Salesforce pushes collaboration

 "Salesforce.com has updated its Chatter social enterprise tool to add instant messaging and screensharing. The move puts Chatter in competition with Citrix’s GoToMeeting, Cisco’s WebEx and other collaboration tools. 

"The company, which has 150,000 Chatter networks, is continually adding features to its primary social enterprise tool."

Salesforce pushes collaboration with Chatter update | Networking | ZDNet UK

Its good to see Facebook coming in to this space, but it is also hopeful that the market will develop open standards so these different providers can all interact.

Pirate Pay torrent 'blocker' backed by Microsoft

 "A Russian company has developed software it says can disrupt and prevent people from downloading pirated content. 

"Pirate Pay has been backed by Microsoft and has so far worked with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures to stop "thousands" of downloads. 

"The tool poses as real bit torrent users but then "confuses" peer-to-peer networks, causing disconnections. 

"Critics argue that the method will be ineffective in the long term"

BBC News - Pirate Pay torrent 'blocker' backed by Microsoft

This is simply wrong.  What ever the threat of IP lose to massive companies is, the solution is not Microsoft spending millions to create 'punking' technology.  Already many regimes in the world disrupt social networks to prevent things they don't like.  In Bahrain and Russia regime forces have often flooded Twitter in an effort to disrupt discourse around democracy.  What Microsoft is adding here in an industrial component that will punk social networks as a feature, converting what is now and unethical practice in to an business.

I call this kind of conduct 'Troll Bombing'

If you can't beat them: Microsoft buying its way in to tablets?

 "(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp will invest $300 million in Barnes & Noble Inc's digital and college businesses, valuing them at $1.7 billion. Shares of Barnes & Noble jumped 79 percent. 

"Microsoft will get a 17.6 percent stake in the new unit, while Barnes & Noble will own about 82.4 percent, the companies said in a statement on Monday. 

"The business, whose name has not yet been decided, will have an ongoing relationship with Barnes & Noble's retail stores."

Microsoft's Nook Investment Totals $300 Million; Barnes & Noble's Weighing Spinoff Of Digital Business

So is Microsoft hedging its bets on tablets, getting in on the growing tablet/e-reader market via a partner.

It makes sense, but Microsoft has done a lot of these deals that make sense but don't seem to go anywhere.  The Nokia deal made sense, and in the last year I have seen 2 people on the entire planet (from China to America) using Windows Mobile on a Nokia device.

This graphic shows how the rise of Android and Apple has taken a big piece out of Microsoft's former ownership of the computing space.

The Facebook deal made sense, but it is hard to see how this got Microsoft anything.  Sure Microsoft allows you to connect Office and even Windows to Facebook but it is so annoying I was personally able to keep it going for maybe a day.

Microsoft has had the leverage to buy in to Web 2.0, tablet e-readers and mobile, but it has not had the internal skill to leverage this in to anything for Microsoft.

But its not all doom and gloom, as Microsoft start has set on the hand held and desktop it has grown on the back end. As Microsoft lost home user it has gained the Enterprise back end.

 

Looking specifically at SharePoint is a dramatic picture, in the Enterprise Content Management Space Microsoft has been going from strength to strength. 

Yahoo Layoffs Set to Begin Next Week, Followed by Restructuring - Kara Swisher - News - AllThingsD

Yahoo Layoffs Set to Begin Next Week, Followed by Restructuring - Kara Swisher - News - AllThingsD: "First the layoffs: Sources said the cuts will be deep and mostly aimed at the product, research and marketing units of Yahoo. The ultimate goal, said multiple sources, is to cut many thousands from Yahoo’s staff of close to 14,000 employees, which is actually much larger, due to contract workers not officially in its roster."

'via Blog this'

Is there any money in Web 2.0?

"Daily voucher company Groupon has reported an unexpected loss.

In its first set of results since listing on Nasdaq stock exchange in November, Groupon reported a net loss of $42.7m (£27.0m), when a small profit had been expected.

The loss for the last three months of 2011 compares with a loss of $378.6m in the same period of 2010."

BBC News - Groupon reports unexpected loss

A year ago the hot world was 'social', from conferences to the hunt for VC social was everywhere. Suddenly young good looking people nothing like Mark Zuckerburg were trying to make a career of social.

It was all like the dot bomb all over again maybe.

Recent filling by Facebook shocked us to see that the giant with almost a billion users earns less than $5.00 per user per year!

If you try to think of the entire social media pie you have to imagine right now Facebook has a large piece of that pie. And yet it only earns about $4,40 per user per year. Foursquare and Twitter along with YouTube will be taking most of what is left of the pie.

What does this mean? It means that maybe there is not much of a pie. Facebook and Twitter had explosive growth because of the massive population with web tool that needed something to do with them, but the fact remains the web seems better at free stuff than pay stuff.

There simply may not be any business online.

But wait, didn't we go through all of this before? Didn't dot coms collapse because of the market pulled out only to have the industry return with even more power.

Well yes, the web came back with Web 2.0, dot coms funded by IPOs collapsed to be replaced by new social firms funded by VC, but still the large sustainable ecosystem is not there. So far the companies to make money off the web are Apple and Google.

But that is not the full story, thousands of smaller companies make more money because of the web, people make more at their jobs because of the web, the web reduces the costs of many firms.

Maybe we have a new kind of economic model coming up. One that has a few massive web companies that take up what little profit can me made, a lot of non-profit projects like Wikipedia and Debian and a huge network of smaller firms that make smaller revenues doing specific work.

Android Faces Windows 8 Tablets

"The platform will be bigger threat for Android as compared to iPad because Android is already facing a tough time against Apple's tablet. The sheer survival of any single Android tablet is difficult when it comes to facing iPad. Amazon's Kindle Fire has come for its rescue and has contributed majorly to the Android's market share but that's pretty less as compared to iPad's lion's share. "

Why Android Should Fear Windows 8 Tablets?

We see three key factors that are going to make Windows hard to beat:

• They have lots of money and resources to fight it out.
• Windows and Office are still familiar productivity tools, and the tablet's main application will be as an office tool opposed to the smartphone which is more of a toy.
• Windows 8 will give a single experiences from PC to laptop to Tablet to Phone, that will be powerful. Mac is struggling to get the set of iOS and OSX working for people and Android has no presence outside of the PC Chrome browser.

But there are major problems Windows has to overcome:

• No history of mobile presence with consumer.
• A very crowded tablet space with Amazon, Google, Apple and now Microsoft fighting in a battle which is turning out to be much larger than we had anticipated.
• iPad and Android ecosystems.

Microsoft Bribing Nokia to use its phone?

"In its statement, Nokia also revealed the amount that it receives from Microsoft for its utilisation of the Windows Phone platform, acknowledging that the Redmond-based company paid it $250 million in “support payments” over the last quarter:"

Microsoft Paid Nokia $250m for Windows Phone Use

It looks like Microsoft had to bribe Nokia to use its platform for Smartphones. There is no question now that if Nokia had started producing Android phones a couple years ago rather than trying to promote its own Linux based MeeGoo project, sales would be very different right now. That is not to say we don't like MeeGoo, but with a competitive market for ecosystems MeeGoo, along with WebOS was just to much to ask of developers who are struggling to build apps for the iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian ecosystems as it is.

Now just because Microsoft is bribing Nokia to use its OS does not make the OS bad, Microsoft is a master of combing unfair business practices with just the right quality of product to win market share, that is until the Web went mobile.

We have been testing the Lumia a great deal lately and we like it, we like it a lot. The OS is great too look at and easy to use, and it shows JQuery mobile pages as well as iPhone or Android devices. Nokia knows how to make a camera that feels right in your hand and the excellent Lumia should be attractive to many.

But good is not demanded and one of the strange states of the market is how excellent machines again and again don't catch on. Four years ago we were excited about the netbook running a Linux like Puppy, this seemed like the obvious course of the future of computing. But it seemed people were more interested in toys like iPhones and iPads than powerful small computers with solid OSs. The quality of a product will not predict its sales, and the Windows Phone still has not proved itself in the market, and it is trying to launch in to a major economic downturn where people might decide to hold on to their iPhones, Androids and Blackberries for a few more months.

CES - Samsung's Smart Window

Is Microsoft Releasing the Next Version of SharePoint in 2012?

: "As rumor has it, a new version of SharePoint will come out this year -- why else would Microsoft plan back to back SharePoint conferences? But while some are pondering what the next version

may bring, most are still working on how to best leverage the current SharePoint release.

01-10-2012 - Is Microsoft Releasing the Next Version of SharePoint in 2012?

"

'via Blog this'

Microsoft 8 its do or die

The latest version of Microsoft's operating system for smartphones is a revolutionary product for its parent company because it is considered to have both taste and culture. Windows Phone uses the company's Metro interface, whose graphics are so cutting-edge they can make the iPhone seem out of date. Its creators, Microsoft's in-house design team, claim it is changing not only how their products appear, but the company's philosophy.

Windows 8, the latest version of Microsoft's world-dominating PCsoftware, will be released later this year and has been given a Metro makeover. The worry is that Microsoft has discovered the power of good taste a little too late.

Windows software is installed on 95% of the world's estimated 1.5bn home and business PCs, but in the western world sales of laptop and particularly desktop computers have reached a plateau. When Windows 8 is released later this year, millions of Microsoft customers will ask themselves whether they should spend money upgrading an old computer, or treat themselves to new one. For many, that new machine is likely to be not a PC but a tablet, and until now Apple has been the only company capable of selling tablets in large numbers.

"The ground is shifting under Microsoft," says Jean-Louis Gassée, former head of Apple Macintosh development and contender for the chief executive role in the late 1980s. "The world will no longer be PC-centric. We will see growing numbers of smartphones and tablets and we as users will spend more time on these devices. PCs will be reserved for the tasks of content creation."

Microsoft sees a future through cleaner Windows | Technology | The Observer

One thing Yahoo! can teach us all, that it takes a long time for the new giants of IT to die. In the case of firms like IBM the dying process is so slow that the company has the ability to rebuilt itself before it dies. That is once a company like Oracle, IBM, Yahoo!, HP, or Dell reach such a size the vibrant growing nature of the IT market and the massive barriers to entry prevent normal market forces from working. There is simply too much increase in demand ever year, and too few new big players to cull the failures.

In the case of IBM this allowed a great firm to survive to become a great firm again, just a different kind of great firm. In the case of Yahoo! it just is a slow pathetic death.

What is going to happen to Microsoft is not entirely clear. Its now certain that everyone who works with Microsoft gets that Windows and Office will not take them in to the future for much longer. Microsoft is facing a world of more mobile devices and the Cloud. So far they have done a very good job of the Cloud. I am confident that Enterprise Cloud will be dominated by Microsoft back ends for some time to come.

The problem has not been the large solutions that run in Cloud farms, but getting Microsoft in to a small device. This is kind of pathetic because their name in MICROsoft. The company was born in the race for the micro computer leaving older mainframe computers in the dust to provide the OS, programming languages and productivity tools for the desktop computing and then laptop computing. Its just that Microsoft has utterly messed up going PALM top.

But this is much more than just a change is overall size of devices, its also a failure to keep up with the change in the social role of computers made possible by this change in size. Microsoft is still stuck in a world of Offices and Windows, a world where computers were grey and used mostly for creating presentations for customer days. Since this time firms like Apple, Google and Blackberry have managed to make computers cool.

Microsoft not only needs to establish itself in the world of small devices running ARM based technology rather than just INTEL chips, which they can do technically without a doubt, but they also need to establish products that can grap the new consumers imagination in the way Android, iOS and Blackberry have, and become as cool as twitter and facebook. This is something they have NEVER done, and probably this element of style and 'class' is where Microsoft looks most like the next IBM or Digital. Computers are never going to be grey again. Can Microsoft live in a world of color?

Time to Close the Book on Windows Tablet?

Consumers’ interest in buying a Windows tablet has plummeted in the past six months, according to a new Forrester Research report on November 29.

Consumers' interest in Windows tablets plummets, study claims | ZDNet

Again more very bad news for Microsoft's effort to be part of the new wave of mobile devices. I have been saying for two years that this new device space is war for how new tablet or slate space is imagined: are slates big phones or small computers.

As the Forrester survey above indicates consumer initially saw these devices as small PC but more and more they are starting to image them as extensions of the phone. This is critical for Microsoft to re-establish the tablet as a place for Windows before Android and iPhone change how people think about computing.

Can Microsoft do it? Over the past year in the mobile space Microsoft has gone from failure to failure. But with the legacy of Office documents and SharePoint I suspect that the Office tablet will likely be a Windows tablet.

But time is running out.

Update: I have just spent a week testing Windows 8.  I have been very impressed with it as a possible future  tablet OS.  I also think the weakness of Android in this space opens a large opportunity for Microsoft.  The iPad has created a public desire for tablets as the next platform.  But the iPad fails because it is very much just a large iPhone.  Don't get me wrong, I love my iPad and use it constantly for work.  But I still need to get up and go to my laptop to do heavy lifting work. The iPad is still really little more than a great Kindle.  Windows 8 could be the OS that makes the tablet a work horse for a more mobile future. 

Intro to SharePoint Sandboxed Solutions

Intro to SharePoint Sandboxed Solutions

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