There were whispers in some corners that the company that owns RCPU was crazy to start a virtualization magazine,
Virtualization Review, not long ago. Well, we're looking a lot less crazy now with studies like
Forrester's latest, which shows that virtualization is very well-established in the enterprise as well as among SMBs. VMware's leading the way, of course, in terms of hypervisor market share, but Microsoft is in the leader's rear-view mirror.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 10, 20090 comments
The late
Patsy Cline would probably have loved Windows 7. Or, at least, she might have related to it. In her tragically brief career (and life), Patsy was famous for falling to pieces, and, in a sense, that's what Windows 7 will do.
OK, so maybe falling to pieces isn't the perfect metaphor, but Windows 7 will have a modular nature that will allow users to turn off all sorts of features and applications...including Internet Explorer. Now, that last bit is interesting, as everybody is noting this week, because Microsoft has famously said for years that IE was the one "piece" that Microsoft couldn't let "fall off" of Windows.
You might remember a certain antitrust lawsuit here in the U.S. and some (ongoing) trouble with the European Union...and if you think back hard enough, you might even remember Netscape, the browser (and company) that was probably the most victimized by Microsoft's bundling of IE into Windows. Well, Microsoft -- a convicted monopolist, after all -- has managed to disassociate IE from Windows, or at least let users mostly remove it if they so choose.
That's the news here, but it's not the part of the story that we like best. What we like is the fact that users will be able to easily trim down Windows 7 as they please. We say "easily" because it has long been possible to make Windows leaner, but it hasn't always been obvious just how to do that. (Actually, it was pretty obvious in Vista -- for the brave few who bothered to migrate to it.) We also like the fact that Windows 7 will be, apparently, a lot less of a resource hog than Vista. Now, if Microsoft and third parties can just get the driver situation sorted...
Windows 7, already garnering mostly good reviews, is looking thinner, more adaptable and generally more user-friendly than Vista. That has to be good news for everybody, from partners, who will want customers to upgrade to the new OS, to users, who will either want a reason to move off of XP or an escape from the nightmare that is Vista, to Microsoft, which badly needs to regain some goodwill on the OS front.
It's a lot to ask of Windows 7 to placate antitrust regulators, assuage users' fury over Vista and generally get the Windows franchise back on track, but it appears that Microsoft is trying to do all of those things with this operating system. We suspect that Patsy Cline would have been "Crazy" for this OS if she'd been able to see it (or a personal computer at all). We'll see whether users and partners react the same way.
We're always open to what you have to say about Windows 7. Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on March 10, 20093 comments
Kirill Tatarinov took some time to
talk Convergence with
Redmond magazine for the March issue, while
The Seattle Times cranked out a
pretty interesting profile of the head of Microsoft's Dynamics business, who, it turns out, is a ski racer in his spare time.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 10, 20090 comments
The big distributor
blew away estimates with its fourth-quarter numbers, even though revenue slipped a bit. There's a not-unexpected warning, though, that Q1 is going to be tough.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 05, 20090 comments
In the Netherlands, there's a popular
soap opera called "Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden" -- don't try to pronounce it unless you're Dutch -- which translates directly to "Good Times, Bad Times." (You know I've had my share...yeah, we're singing it, too.)
Anyway, GTST, as it's commonly known, probably won't feature a three-episode arc about the RCP reader survey any time soon, but it could. (And if the producers are out there reading, your editor still remembers a little Dutch from his time in Rotterdam and would love a guest appearance.) Because unlike in 2007, when credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities were still mostly wonky Wall Street terms, there's some trepidation in 2009. Imagine that.
First, though, the good times, or maybe the good news...or just the good stuff. For most readers, dealing with Microsoft and the Partner Program is still a positive experience. Oh, there are a few complaints here and there -- maybe more than there were two years ago, but we're all a bit grumpy right now -- but for the most part Microsoft's partner program remains one of the best in the industry. And it ought to be, given Microsoft's position in the technology game and the amount of money its channel funnels into Redmond.
The real story here is the slechte tijden, the bad times. You don't need us to tell you that they're here. In fact, you told us. Your customers are slowing or stopping IT spending. The outlook for 2009 is mostly negative, maybe even a shade bleak. But you're not backing down; overwhelmingly, you're increasing your offerings and expanding your services. And that's good news. More good news amid the bad times: 62 percent of you expect growth this year.
What's not so good is that not all that many of you are venturing into Software as a Service. It's our position at RCPU that SaaS will grow in importance in the next few years and will probably be helped by a shaky economy. We don't see it as a revolution -- we're not on the Salesforce.com payroll, after all -- but we do see it as an alternative that more and more companies of all sizes will be looking into and a model for which pretty much every partner should at least have a strategy.
Only 20 percent of you say that you're planning to expand or start reselling Microsoft's Software plus Services offerings in the next 12 months. Almost as many of you (19.4 percent) say you don't know what you're going to be doing with S+S this year. At least knowing what you're going to do with SaaS would be a good start and probably should be a priority in 2009 for at least 19.4 percent of you. After all, SaaS just might end up being one technology that can turn bad times into good times.
Next week, we clear out the RCPU mailbag. Until then, send us your thoughts on SaaS, the economy, the Partner Program or anything else that's on your mind to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on March 05, 20090 comments
There have probably been happier occasions for Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft's Business Division, than this week's state-of-the-company address in front of the undoubtedly nervous folks from Morgan Stanley and other likely ledge-dwelling financial types.
But Elop performed admirably, it seems, answering questions that were likely beyond his (no doubt considerable) pay grade. After all, Elop runs Microsoft's Business Division -- think Office, Dynamics and unified communications -- and while that's a pretty big chunk of Microsoft, it's not the whole company, and he's not really a financial executive. Still, the up-against-the-Wall Streeters wanted to know how Microsoft would cut costs and make money online in a -- say it with us, everybody -- down economy.
Elop had a lot to say about that, as Kurt Mackie details here. We could go in quite a few directions with this, but we're going to focus on one little bit about business intelligence that's right in Elop's wheelhouse. From Kurt's story:
"Another focus that Microsoft has reconsidered is business intelligence, where Microsoft has tried to 'democratize' the segment via SharePoint and Excel. Microsoft pulled back its Performance Point Server as a separate product and consolidated its features with SharePoint. That decision represents a retrenchment from Microsoft's vertical competition with companies such as Cognos and Business Objects, Elop explained."
We're sure Elop meant to say IBM and SAP, respective owners of Cognos and Business Objects. And so we see, at least in part, the fulfillment of our little prophecy that BI as we used to know it is pretty close to being dead. Well, it's not actually dead; in fact, in terms of functionality, it's very much alive. It's just not standing alone anymore.
Oh, sure, we know that there are still BI vendors out there that are large-ish (we see you, SAS) and smaller, and some of them are doing really cool things. But the big guns -- Hyperion, Cognos, BO -- are part of other companies' arsenals now, and the disappearance of PerformancePoint as a standalone product represents yet another step in the commoditization of BI. It's part of the stack now, folded into SharePoint or embedded in Dynamics ERP suites or into Oracle's or SAP's or IBM's bigger products.
We're not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, either, unless the swallowing nearly whole of BI by huge vendors leads to a slowdown in innovation in the category. Right now, we don't really know whether it has or not -- and, as we said, some independents are still out there doing cool stuff.
Cool stuff, though, might not be enough to save BI as a difference-maker technology. It's now becoming a standard part of a larger enterprise deployment, a commodity rather than a differentiator. Where once it was a potential competitive advantage -- almost a luxury at the prices some vendors charged -- partners should be aware that it's now something IT folks are likely to expect to have rather than invest in.
And that's OK, mostly, as in the long-run native integration is almost always preferable to gluing systems together. We're fairly sure that Stephen Elop would agree. In fact, he'd probably love to talk about it and get all those nervous investor types off his back. Who wouldn't right now?
What's your take on where BI is headed? Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on March 04, 20090 comments
Looking for a category of technology that won't be going pear-shaped in the -- say it again, everybody -- down economy? Look to virtualization, which the analysts at Gartner say will be a
boom technology this year. This gives us a good excuse to post a nice hypervisor comparison from Keith Ward's blog on
VirtualizationReview.com, our sister site. Check it out
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 04, 20090 comments
The Phoenix HyperSpace Linux quick-boot shell will
now be friendly with Microsoft's Word and Excel file formats. We just love when everybody (sort of) gets along.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 04, 20090 comments
Kurt Mackie delves into the future of cloud computing at Microsoft by examining an
interview with the company's Cloud Computing Futures project director.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 04, 20090 comments