A recent survey from Intel suggests that Americans are
hopelessly addicted to the Internet. OK, maybe it doesn't suggest that, but that's sort of how we feel ourselves sometimes. The proliferation of wireless routers into every home that allowed for the deadly TV-Internet combo, combined with the spread of high-definition TVs, might have been the most important development in the last half of the 20th century. Well, maybe not
the most important, but it's got to be up there. Having said all that, we hope you enjoy our company's
wide selection of monthly print magazines.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/17/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
We're huge fans of acronyms here at RCPU -- we even refer to ourselves as an acronym -- so we were very impressed to get the following e-mail from frequent contributor Jon in response to a
brief but acronym-laden post:
"You seem to be enjoying acronyms in today's RCP Update. Here we have many acronyms that start with the same letter as the name of the company, which has resulted in a few that sound very similar. So we invented another acronym: TAS -- Tangled Acronym Syndrome."
Tangled Acronym Syndrome! We love it. It's not just your company, Jon -- the whole industry suffers from it. Heck, our whole culture is full of acronyms; even the name of our country shortens nicely to one. Add TAS in the tech industry to the relatively recent fashion of referring to athletes by initials or by first initial and last name (for instance, KG for Kevin Garnett or T-Mac for Tracy McGrady), and it's clear that this has been a fantastic decade for the single letter and collections thereof. LL Cool J was truly a visionary in the '80s.
Here's where we skillfully tie today's two reader e-mails together. Ready? Speaking of acronyms (oooh, very smooth), there's no product that relies on them more than Microsoft Dynamics, with its four suites -- although, strictly speaking, we don't think that referring to the erstwhile Axapta by "AX" strictly qualifies as using an acronym.
The same could be said of NAV and Navision and even SL and Solomon -- although GP is a very solid acronym for Great Plains. Still, we're not here to split hairs. Dynamics, which we wrote about last month, in case you were wondering, is alphabet soup (or TAS, perhaps) at its chunkiest. And that's still a problem for a lot of users and partners. Wrote Joseph back in November:
"My biggest problem with the Dynamics lineup, and I doubt it has changed with NAV 09: It is very difficult to understand or comprehend what the different products actually do or do not do. There is also very little in the way of partner support available for these particular products."
That's an interesting point about partner support, Joseph, and we weren't aware that it was a problem. We are aware, though, of the confusion that still surrounds Microsoft's four-suite strategy with Dynamics. Without rehashing a bunch of stuff we've hashed before, we'll just say that the four-suite thing is the proverbial (and horribly cliché -- sorry) elephant in the room in every conversation about Dynamics.
Nobody wants to talk about the confusion that four suites create, but it's definitely there, and there still seems to be a lot of channel conflict to go with it. We understand that Project Green is dead, at least from a marketing perspective, and we think we understand why (talk of merging the four suites was hurting sales, as customers waited for the final product), but we're just not sure that customers and partners will continue to digest Dynamics' alphabet soup. And a struggling economy is the worst environment in which to...well, do almost anything, really, but especially to go out with a befuddling branding message. Still, we'll likely see Dynamics TAS survive for a long time to come.
Thanks again to Jon and Joseph for their contributions. If you have anything else on your mind, be it related to ERP, CRM, SFA, SQL, MSPs, MOSS, WEBS, SLED, SAP, RCPU or anything else, spell it out and send it to [email protected]. And don't forget to send your top 10 lists for 2009.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/17/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Whether anybody cares about
this or not, we have no idea. But, hey, it's a slow news...month.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/16/2008 at 1:22 PM2 comments
It's that time of year when news slows to about the pace of current returns on an investment with
Bernard Madoff, and everybody in the press fills Web site space with top-10 lists.
There are top-10 lists of every conceivable nature, from the top 10 Microsoft stories, to the top 10 Linux stories (or at least the top Linux stories -- we didn't count them...or read them), to the top 10 Internet stories, to, as far as we can tell, the top 10 stories, period, at least from a technology-industry perspective. There's even a list of the 10 most influential "biztech" leaders of 2008.
We were going to go whole hog, as we'd say in Texas, and post 10 top 10 lists...but most of them really aren't worth reading, anyway. Why? Because they all look backwards! We all know what happened (and is still happening) in 2008, but what we really want to know is what's going to happen in 2009.
That's where you come in, brave reader. Send us your top 10 for 2009. Whatever kind of top 10 you want -- it doesn't even have to have 10 entries. You can do this any way you want; you can be serious and send us a few (or 10 even) of your own priorities for 2009 -- projects, goals, whatever. You can send us 10 things you'd like to see in 2009 -- industry trends, products, acquisitions, you name it. Or you can send us the stories you think you'll be reading or hope to read next year. For instance: "Microsoft Buys Google and Cisco, Takes Control of Entire Internet and Requires Users To Buy Vista To Get Access." Or maybe, "Virtualization and Cloud Computing Allow for Storage of All Human Knowledge on One Server in One Datacenter."
Anyway, have fun with this; be as serious or as silly as you like, but let us know what's up for 2009. This will be the last week of RCPU for the year, so you have plenty of time to get your answers in -- we'll run them in 2009 after we've all sung Auld Lang Syne and watched 800 hours of college football on New Year's Day.
You know the address: [email protected]. Look into your crystal ball and tell us the future, or what you want the future to hold.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/16/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
In case there was any lingering doubt, we can confirm this week that
Microsoft is serious about this SaaS -- or even Software Plus Services -- stuff
after all. And despite some early concerns, it's becoming clearer that partners
won't be as shut out as they might have thought.
This week, Microsoft and HP revealed an initiative aimed at preparing
VARs to undertake what's called private-label hosting. Basically, VARs resell
applications hosted in datacenters by Microsoft-approved managed service
providers (or MSPs, of course); HP and Microsoft provide some technical
infrastructure and handy tips for getting started.
The nice thing here for VARs, other than getting some assistance in moving
into a hot, new technology model, is that they can put their names on these
hosted services. That's the nature of private label -- VARs brand hosted
offerings as their own rather than selling a product with somebody else's name
on it and just settling for a referral fee. With private label, VARs don't have
to give up their identities as trusted advisers to customers.
For MSPs, too, there are advantages. Despite considerable efforts from the
good folks at the MSP Alliance, managed service providers still face a bit
of an uphill battle overcoming the bad impressions a few of
the bad apples in their industry have left with customers. HP and Microsoft,
with this new program, are giving MSPs a little endorsement in selling to VARs.
Private-label sales to VARs already is and should continue to be a nice revenue
stream for many MSPs; a positive word and some technical help from Microsoft
and HP should only help service providers' cause in attracting VARs as
customers.
Of course, this new initiative doesn't make everything OK. Microsoft is
still planning to host its own applications and therefore compete pretty directly with MSPs, as well as with VARs.
And unless Steve Ballmer has changed his mind since July, Redmond doesn't plan on giving a competitive inch to its
partners-slash-competitors.
Still, if anything, the Microsoft-HP initiative has the look of a bit of an
olive branch to the channel at a time when a lot of partners are still not
totally sure how cloud computing will affect their businesses or how, exactly,
they should participate in it. And that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
Will you take advantage of the Microsoft-HP hosting offer? How are you
preparing your business to deal with cloud computing? Let us know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/2008 at 1:22 PM1 comments
One of the Compaq PC lines will have Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
(SLED, in case you needed another acronym)
pre-installed.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
We were wondering when this would happen. We've asked here many times over
the last couple of years whether we'd ever see a true hosted version of Office
from Microsoft -- and unless Stephen Elop somehow falls from power and
Microsoft changes direction dramatically in the months to come, the answer
appears to be yes.
Yes, we will see a hosted version of Office, that is. Elop said as much this week, and he didn't stop
there. Apparently, Redmond is looking at offering multiple pricing models for
hosted Office, including the one that attracts us the most at first glance:
free.
Well, of course, nothing is totally free. The free version of Office will be
advertising-supported, naturally, so the potential for ads grabbing screen
space will be high. Still, though, Microsoft is promising compatibility between
desktop Office and hosted Office...as well as hosted version of Exchange and
SharePoint.
Clearly, Microsoft doesn't want to fall (further?) behind in the field of
hosted applications, meaning the giant sees real potential in the SaaS (or even
S+S) model. And it's that type of endorsement that'll help carry SaaS from
potentially interesting model to everyday enterprise reality.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It's apparently -- chemistry majors we were not -- the symbol on the
periodic table of for sodium chloride. In any case,
NaCl, or Native Client, is Google's effort
to bring Web applications up to the same level of performance as desktop apps.
And already ink-stained (if we can still be called that in the Web era)
journalists are predicting that it could someday spell doom for Microsoft. From
the
InformationWeek article linked above:
"NaCl, the chemical formula for sodium chloride [See, we told you.
--LP], can be seen as salt in Microsoft's wounds. If Google's Native Client
becomes a robust system, the performance gap between desktop and Web
applications could all but vanish.
"For companies that continue to rely on revenue from desktop software,
such as Microsoft and Adobe, that would further undermine the value
proposition of their costly software products. That possibility has long been
foreseen, however, and both Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) and Microsoft are moving their
applications online in ways that make the browser less relevant."
OK, so improving performance of Web apps would go a long way toward bringing
Web applications to parity with desktop apps. (We like to call it bridging the
app gap.) But performance isn't the only issue SaaS, Web 2.0, cloud computing
or whatever you want to call it faces. There's also the issue of uptime, the
problem of ownership of applications (some companies just like to run stuff
in-house) and even a few potential regulatory hurdles with HIPAA laws and the
like.
We're believers in Web-based applications, SaaS and all the rest of it, but
we're also not ready to declare the desktop dead yet. And with Windows Azure,
Microsoft is at least acknowledging that it needs to be a player in the cloud.
So we're not ready to see NaCl as salt in anybody's wound -- more like a new
ingredient to spice up competition a little bit.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/10/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
UC still remains (mostly) a mystery to us, but the price tag on
this new effort at least makes it
interesting.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/10/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
And so we come back to this because it just won't go away. Despite a recent
improvement in the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, there's
still a
global economic freak-out in full swing...and journalists
and newsletter writers (ahem) aren't exactly keeping a balanced perspective
about it. It's time for a little
mea culpa.
Wrote reader Dennis back in November in response to RCPU's most grievous freak-out:
"I've been more than aware of the economic problems facing this nation
for the last couple of months, as well as the failures in the housing
industry that seem to have precipitated the whole thing.
"However, one thing that I've been seeing lately has me wondering if
we're making things worse by the way in which we describe the situation.
Words like 'cratered,' which you used in your article, seem to be a bit
melodramatic to describe a growth rate of only 10 percent in Dynamics
billings. Billings 'fell off a cliff' is used to describe the same
situation.
"I suppose that to add some punch to their columns, writers seek for
the most dramatic phrase to describe the Dow's loss for the day, or the
number of home foreclosures in a month. However, when those phrases pass
through the mind of the average person, I wonder if they don't have a
cumulatively depressing effect. If there's any way to be optimistic in
today's market, it's made harder by continually hearing about cratering and
falling off a cliff.
"What I'm suggesting as a remedy isn't to paint everything as rosy, but
to use less emotionally powerful words to describe, as rationally as
possible, the events of the day, and then to give some context for them. To
refer to the Great Depression as something which could happen only once isn't
enough. We've got to refer to events more recent than the 1929 Crash or the
'30s and try to do it in a less hysterical way."
Dadgummit (as we'd say in Texas), Dennis, your brand of thoughtful,
sensible, rational e-mails is just not welcome around here. Just kidding.
Actually, we really like what you had to say.
While we do think that we're all in for some rough times ahead (and in the
midst of rough times now), we did try to qualify that Dynamics revenues being
off isn't exactly tantamount to the coming of another depression. We were
hoping that our readers would be savvy enough to see how silly it is to
juxtapose the two, and we think that most were. You certainly were.
However, when it comes to mainstream coverage of the economy (and, uh, maybe
some of the coverage here, too), we totally agree with you. There are a lot of
alarmist writers out there who've bought into using scare tactics to get people
to read articles. We've tried to subtly parody that just a bit, but it's
entirely possible that we're being way too subtle. And, outside of attempted
parodies, we've also bought too much into the same tactic ourselves -- it's
just so hard to resist!
Really, the conditions of the early '90s and certainly of the late '70s
(especially the late '70s) were arguably worse than anything we're
seeing now, although the potential for total collapse seems much worse today.
Nevertheless, some, maybe a lot, of the doomsday talk -- which has yet to die
down after it was spurred partly by both presidential candidates during their
campaigns -- is way out of line.
As for Dynamics revenues falling off a cliff, they might have by Microsoft's
standards...but they certainly didn't by the standards of, say, AIG or GM. So,
you make a very good point. We should be more careful about using language like
that, and we will try to be in the future.
How panicked are you about the economy? Get your thoughts on that or
anything else that's on your mind in to [email protected]. Next week we'll
release our last batch of RCPUs until the new year, so hurry!
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/10/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments