Microsoft
Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver.
Out of curiosity, what do these awards mean to you? If you're a partner, do
you actively try to win them or partner with companies that have won them? And
if you're in IT (and we know you're out there reading), are you more likely
to partner with a company that has won an award? Let me know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/19/2007 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Those of you who remember the gilded age of the late 1990s (and before) will
simply love an article that's been circulating on the
21
biggest tech flops.
Our favorite tech flop (which did make the article) is speech recognition software,
if only because your editor got a bit of a scoop at Comdex some years back by
reporting that Microsoft wouldn't be including speech recognition in whatever
the next version of Windows was at the time. Hey, it might seem ridiculous now,
but it was pretty darn exciting at the time.
What's your favorite tech flop? Drop me a line at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/19/2007 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Well, here we go again. The European Union, not content to have already hammered
Microsoft with
all
sorts of fines and other hassles (which
Redmond
has appealed, of course), wants more. This time, "people" (we
just love
Bloomberg's
headline on this one) say that the EU is going to look into Microsoft's
dominance in the word-processing and spreadsheet games. And if "people"
say it, it must be true...right?
The EU's main beef seems to be with interoperability with productivity suites
that compete with Office -- specifically, for instance, whether Microsoft is
making it too hard for developers of, say, StarOffice to let their product handle
Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Microsoft counters with its Office Open XML format, which was cruising through
various certification organizations on its way to becoming a standard (having
already been accepted by at least one) -- until this week, when things hit
a bit of a snag. Regardless, Microsoft says that OOXML and its thousands
of pages of documentation make it possible (if not necessarily easy, we'd hasten
to add) for developers of rival systems to create interoperability with Office
formats.
We're all for interoperability here at RCPU, and we're all for anything that
makes it easier. But we're not for excessive government intervention into anybody's
business or products -- and we're not for measures that weaken intellectual
property. So let's see what rivals have to say about Word and Excel and how
legitimate their claims seem (although we suspect there will be nothing new
under the Eurosun). Our guess is that this whole episode amounts to more Microsoft-baiting
from the EU and Redmond's rivals...and more multi-figure paychecks for corporate
lawyers.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/19/2007 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Want to know what the post-Vista world might look like? We'll bet you do.
Well, Microsoft dropped a hint or two with a couple of recent
applications for patents. No word yet on whether the open source folks came
up with any of this stuff first.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/17/2007 at 1:21 PM0 comments
The bad news for Microsoft search watchers is that Google is extending its
market share lead. The good news is that Microsoft is kind of, sort of,
catching
up with Yahoo a little bit.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/12/2007 at 1:21 PM0 comments