The news that Stephen Elop is leaving Microsoft is hardly a surprise -- Elop was believed to have been coveting a CEO job for a long time and now he has one.
Elop will take the reins of Nokia Sept. 21, leaving yet another void in the executive ranks at Microsoft. In addition to looking to fill the hole left by the departure of Robbie Bach, who headed Redmond's Entertainment and Devices business, now CEO Steve Ballmer will oversee the Microsoft Business Division until he names a successor. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 10, 20100 comments
It's hard to believe it's already September. While that means back to school for many, it also means there's less than one month until the official launch of the long-awaited new Microsoft Partner Network.
Some may dispute whether it's long-awaited, I realize. After all, for some smaller partners, the new certification requirements could mean their once-coveted Gold Certified status will be no longer attainable. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 02, 20100 comments
Microsoft yesterday launched what it calls Premier Mission Critical Support Service, which, as the name implies, is intended to help users architect and maintain apps and systems that require constant availability.
These long-term services are for those who want to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform architectural reviews, implementation and monitoring services thereafter, as reported by my colleague Kurt Mackie. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 11, 20100 comments
There's no shortage of opinions out there as to what should happen now that Hewlett-Packard has ousted CEO Mark Hurd.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison blasted HP's board for taking what he felt was a minor infraction and cutting him loose as a result. "The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago," Ellison wrote to The New York Times. "That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn't come back and saved them." More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 11, 20103 comments
A top executive charged with sexual harassment or violating company policies is hardly a rarity in today's business world. Yet, the news Friday that the laser-focused Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd was effectively dismissed for such allegations has rocked Silicon Valley.
As the story played out over the weekend, and no doubt will continue to do in the coming days and weeks, some argue HP's board should have looked the other way, given the fact that the company's market cap has doubled and the company has substantially and consistently grown revenues and profits since Hurd took the reigns five years ago. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 09, 20101 comments
It appears either Microsoft has mainframe-envy or IBM is not too happy about Microsoft's data center ambitions of late. Most likely, it's a combination of both.
Consider the following: More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 03, 20100 comments
Shortly after announcing that it was acquiring Palm, it looked like Hewlett Packard was throwing in the towel on shipping a Windows-based slate PC.
That was a major blow to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who kicked off 2010 in January in his annual opening keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show. That was where he famously unveiled HP's slate PC, saying it would be one of many to run Windows 7.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on July 29, 20100 comments
Anyone who was hoping that Microsoft's partner organization would put the breaks on its plans to require unique certifications was disappointed last week.
"It's full speed ahead," said Julie Bennani, general manager for partner programs at Microsoft, in an interview during last week's Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C. "We are still going on with those requirements and landing those in October."
While she and Microsoft's new partner chief, Jonathan Roskill, signaled they were willing to consider alternatives at a later date, as reported, the plan looks baked to move forward with the Oct. 1 date for transitioning to the new Microsoft Partner Network (MPN). "If we said, 'If you could get Gold in three of the five in Core IO, we could give you a Core IO competency.' That's one thing that's interesting to think about," Roskill said.
Microsoft last week did say it's renaming the competency and advanced competency designations Gold and Silver, but many appeared to welcome a Silver designation like receiving a booby prize.
At WPC last week, I sat in on a session called MPN: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. It was moderated by Mo Edjlali, a management consultant, who, until recently, served five years as the president of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners Washington D.C. chapter.
Now a management consultant, Edjlali looked at the situation from both points of view. "I think Microsoft wants people to have focus, that makes sense," Edjlali said. Indeed there are many partners who are Gold who most would agree don't deserve that designation today.
"But I think the trouble is some products are so closely related that you can't say your good in BI and not in SQL Server, it confuses customers when they might feel that expertise isn't there when it's always been there," he added. "People say 'my staff hasn't changed but now we are going to come across like we're not as sharp as we used to and these big companies that have the manpower will have the credentials but not have the skills or actually put the billable people on project with those skills.'"
That is the center of the fear. The large integrators can afford to have Gold certified engineers across the board, but the small- and mid-sized firms can't. So they will have to decide which disciplines they want to be Gold certified in and accept Silver for the rest.
Perhaps a better idea would have been to introduce a Platinum tier, Edjlali said. "It's going to be difficult for people to go from Gold to Silver," he told me in an interview after the session.
Janice Crosswell of Microsoft Canada's Corporate Assurance Group, who was sitting in on the session tried to spin the situation. "Silver is better than [the current] Gold," Crosswell said to the group. "When you're talking about some of the math, and I am saying 'I am just Silver,' you are actually rank higher than the [current] gold. There are some more requirements."
That didn't go over too well. "Customers are never going to know that Silver is now better than Gold used to be," a partner in the session replied. "They see Gold and that's what they see."
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on July 12, 20100 comments
There is growing buzz that Microsoft will come up with some compromise over the certification requirements that some partners fear will put them out of business. But it is not clear to what extent.
Details of any changes to the new Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) are expected to be made public next week at the company's annual Worldwide Partner Conference, set to be held in Washington, DC.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on July 08, 20101 comments
Report suggests Microsoft's woes stem from lack of young developers and customers.
It was, no doubt, a rather unsettling beginning of Microsoft's new fiscal year.
First Microsoft kills the Kin, making it arguably its biggest flop since Bob. Then a report by Microsoft Kitchen's Stephen Chapman detailed some specifics about plans for Windows 8 including a Windows Store, faster boot-up, support for slate-type devices and facial recognition. Not a welcome move as Microsoft is looking to keep the focus on Windows 7.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on July 07, 20102 comments
Microsoft cut its losses quickly with the Kin, even though it never should have been hatched in the first place. Not that it's a big shock that Kin failed or Microsoft had much choice in the decision to kill it. It just seemed that after the lack of logic in rolling it out in the first place, that Microsoft might be reticent to concede defeat so rapidly.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on July 02, 20100 comments
Quest Software wants providers of managed services to use its broad portfolio of systems management, migration and connectivity software. The problem is managed services providers, or MSPs, don't want to pay Quest's traditional lump-sum licensing fees. In order to make its software palatable to managed services providers, Quest has introduced a new consumption-based licensing model that it hopes will broaden its market.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on June 29, 20100 comments