The question isn't so much when Vista SP2 is coming out as it is whether anybody
cares that it's coming out. But if you do care,
April
might be your lucky month.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/02/2008 at 1:22 PM1 comments
We'd like to thanks the
Times of London, old chaps, for giving us something
to write about in what's bound to be a slow time leading up to the holidays.
Some Times reporter said this week that Microsoft is going to pay $20
billion to buy Yahoo's search business -- a claim quickly refuted in the gosh-darn
American Wall Street Journal (well, in one of its blogs, anyway), by
a couple of investors who were supposed to be involved in the deal. All the
relevant links, plus a nifty news story, are here
on RCPmag.com.
So, yeah...$20 billion for part of a company that had a market cap of $16 billion
on Monday before the market got hammered again? Not likely, we're thinking.
Will Microsoft make a(nother) play for Yahoo's search business, or for all of
Yahoo? Hey, anything could happen -- but we're thinking that the WSJ
has probably trumped the Times this time. And we're happy that this story
is something that vaguely resembles news in December.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/02/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
So, OneCare is dead, but Microsoft's effort to be a security vendor is still
alive. Sort of. Microsoft will replace OneCare next year with a set of
free
security applications. Or maybe Microsoft will finally just take steps to
secure its own applications the way users have wanted it to for a long time.
In any case, there's the potential for trouble in all this.
The immediate reaction from many observers has been to suggest that Morro,
the code name for OneCare's free successor, will be lawsuit bait for Symantec
and McAfee -- you know, those companies that have made a living doing what
Microsoft wouldn't or couldn't to secure Windows -- and antitrust regulation
fodder for the ravenous European Union.
Redmond has already started the spin machine, suggesting that rivals' products
will
still be way better than Morro, which will just be a simple set of tools
for people who won't pay for anti-virus, anyway. Symantec and friends, whose
stock prices took a hit on the Morro news (not that they were alone in seeing
share prices fall this week), predictably played Morro as being no
big deal.
And it probably isn't. First of all, Microsoft isn't going to introduce anything
that might even seem like a legitimate Symantec killer. There are lots of reasons
for this, but let's just confine ourselves for now to saying that Microsoft
likely won't want to throw another meaty bone to the EU regulation dogs.
Folks in Redmond have learned a lot from their various battles with government
regulators, and their attempts to slide in and take over markets aren't as blatant
as they used to be. Plus, Microsoft has a right -- a responsibility, really
-- to provide some level of basic security. And making it free actually seems
less monopolistic and more customer-friendly than making people pay for it.
But that leaves open, of course, greater questions: Where will Microsoft's
security efforts stop? And where should they stop? Symantec and McAfee, among
others, won't go away if Microsoft seriously decides to shore up its products
on its own; the big security vendors have huge businesses these days that go
way beyond making Windows work. So why shouldn't Microsoft improve built-in
security for its own application infrastructure? Most users would probably say
that it should -- and should have a long time ago.
That's not to say that Microsoft won't eventually try a more significant security
land grab -- there is, after all, a hosted
security suite on the way -- but for now, Morro seems pretty innocuous.
Whether rivals, regulators and the industry will see it that way is another
matter.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/20/2008 at 1:22 PM1 comments
It's a little company called Transitive that's
falling
into Armonk's hands. (By the way, we're going to start referring to IBM
as "Armonk" the way we refer to Microsoft as "Redmond"...just
because.)
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/20/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Jerry Yang is
out
as CEO of Yahoo...which is, perhaps, a sign that Microsoft
might
be back in to buy the company -- eventually.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/19/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It probably won't affect the channel except at the very low end, and even there
partners who are trying to make money strictly by reselling software are probably
going broke, anyway. But the
opening
of Microsoft's online store in the U.S. might still make a few partners
queasy.
Sure, the prices are high, and there's no threat to the services element that
brings in most of partners' revenues, anyway, but Microsoft going into the direct-sales
business in the U.S. -- it had already opened stores in Europe -- just might
not set right with partners who are already concerned about Redmond's not-necessarily-channel-friendly
cloud computing strategy.
There's always that nagging question: If Microsoft is willing to cannibalize
retailers' business, when and how might it turn on the rest of the channel?
Hey, we know that Microsoft still makes the overwhelming majority of its revenue
through partners and has probably the best channel program in the business.
Microsoft still seems committed to keeping partners happy, so there's no panic
here. There's not even much suspicion. But there are tiny, lingering questions
that weren't there so much a few years ago. That's all we're saying.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/19/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Just in time for a deep global recession, it's a new enterprise software application
from Microsoft! This time, it's small-business-focused Dynamics NAV that's getting
an update.
Seriously, this doesn't seem like the best time for Redmond to introduce a
new enterprise resource planning offering, but Chris Caren, general manager
of marketing and product management for Microsoft Dynamics, isn't freaking out.
"We're just doing a lot more reconfirming [that] deals are as solid as
we think they are," Caren told RCPU in a face-to-face meeting in Framingham,
Mass. "Deals don't go away; they just get slowed down. Decision-making
processes are a little more extended and involved."
Caren's confidence is encouraging, and it may very well be that NAV 2009 will
fare better than its Dynamics cousins because of NAV's SMB target audience.
Still, Dynamics' recent
revenue struggles and Microsoft's 0 percent financing offer for the Dynamics
product lines seem to be signs that the decision-making process is becoming
very slow indeed.
Still, Microsoft has a not unappealing message with NAV 2009, and it's one
we've heard many times before from more than one ERP vendor: ERP does an organization
no good if users won't touch it.
And still, a lot of ERP applications sit on a virtual shelf in many companies.
Caren cites an oft-noted statistic: According to AMR Research Inc., only 10
percent of a given company's employees on average are licensed to use ERP applications,
and of that 10 percent, only half actually use the apps.
Microsoft has long developed its four Dynamics suites with the goal of increasing
employee usage of ERP and therefore increasing its value in an organization.
That theme continues with the release of NAV 2009, which Microsoft announced
on Nov. 19 and will become generally available on Dec. 1. NAV is generally aimed
at companies with 50 to 1,000 employees that don't need international ERP deployments,
Caren said.
The 2009 version of the suite brings further enhancements to its user interface,
which looks increasingly similar to that of NAV's up-market cousin, AX, Caren
said. The idea is to make the ERP interface as Microsoft Office-like and familiar
as possible to users in order to ease their transition to using the back-office
software. "It looks like a very modern, consumerized, Web-based experience,"
he said.
While Caren said that the enhanced interface is the biggest change in NAV compared
to prior versions, he also notes that NAV 2009 will include for the first time
a database layer that embeds SQL Server. That has allowed Microsoft to build
in business intelligence capabilities that weren't present in previous versions,
Caren said.
"Our mid-market strategy for BI is to take it to market through Dynamics,"
Caren said. And by embedding SQL Server and BI capabilities in NAV, he said,
Microsoft is helping companies skip some of the more arduous steps in the deployment
of business applications. "The advantage of embedding is you have a pre-defined
data model. You can build in all the data models and security. The heavy lifting
is done when you embed BI into a business application," Caren said.
Caren said that Microsoft can't necessarily keep up feature for feature with
other BI vendors, but he points to simplicity as an advantage Dynamics has over
other systems: "Functionally we're at 85 percent" in comparison to
some BI competitors, he said, "but we transform ease of use and we have
price points that are at 20 percent of [those of other] BI tools. Our goal is
not to replace high-end data mining. We want to make [BI] an everyday technology
that all information workers access."
Well, all information workers whose companies are spending money on enterprise
software, anyway.
What's your outlook for Microsoft Dynamics and enterprise software in a tough
economy? Share your thoughts at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/19/2008 at 1:22 PM1 comments
Everybody take a deep breath. One technology bellwether is reporting -- or
pre-reporting -- mostly good financial news. HP says that next week's earnings
report will
beat
Wall Street analysts' estimates.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/19/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Microsoft and HP are
making
a little news, and CA's CEO is providing the views, saying that management
will be the (we hate this expression)
"killer
app" for virtualization.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/18/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Before we get started today, I'm going to drop the first-person plural because
I need to tell you that I messed something up, and it's kind of embarrassing.
Oh, it's not that big of a deal, really, but a couple of readers (Jeffrey and
Walt) noticed a boneheaded move in the first entry in
last
Thursday's RCPU. Walt sums it up well:
"Regarding your reference to depression-era billboards from the RCP
Update yesterday:
"'Still, though...ouch. These are the kinds of messages that bring
to mind depression-era
billboards that encouraged jobless men to not give up -- messages that
are encouraging but also pretty ominous. OK, granted, we don't think that
things will get anywhere near this bad, and we're not seriously suggesting
that there will be bread lines in Redmond or anywhere else any time soon.'
"I don't think that billboard is encouraging these jobless men to
not give up. If I read this correctly, this billboard is a warning to jobless
men traveling through town to keep on moving. The billboard says, 'Jobless
men keep going -- We can't take care of our own,' and it is signed, 'Chamber
of Commerce.' To me, this says, 'Don't even think of stopping in this town,
keep moving along -- if we catch you, we'll make sure you get the message'...It
also appears to be in a train yard, which means the jobless men probably rode
in on the rails..."
Walt, you are, of course, 100 percent correct. I had remembered seeing on
a documentary somewhere in the mists of time a few billboards from the Depression
encouraging unemployed men to keep their chins up, but the one I posted clearly
levied pretty much the opposite message: Get out of town; there's no work for
you here. Yeesh...I guess I missed that "We can't take care of our own"
written in fairly big letters at the bottom of the sign. OK, I feel stupid.
What I meant to post was something like this,
which was meant to serve as a pick-me-up but really (I'm guessing) ended up
coming off as ominous, if not a tad condescending. Anyway, thanks to Walt and
Jeffrey for actually paying attention to what they were reading in RCPU. As
for the rest of you: shame, shame, shame. Just kidding. But, seriously, I'm
sorry for the embarrassing mess-up, and I'll try to do better next time. (And
sorry for spending so much time on this, but as a history buff I feel the need
to overcorrect for this gaffe.)
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/18/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Google Apps seems to be
making
headway with small businesses, but not as much headway as its open source
competitor,
OpenOffice.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/18/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments