Microsoft
loses
another court battle
as the big honchos, the Supreme Court, allow Novell
to go ahead with an old antitrust lawsuit. It's interesting to note that the
chief justice of the Supreme Court is a Microsoft shareholder, though.
Posted by Becky Nagel on March 18, 20080 comments
Kidaro is the latest company to be
subsumed
into Redmond.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20080 comments
So, here it is. Vista SP1.
Available
now
. Anybody interested? Anybody? Bueller? Remember when everybody anticipated
Vista's arrival with bated breath? Yeah, that does seem like a long time ago.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20083 comments
Not everybody is convinced that Microsoft's new
commitment
to openness
is legitimate, but it's good enough for Todd Hooper, CEO of
a startup called
Napera Networks
.
"I think they've bought into it," Hooper told RCPU in a phone chat
recently. "I don't think it's a smokescreen or anything like that. They
started working on this stuff in 2006, and they were anticipating what was to
come."
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20080 comments
A surprisingly high -- we think, anyway -- 20 percent of GP customers have
moved to the Dynamics ERP suite from Intuit's small-business accounting package,
QuickBooks. Or, at least, that's what Microsoft found in doing GP customer research,
said Jon Pratt, senior director at Microsoft and GP guru.
Redmond sees an opportunity in companies growing out of QuickBooks, Pratt said.
"We looked very clearly at the size of when they did move. Many of them
moved much later in the cycle than we thought they should have. Many of them
said we didn't start thinking about it until get got to 20" million dollars
in annual revenue, he said, adding that one customer was still on QuickBooks
despite raking in $100 million in annual revenue. "We'd like to move that
line back." Pratt's thinking that $5 million to $10 million sounds better.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 13, 20081 comments
Remember Microsoft's plan to converge its four ERP suites into one mega-product?
It was
still causing
confusion
at last year's Convergence.
Not anymore. Or not really, anyway. Why? "We concluded Project Green,"
said Mogens Elsberg, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics ERP, not leaving
a lot of room for ambiguity.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 13, 20081 comments
While Dynamics CRM Live, the forthcoming SaaS version of Microsoft's CRM suite,
has sparked a few conversations at Convergence, rarely does anybody breathe
a word about hosted Dynamics ERP.
RCP looked
into hosted ERP in our March issue, and there are a lot of reasons why critical
back-end software and the SaaS model don't always mix. Plus, and probably as
a result, there doesn't seem to be a huge market for it.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 13, 20083 comments
We -- or, more specifically, former Dynamics honcho Tami Reller --
told
you about this
last year. Within a year, Reller said (that's right now,
if you're keeping score at home), Dynamics partners will have to have a SharePoint
competency in order to sell Microsoft's ERP and CRM suites.
Are we there yet? Not quite...but we're close. SharePoint is big business now
for Microsoft (a billion
dollars a year worth of big), but questions remain -- don't they always?
-- as to whether companies are just buying it or actually using it.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 13, 20080 comments
Microsoft gets it. One of the main roadblocks -- probably the main roadblock
-- to a successful ERP implementation is usability, or, more specifically, users
simply refusing to navigate the eye-glazing, brain-scrambling screens in front
of them.
Knowing that, Microsoft is hammering the message at Convergence that Dynamics
applications are easy on the eyes, and, by extension, on the brain. In his keynote
today, Microsoft corporate vice president and still new Dynamics honcho Kirill
Tatarinov spent the bulk of his stage time showing screen shots and getting
into the nuts and bolts of how easy Dynamics is to use. His speech was short-ish
on talking about new functionality and very long on waxing about the apps' user-friendliness.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 12, 20080 comments
Ask Steve Ballmer, as somebody did -- via e-mail, as there was no "live"
Q&A with Ballmer at Convergence this year -- what Dynamics CRM's main selling
points are in competition with online CRM titan Salesforce.com, and here's what
he'll say: "We really are well-integrated with Outlook, Word and Excel.
Your users will appreciate our interface."
OK, so he said a bunch of other stuff, too -- that Dynamics CRM Live (the hosted
version of the software) is half the price of Salesforce.com, that Microsoft
gives users a choice of whether to implement it with a strictly SaaS model or
whether to install something on-premises, and that Dynamics CRM Live is (or
will be when it comes out, which Ballmer says will be by the end of June) easier
to customize than Salesforce.com.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 12, 20080 comments
The whole press release, including some useful information on the new features
in AX 2009 (the latest update of AX, announced today and obtusely "code-named"
AX 5.0), which should arrive by the end of June, is
here
.
There's also "news" about how Microsoft designed some of its "role-tailored"
Dynamics interfaces by using research conducted with something called the IT
University of Copenhagen -- what, we wonder, is the school's mascot? -- on how
users respond emotionally to software screens.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 12, 20080 comments