Novell Suit Against Microsoft To Go Ahead

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


Analysts Say Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Probable

Yahoo appears more and more willing to accept Microsoft's billions, even if Google says that a Microsoft-Yahoo marriage could (somehow) hurt the Internet .

Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20080 comments


Microsoft Buys Virtualization Vendor

Kidaro is the latest company to be subsumed into Redmond.

Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20080 comments


Vista SP1 Arrives to...Indifference?

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


Napera CEO: Microsoft's New Openness Worked for Us

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."

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Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20080 comments


Convergence: Microsoft Wants Companies To Quit QuickBooks

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.

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Posted by Lee Pender on March 13, 20081 comments


Convergence: 'We Have Concluded Project Green'

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.

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Posted by Lee Pender on March 13, 20081 comments


Convergence: SaaS ERP Lives

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.

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Posted by Lee Pender on March 13, 20083 comments


Convergence: SharePoint a Dynamic Addition for Partners

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.

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Posted by Lee Pender on March 13, 20080 comments


Convergence: For Ballmer, It's Still All About Office

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.

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Posted by Lee Pender on March 12, 20080 comments


Convergence: Tatarinov Talks Usability

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.

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Posted by Lee Pender on March 12, 20080 comments


Convergence: Announcements at the Show

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