VoIP Still Going Strong

Posted by Lee Pender on June 23, 20080 comments

UC Market: Tiny Today, Tremendous Tomorrow?

If you've figured out exactly what UC is, then you're already way ahead of a lot of people. So, now it's time to figure out how big the UC market is -- something analysts have discussed without really reaching any kind of consensus.

Last week, though, a few more hints came out. No lesser a light than the mighty IDC is fairly bullish on UC, and why shouldn't it be? The category makes tons of headlines (and gets covered fairly extensively in RCPU special editions) and has huge mega-vendors such as Microsoft and Cisco rushing to be part of it.

But the fairly well-kept secret about the UC market, at least one analyst says, is that it's really not very big right now -- and even with predicted rapid growth, it'll still be relatively small in 2012. Still, everybody agrees that it's got potential, and one blogger posits that UC will gobble away at the traditional telecommunications and messaging markets rather than swallowing them whole. From the blog entry linked above, we quote:

"Which leads to the second point: The UC market, today, is tiny: $200 million is a pittance in absolute terms, and it's a very small share -- just 2 percent -- of the total 'UC-capable' market. Blair's projection calls for the net UC share to increase to 15 percent by 2012.

"Still, even at that point, you're talking about a $2.433 billion market, which isn't gigantic. To me, it's more impressive that the 'gross' market -- all the communications gear that's eligible for UC but may not be implemented in a UC way -- is projected to grow at more than 50% annually and reach almost $16 billion by 2012.

"Partly, I imagine that's because as we go forward, essentially every addition to the installed base of communications gear will be UC capable, and will most likely be replacing a piece of TDM equipment that isn't UC capable, or at least isn't a very good candidate for UC-enabling."

Well, that makes a lot of sense to us, anyway, which is why we afforded a longer-than-usual quote space to another blogger. UC might be one of those categories for which the headlines are currently outpacing actual adoption, but it's poised to grow -- if a bit methodically. That is, of course, if people can actually figure out what it is.

Posted by Lee Pender on June 23, 20080 comments

Nortel Teams Up Again, This Time with IBM

Posted by Lee Pender on June 23, 20080 comments

Redmond Remedies Patch-Blocking Problem

Posted by Lee Pender on June 19, 20080 comments

Microsoft Board Member Steps Down

Staying on the Microsoft board, however, is Texas Christian University basketball legend Dr. James Cash, who also happens to be a former Harvard Business School bigwig and is part of the team that owns...the World Champion Boston Celtics! And if you're thinking that we threw this Shirley entry in just as an excuse for a gratuitous TCU reference and another chance to mention the Celtics, well, you're right. But we really do love James Cash.

Posted by Lee Pender on June 19, 20080 comments

Legendary Reader Feedback

We love all of the reader feedback you send us, but some folks have shouted out to us often enough to become bona fide RCPU legends. We have thoughts from two of them today, along with a funny e-mail from a less prolific but no less loved reader. So, we're pretty close to having a Paul Pierce-Ray Allen-Kevin Garnett-style trio.

Anyway, to start us off, we have an e-mail from Jon, who actually signed his message thusly: "The serial e-mailer, using my personal address this time." Yes, Jon, we know you well. And now, here are some of your thoughts on Windows 7's touch screen interface (yes, we're going a bit retro here):

"Touch would be great for moving windows. But at this resolution, a lot of buttons are pretty tiny, and I'm not sure how accurately I could click with a touch screen. And I am NOT willing to give up a single pixel for giant buttons! Office 2007 has already begun the migration away from menus to a dazzling array of screen-consuming buttons -- which would really use a lot of pixels if they were all enlarged. (And frankly, I'm having trouble adjusting to the loss of menus as it is.)

"Monitor prices have been dropping. But do I really want to replace two perfectly good 1600 x 1200 monitors, one of which has lived long enough to have been attached to four or five generations of computers? Or even if I just had one monitor? If this takes off, it's an e-waste disaster waiting to happen. Just like all those analog TVs that are going to get tossed next February by folks who don't want to be bothered with a government-subsidized converter box. I hope that some sort of recycling program can be set up to harvest the screens from all those discarded monitors so that they can be reprocessed into new touch screens."

If those two paragraphs seem a little disjointed, it's because we plucked them from different places out of Jon's, uh, thorough e-mail. But we like both of these points -- and, really, we don't like the idea of a touch screen for the same reasons that Jon mentions. Besides, touch screens to us just seem like a greasy screen waiting to happen, and the thought of that is kind of nasty.

Our next RCPU legend to weigh in is Mike, who gets a few shots in at our favorite punching bag, Vista:

"I think part of the problem is Microsoft did a poor (marginal, at best) job of convincing people that they needed Vista. You have a solidly functioning OS with XP and then they come along basically saying, 'New and Improved.' That may work for a $2 bottle of dish soap, but not so much for a several-hundred-dollar OS.

"Then folks start hearing about upgrade issues, which is the category most business users fall into because who the heck wants to buy a new PC (or hundreds or thousands depending on the size of your business)? The company I work for has about 23,000 employees across the country; many of the machines (clients and servers) we use are leased. These leases are on a rolling three-year basis. So then you start introducing compatibility issues (potential or real) if some were Vista and others were XP. We also have a number of employees who remote in, so then there are issues with supporting that.

"XP is working -- and just fine, at that -- so why risk Vista for a marginal net gain? If we lose functionality or have downtime due to these issues, then we start dramatically affecting our ability to work, which hits the company in the pocket a second time (first being the cost for the upgrade or replacement machines, etc.). We're in the service industry, and if customers can't be served by us, then they'll go elsewhere. Who can afford that?"

Nobody, Mike, or at least not many people, as yet another study has confirmed. You might as well get your fingers limbered up for that Windows 7 touch screen. Oh, and lay off the potato chips.

Our third contributor, Doug, has only e-mailed us a couple of times, so he technically shouldn't have "legend" status. But we'll let it go this time, as we really enjoyed his timely contribution about Europe being a Microsoft shop despite Neelie Kroes crying in her Heineken about Microsoft's market dominance:

"That story about the EU using Microsoft products reminds me of when I worked at UUnet from 1999 to 2002. The UNIX SAs talked trash about Microsoft all the time. Joe Blow staff person got a SendMail mailbox. Senior management got Exchange mailboxes because they liked shared calendaring and OWA. Of course, since my team was the Microsoft tier 3 support group, we got Exchange mailboxes also. We also ran several multimillion dollar applications on Windows servers."

We love it, Doug. We like our irony thick and fat like a Red Auerbach cigar (although we don't actually smoke). Good stuff.

Got anything else to add? Want to step up to RCPU legend status? Want to celebrate the Celtics or grieve for the Lakers? Send your thoughts to [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on June 19, 20080 comments

First the U.S., Then Europe, Now China?

Um, what now? China? We know that the Chinese economy is pretty wide open these days, but aren't we still talking about a communist country here with a one-party government? And Microsoft might be in trouble for being too powerful? Again, irony...we love it.

Apparently, though, Chinese officials are denying that there will be an investigation. We'll see.

Posted by Lee Pender on June 19, 20080 comments

Robobak Provides Backup for SMBs

Posted by Lee Pender on June 18, 20080 comments

Salesforce.com Releases Summer '08 Update

Posted by Lee Pender on June 18, 20080 comments

Dell Rolls Out New Storage Array

Posted by Lee Pender on June 18, 20080 comments

Europe Is a Microsoft Shop

"For the moment, we are working in a Microsoft environment."
-- Christos Ellinides, the director of corporate IT solutions and services at the European Commission

If you love irony, you have to love that quote. After years of hacking away at Microsoft by imposing fines and generally being a nuisance, the European Commission is looking at itself to find that it's still, at least in part, a Microsoft shop.

Oh, sure. The EC's been talking about moving to open source applications and using open standards -- competition czar and Microsoft hater Neelie Kroes harps on that stuff repeatedly -- and it seems to be happening to some extent. But there's still a lot of Microsoft applications in the EC's shop. And while it's not news for a government entity to have a big investment in Microsoft, it's funny that the EC itself -- tormentor of Redmond for so long -- is still heavily Microsoft.

Another quote from the same story that struck us came from a guy with the best title we've run across so far this year: Francisco Garcia Moran, director general of directorate general (informatics). Apparently Francisco is an EU official, although it's hard to tell whether he's EU, EC specifically or both.

Whatever. Director general of directorate general (informatics) -- and, yes, we love the parentheses -- is simply bureaucra-tastic, and it makes your editor want to change his (unofficial) title to something like editor of editing (newsletter) or maybe senior editor of the editors senior (magazine). At the very least, we demand parentheses for all titles in Redmond Media Group.

Anyway, Moran's quote reads thusly: "The European Commission not only uses Microsoft products...It uses many other products from both commercial suppliers and from the open source world."

Huh. So the EC has a hybrid atmosphere, then, kind of like thousands (millions?) of other governments and enterprises around the world. Well, what do you know? Apparently Microsoft hasn't crushed its competitors altogether. And, apparently, despite Neelie's most stinging one-liners, Europe hasn't rid itself of Microsoft, either. We love irony.

Have a thought on Europe, the EC and Microsoft? Send it to [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on June 18, 20081 comments

Microsoft To Keep an Eye on Open Source

"I always feel like somebody's watching me
And I have no privacy"
-- from "Somebody's Watching Me" by Rockwell

If you remember the song from which we took today's opening quote, then you're probably a pretty big '80s music nerd. And that's a good thing because it's the nerds we're talking to today -- not so much the '80s music nerds but open source nerds, although we figure the groups might overlap pretty heavily.

We don't know whether Rockwell was into open source software back in the day, but the paranoia expressed in "Somebody's Watching Me" wouldn't be out of place for open source folks today. Big brother is out there, people...and its name is Microsoft.

This week, Microsoft announced that it's going to co-sponsor something called the Open Source Census, a project open source folks have undertaken to figure out exactly how much of their software is in use in enterprises and encourage folks to adopt even more of it. Not exactly a blockbuster thus far in terms of enterprise penetration, the Census could nevertheless ultimately serve as Microsoft's window (um, no pun intended) on what is probably its biggest competitor these days.

The folks in Redmond are talking up their census participation in interoperability terms, saying that it'll be helpful to know where open source software is and how people are using it so that Microsoft can better fit its applications to work with open source apps. Of course, there might be just a little bit more to Microsoft's participation, as this article keenly suggests (and we quote):

"Of course, the sponsorship can't be entirely altruistic. Hard data on the shape of open source software usage is difficult to come by since it can often be downloaded, shared and used at will. With more data, Microsoft would undoubtedly be able to better understand its open source competitors and where exactly their weaknesses lie."

Ah-ha! So, Redmond does have a sinister motive! Well, of course it does, and why shouldn't it? Open source folks are always saying that their applications are hard to compete with because they're, well, open, and because it's hard for a proprietary developer to innovate at the speed of the rest of the world. But there's another side to openness, and this is it -- Microsoft can just waltz right into the type of market research project that no proprietary competitor would dream of letting Redmond get near.

In the long run, Microsoft's participation probably won't make a huge amount of difference to the Census, other than to actually get it up and running in a serious way. And we wonder, really, to what extent Microsoft will just take over the whole thing and sort of ditch the "encouraging-the-use-of-open-source" stuff in favor of pure competitive research. Heck, a real conspiracy theorist -- although we're not in that category -- might suggest that Microsoft would fudge the numbers to make open source look less important in the enterprise than it really is.

In any case, the proprietary monster is on board, open source folks. Microsoft really is watching you now. You've got something in common with an '80s flash-in-the-pan pop act after all.

What's your take on the relationship between Microsoft and open source? Open up at [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on June 17, 20080 comments