Six years ago, when Microsoft bought enterprise resource planning software
vendor Great Plains, it truly found a diamond in the rough -- or, in this case,
on the prairie of North Dakota.
Great Plains brought with it solid functionality, a good reputation for service
and one of the most loyal partner bases in the technology industry. It also
brought with it customers who would walk through fire for founder Doug Burgum,
an old-school technology guy who genuinely seemed to have a passion for his
product and his people.
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Posted by Lee Pender on July 02, 20072 comments
Apparently the big Linux distributor
talked
to Microsoft about a patent deal
before Novell did -- and might still be
in negotiations. Bagging Red Hat would be huge for Microsoft's Linux protection
racket, which has seen some high-profile refusals of its overtures of late --
including one (we all thought)
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 29, 20070 comments
Google is moving deeper into Microsoft's sacred ground -- the channel -- through
a
deal with
Ingram Micro
to distribute the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini.
Redmond surely can't like seeing this. Google is already killing Microsoft
in the consumer search market -- a market Microsoft desperately wants to dominate.
Now, here comes Google storming further into enterprise search, maybe the only
area of search in which Microsoft might have had a built-in advantage for reasons
we hope are obvious (as in, pretty much everybody has a Microsoft infrastructure
with lots of data floating around in it).
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 29, 20070 comments
In a move that surely has
this
guy
snooping around a bit more than usual, French defense experts have told
their government officials to
stop
using BlackBerrys
, lest those dastardly American spies steal state secrets
from servers in North America. Never mind that the biggest state secret in France
is probably a soufflé recipe.
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 22, 20070 comments
Last week, in an entry on a
shakeup
in the Microsoft Partner Program
, we asked you to submit your thoughts on
the program -- what it's doing (or not doing) for you, and what you'd like to
see from it. And submit them you did.
Now, we know that Microsoft has lots and lots of partners -- the company now
says 400,000 -- and we're sure that many of them are happy to be working with
Redmond. But the responses we got reflect a few points of frustration that maybe
some of you who didn't write also share. Read and decide for yourself, and please
keep your thoughts coming to us. (And, in case you were wondering, yes, we do
sometimes share these sentiments with Redmond. So you're not just complaining
into a vacuum.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 08, 20070 comments