February 9th, 2010

Microsoft on Google Buzz: Been there, done that

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:41 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, SharePoint Server, Web 2.0, Windows Live

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Social Networking, Groupware, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Enterprise Software, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Google Buzz, which sounds like the slightly less confusing successor to Google’s “future of e-mail” Wave product, is coming in both consumer and enterprise flavors, according to Google. Are the Softies quaking in their boots?

Not exactly. I asked Microsoft officials for comment on Google Buzz, which Google unveiled on February 9.

I received a response attributable to Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live:

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

(Not sure I’d call that statement a “slam,” like TechCrunch did… Felt to me more like attempted buzzzzzzkill.)

Microsoft also has been working to integrate social networks from third parties not just into its Web-mail product, but also into its Outlook mail client, via the Outlook Social Connector that the company unveiled at the Professional Developers Conference in 2009. Microsoft is integrating the Social Connector into the Office 2010 product which is due out in the first half of this year. Microsoft’s Social Connector does a lot of what Buzz does, except with more of a business-centric focus. Microsoft’s Social Connector also provides regularly updated “activity feeds” for those in a user’s social connector via a connection with SharePoint 2010.

(My ZDNet blogging colleague Larry Dignan said he thought Google’s real target with Buzz was Microsoft SharePoint, not Twitter or FriendFeed. I wouldn’t say he’s far off the mark.)

In the longer term, Microsoft is working on infusing a lot of its products with more social networking capabilities. That’s a key piece of the mission of the recently created FUSE Labs at Microsoft, headed by Lili Cheng. Cheng, as Microsoft watchers may recall, has been working on the Social Desktop concept for a few years now….

Is Google actually chasing Microsoft’s taillights with Buzz — despite the lack of acknowledgment of counterofferings from Redmond by the majority of the press/bloggers covering today’s Buzz launch? What’s your take?

February 5th, 2010

Microsoft to phase out its enterprise search offerings for Linux and Unix

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:09 pm

Categories: Advertising, Corporate strategy, Office, Search, SharePoint Server

Tags: Enterprise Search, Microsoft Corp., Linux, Cloud Computing, Search, UNIX, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is going to be phasing out support for Unix and Linux platforms for its FAST enterprise search products as of their next release (some time after 2010).

Microsoft shared that information, as well as other news about its near- and longer-term search plans as part of its latest update to its enterprise-search roadmap, which it made public on February 4. (Strangely, that blog post about ending support for Linux and Unix from FAST CTO Bjørn Olstad is entitled “Innovation on Linux and Unix.”)  Via a new post on the Microsoft Enterprise Search team blog, company officials detailed what customers can expect this year and beyond. From that post:

• There are two standalone search products based on the technology Microsoft acquired in 2008 when it purchased FAST Search and Transfer for $1.23 billion. These products are due out in the first half of calendar 2010. These are FAST Search for Internet Sites and FAST Search for Internal Applications. As it indicated a year ago, Microsoft also is going to be offering two versions of SharePoint for Internet Sites (Enterprise and Standard) in the first half of this year. The Enterprise version will include rights to use FAST Search outside the firewall.
• FAST Search for Internet Sites includes the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) 5.3 core and includes content-transformation services, which are tools for processing structured and unstructured information, and Interaction Management Services (a new framework for building interactive user interfaces). This product will be licensable using a server-only model.
• FAST Search for Internal Applications includes the same ESP 5.3 search core which is licensable via a new Server/Client Access License (CAL) model.
• These two new FAST products will be the last release to include a serch core that runs on Linux and Unix. What does that mean for FAST users who have been running on those non-Microsoft operating systems, in terms of support? According to the blog post: “Microsoft is committed to supporting ESP 5.3—our multi-OS search core—for 10 years as per our support policy. Non-Windows customers who want to remain on the ESP 5.3 core can take advantage of new Windows-only innovations by using a mixed-platform architecture. Microsoft is also introducing a Customer Upgrade Program to help customers evaluate hosted solutions and/or a Windows-based deployment and remains fully committed to interoperability with non-Windows systems on both the front- and back-end.”
• Microsoft also is discontinuing FAST AdMomentum, “a search-based advertising solution,” company officials said.

In other, non-enterprise-focused search news, Microsoft announced on Februrary 5 that it had extended its search partnership with Facebook, but that Facebook would be taking over its own advertising business, a piece of which Microsoft had managed previously.

February 5th, 2010

Microsoft readies free upgrade program for Office buyers

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 5:33 am

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Office 2010/Office 14, Resellers, SharePoint Server, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Just like it does with Windows to keep the bottom from dropping out of the market in the months prior to the launch of a new release, Microsoft does the same with Office via its Tech Guarantee program. It looks like that free-upgrade program is about to begin for Office 2010.

Ars Technica got a glimpse of a Microsoft partner’s blog post about the imminent launch of the Office 2010 Tech Guarantee program — just before the post was yanked. Here are some of the details (via Ars):

• The program runs between March 5, 2010 and September 30, 2010
• Customers who buy a copy of Office 2007 during that period — with or without a new PC — from a participating reseller will qualify for the promotion
• To qualify, customers must activate their copies of Office 2007 by September 30 and request their free upgrade to Office 2010 by October 31
• Those who are eligible will get a free download of Office 2010 (although discs will e purchasable for a shipping and handling fee)
• Limit is 25 free-upgrade copies per person

Microsoft is rapidly approaching the finish line with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. This week, Microsoft made the near-final Release Candidate (RC) of Office 2010 available to participants in its Technology Adoption Program (TAP). The company is not planning to make the RC more broadly available. Release to manufacturing could happen any time, but it’s likely this spring. Microsoft officials have said the final code will be available by June for sure. Microsoft execs said last year to expect SharePoint 2010 to be released alongside Office 2010.

Microsoft already has revealed the planned version line-up for Office 2010 (with seven different SKUs, the prices for most of which the company also has shared), as well as the system requirements for the final Office 2010 product.

February 2nd, 2010

Office 2010: RTM's getting closer

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:33 pm

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, Google, Office, Office 2010/Office 14

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Yes, Microsoft officials have been saying Office 2010, the next version of the company’s desktop productivity suite, will be available by June 2010. But you know those under-promise/over-deliver-focused Office guys always like to beat their own deadlines. I’m expecting they’ll do it again this time around … and by more than a few months.

Microsoft is confirming this week that it has provided its Technology Adoption Program (TAP) members with the near-final Release Candidate of Office 2010. The company isn’t planning to provide any more public test releases of Office 2010, however. A spokesperson sent the following update:

“Microsoft made a release candidate available to members in the technology adoption program (TAP). This is one of Microsoft’s planned milestones in the engineering process; however they do not have plans to make this new code set available broadly.”

Distributor Ingram Micro also has begun inviting select reseller partners to a March 1 “launch event” for Office 2010 at a Microsoft office in Canada. A “launch” can mean a lot of things in Microsoft’s world. Sometimes the company launches products and later ships them; sometimes it uses “launch” to refer to the kick-off of marketing and training activities. But given various reports of possible Office 2010 escrow builds in the wild, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Office 2010 be released to manufacturing sooner rather than later.

From the Ingram invitation (a copy of which one reader shared with me):

“Now easier to sell, Microsoft Office 2010 helps you grow your revenue, increase profitability, and meet evolving customer demands.  With a streamlined product line and easier sales process, Office 2010 helps save you time, effort, and money by reducing complexity and shortening sales cycles for the world’s most popular productivity suite.”

I’d be interested to hear what tricks Microsoft has up its sleeve to shorten the Office 2010 sales cycles, at a time when competition is up, and economic pressures are preventing many businesses from upgrading… I’d expect Office Web Apps, the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, to play a big part in the campaign. (Speaking of OWA, check out this nifty chart I found on one Microsoft blogger’s site, which compares what Office 2010’s locally installed Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will provide, feature-wise, vs. Office Web Apps.)

Microsoft officials aren’t changing their public Office 2010 timing guidance. They are continuing to say that Office 2010 will be available by June 2010.

In related news, was I the only one who thought it odd that almost none of the recent reports about Google possibly launching an apps store for third-party products that will work with Google Apps mentioned Microsoft?

Microsoft already offers free add-ons and templates to Office from third-party vendors via the Office Online site. That same site also features a marketplace of paid third-party apps and services that complement Office. Microsoft and Intuit recently announced a deal via which users will be able to access hosted small-business productivity apps via Intuit’s App Center marketplace.

February 1st, 2010

Microsoft to target SMB users with new 'BPOS Lite' cloud service

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:08 am

Categories: Azure, Channel, Code names, Corporate strategy, Exchange Server, Office, Resellers, SharePoint Server, Systems integrators, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Small And Medium Business, xRM, Smb/Sme, Team Management, Collaboration, Content Management, Groupware, Human Capital Management, Enterprise Software

As part of its next wave of cloud offerings, Microsoft is working on a “BPOS Lite” productivity/collaboration suite that is aimed at small/mid-size businesses (SMBs).

Even though Microsoft currently hawks its hosted services to customers of any size, different offerings appeal more to different user bases.

For example, take BPOS, the Business Productivity Online Suite bundle consisting of Microsoft-hosted Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Live Meeting conferencing and (in the future), Communications Online. Microsoft will sell its $120 per user/peryear BPOS subscription to customers of all sizes. But to date, the far and away biggest audience for BPOS has been large enterprise customers — Energizer, Coca Cola, Hilton Hotels, etc.

Microsoft also has a Microsoft-hosted offering at the very low end: The Deskless Worker offerings (hosted Exchange/SharePoint with many features turned off). But right now, it doesn’t offer a cloud-hosted productivity-suite/service for SMBs.

Microsoft is working on such an offering, however, that insiders currently refer to as “BPOS Lite.” Unlike BPOS, which is managed by Microsoft, BPOS Lite sounds as if it will be managed by partners.

I Googled Binged “BPOS Lite” after receiving a tip on it and found a couple of Microsoft job descriptions referencing its existence. From one of those postings:

“The IW (Information Worker) Unmanaged Services team is looking for an experienced product manager to launch a new set of Microsoft Online services to customers and through partners. The first offer - code-named BPOS “Lite” - is part of the “next wave” of services targeting professional individuals and smaller organizations, offering Microsoft’s best collaboration, communications and productivity services. Acquiring millions of BPOS-Lite customers across channels is core to MBD’s strategy to help achieve scale and compete effectively for services that ‘light up’ Office and extend the power of IW cloud services to our smallest and most numerous customers.”

It sounds as if there will be increased synergies between the BPOS Lite team and the CXM (customer anything management) — which I think is what Microsoft also refers to as XRM — team. That makes sense, given the xRM team is working with partners to try to get them to develop applications that build on top of the “guts” of Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM offering. xRM is key to what Microsoft is doing in what’s been called the  “platform as a service” space. Even though Microsoft officials no longer talk publicly about xRM as part of its overall Azure cloud platform, xRM-based applications are cloud-hostable.

Speaking of what is and isn’t part of Azure, Directions on Microsoft analyst Rob Sanfilippo had some interesting observations when I asked him for his take on when (and if) Microsoft might move BPOS and other related services to Azure. (They currently are hosted by Microsoft on a different internal cloud platform across various Microsoft datacenters). Sanfilippo said:

“It is unlikely that Microsoft’s online application offerings (Exchange, SharePoint, Communication Services, Live Conferencing) will be deployed on Azure for some time. Azure is currently geared for lower level Web services rather than for deployment of a full server product such as Exchange or SharePoint. It is possible that the two models will converge as Microsoft’s server products continue to be refactored to work in the cloud (that is, as more modular services) and as Azure offers more ways to host larger applications (such as the upcoming virtual machine roles). I don’t expect to see this kind of convergence for at least 2-3 years.”

Would you be interested in a BPOS Lite type of offering — whether or not it was Azure-hosted? What kinds of features, pricing and licensing would it need to attract an SMB shop, in your opinion? Oh, yeah… and in terms of reliability… given the BPOS outage that happened last week.

January 28th, 2010

Earnings take-away: Microsoft is still powered by Windows

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 3:47 pm

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, Windows 7, Windows client

Tags: Revenue, Microsoft Corp., Earnings, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Operational Accounting, Operating Systems, Software

Microsoft’s brass is always looking for the next billion dollar business and has stuck a toe into everything from healthcare to energy monitoring. But as the company’s second quarter earnings for fiscal 2010, which Microsoft released on January 28, show, Windows is still the big wheel that keeps on turning in Redmond.

Consumer sales of Windows 7 buoyed Microsoft to report record earnings, even after deferrals were figured in. Microsoft reported net income of $6.66 billion, or 74 cents a share, on revenue of $19.02 billion, which included $1.71 billion in Windows 7 deferred revenue for the quarter.

As part of that announcement, Microsoft reported that it has sold more than 60 million Windows 7 licenses to date. The combined Windows and the Windows Live division had operating income of $5.39 billion on revenue of $6.9 billion, compared to the year-ago quarter’s operating income of $2.71 billion on revenue of $4.06 billion.

Business sales of Windows 7 — unsurprisingly, given typical enterprise sales, testing and deployment cycles — have yet to kick in for Windows 7. That isn’t because business users are waiting for Windows 7 Service Pack (SP) 1, which is widely expected to ship some time this calendar year, Microsoft officials said. In fact, Microsoft is seeing more business activity around upgrades to the latest version of Windows than it has with previous launches, according to Microsoft’s new Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein.

“People want Windows 7 on all devices on all form factors,” said Klein during today’s call with Wall Street analysts. (In case you were wondering, that question wasn’t prompted by a question about the Apple iPad. Nobody asked about it during the Q&A session.)

Klein noted that netbooks currently comprise about 11 percent of the PC market and Windows is currently on 90 percent of these machines. Windows 7 is more than half of that base (XP, and to a much lesser extent, Vista) are on the rest of the Windows netbooks.

Yes, Office is still the other big Microsoft cash cow (with revenues of $4.74 billion for the Business Division this quarter), and that unit ended up really kicking in for Microsoft when the economy and Vista sales were down. But in Q2, Business Division revenues and operating income were both down, compared to the year-ago quarter. Microsoft officials attributed the decline, in part, to the imminent arrival of Office 2010. (Office sales comprise more than 90 percent of the Business Division’s revenues; Dynamics products are the other 10 percent.)

(Detailed breakdowns for each division can be found in Microsoft’s latest 10-Q, filed on January 28.)

Server and Tools held its own (revenues up two percent, primarily because of Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) suites, System Center and SQL Server). But services/consulting revenues were down two percent, or $32 million. The Online Services Division (the search/advertising unit) is still in the red. Online access (dial-up) continues to plummet, and online advertising was off. In Entertainment and Devices, gaming console and game sales were down, but Xbox Live revenues were up.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown by division of revenue and operating income (click on the image below to enlarge).

Microsoft cut 800 jobs in the second quarter of FY 2010 and spent $59 million in severance payments. No analyst on today’s call asked whether there would be more layoffs planned for this year. The Softies did say they planned to continue to keep a tight rein on costs. While the Windows division spent more than usual on sales/marketing because of Windows 7 launch-related activities and ads, other divisions cut back on not just headcount, but also sales and marketing, as well as research and development expenses.

January 22nd, 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 system requirements: Changes in disk space, GPU recommendations

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:48 am

Categories: App Compatibility, Channel, Corporate strategy, Office, Office 2010/Office 14

Tags: Microsoft Office 2007, Disk, Microsoft Corp., GPU, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Via a January 22 blog post, Microsoft is providing more details about the system requirements for its Office 2010 suite, due out by June 2010.

The bottom line: If your PC can run Office 2007, it will be able to run Office 2010. If you just acquired a brand new PC, it also will be able to run the forthcoming suite. But if you’re using Office 2003, there are no guarantees you’ll automatically be able to run Office 2010 on the same hardware.

The 32-bit version of Office 2010 will run on the following 32-bit operating systems: XP with Service Pack (SP)3, Vista SP1, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 R2 (with MS XML). The 64-bit version will run on on 64-bit versions of all of these same operating systems, with the exception of Windows Server 2003 R2.

CPU and RAM requirements approximately doubled between Office 2003 and Office 2007, blogged Alex Dubec, a Program Manager on the Office Trustworthy Computing Performance team. The minimum system recommendations (for being able to perform average Office tasks relatively quickly) for Office 2003 specified a 233 MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM. For Office 2010, the suggested minimum requirements are a 500 MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM.

The disk-space requirements for Office 2010 are somewhat greater than for Office 2007 or Office 2003. Dubec noted that the footprint of most Office apps has gotten larger. As a result, “most standalone application disk-space requirements have gone up by 0.5 GB and the suites have increased by 1.0 or 1.5 GB,” he said.

“New features mean more code,” Dubec explained. The introduction of 64-bit Office, an Office-wide Ribbon implementation, inclusion of OneNote in more versions of the Office 2010 offerings, and the optional free trial versions of Pro 2010 apps in the retail boxed version of Office 2010 all add to the total disk space requirements.

In addition, Office 2010, unlike Office 2007, has a GPU requirement in order to speed up graphics rendering of charts in Excel or transitions in PowerPoint. Microsoft designed Office 2010 to assume a minimum Microsoft DirectX 9.0c compliant graphics processors with 64 MB video memory, which Dubec characterized as fairly minimal. He noted Office 2010 will still work on PCs without a standalone GPU like the one described.

Dubec offered more details in his post on the Office Engineering blog:

“One of the pieces of feedback we’ve received from customers is that they really, really hate having to buy new hardware every time a new version of Office is released. With that in mind, one of our goals for the Office 2010 was to make sure that the minimum hardware requirement would not increase from Office 2007. We invested in improving the customer experience on minimum-requirement hardware, and we regularly tested performance throughout the development cycle. Our footprint has gotten larger since Office 2007, but we’re proud to say that we’ve succeeded in keeping the CPU and RAM requirements the same as for Office 2007.”

Anything in the Office 2010 requirements details triggering any alarms (or relief)?

January 21st, 2010

The consumerization of IT -- and of Microsoft

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:22 am

Categories: Apple, Channel, Corporate strategy, Exchange Server, Facebook, Google, SharePoint Server, Web 2.0, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows client, Xbox, Zune

Tags: Deck, Information Technology, Microsoft Corp., Tool, Productivity, Content Management, Enterprise Software, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is spending an awful lot of money these days on projects at which company officials might have scoffed not so long ago. Training in the form of collecting Facebook-based achievement awards? Twitter-update clients for your media player? A BorgVille equivalent of FarmVille? (OK. I made that last one up. But if/when it happens, — like Windows 7 –it was my idea.)

Microsoft has established its reputation as an enterprise software/services vendor. It’s trying to be a consumer one, too, and is spending money on retail ads, brick-and-mortar stores and viral marketing campaigns to try to gain more mind share there.

Not everyone thinks Microsoft should be so focused on the gadget and Web 2.0 space. More than a few industry watchers, customers, partners and Microsoft employees themselves believe Microsoft is spreading itself too thin and should stick to its enterprise knitting.

With that in mind, I read with interest a recently posted PowerPoint presentation deck that Microsoft is offering its partners to explain Microsoft’s official views on the “consumerization of IT.” The deck is designed for partners to use with their business customers when trying to position (justify?) Microsoft’s growing investments in more consumer-focused markets and technologies.

Microsoft’s definition of the consumerization of IT is “the increasing influence that our technology experiences as consumers -— both hardware and applications -— have on the technology that we expect to use at work,” according to the deck. More:

“The reality is that many of us have powerful computer systems at home, and social computing tools like MySpace, Twitter, blogs, etc. are a part of our everyday lives. As technology plays an increasingly important role in our personal lives and we become accustomed to the power, convenience, flexibility, and connectedness of consumer technology experiences, we want those same capabilities to help us at work. However, in most cases we aren’t being given the tools.”

Enter, Microsoft. It has the tools and the technologies that will help get these kinds of socially friendly deliverables into business users hands, the deck says.

Using virtualization (desktop, application or user state, where appropriate), user settings can be centralized, synchronized and safeguarded. “People search,” like what’s being built into SharePoint, can help users find answers to questions faster by calling on established experts. Content feeds, podcasts, shared documents, Wikis — all available as part of SharePoint — also can help with quicker information discovery and sharing, the deck notes. (It’s no coincidence that Microsoft plans to push the built-in social-networking tools as one of the big selling points of SharePoint 2010 this year.) And don’t forget about corporate instant messaging, presence capabilities, built-in VOIP and other unified communication features in Exchange, Office Communications Server, and other Microsoft software/services.

Even if you yourself aren’t a social-networking believer, there’s evidence your next-generation workforce will be, the deck points out. The “millennial generation” are avid social networking/social computing tool users

“They love their devices and stay at the forefront of what technology can do. And this generation expects to be able to use these same tools at work,” Microsoft warns in the deck.

What’s your take? Do you think Microsoft is right in obsessing so much about Apple and Google? Or do you agree with one Microsoft shareholder, who recently said: “I don’t expect (Microsoft) to be Apple, I don’t want them to be Apple. They need to be really good at being 50, an elder statesman”?

Update: Right after I hit publish, I noticed IDC has just published a new Social Business Survey. The study “confirmed that consumer social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn continue to dominate business use, although the gap between consumer and corporate-sponsored social networks has narrowed in the past nine months. This survey also showed that the use of social media has penetrated deeper into U.S. organizations, with executive managers and IT leveraging these tools for business as well as line-of-business workers.”

January 20th, 2010

Microsoft partners with Intuit to shore up Redmond's small-business cloud play

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:50 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Channel, Corporate strategy, Office, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Intuit Inc., Small Business, Microsoft Corp., Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is partnering with rival Intuit with the shared goal of getting more developers to write cloud-hosted applications targeted at small businesses.

The pair announced they’re releasing a beta of a new software development kit (SDK) for Azure, and that Intuit will be recommending to its partners and customers Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud operating system as a “preferred platform” for hosted small-business applications. The SDK is a set of tools, code samples and services aimed at enabling Azure-hosted apps to federate them with Intuit’s Partner Platform (IPP) and sell them in Intuit’s App Center marketplace. The final Version 1 of the SDK is slated for February 2010.

By the end of calendar 2010, Intuit also will be offering its developers and customers access to Microsoft’s hosted suite of business applications — known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), consisting of SharePoint Online, Communications Online, Exchange Online, and Office Live Meeting — via the Intuit App Center portal.

Today’s announcement isn’t about Intuit hosting any of its own apps/services or its Partner Platform in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Intuit plans to continue to do its own hosting for its Partner Platform or its App Center small-business app store, Intuit officials confirmed. And Intuit is not attempting to restrict small-business app developers to Azure.

“Last summer, we realized we needed to be more open (with the Partner Portal),” said Bill Lucchini, Vice President and General Manager of Intuit’s Platform as a Service Group. Intuit developers “can build anywhere they want, but Azure is where we are recommending developers build” and host.

The new Intuit-Microsoft partnership comes at a time when some of Microsoft’s small-business customers are unsure about Redmond’s commitment to the small-business market. I’ve heard from a couple of readers that Microsoft’s decision to drop its Office Accounting products and services, announced last fall, have made them wary of betting on Microsoft.

Microsoft officials have attributed that decision to lack of traction with the product, but have said the small/mid-size market remains critically important to Microsoft.

“Customers don’t want a one-point small-business solution. They want a whole suite,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Developer & Platform Evangelism. He said that this kind of partnership with Intuit was an example of how Microsoft plans to address the needs of small-business developers and customers.

January 14th, 2010

Visual Studio 2010 gets a new launch date

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:06 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Corporate strategy, Development tools, SharePoint Server, Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server"), Windows client, Windows server

Tags: Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Development Tools, Development Tools, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Mary Jo Foley

After announcing in late 2009 that it was adding an unexpected extra test release to its Visual Studio 2010 schedule — resulting in a push-back of the launch of the product — Microsoft has rescheduled the official launch event.

The new launch date for VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4 is Monday, April 12, according to a one-line post on a Developer Division’s Marketing and Communications Manager Rob Caron’s blog.

The original launch date for VS 2010 and .Net 4 was March 22. A previously unplanned Release Candidate of the technologies is slated to go to testers in February.

Microsoft is positioning Visual Studio 2010 as its tool platform to support Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Azure, SQL Server, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. The suite is slated to feature new drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation; interoperability with the ASP.Net model view controller (MVC), better multicore support and UML support, among other new features.

Microsoft unveiled in October the four planned Visual Studio 2010 versions and their pricing.

Speaking of Visual Studio 2010, I recently stumbled onto a matrix (which requires Silverlight to view it), which presents the enhancements over previous versions of Visual Studio that will be part of the 2010 release. One  goal of the matrix is to help developers convince their bosses they’ll need the 2010 version of the product when it releases this spring. And to help bust some myths around Visual Studio 2010, as well….