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Saturday Morning Inspiration
Never underestimate the underdog. Go Hokies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVwwz_QbVsI
Oracle suffers a Homer Simpson Moment When Rebranding JAVA from Sun to Oracle – Duh
When Oracle laid out its roadmap for meshing Oracle and Sun products in February, one goal was to improve Java’s performance. Needless to say, $7.4 billion also bought Oracle the right to rebrand Sun’s products as its own. Unfortunately, performance came at the expense of branding this month, when users of the Eclipse software development environment, used to create applications in Java — among other languages — started seeing Eclipse crash with an “OutOfMemoryError” when they began using the new Java 6 update 21 (1.6.0_21).
Now what would Homer say if he was running Oracle – Maybe somehting like “You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is: never try.”
Cloud Awakens Microsoft’s Server and Tools Giant
Great article from e-Week. My favorite line is “Moreover, baked into Microsoft’s developer story for the cloud is .NET, along with the flagship Visual Studio development platform, and the Silverlight environment for building rich media applications. Despite Microsoft clearly pushing its business solutions and services to the cloud, the company’s Server and Tools offerings are perhaps in a front-runner position as they actually enable the move to the cloud.” I couldn’t have said it better Darryl.
Cloud Awakens Microsoft’s Server and Tools Giant
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Cloud-Awakens-Microsofts-Server-and-Tools-Giant-855303/
By: Darryl K. Taft
Has the cloud awakened a sleeping giant at Microsoft? The cloud is the future of IT, and Microsoft’s Server and Tools business has the company poised to cash in on that opportunity. Server and Tools is now Microsoft’s third-largest unit, approaching parity with Windows and Office.
REDMOND, Wash.—Has the cloud awakened a sleeping giant at Microsoft?
Well, as quiet at it is kept, Microsoft’s strong, steady and increasingly effective Server and Tools Business has crept into the limelight as one of the company’s major sources of income. It is beginning to challenge long-term cash cows such as Windows and Office in contributing to the Microsoft bottom line.
At the 2010 Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM) here, Bill Koefoed, Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations, said Server and Tools ended the 2010 fiscal year “with record revenue and record profits. It is now a $15 billion a year business and is growing at a good pace.”
Indeed, Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business saw 5 percent growth year over year and 14 percent in the fourth quarter.
Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, broke things down a little further. Turner said Microsoft’s business division–which includes Office, SharePoint and other leading products—delivered 29.8 percent of the company’s revenue ($18.6 billion), Server and Tools drove 23.8 percent, and Windows and Windows Live delivered 29.6 percent ($18.5 million) of Microsoft’s revenue last year. Those three groups alone produced more than 80 percent of Microsoft’s business. Entertainment and Devices accounted for 12.9 percent of revenue, and Online accounted for 3.5 percent.
Moreover, enterprise customers accounted for 35.8 percent of the company’s business; small and medium business accounted for 20.5 percent; consumer, 16.9 percent; and OEM, 26.8 percent.
With the enterprise clearly the sweet spot for Microsoft’s current sales, many observers wonder why the company continues to place so much emphasis on the consumer side. Well, obviously there is room for growth in this segment for Microsoft—as there was in the enterprise a decade ago. Indeed, Microsoft was not seen as an enterprise provider just 10 or so years ago, yet today the enterprise represents more than one-third of Microsoft’s business.
Will the same happen in the consumer space? Microsoft certainly hopes so, but the company has much to do in that area.
Turner focused on the enterprise in his morning presentation; however, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer emphasized the consumer opportunity during his talk later in the afternoon.
“Microsoft is hitting on every cylinder,” Koefoed said.
Koefoed explained that Microsoft has eight core businesses: Xbox and TV, Bing, Windows Phone, Windows, Office, Business Users, Windows Server, and SQL Server. Business Users focuses on the business scenarios of manageability and virtualization, including technologies such as Exchange and SharePoint. And the Windows and SQL franchises capitalize on the cloud with Windows Azure and SQL Azure.
Meanwhile, enablers of those eight areas include Microsoft vehicles such as Microsoft’s retail stores and online marketplaces, services and support, the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), mice/keyboards, Mediaroom, Visual Tools, and Windows Live, with Microsoft Dynamics also playing a role as its own entity.
However, Microsoft’s biggest single focus is the cloud. Like a rudder steering the software giant’s overall direction, cloud computing is now behind almost every move Microsoft makes. And Server & Tools has taken full advantage of the push toward the cloud. Not only is Microsoft’s core cloud computing play, Windows Azure, part of the Server and Tools business, so are new technologies such as AppFabric, as well as mainstays BizTalk and Windows server.
Moreover, baked into Microsoft’s developer story for the cloud is .NET, along with the flagship Visual Studio development platform, and the Silverlight environment for building rich media applications. Despite Microsoft clearly pushing its business solutions and services to the cloud, the company’s Server and Tools offerings are perhaps in a front-runner position as they actually enable the move to the cloud.
Al Hilwa, program director for application development software at market research firm IDC, said Microsoft’s performance with its Server and Tools business is all the more impressive because “Server and Tools is probably Microsoft’s least sexy business.” But Hilwa, who attended the FAM event, added: “If you look at the numbers, this is a business that has delivered solid growth in a highly competitive space. They probably can count more big competitors in this space than in any of their other businesses, which really makes these gains even more impressive.”
Microsoft built Server and Tools from practically nowhere some 10 years ago and truly leveraged their client strengths to muscle into a difficult space, Hilwa explained, adding that they sell servers to leverage their growth in SharePoint and Office Communication Servers, which are great growth drivers. “They have also benefited from a good rebound in IT spend in the Enterprise while being largely insulated from the ups and downs of the consumer sector,” Hilwa said. “Finally, in the last few quarters they have had excellent comparisons with some of the worst quarters in the server business earlier in 2009.”
The company is “leading with the cloud,” Turner said. “If you want on-premise software, we have that, but we are going to lead with the cloud. Leading with the cloud actually helps Microsoft to sell more on-premise software than we have before.”
Turner said Microsoft is focusing on three main things: Driving the Windows 7 and Office 2010 refresh, driving customer satisfaction and growing the company’s share.
“We see this opportunity with these old versions out there–XP and Vista,” Turner said. Microsoft also is going after older versions of Internet Explorer. “We grew share in the browser space for the first time in a long time,” he added, noting that he considered Windows 7, IE (Internet Explorer) 8/9 and Office 2010 to be Microsoft’s “triple play.”
“Everybody in this company has a quota for going after some of these old versions,” he said. Turner also said a beta of IE 9 will be available in September.
Turner then spoke of competing with Microsoft’s core competitors including Google, Linux, VMware and Oracle. Reiterating much of what he said at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference earlier in July, Turner cited several customers, including Serena and Datatune, that had gone to Google for cloud services, but came back to Microsoft for its BPOS (Business Productivity Online Standard Suite).
Turner also announced new wins with the Dow Chemical, Hyatt and the University of Georgia.
Meanwhile, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, said, “The combination of the client and the cloud to create the new computing platform will redefine both how people develop applications and ultimately how people consume them and what kind of things are possible to solve.”
“As Kevin reinforced, we’re all in on the cloud; we recognize that it’s an integral part of how we want to provision computing capabilities,” Mundie said. “What I think many people missed over the last few years in the discussion of how the cloud itself was going to evolve and would it ultimately displace or replace everything was that it’s really the composite platform that you get by taking these intelligent clients and their evolution, coupling them up through broadband connectivity to the incredible assets that we have in the cloud, and giving people a common new programming model to think of them as one integrated platform, not two things that were developed disjointedly and which people use in an ad hoc way.”
VSLive is next week in Redmond – Join us!!!
Over 5 days, you’ll attend up-to-the-minute sessions on:
- Silverlight / WPF - Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, XAML, WCF RIA Services
- Web - jQuery, Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX
- Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 - Visual Studio features, IntelliTrace, .NET Framework 4.0 new features, ALM/TFS, Windows Server AppFabric, WCF, MEF
- Cloud Computing - Includes cloud, server and messaging technologies – Windows Azure, REST services programming, Project “Dallas”
- Data Management - SQL Server, NET Data Access, WCF Data Services/OData
- SharePoint SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server 2010, Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tools and SharePoint Designer 2010
Plus, all VSLive activities take place on the Microsoft Redmond Campus - where you’ll get an insider’s glimpse into the Microsoft headquarters, access to the employee store (with incredible discounts), and more!
Sign-up now at http://vslive.com/events/vslive-summer-2010/home.aspx.
The New Easy – WebMatrix
WebMatrix is everything you need to build Web sites using Windows. It includes IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET (a Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). It streamlines Web site development and makes it easy to start Web sites from popular open-source apps. The skills and code you develop with WebMatrix transition seamlessly to Visual Studio and SQL Server.
Check it out today. http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/
Pretty Good Quarter
6.04 billion, a 22% increase last year. Net income soared 48% to $4.52 billion or $0.51 per share. Great year for Visual Studio, IIS, .NET and Silverlight. I think it’s time for a vacation.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/microsoft-earnings-surge-48-but-stock-stalled/19565204/
Building Secure Software
I’m reading an interesting book from John Viega and Gary McCraw entitled Building Secure Software. These gentleman do a nice job pointing out common problems and concerns. Good read if you are interested in this topic.
