Duffbert's Random Musings

About Duffbert...

Duffbert's Random Musings is a weblog semi/sorta related to IBM/Lotus Notes & Domino software, but I don't let that be a limiting criteria. I'm Thomas Duff, and you can find out more about me here...

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06/30/2010

This is why I have such a hard time believing/diving into any "new" Microsoft offering...

Category Microsoft
So Microsoft kills off the KIN mobile device after devastatingly nonexistent sales. And... it does this just two months after they release the device. Can you imagine if you had decided to build an offering for the KIN or staked a significant amount of time and effort to support the device based on Microsoft's assurances that this would be the next greatest thing since sliced bread?

I find it hard to believe that a company the size of Microsoft could spend hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions over the life of the project) on a device that reportedly only sold between 500 and 1000 units. This is during the same time that Apple can't even keep up with the demand for iPhones and iPads. Was their market research for the viability of the KIN *so* off-base as to give it a shelf-life of only two months? Did they even *do* research?

It amazes me that a company, regardless of their size, could spend as much as they did on "Project Pink" and basically write the whole thing off as a loss without the market clobbering them. And it's not like this is a first for MS when it comes to entertainment devices... Zune has underwhelmed the market. Xbox has been a money pit with MS subsidizing the devices in hopes of establishing market share. Quarterly reports would argue that they haven't been successful with that strategy unless they're playing by the rules of golf... lowest dollar total under break-even wins.

If I were on the board of directors for Microsoft, I'd be looking for some heads to roll, and there's just been one head at the top of all of these flops... Perhaps Ballmer needs to step down to spend more time with his kids and family, and to pursue "other opportunities."

It's repeated episodes like the KIN that make me look at all new and shiny Microsoft offerings with a cynical glance, and let them play out for awhile before seeing if something's going to stick. It's a given that betting on first-generation MS offerings is not a sure thing, and life is too short to follow a company around hoping to stake your career on something that for them seems to be nothing but a rounding error if they decide to write it off.

Posted by Thomas Admin Duff At 4:39 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (6)

06/18/2010

Here's how at least one SharePoint blogger guru views the Notes discussions this week....

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
With all the conversations about Lotus Notes this week, a few statements have been made about how the Microsoft bloggers are viewing all the angst. I don't follow many MS-oriented bloggers, so I'll admit I hadn't seen that statement play out in reality. But today I ran across a blog entry by Joel Oleson, who is one of the biggest SharePoint gurus in that universe...

Give me your tired, your poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free... With open arms we welcome Notes Admins and Developers to SharePoint

It’s no longer a fierce battle. The battle is over and we welcome you with open arms. It’s a time of reparations it’s a time of healing. If I could I’d say welcome Notes admins and developers on an icon like the statue of liberty. Which represents the open arms that America once had for welcoming the rejected.

Ouch...

Posted by Thomas Admin Duff At 4:51 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (3)

12/28/2009

The SharePoint and Lotus communities are much more alike than different...

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
This morning, I was reading SharePoint Joel's Year End Review - SharePoint in 2009 blog entry. Joel Oleson is probably what Ed Brill would be if he were highly technical (neck deep in code), left IBM, and started his own company doing Notes stuff.

In this entry, Joel talks about the highlights and lowlights of SharePoint, touching on many items that should sound familiar to most of us:

Highlights

1. SharePoint Conference Explosion
2. Media and Analyst Spotlight
3. Growth of Expertise in the Community
4. Community Stickyness
5. SharePoint User Group Expansion

Lowlights

1. Community Attacks & Blowups
2. ISV Challenges Revenue & Awareness
3. Leaks
4. Plagiarism
5. Blogging Challenges

Look at how many have to do with community (the SPVerse? MicroVerse?), and funny how they seem to mirror many of our own triumphs and challenges.

In other words, when you have a number of highly passionate people come together over a technology, perhaps the behaviors we see are to be expected. That'd be an interesting blog post or deeper analysis on its own.

Regardless... Yes, our Lotus community is quite vibrant and is special to all of us. But it's not as unique as we think it is, and that same amount of passion and skill is there on "the dark side" too.

Perhaps the "dark side" is just the bathroom mirror before we turn on the light in the morning...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 4:13 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (11)

12/11/2009

Well worth reading (for more than just the Microsoft angles): Analyst: 'It is game over for Microsoft in consumer'

Category Microsoft
From Mary-Jo Foley: Analyst: 'It is game over for Microsoft in consumer'

Ms. Foley reports on what one highly respected analyst sees coming in 2010 in terms of overall computing technology:

But what if Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and other leaders at Microsoft are wrong and integrating the consumer and business worlds doesn’t really matter? One very influential market watcher, Mark Anderson, author of the Strategic News Service newsletter, is betting that instead of a melding, there will be an increasing chasm between the consumer and business market.

He lists 10 predictions for 2010, some of which don't bode well for Microsoft. But since this isn't a Microsoft-centric list, I found a few of the items *very* interesting in terms of business impact, especially #6...

6. There will be a Cloud Catastrophe in 2010 that limits Cloud growth by raising security issues and restricting enterprise trust. CIOs will see the cloud as the doorstep for industrial espionage.

I think this is the biggest fear that many have with the whole move towards "the Cloud". You lose control of the physical possession of your data, and one industrious hacker can get into areas that were only fantasies when they sat behind corporate firewalls. That's not to say that premise data was always 100% safe either. But if you work in the US and your data is located in data centers in China, India, and a storage container in back of Joe's Bar and Grill, there's obviously more points of access.

I recommend reading the article and considering the different predictions he makes. 2010 could shape up to be an interesting year...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 5:20 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/08/2009

So... with Windows 7, Lotus Notes is apparently a discardable application according to Microsoft

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
From Mary-Jo Foley's All About Microsoft: Windows 7 compatibility problems? Microsoft might have an app (or service) for that

Microsoft is obviously pushing companies hard to convert to Windows 7, which is to be expected...

Microsoft is continuing to emphasize its “businesses should upgrade sooner rather than later” message with Windows 7 — and is using both carrots and sticks to push them to do so.

The latest attempt to convince customers comes in the form of take-aways Microsoft officials have uncovered and are sharing publicly from some of the early Windows 7 enterprise deployments. Norm Judah, the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Services (the group that encompasses Microsoft Consulting Services, consumer support and commercial support) discussed some of these learnings and offered advice during an interview I had with him on December 7.

Part of these learnings involve examining applications that may not be compatible with the new environment, and discarding them whenever possible... like this:

“There’s also the question as to whether customers really need an (incompatible) application,” Judah said. When performing an evaluation, customers have a chance to figure out which apps are worth taking the trouble to try to fix vs. which can be “discarded,” he said. Judah cited as an example of an app that might be discardable as Lotus Notes… And no, I’m not kidding.

Wow... and I thought Mr. Ballmer was the king of stupid statements at Microsoft. Mr. Judah might well be in line to be the next CEO with stuff like that!

And to Mary-Jo's credit, she knows BS when she hears it...

(Maybe if Microsoft is throwing in a free copy of Exchange plus offering to do all the migration work from Notes to Exchange. Otherwise, I’d tend to think Notes might fall more into the “mission critical” than the “who cares” department.)

Unbelievable... and for those who want to push the "Microsoft just wants to play nicely with Notes" fantasy, you can go back to smoking whatever now...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 6:17 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (5)

06/15/2009

Why enterprises are moving to Google Apps, Gmail

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft Google
From CIO.co.nz: Why enterprises are moving to Google Apps, Gmail

This is an interesting article, and shows how (in my opinion) IBM and Microsoft are not competing against each other, but against Google...

Though it started selling software to universities and small businesses, Google has pervaded more large businesses during the past year with Google Apps, the company's suite of messaging and productivity software. Analysts say Google Enterprise, the division of Google that runs Apps, has added many features to the product that make it more attractive to enterprise IT departments.

JohnsonDiversey, a company that sells commercial cleaning products, is Google's most recent win. It moved its 12,000 employees over to the premier edition of Google Apps, which includes Gmail, instant messaging, documents and spreadsheets (among other apps) for $50 per user per year.

"E-mail is critical to our work, but we're trying to simplify IT," says Brent Hoag, JohnsonDiversey's IT director. "We want less infrastructure to maintain, and Google [Gmail] allows us to do that."

I don't think it really matters much if you believe they are overlooking other options from Lotus that could do the same thing. The fact remains that corporations are buying the "less infrastructure/let Google do it" story in ever-increasing numbers. Obviously, that does not bode well for either Lotus or Microsoft when it comes to selling on-premise computing.

But there was a "ah-ha" moment a bit further down in the story, and it's an angle I didn't consider in this light when the news came out last week:

Perhaps most significantly, at a Google Apps CIO roundtable event in San Francisco last week, Google announced that enterprise users of Google Apps could access Gmail through an Outlook client. The company hopes it will quell the protests by users who have become tethered to the desktop app and who, as a result, have sometimes hindered enterprise adoption of Google Apps.

"For me, it eliminates the last hurdle or mindset for letting go of [Microsoft] Exchange or the Exchange mentality," said Bob Rudy, vice president and CIO of Avago, a semiconductor company that moved its employees over to Google Apps, during the event. "This will help with adoption."

I remember reading a number of Yellowverse comments along the lines of "imagine if Lotus had that same type of tight integration with Gmail". But I either didn't see or missed (probably the latter) the angle that Google put the hammer down on Exchange by that little move. We've said it before ourselves... "Users don't want Exchange... They want Outlook." Gmail just gave it to them. So instead of us saying "we'll give them an Outlook connector to Domino", Google has said "use your preferred mail client, and we'll run your mail infrastructure for you." Imagine trying to sell Exchange into that argument.

Or Domino...

At least the Notes client isn't "free", so it's not as if Lotus is giving away the mail client which now is back-end agnostic. But overall, I'm not convinced that having Notes able to access Gmail as a easily configurable (or preferable) option is such a hot idea. If Google says "use Notes, Outlook, or Gmail... we don't care", the email server becomes even more of a commodity at that point. And if it's not cloud-based, the selling becomes that much harder.

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 6:36 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (11)

04/26/2009

IBM really needs to have a response to this "Comparing Lotus Domino/Notes and Exchange Server 2010" piece...

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
So out on Microsoft's website, we have this: Comparing Lotus Domino/Notes and Exchange Server 2010.

Both vendors should be expected to do this type of material, and in a tight competition they should be very focused on advantages over the competition. You know this webpage will be referenced by sales engineers looking to make a business case to stay with or convert to Exchange. But where is the comparison paper from the standpoint of Notes/Domino?

Those who work with Notes/Domino can find plenty to pick apart here. The entire first half of the paper doesn't even mention Domino. The "standing ovation" quote needs to have similar Exchange to Notes quotes from customers. Unified Communications provided within the single Exchange "product"? That makes it sounds like it's a single server product. Is that *really* the case? "Notes continues to play catch-up..." I *know* the laundry list for Exchange catchup would be just as long is not longer...

Mindshare is all-important in this competition between the two dominant premises email vendors. If you're not making the statements, your competitor is...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 2:03 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (15)

04/25/2009

Microsoft: The Decline Begins

Category Microsoft
From BNET: Microsoft: The Decline Begins

Been catching a few stories from BNET in my Google news alerts. Seem as if they hate IBM/Lotus and Microsoft equally. :) Anyway...

Microsoft disclosed that sales fell 6 percent during its third fiscal quarter ending March 31, its first ever year-over-year quarterly sales drop, and the start of an inexorable demise. Rome didn’t decline in a day, and neither will Microsoft, but the graffiti is on the wall.

Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell sounded funereal during yesterday’s earnings call, citing the toughest economic climate the company has seen in its 30 years, and cautioning analysts that while conditions had stopped worsening, he hadn’t seen any indication that they were improving.

But unless Liddell has been living in a cave, or getting his news using a Windows Mobile smart phone, he knows that a range of tech companies, including Apple, Amazon and Google, described a much rosier outlook for the future. The difference is those companies are still at the front, while Microsoft is near the end of its life cycle of relevancy.

I know it's media sport to predict the decline and fall of Microsoft. I know I've done it on this blog, and been pretty wrong on a consistent basis. But there are some troubling shorter-term factors in play here.

Microsoft’s performance would have been catastrophic were it not for annuity income from its Servers and Tools division — licensing revenue that came up for renewal during the past quarter. And while those renewals were stable, customers weren’t adding products as they usually do, nor were they adding seats; indeed, because of layoffs, many of them were in fact reducing seats.

Microsoft’s fourth fiscal quarter, ending June 30, is the really big one for annuity renewals. If Liddell hasn’t seen any improvement in business conditions — and he says he hasn’t — that bodes really badly for Microsoft’s annuity business and thus the company overall.

Liddell projects that the company will have really great products coming to market in the next 12 to 18 months, yet they don't see things improving before then. Much like any other company dependent on per-seat licensing, they have to be concerned that large companies are cutting staff (and seats) and delaying purchasing the newest toys in the window.

Macs are becoming ever more mainstream, the entertainment division will never recoup the billions in losses they've incurred over the years, and how long have we been waiting for the payoff in all the online investments to occur? Not good signs, and no one like Gates is at the helm to pull a sea change a la the internet memo.

If it weren't for the billions in free cash flow Microsoft has coming in, they'd be forced to do major cutbacks across the board, slicing many of these side businesses that haven't delivered. As it is, their cutbacks pale in comparison to choices and decisions facing industries like the automakers.

It may be a slow decline, but it's a decline nonetheless. I'm not sure any single company will dominate the computer industry again like Microsoft has in the past. The barrier of entry for new products has become more of a speed bump than a hurdle, and there's far too alternative (read: cheap) products for just about every major offering that rakes in the bucks for the big boys. It'll be interesting to look back in a decade and see how obvious some of this was in hindsight...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 4:48 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

04/21/2009

I'm having a hard time seeing where Windows 7 Starter version for netbooks is going to work...

Category Microsoft
I'm not to the point of following Microsoft product releases the same way I follow Notes/Domino upgrades, so I haven't been keeping track of all the different variations of Windows 7 that will probably end up being released. But yesterday was the first time I had heard about Windows 7 Starter, a scaled-down (some would say "crippled") version of the operating system for netbooks.

From ZDNet: Living with the limits of Windows 7 Starter Edition

If you’ve read anything about Windows 7 Starter Edition, your first reaction was probably the same as mine: Is Microsoft nuts? This ultra-cheap edition is intended for use on netbooks, but its biggest restriction sounds like a complete deal-breaker: it only runs three applications at once.

But I prefer to form my opinions based on facts, not press releases. So, for the sake of research, I’ve spent the last three weeks running Windows 7 Starter Edition on an ultra-portable Sony notebook. Here’s what I learned.

I realize that netbooks (small and *cheap*) are growing as a viable hardware option, and that Linux (the "cheap" option) has been doing quite well. And when you look at retail costs of Windows operating systems (does *anyone* pay retail for those?), you can end up spending as much on the OS as the hardware to run it. So Microsoft really does need to have an option in this area...

But a crippled version of Windows 7 that only runs three apps at a time? This sounds reminiscent of the stripped down versions of Windows that Microsoft offered to other countries in order to combat piracy. It also seems to follow the model of shareware apps... "Ok, you've used the application x number of times. If you want to continue using the application, please pay us for it." Fine for a particular application, but would I want to run my entire operating system in that mode?

Time will tell as to how Windows 7 "trial edition" plays out. But I can't think that this will meet with too much approval in the geek world. The other option would be to have it accepted by default as that's the only option available (or the upgrade price is real cheap). But with Linux as a viable alternative and geeks/road warriors being the initial primary market for netbooks, that doesn't seem to work well either.

Ah, the trials and tribulations of protecting cash cows...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 3:55 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (2)

04/13/2009

Enjoying my ASP.NET class at Netdesk here in Portland...

Category Microsoft
I'm taking a week-long ASP.NET class in Portland this week at Netdesk. It was supposed to have been an *actual* class in Portland in March, but it had to be cancelled due to lack of signups. This particular class is actually being taught in Seattle, where they have about 10 attendees. My coworker and I are the only two in Portland, and we're taking the class remotely.

Now a week-long class is normally something I semi-dread. You're on the schedule of the person teaching, some parts lag, etc. But this is rather nice. On top of the content being pretty good so far, the environment is sweet. Dual monitors, so that you have the instructor's screen on one side and the virtual machine for the labs on the other. Jane and I each have our own row. I have my personal laptop plugged in via ethernet cable, so I can call into work if I need to (as well as stay plugged in to the virtual world). We have the phone on mute, so we can talk back and forth without disturbing anyone, and bounce ideas around. And the view... 21st floor of the US Bancorp Tower, with a panoramic view of the Willamette stretching to the north.

Couple that with free diet soda, and I'm really liking the setup.

I may get more out of this class than any other I've ever taken. I would have liked to have had more Visual Studio experience, but so far I've been able to hack out the solutions without too many problems. And, after searching for something for five minutes, you tend to remember it the second time around.

I think this is gonna be a good week...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 4:24 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/04/2009

At what point does cost savings of cloud trump control of on-premise? It may be lower than I thought (to Lotus/MS peril if you don't have an answer)

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
I've seen a couple of articles of late that are making me rethink my mindset of "the cloud isn't enterprise-ready"...

From TMCnet.com: Saving Money with Cloud-Based E-mail

Smaller businesses can save significant amounts of money by replacing a "premises-based" e-mail system with a cloud based alternative, say researchers at the Yankee Group. Analyst Jeffrey Breen says a 75-person firm moving from premises-based e-mail and messaging to a cloud-based platform can save $64,000 in the first year and $207,000 within three years.

And Yankee Group based this on their own internal model based on using Lotus Notes as the internal, on-premise mail system. They modeled a switch to Google Apps Premier Edition.

From InformationWeek: One CIO’s Strategy For Software As A Service

This CIO is embracing SaaS anywhere it’s practical. And where it looks practical to him today is CRM, human resources, and -- probably -- e-mail.Salesforce (NYSE: CRM).com is implemented at the company, Workday HR is just at the starting phase, and e-mail is a question mark. Is Google (NSDQ: GOOG) up to the task? The cost savings are there, and all employees already are used to accessing e-mail via the Web using Lotus Domino. But is Google’s basic functionality today just too basic? Where is its road map headed? He’s visiting Google this month to find out. The big vendors (Microsoft and Lotus) offer online options, but the costs savings don’t look nearly as compelling to him.

While you can't draw generalized conclusions from a single CIO discussion and a single analyst report, I'm becoming more aware (mind share?) of the whole "cloud vs. on-premise" debate. It seems like we (the on-premise crowd) tend to present the argument for control of data and 24/7 availability (or at least the option to have it), while the cloudies talk about major scalability, no infrastructure cost, and per-user pricing. I'm still of the opinion that control of data is a *very* good reason to not ship your data off to a 3rd party, but that's being challenged by the "at what cost" arguments.

In a perfect world with infinite resources, you keep your email and data in-house, and maintain 100% control. But if a *small* company (read: SMB) can save tens of thousands of dollars having someone else manage it, what is that control realistically worth? And no lofty "it's worth everything" statements... I'm talking hard dollars that may be the difference between staying in business, turning a profit, or declaring bankruptcy. And this small business scenario doesn't even begin to address the probable hundreds of thousands of dollars a GSK will save by going to the cloud.

Yes, Domino has an application development platform. But is a small business going to spend money to have custom apps developed if 75% of what they want can be purchased off the shelf or provided online? Yes, Foundations is a great option for a plug-and-play server. But is Joe Dentist going to be more comfortable with a box he doesn't know much about, or a Google URL that he uses on a regular basis anyway?

The cloud is not the answer to every problem. But much like low-cost countries have taken over entire industries, the cloud concept is following the same model. Start with a low-cost model, basic services, and attack the very low-margin market. The high-end players don't care. Once you have competency there, start carving into the mid-market range. The high-end players will notice, but will still be set on defending the big high-margin accounts. Once the battle for the mid-market is lost, then the high-end players notice and start to defend their remaining turf with a vengence. But by then, the "low-cost" providers know your business as well as you do, they've squeezed out extra cost, they're competent players, and they can offer your level of service for a fraction of the cost. At that point, it's only a matter of time before you are bought or go out of business.

A number of people far smarter than I have been stating for some time that IBM/Lotus's main competitor isn't Microsoft, it's Google. I now understand that much better. And while I think Microsoft is far too involved in too many things to have the focus it needs, it *has* responded in the cloud world with offerings that are getting noticed and purchased. In my view, Microsoft is far better prepared to fight Google than Lotus is, and I think Google is starting to carve away at that mid-market range...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 5:16 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (4)

03/02/2009

GlaxoSmithKline deal highlights Microsoft's overseas launch of hosted collaboration software

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
From ComputerWorld: GlaxoSmithKline deal highlights Microsoft's overseas launch of hosted collaboration software

Microsoft Corp. officially launched its Business Productivity Online Suite outside of the U.S. on Monday, headlined by a deal with GlaxoSmithKline PLC as its first major customer for the hosted communications software suite.

The London-based drug maker is migrating 100,000 employees from IBM's Lotus Notes to Microsoft's hosted suite, which includes Exchange for e-mail, SharePoint, Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting, all managed from Microsoft's own data centers.

GlaxoSmithKline had been standardized on Notes for the past seven years. It was also using Google Inc.'s Postini for spam filtering, said Eron Kelly, senior director of Microsoft's business online services group, last week.

By switching to Microsoft's online suite, GlaxoSmithKline expects to shave 30% from costs over time, said Kelly. It will also allow GlaxoSmithKline's IT department to offload management of key infrastructure software.

Regardless of how you might want to spin this (shortsighted company, didn't consider other costs, what if the online cloud is down), the fact remains that Microsoft is gaining traction *and* mindshare in this area and offering. And personally, I don't see Lotus having much of an overall response at this particular point in time. I know that LotusLive is supposed to answer this, but I'm not seeing any major announcements of Exchange shops moving to hosted Notes (or hosted IBM anything, for that matter).

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 5:10 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (26)

02/25/2009

Which file download names would you like to deal with?

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
Do you want a series of files cryptically named with such wonders as C8N7YX.exe (and I hope you wrote down what file that was from Partnerworld when you downloaded it)?

Or would you prefer something like Enter_Office2007_MultiLanguage.iso (and I'll have no problems remembering that when I come back after the MSDN download)?

It's the little things that mean a lot...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 4:15 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (12)

02/19/2009

So the Notes/SharePoint community site idea seemed to have some backing... now for a descriptive domain name?

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
Since the idea of a Notes/SharePoint community site didn't meet with pitchforks and torches, it's time to take the first step... a good domain name!

I don't want to use my duffbert.com domain, as I want this to reflect something other than "me".

I sort of liked NotesPoint.com, but it's taken. I could always go for the .net version of something like that, but I'd prefer not get into the .com/.net - different sites situation.

Any suggestions or ideas?

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 8:16 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (24)

02/18/2009

Any interest in forming a community of Notes professionals who also work with SharePoint?

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
I can't believe I typed that as a title... :)

So I'm now in the "I do both" camp in terms of Lotus and Microsoft stuff. We're slowly getting up-to-speed on SharePoint, and my time will continue to shift towards an emphasis on that type of development. I'm definitely not leaving the Notes world, as we still have a large inventory of Notes apps that we have to maintain in the short term. What I *hope* to be able to offer the Notes community is an insight into SharePoint from a Notes developer view, devoid of any sales pitch or ulterior motive to adopt one side or the other. Let's be realistic... both sides have good points and bad points. If I can drop my blinders and predisposition towards "but Notes does that too", I can learn and improve in both areas.

One thing I've noticed over the last six months or so is that I'm not the only Notes person going through this. I heard from a number at Lotusphere who have some level of SharePoint involvement at their place of employment, as well as getting a few emails and direct messages on Twitter. To some degree, it feels as if there's a reluctance to "admit" to using (and perhaps even liking) SharePoint in our community. It could be that those who are in that situation are not vocal on blogs/Twitter, and we never hear from them. Or, there's always the possibility that they could feel uncomfortable in the Yellow Bubble talking about "the other side".

Well, I'm vocal... And I'm also getting old and crotchety in that I'm caring less about what others think and more about what's best from a professional standpoint (both for me and others).

So given all that, I've been toying with the idea today of trying to start some sort of community of Notes professionals who also work with SharePoint. The group could share experiences, ask questions, and help each other make the transition to the many moving parts that is the Microsoft stack. It's rather daunting when you've specialized in Notes development for the last decade, and all of a sudden there's 10 different things you have to be good at in order to survive.

And notice the phrasing of the community... *Notes* professionals who also work with SharePoint. Not Notes enthusiasts who want to argue the merits of SharePoint vs. Notes, nor SharePoint experts seeking clients to convert from Lotus to Microsoft. Just those of us who live in the trenches and, either by choice or by necessity, have to make both of these worlds work in a single environment.

I'm open to ideas, suggestions, comments, critiques, or whatever. This may be a stupid idea that just hit me at the end of a long day where not much went right. But I can also fantasize about it being a useful resource filling a niche that doesn't seem to be covered too well from what I can tell.

It's not about bleeding yellow for me any more. It's about keeping whatever blood remains inside my body, and becoming a technology professional who can talk about collaboration in multiple technologies, delivering value to businesses regardless of where their vendor commitments may lie. That probably should have been my goal all along, but sometimes it takes a relatively large stick upside the head to clarify one's vision...

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 6:29 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (32)

01/17/2009

Potential 'big badass botnet' spreading fast - ZDNet

Category Microsoft
Well... I think we found our Lotusphere spoiler for 2009. :)

From ZDNet - Potential 'big badass botnet' spreading fast

The 'Downadup' worm is spreading quickly and now infects more than 3.5 million PCs, according to the security company F-Secure.

In a blog post on Wednesday, F-Secure put the total number of infected machines at an estimated 3,521,230 — a rise of more than a million machines over the previous day's tally. The security firm bases its estimates on information it has gleaned by tapping into infected machines.

Downadup, which also goes by the name of Conficker, exploits a vulnerability outlined in MS08-067, a Windows Server service flaw that was patched in October. It executes a dictionary attack in order to try cracking user passwords, in the process locking user accounts out of the Active Directory domain. It emerged a week ago that Downadup can also infect USB sticks, thereby propagating on the client side.

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 8:04 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/15/2009

Au contraire: Exchange's lead over Notes actually 'getting bigger and bigger,' says Gartner

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
From Computerworld: Au contraire: Exchange's lead over Notes actually 'getting bigger and bigger,' says Gartner

OK... a different view heading into Lotusphere from one of the analysts...

While IBM Corp. argued Thursday that its Lotus Notes collaboration software was turning the tide against the market leader, Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange, a Gartner Inc. analyst said that's not the case.

"I don't believe that in either revenue or user seat share, that IBM is closing the gap [with Microsoft]," Tom Austin, a Gartner analyst, told Computerworld on Thursday. "The gap is getting bigger and bigger."

<snip>

Austin, a Gartner group vice president and research fellow who conducted that research, said that statistic was for 2007 shipments of Notes versus Exchange only. It is far different than the percentage of workers actually using either software today, the installed base.

For that, "Microsoft Exchange has at least three times the users of Notes with enterprises with 500 or more users," Austin said. IBM may be adding Notes users, but its share of the installed base "is getting smaller," he said.

Now, Austin does go on to say that Notes 8 has helped staunch the flow of moves to Exchange:

"Notes 8 has staunched some of the anxiety IBM inflicted on itself when it was pushing Workplace as a Notes replacement, causing its user base to freak," he said. "They can honestly say that Notes 8 today is almost as good as Outlook."

However, Austin thinks IBM won't be able to start winning large companies back until it starts to "carpetbomb" corporate end users with marketing and free copies of Notes the way Microsoft did when it was building up Outlook in the late 1990s.

"Mere mortals, not IT people, are going to have more and more say, but IBM adamantly refuses to do anything that would piss off IT buyers and senior executives," Austin said.

"Carpetbomb" corporate end users... I know more than a few in the Notes community would wholeheartedly agree to that.

It's frustrating that for something that sounds so straightforward and simple (who runs what software), no one can agree on a counting methodology, analyst percentages differ wildly, and vendors tout the numbers that make them look best. I'm surprised that Enron didn't try to develop a market in trading seat counts... :)

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 8:31 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (2)

12/31/2008

SharePoint/Notes interaction question: Can SharePoint be made to accept Notes:// URL formats?

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
In our installation of SharePoint, we have a need to link to some Notes client applications using the Notes:// URL format. When we attempt to use that type of a URL in a SharePoint dialog box (like for a Quick Link), it says that's an invalid URL format (wants http:, https:, ftp:, etc.)

Is there any way to change SharePoint's behavior in that area?

If not, I'll probably write a Notes app for our web-enabled Domino server that has a dockey and URL field (that *does* accept Notes://). Then when you hit that page from a browser, it automagically redirects to the Notes:// location. A little clunky, but it would work...

Any thoughts?

Posted by Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff At 11:47 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (7)

11/25/2008

Michael Sampson's Seamless Teamwork book just showed up today!

Category Microsoft
This may be the first time I've been overly excited about reviewing a book on Microsoft technology... :)

Posted by Thomas Admin Duff At 6:09 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

11/18/2008

Microsoft Exchange's challenges: partners, the cloud, and (still) Lotus Notes

Category Microsoft IBM/Lotus
From Computerworld: Microsoft Exchange's challenges: partners, the cloud, and (still) Lotus Notes

A number of things caught my eye in this article, both good and bad...

But Microsoft hasn't fully answered questions about how Exchange Online won't hurt its loyal army of partners, nor how the service can overcome some of its limitations and aid the war against IBM's Lotus Notes.

"Microsoft may in fact succeed with Exchange Online," said analyst David Ferris of Ferris Research. "But they have aggressively rolled out similar offerings in the past that have failed."

Ferris recognizes that Microsoft doesn't necessarily have a great track record in following through with significant new architectures. On the other hand, Workplace didn't fare so well, either...

Today, Exchange is used by 65% of workers in developed economies, according to Ferris Research. Lotus Notes is used by 10% of workers.

10%??? I think that's the lowest number I've ever heard for Notes seats percentage. And Ferris is a bit more reliable than Radicati (who gets quoted later on in the article also). I'd love to know the methodology behind those numbers.

That may not be easy. Despite Microsoft's rhetoric, migrations from Notes to Exchange have slowed, said Ferris.

"Every Notes user says their strategic direction is to migrate to Microsoft, but as a practical matter, those who could have easily done it would have already done it," Ferris said. "Migrating is too much hassle, the porting costs are too great."

Another case in point of once the money's been spent, you have... email.

And there are limitations in Exchange Online. Mailboxes default to just 1GB. Every additional gigabyte costs $2 per gigabyte per month. The maximum size is 4GB, despite the service being built with Exchange 2007, which supports mailboxes up to 16GB.

The 4GB limit is "to ensure the best performance in Outlook," said Betz. "Customers we talk to tell us that overly large inboxes create many problems for their organizations," which have to comply with rules around compliance and e-mail discovery.

Betz suggests customers with large e-mail accounts should move them to Exchange Hosted Archive or store large attachments on SharePoint Online.

I'm betting THAT little gem isn't mentioned up front...

In a blog posting last week, Jha said he plans no major strategic changes for Exchange.

Tea leaf readers will view that as implicit confirmation of predictions by Gartner Inc. analyst Matt Cain and others that Microsoft will still use the Jet storage engine in Exchange 14.

Jet is the reason for a hard 16 GB cap on e-mail account sizes in Exchange 2007.

Cain predicts that Microsoft will switch to the more-scalable SQL Server for the subsequent version of Exchange, due about 2012.

So *how* long has Microsoft been saying they'll switch to SQL Server in the "next release"?

Overall, there's lots of eye candy with the announcements, but at the same time there's some significant limitations and lack of direction on where you go in the future. And given the announcement about dropping more Live Services features, I'm not sure that's a safe direction to take.

Posted by Thomas Admin Duff At 5:41 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (5)

11/18/2008

Microsoft kills Windows Live OneCare and Equipt subscription services

Category Microsoft
From All About Microsoft from Mary-Jo Foley: Microsoft kills Windows Live OneCare and Equipt subscription services

Microsoft’s Equipt — which Microsoft launched in July of this year — is dead and Microsoft is having to go back and pull copies of Equipt from the channel (Circuit City in the U.S. and DSGI in the U.K.). Microsoft is offering customers a pro-rated refund for the service and allowing purchasers to keep Office Home & Student edition for free forever, Microsoft officials said.

Launched in July, and dead by November? That's fast even for Microsoft standards!

And in case you forgot the buzzwords:

New Microsoft Office subscription bundle to hit in mid-July Equipt is the product/service that was formerly codenamed “Albany” (and inside Microsoft, known as “ValueBox”). Equipt, which Microsoft describes as its “essential set of software and services for consumers,” includes a version of Office Home and Student 2007; Windows Live OneCare, Microsoft’s PC management/security bundle; a few Windows Live communication/collaboration services; and Office Live Workspace, Microsoft’s online-collaboration add-on to Office.

Must not have been *too* essential. :)

Obviously, those who bought Equipt now have free-forever software, which isn't bad when OpenOffice costs the same amount... nothing. However, it continues to amaze me how much money Microsoft can burn through with all the mistakes, missteps, and aborted launches. Whatever they spent to get Equipt out the door is now lost money. At least half (if not greater) of all the revenue realized from the sale of Equipt is headed back to the customer. And I bet the people who have the now-free version of Office won't be upgrading for a LONG time.

If Microsoft has that much money to burn, perhaps the auto industry should be talking to them instead...

Posted by Thomas Admin Duff At 4:15 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

11/10/2008

Study: SharePoint, Lotus in for Long Collaboration Fight

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft
From PC World: SharePoint, Lotus in for Long Collaboration Fight

Nothing like being in the front row for this battle... :)

Microsoft and IBM have been duking it out over e-mail and messaging software for years with their respective Outlook/Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino products. As their product lines have evolved, however, a new fight is brewing between Lotus and Microsoft's SharePoint Server as the platform of choice for enterprise collaboration strategy.

According to a new report by Forrester Research, both companies will be in this battle for the long haul, as there are benefits for enterprise customers to using one, the other or both platforms in their IT networks for the foreseeable future.

The report, by analyst Rob Koplowitz, notes that collaboration software, which allows workers across geographically dispersed offices to work more efficiently together through Web-based programs, is increasingly becoming a priority for enterprises. Nearly 50 percent of the 1,017 IT professionals in Europe and North America that Forrester surveyed for the report called implementing a collaboration strategy a priority or critical priority in 2008, according to the report.

While Lotus has more history in this market and has evolved over the years, SharePoint only in the past 18 months or so has rapidly come into its own as a collaboration platform, according to the report. "SharePoint has finally found its place in the world and is growing up fast," Koplowitz wrote.

Posted by Thomas Admin Duff At 4:38 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/30/2008

Comparing the Microsoft PDC conference with Lotusphere...

Category Microsoft IBM/Lotus
So I've spent the last five days getting inundated with information about where Microsoft is going in the next two years. My thoughts on the technology will be a different blog post, but I thought it might be interesting to compare how the conferences were run. Not having a huge pool of conference experience, it was hard *not* to compare PDC to Lotusphere. But here are a few of my observations...

Meals - Both conferences do a nice job on meal planning. When you're serving thousands in the course of 60 to 120 minutes, you better have your act together. For all intents and purposes, both conferences shine there. I'd give a slight nod to PDC for having pop (both regular and diet) on ice for all meals. I loved knowing that I didn't have to track down a diet Coke/diet Pepsi somewhere before breakfast.

Breaks - PDC had it all over Lotusphere in this case. There was coffee, juice, fruit, pop, and snacks laid out for consumption from 6:30 in the morning until the final conference session at 6:30 at night. And if you wanted a higher-end coffee experience, there was a Starbucks kiosk right there on premises. I know many attendees would be happy with just having coffee available at all times. I was overjoyed to see refrigerated cases in numerous places, kept fully stocked. Apples, oranges, and bananas were always there too. For snacks, they usually had granola bars (different flavors each day), chips, cookies, yogurt covered pretzels, Twinkies, Hostess cupcakes, etc. Basically, if you needed something to munch on, it was there.

Transportation - a tossup. I never had to wait for a bus from my hotel to the convention center, or from the convention center back to the hotel. Given that some of them had to navigate through LA traffic, it was impressive. They started running busses at 6:45 am (breakfast at 7), and often ran until 10'ish. The downside is that they stop running altogether between like 10:30 am and 5. They also had free bus shuttles back to the airport. You could just see the taxi drivers seething over THAT one.

Conference swag - It's hard to beat the 160GB external USB hard drive that had all the latest and greatest Microsoft pre-beta stuff on it. On the flip side, their conference "bag" was something you'd find in a supermarket as an eco-friendly replacement for paper and plastic. Needless to say, that didn't come home with me. The vendor area seemed much smaller than Lotusphere, but the Microsoft area for their own products and hands-on labs was the same size (if not bigger) as the vendor area. It was cool to see beanbag chairs tossed all over the place, and people banging away on xBox games. The conference store was also rather large, with a lot in the way of book offerings and other stuff.

Audience - PDC is very targeted... new stuff from Microsoft, geeks abound. It seemed to be about the same size as Lotusphere, but the demographics were very different. At Lotusphere, you have a fair number of attendees that fall into the female gender category. Not so at PDC. I would be shocked if the percentage of women made it into the double digit range. I wouldn't be surprised if it was less than 5%. Very strange...

Conference videos - EVERY session is recorded. EVERY session is available for download from the PDC site 24 hours after it's given. Let me state that again... EVERY. SESSION. IS. RECORDED. AND. IS. AVAILABLE. FOR. DOWNLOAD. BY. THE. ATTENDEES. If I could wish for any PDC feature to be copied by Lotusphere, this would be it.

Content - Lotusphere has something for everyone. You may not like the ratios given your particular interest or function, but they try and cover it all, from strategy to bleeding edge to best practices. Beginner to advanced. PDC is much more targeted to geeks and those who make their living with MS technology. If you're just getting started with MS stuff, or if you want to go back and start using the stuff today, this may not be the best place for you. I got exposed to a lot, but I'll be the first to admit that much was over my head when it came to details. PDC also does a great job with ad-hoc "unsession" stuff. There's plenty of space to have spur of the moment meetings and sessions run by the attendees themselves. I guess that PDC had more of a "geek vibe" to it than Lotusphere often does. Not to say that Lotusphere doesn't have its share of geeks. There just seemed to be more of them at PDC.

Miscellaneous - I loved how there was an area to check your luggage on the final day at the convention center. Probably not as critical at Lotusphere since the event is held at hotels. When I went to pick up my luggage to head to the airport, it looked like disembarkation on a cruise. MILES of luggage lined up...

Most of all, I came away with an even greater appreciation for what it takes to pull off a conference the size of Lotusphere or PDC. It's amazing that 9K to 10K people can come together and learn without tearing the place up or having the organizers swear "never again". My hat is off to the Lotusphere group for what they do for us each year...

Posted by Thomas Admin Duff At 12:44 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (6)

10/26/2008

Here in Los Angeles for Microsoft PDC...

Category Microsoft
I'm finally here in LA, in my room at the Westin Bonaventure, getting caught up on emails and hoping for an early and restful night. I arrived around 1:15 pm, and found that they were already running shuttles between the hotels and the conference center. I didn't register for the pre-conference, but I did head over there to register for the main conference and get all that taken care of. It's hard not to want to compare this to Lotusphere, as that's my conference point of reference for these kind of things.

In terms of transportation, I think LS wins. The shuttles run later, which is a point for PDC. But the shuttles quit running completely between 10:45 and 5'ish each day.

The LA conference center is VERY nice so far as the lobby area goes. Registration was smooth. I didn't wander around the place, figuring I'd find out all the locations starting tomorrow. Their PDC store is huge! Books, swag, you name it. The only part where I was disappointed is that the conference "bag" is one of those plasticky sacks like you see grocery stores selling. I'll definitely be using my Lotusphere backpack to tote around my laptop and such. But later in the week we go back and get the 160GB hard drive with all the software on it. I expect that will more than tip the scale back to the PDC side. :)

Coincidences... My publishing contact at Pearson wasn't able to make the show, but she told me I should go to the booth and introduce myself to Curt Johnson who *would* be there. While taking the shuttle from the airport to the hotel, I was sitting next to a guy and we were engaging in some conference small talk. He mentioned he worked for marketing for a publisher, to which I asked him which one. Turns out it was... Curt Johnson. When I introduced myself, he said... "You're Duffbert!" I love reviewing... :)

Ms. McGivney happened to be leaving LA just as I was arriving, and will be coming back just as I'm leaving. But she found time to get a copy of Wil Wheaton's latest book autographed for me, and it was waiting at the front desk when I checked in. Thanks so much, Kathleen!

Well... since I'm supposed to be doing some actual work, I'll close here for the evening. I won't be twittering any of the sessions "live" here at PDC, as I'm going to be in over my head so far I'll be asking directions to the surface. But I'm sure I'll drop a few observations in over the course of the day, now that I have a laptop that hibernates.

Oh, yeah... the laptop. Friday night, my Sony Vaio, just recently rebuilt with Windows XP and sitting there at the side of my desk, spontaneously rebooted. After I got the Vaio splash screen and startup tones, I got... nothing. Black screen, blinking cursor, and nothing else. Let it cool down, but it wouldn't come back to life. Not the thing to have happen 36 hours before you leave for a week. I decided a new laptop was in order, so I'm now the new owner of an HP Pavilion dv7. 4GB, 320GB hard drive, 17 inch screen, and very nice. Except for having to go back to Vista 64. Sigh... I'd have considered a Mac, but it looks like I'll be playing more in the MS realm in terms of software development, and I think a Windows box is still better for that. :)

And finally, I did my laundry on Saturday, only to realize on Saturday night that my wallet didn't make an exit from my pants beforehand. I'm traveling on laundered money and credit cards.

It's NOT been a good weekend. :)

Posted by Thomas Admin Duff At 2:32 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (4)

10/14/2008

Anyone going to the Microsoft PDC conference in LA in a couple of weeks?

Category Microsoft

I'm going to be heading down there myself in order to start ramping up on some additional skills for work. If you're going to be there, let me know and perhaps us brave Lotuspherians can band together for protection... :)

I'll admit this will be rather strange. I'm sure it'll be similar to my very first Lotusphere when I sat there not understanding 90% of what was going on. I'll also have a hard time not comparing it to Lotusphere as it's the same type of conference. The party is Tuesday night instead of Wednesday (Universal Studio). One thing that will *definitely* be nice, however... it looks like part of the conference material package includes a 160GB external hard drive. Guess that's *one* way to get all your software into the hands of your technical base. :) Could also explain why the conference is more expensive than Lotusphere, too...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:45 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (2)

07/21/2008

New studies highlight the potential downsides of SharePoint

Category Microsoft

From All About Microsoft: New studies highlight the potential downsides of SharePoint

I find it rather interesting that SharePoint is being accused of the same problem that Microsoft accuses Notes of... proliferation of applications in an out-of-control fashion.

SharePoint is one of Microsoft’s crown jewels. Microsoft is touting the fact that SharePoint generated $1 billion in revenues for Microsoft last year. At Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Partner Conference, company officials said they expect partners to generate $5 billion in SharePoint-related services revenues for themselves in the coming year.

But it’s not all roses on the SharePoint front — especially when it comes to the growing trend by customers to use SharePoint not just as a set of loosely integrated applications, but as a development platform in its own right. A couple of new studies highlight the potential risks of which customers should be aware when betting big on SharePoint.

The Forrester report includes some pithy warnings about the potential risks of uncontrolled growth of customized SharePoint applications. From the report’s executive summary:

“(A)s many shops are discovering, SharePoint is also a development platform that people both inside and outside of IT use to create intranets, outward-facing portals, electronic forms, workflows, and even dashboards. The promise of SharePoint: Your organization will be able to create and deploy collaboration applications faster and give businesspeople productive new tools. The pitfalls: SharePoint can add new unplanned demands as your teams fill the product’s gaps in application life-cycle management and enterprise integration and as they create policies to prevent a new chaos of usergenerated applications.”

SharePoint’s customizability and rich feature set is a blessing and a curse for many customers. Forrester noted that “SharePoint is a pure Microsoft server stack that closes off any opportunities to substitute third-party databases, Web servers, and other products for Microsoft components,” Forrester cautioned. In addition, the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint, which includes many of the advanced app-development features, “can add $200 per user to your budget,” the report’s authors noted.

With power comes responsibility... Yes, your users *can* create their own Notes and SharePoint applications. And yes, you will have a number of them that will be built in a haphazard fashion, become mission-critical, and end up back in the hands of IT to "support". Unfortunately, that what happens when you make something that can be "programmed" without programming. It happened with Access, it happens with Notes, it will continue to happen with SharePoint.

And then, IBM will be touting a conversion package to move SharePoint apps to Notes/Domino, because only about 15 - 20% of the SharePoint applications in your organization are actually used. The rest are abandoned or obsolete... <only slight sarcasm there />

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:22 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/28/2008

Glad to see .docx formats taking over... NOT! :)

Category Microsoft

I received an email yesterday from a coordinator of a program that Susan and I were participating in. In the email was an attachment of the course evaluations. Apparently the leader is running the latest and greatest version of Word, and sent the attachment out in the .docx format. I tried opening it in the version of Word I have running on this machine (2002), and no luck. Every option it gave me produced unreadable text. Granted, I didn't try very hard to get around it either. :)

This morning we get a follow-up email... Apparently everyone was having problems reading his attachment, so he just embedded the results in the email.

All hail OOXML! :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:59 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/25/2008

I stumbled across the transcript for Unify's financial conference call today...

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft

Unify is that "wonderful" company that kept advertising in SearchDomino offering to migrate you off of that creaky old Notes infrastructure... NOT!

Here's the conference call transcript...

And proving that Microsoft can have a million #1 priorities, here's proof that killing off Notes is still one of them:

Don McKernan – Landoak Securities

And then in your prepared comments you said that Microsoft designated this Notes issues as one of their top three priorities or something like that. Can you clarify what you mean by that?

Todd E. Wille

Well, just what it means is that over the last year, and continuing this upcoming fiscal year, they’ve got two, three or four key initiatives that really the whole company focuses on in addition to their normal goal setting. And one of those key initiatives is this whole Lotus Notes initiatives because SharePoint and Exchange and a lot of their products that are all on a collaborative environment, (a) and (b) IBM identified as one of their major competitors, those two reasons have led this to be one of the key initiatives for them as a company last year and this going forward year.

So, obviously, the point to us is that it’s great news for us to have that exposure. And it goes all the way to the top of Microsoft and all the way down, is that this initiative is important and it’s funded and that bodes well for us.

Don McKernan – Landoak Securities

You’re the only answer for them, basically, on the complex end.

Todd E. Wille

That’s correct.

I guess we can assume we're still on Microsoft's radar. :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:03 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (2)

05/24/2008

Yahoo buy not a strategy in itself: Microsoft CEO

Category Microsoft

From Reuter's: Yahoo buy not a strategy in itself: Microsoft CEO

Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Friday that buying Yahoo was not a strategy in itself, and dropping the bid meant it now had $50 billion to spend on other acquisitions.

"Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing, it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business," he told a packed hall at a technology conference in Moscow.

"We will spend money on some acquisitions. You can do a whole lot of things with 50 billion dollars," he said.

What the...?

Let me get this straight... Microsoft was willing to burn their cash reserve and go into debt for the first time in its history, to spend nearly $50 *billion* dollars for a non-strategic purchase? $50 *billion* as "a way" to accelerate their online ad business, with no thought to catching up in search? Once you've spent $50 *billion* as "a way" to accelerate, what other options might you have to resort to if that doesn't work? For $50 *billion*, I'd be wanting to make sure it was *THE* way to accelerate just about everything in my company.

It continues to amaze me that they allow Ballmer to speak in public, and that the shareholders of Microsoft haven't gone into full-fledged revolt.

Posted by Tom Duff At 9:11 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/22/2008

OOXML Stalemate May Lead to Cliff-Hanger Ending

Category Microsoft

From InternetNews: OOXML Stalemate May Lead to Cliff-Hanger Ending

Microsoft's bid to upgrade Office Open XML's (OOXML) status to that of an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard is starting to look like a good old fashioned cliffhanger.

Microsoft confirmed Thursday that India's delegation to the ISO process has voted not to change its vote from 'No' to 'Yes'. That is, in the standards balloting last summer, India voted against OOXML being certified by ISO. This week's decision means that it will maintain its No vote.

Now I haven't been following the internal twists and turns of this whole process very carefully, but it's been hard to miss all the underhanded attempts at Microsoft to stack the deck and manipulate the process. Microsoft and ethics haven't been two words you'd see together very often in this long, drawn-out process...

But the interesting part of this article is the closing lines...

Meanwhile, whether Microsoft wins or loses in ISO politics, it may still have problems surrounding OOXML. The European Commission is reported to be investigating whether Microsoft broke any European Union laws in its attempts to get as many nations as possible to vote for ISO certification.

If even half the stories are true, then Microsoft better set aside some of that money meant to pay for Yahoo in order to be able to pay off this particular fine that's surely coming.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:39 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/07/2008

SearchDomino... probably not the most opportune timing for this article.

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft

So strolling through Google Reader yesterday, I happen to come upon a story feed by SearchDomino titled Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint Integration. And yes, I'm not linking to it.

My first thought was "I thought I turned all those feeds off from there!". Apparently not, but that's now corrected.

But what I found interesting is that they'd run this so soon after all the bad press they took in the Domino community over their advertising fiasco with Unify and migration from Domino to Microsoft platforms.

I'm currently reading a book (really? a book?) called Stop The Presses. It's about dealing with media crisis when you're under attack for bad news, accusations, etc. Reading the information here and comparing it to SearchDomino's handling of the offensive advertising has been interesting, to say the least. Needless to say, there was plenty of room for improvement on how to respond, where to respond, and how not to continue to badger and irritate your audience and readership.

One of the lines that was drawn by SearchDomino is that advertising and editorial copy are two entirely separate areas. Generally, that's the way it's supposed to be. But if I had been put in that position (and I was sitting on the editorial side), I would have tried VERY hard to not give the appearance of letting sponsors drive content. Instead, we get a co-existence article written by one of their main editors.

The argument will be that co-existence is different than migration, and information is different than provocative ad copy. I'm sure there'll also be the contention that Lotus/SharePoint integration is a fact of life, and that the readership has a need for that information. Separated from prior events, I would agree. Colored by those same prior events, it looks really bad.

If I were an editor, I think I would have shelved this type of content for at least six months...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:52 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/04/2008

IBM launches "Microsoft-free" PC initiative

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft

From PC Pro: IBM launches "Microsoft-free" PC initiative

IBM is teaming up with partners in Austria and Poland to offer Microsoft-free PCs for the eastern European market.

IBM says it is offering the Linux-based PCs together with Red Hat software distributor VDEL of Austria and Polish distributor and services firm LX Polska, in response to demand from Russian IT chiefs.

The PCs will include IBM's Lotus Symphony software based on the Open Document Format...

Interesting that IBM is positioning Lotus Symphony as the productivity suite for these Linux offerings. Given that Microsoft obviously doesn't play AT ALL in the Linux space with Office, that pretty much gives IBM a head start for that platform. And if they continue to work at the SDK model for Symphony, the feature parity between Office and Symphony will continue to narrow. And it's already pretty narrow when you consider the pricing and the feature set that most users actually utilize in Office. Then as that SDK model is brought into the Windows arena, you have an interesting battle if OOXML is not ratified as a standard...

Microsoft is active in IT education campaigns in Russia and last month signed a deal with MTS, Russia's largest mobile operator, to offer services and cut-price laptops installed with its Vista operating system for small businesses.

IBM says the Linux PC line, called Open Referent, will cut desktop computing costs by up to half.

This seems to be a textbook case of a product entering the "maturity" phase of it's life (also known as "death of the cash cow"). With price cuts on Vista, special deals like the one listed above, and everything else Microsoft is doing to push their software onto as many PCs as possible, it appears that they are spending more to receive less margin.

This is very common in manufacturing and sales. Company A (usually a western company of some sort) has a solid hold on a market. Company B (often a lower-wage country) starts to nibble at the fringes. Company A isn't worried, since their core market is not affected. They'll concede those low-margin, low-volume markets. Pretty soon (and it seems to be sooner than later any more), company B starts to improve quality, match features, and cost less. Company A takes notice, retrenches for their high-margin markets, and puts up some resistance at the lower-mid-market level. Company B is now joined by companies C, D, and E, and also buys into Company A's main western competitor. The low-end market is completely lost, the mid-market is also lost (company A is now just another player, and not all that attractive any more), and the high-margin market is now under a full attack. Quality is equivalent, function is equivalent, branding is now established in favor of the competitors, and price is a losing proposition for company A. It's time to either find a new market, fold up the tents, or decide that you are going to be a mere shell of your former self (or a subsidiary of company B).

Apple... iPhones... iPods... Linux... Google... OpenOffice... Open Source... ODF... Nintendo...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:59 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/29/2008

OK... are the Windows games REALLY necessary to run Windows?

Category Microsoft

Over the last few weeks, I've deleted some of the Windows games that tend to suck time away from things I really *should* be doing. So Hearts, Spider Solitare, and regular Solitare have been deleted from my hard drive.

But I just LOVE how when I delete those, Windows XP comes up with a message telling me that essential files necessary for running Windows have been deleted, and I should restore them from my backup CDs.

Yeah, right...

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:20 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (2)

02/29/2008

I wondered if we'd finally get to this particular slant on the Microsoft Vista/Intel chipset controversy...

Category Microsoft Intel

From Microsoft Watch: Intel-Microsoft Graphicsgate, Part 1

News Analysis. How serious could be Intel's and Microsoft's mutually beneficial, apparent collusion over Windows Vista and integrated graphics chip sets? Criminal.

This morning, I asked Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, if there might be violations under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department or Securities and Exchange Commission.

"Yes, to all of the above," he answered. "Maybe, we haven't exhausted the universe of possible problems here."

Quick recap of this week's events: As part of the discovery process for the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit, on Wednesday the court publicly disclosed 158 pages of internal Microsoft documents. On page 30, unidentified Microsoft employee John Kalkman writes in an e-mail about Vista certification for an Intel chip set: "We lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded." Later, after explaining some of the negative market results, he admits: "It was a mistake on our part to change the original graphics requirements."

Goldman hadn't yet reviewed all the released documents, when we first spoke. Clearly stunned, he asked me to reread the Kalkman quote about Microsoft helping Intel earnings.

The statement is "very serious" if straightforward as it appears, "with life-changing consequences for the individuals involved," he emphasized.

Later, after becoming more familiar with the case, he e-mailed and expressed how news stories "shockingly haven't been getting into the legal consequences.

Having been part of Enron Broadband during the hyped years, I understand a bit about how things can be made to "fit" for Wall Street. Turns out that many of those "deals" that were closed right before quarterly earnings reports were done primarily to juice the reported earnings, when in reality they were washes or cover-ups with little real substance behind them. They all looked and sounded great to us employees at the lower levels, but little did we know the amount of smoke and mirrors that were really being used.

Fast forward to Microsoft and Intel... We apparently have Microsoft making false statements (the Vista-capable certification) in order to sell their software on Intel chipsets that were not up to the task. And if it's proved that Microsoft did this in order to help Intel make quarterly earnings numbers, then I don't see how the feds *can't* get involved in terms of potential criminal violations of financial security laws. One of the charges that seemed to be part and parcel of the indictments of Enron executives was the intent to defraud the market in terms of earnings based on written financial reports and quarterly conference calls. While not a pure apples-to-apples comparison, it's not a huge leap to see either Intel or Microsoft (or *both*) executives having to answer for this apparent collusion in a court of criminal justice, not just a class-action civil case.

The monopoly aspect of Microsoft has been well-established over the years. Their financial reports have always shown an incredible amount of free cash-flow. But I've always wondered what might happen if somehow it was proved that the statements were not all they appeared to be, and that the financial results were somehow manipulated in some way, shape, or form. They wouldn't be the first company to do so, and they wouldn't be the last. But an event like that would definitely send tremors through the tech industry, and would rock the very foundations of the company...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:25 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (3)

02/18/2008

Yahoo's Chinese partner concerned about Microsoft bid

Category Microsoft

From San Jose Business Journal: Yahoo's Chinese partner concerned about Microsoft bid

The Chinese Internet company part-owned by Yahoo Inc. is exploring becoming more independent if Microsoft Corp. succeeds in acquiring its U.S. partner, according to a report on Monday.

Alibaba Group is concerned about how the Chinese government will view a combination of Sunnyvale-based Yahoo and Microsoft, the Wall Street Journal reported citing an unnamed source.

The paper said Chinese regulators have already contacted Alibaba, which is 39 percent owned by Yahoo.

Yet another potentially valuable asset of Yahoo that will likely "not play well" with Microsoft should the acquisition actually happen.

Now, it could be said that Alibaba hasn't got much to say about the merger as they don't control that 39% of the company. But getting on China's doghouse list wouldn't be a good way to approach a huge potential market that everyone is trying to get a piece of. And who's to say that the Chinese government wouldn't either legally stop any merger activities on their own shores, or just flat-out buy out that 39%?

Either way, it's yet another piece of the $40 billion price tag that will either never return value or will be a one-time sale price and that's it.

Remind me again why this is a great idea for Microsoft?

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:55 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/13/2008

Hadn't seen or heard about the Vista "Capable" class action lawsuit...

Category Microsoft

From Preston Gralla's ComputerWorld blog: Microsoft exec: Vista-Capable PCs are "junk"

Top Microsoft execs have admitted that "Windows Vista Capable" PCs, which can run only the most basic version of Vista, are "junk," with Jim Allchin, then co-president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division, saying in an email, "We really botched this."

So reported the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last week in a report about a class action suit, which charges that Microsoft misled consumers into buying the Windows Vista Capable PCs, even though the PCs couldn't run the most important features of the then-new operating system.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Is it no wonder that the public is so cynical and skeptical any more about companies? Granted, due to the lawsuit-happy society we've become, it's nearly impossible for a company to come right out and say "we blew it" without incurring a nearly-guaranteed lawsuit in the process. Instead, they have to spin everything to make it appear positive, while at the same time they're acknowledging internally that they have a disaster brewing. Meanwhile, we the public immediately discount any and everything said by the organization, and attribute evil motive and intent behind anything they do.

This happens to be yet another instance of a Microsoft blunder, but by no means is it isolated to Redmond. Pharmaceutical companies, auto manufacturers, food distributors... the list is endless.

When did we lose all sense of ethics? The courage to act on what is right and what is wrong?

sigh...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:28 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

02/13/2008

So what would Microhoo do to my blog search engine referrals?

Category Microsoft

Using StatCounter, here's the "Search Engine War" graph for the most recent 500 hits to my blog:

A picture named M2

So for $44 billion, the score will go from Google - 148, Microsoft - 5 to Google - 148, Microsoft - 11.

Yeah, sign me up for *that* acquisition... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:36 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

02/12/2008

Why Ray Ozzie can't save Microsoft

Category Microsoft

From the ComputerWorld blog of Preston Gralla: Why Ray Ozzie can't save Microsoft

When Ray Ozzie took over as Microsoft's chief software architect in 2006, he was hailed as a visionary who would save Microsoft by bringing it out of the doldrums and into the Internet age. But based on his poor stewardship of the "Live" brand, and Microsoft's ham-handed attempt to take over Yahoo, it's clear he's not the one to save the company. Maybe nobody can.

Finally, someone questioning whether the emperor has clothes...

I have a lot of respect for Ray Ozzie. You can't argue with what he did with the concept of Notes... still essentially the same solid architecture after all this time. Groove was another interesting idea, and I know that Microsoft was touting it big time when they bought Ray and his company. But let's face it... Groove is pretty much a non-starter and a niche software offering now. I won't blame that entirely on Microsoft, as Groove would have died completely a long time ago if not for MS buying them out. Think IBM rescuing Lotus, only with *that* story having a far better outcome (but not without some rough patches, either).

The expectations of Ozzie were extremely high when he was absorbed into the Borg. His quiet, behind-the-scenes style has had everyone wondering what he was up to... what revolutionary ideas would he come up with to take Microsoft to the next level. Personally, I've had my doubts. Is his silence because he's hard at work, or is there another element in play here? If he *is* the architect of the Microsoft Live concept and brand, then it's either been less than successful, or corporate bureaucracy has badly executed on his technical concept. Perhaps it's a bit of both...

He was put in charge of the company's Internet push, through its "Live" brand. And now, more than two years later, Microsoft has done such a poor job with the Live brand under Ozzie, and found itself so far behind Google, that it's trying to bail itself out by buying Yahoo.

It's the same point I made in a posting yesterday... On top of the billions they've spent trying to succeed on their own (and failed), they're now trying to throw more than $40 billion at the problem in hopes of winning. Not a good track record there...

Ozzie hasn't been able to change the overall outlook and direction of Microsoft. If the Live brand was supposed to compete against Google, it's been a failure. Microsoft remains a company that sells software that lives on people's PCs. That brings it in plenty of revenue today, and for years to come. But ultimately, it's yesterday's business plan.

Ozzie's memo of several years ago was prescient. "Our business as we know it is at risk," he said then. That's true even more so today. And it's because Ozzie has overseen a Live brand that hasn't done a thing to help Microsoft compete.

Yes, elephants can be taught how to dance. IBM pulled it off under Gerstner. But it's for sure that the current crop of management at Microsoft don't have a degree in choreography...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:13 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

02/11/2008

OK... Loved this Microsoft Watch column about Yahoo rejecting the Microsoft bid...

Category Microsoft

Yahoo Squeaks, Microsoft Squawks

They say trapped animals fight more fiercely. But what happens when two animals are cornered?

Microsoft's unsolicited—and unwanted—$44.6 billion bid backed Yahoo into a place from which there was seemingly no escape. But rather than die, Yahoo is fighting back. Earlier today, Yahoo rejected Microsoft's offer.

Microsoft feels cornered, too, but by Google. Microsoft sees no escape without Yahoo, and the company will fight fiercely to get its prey. From Microsoft's perspective, there are two losers without the merger. Yahoo must die so that Microsoft will survive.

So, it is no surprise that Microsoft is fighting back too. After U.S. stock markets closed, Microsoft issued a rather long response to Yahoo, but more to shareholders than to the board of directors. Microsoft's strategy now will be divide and conquer, to rally a mutiny among Yahoo's ranks.

As I pretty much expected, Microsoft has decided to push on with its Yahoo bid. Based on the market's reaction over the last two weeks, you'd think that Microsoft would have found some way to spin it so that they could step away and perhaps regain that $40 billion market cap hit that they took in their stock. But I think ego and testosterone is making the decisions now.

There will be two losers from any hostile takeover. Then Google will take everything else. Not that it really matters. Microsoft's bid, assuming that it is sincere, reveals that the services platform is vaporware. Sure, Microsoft has built out something, but it's not nearly enough to compete with Google. Microsoft has tacitly admitted that it's even farther behind Google than anyone suspected. Surely Google can smell that blood. Yum!

This is the thing that surprises me... If you listen to the company spin, Microsoft's Live offerings will be the biggest driver in the company's portfolio in the next few years. But there's nothing to indicate that now. We've been told how many times that MSN Search is *the* critical driver for Microsoft, and that they will be the dominant player? But yet no one seems to question that they are now looking at spending over $44 billion dollars to become a distant second. FAIL?

Ah, but my favorite part is Wilcox's parting line...

Microsoft's Yahoo takeover is now unequivocally hostile. Today, the companies gave each other an upraised middle finger. Each has one hand still free. There's another birdie coming.

Even if Yahoo is successful in fending off Microsoft (and that's a *big* if), I wonder how much of a hit they've taken with people migrating away from their services based on users not wanting anything to do with Microsoft. I know I've started that move, and there'll be no reason to go back regardless of how it turns out. Home page portals, email, instant messaging... I can get those commodities anywhere, and in fact already have non-Yahoo alternatives that I've given more weight to. Flickr is about the only Yahoo property that I feel still has value due to critical user mass and quality of service. I'm not sure that "MSN Flickr Live" wouldn't kill that off too...

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:08 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

02/09/2008

So it looks like Yahoo is going to reject Microsoft's offer...

Category Microsoft

From an InformationWeek blog: Yahoo To Reject Microsoft Offer, But Deal's Hardly Dead

The Wall Street Journal on Saturday reported that Yahoo's board will formally reject Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid to buy the company. The report says the board feels the offer "massively undervalues" Yahoo. So where does that leave the prospect of a Microhoo?

Paul McDougall goes on to conjecture that Microsoft might well be prepared to up their offer, or that someone on Yahoo's board might force them to accept Microsoft's bid at some point. Either way, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Does Microsoft look at this as an opportunity to back away from the deal after it was so widely panned by many? It seems like that'd be the smart thing to do, but who said common sense rules? The market has punished their stock price of late, and the risks of taking on debt for such a large takeover of clashing cultures seem high. But if they back away, the market/industry spin will be that Google won, Yahoo is #2, and Microsoft lost (with few to no options to catch up with Google). You just know *that's* gonna play well with Ballmer come Monday morning...

It's rather tough when you're the 800 pound gorilla, you're losing your lunch to the agile chimp, and you can't make anyone play with you any more...

Posted by Tom Duff At 1:09 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/05/2008

OK... I'll bite. Gary's "congrats" posting is in very poor taste...

Category Microsoft

So Gary Devendorf posts a blog entry titled Rocky and now Bob Balaban, "congratulating" them for their new jobs. In it, he goes into detail about "why they left", i.e. the poor working environment at IBM, the stupid way the company treats developers, etc. I found that posting to be in very bad taste, and proceeded to reply in the comments. Then when I clicked the Submit button, I get taken to this URL: http://german-58826326439.spampoison.com/

So, Gary has either misconfigured his blog ("surprising" for someone who knows Domino so well...) or I'm banned from commenting. I'll accept either as a valid reason. As such, I'll post my comment here, where I *know* it will be saved and posted...

I'm stunned that you would post something like this, Gary...

If you know the reasons they left (as in they actually *told* you), then I don't think they would appreciate you airing their laundry for them.

If you don't know the reasons they left (as in this is all conjecture on your part), then you put them in an awkward position of having to defend their choices against rumor and innuendo.

If there's a third option, then I'm open to suggestions as to what it might be. Either way, I don't think you'll be getting a "Thanks, Gary" response from either of them.

And based on how you have your blog configured, you may not get a response from them anyway. Which could explain how come all your blog entries on Lotusphere plans never showed up in my RSS feed until *after* Lotusphere... replication issues?

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:49 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (10)

02/02/2008

So does the potential MicroHoo takeover change anything in your computing world right now?

Category Microsoft

I have had my Yahoo mail account for many, many years. I switched it to a paid account back when average mail service offerings were a whopping four to six megabytes per account. With a paid Yahoo account, I got something like 20 megabytes, no advertising on the email, etc. Even though mail account sizes for free offerings are virtually limitless now, I've left the paid account in place to take advantage of the ad removal, advanced spam-guard, etc.

Earlier this week I got the notice saying the service would be renewed at the end of February if I did nothing. I've been thinking about migrating the Yahoo account more to the Google side, but I figured I'd leave the paid service in place until I got around to seriously addressing migration.

Today, I cancelled the paid service. I dropped Hotmail quite some time back because it was nothing but a spam magnet. The thought of Microsoft having involvement in my personal online mail account again doesn't do much for me. Rather than help MS with another $20 (I know... stop the merger, right?), I decided to just cut the service now, deal with "reduced" functionality or features, and slowly start weaning myself away from the Yahoo account. Nothing drastic, and it will still be there (I'm sure) for many, many months to come. But visiting the Yahoo mail account may become a "few times a week" event rather than "many times a day".

Guess I also need to look at my home page, which is currently My Yahoo. Even on that front, I've toyed with the Google homepage a bit. But there's one stock portfolio module on the Yahoo side that doesn't seem to have any decent replacement on the Google side. If that changed, I'd switch with no regrets at all. Time to start looking again.

And as a side note... I don't expect Grandma Mabel or Uncle Joe to have the same reaction to dropping any Yahoo features because they're now run by Microsoft. But I'm sure I won't be the only technology-inclined person who will bail on Yahoo if Microsoft takes it over. Does that have any impact on the value of Yahoo in terms of what Microsoft is (over-)paying for it?

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:28 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (5)

02/02/2008

So what do I think about the MicroHoo announcement?

Category Microsoft

I'm doing this more for the humor of looking back five years from now and either being 1) impressed by my own wisdom, or 2) amused by my total stupidity.

First off, I've read more than enough business books to know this... there is NO way to tell right now how this will play out. The people who claim that this will propel Microsoft past Google have just as much credibility as those who are saying that this will be the death of Microsoft *and* Yahoo. Books and articles will be written two to three years from now, and every decision made between now and then will be given a far greater level of importance and meaning than it had at the time. Hindsight is 20/20. Look how many people were fooled/were wrong about Enron. :)

Having gotten that caveat out of the way...

Personally, I see this as a huge risk for Microsoft. While it does give them a large infrastructure and content, it also presents problems on branding. Does Yahoo mail cease to exist? Yahoo Instant Messenger? Do those people who chose Yahoo-branded products over Microsoft stay the course, or do they jump over to Google (or other alternatives) because they didn't want to use Microsoft stuff to begin with? Will Microsoft be smart enough to leave successes like Flickr alone, or will they attempt to rebrand and control it to be another forgettable entry in the list of "Live" offerings?

As an IT guy, I'm *really* curious to see how they'll handle the culture and infrastructure issues. While Google has "out-Yahoo'd" Yahoo in terms of working environments, Yahoo still has that free and independent spirit. Microsoft used to have it, but that was long, long ago. How will Yahoo talent react to the process-heavy Microsoft management style? Or, given the deteriorating economy, will people just be happy to still have a job? And just how many people will be laid off from various areas of Yahoo and Microsoft as the integration process begins? Will Yahoo's long-time support for open source/open standards become support for *Microsoft's* version of source/standards? Or will Microsoft finally have to admit that there are more platforms than Windows, and they should start using them?

Finally, is this a purchase to compete in the race that's in the rear view mirror, or an attempt to shape and define where things are going from here? Paying $44 billion to become a somewhat close second in monthly search engine stats is rather steep. I know the Microsoft press machine will say that this purchase will propel them to new ideas and areas of leadership, blah, blah, blah. And Bill Gates tells us every year that the paperless office is right there on the horizon... Telling the market where things will go, and getting them to actually go there are two entirely different things.

If I had to make a general statement of success or failure, I'd tend to place money more towards the failure side. Major acquisitions are notorious for delivering less than promised (AOL/Time Warner, anyone?), and I don't think that MicroHoo will be any different. It *does* change the landscape, and it *does* mean that Google has a lot more competition. But whether Microsoft can successfully take that change and build on it is still up for discussion. Things like XBox and IPTV haven't exactly become revenue streams to be proud of. And now with $44 billion less on the balance sheet, the room to support money pits for long periods of time may be at an end.

Posted by Tom Duff At 10:50 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (2)

01/31/2008

Microsoft Dogged By Sharepoint Support Issues - Study

Category Microsoft

From ChannelWeb: Microsoft Dogged By Sharepoint Support Issues - Study

Office SharePoint Server 2007 is now a billion dollar business for Microsoft, but the product's runaway success is posing support problems for the software giant and its channel partners.

Office Sharepoint Server 2007 is a workflow and collaboration engine that integrates with the Office platform and features Web content management, enterprise content services, enterprise search, and business process and business intelligence tools. Increasingly, it's also being used as an application development platform.

This broad feature set has helped fuel Sharepoint's popularity, but according to a recent study by London, Ontario-based research firm Info-Tech, nearly a quarter of the 258 organizations surveyed were either 'dissatisfied' or 'very dissatisfied' with Microsoft's support for Sharepoint.

While Microsoft is pleased with the strong demand for SharePoint Server 2007, "the rapid adoption has caused some strain on our consulting and support services teams," a Microsoft spokesperson said via email.

I find it interesting that many of the points made in this article (like dearth of higher-level design training) could also be applied to Notes/Domino as a development platform. It also should emphasize the point that the argument is really no longer "Notes vs. Exchange", but "Notes vs. SharePoint".

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:43 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/19/2008

Will Microsoft ever learn that these tactics are what got them into trouble in the first place?

Category Microsoft

From Fortune: The Hard Side Of Mister Softie

Ah, Microsoft. Nothing gets the knickers of Silicon Valley startup guys more twisted than signs that the world’s largest software company is over-reaching again. The latest outrage? Some of my friends at the Valley’s best-known social networks and Web 2.0 companies are privately grousing that emissaries from Redmond are trying to “strong-arm” (their term) startups into giving special treatment to Messenger, Microsoft’s (MSFT) answer to AIM and other instant messaging programs.

The problem typically arises when a social network, say, offers its users the ability to import the list of contacts they’ve accumulated on Microsoft Hotmail.

Since the summer, my friends tell me, Mister Softie has been sending cease-and-desist letters to startups that try to do this. These nastygrams are typically followed up by a meeting with Microsoft reps, who then try a couple different approaches to get the startup to integrate Messenger into their service.

If the company wants to offer other IM services (from Yahoo, Google or AOL, say), Messenger must get top billing. And if the startup wants to offer any other IM service, it must pay Microsoft 25 cents a user per year for a site license.

If, however, the startup decides to use Messenger exclusively, the licensing “fee will be discounted 100 percent.”

Such a deal!

Or not. The standard Microsoft term sheet being shown around the Valley also instructs startups that if they want to offer search at any point in the future, they must agree “to negotiate in good faith for a period of sixty days exclusively with Microsoft on the terms under which Microsoft may provide such search service functionality…”

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:08 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/19/2008

Adventures in Migrating Content from Lotus Notes and SharePoint Backwards Compatible Document Libraries to WSSv3

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft

From Robert Bogue's blog: Adventures in Migrating Content from Lotus Notes and SharePoint Backwards Compatible Document Libraries to WSSv3

I can see why they did the SharePoint migration to get things up-to-date. But both the Notes and the SharePoint conversions sounded painful...

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:01 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/18/2008

It may well be that Microsoft will time some "blockbuster" announcement on Monday to compete with Lotusphere 2008...

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft

Like perhaps an 80 GB Zune in Lotus yellow... :)

But seriously, I'm really surprised there's been little hinted at or announced to date. Are they that scattered and fragmented that Lotus is no longer the "enemy du jour"? Is the Xbox, Zune, <insert consumer device here> the main focus now? Are they so excited about delivering ads to grocery shopping carts that email and collaboration don't matter?

Cool! :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:53 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/15/2008

And on the flip side of the news, here's what I show for Microsoft...

Category Microsoft

Microsoft Once Again In EU Legal Crosshairs
CRN - Manhasset,NY,USA
This just in from the "Uh-oh, Here We Go Again" Department: The European Commission has launched a pair of formal investigations of Microsoft pertaining to ...
See all stories on this topic

Microsoft cancels conference for mobile and embedded developers
Computerworld - Framingham,MA,USA
January 15, 2008 (Computerworld) -- Microsoft Corp. has canceled its annual conference for developers of mobile and embedded devices and applications, ...
See all stories on this topic

Microsoft Launches Web Site For Mac Office 2008 Users
InformationWeek - Manhasset,NY,USA
By Paul McDougall Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled a redesigned version of its Mactopia Web site for users of its new Macintosh-compatible software. ...
See all stories on this topic

Microsoft Unveils Red, 80-Gbyte Zune For Valentine's Day
InformationWeek - Manhasset,NY,USA
Wi-Fi capabilities and a bright, 3.2-inch screen mean the device can do more than play silly love songs, Microsoft says. By Paul McDougall Microsoft fired ...
See all stories on this topic

That's gotta suck... Major EU lawsuits, cancelling conferences for developers, and the best you can do to counter MacWorld is announce a new Mac Office 2008 site and a red Zune...

Methinks someone has lost focus and edge.

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:11 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/29/2007

Someone's not having much SharePoint fun...

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft

From Notes Migration Blog: Uninspired

A full week of literally babysitting the SharePoint environment, testing it every few hours, rebooting services and servers when they went down, just trying to keep it afloat. Tens of hours researching errors and problems, to find that we are not alone in our tribulations, but nobody else has answers either. Being told that other organizations had to rebuild their server farm from scratch to resolve these kinds of issues. Starting to do so ourselves just in time, as our initial farm dying a tortured death. Piecing things back together, getting 90% of the functions in place, but beating our heads against the last 10%. Hiring some of the top consultants in town only to have them shrug their shoulders at our problems.

Posted by Tom Duff At 11:09 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/02/2007

Do Microsoft Business Partners even read their press releases?

Category Microsoft
This gem from Unify pushing the whole Domino-To-Microsoft conversion software...

Efficiently Migrating Lotus Notes Applications to Modern Platforms

ABSTRACT:

As businesses move into the era of highly scalable architectures, SOA, rich customer-facing applications, and mobile workforces, they are discovering that previously satisfactory workgroup and workflow systems no longer provide needed capabilities.

Lotus Notes, in particular, is quickly becoming viewed as a legacy platform that is difficult to shed as part of a move to modern, scalable, and non-proprietary architectures.

This white paper examines:

* Options for rapidly migrating off of Lotus Notes to Microsoft's .NET platform
* How organizations can better manage the transition
* A solution for migration off the complex Lotus Notes applications to Microsoft's enterprise infrastructure

First off, Lotus Notes does "highly scalable architectures, SOA, rich customer-facing applications, and mobile workforces" just fine, thank you.

But what really gets me is how moving to a "modern, scalable, non-proprietary" involves *anything* to do with Microsoft! And comparing a "complex" Lotus Notes application to Microsoft's "enterprise infrastructure" is laughable. Have you seen how many moving parts you need to build an equivalent platform in Microsoft? Look up "complex" in the dictionary, and you'll find Microsoft's logo...

Blatant sales hype and lies don't get much better than this one... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:11 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (4)

10/20/2007

In a small way, I feel sorry for Steve Ballmer...

Category Microsoft
From Wired: Microsoft Wants 100 Companies, but to What End?

That "sorry" feeling doesn't extend to asinine comments like the one he made at the Web 2.0 Summit:

During his Q&A at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday he made the ballsy claim that the company is prepared to purchase 20 companies a year, for the next five years.

However juicy the proposition may sound, one should still take heed. One thing Ballmer didn't state in his froth was a solid direction for all these purchases. He merely went on to say that the buys will be "good acquisitions . . .and they're of strategic importance." If we're keeping score, that potentially means that Microsoft is prepared to spend a lot of money over a five year stretch on companies that it hasn't seen yet, that will ultimately provide services or products that it hasn't identified yet.

OK... So I can say that I'll build 100 Domino applications over the next five years, they'll be good applications, and they'll be of strategic importance. Measured by what? And now I'm a prophet who can tell exactly what's coming down the road over the next five years, and that I'll be at the forefront of all of it? I can see MSFT now... "It's November 15th! We still need to buy 5 more companies! Go find some good acquisitions of strategic importance, quick!"

This is nothing but a soundbite with no substance behind it at all...

Where I *do* feel sorry for him, is that photographers must put their cameras on auto-shoot so they can capture the worst possible picture of the guy to lead a story. I mean, would *you* feel good to see a picture like this leading an article about you?

Image:Duffbert's Random Musings - In a small way, I feel sorry for Steve Ballmer...

Guaranteed to give small children (and impressionable adults) nightmares...

Posted by Tom Duff At 9:20 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

10/11/2007

And Ballmer should be worried for the exact same reason...

Category Microsoft
From InformationWeek: Microsoft's Steve Ballmer Calls Rivals 'Pretenders'

This is a typical Ballmer analyst session... lots of bluster and little substance. But I *love* this exchange with a Gartner analyst...

Gartner analyst Yvonne Genovese stuck it to Ballmer about her problems with Windows Vista. She was an early adopter, buying and installing Vista after her daughter gave it two thumbs up. "I like your daughter already," Ballmer said. "You're not going to like her mom in about two minutes," Genovese snapped back. She re-installed Windows XP after only two days on Vista. Ballmer kept up. "Your daughter saw a lot of value," he responded. "She's 13," Genovese quipped. "She's a user, and you're going to hire her in about nine years," Ballmer said with the last word.

Think about those implications you just laid out there, Steve... It's the 13 year olds that are not tied to the last 20 years of operating systems. They're the ones who think that the Web 2.0 world is how it's always been. They're the ones who will be most comfortable with online software applications such as the type Google is making available. They don't need mom and dad to bring home a copy of Microsoft Office from work any more. And it's the 13 year old geeks who don't have a problem loading up an OS like Linux or who prefer Macs to PCs.

Yeah, Steve... they are users, we'll be hiring them in about nine years, and that should keep you awake at nights...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:48 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

07/27/2007

Does anyone else have a problem with Microsoft's attitude here?

Category Microsoft
From Reseller News: Monetise our innovation: Turner

OK... starts out with the subheading of “I see monetisation. I can smell it and hear it," says Microsoft COO

That already doesn't set well with me... Where's the money coming from? Customers needing Microsoft and partners.

Billions of dollars of opportunities await partners through the products Microsoft has released in the past year and those it plans to launch in the next 12 months, says COO Kevin Turner.

According to Turner, a “frenzy of opportunities” await partners who “monetise” the company’s latest innovations such as Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007, as well as Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, due out next February.

Microsoft put more than US$20 billion of previous years’ research and development into products released in the last year, says Turner, adding “this is the year that we’re going to monetise that innovation.

“I see monetisation. I can smell it and hear it.”

Vista alone represents a US$300 billion partner opportunity over the next year, says Turner, citing a report by IDC.

Let me understand... Microsoft (rather, IDC) expects customer spending related to Vista alone to be $300 BILLION in the next year? And what exactly is the customer getting for all that money?

Turner meanwhile said that Microsoft partners helped attract more than 2.5 million email users from IBM’s Lotus Notes software to Exchange Server, adding the company aims is to take out another four million Notes seats this year.

Turner also promised Microsoft will continue to increase its $7 billion annual investment on software research and development, and that it will make available a “clear software road map”.

OK... not terribly fond of the Notes quote, but that's business. But it's nice to hear that they'll get a clearer road map for $7 BILLION a year...

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:26 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (3)

06/18/2007

Why Microsoft's argument to support two Office XML standards for freedom of "choice" rings hollow to me...

Category Microsoft
From ZDNet: Microsoft fails Aussie maths compatibility test

Microsoft's decision to dump compatibility with Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) in favour of its own Office MathML (OMML) in Office 2007 is unlikely to win any support in Australia, where software tools like TeX, MathType and Mathematica predominate.

According to a blog entry posted by Microsoft Office software development engineer, Murray Sargent, the rationale behind the decision, is the desire to have an XML that corresponds closely to the internal Microsoft format.

"The main problem is that Word needs to allow users to embed arbitrary span-level material (basically anything you can put into a Word paragraph) in math zones and MathML is geared toward allowing only math in math zones," Sargent wrote in the post.

So it sounds really nice to talk about compatibility and interoperatibility, until people are already using your base "standard". Then you can drop "compatible standards" that aren't as "compatible" as what you offer...

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03/31/2007

How Microsoft manages their press...

Category Microsoft
From Joe Wilcox and Microsoft Watch: Channel 9 Unwired

All companies work at managing their press. But apparently Microsoft takes press spin more seriously than I though. Wilcox covers a story written by Wired that didn't turn out quite the way Microsoft wanted it. And in the process, we were able to take a look at the man behind the curtain...

After investing executive time and PR dollars into handcrafting a story about increased transparency, Microsoft instead got a story more about radical evangelists bucking the system to push out transparency. Then there was the unwelcome surprise—learning that Vogelstein received the 15-page briefing file and seeing it dominate the closing paragraph of the Channel 9 story. Then on Monday, Wired chose to post the dossier online.

The Microsoft and Wagged blog response to the posting is most unsettling and reason for both companies to re-evaluate their blog policy. Ironically, the postings offer a kind of transparency into the PR tricks some companies use to combat bad news.

<snip>

The dossier details other meetings, presumably at some expense to Microsoft, to evangelize new transparency around Channel 9 and employee blogs, including a trip by Sandquist to meet with Wired's editorial staff. Sandquist leads the Channel 9 and Channel 10 teams.

In the interest of shaping the story and, presumably, supporting the idea of greater transparency, Microsoft gave Vogelstein a fair bit of access to employees working for Channel 9, including time with the team during the Computer Electronics Show in January.

The dossier reveals how Microsoft and its PR agency attempted to set the editorial agenda for Wired: "We're pushing Fred to finish reporting and start writing" and "We will continue to push Fred to make sure there are no surprises."

In an e-mail presumably sent from Waggener Edstrom to a Microsoft executive: "Briefing for your call with Wired is below. We want to keep it short and not offer any new avenues to him—Fred has done plenty of reporting here and it is time for him to stop and just write the article."

There are notes on Vogelstein's interview style and even scripted answers to expected questions. Microsoft pitched the story and clearly had every intention of managing it to a favorable end.

This is a rare look at how a company "opens up" in such a way that the expected outcome is exactly the story they want to push. Something to keep in mind when you read a "pro-vendor" story. Just how much leading (or even downright pressure) did the journalist get to come to their "own" conclusions?

As with all forms of communication (press, books, magazines, blogs), remember it's buyer beware. Non-biased journalism is terribly rare, as everyone comes into the game with their own biases. That's to be expected. But coming in with someone else's slant presented as "the facts" is another story altogether.

Posted by Tom Duff At 9:27 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

03/22/2007

10 Reasons Why Microsoft's Vista Has Missed The Mark

Category Microsoft
From SeekingAlpha: 10 Reasons Why Microsoft's Vista Has Missed The Mark

Yes, Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Vista will eventually run on most corporate desktops. But early sales in the consumer market have been softer than some analysts expected. For those of us who covered Windows 95's launch more than a decade ago, Windows Vista has been a yawn. These 10 questions—and their answers—reveal why Vista isn't the hit some pundits expected:

This is an interesting article for a couple of reasons. First, it talks about why Vista isn't making the impact that Microsoft had hoped and promised. No new revelations there... But second, it does so in the context of Windows 95, Microsoft's biggest OS splash of a decade back. When you place the context of the Windows 95 launch against the computing environment back then, it's easy to understand why it was successful. What people did, where people lived, and what other offerings were available. The mindset of users and the landscape of the computing world has changed dramatically since then, and unfortunately Vista is still trying to answer and address the Windows 95 world.

Definitely worth a quick click-and-read...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:27 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

03/18/2007

Microsoft needs to hire a professional CEO who knows how to control his mouth...

Category Microsoft
From TheAge.com.au: Microsoft boss snipes at Google

Too much quote-worthy material in this story, and proof that Ballmer's reality has no bearing on what is happening in the rest of the company and world...

MICROSOFT Corp chief executive Steve Ballmer says rival Google's pace of employee growth is "insane" and the company has few successful businesses outside of internet search and advertising.

"They're going to double in a year. That's insane, in my opinion," Mr Ballmer said, speaking to students at Stanford University in California.

You can grow like that when you have a smaller employee base. Google has 10000 employees, Microsoft has over 74000. Yes, uncontrolled growth is generally not a good idea and can often lead to entrenchment later on. But this is the same Microsoft that is building new facilities, wants to hire 10 to 15 thousand new employees over the next year, and whose own staff feels that they need to trim the fat when it comes to employee count. Google is still very agile. The same can not be said for Microsoft as a company.

"They're still really one business and it's a search and advertising business," he said. Google's other efforts had been "cute", he said.

That'll win you a lot of friends there, Steve... Calling another company and competitor "cute"....

Asked by a student what kept him up at night, Mr Ballmer said managing people and relationships and shifting business models were the biggest culprits. Still, those weren't major interruptions.

"I actually do sleep very well," he said.

And that may be a prime reason that Microsoft has lost any sense of urgency and creativity in today's market. They are coasting on Windows and Office, and nearly everything else is a "me too" product that is generally competitive through force of sheer dollars spent. Origami? Zune?

There should be a lot of things keeping Ballmer up at night...

Edit: I don't read Scoble on a regular basis, but apparently he feels the same...

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:05 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/16/2007

If you want to see a scathing, satirical look at yesterday's MSFT news conference...

Category Microsoft
... head over to MSFTextrememakeover and read I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

An excellent analysis, and one that puts into words many of the unspoken impressions I've had about Microsoft:

Loss of focus by trying to go after every market niche
Still relying primarily on two products... Windows and Office
Spending billions in markets (Xbox) with little chance of ever recouping that investment

Over the last year or so, I've had this "haven't I seen this before?" feeling about Microsoft when it comes to their financials. Enron had this great financial picture, impressive growth numbers, and a compelling story. All it lacked was transparent detail about how they got there. When analysts questioned that, they were told, in effect, that they weren't smart enough to understand it, and that it was a trade secret. The reality was that there was significant trouble brewing, and the attempts to cover it up were becoming increasingly desperate. When it comes to Microsoft, no one questions where the dollars come from (can you say monopoly?). But the company is chasing after more and more opportunities for the next "big hit", none seem to be transpiring, and the cash cows are starting to be introduced to the backyard barbecue grill. When the analysts question the numbers and outlook, they're being given vague answers, contradictory statements, and vision with no substance.

I have to wonder if the big stock/company crisis for Microsoft is still to come... The dollars will still be flowing in, but flat or negative growth will send the stock spiraling, leading to massive cuts, retrenchment, and general panic.

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:27 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

02/14/2007

OK, everyone... time for some Red Bull 2 steaks!

Category Microsoft
From InteropTips: Microsoft Transporter Suite For Lotus Domino Release - On Valentine's Day !

Today we release the Microsoft Transporter Suite 2007 for Lotus Domino. It is publically available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/collaboration/default.mspx. Customers, Partners and consultants can download the released product immediately and begin using these tools to transition from Domino to the Microsoft 2007 collaboration platform.

"begin using these tools to transition from Domino to the Microsoft 2007 collaboration platform"

Sorta screws up Gary's message of peaceful coexistence... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:48 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

02/02/2007

I'm starting to wonder if Microsoft management is completely disconnected with reality...

Category Microsoft
First, I ran into this item today: Microsoft tried to muck with anti-Linux ‘facts’

Mary Jo Foley talks about the Get The Facts campaign that Microsoft ran (and still runs) to convince people to choose Windows over Linux...

According to an e-mail message, dated November 1, 2002, that has been entered as evidence in the Iowa consumer antitrust case against Microsoft, some Microsoft executives favored hiding the fact that Microsoft paid International Data Corp. (IDC) for one of the total-cost-of-ownership studies comparing Windows and Linux that the firm conducted at Microsoft's request. (It looks like fear of being outed triumphed, and Microsoft ultimately decided to admit its role in commissioning the IDC TCO and subsequent anti-Linux studies.)

Additionally, according to the e-mail trail, it looks like Microsoft attempted to pressure IDC analysts to tweak the December 2002 study to put Microsoft in a better light.

I think everyone understood that there were inconsistencies and conflicts of interest there, but this shows that Microsoft actively knew it and still chose to "stretch the truth."

Ah, but the better item... From Daring Fireball, talking about a Newsweek interview with Bill Gates:

I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise.

That's a direct quote from Bill Gates. And we thought Ballmer was a fool who couldn't keep his mouth shut. There's only two conclusions I can draw from this. Either 1) Bill Gates is totally disconnected with reality and the state of computer security, or 2) he's a company leader with no morals who will tell any lie necessary to come out on top. Neither view is flattering.

But you have to like this question/answer...

So you feel in 2010-2011 Microsoft will be back with the next big one?
Absolutely. We'll tell you how Vista just wasn't good enough, and we'll know why, too. We need to wait and hear what consumers have to tell us. We don't know that, otherwise, of course, we would have done it this time.

Followed by...

So can you give us an indication of what the next Windows will be like?
Well, it will be more user-centric.

What does that mean?
That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services [a way to connect to Microsoft via the Internet] to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks, they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline.

So in one statement, he doesn't know what the next version of Windows will look like. In the next statement, he already has the next version mapped out. And Bill? If you look at what you promised at the start of Vista and what you delivered, the "we would have done it this time" statment rings very hollow.

Let the schedule slippage begin! Let's just hope we've all upgraded to 128 bit machines with a terabyte of RAM by then...

Posted by Tom Duff At 2:52 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/28/2007

In my view, Microsoft doesn't yet "get" social networking...

Category Microsoft
First we had the attempt to influence bloggers to write nice things about Microsoft Vista by handing out fully loaded Acer laptops (that just *happened* to be preloaded with Vista). The latest faux pas is the revelation that they are paying people to "correct" Wikipedia entries about Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office OpenXML (OOXML). Both of these actions, but especially the second one, shows a complete and total disregard for the ethics of this new environment.

Manipulating public opinion is a constant in life. That's why we have advertising. But when you start paying money to influence mechanisms that purport to be "neutral" or informational, then you've crossed a line that people won't soon forgive or forget. Yes, it's always up to the reader to be on guard for bias, but they shouldn't have to do that when they go to a reference site.

I suppose you could say that this payoff is no different than having someone whose employment at Microsoft involves monitoring web sites such as Wikipedia for supposed "inaccuracies". But at least there, the interests are out in the open and can be factored in by those who control the reference site. The attempt to buy sources with no connection to Microsoft is what makes this different and wrong.

But hey... I guess when you've got all that cashflow from the Office and Windows monopoly flowing in, you've got to put it to use somewhere, right? Xbox and Zunes will only suck cash and create losses for so long... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:29 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/25/2006

This is really gonna mess up Allchin's Vista home computers not running anti-virus software... :)

Category Microsoft
From CNNMoney.com: Report - More flaws found in Microsoft's Vista

Computer security researchers and hackers have found more flaws in Microsoft's Vista, the long-awaited update to the Windows operating system, according to a report Monday.

One programmer said it was possible to increase a user's privileges on all of the company's recent operating systems, including Vista, while a computer security firm said that it found five other vulnerabilities, including one error in the software code underlying the company's new Internet Explorer 7 browser, the New York Times reported.

<snip>

The Determina researchers told the paper they had notified Microsoft of four other flaws they had discovered, including a bug that would make it possible for an attacker to repeatedly disable a Microsoft Exchange mail server simply by sending the program an infected e-mail message.

I know I get as frustrated as others that IBM doesn't do more "in your face" marketing against Microsoft's security woes, but conversely they don't have to continually look like idiots when it comes to proclaiming the security of their software...

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Posted by Tom Duff At 11:45 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/06/2006

And that leaves what option, Microsoft?

Category Microsoft
From eWeek: Microsoft Issues Word Zero-Day Attack Alert

Microsoft on Dec. 5 warned that an unpatched vulnerability in its Word software program is being used in targeted, zero-day attacks.

A security advisory from the Redmond, Wash., company said the flaw can be exploited if a user simply opens a rigged Word document.

Affected software versions include Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Word 2004 v. X for Mac. The Microsoft Works 2004, 2005 and 2006 suites are also affected because they include Microsoft Word.

Ah... but my favorite part...

There are no pre-patch workarounds available. Microsoft suggests that users "not open or save Word files," even from trusted sources. "As a best practice, users should always exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments from both known and unknown sources," the company said.

Now I realize that the use of quotes there means that perhaps the statement from Microsoft and the reporter's spin are somewhat different. But still... Don't open or save Word files? Do they have a clue as to what happens in corporations millions of times a day???

Can anyone say OpenOffice.org?

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:39 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/04/2006

It amazes me that Microsoft can say that with a straight face...

Category Microsoft
From ZDNet: Microsoft denies flaw in Vista

Sophos says that malware from 2004 will execute in Vista, and Microsoft says it's social engineering, not an OS flaw. Fine... But what gets me is this little bit further down...

Social engineering relies on tricking users into executing malicious code themselves -- a user has to open an infected attachment on an e-mail for these worms to infect the system. Windows Mail Client -- the Vista replacement to Outlook -- will block the worms, but businesses running third-party e-mail clients such as Lotus Notes, or webmail such as Yahoo or GoogleMail, could be vulnerable to social-engineering attacks.

Microsoft stopped short of blaming third-party e-mail clients for the problem, but said that User Account Control (UAC) -- which limits users' ability to install applications unless they have administrator privileges -- can "help to provide better protections". IT managers can run Vista end-user accounts with limited "standard user" privileges, rather than administrator privileges. Users are also given security prompts when attempting to run executable code.

"In those cases where other e-mail clients may not have made the same aggressive security design decisions as Microsoft did with Windows Mail Client, other protections such as UAC can apply still to help provide better protections against email-based social-engineering attacks," Microsoft's statement said.

If they were "agressive security design decisions", it'll be a first... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:03 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/22/2006

Ballmer's mouth is such an "undisclosed balance sheet liability"...

Category Microsoft
From The Inquirer: Microsoft's Ballmer forced to eat his Linux words

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has triggered a PR nightmare for his firm over his threats to down Linux with intellectual property based lawsuits.

Not only has his new Linux chum Novell issued a statement which said it disagreed with what Steve whispered to the press, Volish spinners have had to issue a statement toning down his original comments.

It's not often that someone of Ballmer's level can have so many "engage mouth before brain" moments without getting demoted or outright fired for it. It just amazes me that a company the size of Microsoft would allow such ill-advised comments to spew forth from this guy. He's more a caricature of himself now than anything else, and I don't see that too many people take him seriously except for a rah-rah cheerleader ignoring reality.

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:31 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/10/2006

"Vista doesn't need anti-virus software"...

Category Microsoft
From InformationWeek: Microsoft Exec Says Vista Is So Safe He Doesn't Need Anti-Virus Software

Windows co-president Jim Allchin has said that Windows Vista, which met its release to manufacturing milestone earlier this week, is so superior to Window XP on security that he feels safe letting his own son run a PC without anti-virus software.

A prominent security analyst countered that that attitude would be fine as long as everyone using Vista was a seven-year-old.

"Don't misunderstand me, this is an escalating situation. The hackers are getting smarter, there's more at stake, and so there's just no way for us to say that some perfection has been achieved. But I can say, knowing what I know now, I feel very confident."

So confident, in fact, that his seven-year-old son's Vista PC lacks anti-virus software.

"Honestly, he doesn't have an antivirus system on his machine. His machine is locked down with parental controls, he can't download things unless it's to the places that I've said that he could do, and I'm feeling totally confident about that," Allchin said. "That is quite a statement. I couldn't say that in Windows XP SP2."

By no means am I an expert in security, operating systems, or likely anything else, for that matter. But this has got to be one of the most ignorant, stupid statements to come out of the mouth of a Microsoft executive. There has never been a totally secure operating system. Never. Period. Every attempt by Microsoft to "focus on security" has been met with at least one well-publicized hack shortly thereafter. Conceptually, I'm sure Vista is far better than the current Microsoft operating systems. But to say that you can bypass anti-virus controls is like announcing a million dollar reward to the first hacker to successfully launch a Vista OS virus. The hackers won't even care about the million. They'll just want the street cred for being the first to bust Vista...

I have a feeling that this will rank right up there with some of Ballmer's classic lines.

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10/26/2006

The second IE7 flaw is now out there...

Category Microsoft
From WebUser.com: Microsoft Admits Flaw In IE7

Security vendor Secunia has reported a second flaw in Microsoft's new Internet Explorer browser. This time, though, Microsoft has accepted the vulnerability as genuine and posted advice to users on its security blog.

The flaw could cause some users to fall victim to phishing attacks, which is particularly bad news for Microsoft - one of the hyped new features of IE7 was an improved anti-phishing facility.

Secunia says that the issue lies in the address bar of the browser.

"The problem is that it's possible to display a popup with a somewhat spoofed address bar where a number of special characters have been appended to the URL. This makes it possible to only display a part of the address bar, which may trick users into performing certain unintended actions," reads a note on Secunia's website.

In some ways, I feel bad for Microsoft... Must suck to walk around with a target on your back...

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:38 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (4)

10/20/2006

And take your vitamins and say your prayers...

Category Microsoft
From Microsoft's InteropTips site:

What can I do to prepare for the new 2007 version of the interoperability and migration tools for Lotus Domino and Microsoft?

Familiarize yourself with PowerShell, make sure you’re comfortable with configuring SMTP for both Exchange and Domino and get your hands on the beta copies of Exchange, Office and SharePoint 2007.

And you'll be ready to attempt a conversion by 1st quarter 2008... :)

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Posted by Tom Duff At 4:22 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/19/2006

Well... that didn't take long to find the first IE7 security flaw...

Category Microsoft
From Microsoft Watch: IE 7 Fails Its First Security Test

It seems that Microsoft's brand-new Internet Explorer 7 browser, which was just released Oct. 18 for Windows XP, has already failed a security test.

An advisory from Secunia, released Oct. 19, says the gold version of IE 7 was shipped with an information disclosure flaw that could be used in spoofing attacks.

The vulnerability is caused by an error in the handling of redirections for URLs with the "mhtml:" URI handler. "This can be exploited to access documents served from another web site," Secunia warned.

Secunia has a test page available that demonstrates the bug on a fully patched version of Windows XP SP2, running Internet Explorer 7.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:06 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/24/2006

Anyone want to venture a guess as to the release date of these "improved" tools?

Category Microsoft
Ed Brill mentioned the other day that the "Red Bull" blog had been pretty silent of late. Well, they came out of their hole long enough to acknowledge the silence, and to post this note:

An IBM blogger mentioned that our blog has been pretty quiet lately. It's true - as the product team (rather than a Marketing or Sales group) we have been heads down working on the 2007 version of our coexistence and migration tools. They're coming along really well now - we're on schedule to ship when Exchange 2007 and Office 2007 ship and we're going to be offering some really great new features, including PowerShell support, which will allow you to do all kinds of scripting. We'll have a single GUI interface for working with all of the tools and of course we'll be supporting the latest and greatest versions of Exchange and Office.

Anyone want to guess when the release will be, and when all the press releases will be issued? I'm guessing sometime between January 1st and January 20th....

:)

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:14 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (3)

06/11/2006

I don't consider this a selling point on the Microsoft collaboration tools...

Category Microsoft
At the MS Collaboration Tools blog, there is a post that talks about the ongoing development of their conversion/migration tools, a.k.a "Wave 12". One of the points is as follows:

What is changing? Actually quite a lot. Most of the Microsoft targets. (Especially Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007) have had major changes in the interfaces we use. As a result, most of the tools as they are known today are being completely retooled.

And one of these days, perhaps they'll get it right and come up with something that migrates forward well...

Posted by Tom Duff At 12:55 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

05/27/2006

Microsoft's biggest competitor right now is... Microsoft.

Category Microsoft
John Gruber at the Daring Fireball blog has an insightful post about Microsoft's competition struggle. Well worth reading, because I think he nails the point very well...

It is, admittedly, a cliché, but Microsoft is clearly a victim of its own staggering success. What they’ve done best, historically, is kill and/or neuter their competitors. That’s why they’re gearing up for a fight against Google; Microsoft, as a company, defines itself by its rivalries. They relegated early PC peers like WordPerfect, Lotus, and Borland to relative obscurity; then, famously, they outright obliterated Netscape.

In the ’90s, to sell copies of Word, they needed to beat WordPerfect, and they did; to sell Excel, they needed to beat Lotus 1-2-3. Now, though, to sell new copies of Microsoft Office, they need to beat older copies of Microsoft Office. Hence the much-maligned ads in which Microsoft casts their own users as dinosaurs simply because they haven’t upgraded to the latest version of Office.

Most of the criticism of these ads revolves around the fact that it’s a bad idea to insult your own customers. But what I found interesting about them is the tacit acknowledgment that Microsoft’s strongest competitor in today’s office software market isn’t OpenOffice, or any other competing suite from another company, but rather the Microsoft of a decade ago.

And concerning their latest "people_ready" campaign...

This ad epitomizes everything that’s wrong with Microsoft: they have nothing new to offer. There’s nothing wrong with branding ads; I like branding ads (e.g. Nike’s “Just Do It” and Apple’s “Think Different” campaigns). But if this “people_ready” ad is supposed to be about their brand, what is the message? The only message I can suss from it is “Buy Microsoft software just because it’s Microsoft software.” They would be better off running an ad that literally reads “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft” — at least that would be bold.

I’m sure that when Vista and Office 2007 finally ship, Microsoft will run plenty of ads touting tangible features of these products. But this ad reeks to high hell of “We’ve got lots of money in the ad budget but no new products to advertise, so we’ll buy some ads that say nothing at all.”

This ad is almost offensively timid. And “timid” is not a word normally associated with Microsoft — or any thriving company, for that matter.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:49 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

05/25/2006

Vista will be late again... or not...

Category Microsoft
Make up your mind, Stevie-boy!

First, Forbes quotes him as saying Vista might get moved back "a few weeks". Then the next day, he's in spin control. Reuters quotes him as saying they are on track for a January shipment, but that they will listen to feedback from users.

We are, we aren't, we are, we aren't...

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:13 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

05/01/2006

Give up the blog, Ray... Apparently you're not cut out for it...

Category Microsoft
And this makes 0 - 3...

http://spaces.msn.com/rayozzie

Access Denied.

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:28 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (5)

04/27/2006

Amazing how earning $3 billion in a quarter is bad... :)

Category Microsoft
Microsoft announced their quarterly results today, and they "only" made close to $3 billion and missed estimates. The stock got hammered after hours, too. I think some of the news story quotes are enlightening, however...

From Bloomberg:

Some customers held back purchases amid delays in Microsoft's new Windows and Office products. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer relies on the two products for more than 50 percent of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft's revenue and nearly all its profit. Growth in both products has been less than 10 percent for three quarters in a row.

That's scary that with all the "stuff" Microsoft is doing, Windows and Office still are the only things keeping Microsoft afloat.

From TheStreet.com:

Microsoft has decided to forgo profitability in favor of heavy investments in its video-game business, online advertising and other areas the company deems high growth.

The "strategic decision," as CFO Chris Liddell calls it, explains the company's surprisingly weak bottom-line performance in the just-completed third quarter and the disappointing earnings guidance for the fourth quarter and fiscal 2007.

In the third quarter, the cost of revenue increase by 53% from $1.3 billion a year ago to $2 billion. Sales and marketing increased by about 14% in the quarter and R&D was up nearly 9%.

One big culprit: spending on the Xbox 360. Sales have gone up significantly, but because Microsoft loses money on every unit sold, the company's profitability suffers. Liddell said the delay of Sony's PlayStation 3 as an opportunity for Microsoft to grab share, and he forecast heavy spending on the console throughout the rest of the fiscal year, but not into 2007.

The company's Home and Entertainment segment, which makes the Xbox 360, increased revenue by 80% to $1.1 billion due to strong demand for the console. But the division's loss grew even faster, ballooning by 121% to $388 million.

The company's Client division, which sells Windows, grew by nearly 8% to $3.19 billion in sales while making a profit of $2.5 billion. The Information Worker business, which sells Office and other products, grew by 5% to $2.95 billion in sales and earned a profit of $2.1 billion.

Growth in other areas was more dynamic. Business Solutions, which runs Microsoft's fledgling enterprise applications business, grew revenue 20.7% to $216 million while narrowing its loss to $13 million from $39 million a year ago.

For as much as Microsoft wants to be in every software market out there, the reality is that without Office and Windows, they'd be hemorraging money. Even with the built-in monopoly they have in the OS market, they still are not dominant from a financial standpoint in any other area.

I know that many have talked about Microsoft needing to split themselves up to be more agile and responsive in today's market. But if they did that, the only part that would survive would be Windows and Office. How long can you build game consoles as a stand-alone company and lose money on each unit you ship? Nice to know every purchase of Word and Excel is making it possible for someone to play the latest Xbox 360 game...

Numbers like this also explain why Ballmer and company fear Linux and OpenOffice so much. When 100% of your product profit comes from software that has viable free alternatives, you probably don't sleep well at night...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:32 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

04/01/2006

Gartner: Microsoft Delay Could Affect Licensing Rights

Category Microsoft
From InformationWeek: Gartner: Microsoft Delay Could Affect Licensing Rights

Microsoft Software Assurance volume license customers need to check contract expiration dates as they wait for 2007 Microsoft Office System, warned analyst firm Gartner Inc. Friday.

The one-month lag could mean bad news for companies that didn't purchase Microsoft's Software Assurance maintenance for Office products in three-year Select Agreements or Enterprise Agreements, Gartner said.

Customers who purchased SA on Office under a three-year Open Value Agreement, Select Agreement or Enterprise Agreements will not get the rights to Office 2007 if the agreement expires in August 2006 or earlier, Gartner said.

Gartner recommendations:

--Volume licensing customers who renewed SA in September 2003: Lobby Microsoft to make an exception and award you the upgrade to Office 2007.

--Volume licensing customers who plan on purchasing Office licenses without SA: Consider delaying purchases until Office 2007 is available and use downgrade rights if you intended to acquire Office 2003.

I don't think I'd necessarily like to be a Microsoft sales rep right now...

Posted by Tom Duff At 2:38 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/30/2006

So What About That MSFT Stock Price, Steve?

Category Microsoft
Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch has an interesting excerpt from an interview that Fortune did with Ballmer. Basically, I think this goes back to my post the other day about Microsoft's lack of focus of late. It's looking increasingly like Microsoft is trying to be everything to everybody, and in the process will be nothing to anybody...

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:04 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/29/2006

So now Windows Desktop Search can index your Lotus Notes emails...

Category Microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=ac768e36-be57-4306-966c-5089b0c4d50e&displaylang=en

Overview
This Protocol Handler allows you to easily find your Lotus Notes e-mail and search the contents within.

By downloading this Add-in, your locally stored Lotus Notes e-mail will be indexed by Windows Desktop Search when your PC is idle, or when you select to ‘Index Now’. Once the index is updated you can immediately search your Lotus Notes e-mail.

All I can say is I hope this was developed by a different group than the Red Bull team... :)

I'll be interested to hear from anyone who tries this out. For obvious reasons, I don't care to be a guinea pig for MS on this one.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:26 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (3)

03/15/2006

And you wonder why we get all hot and bothered by the Microsoft "Application Analyzer"?

Category Microsoft

Paul sums it up pretty well...

A really good reason to run it in your own shop, document your results, and make sure you cover how/why results may differ if run with different XML parameters.

One of those "ounce of prevention, pound of cure" things...

Good job, Paul...

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:31 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/11/2006

Can't help but laugh when I read the Microsoft Collaboration Tools blog...

Category Microsoft

Since their blog started as a result of the Red Bull beta fiasco, it's hard not to read the subsequent entries in that light. Although I realize their scope and goal for the blog are far broader than mine, I can't help but think Red Bull when I read each entry. And because of that, it's difficult to take some of these posts seriously...

First, there's a lot of "who we are" posts that focus on putting human faces on the team. All well and good, but not much in the way of substance as far as the tools go. Of course, based on the different analysis postings of Red Bull, I can see why they may not want to go down that road. I still find it interesting that their beta/slip-up/vaporware release before Lotusphere was heavily covered via the press, but their subsequent release (new and improved!) has not garnered a *single* press mention on my Google News Alerts for Microsoft. Talk about trying to stay low-profile...

Next, we have the latest "I am..." post by Kahren Allakhverdyan, the person in charge of software testing. Love the last couple of lines in this posting:

Currently, most of our team is working on the Microsoft Data Migrator for Lotus Domino 2006. This tool will be able to migrate data from the Notes Applications on the Domino server to Microsoft WSS technology.

Being last to handle and complete the product, prior to releasing to the customer, our test team's mission is to assure that the applications and messaging products are bug free, reliable, scalable, secure and truly world class products.

Bug free? Reliable? World class? They can't even get the number of database uses right, nor basic information such as Notes/Domino release numbers. If this is what they consider a world class product, sell your Microsoft stock now.

And finally, we have the new Friday FAQ series, where there will be question and answers from people who are running their migration tools. This is where the scope and perception issue come in. I think Red Bull, so I'm looking forward to hearing them answer real life questions about it. Instead we get information on the "migration tool from Lotus Notes 6.5 mail to Exchange" and on the Exchange Connector for Lotus Notes. When it comes to Red Bull, all we're getting is general philosophy behind how Microsoft analyzes a Notes/Domino installation in order to convince them to migrate.

I thought it was a wise move on their part to start a blog and try to manage the PR nightmare they had after the first release. But so far they've yet to figure out that just having a blog isn't enough to sway opinion or combat negative press. You need to do more than just post bios of the team while ignoring real issues and problems.

Of course, if I were trying to defend the current iteration of Red Bull in a public forum, I'd probably try and deflect attention away from it too... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:02 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/07/2006

OK... this must be the latest version of "real collaboration" from Microsoft...

Category Microsoft

Sean Harris emailed me about an eWeek article about Microsoft's Office 2007 suite. In the article, we get this rich quote from Microsoft's John Cairns, senior director of licensing and pricing in Microsoft's Information Worker division:

Asked about the large number of offerings, Cairns said customers have been telling Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., about the changing nature of their work and their new and diverse needs. "We believe these offerings will provide the flexibility customers need to meet all of their needs," he said.

There are three new offerings among the seven Microsoft Office client suites, two of which are specifically targeted at business users. The new Office Professional Plus 2007 has a number of enhancements, most notably the addition of server-enabled capabilities that allow customers to do things like document routing and approval, create electronic forms and pass those around, and publish spreadsheets more easily, he said.

Microsoft, however, considers the new Office Enterprise 2007 suite "the biggest news for the enterprise" as it contains all the software found in Office Professional Plus 2007 as well as two additional applications: Office OneNote and the new Office Groove, which are aimed at to boost collaboration and mobility for users. "We believe that this will be the benchmark suite for those companies that take collaboration seriously," he said.

Um... sure... New release of products that have had little to no traction in the marketplace, and *that* is the new benchmark of collaboration?

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:04 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

03/02/2006

Microsoft may be learning from the first Red Bull disaster...

Category Microsoft

Remember their first attempt at Red Bull? If you have a Google News Alert setting on "Microsoft", it was in every freaking article... "Look at us! We're releasing a conversion tool for Notes!". Then they had to go into major spin control when it was shown to be nothing but a publicity sham.

This time, it's been 24 hours since the release of Red Bull Redux ("Red Cow"? "Red Calf"?). Google News Alerts? Not a one... Instead of press releases, they simply hid the announcements in a variety of blogs.

Microsoft might be learning not to play up stuff that doesn't do what it promises... Either that, or this next revision isn't much better, and they don't want to have to publicly do damage control again... "It was just a beta!"

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:01 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (3)

02/28/2006

Microsoft "FUD"ing on their partner site...

Category Microsoft

http://partners.ms-sst.com/ctrevents.aspx

TS2 – Competitive Tools and Resources Event Series

Does your organization have Lotus Domino and/or Novell migration expertise?

Today's organizations that own Lotus Domino or Novell Netware have reached a "fork in the road" in the future of their collaboration platform. According to the Radicati Group, "Only 21% of the Lotus Domino customers surveyed are planning to deploy IBM Workplace." For Novell Netware users their operating system is coming under intense pressure from Linux with Novell’s acquisition of SuSe! According to the Yankee Group based upon a survey of 100 Novell customers, "8 out of the 10 businesses are planning to migrate from Netware to Windows by 2006." The opportunity is here! Come join Microsoft as we present to you the competitive tools and resources that are available to assist your organization to take advantage of this current market opportunity!

Maybe if they repeat the "fork in the road" lie long enough, they'll start to believe it themselves. The Radicati stats are worthless, and IBM Workplace is not a "migration" from Lotus Notes/Domino...

Novell might be a different matter, however... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:34 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (10)

02/21/2006

World's largest Windows error message...

Category Microsoft

From NetworkWorld...

That's gotta hurt. :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:43 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

02/11/2006

It's migration, not coexistence...

Category Microsoft

From yellowisthenewblack.com: Coexistence?

Gary Devendorf's team leader (boss?) has a blog post talking about his role managing Microsoft evangelists, including Gary's role. And what's the definition he uses for that role?

Notes migration

Let's just look at the definition of that word "migration":

migration

1. A change from one hardware or software technology to another. Migration is a way of life in the computer industry. For example, once known only to those in the glass-enclosed datacenter, users today understand the meaning of migrating from one operating system to another.

2. Moving data from one storage system to another (data migration).

3. Moving data and applications from one computer to another.

That's quite a bit different than "coexistence", which is the story we've been told.

Co·ex·ist·ence

Existence at the same time with another; -- contemporary existence.

I took a bit of heat in my blog for the pre-Lotusphere post supporting IBM's position of denying Microsoft and Gary a booth. A lot of people tried to tell me that his information was useful, which I don't deny or argue. A few suggested I have a problem with Gary, which I don't. My main problem is that Gary's repeated message of coexistence and cooperation is at odds with Microsoft's message of migration away from Notes. And his assertion that Microsoft really doesn't care about Notes and that all this work is his own personal quest to help Domino developers just flat out doesn't hold water.

So Gary? Rock on with your Domino/.Net work. For those who need to integrate with or even <shudder!> migrate to Microsoft technologies, the information will be invaluable. But can we now officially cut the kumbaya crap about just wanting to help us Domino developers out? Your job is evangelizing Notes migration. You work for Microsoft now, not Lotus. And if you represent Microsoft in any official capacity at an event, you also represent their position.

Regardless of what you might want us to believe (or what *you* personally believe) otherwise...

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:29 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

02/09/2006

Follow-up on my Google/Dell post from yesterday...

Category Microsoft

That was the post where Google is reportedly paying $1 billion to put their software on Dell computers...

Now I read in the Manila Bulletin Online that Google is testing GooBuntu, their own version of Linux. If that's indeed the case, what would it take to extend their partnership with Dell to offer that as an OS option, perhaps saving consumers (and Dell) a few hundred in OS licensing costs per machine?

And this dovetails nicely with an eWeek article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols where he asks Must Linux Buy Its Way Onto The Desktop?

Opinion: If Google has to pay a cool billion to Dell to get its applications on the desktop, what is it going to take to get Linux pre-installed on a tier-one vendor's desktop?

My guess is, they just did...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:06 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/09/2006

Microsoft's response to the latest Red Bull findings has been strangely silent...

Category Microsoft

I'm semi-surprised/semi-not about how all the "official" Microsoft sources for Red Bull information have stayed silent over the technical analysis of how Red Bull works...

Apparently the original situation was so bad that the collaboration team there decided to start a blog to address the issues. On that count, I laud them for deciding to use a powerful medium to get their side of the story out (regardless of how wrong we might think it is). So what do they do with this ideal mechanism? Everyone introduces themselves, pats themselves on the back for assembling such a great team, tells us all sorts of exciting things are going on, and basically holds a Kumbaya lovefest amongst themselves.

And meanwhile, let's just ignore the fact that the software do much, and what little it *does* do is based on a flawed premise of determining a template application...

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:36 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/08/2006

Dell's Google software test may hurt Microsoft

Category Microsoft

From The Seattle Times: Dell's Google software test may hurt Microsoft

Dell is testing software from Google and may distribute the programs on its PCs, a move that would be a blow to Microsoft.

The test includes a Google-powered Dell home page, Google desktop search and Google Toolbar, Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn said Tuesday. He declined to discuss a possible deal.

Google is apparently looking to pay Dell a billion dollars over three years for this privilege. Although I think the software being mentioned in the article isn't *that* big a deal, it's the nose of the camel poking into Microsoft's tent. Users buy Dell computers, and they see Google software. Next step, Google creates their own browser ("Growser"?) and adds that to the mix. People use it because it's there... the *exact* advantage that Microsoft has had with all their software being part and parcel of each new Windows PC. Linux-based Google operating system ("GoOSe"?) ventures forth? Dell offers it as a choice on new PCs...

Some stock analysts have clobbered Google on this, as they see it as a huge expenditure to get new customers. I see it as a pretty shrewd investment to get a place at the table that's been traditionally a Microsoft-only event.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:31 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/06/2006

Another great post on Workdomosphere...

Category Microsoft

David DeWell is fitting in real nice with his latest post Sometimes life hands you material.....

Definitely a piece of writing that Microsoft doesn't lead with... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:15 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/05/2006

The Red Bull "Analyzer"... Is it actually this bad?

Category Microsoft

From the Workdomosphere blog by David DeWell (modchaos): Microsoft Application Analyzer has my official FUD seal...

After looking through the Microsoft.Exechange.AppAnalyzer.DataCollection DLL I see absolutely no methods or functions reading design in this application. All the DataCollection is doing is reading the database header information. Being the disbelieving soul that I am, I restarted my machine with the SoftIce suite. Re-Ran the Analyzer and pulled up Softice during the "Data Collection" stage. Much to my surprise, there are functions that I missed that are being called that access the database. With method names such as "StartDataCollection" and "StartDataImport" I thought maybe I had missed so methods looking through these DLLs when it dawned on me that SoftIce was not lying that they returned null values. There is no code in these methods. They do NOTHING. So, after confirming that this application just gets header information with SoftIce, I pulled out my trusty HexEditor and scanned through the DLLs looking for clues and verified what my DLL search had brought to my attention.

Since David provided a trail as to what he did, this information should be verifiable. And if true, it proves *exactly* what the Notes community has been contending all along. The tool is useless and is nothing more than a smoke screen released to coincide with Lotusphere.

Redmond, your turn to counter. Let's see if you can come up with less than four official answers this time, huh?

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:19 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (3)

02/03/2006

Interesting additional pickups of the Red Bull fiasco...

Category Microsoft

Microsoft Lotus-eating tool pulls disappearing act

Lotus friendly blogs smell blood

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:24 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/01/2006

Mary Jo Foley has picked up the Red Bull story in Microsoft Watch...

Category Microsoft

Microsoft's 'Red Bull' Explanation: A Lot of Bull?

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:01 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

01/31/2006

Microsoft revisionist press releases, part deux...

Category Microsoft

From Microsoft Watch: Seadragon Software: A Microsoft Company?

When Microsoft issued the original press release last week about its plans to create a new Live Labs initiative, the company simultaneously announced it had acquired Seattle-based Seadragon Software. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft deleted from the online release any mentions of its Seadragon acquisition. And the Seadragon Web site is down for the count. ("This domain name has been suspended for exceeding the monthly bandwidth quota. The site will be automatically turned on again on the first day of next month.") So what gives?

To paraphrase a certain Microsoft blogger, I'm sure it's just because the company was in BETA and had reached the end of its BETA cycle. Nothing more sinister than that I’m afraid. So nothing to see here, please move along :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 1:57 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

01/31/2006

Microsoft's 3 business units adding own finance chiefs

Category Microsoft

From the Seattle Times: Microsoft's 3 business units adding own finance chiefs

Microsoft is changing its internal financial-reporting structure, adding chief financial officers for each of the three business divisions created in a massive September reorganization.

One analyst said the change could lead to investors getting less specific information about the myriad of businesses within the three large divisions. But a Microsoft spokesman said no major changes to the reporting approach are planned.

Looks as if another step has been taken to allow spin-offs if government regulators get feisty or the stock price doesn't get busy...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:08 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/30/2006

Microsoft merges Exchange, corporate IM units

Category Microsoft

From ZDNet: Microsoft merges Exchange, corporate IM units

The company is combining the Exchange unit with the Real-Time Collaborations (RTC) unit into a new Unified Communications Group. The move will bring together Exchange--Microsoft's server software for managing corporate e-mail, scheduling and contacts--and the RTC unit's products. Those include Live Communications Server, which lets workers see a colleague's IM status and communicate instantly via text or voice.

The setting-up of a unified communications unit does not reflect an immediate decision to merge the two former units' products into a single server software line, Microsoft said.

"There will be no changes to the timing or feature sets for the next generation of products currently under development," it said in a statement.

This definitely seems to make sense if you want to compete in the contextual collaboration arena. I just hope for Microsoft's sake that the RTC team has more influence than the Exchange team. Otherwise, they might as well just hang it up now.

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:29 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/21/2006

Every year we're at Lotusphere, some major Microsoft virus creates havoc on the 'net...

Category Microsoft

Apparently it started a day early this year...

New Kama Sutra Worm Corrupts Microsoft Documents

A new worm that already accounts for 1 in every 15 pieces of malicious code carries a "nuclear option" payload that corrupts data in a slew of popular file formats, a security company warned Friday.

The Nyxem.e worm, said Finnish security firm F-Secure, carries code that instructs it to replace data in files with .doc, .xls, .mdb, .mde, .ppt, .pps, .zip, .rar, .pdf, .psd, or .dmp extensions with the useless string "DATA Error [47 0F 94 93 F4 K5]" on the third of the month.

The worm arrives as an attachment to e-mail messages with a variety of subject headlines, many of which tout porn with phrases like "Arab sex," "give me a kiss," "Hot Movie," and "F***** Kama Sutra pics." It also tries to delete selected security software, and can spread through shared folders as well as by hijacking addresses from infected PCs.

F-Secure raised its alert level on Nyxem.e to "2," the first time the Helsinki-based anti-virus company has used that high a warning since December's Windows Metafile vulnerability broke into the news.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:21 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/21/2006

Barbara Darrow - Truth In Marketing (poking at the Microsoft collaboration migration tool announcement)

Category Microsoft

A really nice story from Barbara Darrow titled "Truth In Marketing".

Nice to see *someone* in the media can see beyond the FUD marketing of Microsoft...

Last week’s Microsoft announcement on updated Domino/Notes migration tools truly was a piece of work.

First, please note that the tools are for migrating to Microsoft’s “collaboration platform.” You have to drill down to find that this platform comprises a wealth of products—the Exchange Server workhorse, SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services. And, one might presume, the newly acquired Groove Virtual Office and underlying collaboration technology.

Interestingly, the two product management types designated to speak on these offerings had to be asked which product they manage (Exchange). Then, when asked where Microsoft’s Groove technology will fit into the collaboration platform, they referred the question to another group at Microsoft.

Next question: Where does the realtime collaboration Live Communications Server stuff fit into this puzzle? Answer: Hmm. You’ll have to talk to yet another group.

So tell me again about all this “integrated innovation” that is supposed to be so helpful to partners and users alike. When Microsoft, which is supposed to know a thing or two about marketing, starts peddling a platform but puts frontmen out there with no apparent clue about its component parts, that’s a problem, folks.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:03 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/20/2006

Ballmer shows his true colors... no space for anyone else, competitively...

Category Microsoft

Steve Ballmer was interviewed and questioned about being a challenger and not a leader in project/portfolio management software. His answer is telling...

Said Ballmer: "For what it's worth, we are the market leader in units, and we are the market leader in revenue, which at least is another indicator of bets that should be made, because of the work that folks in this room and many others do. But we don't want to leave any space for anybody else, competitively."

Um, hello, U.S. Justice Department? Ballmer immediately recognized the anti-competitive manner in which those words might be construed, and as the crowd broke into laughter, he quickly explained what he actually meant -- lest it become a topic for the company's next antitrust compliance hearing.

"On the innovation front!" he said. "Everybody is welcome to thrive commercially. But we will lead on the innovation front."

Grinning, he wiped his brow theatrically. "Phew," he said.

Methinks his first statement was more honest than his "explanation". It's hard to hide the spots 24/7...

Posted by Tom Duff At 3:29 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/18/2006

Interesting how Microsoft keeps "pulling" their conversion stuff off the web...

Category Microsoft

After a less-than-stellar review from the Lotus community (like they expected anything less?), we see that the beta downloads that were available yesterday are now "coming soon".

And it's not the first time that they've pulled material that was found to be FUD-ish and just outright wrong. Remember their conversion whitepaper that had a weblife of about 36 hours?

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:55 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/16/2006

I'm sure the timing of Microsoft's migration tool announcement is just coincidental...

Category Microsoft

... to the fact that Lotusphere starts in less than a week...

From ITWorld: Microsoft unveils new Exchange migration tools

And in true Microsoft fashion, let's announce something that isn't even close to being available yet...

New resources introduced Tuesday include two free software tools, the Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino and Microsoft Data Migrator 2006 for Lotus Domino, Murff said. Once available, both tools can be downloaded on the Web.

Microsoft Application Analyzer is an analysis and reporting tool that describes existing Lotus applications and provides usage information for them, Murff said. The tool also recommends to what Microsoft collaboration environment the applications can most easily migrate. The tool will be available some time in the first quarter. Microsoft Data Migrator takes key information from Lotus Notes templates and moves them to a Windows Sharepoint Services Web site for use with a Microsoft-based collaboration application, he said. The tool will be available in the second quarter of 2006.

And Paul Mooney has *already* found the first piece of FUD being used by Microsoft around this...

"1. We have found that Lotus Notes is not able to handle large number of databases (typical 1000 databases). If the Application Analyser is run for more than 1000 databases will product an error for all the selected databases above 1000. The solution is to exit and re-execute the application for the remaining databases without selecting the "Clear all previously imported database information" checkbox if you want all the previous analysis to be included in one report."

Please...

I *highly* recommend you check out Paul's post, as he does a great job in analyzing the software in a real-world environment. And *your* idea of real world is not Microsoft's idea...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:16 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (3)

01/05/2006

Someone else picking up the call for a Microsoft class-action lawsuit over security issues...

Category Microsoft

In an InfoWorld weblog, Dave Rosenberg asks if it might not be time for a class action lawsuit against Microsoft.

It's not like I haven't wondered that myself on 09/19/2003, 10/08/2003, 12/31/2003, 06/26/2004, and 01/02/2005.

And in Microsoft's own 10-K filing, they point out that very same possibility...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:38 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/30/2005

What a lame explanation from Microsoft regarding the WMF exploit...

Category Microsoft

From their press release:

Microsoft Security Advisory (912840)
Vulnerability in Graphics Rendering Engine Could Allow Remote Code Execution.
Published: December 28, 2005 | Updated: December 29, 2005

Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in Windows. Microsoft is also aware of the public release of detailed exploit code that could be used to exploit this vulnerability. Based on our investigation, this exploit code could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the user's system by hosting a specially crafted Windows Metafile (WMF) image on a malicious Web site. Microsoft is aware that this vulnerability is being actively exploited.

Microsoft has determined that an attacker using this exploit would have no way to force users to visit a malicious Web site. Instead, an attacker would have to persuade them to visit the Web site, typically by getting them to click a link that takes them to the attacker's Web site. In an e-mail based attack, customers would have to be persuaded to click on a link within a malicious e-mail or open an attachment that exploited the vulnerability. In both the web and email based attacks, the code would execute in the security context of the logged-on user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

Microsoft will continue to investigate these reports and provide additional guidance depending on customer needs.

So... It's really not Microsoft's fault if you get infected. You should have been more careful and not have been "persuaded" to visit those horrible sites...

I'm so glad Microsoft is focused on providing us enhanced security...

Posted by Tom Duff At 11:42 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/23/2005

Microsoft acquiring Opera?

Category Microsoft

From CoolTechZone: Microsoft Buys Out Opera

OK... This definitely falls into the realm of "unsubstaniated rumor", but still...

(Insider Report) - Here comes a surprise. In a recent conversation with one of our insiders at Microsoft, the source revealed that Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, has acquired Opera Software, makers of the Opera browser. The insider reported that both Microsoft and Google were trying to bid on Opera, but in the end, the software maker took the lead.

At the moment, the deal is almost through with Microsoft and Opera planning on locations for the browser’s research and development centers throughout the world. One of such locations includes India; other locations at this time are unknown.

I guess if you can't do it on your own, just buy them out. I could understand this from Opera's perspective. Although innovative and well-liked in the tech world, it never achieved the status that Firefox did in the fight against IE. How long do you continue to play third fiddle in an area where market share shifts are small and rare? From Microsoft's perspective, I find this a bit confusing. The naysayer in me snidely says this proves they couldn't get it right on their own. The more logical side wonders what they gain from this. Does Opera have browser technology that IE doesn't and that Microsoft couldn't add on their own? Is this simply a play to get Opera's mobile browser? If they want to get the mobile browser, do they now have browser technology that uses different software foundations for different platforms? Are they simply out to acquire Opera's development staff and leadership personnel?

The whole thing sounds a little "hackish" to me... Groove, anyone?

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:44 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/15/2005

I can understand why Mini-Microsoft and MSFT Bagholder think there's too much bloat in the company...

Category Microsoft

Mini-Microsoft and MSFT Bagholder are two bloggers who appear to work for Microsoft and who are openly cynical about the company's current direction and prospects. There's been more than one discussion about how large the company has become, and how a major trimming of personnel is needed to make the company lean and responsive like it once was. Having that much free cash flow allows Microsoft to hire and staff positions that in other companies would not even be contemplated. One of those roles that Microsoft seems to love is "evangelist"...

From what I can tell, an "evangelist" is a position where the employee goes out and generates excitement and hype about a product. They don't seem to be directly responsible for sales, nor do they seem to have any bottom-line accountability for quantifiable results. I'm open to a better understanding of this position and role, because frankly it really confuses me...

The whole Microsoft at Lotusphere discussion on this blog has often talked about how certain Microsoft employees are "evangelists" for the Microsoft collaboration products, and their role is to help Domino shops integrate the two technologies. Cliff Reeves has stated that these people are not trojan horses, and that there is no ulterior motive in their presentations and talks. They are there simply to provide technical information and help the customer.

So... let me ask a serious question...

Does this mean that Microsoft staffs positions and spends significant money helping Domino shops use Microsoft technologies, with absolutely no expectation or desire that Domino will be used less and Microsoft will be used more by said company? Is that the primary purpose of a Microsoft technology "evangelist" in this area?

My "cynically optimistic" nature doesn't allow me to easily believe that a company would spend millions of dollars with no sense or expectation of return on investment (ROI). Perhaps a better understanding of the role of "evangelist" within Microsoft, along with understanding how the company measures the results of that type of position would allow me to view the whole Lotusphere issue in a less antagonistic fashion...

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:22 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (9)

12/04/2005

Is Microsoft turning into a "me too" company?

Category Microsoft

I was reading the latest entry from MSFT Bagholder (Blurring Vision), as well as a number of Google News Alerts that stacked up during my vacation, and I think Baggy has a point:

Unfortunately, Bill still fancies himself chief visionary. He still serves as the uber-idea guy at Microsoft with the title of Chief Software Architect. Once a year, he famously goes off to a secluded cabin in the woods for "Think Week" where he cogitates in solitude over the future direction of technology and what Microsoft's 60,000 employees are going to do about it. It was during Think Week a decade ago when he belatedly discovered the Internet. Bill's most recent deep thoughts have resulted in a company-wide memo to rally his troops around his latest vision of the future. And what exactly was it that the Microsoft "genius" saw when he looked into his crystal ball?

Advertising supported software services!

Apparently, Bill just figured out what the rest of the world has known for a while. And this is how it has been for a long time now. Microsoft has been chronically late to the party, chronically catching up. This is a huge change for a company that used to be able to see so far ahead.

I think this became more insightful to me as I caught up on Microsoft news over the last week... Microsoft's getting ready to launch their version of Google Base. Microsoft's getting ready to launch their version of Craigslist. Microsoft's getting ready to launch *their* version of <insert the latest software offering from Google/Yahoo/whoever>. I know many have said that Microsoft doesn't always come up with new ideas first, but they either market or buy their way to the top with their version. There seems to be even more of that manic type of activity of late. Witness their preoccupation with Google and searching over the last year or so.

Meanwhile, Vista just keeps on slipping its schedule...

Posted by Tom Duff At 1:26 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/04/2005

Microsoft Drops the Office Open Standard Ball

Category Microsoft

From eWeek: Microsoft Drops the Office Open Standard Ball

When Microsoft announced a week ago Monday that it had decided to open up its Office 12 XML file formats and had submitted the formats to be considered as a formal open standard by ECMA International, Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's Information Worker Strategy, said, "The new license that will accompany the Open XML format with the standards organization will go well beyond traditional standards licensing and will be very positive for the vast majority of developers, even open-source developers."

This new license was to have been released last Wednesday. Instead, all that Microsoft did was to release its Patent Protection Covenant for its Office XML formats.

The only difference between Microsoft's November 2003 open and royalty-free license for the Office 2003 Reference Schemas and today's Office 2003 license, according to the company, is that "Microsoft is offering a covenant not to sue for the Office 2003 Reference Schemas."

Microsoft also said it "will also be offering this same covenant with respect to the forthcoming specifications for the 'Office 12' schema specifications. More information about this program will be forthcoming at or before the time of the commercial availability of 'Office 12.'"

And they wonder why people don't trust them? This is a prime example of how Microsoft can use language that they conveniently redefine as they go along. To the rest of the world, "formal open standard" means that it's not owned by a single company and that there is a group that accepts input from a variety of sources for growth of the standard. And you can't tell me that Microsoft didn't expect that reaction when they made their announcement. But now, we find that "formal open standard" means that they just promise not to sue someone for using the technology behind the standard. And what's to prevent *that* definition of "open standard" from changing later down the road... The track record isn't good...

Posted by Tom Duff At 11:44 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

12/04/2005

Yet another major IE flaw...

Category Microsoft

From eWeek: IE Design Flaw Lets Hacker Crack Google Desktop

It just amazes me that with all the words that come out of Redmond about security being a major focus, that we still see these types of flaws that uncover significant structural defects in Microsoft software that leaves user information wide open to theft and abuse.

With the increased scrutiny on businesses securing personal data (and being responsible for exposing it) and Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, it seems like Microsoft is just one OS or IE bug away from major legal action. And as I've mentioned in the past, I'm still surprised it hasn't happened yet.

Posted by Tom Duff At 11:15 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/16/2005

Normally I like the Ferris Research blog, but this entry really irritates me...

Category Microsoft

Exchange 12 Will Be 64-Bit Only

The whole issue of Exchange 12 being 64-bit only has been pretty well beat up on many other blogs, so I won't rehash it here. What irritated me about the blog entry was the ending line:

64-bit support makes great sense and is good for everyone.

I agree that support for 64-bit is great. Forcing your customer base to potentially upgrade their hardware infrastructure to migrate is not.

I'm willing to venture a guess that when Notes/Domino comes out with 64-bit support, 32-bit support doesn't hit a brick wall.

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:07 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/16/2005

Pardon me if I have my doubts...

Category Microsoft

From vnunet.com: Microsoft claims firms 'hitting a wall' with Linux

Microsoft today released the findings of an independent report claiming that the Windows platform is "more consistent, predictable and easier to manage than Linux".

The study, commissioned by the software giant from Security Innovation, a provider of application security services, claimed that Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts.

The emphasis in the above quote is mine...

I don't care how "independent" Microsoft (or IBM or any other software vendor) wants to claim a certain report is. If you commission it, you set the rules. If you set the rules, it's not independent. And if it's not complimentary towards your company, it never sees the light of day.

Come talk to me about "independent" reports when either IBM commissions (and releases) a report saying Exchange is better than Notes, or Microsoft commissions and releases a report saying that Exchange sucks wind compared to ND7 (and 6, and 5, and...)

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:01 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/16/2005

Microsoft still doesn't get open source...

Category Microsoft

From ZDNet: Microsoft rejects IBM strategy and open source 'dorks'

They don't get "on demand" either...

"When people are talking about on-demand, I don't know whether they are talking about the crazy, IBM approach — "I'm going to host everybody's mainframe and there is nobody in the market who knows how to run a mainframe, so if we are going to preserve that business we are going to have to run it ourselves," said Fitzgerald. "Then my cable company talks about on-demand when I can video on-demand. It's not a super-useful term for me."

According to Fitzgerald, the real magic of Live "is that it will be a combination of client software, peer-to-peer interactions and cloud-based services so it is not any one of those — it is actually the mix of all those things".

Now I won't necessarily say that I understand exactly what IBM fully means by "on demand", but I don't necessarily think that Microsoft's definition of Microsoft Live is very useful, either. And notice the definition includes "that it will be". Not "is", but "will be"... :)

But the part that really floors me is the following about open source:

Equally, Fitzgerald has no time for open source, which he claimed is not an end-user experience but "is really a developer phenomenon that speaks to infrastructure."

"With Windows Live and Office Live we are talking about customer experiences, whether it is a personal set of services for Windows Live or things that are aimed at helping people grow and manage their businesses," said Fitzgerald. "I doubt if you talk to users of Office Live that they have any interest in dorking around with source code. This is about customer experience rather than developer experience so it's largely irrelevant."

Excuse me, but using open source code isn't about "dorking around with source code". I use OpenOffice. I installed it, I didn't compile it. And I don't have the source anywhere on my machine. Same with Gaim for instant messaging. I use it, and I don't even know what the source looks like. I can get it if I want, but I don't need it.

Open source is about the freedom to use the software as I see fit, not as another company defines.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:52 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/16/2005

Looks like Ozzie's going to try blogging again...

Category Microsoft

... this time using the company-approved tools... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 3:51 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/31/2005

Google lends a hand to Microsoft Office rival

Category Microsoft

From TimesOnline.com: Google lends a hand to Microsoft Office rival

Google is opening up yet another front in its battle with Microsoft by backing a competitor to Bill Gates’ dominant Office software package.

The internet search and advertising company is set to hire programmers to improve OpenOffice, a freely distributed "open source" alternative to products including Word, Microsoft’s massively popular word processor, it was revealed today.

"We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better," Chris DiBona, manager for open-source programs at Google, told news.com, the industry website.

"We use a fair amount of open source software at Google. We want to make sure that's a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry," he added.

Ouch... Not good news for Microsoft to have their hottest competitor throw weight behind a free Office alternative. I realize that Office 12 is supposed to do everything but wash your dog, and it will probably have some cool features. But conversely, the typical home user just wants the basics. Likewise the small to medium business. Google will lend major credibility to OpenOffice, at exactly the time when Microsoft needs to have a blockbuster winner... Also, if OpenOffice is the only significant office suite supporting OpenDoc format, guess where people will start looking?

This one will be interesting to watch...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:46 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

10/28/2005

Microsoft could pull Windows from S. Korea

Category Microsoft

From Macworld: Microsoft could pull Windows from S. Korea

Microsoft Corp. has warned that if South Korean regulators order it to remove code or redesign Windows as part of an ongoing unfair competition investigation, it could pull the operating system from the market or delay the introduction of new versions.

The warning was relayed Thursday in a Microsoft regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it is possible that the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) — the country’s antitrust body — could issue a remedial order barring a version of Windows that includes its Media Player or MSN Messenger software.

If *that* doesn't sound like a hollow threat... How can you afford to alienate a significant player in the burgeoning Asian global market, at exactly the time you're trying to fend off the growing option of running desktop Linux and/or stopping the spread of open source software alternatives to Office? China's already made their preference to Linux known. Does Microsoft think that major foreign governments are going to start shaking in their boots if they threaten to stop selling them software?

You may be a near monopoly in reality, but there *are* other options that are viable and gaining...

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:10 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/28/2005

India a threat to Microsoft: Bill Gates

Category Microsoft

From the Financial Times: India a threat to Microsoft: Bill Gates

Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates said on Wednesday the software giant faced growing competition from companies in China and India but, for now, the strength in those countries lies in software services.

Gates, on his first visit to Israel, said Israeli companies would also confront increased competition from China and India.

"There will be competitors for Microsoft and for Israeli companies coming out of those countries although today the success, particularly in India, has mostly been in the software services area, outsourcing work, doing call centres and things like that," Gates told a news conference.

Then if they consider India a threat, how come we keep getting stories about how they've committed to increase their staffing over there? It seems rather strange that you'd complain about a country being a threat, at the same time you're leveraging their lower cost skills to create and sell your software...

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:01 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/27/2005

Now there's a way to get your Exchange 5.5 user base to upgrade...

Category Microsoft

From PCWorld.com: Microsoft to Retire Exchange Server 5.5 by Year's End

Microsoft will retire Exchange Server 5.5--along with support for the product--at the end of this year, it said today. The company recommends that users upgrade to the latest version.

Microsoft urges customers who are still running Exchange 5.5 to upgrade to Exchange Server 2003, a more secure version of the messaging and collaboration server product.

Microsoft also reminded customers that Exchange Server 2000 will move out of mainstream support and into extended support at the end of 2005.
Mainstream support includes free incident support, security updates, and nonsecurity hotfixes. Once Exchange Server 2000 moves into extended support, customers will have to pay for support and non-security-related hotfixes, according to Microsoft.

Sounds like it's about time to adopt the MS campaign approach...

"Since you have to undergo a painful migration to Exchange 2003, have you thought about other alternatives? Ones that promise you won't have to face this type of pain again? Have you considered IBM's Notes/Domino 7?"

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:45 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (3)

10/20/2005

I do not believe Ballmer just said that...

Category Microsoft

From PCWorld: Microsoft assesses Linux, Google

I realize it's his job to be a rah-rah guy for the company... But in the software industry (and if you're Microsoft specifically), Ballmer can't *really* believe what he said here:

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer believes the company has ironed out all of the security problems in its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system so that users can consider adopting it the first day it is released. For the most part.

"Most people will trust it from day one on their home computer, and then they will have to decide about their corporate [PC]. I encourage you to get it early but I must be honest among friends," Ballmer joked Wednesday before an audience of IT professionals and analysts at Gartner's Symposium and ITxpo 2005 here this week.

Ballmer thinks that all security issues have been resolved in Vista??? *NO* software of substance is free of any and all security issues. Microsoft's track record is abysmal in this area. And Ballmer expects us to believe that a significant rewrite of their flagship OS is going to withstand any and all attempts to exploit security?

Three months after the official release, I'll bet there'll be a major security outbreak that will have Microsoft scrambling to issue patches. And I'm probably being overly generous in my time estimate.

Posted by Tom Duff At 3:30 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

10/18/2005

Stop the presses! Microsoft defections!!!

Category Microsoft

From eWeek: Father of Wiki Moves from Microsoft to Eclipse

Microsoft Corp. has lost one of its high-profile hires to an open-source consortium.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, announced on Monday that Ward Cunningham is leaving Microsoft to join the staff of the open-source tool consortium. Cunningham's new title is Director of Committer Community Development.

Cunningham, the father of the Wiki concept, joined Microsoft about two years ago. At Microsoft, he was not involved directly in social-networking-software development.

Hey... If Microsoft considers it news when they hire ex-Loti who haven't worked there in years, then I figure this must be front page headline stuff... :)

Just trying to apply the same ruleset to both sides here.

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:56 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/15/2005

Microsoft: We were railroaded in Massachusetts on ODF

Category Microsoft

From ZDNet: Microsoft: We were railroaded in Massachusetts on ODF

This is an excellent (but long) investigative report on what happened in Mass. on the ODF decision. It was an outgrowth of an attempt by Alan Yates of Microsoft to explain to ZDNet reporter David Berlind about how people conspired against them to oust Office XML as an accepted solution for the state. Well worth reading, as it offers insight into how Microsoft views their position in the industry, and perhaps how they've reached a tipping point of not being able to react to changing circumstances...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:08 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/03/2005

Microsoft Backs Open Source In Its Competition With IBM

Category Microsoft

From InformationWeek: Microsoft Backs Open Source In Its Competition With IBM

When will Microsoft stake some of its resources on open-source software? When the product in question helps Windows sales and takes market share from IBM.

That was the impetus behind a technical deal struck last week in which Microsoft will fly engineers from software company JBoss Inc. to Redmond, Wash., to make sure JBoss' open-source, Java-based middleware runs well on Windows, SQL Server, and other Microsoft products. JBoss sells its products under an open-source GNU Public License that Microsoft has criticized as a threat to intellectual-property ownership, and its technology is based on the Java 2 Enterprise standard that competes with Windows as a development platform. But Microsoft said the deal is meant to help a small software company that influences sales of Windows server software.

"JBoss is an alternative business model and finding great financial success building on Windows," says Bill Hilf, Microsoft's platform-technology strategy director.

I suppose the optimist in me should applaud the fact that Microsoft is recognizing the value of open source projects... even ones that compete against their own areas. They *have* been trying to tell us they're more interested in playing well with others now.

The cynical realist is a lot louder, however... I'm not buying the altruistic spin. I personally see it as a defensive measure to not allow the real competition (IBM) to have areas where Microsoft has no answer. Similar to today's announcement that Office 12 will support PDF files (thank you, OpenOffice.org).

And I'm guessing similar to an announcement in the not-too-distant future about how Microsoft is responding to the customer and marketplace demands in order to support the OpenDoc format... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:04 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

09/26/2005

Did Microsoft send the wrong guy to Massachusetts' ODF hearing?

Category Microsoft

From ZDNet.com: Did Microsoft send the wrong guy to Massachusetts' ODF hearing?

Microsoft called Massachusetts' bluff and lost. One of Microsoft's biggest mistakes in what will prove to be a critical turning point for the Redmond-based company is that it sent the wrong men to Massachusetts' last hearing before that state set a new IT policy into stone: one that essentially bumps MS-Office from its approved software list.

In case you haven't been following the saga of Microsoft vs. Massachusetts [sic], the Commonwealth of Massachusetts last week officially ratified what it calls its Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM). Amongst other things, ETRM requires that all of the Commonwealth's agencies as well as outside entities that do business with it move to the OASIS-ratified Open Document Format (ODF) as the state-wide standard for storing and exchanging documents that are produced by productivity applications such as word processors and spreadsheets.

Either Microsoft thought the state was bluffing, or it gravely miscalculated when it didn't send one of its top executives — either Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates (someone who could make a decision on the spot) — to that last hearing on Sept. 16, 2005. The reason I say "gravely" is that there is much more at stake for Microsoft than it may realize. Not only does the ODF decision extend to any of the state's 80,000 employees who may need access to an Office-like productivity solution, but also to nearly everyone whose business with the state may involve the exchange of electronic documents.

I have no doubt that Office 12 will magically support ODF, as this is one of those "ripple effect" items that will require other entities who work with the state to have a way to generate ODF-compliant documents. If not Office, OpenOffice.org? We're talking other states, contractors, etc. Not a good precedent to set just to say that you only want to support your own formatting...

If Microsoft insists on not generating ODF, this will definitely affect their market share to some degree. But I just can't see them doing that. It will be a simple case of spin when the time comes to announce it. Remember, there was no new IE coming, nor was tabbed browsing something that customers wanted... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:47 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/24/2005

Microsoft's nightmare inches closer to reality

Category Microsoft

From News.com: Microsoft's nightmare inches closer to reality

Very well-written article on the challenges facing Microsoft when it comes to Google and the web platform they are pushing... Worth reading.

As early as May 1995, three months before Netscape Communications' initial public offering sparked the dot-com boom, Microsoft executives were worried that the nascent World Wide Web could one day become a significant threat to the Windows franchise.

In an extensive memo called "The Web is the Next Platform" that was introduced as evidence in Microsoft's antitrust trial five years ago, Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka described a "nightmare" scenario for the software giant.

"The Web...exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival--and even surpass--Microsoft's Windows," Slivka wrote.

Microsoft, however, didn't heed the warning. Instead, it embarked on a strategy--championed by Jim Allchin, who today heads up development of the next version of Windows--that was fanatically focused on the operating system.

Fast-forward 10 years: The nightmare is inching closer to reality and Microsoft execs are apparently paying attention to the decade-old alert.

Posted by Tom Duff At 9:24 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/17/2005

Microsoft tries and fails to recruit open-source guru

Category Microsoft

From TechWorld.com: Microsoft tries and fails to recruit open-source guru

I guess we potential "Exchange Rangers" weren't the only ones to receive emails asking about joining Microsoft. You'd think if MS wanted to recruit a well-known name in the industry (especially one that has been diametrically opposed to them on nearly all counts), they'd do better than sending an e-mail...

Microsoft has tried and failed to hire high-profile open-source advocate Eric Raymond, according to Raymond himself.

On Thursday, he received an e-mail from a Microsoft recruiter asking him if he'd be interested in discussing a position with the software company. The open-source guru was not impressed. "I thought it was an utterly ludicrous offer that deserved nothing but a ludicrous response," he said.

And so that's what he offered. "What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a Satanist orgy?" he wrote. "I’ve in fact been something pretty close to your company’s worst nightmare since about 1997."

Posted by Tom Duff At 11:45 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

09/05/2005

Microsoft's latest 10-K report... fearing security lawsuits?

Category Microsoft

A couple people pointed out to me the following statement in Microsoft's latest 10-K filing with the government, under Risks:

Security vulnerabilities in our products could lead to reduced revenues or to liability claims. Maintaining the security of computers and computer networks is an issue of critical importance for us and our customers. There are malicious hackers who develop and deploy viruses, worms, and other malicious software programs that attack our products. While this is an industry-wide phenomenon that affects computers across all platforms, it affects our products in particular because hackers tend to focus their efforts on the most popular operating systems and programs and we expect them to continue to do so. We devote significant resources to addressing these critical issues. We are focusing our efforts on engineering even more secure products, enhancing security and reliability options and settings when we deliver products, and providing guidance to help our customers make the best use of our products and services to protect against computer viruses and other attacks on their computing environment. In addition, we are working to improve the deployment of software updates to address security vulnerabilities discovered after our products are released. We are also investing in mitigation technologies that help to secure customers from attacks even when such software updates are not deployed. We are also advising customers on how to help protect themselves from security threats through the use of our online automated security tools, our published security guidance, and the deployment of security software such as firewalls, antivirus, and other security software. The cost of these steps could adversely affect our operating margins. Despite these efforts, actual or perceived security vulnerabilities in our products could lead some customers to seek to return products, to reduce or delay future purchases, or to use competitive products. Customers may also increase their expenditures on protecting their existing computer systems from attack, which could delay adoption of new technologies. Any of these actions by customers could adversely affect our revenue. We devote significant resources to improving the security design and engineering of our software. Nevertheless, actual or perceived vulnerabilities may lead to claims against us. While our license agreements typically contain provisions that eliminate or limit our exposure to such liability claims, there is no assurance these provisions will be held effective under applicable laws and judicial decisions.

I'm still surprised that no one has challenged those agreements in some form of a class action lawsuit after a significant virus outbreak...

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:02 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

09/05/2005

More Microsoft mindset... "Just wait for our next release!"

Category Microsoft

From PC Pro: New file format causes Mass panic at Microsoft

In regards to Massachusetts' plan to standardize on the OpenDocument format and ditch Office:

Writing in his blog, Brian Jones, Microsoft's Office Program Manager said he agreed with the principle that file formats should be open but claimed that the forthcoming formats for the upcoming Office 12 product were just that - if only Massachusetts had waited to see the beta of the new version coming out in a few months.

'Moving to document formats that are open, documented, and royalty-free is actually really valuable,' writes Jones. 'The default format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office 12 will be completely open, meaning you aren't tied into Microsoft software to access your files. They will now totally belong to you and you have control over them. I'm extremely excited about the opportunity this gives to people to build solutions that operate on Office documents and it's royalty-free (no cost).'

Having put in his pitch for the new Office 12 formatting, Jones condemns the State's decision as being based on 'no thorough research' as the first beta of the new productivity suite will not be out for a another couple of months. ' I can't imagine that they would have made this decision as it actually provides the easiest path of moving from proprietary binary formats into open XML formats,' he writes.

Did you catch that key line?

if only Massachusetts waited to see the beta of the new version coming out in a few months.

In other words, put your business and organization on hold indefinitely until we show you a beta release of a new version of software coming soon. If that's not freezing the market, what is?

I also love the complaint that the decision was based on "no thorough research". I think it's more a case of "we didn't win, so the decision was wrong".

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:44 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (4)

09/05/2005

Microsoft's FUD... straight from the horse's mouth...

Category Microsoft

From The Register: Microsoft's Ballmer: chair-tossing potty-mouth

Gotta love that publication! :)

In a continuation of the story about Lukovsky going to Google, we have the following from the court documents...

Thereafter, Mr. Ballmer resumed trying to persuade me to stay....Among other things, Mr. Ballmer told me that "Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards." Lukovsky left Microsoft in March this year.

Yes, Mr. Ballmer... And Linux is more expensive to run than Windows, and Lotus Notes is dead, and there will be no release past Lotus Notes 6.5, and, and, and...

If you can't win on merit, lie.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:35 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/03/2005

Microsoft's Ballmer vows to "kill" Google...

Category Microsoft

From The Telegraph: Microsoft's Ballmer vows to "kill" Google

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's ebullient chief executive, threatened to "kill" Google and "bury" its chief executive during a foul-mouthed tirade against the internet search engine giant, according to court documents.

Ballmer's alleged threats are detailed in a sworn statement by Mark Lucovsky, a former Microsoft engineer, who met the Microsoft chief executive in November to discuss his intention to defect to Google.

The documents say that when he became aware of Lucovsky's plan to move to Google, Ballmer roared: "F**king Eric Schmidt [Google's chief executive] is a f***ing p****. I'm going to f***ing bury that guy. I have done it before, I will do it again. I'm going to f****ing kill Google."

Lucovsky's statement said that Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room, hitting a table in the office.

Ballmer yesterday dismissed Lucovsky's version of the events as "a gross exaggeration of what took place". He said the engineer's decision to leave Microsoft was "disappointing". "I urged him strongly to change his mind," Ballmer said. "His characterisation of that meeting is not accurate."

Yeah, the chair probably only went halfway and missed the table... :)

Seriously, I know this is one of those "I did not, you did too" stories, but I don't have a hard time making this mental connection. It also falls right in line as to why I don't believe Microsoft's "benevolence" when they offer help to "integrate" Notes data with .Net technology. Co-existance is not part of their makeup, just complete domination of any and all markets. Regardless of the spin coming out of Redmond by ex-Loti, Microsoft is a competitor and not a partner.

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:43 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/25/2005

And Lotus Notes/Domino has had presence awareness for HOW long???

Category Microsoft

From eWeek: Microsoft Pushes Presence for Business Applications

The Microsoft brass believes real-time collaboration means a lot more than just instant messaging.

To push real-time technologies into the business applications space, the Redmond software vendor is making available to Visual Studio developers a set of controls and code samples that can be used to build presence directly into their applications.

Only Microsoft can get away with a catch-up feature being touted as something new and exciting...

Though I admit to being a little dismayed that the IBM marketing of Notes/Domino can't get this same type of visibility for stuff that is *truly* revolutionary...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:07 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

08/11/2005

And another thing that bugs me about that eWeek article...

Category Microsoft

This isn't the fault of the writer (except for possibly including it and adding to the FUD out there) is this statement:

The news comes on the heels of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's swipe at Lotus Notes at this week's Microsoft's WorldWide Partner Conference in Minneapolis.

"I'd never seen a customer base that's more ripe to be plucked and moved than that Notes customer base—left and right, large account after large account that I meet with that's a Notes customer—they're just waiting for us and our partners to do the conversions," said Ballmer.

All I can visualize is Ballmer sweating up a storm, running back and forth on the stage, and screaming repeatedly, "THEY ARE RIPE FOR THE PICKING! THEY ARE RIPE FOR THE PICKING!"

Please, Steve! Repeating a statement loudly and often doesn't make it true.

When Ed Brill talked at Lotusphere about heads-up competition against Notes vs. Exchange, he mentioned over 1800 competitive wins. *That's* a real number. Give us a number, Steve... Give us examples. Don't just keep repeating your mantra that Notes is dead (it's not) and that they are all waiting to be converted like little sheep (they're not). And *don't* insult the intelligence of your customers and make it sound like they are incapable of doing anything for themselves and need to wait for you and "your partners" to show up to convert them.

This is one of those times I'd love to see IBM/Lotus go "in your face" offensive with a large ad titled "The Truth About Lotus Domino". Spell it out in words that can be understood from the CxO on down. Notes isn't dead. Notes isn't going away. Workplace is not a migration or conversion. Notes is *the* most secure enterprise email platform used today. And you'll never have to rip and replace.

Or we could just douse Rhodin with water and send him out on stage at Lotusphere screaming "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS..." Seems to work for Microsoft... :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:07 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

08/11/2005

Credit where due... Barb Darrow's original "MS Hiring Lotus Developers" article was better than eWeek's...

Category Microsoft

Since I ranted about eWeek's misleading article about Microsoft poaching Lotus developers, and since Ed blogged the same thing (and no, we didn't call each other and collaborate beforehand), I feel I must give credit where due...

Barb Darrow has a blog entry noting that her article did not make the direct-poaching claims. True... That's why I went off on the eWeek article and not the CRN article I first saw. I still contend that the whole story *isn't news* and should not have even made either publication.

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:54 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/10/2005

Microsoft continues to raid Lotus? Let's see some truth in reporting, eWeek!

Category Microsoft

From eWeek: Microsoft continues to raid Lotus

Microsoft Corp. continues to woo top Lotus software developers to its ranks.

Among its most recent hires are two former Lotus developers, Julio Estrada, who joined Redmond's ranks in June as software architect in the Exchange Server Group; and Bob Congdon, hired in July as an Exchange design engineer also in the Exchange Server Group, according to Microsoft spokeswoman Michelle Hinrichs.

This article makes it sound like people are leaving Lotus left and right. In Congdon's case, yes he did leave Lotus directly. Estrada left four years ago to form Kubi. So why does his leaving Kubi to work at Microsoft deserve press?

Estrada and Cognos follow other Lotus luminaries who have joined Redmond in the past year, such as Gary Devendorf, a technology evangelist in Microsoft's server division and former application development product manager at Lotus; and Charlie Kaufman, security architect for Microsoft's Common Language Runtime group, formerly chief security architect for Lotus Notes.

And then, of course, there is Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie, who recently joined Microsoft's ranks as CTO with Redmond's acquisition of the collaboration software company he founded, Groove Networks Inc.

People... There's a freaking DIFFERENCE between leaving Lotus to work for Microsoft, and leaving Lotus and eventually ending up at Microsoft. If the person's high enough on the food chain, such as Ranger Ed, then the first situation is news. Anything in the second category is not news. I don't care if Microsoft issues a press release about it or not...

Was it that slow of a news day, eWeek?

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:39 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/03/2005

Microsoft must be desperate... They're interested in me!

Category Microsoft

... or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof... How many other Notes/Domino bloggers got contacted with the following email?

I suppose I should feel somewhat honored to be noticed, but I just find this funny. You wonder how much of a threat Lotus is to Microsoft? Here's your answer.

And no, I'm not interested.

----------------

Hi Thomas,

I am <name removed>, recruiter at Microsoft. I came across your contact info on the internet and although I don’t have any detailed information about your background, it seems that you travel in the circles that would warrant a closer look at your skills and experience to see if we might have something that would appeal to you or to someone you know.

Right now I am looking for 3 high level individuals (who can be based anywhere in the US and even abroad) who have the opportunity of getting trained in Microsoft Exchange Ranger status (of which there are about 60 professionals worldwide). Here is some additional info on those roles. In addition to this role, I have several other roles ranging from development, to test to marketing. Please let me know if you would like to discuss these opportunities further or if you know of anyone who may want to discuss them with me. A good place to start would be to see a profile or resume of anyone interested. Thanks for your time in looking over this info and passing it along to anyone you feel it might be a fit for:

Program Manager/ Consultant

The Lotus Note Migration Team is looking for a technical Notes expert to assist our field, partners & customers with Lotus Notes migrations. This position requires an individual with deep Lotus Notes\Domino, Exchange, .NET, Sharepoint, Outlook, Active Directory, Domino Designer & SameTime products. Preference would be an individual who has run an IT department using Lotus Notes or Exchange, has past consulting experience, has been thru a Notes to Microsoft\Exchange conversion first hand, is deeply familiar with Notes environments and understands configuration & management; can optimize, debug and integrate Notes systems, is a strong leader, self-sufficient, enjoys competitive customer environments, thrives on being the hero in technical engagements, is able to voice their opinion and participate in challenging intellectual executive discussions, has a proven track record in driving technical migration projects, is able to think ‘big picture’ strategy one day and get deep both tactically & technically the next.

Position also requires working with our field & partners to conduct training sessions while building guidance on our tools & technologies. Individual will also be required to complete & be certified as a Microsoft Exchange Ranger (~60 worldwide).

Direct interaction with customers, partners & senior executives will be a major part of this position.

The role consists of the following objectives:

Travel on-site for customer engagements & escalations with periodically

Effectively train partners to perform successful engagements.

Be the migration & coexistence technical expert for Microsoft.

Understand current customer IT & usage scenarios & be the Product Group Subject Matter Expert who flies in, saves the day & resolves any planning or technical migration issues.

Understands both prior & upcoming Lotus offering & products.

Ensure competitiveness of product scenarios by driving differentiation along key product dimensions

Work with Engineering in driving competitive planning across R&D efforts

Work with Marketing to create a prioritized list of scenarios, workloads and products for analysis

Assist in the education and presentation of competitive analysis and technical content

Position Requirements:

Minimum 7 years industry experience

Deep broad hands-on technical messaging knowledge, high-level understanding of Lotus Notes, Unix/Linux and Windows\AD architecture and server technologies.

Experience as an IT administrator/manager and/or software product/program manager

Ability to present deep technical content to both technical and business executive audiences

Demonstrated ability to work effectively across different groups & in political scenarios.

Ability to scope technical projects, lead technical staff members and own the execution of project deliverables.

Posted by Tom Duff At 12:20 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (15)

07/26/2005

"Lotus Notes At The Crossroads"... Try again, Microsoft!

Category Microsoft

Through a friend, I received a PDF copy of a presentation made by Microsoft to business partners titled Lotus Notes At The Crossroads. This is the type of material they're putting out there to try and get customers to migrate. Just a couple of slide examples:

Tips And Tricks On Migration

Don’t recommend “rip and replace”
Messaging and applications can (and are) often migrated separately
Application analysis is a great tool
Don't shortcut - build full requirements
Watch out for Notes quirks
Test data migration carefully
Keep the faith

and

In Conclusion

Let’s move them!
Notes customers are at a transition point…and they are starting to move
The opportunity is both real and significant
Establish the value of the Microsoft solution and then help customers get their heads around the transition

Besides quoting Radicati studies that are dubious and a Converting From Notes To .Net report they pulled from their own website, there's another thing that stood out to me... The whole thing is about how much opportunity there is for Microsoft and their partners, and not much (if anything) about how this will benefit the customer. At one point, they talk about how you should aim for replicating the functionality of the current environment.

And the payback on that to the customer is what?

Just another example of a schizophrenic company that has a number of messages going out at once, and quite honestly can't be trusted to play well with others...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:27 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

07/10/2005

Microsoft's Ballmer tells lurvely partners to stick it to IBM

Category Microsoft

From The Register: Microsoft's Ballmer tells lurvely partners to stick it to IBM

A pumped-up and sweating Ballmer informed Microsoft's Worldwide partner conference on Sunday morning that IBM is a spent competitive challenge that is pushing sub-par software, while he worked the crowd's concerns over IP and patents by talking of so-called "rumors" that Linux violates more than 200 patents.

Let's see... Gates recently admitted that they never matched Notes in many areas of collaboration, and Ballmer says IBM is pushing sub-par software...

What does that say by inference about Microsoft's offering? :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:38 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

07/09/2005

IMPORTANT READ, PEOPLE!!! - Look out IBM, here comes Microsoft's OzFest

Category Microsoft

From The Register: Look out IBM, here comes Microsoft's OzFest

If the following is true (and I have no reason to believe it's not), you had best be prepared to counter some major spin/FUD coming out of Redmond in September...

Microsoft is gunning for IBM's Lotus Notes users in an effort to quadruple the size of its ISV partner community around the Office desktop productivity suite.

The company will launch a sales and marketing campaign in September that encourages 100m Notes customers to build their future collaborative software applications and services on Office and SharePoint Portal Server.

Microsoft believes it can exploit what it perceives to be uncertainty and concern among users over the future of their platform caused by IBM's newer Workplace strategy.

By targeting Lotus Notes users, Microsoft believes it can create new business opportunities for ISVs and services companies, thereby growing its network of certified Office partners from 1,600 to around 6,000. Microsoft provided the numbers in an attempt to clarify comments made earlier at the Worldwide partner conference around plans to expand its partner ecosystem by a factor of four.

"We are hearing that with Workplace technology there has been a decent amount of concern from Lotus Notes customers about what the future holds for them," Microsoft corporate vice president for the information worker product management group Chris Capossela told The Register on Friday.

One spot where Microsoft hopes to lure Notes customers and potential partners is in the area of increasingly richer search technology. Capossela said search would be one of the key developments in Office 12, due in the second half of 2006.

Pre-empting Office 12, IBM in May took steps to beef-up search capabilities in Notes working with Google to produce Google Desktop Search for Enterprise. The software searches Notes in addition to Office, AOL and Internet Explorer files.

Microsoft’s campaign represents the company's latest attempt to unseat Notes as companies' choice of corporate messaging and collaborative backbone. Microsoft spent much of the 1990s launching code migration wizards to move users of Lotus Development's Notes software to its, then, new Exchange Server and Outlook.

Capossela said things are different this time around, though, as Microsoft is preaching a message of co-existence with Notes instead of rip and replace.

"We will be getting customers to build [new applications and services] using SharePoint rather than Lotus Notes or Workplace and keep Lotus Notes in maintenance mode." Capossela said.

Things certainly will be different this time for more reasons than one: in a twist of irony, or higher pay packages, Ray Ozzie, the man credited with creating Notes, is now working for Microsoft to help enhance Microsoft Office's peer-to-peer and collaborative capabilities, after Microsoft bought Ozzie's Groove Networks earlier this year.

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:53 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/09/2005

Microsoft Extends Competitive Sales Tool

Category Microsoft

From CRN: Microsoft Extends Competitive Sales Tool

Microsoft on Saturday told Certified and Gold partners that they now have free and unlimited access to presales technical support.

The offering extends Microsoft's Competitive Sales Assistance hotline,which enables partners to close hotly contested sales against Novell Linux and IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino.

Smart move on their part... extending front line competitive sales support to business partners in one location. Although I find it interesting that they offer this at the same time they are preaching a "kinder, gentler" Microsoft that really just wants to play well with others. :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:48 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/05/2005

Analyst Reports - Framing The Discussion...

Category Microsoft

I've had this entry bookmarked for awhile in order to blog it, and I keep forgetting about it. But finally...

Joe Brockmeier's ZDNet blog: Framing The Discussion - Linux vs. Microsoft

I know a lot of us, having seen the farce and folly that often accompanies sponsored analyst reports, wonder why a company such as IBM or Microsoft would even bother if the results are met with such derision... I think Brockmeier has the answer:

Microsoft seems to realize that many people take its sponsored studies with a grain of salt. So, why would the folks in Redmond — or any other vendor, for that matter — go to the trouble to finance a study that they know will be dismissed as biased?

Microsoft knows that it's unlikely that the majority of IT professionals will take the results at face value, once they learn that a study has been sponsored by the vendor. But, by releasing the study anyway, Microsoft has a chance at framing the discussion.

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:17 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (3)

06/28/2005

Pretty good Ozzie interview in Redmond magazine...

Category Microsoft

It's Groove Baby!

I liked his observations on moving to Outlook/Exchange as a user:

It has been interesting in the first few weeks. I have been using Notes for my own mail for as long as there has been a Notes. You get habits. You use it a certain way. Now I'm an Outlook and Exchange user. The Exchange groups and Outlook groups already have a wealth of feedback (from me) from those experiences.

There are some aspects of Outlook that just kick Notes' butt and there are some aspects of Notes that kick Outlook/Exchange's butt. They have different heritages and different architectures. I think our experience with Notes will help make Outlook and Exchange a better product, because we can give them that kind of feedback. But it is interesting calling them "we."

:-)

The general impression I got after reading it was that Ozzie doesn't have much that he *has* to do at this stage. He wants to "influence", but he doesn't have staff or decision-making capabilities. He still thinks that Groove will be a stand-alone product. Everything he wants to do is in the "idea" stage. I don't want to call him a figurehead, because he's more important than that. But I don't quite see so far where he's tasked to make things happen or lead some new software development.

Time will definitely tell...

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:27 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/20/2005

Microsoft meets the hackers...

Category Microsoft

From news.com: Microsoft Meets The Hackers

Kudos to Microsoft for coming face-to-face with the real world, not the world they imagine or ignore...

Posted by Tom Duff At 3:54 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

05/28/2005

Microsoft urges Windows users to dump Netscape 8

Category Microsoft

From STLtoday: Microsoft urges Windows users to dump Netscape 8

Microsoft Corp. is urging Windows users to uninstall the new Netscape 8 Web browser from their computers, saying it damages Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft's announcement on Friday came after a Microsoft technician's blog posting a day earlier that said Netscape's updated technology interfered with Internet Explorer's ability to display some Web pages.

Computer users who install Netscape 8 and then go back to using Internet Explorer for browsing may see some Web pages appear blank in Internet Explorer.

The problem particularly affects pages incorporating display technology such as that used for syndication-service feeds.

It must really suck for Microsoft to be on the other end of that problem for once... I wonder if we'll see an update for IE 6 that causes it to die if people are using Firefox, so that Microsoft can ask you to remove that one too.

There used to be a running joke in the Lotus community that Microsoft's mantra was "Windows isn't done until Notes won't run." Looks like Netscape has adopted a version of that... :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 3:01 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

05/14/2005

Another reason why I don't trust the "kinder, gentler" Microsoft line...

Category Microsoft

From Brian Benz's blog... New Position At Microsoft: IBM Strategist/Director of Competitive Strategy

Lines like this tell the story: You will play an essential role in assisting with the business planning aspect of running our perception changing and compete campaigns (BPR, WWSMM, PRISM, Strategy Day, Board of Directors quarterly presentation, etc.)

This is why I don't buy the evangelist spiel coming from the Scobles and Devendorfs of the world.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with Microsoft having a position like this. If you have as much spare money sitting around as Microsoft does, it makes sense to have a specific high-level person focusing on one of your largest competitors in a number of areas. Just don't expect me to buy the pap that Microsoft is now more focused on integration and cooperation instead of domination.

Posted by Tom Duff At 1:29 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

04/14/2005

Legal smoke affects Microsoft Chimney, Longhorn

Category Microsoft

From the Inquirer: Legal smoke affects Microsoft Chimney, Longhorn

Just what they need... more delays for Longhorn...

A software firm was granted a preliminary injunction against Microsoft preventing it from deploying the technology, slated to be included in next generation operating system Longhorn.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Alacritech won a preliminary injunction against Microsoft in a court in San Francisco.

This San Jose firm alleges that Microsoft has violated two of its patents on technology which speeds up the connection of PCs on networks. This technology is called Dynamic TCP offload data acceleration.

Microsoft has dubbed this technology "Chimney", and, according to the Journal, faces around 30 patent suit cases. Alacritech holds a number of network patents. The patents in question are numbered 6,427,171 and 6,987,868 - both relating to a protocol processing stack for use with an intelligent network interface device.

Alacritech said in a statement that when it discovered Microsoft Chimney was based on its patents, it offer the firm a licence. But the Vole rejected the licensing deal it offered. The firm's lawyer said that the firm owned numerous patents in the same field. Mark Lauer, a partner at the Silicon Edge Law Group, said that last year, at WinHEC, "Microsoft said this technology would allow them to rule the world for the next few years".

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:01 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

04/02/2005

The whole Microsoft/Groove deal is looking somewhat slimy now...

Category Microsoft

From the Boston Globe: Groove backers left short

This deal is sounding less like a strategic acquisition and more like a fire sale designed to hide the truth of the situation... The story:

Groove backers left short
Firm fetched less than shareholders had invested in it

By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff | April 2, 2005

Financial backers failed to recoup their investments in Groove Networks Inc., and rank-and-file employees weren't compensated for stock they'd been given in the Beverly software company that has agreed to be purchased by Microsoft Corp., according to documents filed in a lawsuit brought by a former Groove executive.

A judge in Wilmington, Del., yesterday denied a motion by Michael Matthews, who had been Groove's executive vice president for sales and marketing, to block the $120 million acquisition deal. Its price tag was among financial information contained in the lawsuit that wasn't disclosed when Groove and Microsoft unveiled the deal March 10.

While the deal will now go forward, and could be completed next week, Delaware Chancery Court Judge William B. Chandler III will permit Matthews to file an amended complaint challenging allocation of the merger proceeds among different groups of stockholders. In his initial complaint, lodged March 25, Matthews alleged that Groove and its directors violated the company's certificate of incorporation and breached their fiduciary duty by not adequately compensating employees who'd been issued common and junior preferred stock.

M. Duncan Grant, a lawyer for Matthews, said his client had not yet determined whether to file a new complaint.

In a statement yesterday afternoon, Groove said Matthews was the only one of the firm's principal investors not to approve the deal with Microsoft. The statement said the other principals continue to support the deal. ''Groove Networks and Microsoft are proceeding toward closing of the transaction according to the terms of the merger agreement," it said. Microsoft officials declined to comment.

Because the sale price was less than the $155 million invested in Groove, the cash-for-stock deal provided no payout for an unspecified number of employees who had been given Groove shares. Groove did set aside some money to be paid to current employees who remain with the firm after the Microsoft purchase takes effect. That will come in the form of ''reward retention bonuses," half of which would be paid one year and the remainder two years after the deal is complete.

Matthews' suit named as defendants the company, its founder and chief executive Ray Ozzie, and a pair of directors, James Breyer and John P. Stenbit. Ozzie, a pioneer in collaboration software and the creator of Lotus Notes, will become a Microsoft senior vice president and chief technical officer upon completion of the deal.

According to the complaint, Ozzie, together with Microsoft and Accel Partners, a Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm that employs Breyer -- all part of a class of senior preferred shareholders -- owned 77.7 percent of the total outstanding shares of Groove. Other financial backers in the eight-year-old company included Intel Capital and Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp. of Cambridge.

The complaint said Ozzie would get $382,966 under the deal, while Breyer would receive about $1.7 million and Accel about $3.4 million. Microsoft, Groove's largest investor, would recoup about $80 million, it said. The document doesn't indicate how much each of those parties invested. It also said a March 4 letter from the board apprising Groove stockholders of the acquisition didn't mention the separate deal in which Ozzie would become a Microsoft executive.

''Stockholders were not provided with the supposedly final merger agreement . . . until 9:53 p.m. on March 8, 2005," the complaint said. ''Stockholders were then asked to give their written consent no later than 9 a.m. the following morning, thus giving stockholders zero business hours in which to conduct their review of (and seek advice regarding) the supposedly finalized merger documents."

Now, I'm no business legal expert, but this whole situation looks really bad. It'd be interesting to see how much the retention bonuses are. There's obviously no guarantee that these people will stick around. Also, if Microsoft is paying $120 million for the company but recouping $80 million, then the company is only worth $40 million... far less than the $120 million that made it look so important. And Ozzie? Apparently that's a whole separate deal... Sounds like there's a little less altruistic benefit going on than was originally speculated.

And that final paragraph... less than a day to approve a merger agreement? Do the words "due diligence" mean anything? This reminds me of the "you MUST call in the next 15 minutes to take advantage of this offer" sales pitch.

While I have no doubt that Microsoft wants to incorporate Groove technology into their software to give them some collaboration features they are lacking at this time, the Microsoft/Groove acquisition is appearing to be a far different business reality than it appeared less than a month ago...

Posted by Tom Duff At 9:22 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

04/02/2005

More on the Microsoft/Groove lawsuit...

Category Microsoft

From the Seattle PI: Suit challenges Microsoft's deal for Groove

Interesting things coming to light in this deal, and it looks like this was truly a desperation deal for Ozzie's company... Some points from the story...

Former Groove employee Michael Matthews, who sued closely held Groove and its directors and seeks to block the deal, claimed that Microsoft and Ozzie "seek to eliminate the interest of junior preferred and common stockholders for no consideration," according to the suit filed March 25 in Delaware Chancery Court. Only senior preferred stockholders receive compensation under the deal, he said.

Matthews asked Judge William Chandler III to stop the buyout under its current terms, which provide $50 million in "golden parachute" payments and other benefits, including $27 million in stock grants for Ozzie. Together, Microsoft and Ozzie hold 59 percent of Groove's stock. Matthews seeks damages and legal fees.

When Microsoft first announced the deal, it didn't disclose the financial terms.

Matthews said in the lawsuit that he learned of the terms in letters to stockholders from the Groove board. Groove lawyers asked Chandler to keep details of the transaction confidential. Chandler denied the request.

Matthews' lawyer, M. Duncan Grant, said Groove was unjustified in trying to withhold information "that the company allegedly would be mere weeks, if not days, away from a bankruptcy filing," according to court papers filed Wednesday.

Chandler wrote in an opinion the same day that Groove hadn't shown that any harm would occur by allowing the public to see filings in the case.

In papers filed yesterday, Grant disputed Groove's contention that the court has no power to stop the buyout. Grant also said Groove officials had suggested "that unless the merger proceeds as planned, Microsoft, which has over $80 million invested in the company, will choose to simply walk away with nothing."

Groove said in a statement that at a hearing yesterday Chandler denied a request by Matthews, a former Groove executive, for a temporary order to stop the buyout. The case could go to trial.

Microsoft has so much money floating around that I doubt they'll view this as a showstopper. They could easily restructure the deal, throw a few more million on it, and pay everyone to just shut up and go away. What this story *does* highlight is that Groove was basically finished as a company unless a white knight stepped into the picture and rescued them...

Posted by Tom Duff At 9:05 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/01/2005

The Microsoft/Groove deal is being challenged (and this is not an April Fool's joke)...

Category Microsoft

From the Boston Business Journal: Microsoft's $120 million Groove buyout challenged in suit

Microsoft Corp.'s $120 million cash offer to buy Groove Networks Inc., owned by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie, ignores some employees who hold preferred and common stock, a former Groove worker said in a lawsuit, Bloomberg Business News reported.

Former Groove employee Michael Matthews claimed Microsoft and Ozzie, who together hold 59 percent of Groove's stock, "seek to eliminate the interest of junior preferred and common stockholders for no consideration" in the $120 million deal, according to a lawsuit filed March 25 in Delaware Chancery Court.

The lawsuit could temporarily block the deal. Microsoft, the world's largest maker of software, wants to use Groove products to supplement its Office business applications. The combination will help computer users in different locations work on documents together over the Internet, Microsoft said.

Matthews sued closely-held Groove and its directors, including Ozzie. He asked Judge William B. Chandler III to stop the buyout under the present terms and award damages and legal fees. Groove lawyers asked Chandler to keep details of the transaction confidential, but he denied the request.

The suit claims the buyout is also unfair because insiders will get $50 million in "golden parachute" payments and other benefits, including $27 million in stock grants for Ozzie.

Ouch... $27 million in stock grants... Hadn't heard that one... :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 11:03 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/21/2005

Readjusting my view of my visibility...

Category Microsoft

Everyone blogs for reasons that make sense to them... And unless you're an "A-List" blogger, you pretty much figure that you have a smaller confined audience that makes you known to about 3 - 25 people who happen to share the same interests...

Until you realize you're on radar screens that you didn't know about... like when you get a personal invite to the "Optimizing Collaboration and Communication with Microsoft Technologies" seminars from someone who is closely tied into the events, and from someone who you've never conversed or traded emails with before... :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:55 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (3)

03/11/2005

Gartner weighs in on MS/Groove

Category Microsoft

Microsoft Pursues Future of Work Vision with Groove Deal

The thing I like about Gartner write-ups is their probability factors on certain scenarios.

Microsoft might be buying Groove to block IBM from buying it. The company may intend to dissolve Groove's technology into its own products (0.3 probability). Gartner believes, however, that Microsoft will leverage Groove's unique market visibility and technology experience to make Groove a prominent part of its collaboration offering (0.5 probability). The prospects for Groove technology are at least as good, and probably better, with this acquisition than if Groove remained independent.

The deal's challenges include:

Reconciling Groove's peer-to-peer architecture with SharePoint Portal and Windows architecture
Determining how or whether to continue supporting the current Windows SharePoint Services shared workspaces
Bringing Microsoft's disjointed collaboration products into a more cohesive workplace offering

Recommendations:

Microsoft customers: Seek a clearer road map before you make strategic buying decisions.
IT organizations: Take this opportunity to become trusted advisors for your users, or risk being viewed as roadblocks.

So... as pointed out in many other articles and analysis pieces, Microsoft sacrificed their short term vision and story (whatever it was this week) for something that might pan out better in the future. I'd personally hate to be a Microsoft sales person trying to answer questions about the viability of software I just sold last week...

Posted by Tom Duff At 3:31 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/11/2005

And another take from ZDNet along the lines of what I'm thinking...

Category Microsoft

Microsoft's Groove Move Makes Solid Sense

Microsoft's backing will ease fears while injecting some much-needed pizzazz into the Office line-up, which is currently getting ever flabbier as it waits for Longhorn to give it somewhere new to go.

Making the deal work needs more than a cheque and a new email address for Ozzie, though. Microsoft has a history of buying companies for their technology and staff, only for both to fade from view. Company insiders blame cultural and political battles for this, as well as the magnitude of the task of innovating within a management-heavy framework dedicated to perpetuating monolithic compatibility with the largest user base on the planet. Ozzie's position as one of three chief technical officers both underlines this and shows how serious Gates is about trying to change it. On the one hand, three chiefs is two too many: on the other, that might be the price Ozzie needed to extract in order to protect his team and ensure top-level patronage.

This is why I'm more in the mode of "time will tell" on this whole acquisition...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:45 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/11/2005

Interesting take on the MS/Groove arrangement over on the Ferris Research Weblog

Category Microsoft

Microsoft Aquires Groove

The cynical view would be that this is just Microsoft's latest course change in collaboration technology. Last year's message to build collaboration on top of Sharepoint looks like it is at risk now. Groove offers a better forms architecture and an off-line solution. The next several years will likely see these products share feature sets, if not merge altogether. That could be an uncertain time for application developers make the best near-term architectural choices.

There was a lot of discussion in the Microsoft Q&A about how Groove fits with Office, Sharepoint and other technologies. However there was no discussion whatsoever about how it fits with Exchange. The obvious conclusion is that - in line with what Microsoft has been implying for the last several years, if not saying outright, - is that Exchange's only role in Microsoft's collaboration vision is to move the mail around.

Just keep throwing things at the wall... I'm sure *something* will stick at some point in time.

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:30 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/10/2005

Guess this answers the question of Ray Ozzie coming back to IBM...

Category Microsoft

That would be "no".

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/mar05/03-10GroovePR.asp

Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks, Combining Talents to Create Anytime, Anywhere Collaboration Products and Services

Groove Founder Ray Ozzie Will Join Microsoft as New CTO

BEVERLY, Mass. -- March 10, 2005-- Microsoft Corp. announced today that it will acquire Groove Networks Inc., a leading provider of collaboration software for the "virtual office." The deal unites two top innovators of technology that help geographically distributed workgroups be as productive as those that work in a single physical location. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The addition of Groove products to the lineup of Microsoft® Office System products, servers and services builds on the capabilities of Microsoft's current collaboration products, allowing Microsoft to better meet the needs of organizations of all sizes that increasingly are creating borderless project teams comprising employees, customers, partners, suppliers, contractors and others.

"The acquisition of Groove complements Microsoft's collaboration offerings to include real-time, server-based and peer-to-peer solutions that address the ever-changing and more-complex work environment," said Jeff Raikes, group vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Group. "Together, Microsoft and Groove will make anytime, anywhere collaboration a more natural and easy extension of how information workers coordinate their projects and document-centric work."

The acquisition also brings to Microsoft the development talent and technology leadership of top Groove executives, including founder Ray Ozzie, a creator of IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes. Ozzie will assume the role of chief technical officer, reporting to Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, chairman and chief software architect, with responsibility for influencing corporatewide communication and collaboration offerings and associated platform infrastructure. Ozzie also will continue his work with the Groove team, which will be part of Microsoft's Information Worker Group.

"Ray and his team are true innovators. Microsoft and its customers will greatly benefit from their experience," Gates said. "After working with Ray for years as a close partner, it will be great to have him on our senior leadership team."

"We developed Groove's highly security-enhanced virtual office technology to help businesses and individuals -- wherever they are, whenever they work -- overcome the challenges presented by today's increasingly decentralized work environment," Ozzie said. "By joining forces with Microsoft, we can more effectively address the needs of information workers for collaboration solutions that 'just work' across organizational, geographic and network boundaries."

As a Windows® desktop-based collaboration offering, Groove's Virtual Office complements Microsoft's collaboration solution offerings, which include the following:

Real-time collaboration solutions such as Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2005 and Microsoft Office Live Communications Server that enable in-the-moment one-to-one and one-to-many collaboration
Server-based collaboration solutions such as Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services that allow businesses to create and manage collaborative work spaces online or on a company's internal IT system
Peer-to-peer collaboration solutions through Groove's Virtual Office, which let any Windows-based PC user instantly create ad hoc, virtual work spaces that securely and easily span organizational, geographic and network boundaries, and allow information workers to be productive whether they're online or temporarily disconnected from the network.

Founded in 1997, Groove has worked closely with Microsoft for nearly five years. After the deal is completed, the nearly 200-person Groove organization will continue to operate from its Beverly, Mass., headquarters as part of Microsoft's Information Worker Group.

The acquisition is expected to be complete in the second quarter of 2005. Microsoft and Groove plan to provide customers and third-party partners with uninterrupted product and service offerings. Groove will continue to operate as a separate company until regulatory requirements have been met and the acquisition is finalized.

At 11:30 a.m. EST today, Microsoft and Groove will hold a teleconference to discuss the acquisition. To participate, U.S. residents can dial (888) 368-4276, and those outside the United States can dial +1 (706) 679-5613. The call will be available for playback through March 19 at 11:59 p.m. EST. To access the playback beginning at 1:30 p.m. EST today, U.S. residents can dial (800) 642-1687, and those outside the United States can dial +1 (706) 645-9291, and ask for the Microsoft/Groove teleconference.

About Groove Networks

Founded in October 1997 and headquartered in Beverly, Mass., Groove Networks Inc. delivers the "virtual office" through software that allows teams of people to work together over a network as if they were in the same physical location. Groove software helps organizations, large and small, save money, time and eliminate travel by offering both a desktop application for instant joint work, and a set of customizable, open collaboration capabilities that enhance the utility and value of existing solutions. For more information about Groove Networks, visit http://www.groove.net. A free trial edition of Groove Virtual Office is available at http://www.groove.net/download.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Microsoft, Windows and SharePoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

Groove Networks and Groove are registered trademarks of Groove Networks Inc.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:39 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

03/03/2005

Microsoft Math

Category Microsoft

From RedmondMag.com: Microsoft Math

A very interesting and well-written article analyzing Microsoft's track record on meeting shipment dates.

It shouldn't be news to anyone who has dealt with or followed Microsoft for any length of time that the company is notorious for missing ship dates. But with another major operating system upgrade on the horizon in Longhorn, it's a good time to take a hard look at the company's track record to try to glean tendencies that can help customers plan accordingly.

To do that, Redmond magazine researched announcement dates and delays for Microsoft desktop and server operating systems, along with Microsoft Office and Exchange products going back as far as 1983. We took the resulting data and handed it off for analysis to Barry Bayus, a professor of marketing at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina. Bayus co-authored a 1999 report titled, "Truth or Consequences: An Analysis of Vaporware and New Product Announcements," and thus has expertise in missed product ship dates.

The result picturing isn't a pretty one. After tallying up all the numbers, we found that, on average, Microsoft ships its desktop OSes 10 months late while its server OSes are just over a year late. The track record for major, mold-breaking OSes, however, is much worse. Windows 95, for example, was 14 months late, while NT Server 4.0 was 21 months late—nearly two years.

It's the mold-breaking products you should likely keep in mind when trying to assess when Longhorn might ship, because it's Microsoft's most ambitious operating system in years—or at least, it was before the company began stripping out key components like WinFS, a step the company took solely so it could hit a reasonable ship date.

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:58 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

02/25/2005

Microsoft admits targeting Wine users...

Category Microsoft

From ZDNet: Microsoft admits targeting Wine users

The software giant has admitted specifically excluding users of the popular Windows compatibility toolkit with its update tool.

Microsoft prioritised making its anti-piracy tool prevent users of Wine, an open source toolkit that allows users to run Windows applications under Linux, from downloading Windows updates, the software giant said on Friday.

A Microsoft spokesperson told ZDNet UK it made sure the validation tool used by its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) programme identified Wine users, so that only users are running a genuine version of Windows could download updates and add-on tools.

"As the most popular third-party translation technology in use, Wine was the first emulator to be specifically tested for via WGA," said the spokesperson. "Microsoft does not knowingly provide copyrighted Microsoft Windows OS files to users of third-party emulators or cross-platform API translation technologies such as Wine."

It's like they're trying as hard as possible to alienate anyone using any other platform. And this from the company who wants to play well with others.

And I love this second piece at the bottom...

Microsoft's public acknowledgement of Wine suggests a shift in corporate policy. Earlier this week Jeremy White, chief executive at CodeWeavers, which sells products based on Wine, said that Microsoft has until now had "a clear corporate policy to not talk about Wine".

For this reason, White said he was excited rather than worried to hear that the WGA validation tool was blocking Wine. "The reason we love this is because this shows that Microsoft is aware of Wine at very high levels," said White. "For us it's exciting -- it is an acknowledgement of us as a threat."

While I understand his statement on an emotional level, I don't think it's too wise on a rational one. I'm sorta kinda thinking that having a software giant worth more than $55 billion perceive you as a threat is not the best way to ensure your longevity if you probably don't have revenues that top the double-digit million dollar range. :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:28 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (4)

02/04/2005

We want to integrate well with everyone (on our terms, thank you!)...

Category Microsoft

The latest line out of Microsoft is that they really just want to play well with others. They're launching a major effort to integrate with non-Microsoft solutions. No more "embrace and extend"... They're all really nice guys who are just misunderstood...

I'm sorry, but I'll remain a skeptic on this one...

On one hand, we have: Microsoft's New Mantra - Compatibility

Microsoft Corp. adopted a new mantra on Thursday, promising to work harder to make its software work better with other software systems and hardware, Chairman Bill Gates said in an e-mail to customers.

Previously, such e-mails signaled the launch of massive new efforts by the world's largest software company. The last major initiative, to improve the security of the company's software, was launched by Gates three years ago, and most messages since then have focused on that issue.

But in Thursday's lengthy e-mail, sent to major corporate customers and made public by Microsoft, the company said it would boost efforts to make its software work more smoothly, or "interoperate" with other technologies.

"Over the years, our industry has tried many approaches to come to grips with the heterogeneity of software," Gates said. "But the solution that has proven consistently effective -- and the one that yields the greatest success for developers today -- is a strong commitment to interoperability."

[Side note... *how many* security patches are coming out next Tuesday? 13? Great focus, thank you...]

Then in the same e-mail, we have: Linux Makes Interoperability Harder

"Open source is a methodology for licensing and/or developing software - that may or may not be interoperable. Additionally, the open source development approach encourages the creation of many permutations of the same type of software application, which could add implementation and testing overhead to interoperability efforts," Gates wrote.

So... we're all for interoperability, so long as it's on proprietary software platforms (preferably Windows) that don't threaten our core business.

I'm sure Microsoft will come out with some efforts that will look really nice. But to use this latest missive as proof that the company is becoming a kinder, gentler Microsoft doesn't fly with me...

Guess I'm just too much of a cynic...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:55 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/01/2005

Only Microsoft would try something like this...

Category Microsoft

From Miami Herald: Microsoft Drops Alternate Windows Name

BRUSSELS, Belgium - Microsoft Corp. has agreed to change the name of a stripped-down version of its Windows operating system after European regulators balked at the company's original choice.

The name "Windows XP Reduced Media Edition" will be dropped, said Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake. She said the company is still working with the European Union on a suitable alternative.

EU officials had complained about the originally proposed name.

Complying with an EU antitrust order, Microsoft has said it will soon send computer manufacturers a version of Windows without the company's multimedia player.

What's not noted here is that they were going to sell both versions for the same price. I wouldn't be surprised to see the next name come out as "Windows XP Edition (without some of the stuff we normally put in there because the EU made us take it out but we'll still charge you the same price and then complain when consumers don't buy it and try to make the point that buyers really don't care in the long run) Version 1...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:07 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/22/2005

One more Exchange roadmap article...

Category Microsoft

From CRN: Exchange 12 To Rely On JET Engine Standby

The next version of Exchange Server, or E-12, will make the most out of the venerable JET engine and offer a laundry list of incremental improvements over the current release, Microsoft said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... know that already... Let's get to the analyst and customer quotes at the end...

Dana Gardner, an analyst at The Yankee Group, said Microsoft down-scaling its grand Exchange plans may work in its favor. At one point, Microsoft pushed Exchange Server as the basis for collaborative applications in an attempt to dislodge Lotus Domino. But Exchange was not up to the task. Meanwhile, "people started collaborating through blogs or doing app design through Web portals. Exchange got lucky in a sense. By not going to groupware, it's not stuck behind a portal and a hard place right now," he said.

The retreat from once-promised features has confused partners and customers alike. "[Microsoft] flubbed the whole unified store thing. Their credibility is shot with respect to collaboration on Exchange," said one longtime Exchange partner.

But perhaps more important, for many companies, legacy mail systems such as Exchange and Domino are beside the point, the partner said. "In small and medium-[size] businesses, Exchange faces Hotmail, [which] gives you 250 Mbytes of free storage, a calendar that can interact with Office, and it's free. If that's not enough, you can pay $9.95 a month and get more. That's an appealing story."

Gardner's quote is strange, to say the least. By not moving forward, you're not "stuck". Yeah, but you're also not offering your customers any value, either.

Love the quote "Their credibility is shot with respect to collaboration on Exchange". Boy, that's for sure! But you wouldn't know it by reading their spin. The SMB aspect is interesting, too... They may end up competing against themselves, and their free offering is definitely more enticing. :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 10:25 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/14/2005

So this is who taught Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer his dance moves...

Category Microsoft

TechnoPenguin!

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:25 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/09/2004

A major state university urges students to drop IE in favor of standards-compliant browsers...

Category Microsoft

... like Firefox.

From news.com: School's out to shun IE

Penn State's recommendation to drop IE has to concern MS. This is the classic pattern that MS has used in the past... Get the mindset of the developers and young people just starting out, and when they become the decision makers, you'll have your audience. That plan is now coming back to bite them.

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:49 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/03/2004

Giving Microsoft your blog content?

Category Microsoft

I'm not planning on switching over to Microsoft's new blog software (no great surprise there), but after reading this article in ZDNet, I'd advise people against it also.

Unlike rival services such as Blogger, MSN Spaces forces new users to grant Microsoft permission to "use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat" their blog postings.

You know, I don't think so... They could decide to publish a "Best Of MSN Spaces" book each year, populate it with your content, and give you nothing in return.

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:16 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/23/2004

And what is IE's exploit du jour this time?

Category Microsoft

From eWeek: IE Exploit Targets Banner Ad Servers

The ubiquitous banner ad has become the latest delivery mechanism for exploit code targeting a known flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser.

During a 12-hour window over the weekend, hackers broke into a load balancing server that handles ad deliveries for Germany's Falk eSolutions and successfully loaded exploit code on banner advertising served on hundreds of Web sites.

"Users visiting Web sites that carry banner advertising delivered by our system were periodically delivered a file from the compromised site. This file tries to execute the IE-Exploit function on the users' computer," Falk eSolutions confirmed Monday.

The exploit (Bofra/IFrame) takes advantage of an IE vulnerability discovered and reported to Microsoft earlier this month. It is a variant of the MyDoom virus that launched zero-day attacks on vulnerable IE users two weeks ago.

One word... Firefox.

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:24 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

11/23/2004

Microsoft attempts to "clarify" Linux patent issue...

Category Microsoft

From ZDNet: Microsoft attempts to clarify Linux patent issue

Microsoft claims that it did not warn Asian governments against Linux and was merely referring to a study done by an open-source group, but the author of the study says his report was misinterpreted

...

But Dan Ravicher, the author of the OSRM study and the executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, criticised Microsoft for using soundbites from the report.

"Balmer makes a very bold statement by saying 'Linux infringes X patents', which is much different than saying 'Linux potentially infringes X patents', as the requirement to prove infringement is much stiffer and more difficult than the requirement to simply file a case claiming infringement," said Ravicher. "As the SCO saga shows, filing a case based on an allegation is one thing, proving the merits of the allegation in court is something completely different."

Ravicher added that he feels Microsoft's customers are more at risk of being sued for patent infringement than those who use open-source.

"Not a single open-source software program has ever been sued for patent infringement, much less be found to infringe, while proprietary software, like Windows, is sued and found guilty of patent infringement quite frequently," said Ravicher.

"For examples, we have Eolas' patent being infringed by Windows and Kodak's patent being infringed by Java. If one believes the proof is in the pudding, that stark contrast shows how open-source software has much less to worry about from patents than proprietary software."

The Microsoft spokesperson was unable to confirm that Ballmer said that Linux does infringe patents and companies will be at risk of lawsuit, but said that it could infringe patents.

"According to its 2 August announcement, OSRM states that Linux could be in violation of 283 patents and, as such, could expose customers to undetermined licensing costs," said the spokesperson.

Ravicher claimed that Microsoft's decision to back down on its initial statement is simply a marketing tactic.

"Saying something one day that is fearful and scaremongering, and then backtracking is Microsoft's tried and tested PR tactic," said Ravicher. "As they said it the first time people believe it. It's a psychology trick."

You know... You can either think Ballmer is a shrewd businessman for saying these things, or he's a liability and a loose cannon. I'm starting to think it's the latter. Pretty soon he'll have a spin control staff the size of Gate's email filtering department... :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:13 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (5)

11/22/2004

Looks like I wasn't the only one upset with Ballmer's Asia comments...

Category Microsoft

From ZDNet: Linux player hits back at Ballmer

This guy makes some interesting points...

Open source solutions provider Cybersource has lashed out at Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer's statement in Singapore that Linux is potentially in violation of various software idea patents.

Con Zymaris, Cybersource chief executive officer, said that in reality, the platform which is most at risk from drowning in patent litigation is Microsoft's own, adding that even Microsoft's US$50 billion "cash hoard" may not be enough to save it.

"At present, Linux is not the target of any software idea patent attacks," he said. "Microsoft however, is facing between 30 and 35 such court actions. To name but a few, Microsoft has been ordered to pay US$521 million to Eolas for an infringement in Internet Explorer and another US$440 million settlement to InterTrust Technologies Corp. for infringement of digital restrictions management patents and US$1.6 billion to settle a patent and anti-trust suit bought against it by Sun Microsystems. That's over US$2 billion for just three suits, well over US$500 million per patent case. Furthermore, the number of court cases against Microsoft is increasing," Zymaris said.

Zymaris added that Ballmer's "scaremongering" is a response to the Singaporean government's recent decision to migrate 20,000 PCs to open source desktop productivity applications.

"Ballmer is trying to use FUD about software idea patents as a weapon to stem more government and corporate defections to Linux. In his haste, however, he forgets to mention that if software idea patents are a threat to Linux and open source, they are far more of a threat to Microsoft itself," he said.

"If we believe Ballmer, the Linux kernel may possibly infringe on 228 software idea patents. If that's the case, then it seems reasonable to expect Microsoft's Windows, which has a code-base ten times larger, infringes on over 2000. And that's just the operating system. Once we include Microsoft Exchange, Visual Studio, SQL Server and dozens of other products, Microsoft could be infringing on thousands more. On current track record, losing even 100 patent cases might be enough to deplete Microsoft current cash reserves. Suddenly that gargantuan mountain of money that Microsoft sucked dry from its customers doesn't quite seem large enough," Zymaris said.

"In watching Microsoft's recent movements in this space, we come to the conclusion that Microsoft have given up trying to compete with Linux and open source on value, quality and security. We had hoped that Microsoft would respond with better, more secure and much cheaper software, rather than resort to shabby veiled legal FUD. But if that's the message it wants to send the world, then so be it," concluded Zymaris.

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:49 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

11/19/2004

Ballmer's Linux comments in Asia still infuriate me...

Category Microsoft

When I read the stories yesterday about Ballmer "warning" Asian leaders to stay away from Linux due to IP violations, I was rather hot under the collar. If you can't beat them, threaten them.

Then MS went into spin control and said the reporter was wrong and that the comments were taken out of context. Typical reaction. Here's the transcript of the statement that caused all the furor...

After reading the transcript, I do feel like the initial stories were a little overblown. But there's still a kernel of truth there. Microsoft has stated that they are going to protect their IP more vigorously in the future. They've also been making more noise of late over how Open Source software (read: Linux) often violates IP rights and opens up the user to potential lawsuits. You want to tell me it's not a logical assumption that Microsoft may be the one to start the lawsuit frenzy?

This bugs me on a number of levels. One, it's the traditional Microsoft FUD technique to control the market. Get people worried about choices so that you can freeze the market and prevent movement away from your own software. Next, this type of behavior makes it really hard for me to buy statements from people like Robert Scoble and Gary Devendorf that Microsoft has really changed and just wants to help people integrate their software choices. It sounds like they are still bent on migration and single source solutions to me. And finally, regardless of their global reach, Microsoft is still a US company, and now they are preaching to foreign governments that they don't have choices. Linux is an international phenomenon, and doesn't have the stigma of being another American attempt to dominate a market. I just don't understand how Microsoft thinks this is going to fly well outside of our own borders...

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:56 AM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

11/17/2004

This is why I've switched to using Firefox when possible... another pair of IE viruses.

Category Microsoft

From eWeek: Two More IE Holes Surface

And this is on an XP SP2 box, fully patched.

sigh...

Posted by Tom Duff At 2:02 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/11/2004

Microsoft says Firefox no threat to IE

Category Microsoft

From news.com: Microsoft says Firefox no threat to IE

I know that Robert Scoble keeps telling everyone that Microsoft is different, that they are listening to their customers, that they are willing to learn... But in this article, there are some incredible self-serving and delusional statements that show that Microsoft hasn't changed at all.

Just days after the launch of open-source browser Firefox 1.0, Microsoft executives defended Internet Explorer, saying it is no less secure than any other browser and doesn't lack any important features.

At a security roundtable discussion in Sydney on Thursday, Ben English, Microsoft's security and management product manager, told attendees that IE undergoes "rigorous code reviews" and is no less secure than any other browser.

"Because IE is ubiquitous, you hear a lot more about it, but I don't think that Internet Explorer is any less secure than any other browser out there," English said.

Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia's managing director, agreed, saying he does not believe IE's market share is under attack following the recent high-profile debut of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser.

Vamos said that although he has heard other people mention the competitive threat posed by Firefox, he doesn't see it as a problem.

"I'm not sure that that is the reality. I have seen comments around that, but there is nothing I can refer to that really supports that," he said. Instead, Vamos said, consumers need to be educated about all the features already offered by Microsoft's browser.

"We probably need to do a bit of work to communicate the features that are in IE," he said.

Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hype surrounding the open-source movement and that if Microsoft's customers wanted new features, they would have told the company about it.

"I don't agree that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don't have, that feature is important," he said. "It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don't have. We have plenty of features that our customers don't use.

"If there are features in our products that are subpar or need to be added, then I have great confidence that we are an organization that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that."

English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users.

"I don't believe it is a true statement that IE doesn't have the features that our customers want," he said. "We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback, then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team."

Ross Fowler, managing director of Cisco Systems Australia and New Zealand, said the networking giant uses IE internally but only after deploying Cisco's Secure Agent, which is a desktop utility that monitors all activity and alerts the user if it spots something unusual--such as a keystroke-logging program.

"Internally, we have deployed Cisco Secure Agent to prevent those day-zero attacks, and we have more and more of our customers--particularly in the university sector--deploying the Cisco Secure Agent," Fowler said.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:26 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

11/04/2004

Firefox gaining more ground on IE...

Category Microsoft

From ZDNet: Firefox gains more ground on IE

I was watching a blog thread on someone's site that was talking about conversion rates of clicks to downloads at the Firefox download area. They figured about 50% of those who visited downloaded the software. The method of their computation was open to debate, but still... Then the conversation turned to whether 50% was abysmally low or incredibly successful. I saw it as nothing short of astounding...

In the IT media, a percentage point drop of IE usage translates into a major story. Can you imagine what the writing will be if Firefox takes IE down from the current 92.9% to anything under 80%? We're talking op-ed columns predicting the immediate death of MS... :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:23 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

10/27/2004

Microsoft's Worst Nightmare...

Category Microsoft

And if you don't think that David can battle Goliath any more, read this article by Business 2.0: Microsoft's Worst Nightmare

An excellent Firefox browser article that shows that one person can still make a huge difference...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:49 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/27/2004

Windows vs. Linux... Which is more secure?

Category Microsoft

Recently, I blogged about an article where Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was interviewed and was stated that the whole Linux issue was overblown. But in yet another action that seems to be contrary to that "core belief", we have him sending out an executive email to customers stating that Linux is less secure than Windows, offers less total cost of ownership value, and can't be relied upon due to the ad-hoc development efforts of the package. For someone who professes that Linux is not a serious threat, the dude sure spends an increasing amount of time and effort trying to convince us of that fact.

Then on top of that, we have a new report by journalist Nicolas Petreley that shows that Linux is *far* more secure than Microsoft when you look at the most recent track record of alerts and security notices.

It's just amazing that Microsoft-funded studies find Linux less secure and independent studies find Linux more secure... :-)

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:34 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/23/2004

Does Microsoft win by quality or by inertia?

Category Microsoft

I've watched a number of my friends switch from using Internet Explorer to FireFox. I've also seen people break out of the Office environment and move to OpenOffice.org. Microsoft Messenger? How about Trillian or Gaim instead? All worthy alternatives.

I've got each of these alternatives loaded on my computer(s). I agree that using them is a good idea to avoid security breaches and to support the concept of choice. And what do I find myself doing almost daily? Launching IE and Word. Why? Is it because I think IE and Word are superior products and should be my first choice? No. I think I finally put my finger on it today.

It's inertia.

Old habits die hard, and I tend to use what I'm used to. I'm used to IE, and that's where my bookmarks are. So I launch IE. I'm used to the features in Word, so I launch Word. Since Firefox is a little different and my bookmarks aren't exactly the same, I don't think to launch it first. Since OpenOffice.org takes longer to launch and doesn't react quite the way I'm used to, I use Word instead. Not that the MS options are better, just that they are more familiar. The admittedly minor effort to break out of a rut keeps me from practicing what I preach and believe.

So what do I do? Force myself to take those steps to eliminate the convenience factor. I run Gaim on my Linux box which is right next to my laptop. I removed the IE icon from the Quick Launch bar on W2K. Now my quick option is to launch FireFox, and in reality there's only a couple of bookmarks that weren't there from my initial install and import of IE bookmarks. For my December e-ProWire newsletter articles, I'm writing them with OpenOffice.org's Writer. I'll save in Word format, as I need to exchange the data with someone else. But still, I'll use this as my personal self-training.

This flaw in my character makes me wonder how much of Microsoft's market share is predicated on quality and how much is due to convenience.

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:34 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (5)

10/21/2004

I'm still not seeing the correlation here...

Category Microsoft

From ZDNet: Ballmer: We Need A $100 PC

"The biggest problem we have right now is that people who should be paying for software aren't," Ballmer told an audience of technology executives at an industry conference here sponsored by market researcher Gartner.

One way to stem piracy is to offer consumers in emerging countries a low-cost PC, Ballmer said. "There has to be...a $100 computer to go down-market in some of these countries. We have to engineer (PCs) to be lighter and cheaper," he said.

People in poorer countries have one low-cost computing option, Ballmer said. "They have a leased-PC concept: the Internet cafe. Pay-by-the-drink computer use--that has a very important place in the market. (Microsoft) has five times as many Hotmail users in India and China than there are PCs because of this," he said.

Ballmer said piracy of Microsoft's Windows and Office software in emerging markets has become a major concern for the software giant, especially among business users who can afford to pay for software.

"PCs are not selling to the lower end of the population in China and India. People buying machines there are relatively affluent. So...should the prices be lower? Not really. Until government and situational factors reduce piracy...those people...don't pay," Ballmer said.

But lower prices have become part of Microsoft's strategy for gaining market share in developing nations. In recent months, the software maker has announced plans to introduce low-cost "starter editions" of Windows XP into countries including India, Russia and Thailand. These versions will be bundled only with entry-level PCs and will not be available for retail sale.

This seems to be a trend that is gathering steam at Microsoft... Offer cheaper, less feature-rich versions of software in order to get emerging countries to pay for it instead of pirating it. And now it's proposing cheaper hardware to drive the demand for Microsoft's software. And I guess I'm just not making the connection...

If I can buy a $5 copy of Win XP SP2 on the street corner and I don't care about piracy, why in the world would I want to spend more than that to get less? And if I can get a $100 PC, I think this means I can now have my own $5 copy of Win XP *and* my own $5 copy of Office XP. Also, I don't see how offering software with little profit margin means that you'll gain the margin later. If I *do* choose to buy your crippled $15 version of Win XP, does this necessarily mean that I'm now willing to buy Longhorn in x number of years for $300? I doubt it. I'm going to demand a $15 version of Longhorn or I'll go buy the $5 version on the corner.

While Microsoft can currently afford to *buy* market share due to the incredible margins on their software cash cows, I believe this is the beginning signs of a desperate effort to avoid a downward trend. Once you set lower price expectations, that becomes your new baseline...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:39 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (2)

10/21/2004

OK, Mr. Ballmer... Which is it?

Category Microsoft

On one side, we have this... Ballmer Calls Linux Threat Overblown (CRN)

"There is no appreciable amount of Linux on the client anywhere in the world," Ballmer said in response to questions from Gartner analysts. "People can read the drama stories. ... They read about the city of Paris. It said it would adopt Linux. Well, the study came back, and there's no ROI case for Linux for the next seven to eight years."

Ballmer said similar stories of Linux adoption in Brazil and elsewhere around the globe also have been blown out of proportion. He pointed to the city of Munich, Germany, which drew lots of media attention by opting for Linux over Windows clients. "Now, Munich is Munich. We lost the city of Munich," Ballmer said, with a caveat. "You hear 65,000 stories, and there's still only one customer. And [Munich] ... what's a polite word for this? They're still diddling around, deciding on whether to do the migration."

Then over here, we have... Microsoft Courts "Non-Friendly" Linux Users To Increase Sales (Bloomberg)

Ballmer's latest move to fend off Linux date to July, 2003, when he tapped 11-year Microsoft veteran Martin Taylor to help convert Linux devotees and what Taylor calls ``corporate non- friendlies.'' Among Taylor's first decisions: to attend LinuxWorld 2003, a gathering of 11,000 Linux developers.

Back at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters, he ordered a group of 30 employees who drum up interest in Windows to seek out Linux users and persuade them Microsoft is better.

``I said `Dammit, go talk to these people. Show them some love,''' Taylor, 34, said he told the group's leaders in a planning meeting earlier this year.

Ballmer, 48, is also hiring Linux salespeople. The company in April hired Karl Aigner, who helped Suse Linux convince the city of Munich to convert its 14,000 Windows personal computers to Linux, Microsoft's biggest loss to Linux in the PC market. In January Microsoft recruited Bill Hilf, 35, who promoted Linux for International Business Machines Corp., and the company has added 10 salespeople from top Linux seller Red Hat Inc.

Linux is growing faster than Windows. Windows accounted for 58 percent of server operating-system software shipped in 2003, compared with 23 percent for Linux, according to preliminary data from Framingham, Massachusetts-based researcher IDC.

``Linux is clearly a worry,'' said Robert Mattson, an analyst in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, at Gartmore Group, which manages $77 billion including Microsoft shares. ``I can't understand anyone who says it isn't. Microsoft's growth rate would have been faster had Linux not been there.''

Couple this with official statements from Microsoft stating that the threat of open-source software may have negative impact on earnings, and we've got some serious spin control going on by Microsoft's president...

Posted by Tom Duff At 5:16 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/15/2004

Earth to Mr. Gates... What planet are you now approaching?

Category Microsoft

From USA Today: Gates Has A Plan - Computainment (thanks, Alan!)

While most of the interview is about the new media offerings, there are a couple of Bill Gates answers that show a major disconnect from reality...

Q: Speaking of security, Internet Explorer has had well-publicized holes …

Gates: Understand those are cases where you are downloading third-party software.

Ahhh... I understand. I was unaware that displaying a graphic image on my browser was considered a "third-party software" product...

Q: There is talk of a Google browser. Internet Explorer has had its security woes. How do you keep users?

Gates: More has been invested in making IE secure than any browser on the planet by a long shot. Nothing is going to change. That's the one over 90% of people are going to keep using.

Could it be that more has been invested in making IE secure because it was such a security risk by a long shot? Is this why sites concerned with secure computing practices advise against using IE? Nothing is going to change? Talk about arrogance...

Posted by Tom Duff At 3:31 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/13/2004

Scobleizer: Microsoft doesn't get credit...

Category Microsoft

Yesterday, Robert Scoble had a blog entry titled Steve Jobs Positions Microsoft In Business Week. In the posting, he laments:

Steve Jobs of Apple says, in BusinessWeek, Microsoft sucks. Oh, OK, he didn't really say that, but he implied it.

The funny thing is that he's right. We do suck. We suck at not getting credit for the really cool things that Microsoft has been kicking out left and right.

Being the typical pro-IBM/anti-Microsoft person, I at first thought this was just typical MS propoganda. But I couldn't shake this thought. He's actually right, I think. Microsoft *does* come out with some cool stuff. Visual Studio is generally acknowledged to be a killer IDE. And I'm sure there's other things out there (we'll leave Exchange out to make it fair). But why does MS get bashed in the press and by techno-geeks?

I'll venture forth a guess.... All the cool stuff you deliver isn't worth anything if you can't deliver on the basics... Security... Reliability... Scalability... Announced feature sets...

That's also true for life in general... Your best efforts and results aren't worth anything if people can't trust you with the basics...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:08 PM Location In The Basement... | Permalink | Comments (1)

10/05/2004

VUNet Q and A with Steve Ballmer

Category Microsoft

Part 1: http://www.vnunet.com/analysis/1158568

Part 2: http://www.vnunet.com/analysis/1158567

Interesting view of Microsoft from Ballmer's eyes... Though I like the answers to these two questions. Basically, Microsoft still knows what you need and you better like it...

When Computing asks chief information officers about Microsoft, the most common response is to do with software quality problems, patching, security flaws and so on. Do you have an issue about trust with your customers?

We recognise that listening and responding to our customers is and will be a key quality that allows us to continue to see the kind of success we have had. In some very important ways in the past couple of years we have really taken that to heart. The heart of trust is responsiveness - do you listen, do you pay attention, do you learn?

Take security - big issue for our customers, no doubt about it. Starting about two-and-a-half years ago, we made security priority number one, the Trustworthy Computing initiative. There's a lot of hard problems there, the bad guys are out there and going to stay out there.

We've done a huge amount of beneficial work - we're not all the way to where our customers want us to be, but I think most people who look at it objectively will see the work we've done to improve our patch process or the work on management deployment tools, the work we've done to dramatically reduce the number of vulnerabilities in our product, the work we've done on firewalls and other isolation technologies, the work we did in the Windows roadmap.

People sometimes tease me and say you've not had a browser release - I say, we just had a significant browser release - it's called Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). If you want to safely browse the internet, if security matters to you, we just did a significant browser release. You can't have it both ways. This stuff is important. We changed our plans for Longhorn [the next version of Windows] in order to be able to prioritise some of the security needs that we delivered in SP2.

Are we everywhere our customers want us to be? I'm not going to say that. But I am going to say we have done the right stuff, we've taken the message to heart, and I think customers are now seeing that, seeing the outputs, seeing the results and the improvements. The data I see says we are making progress in terms of customers' perceptions. People want to know we are being responsive, that's what trust is based on.

<later on...>

Has the approach to innovation in Microsoft changed? Often now, customers say they don't want loads of new features, they want the existing product to work. They want quality first.

Customers need innovation. Nobody ever thinks they need innovation, they think they need improvement in what they've got. That's why I say there's twin pillars - they want both. The companies that succeed have to bring products to customers that they don't know they want. If you think you know everything you want, and you only listen to what your customers want - you will fail. No company in this industry can succeed by only giving customers what they ask for. You have to try things that surprise people. If you don't you will fail.

I don't buy into 'customers don't want more features.' All customers, someplace

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06/30/2010

This is why I have such a hard time believing/diving into any "new" Microsoft offering...

06/18/2010

Here's how at least one SharePoint blogger guru views the Notes discussions this week....

12/28/2009

The SharePoint and Lotus communities are much more alike than different...

12/11/2009

Well worth reading (for more than just the Microsoft angles): Analyst: 'It is game over for Microsoft in consumer'

12/08/2009

So... with Windows 7, Lotus Notes is apparently a discardable application according to Microsoft

06/15/2009

Why enterprises are moving to Google Apps, Gmail

04/26/2009

IBM really needs to have a response to this "Comparing Lotus Domino/Notes and Exchange Server 2010" piece...

04/25/2009

Microsoft: The Decline Begins

04/21/2009

I'm having a hard time seeing where Windows 7 Starter version for netbooks is going to work...

04/13/2009

Enjoying my ASP.NET class at Netdesk here in Portland...

03/04/2009

At what point does cost savings of cloud trump control of on-premise? It may be lower than I thought (to Lotus/MS peril if you don't have an answer)

03/02/2009

GlaxoSmithKline deal highlights Microsoft's overseas launch of hosted collaboration software

02/25/2009

Which file download names would *you* like to deal with?

02/19/2009

So the Notes/SharePoint community site idea seemed to have some backing... now for a descriptive domain name?

02/18/2009

Any interest in forming a community of Notes professionals who also work with SharePoint?

01/17/2009

Potential 'big badass botnet' spreading fast - ZDNet

01/15/2009

Au contraire: Exchange's lead over Notes actually 'getting bigger and bigger,' says Gartner

12/31/2008

SharePoint/Notes interaction question: Can SharePoint be made to accept Notes:// URL formats?

11/25/2008

Michael Sampson's Seamless Teamwork book just showed up today!

11/18/2008

Microsoft Exchange's challenges: partners, the cloud, and (still) Lotus Notes

11/18/2008

Microsoft kills Windows Live OneCare and Equipt subscription services

11/10/2008

Study: SharePoint, Lotus in for Long Collaboration Fight

10/30/2008

Comparing the Microsoft PDC conference with Lotusphere...

10/26/2008

Here in Los Angeles for Microsoft PDC...

10/14/2008

Anyone going to the Microsoft PDC conference in LA in a couple of weeks?

07/21/2008

New studies highlight the potential downsides of SharePoint

06/28/2008

Glad to see .docx formats taking over... NOT! :)

06/25/2008

I stumbled across the transcript for Unify's financial conference call today...

05/24/2008

Yahoo buy not a strategy in itself: Microsoft CEO

03/22/2008

OOXML Stalemate May Lead to Cliff-Hanger Ending

03/07/2008

SearchDomino... probably not the most opportune timing for this article.

03/04/2008

IBM launches "Microsoft-free" PC initiative

02/29/2008

OK... are the Windows games REALLY necessary to run Windows?

02/29/2008

I wondered if we'd finally get to this particular slant on the Microsoft Vista/Intel chipset controversy...

02/18/2008

Yahoo's Chinese partner concerned about Microsoft bid

02/13/2008

Hadn't seen or heard about the Vista "Capable" class action lawsuit...

Which file download names would you like to deal with?

And that leaves what option, Microsoft?

Well... that didn't take long to find the first IE7 security flaw...