July 23rd, 2008
Microsoft splits its Platforms & Services unit in two
Microsoft announced on July 23 that it is cleaving its Platforms & Services Division in half and the head of the formerly combined unit is leaving the company.
Microsoft is carving up the so-called PSD unit along the natural fault lines. The Windows and Windows Live team will be one unit, run by three senior vice presidents (Steven Sinofsky, Jon DeVaan and Bill Veghte. And the Online Services Business (OSB) will be headed by a new, and as-yet-unnamed senior leader. Microsoft is conducting a search inside and outside the company for that person.
Both of the new, separate divisions (Windows/Windows Live and OSB) are reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer.
Kevin Johnson — one of Microsoft’s three presidents and the current head of PSD – is leaving the company as part of the restructuring. No date or reason for his departure was provided at the time I posted this blog entry.
Update No. 1: Johnson is going to run Juniper Networks, according to the Wall Street Journal. Still no word if his departure from Microsoft is voluntary or not. (I’m betting the latter.)
In its press release announcing the shake-up, Microsoft highlighted that the two businesses — Windows/Windows Live and Online — are doing well.
The reality is a bit different. Microsoft has been struggling to convince the market that Windows Vista, of which it has sold 180 million copies since launch, isn’t a flop. And the Online Services Business continues to be a sink hole for resources, as Microsoft’s latest financial results indicated.
Today’s announcement has left me wondering about a couple of things:
* Why has Microsoft decided not to appoint a single head of Windows as part of this latest reorg? It sounds like a triumvirate (head of Windows/Live engineering Sinofsky; head of Microsoft’s Core Operating System division DeVaan; and head of Windows/Live marketing Veghte) will run “Platforms.” Why is there no single Windows/Windows Live champion — other than Ballmer himself — and no plans to look for one?
* What kind of person is Microsoft seeking to run OSB? Has the company already decided against promoting Brian McAndrews, the former head of aQuantive, into this role? (I hear Microsoft is expecting McAndrews to be a “strong candidate.”)
* How much, if at all, did the Microsoft-Yahoo debacle play into this shake-up?
In the meantime, what’s your take? What’s behind the latest reorg — and will it matter?
July 22nd, 2008
Microsoft hints about new profile-centric Win Live wares
The blogosphere was atwitter (pun intended) over the past day or two about Facebook’s recent revamp designed to make user pages more profile-centric.
But Facebook isn’t the only one going this route. It sounds like Microsoft is going more profile-centric in a couple of different ways with its upcoming Windows Live software and services.
Microsoft recently completed its internal “Milestone 1″ release of its next wave of Windows Live services, according to Brian Hall, General Manager of Windows Live. Microsoft is planning to make the first test bits of software and services for the PC, Web and phone that are part of “Windows Live Wave 3″ available to folks outside the company as part of a private beta later this summer, he said.
Hall declined to provide specifics, but he did note that Microsoft will be “taking advantage of the profile concept with Live” in its next release.
Windows Live Profile already exists as part of Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s existing blogging/social-networking platform. I’m not clear whether Microsoft is intending to replace Live Spaces with a more profile-centric platform or just make Live profile more front and center to the next version of Live Spaces.
“There’s lots of opportunity for improvement with Spaces,” Hall said. He noted that the user base of Live Spaces grew quickly, “but the (user) engagement on Spaces compared to other social sites is low.”
It also sounds like, from hints Hall dropped when I chatted with him this week, that the updated Windows Live Profile technology will be more tightly integrated with the next versions of Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and other Windows Live services.
“We’re not creating another social network,” Hall said. “We’re more about fusing the best of our platform” with other Live services, he said.
When Microsoft finally takes the covers off its more profile-centric Live wares, I’ll be curious to see how much the Microsoft Research C2 project — which I likened to Microsoft’s version of FriendFeed — played into the design. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, speaking of things Live-related, the LiveSide guys noted Microsoft has made available test versions of the mobile portal and Mac clients for Live Mesh, its synchronization and collaboration service. The mobile portal is currently available to testers; the pre-beta Mac version was briefly available, but Microsoft pulled it after LiveSide wrote about it.
July 21st, 2008
Microsoft delivers Home Server data-corruption fix in Power Pack 1
On July 21, Microsoft announced that the final version of the Power Pack 1 update for Windows Home Server is available for immediate download.
Power Pack 1 is basically a feature pack. It adds 64-bit Vista support, shared-folder backup, remote-access improvements and power-consumption functionality to Windows Home Server. Power Pack 1 also includes a fix to the data-corruption bug that had plagued a number of Home Server customers.
Microsoft decided to delay delivery of Power Pack 1 to include the data-corruption fix, a choice that met with a mixed reception among Home Server users. In mid-May, Microsoft acknowledged it had cut the expected database-backup functionality from Power Pack 1 in order to ship the Power Pack sooner rather than later.
Windows Home Server users who want Power Pack 1 can get it now from the Microsoft Download Center.
July 21st, 2008
New studies highlight the potential downsides of SharePoint
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.
First, a quick refresher as to what SharePoint is — especially important given how difficult it is to figure this out from Microsoft’s own Web site. SharePoint is a collection of six servers that provide document collaboration, portal creation, enterprise search, enterprise content management, electronic forms creation and management and business intelligence functions (analysis and publication of business information).
Microsoft released the most recent version of SharePoint, known as MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 a year and a half ago. A point release of SharePoint sounds likely for some time this year, based on information in the Forrester study. The next full-fledged version of SharePoint, currently known by its codename of SharePoint 14, is expected in 2009. Microsoft is expected to add Master Data Management, as well as more social-networking funcitonality to the next version of SharePoint.
Forrester Research published a new 25-page report on July 16 entitled “Now Is The Time To Determine SharePoint’s Place In Your Application Development Strategy.” In preparing the study, Forrester interviewed 13 user and five vendorcompanies, including Advanced Micro Devices, easyJet, General Mills, Hitachi, Microsoft, TPGAxon Capital, and Unisys.
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.
While these two facts are a positive for Microsoft — and a big part of the reason the Redmondians are going to bang the SharePoint app-dev drum increasingly loudly in the coming fiscal year — the lock-in and higher costs are not good news for Microsoft customers.
The Forrester study provided a fairly lengthy laundry list of app-dev-specific shortcomings in Office SharePoint Server 2007 — everything from the lack of support for SharePoint database replication, to required custom development to include data stored in SharePoint lists for reporting purposes. Application lifecycle management of SharePoint is incomplete, the report authors said. And enterprise data integration for SharePoint is “primitive.”
Forrester recommended customers keep their SharePoint customizations to a minimum and that they create a comprehensive SharePoint governance policy sooner rather than later.
The other new SharePoint study I had a chance to see is from J. Boye, a Danish consultancy specializing in Web projects and strategy. Entitled “Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites,” the 25-page study was published June 19.
July 18th, 2008
Open-source Castle Project founder joins Microsoft
Hamilton “Hammett” Verissimo, the founder of the open-source Castle Project, is joining Microsoft on August 11 as a program manager on the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF) team.
Verissimo will continue to work on Castle “as much as I want,” he blogged on July 16. “So nothing changes.”
The Castle Project has been working on “a simple set of tools to speed up the development of common enterprise and web applications while promoting good architecture.”
According to the Castle Project Web site, “Castle was born from the Apache Avalon project, in mid 2003, as an attempt to build a very simple inversion of control container.” There are a number of projects currently listed under the Castle banner, including MonoRail, a Model-View Controller framework; ActiveRecord, an enterprise data-mapping pattern; and a couple of microkernel projects.
From Verissimo’s blog post announcing his decision to join Microsoft:
“You probably remember the many times that I’ve made public my disagreement with MS, the .Net team, the ASP.Net team and even the virtualization team. I’m still carrying these disagreements, my beliefs haven’t shifted a bit. The difference is that from now on I will have a chance to make a difference, to tell people what - in my view - is wrong and how it could be fixed, directly.
“I’m joining MS with nothing but respect to those guys — as I love .net and it is my platform of choice, and the same is true to most of you reading this — and have felt the same respect from them. IMHO (In my humble opinion) respect is the foundation of a good relationship.”
Microsoft’s Developer Division has attracted several high-profile open-source developers in the past few years. Jim Hugunin of Iron Python fame and John Lam, the force behind IronRuby, are both Microsoft staffers.
July 18th, 2008
Microsoft’s online plan: Spend, spend, spend
If you think Microsoft’s been spending like crazy in the online space, you ain’t seen nothing yet. (And that’s not counting when or if Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar bid for Yahoo’s search business is ever consummated.)
Microsoft missed earnings projections when it announced its Q4 FY 2008 numbers on July 17. To some company watchers’ surprise, it wasn’t Windows Vista — which Microsoft claims to have sold 180 million licenses now — that was to blame. Instead, yet again, it was Microsoft’s Online Systems Business (OSB), more than anything else, that dragged down the numbers.
However, Microsoft officials told Wall Street analysts not to expect Microsoft to change its OSB investing-for-the-longhaul strategy any time soon. Microsoft is planning to step up its online spending around driving usage of Live Search and growing its advertiser base for its adCenter online-ad platform.
Chief Financial Officer Chris Lidell told Wall Streeters that “the additional investments of several hundreds of millions of dollars is worth the short-term cost, given the opportunity to participate in a market where the opportunity is measured in the tens of billions of dollars.”
Once it became clear that Microsoft wasn’t going to be buying Yahoo or — at least for the time being, even just its search unit — and that Yahoo would do a search-outsourcing deal with Google instead, Microsoft decided to “accelerate our online services’ organic growth strategy,” Liddell said. Specifically, according to a transcript of Microsoft’s earnings call:
“(A)bout two-thirds of the incremental spend that we are planning is related to investments to drive usage of our search offering. We’re dialing up our search distribution initiatives with targeted OEM toolbar [alt] search deals, scaling search globally with investments in localized engineering and data centers, pursuing acquisitions and partnerships to build vertical content to support our commercial strategy, accelerating the rollout of our Cashback program, and increasing marketing in the business to grow awareness and drive traffic.
“Second, we are upping the investments in our ad platform and increasing the number of advertisers and high quality inventory on that platform. Specifically, these investments are in the area of accelerating the integration of our ad platform assets, expanding our sales and service capabilities, small acquisitions to enhance the platform technology, and investments in strategic partnerships to increase third-party inventory available to advertisers on our ad platform.”
To be fair, it wasn’t just OSB that impacted Microsoft’s earnings per share. Microsoft claims to have sold more Xbox 360s than its guidance had reflected (resulting in greater cost of goods sold), as well as to have grown consulting and support revenues (both of which “carries higher associated costs than does software revenue”) more quickly in the quarter than planned.
General Manager of Investor Relations Colleen Healy also told analysts yesterday that the lower profits also could be traced to being “able to bring servers in our data centers online faster than expected and we invested in premium online content, which is [higher creative and agency fees associated with it].” And then there were high headcount-growth, product development and new marketing campaigns also playing in, she claimed.
Do you think Microsoft has no choice but to keep pouring money into OSB? Is there some point at which the Redmondians could/should give up trying to compete in consumer Web search and simply focus on other channels (like paid subscriptions for enterprise software/services) in the online space?
July 18th, 2008
Microsoft Fiji beta over; final ‘TV Pack’ due soon
Microsoft is done testing “Fiji,” its update to Windows Media Center and is preparing to release the product — officially known as “Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008.”
Microsoft notified testers that it had RTM’d (released to manufacturing) Fiji on July 17, according to testers who requested anonymity. From the alleged release note:
“Fiji, officially known as Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008, has Released! The input from Self Host testers has been invaluable to this product and the team would like to thank each of you for your bug reports and feedback.
“As the release team is taking a much needed break, our next focus will be to post the final build onto the Products servers. Please check the newsgroups for updates. Once the build is live, we will notify you.
“-Windows Media Center-”
(I’ve asked Microsoft to confirm officially the RTM of Fiji. If/when I hear back, I will update this post.)
Update: Microsoft confirmed the RTM of Fiji in a new Knowledge Base article (No. 955485). It says:
“The Windows Media Center TV Pack was released on July 16, 2008. Not all computers that are shipped by hardware vendors in the retail channel have the Windows Media Center TV Pack installed. “
I’ve also heard from a couple of testers that Microsoft is not planning to release Fiji publicly until September 3 at the CEDIA conference in Denver.
Microsoft has done its best to maintain an information lock-down about Fiji since it began signing up testers for the beta over a year ago. Microsoft sent Fiji beta code to external testers this past spring.
Recently, Fiji testers lashed out against Microsoft when Microsoft made it plain that the DirectTV support many had been expecting to be part of Fiji would not be in the product. Testers are now wondering if Microsoft is intending to wait until Windows 7, due in late 2009 or thereabouts, to introduce DirectTV support — even though Microsoft signed a deal in 2006 to get DirectTV content on Windows PCs and Xboxes.
Some testers also were upset about Microsoft’s expected distribution plan for Fiji. According to one Fiji tester:
“The (Fiji) release going to be OEM only on new machines. They have not been testing any upgrade scenarios whatsoever — even when they were at RC (Release Candidate) 0. Did they not watch the whole Ultimate Extras debaucle? They put Media Center on millions of PCs thru Home Premium, and then give them all the shaft?”
(Ultimate Extras are the set of premium add-ons Microsoft promised to make available to Vista Ultimate users only as an incentive for them to buy the highest-end version of Vista. Microsoft has dribbled out slowly and sporadically the anticipated Ultimate Extras, angering many of the enthusiasts who were expecting more and better.)
Engadget reported earlier this month that — even minus the DirectTV support — Fiji will still deliver a number of new features to Media Center users, including new HD recording preferences; better ability to control the tuners; and the replacement of DVR-MS with WTV ” so hopefully 3rd parties like VideoReDo and DVRMSToolBox can adapt to the new format.”
Any Media Center Fiji testers out there who are still excited about “Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008″? Why/why not?
July 16th, 2008
Poll: Would a MicroAOL be better than a MicroHoo?
The latest rumor relating to the Redmondians is Microsoft is contemplating some kind of acquisition or merger with AOL.
As much as I (and many others inside and outside Microsoft and Yahoo) thought a Microsoft buy of Yahoo made little sense, a Microsoft-AOL tie-up seemingly makes even less.
With Yahoo, Microsoft at least was set to get Yahoo’s search share (and/or to take the second biggest search vendor out of the equation). But what would Redmond gain by buying AOL? I am guessing that the Microsoft dealmakers are rationalizing the idea by claiming the AOL online properties would give Microsoft and its adCenter advertisers more potential ad real estate.
But what else would Microsoft get from an AOL acquisition? Are there AOL sites and services that don’t overlap with MSN.com and the various Windows Live ones that I am overlooking? Is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer going to cite potential “backend-infrastructure synergies” or “brain trust” rationalizations for an AOL purchase, like he originally did a Yahoo one?
Loading …Other theories and rants welcome in the Talkbacks.
Me? I think Microsoft is doing everything in its power right now to mess with Yahoo. And if Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is talking to Time Warner/AOL, Ballmer is going to do his best to thwart any kind of deal his nemesis might try to forge.
July 16th, 2008
Microsoft opens up Live Mesh to more testers
If you were closed out of Microsoft’s Live Mesh preview for lack of an invite, you now can get in you’re now more likely to get in.
Microsoft has opened up availability of its Live Mesh Software + Service sync/collaboration platform to any more U.S.-based testers with a Windows Live ID. (Those outside the U.S. also can get access to the test build as long as they have a Live ID and are willing to change their Windows operating system region and language setting to EN-US.)
Update: Looks like Microsof changed its mind. LiveSide has a copy of the original Microsoft Forum wording on its site, claiming that
“Live Mesh is now openly available to anyone in the U.S.
The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No sign up needed to participate!”
But when I checked back at 1 p.m. EST on July 16, Microsoft had changed its wording, narrowing the number of testers who will get access from “anyone” to “more.” The new wording:
“Signing up for Live Mesh now!
The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that we have simplified the signup process for our US customers. We are doubling the upper limit of our technology preview program. Our technology preview is still limited to ensure great performance and experience for our customers. You can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No waiting list at this time!“
Microsoft officials acknowledged the opening up of the Live Mesh preview via the Live Mesh Forum on July 15, as first reported by the LiveSide.Net site.
Microsoft announced its Live Mesh technology and strategy in April at the Web 2.0 conference. At that time, Microsoft said that it would make the preview release of Live Mesh available to 10,000 testers.
Microsoft is expected to unveil a full-fledged beta of Live Mesh later this year, and is expected to provide a Live Mesh software development kit (SDK) at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in late October.
Microsoft has been providing new features and functionality for Live Mesh as part of periodic updates to the product/service. Microsoft has said it will add support for Mac OSX clients to its Live Mesh scheme, but so far has yet to make this available to testers outside the company.
July 15th, 2008
Should the Empire strike back?
Microsoft still has yet to show off the fruits of the $300 million plus it spent to create a new consumer-focused ad campaign designed to make Windows Vista and Microsoft “cool.” But in the interim, some bloggers are weighing in with advice for the Redmondians that runs contrary to what some Microsoft backers had been advocating Microsoft do to “take back” the operating-system conversation from Apple.
Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle had a good post yesterday, entitled “Memo to Microsoft: Don’t Be Cool.” In it, Silverman links a post from Michael Mace, a principal with Rubicon Consulting and — back in the 1987-1997 period — a marketing director with Apple.
Even though Mace hasn’t part of the Cupertino camp for 10+ years, he, too, had some advice for the Redmondians, which boiled down to “don’t let yourself be goaded by Apple.” Mace noted:
“When I was at Apple, one the competitive team’s central goals was to goad Microsoft and Intel into targeting us in public. We used all sorts of tactics to irritate them. We printed bumper stickers that read ‘Honk if your Pentium has bugs.’ We hounded them in online discussions. We did press and analyst tours demonstrating all sorts of annoying flaws we’d found in Windows.
“The whole idea was to get them so pissed off that they would lash out at us in public. Because we knew that when a market leader attacks a challenger, it just makes the challenger more credible.”
To date, Microsoft has been following this advice in regards to Vista. The result? Apple has been talking more about Vista than Microsoft has. OK, that’s an exaggeration. But it isn’t an exaggeration to say that Apple’s “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercials have provided many a casual Windows PC user with all the Vista information s/he has absorbed.
So what should Microsoft do? I’ve been an advocate of Microsoft striking back at Apple, preferably with some uncharacteristically self-deprecating humor. But now I’m wondering if that might result in Microsoft playing right into Apple’s hands.
(I had been thinking Microsoft might be well-served on the Office side of the house by some kind of similarly satirical campaign aimed at skewering the myths around Google Docs/Apps demolishing Office’s market share. But again, now I wonder if such a move might be just what Google wants: An acknowledgement by Goliath that David’s stone hit right where it hurts.)
Do you think the Empire should strike back at Apple and/or Google? Or is Microsoft right to continue to (at least publicly) take the high road, in terms of not lashing out at its competitors?
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