This is our last edition of the year, and with it I'd like to thank the people who make RCPU possible. That's right -- I'm dropping the royal "we" for today because this is personal. (That sounds sort of menacing, but it's about to get very sappy.)
First, to the readers, the e-mailers and the contributors to entries on the blog site, thank you for your attention and participation. I hope that at least you're entertained here and occasionally even informed. I love reading your comments and enjoy having e-mail discussions with you -- something I'm going to try to do more often in 2009. You are the lifeblood of RCPU, and I wouldn't have a newsletter (or possibly even a job) without you. So thanks for being part of our little community, and I hope to hear more from you in 2009.
To Mike Domingo, Becky Nagel, Gladys Rama and all our Web folks in SoCal, thanks for never complaining about having to read copy that can sometimes, um, ramble a bit, and thanks for doing such a great job of putting together a beautiful e-mail newsletter and a very snappy blog site. Y'all are the best, and I hope to get to see you again in person in 2009. (Let's do it in L.A., though -- preferably during the winter months.)
To Doug Barney, who helped me so much when I started writing this newsletter regularly almost three years ago, thanks for your continued guidance and support. To Scott Bekker -- who fills in so ably here, very often at the very last minute when I'm overwhelmed with other stuff -- and Anne Stuart, thanks for your continued suggestions and for catching some of the dumber things I write and correcting them for me. (Anne did just that for me yesterday, actually.) You've spared me a lot of blushes, as our English friends would say.
To Ed Scannell, my boss at Redmond since July, thanks for having the patience to let me continue to write a newsletter for the RCP wing of the empire. Oh, and to Scott Shultz, RCP art director and my office neighbor, thanks for making me laugh and getting me in the right frame of mind to at least try to be entertaining and clever here.
I really enjoy writing RCPU and connecting with the people who read it. I'm very proud of the work we've all done on it, and I'll do my best to keep my end up. Happy holidays to all and have a great new year. Don't forget to send your top-10 (or however many you want) lists for 2009 to [email protected]. I'll see you again next year.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 18, 20081 comments
The CTP of the new SQL implementation is
due in January from PASS. (Seriously, we can't get enough of acronyms.)
Posted by Lee Pender on December 17, 20080 comments
A recent survey from Intel suggests that Americans are
hopelessly addicted to the Internet. OK, maybe it doesn't suggest that, but that's sort of how we feel ourselves sometimes. The proliferation of wireless routers into every home that allowed for the deadly TV-Internet combo, combined with the spread of high-definition TVs, might have been the most important development in the last half of the 20th century. Well, maybe not
the most important, but it's got to be up there. Having said all that, we hope you enjoy our company's
wide selection of monthly print magazines.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 17, 20080 comments
We're huge fans of acronyms here at RCPU -- we even refer to ourselves as an acronym -- so we were very impressed to get the following e-mail from frequent contributor Jon in response to a
brief but acronym-laden post:
"You seem to be enjoying acronyms in today's RCP Update. Here we have many acronyms that start with the same letter as the name of the company, which has resulted in a few that sound very similar. So we invented another acronym: TAS -- Tangled Acronym Syndrome."
Tangled Acronym Syndrome! We love it. It's not just your company, Jon -- the whole industry suffers from it. Heck, our whole culture is full of acronyms; even the name of our country shortens nicely to one. Add TAS in the tech industry to the relatively recent fashion of referring to athletes by initials or by first initial and last name (for instance, KG for Kevin Garnett or T-Mac for Tracy McGrady), and it's clear that this has been a fantastic decade for the single letter and collections thereof. LL Cool J was truly a visionary in the '80s.
Here's where we skillfully tie today's two reader e-mails together. Ready? Speaking of acronyms (oooh, very smooth), there's no product that relies on them more than Microsoft Dynamics, with its four suites -- although, strictly speaking, we don't think that referring to the erstwhile Axapta by "AX" strictly qualifies as using an acronym.
The same could be said of NAV and Navision and even SL and Solomon -- although GP is a very solid acronym for Great Plains. Still, we're not here to split hairs. Dynamics, which we wrote about last month, in case you were wondering, is alphabet soup (or TAS, perhaps) at its chunkiest. And that's still a problem for a lot of users and partners. Wrote Joseph back in November:
"My biggest problem with the Dynamics lineup, and I doubt it has changed with NAV 09: It is very difficult to understand or comprehend what the different products actually do or do not do. There is also very little in the way of partner support available for these particular products."
That's an interesting point about partner support, Joseph, and we weren't aware that it was a problem. We are aware, though, of the confusion that still surrounds Microsoft's four-suite strategy with Dynamics. Without rehashing a bunch of stuff we've hashed before, we'll just say that the four-suite thing is the proverbial (and horribly cliché -- sorry) elephant in the room in every conversation about Dynamics.
Nobody wants to talk about the confusion that four suites create, but it's definitely there, and there still seems to be a lot of channel conflict to go with it. We understand that Project Green is dead, at least from a marketing perspective, and we think we understand why (talk of merging the four suites was hurting sales, as customers waited for the final product), but we're just not sure that customers and partners will continue to digest Dynamics' alphabet soup. And a struggling economy is the worst environment in which to...well, do almost anything, really, but especially to go out with a befuddling branding message. Still, we'll likely see Dynamics TAS survive for a long time to come.
Thanks again to Jon and Joseph for their contributions. If you have anything else on your mind, be it related to ERP, CRM, SFA, SQL, MSPs, MOSS, WEBS, SLED, SAP, RCPU or anything else, spell it out and send it to [email protected]. And don't forget to send your top 10 lists for 2009.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 17, 20080 comments
Sometimes we really do wonder why people pay so much for Office when there are free or cheaper alternatives out there. But then we remember that everybody has Office, and it can be something of a pain to exchange non-Office documents. Is that changing? With Microsoft seemingly willing to
open Office to other file formats, maybe.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 17, 20080 comments
It's that time of year when news slows to about the pace of current returns on an investment with
Bernard Madoff, and everybody in the press fills Web site space with top-10 lists.
There are top-10 lists of every conceivable nature, from the top 10 Microsoft stories, to the top 10 Linux stories (or at least the top Linux stories -- we didn't count them...or read them), to the top 10 Internet stories, to, as far as we can tell, the top 10 stories, period, at least from a technology-industry perspective. There's even a list of the 10 most influential "biztech" leaders of 2008.
We were going to go whole hog, as we'd say in Texas, and post 10 top 10 lists...but most of them really aren't worth reading, anyway. Why? Because they all look backwards! We all know what happened (and is still happening) in 2008, but what we really want to know is what's going to happen in 2009.
That's where you come in, brave reader. Send us your top 10 for 2009. Whatever kind of top 10 you want -- it doesn't even have to have 10 entries. You can do this any way you want; you can be serious and send us a few (or 10 even) of your own priorities for 2009 -- projects, goals, whatever. You can send us 10 things you'd like to see in 2009 -- industry trends, products, acquisitions, you name it. Or you can send us the stories you think you'll be reading or hope to read next year. For instance: "Microsoft Buys Google and Cisco, Takes Control of Entire Internet and Requires Users To Buy Vista To Get Access." Or maybe, "Virtualization and Cloud Computing Allow for Storage of All Human Knowledge on One Server in One Datacenter."
Anyway, have fun with this; be as serious or as silly as you like, but let us know what's up for 2009. This will be the last week of RCPU for the year, so you have plenty of time to get your answers in -- we'll run them in 2009 after we've all sung Auld Lang Syne and watched 800 hours of college football on New Year's Day.
You know the address: [email protected]. Look into your crystal ball and tell us the future, or what you want the future to hold.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 16, 20080 comments
Whether anybody cares about
this or not, we have no idea. But, hey, it's a slow news...month.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 16, 20082 comments
One of the Compaq PC lines will have Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
(SLED, in case you needed another acronym)
pre-installed.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 11, 20080 comments
We were wondering when this would happen. We've asked here many times over
the last couple of years whether we'd ever see a true hosted version of Office
from Microsoft -- and unless Stephen Elop somehow falls from power and
Microsoft changes direction dramatically in the months to come, the answer
appears to be yes.
Yes, we will see a hosted version of Office, that is. Elop said as much this week, and he didn't stop
there. Apparently, Redmond is looking at offering multiple pricing models for
hosted Office, including the one that attracts us the most at first glance:
free.
Well, of course, nothing is totally free. The free version of Office will be
advertising-supported, naturally, so the potential for ads grabbing screen
space will be high. Still, though, Microsoft is promising compatibility between
desktop Office and hosted Office...as well as hosted version of Exchange and
SharePoint.
Clearly, Microsoft doesn't want to fall (further?) behind in the field of
hosted applications, meaning the giant sees real potential in the SaaS (or even
S+S) model. And it's that type of endorsement that'll help carry SaaS from
potentially interesting model to everyday enterprise reality.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 11, 20080 comments