Oracle, here's what you're getting yourself into. These are
dark times at Sun, financially speaking.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/30/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
In the midst of Windows 7 hype (which we're happily contributing to), poor old Vista's second service pack
is finished. So, uh, be on the lookout for that...if you or your customers are unfortunate enough to actually be running Vista.
As for Office 2007, SP2 for the product that sports the ever-popular ribbon interface is out there now.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/30/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Here in Greater Boston, today is a real anomaly. As your editor sits and types this on Tuesday afternoon (cue the
Moody Blues, even though you'll be reading this on Wednesday), it's 93 degrees outside. Around here, that's hot for this time of year. In fact, this is record-breaking heat. But it's going away tonight, and tomorrow we'll be back to showers and temperatures in the 50s. So, since the weather is giving us an unusual day, we at RCPU thought we'd come up with an unusual topic for the newsletter. We also want to get outside before the rain comes and the temperature drops 40 degrees, but don't tell our bosses that, please.
Anyway, your editor just ordered a netbook (running XP), one of those nifty little low-cost computers that's helping put a dent in Microsoft's earnings. And then today, we noticed that HP is introducing a low-cost ($529 -- not netbook-cheap, but not a wallet-buster) computer for small businesses, which will, if you want it to, come pre-installed with Linux.
On a personal level, it was hard to justify spending the money to buy a full-fledged notebook, but XP was more attractive than Linux for a lot of reasons. On an enterprise level, we know that low-cost options -- thin client computing comes to mind -- have existed for a long time. But we're wondering: Why shouldn't small businesses adopt netbooks, at least for those employees who don't do much more than use Office and a browser? And if compatibility with Office is good enough, why shouldn't those people use OpenOffice.org 3 running on Linux? Or maybe Google Docs? You see where we're going with this.
Microsoft always says that the cost of running Linux is more expensive than the cost of running Windows...eventually. And it probably is. It probably doesn't make much sense, either, to try to get everyday office workers to switch away from using the software they've known forever and to type on keyboards that are 92 percent of regular size.
Then again, people seem to like netbooks for home use, so it's not unreasonable to think that they could get used to them in the office. And while, as far as we've read, only a small percentage of netbooks sold runs Linux, it's a much cheaper option than Windows, at least at the outset. The fact that it's selling on netbooks at all shows that at least some consumers must be warming to it.
So as we sit in the air conditioning on an unusual day, we wrap up this unusual post by asking whether you, partners, are running into any interest in netbooks or desktop Linux in your accounts and how you're dealing with it if you are. And we're asking whether it makes any sense at all to even talk about netbooks and Linux in a business setting.
Send your opinions to [email protected]. Hey, it could be a good point for discussion, or it could be just a silly detour from more rational thinking on a hot day.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/29/2009 at 1:22 PM4 comments
Microsoft has
signed up a slew of partners to host its Business Productivity Online Suite, despite the fact that Azure is still in beta. It's a sign -- we hope and think -- that Microsoft is serious about keeping partners in the loop despite having plans to host some services itself. And it's a potential opportunity for partners to follow Redmond into the cloud.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/29/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
After a break, just because we felt like it, we're back to offering profiles of the third-party partner programs that work best for Microsoft partners according to a reader survey in
RCP the magazine. Today's profile:
Seagate.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/29/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Microsoft
already has Pinpoint, a directory that lets customers find partners. Now, it has (fairly quietly, once again)
launched Matchmaker, which helps partners find each other. Why Microsoft doesn't make a bigger deal out of these things -- most of the potential customers your editor talks to for
Redmond magazine have never heard of Pinpoint -- we don't know, but we're getting the word out now.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/28/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
A few teams at last weekend's NFL draft needed arms. Microsoft, though, needs a shot in the arm. Hopefully not a flu shot...but we digress. It's no secret that Redmond is struggling in this recession the way many of us are, and if anybody needed any more proof of Microsoft's woes, it came last week with an historic earnings report.
That report was historic for unfortunate reasons, of course. By now, you know that Microsoft experienced its first year-over-year earnings shortfall ever, or at least since it became a public company more than two decades ago. That means, of course, that Microsoft made less money in the first three months of this calendar year than it made in the first three months of 2008. Microsoft's funky fiscal calendar makes the first three months of the year the third quarter, but it's still January-March on the calendar.
The news for enterprise partners wasn't actually that bad. Microsoft's server and tools division -- the one that rakes in so much cash for the channel, with products such as Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 -- actually managed to grow 7 percent year over year.
But nothing else did. In fact, all of Microsoft's other divisions experienced revenue shortfalls, including the business division, home of Dynamics. Windows, the heavy-hitter of the company's client division, was the big loser as PC sales dropped and netbooks continued to eat away at traditional PC revenues. And while Windows sales don't make that much of a difference to the enterprise channel, a stable Microsoft is always a steadying force for partners.
It is, then, perhaps appropriate that the NFL draft was held last weekend, as rarely does an event pile expectations on the back of the young and mostly untested the way the draft does. Matthew Stafford, this year's can't-miss quarterback prospect from Georgia, now steps into an unenviable situation in Detroit. For those of you who don't follow football, the Lions lost every game they played last season, a rare occurrence indeed.
Windows 7 doesn't have it quite so bad. Microsoft is more like, say, the Dallas Cowboys than the Detroit Lions -- a historically successful entity that has hit a bit of a rough patch recently. But with Vista now pretty much officially the Ryan Leaf of operating systems, and with Microsoft's earnings reports bearing its scars, Windows 7 needs to be a superstar, and fairly quickly.
That's why Redmond has been rushing the young star onto the field, preparing a release candidate for launch on April 30 for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The RC launch for everybody else will happen on May 5. (Of course, some early scouts got an unauthorized sneak preview of the new kid last week.)
Windows 7 will need to be most things to most people -- compatible with existing applications and drivers (a virtual "XP mode" should help that), nimble enough to run on netbooks but powerful enough to satisfy power users. Of course, with multiple editions, the idea is that there will be something for everybody.
About a decade ago, there was a great debate among football fans at draft time regarding two quarterbacks, Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf. None of them would admit it now, but the aforementioned Leaf had plenty of supporters. Well, as any fan knows, Peyton Manning became a Super Bowl winner, and Ryan Leaf -- well, his career didn't go so well. Microsoft needs a Peyton Manning with Windows 7. The new operating system will even wear a quarterback's number. But will it be a legend or a flop? For Redmond's sake, it had better be a legend.
What's your take on the importance of Windows 7 to Microsoft...or on the NFL draft? Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/28/2009 at 1:22 PM2 comments
Nobody gives the "shift" key a better workout than VMware. This week, the virtualization market leader drove journalists and bloggers a few strokes closer to carpal tunnel syndrome with the unveiling of vSphere.
To be specific, it's vSphere 4 that VMware is talking about this week. You might remember it as VMware Infrastructure, its former name. It's basically the company's platform for the datacenter, or, as one VMware executive says in Keith Ward's excellent story on vSphere, "We're calling vSphere a cloud operating system."
There are a lot of those floating around these days, of course. But the experts in Keith's story say that VMware remains way ahead of everybody else in this game, and we're more than willing to defer to them on this topic. It seems as though VMware has beefed up features significantly and has expanded its tiered pricing model so that vSphere is more affordable on the low end.
The VMware folks say that they want to let companies build private clouds that will connect with public clouds (and with all these clouds around, no wonder Sun is disappearing -- heh heh). The idea is that everything will be virtual and services-based rather than application-based. That makes sense to us...we think. Exactly what should go into which cloud seems to be the question that IT professionals will have to answer. Partners should help them answer it (for a reasonable consulting fee, of course).
And that's where we'll leave the discussion of vSphere, because your editor's hands are starting to cramp from all this shifting.
What's your take on vSphere, cloud computing, private clouds and public clouds? Do you have this stuff figured out? Are you selling or using anything like this now? If so, explain everything to us at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/22/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Have you ever wanted to know how Microsoft Services does things, like how it develops best practices and consults with customers? Well, if you're a Gold Certified Partner, you can buy that knowledge from Microsoft in a
nifty little package that covers a bunch of different categories. There's more info on the program
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/22/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
In our continuing series on the best complementary partner programs for Microsoft partners, we come to
APC. Who? It's a power and cooling specialist, apparently, and its partner program is worth checking out.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/22/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments