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Microsoft BI, Late at the Office

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that the official release timeframe for SQL Server 2008 R2 would be May of this year.  Since a huge proportion of the features new to SQL 2008 R2 are Business Intelligence-related, Microsoft BI users and professionals should be very happy.  Ostensibly, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will be released concurrently with R2, or very close to it, and the MS BI stack will get its most important refresh in quite a long time.

Reporting Services will have important new data visualization capabilities, “grab and go” reporting and a much more useable Web-based report viewer and management UI.  PowerPivot, Microsoft’s exciting new self-service OLAP product, will be ready to go too.  And, with SharePoint 2010’s delivery, a new build of PerformancePoint will be part of the mix as well.

But how long will it take before PowerPivot and PerformancePoint 2010 will actually be an option for customers?  They won’t be able to use the former’s client component until they upgrade at least some users to Excel 2010, and they won’t be able to use PowerPivot’s server component or the new version of PerformancePoint unless and until they adopt SharePoint Server 2010 and purchase enterprise client access licenses (eCALs) for all users of these BI products.

No matter how dedicated of a Microsoft shop some customers are, the time between release and broad deployment of Office and SharePoint will be non-trivial.  Users of competing BI stacks, like IBM/Cognos, Oracle/Hyperion and SAP/Business Objects don’t have this problem, and that creates a competitive disadvantage for Microsoft.  By tying much of its BI stack to Office, Microsoft limits its ability to refresh its stack to a frequency of once every three years or so.  And because of the lag time between release and adoption, MS BI users get new BI technology after the point in time where it’s cutting edge.

What can Microsoft do?  Basing its BI toolset in Office and SharePoint gives it the power of “incumbency” that constitutes a strong competitive position, so divorcing from Office/SharePoint is unlikely.  One solution: a more frequent release cycle.  This would allow Microsoft BI products to release more often than Office and perhaps allow alternate releases to be compatible with exiting versions of it.  This would require greater agility and more investment from Microsoft, in order to do more releases, more quickly.  One could argue that the usually-staggered releases of SQL Server and Office already constitute such a scheme, but I would counter-argue that changing the platform without changing the tools on top of it is too infrastructural to address the competitive threat I’m discussing here.

Another possible device to break the logjam would be the cloud.  If Microsoft BI products, on the server side, and Office on the (hosted, virtualized) client side were one day all cloud-based, then the upgrade burden would be on Microsoft, instead of its customers, to to carry out.  Customers would still need to schedule training for new versions, and might still be slow in doing so.  But the lag time would almost certainly shorten, and the BI stack would benefit.

There are probably other possibilities here, but I can’t think of them.  Can you?  Leave a comment and let me know.

posted @ Thursday, January 21, 2010 9:16 AM | Feedback (0) |

GOOG vs. MSFT vs. NYC

Tonight was the inaugural audience event of the newly formed New York Technology Council, and I must say the organization is off to an excellent start.  The event was panel discussion focusing on technology trends for 2010, and included Alfred Spector, who heads Google’s research and special initiatives (and is based in New York City, not Silicon Valley), Bill Zack, an Architect Evangelist for Microsoft focusing on Azure, and New York City Councilmember Gale Brewer, who is the Chair of the Council’s Committee on Technology in Government.  The panel was moderated by BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl.  This was a strong panel, with an excellent moderator and an impressive turnout; a good omen for the future success of NYTECH.

I won’t relate the blow-by-blow of the discussion (if you’re interested in that you can read the tweets from the event), but I think a summary of the discourse merits some discussion. 

Questions and statements concerning health IT, government open data, mobile devices, and broadband were raised.  With each question, patterns emerged amongst each panelist’s answers.  Google’s Spector said his company believes all data will, and should, be interconnected.  Google also feels that mobile devices, fetching data from the cloud, will continue to grow in popularity and disrupt. Microsoft offers, not surprisingly, a differing, though not opposing, view. Redmond’s take is that on-premise and cloud-based architectures are very different, that each offers distinct advantages and that in many cases, a combination of the two is the most sensible choice.  Contrast this with Spector’s comment that “it's only incidental whether data is stored on-premise or in the cloud” as long as it’s not in a “walled garden.”

Before I get to Councilmember Brewer’s views, let’s observe that in their responses, Google and Microsoft each clearly espouse views that correlate to their own agendas.  Google wants everything to be published and interconnected, so that it can all be indexed, searched, and Adwordized.  Microsoft, on the other hand, wishes both to promote its new cloud platform (Azure) and protect its legacy PC and server software franchise.  Software + Services, don’t ya know?  Google is all for mobile devices, and why not?  They’ve got an increasingly ubiquitous mobile operating system, and are tickled pink by underpowered devices that rely on the Web and the cloud for their functionality.  Microsoft, too, sees mobile as a key part of the future tech landscape, but doesn’t quite assign the same emphasis to the space as does Google.  If Windows Mobile 7 ever comes out, and if it gets any traction, let’s see if Microsoft changes its story here.  In any case, the themes are pretty clear: Google wants to index, advertise and monetize it; Microsoft wants to license it or host it.

So what vantage point did Councilmember Brewer have to offer?: Reality!  Brewer explained that many New Yorkers can’t afford broadband.  Their libraries have it, but they’re only open 6 days a week, at most.  Schools are short on computers and, in any case, pulling broadband lines into the 1600 NYC Department of Education school buildings isn’t the trivial matter Microsoft and Google might assume.  And mobile devices don’t help: NYC school kids are not allowed to have them in school; in fact, if they even want to bring them, they have to leave them at a local bodega (corner grocery) and pay a checking fee of $1.  Think this is a problem unique to underfunded cities?  Think again.  Brewer explained that New York City has an annual budget larger than any other American city, 48 of its states, and half the countries in the world.  Software?  Services? Connectivity? Hmmm…how about something faster than dialup for people who could benefit most from it.

The panelists never really talked about trends.  Explicitly.  But they sure hit on the key issues for the year ahead.  While the titans duke it out over architecture and business models, a huge proportion of their customers are still fighting for decent usability, functionality and basic access.

posted @ Thursday, January 14, 2010 11:10 PM | Feedback (2) |

#CES Exhibits to Microsoft: Watch Your Back

As an avid Microsoft observer and dedicated partner, I find special excitement in attending the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.  Redmond delivers the event’s night-before keynote, and it has a large booth immediately  adjacent to one of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s Central Hall entrances.  Beyond that, attendees are genuinely interested in what Redmond has to say about the Consumer Electronics Industry.  It’s a place where Microsoft can shine, outside of the hardcore IT world.

But this was a tough year for Microsoft at CES.  Not only was Steve Ballmer’s keynote (covered in my prior post) disappointing, but walking around the trade show floor, I saw a number of threats to Microsoft and Windows.  I thought it wise to enumerate some of these here:

The Ubiquity of Android

Google’s Linux-based operating system, Android, seemed to me to be the star of CES.  It appeared on numerous mobile phones from heretofore close Microsoft partners like Motorola, Samsung and HTC.  But various computing devices shown at CES were running it as well.  These included special purpose kiosk prototypes, but also portable media devices and netbooks.  I swear I even saw Android running on one netbook that had a Windows key on its keyboard.

The Irrelevance of Zune

Zune HD is a wonderful device.  But whereas the iPhone commands an entire third party product subsection at CES, I only saw Microsoft’s media player at the company’s own booth and at the pavilion set up by the HD Radio group.  The latter is hardly a technology market leader.  And I’m afraid that makes apparent Zune’s comparable position.

The Mainstream Growth of Blu Ray and Introduction of Blu Ray 3D

Microsoft backed the wrong horse, HD-DVD, in the high def video disc wars.  I liked Toshiba’s HD-DVD format better than Sony’s Blu Ray, but when HD-DVD lost, it lost.  Microsoft seems to have had trouble admitting this. It has refused to offer a Blu Ray player for Xbox 360, and has also failed to integrate the disc format into its Windows Media Center product, leaving third parties to fill the gap.

Microsoft insists that streaming and downloaded HD content will make Blu Ray irrelevant before it can reach a critical mass in the marketplace.  But this CES made it clear, to me at least, that this forecast is a bad one.  While HD movies are available on Xbox 360, through the Zune Video Marketplace and Netflix, the selection of new releases is still lousy and the availability of titles with multi-channel surround audio is even worse. 

Meanwhile, Blu Ray’s reaching mainstream adoption.  Holiday sales of players and discs were huge, and Walmart now sells a Magnavox Blu Ray player for less than $100.  Studios are rapidly reducing the delta in price between DVD and Blu Ray releases, and with Blu Ray titles they are increasingly including DVD and digital file copies, assuring portability and even enabling non-Blu Ray player owners to buy the discs in advance of their player purchases.

Then there’s the matter of 3D, which was a huge story at CES, and the announcement of a Blu Ray 3D standard.  The latter, to be supported by numerous standalone players and by existing PlayStation 3 units (via a firmware upgrade), further buttresses the importance of Blu Ray and of physical media in general.  It also further impugns Microsoft’s decision to make the Xbox 360 console Blu Ray-averse.

Growth of Connected TVs and Blu Ray Players

A byproduct of Blu Ray’s growth is an interesting one, because it has little to do with the Blu Ray format itself.  Since virtually all Blu Ray players feature Internet connectivity, the vast majority of them now include connectivity to the very streaming content Microsoft said would trump Blu Ray discs in the first place.  Owners of many new-generation Blu Ray players can connect to the likes of Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Blockbuster and other streaming content sources.  And more and more HDTVs are including similar capabilities themselves, so that a Blu Ray player isn’t even required.

Why is this a threat to Microsoft?  After all, Xbox 360 and Windows Media Center both offer integrated clients for Netflix, and Windows 7 Media Center’s Internet TV feature offers access to an array of streaming content from broadcast and cable networks.  The problem is that neither Xbox nor Media Center offer as much content as many Blu Ray players and HDTVs do (most Media Center Internet TV content is from CBS), and so these consumer electronics devices are making the PC, and even Xbox, less important and less necessary devices in the living room and home theater.

Flash’s Increasing Momentum

The cross-platform compatibility of Adobe’s Flash format, its huge momentum in the market and its impending availability on mobile phones, presents a multi-faceted threat to Microsoft.  Flash’s strength continues to prove a formidable challenge to Silverlight’s growth, and it makes direct support for Windows less important.  Case in point: EchoStar’s SlingBox.  This product, which allows consumers to view their video device (cable set top box, DVR, DVD player, etc.) remotely over the Internet, at one time offered software clients exclusively for Windows and Windows Mobile.  But at their booth this year, Slingbox displayed their new browser/Flash-based client, as well as clients for BlackBerry and iPhone.  The company also told me they are working at breakneck speed on an Android client.  The Windows client will continue to be available and supported, but no longer enhanced.  The WinMo client was nowhere to be seen.  Stuff like this should make Microsoft afraid…very afraid.  It should also make them respond with something innovative.  But no such innovation was in evidence at CES this week.

There were probably other threats to Microsoft in evidence at this year’s CES. But the ones I have enumerated here should prove the point.  Microsoft is failing, on both offense and defense, to command relevance with consumers and inspire their passions.  In so doing, it increasingly relegates itself and Windows to the business market, and especially the enterprise market.  The business market is certainly nothing to sneeze at, of course.  But, Microsoft should not concede the consumer market; it’s an important source of revenue and is today where tech influencers are most influenced.  MIcrosoft needs to fight back this year, and wow the CES audience next year.

posted @ Sunday, January 10, 2010 10:26 PM | Feedback (5) |

MS Keynote @ CES10…A Little Like PDC09

It’s always exciting to attend the CES keynote.  This was the second year that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has had the honor of presenting the night-before keynote and, as a speaker, he did well. 

On the PC front, we saw new slate form factors from HP and others.  On the Xbox side, we saw a new mystery/film noire genre game, a new version of Halo, the new Xbox Game Room service that will feature numerous classic arcade games and Project Natal, the forthcoming Xbox innovation that will let you use your own body as the game controller.  We learned that Natal would ship in time for the next holiday season.  This was hoped for when Microsoft first showed Natal at the E3 gaming conference last year, but it took until this CES for it to be officially confirmed.

The keynote also covered Bing, Bing Maps and even Office 2010, with a demo of collaborative PowerPoint editing over Windows Live.  Microsoft MediaRoom, its cable TV/IPTV platform was shown and we learned that a new version will work on existing PCs, Xboxes and phones, rather than requiring a dedicated set top box. Speaking of phones, some new ones were shown, including the new HD2 from HTC.  It’s a nice phone (I tried it out today myself), but it’s still, of course, based on Windows Phone/Mobile 6.5.

What I found striking was that this year’s keynote really focused on the same things as last year’s: Windows 7, Xbox 360, Windows Mobile 6.x and a few other products.  Nothing was discussed last year about Bing, of course, because it had not come out yet.  But even Bing fits this pattern: most of what was discussed in the keynote focused on past achievements, rather than new announcements.

We saw nothing of the “Courier” slate, nothing of Windows Mobile 7 (although we did learn that WinMo7 will be discussed at a future wireless industry conference)  and no new demos of Natal.  And all this reminded me a bit of the Day 1 keynote at this year’s Professional Developer’s Conference – what we got was a progress report on last year’s announcements, rather than any major new ones.

I think that’s too bad.  Not every year can be a big newsmaker, but if Microsoft is going to kick off a a major technology conference, they should have some new tricks to show.  Maybe there’s more waiting in the wings.  It’s just too bad that none of it could be shown or discussed when all the eyes of the technology world were watching.

posted @ Thursday, January 07, 2010 9:42 PM | Feedback (0) |

2010 Predictions, Hopefully with 20-20 Vision

Tech bloggers like to have a predictions post at the beginning of each year (or the end of the previous one).  I’ve never actually written one before, although I have made year-ahead predictions in panel discussions for the now defunct NYSIA.  Since there’s no panel this year, and since I’m taking better care of this blog, I’d thought I’d give clairvoyance a whirl right here.  The following predictions are pretty random and probably not comprehensive, but I’m making it my new year’s resolution to prevent perfection from being the enemy of the good (very Presidential of me, no?). So here we go…

Android Will Continue to Gain Share

I’m really not a Google fan, but I gotta be fair: the Android OS is very well done.  It doesn’t have the polish of the iPhone OS, although that may come with time.  Rather, it appeals to the same gadget-happy demographic that Windows Mobile tried to (and failed).  The 2.1 build of the OS, which will ship on Google’s own (HTC-manufactured) Nexus One phone, looks to be faster and more stable, than the already impressive 2.0.1 build that runs on the Motorola Droid.  Perhaps most important, the platform is growing nicely in terms of application support.  Web 2.0 must-have’s like TripIt, FourSquare, Evernote, Last.fm, Pandora, Qik and OpenTable all offer native Android applications and they all work well.  The Android Market has an order of magnitude fewer applications that the Apple App Store, but Android’s catching up quickly.  2010 will be a big year for the Google mobile phone platform.

Time Warner - Fox Debacle Will Hasten Slightly the Move to a la Carte Programming Via the Internet

Time Warner Cable had one of its end-of-year carriage contract show-downs again this year, but this time the crux of it was over fees Fox wanted TWC to pay for its free, over-the-air Fox and MyTV network stations.  meanwhile, much of that programming is available for free from Hulu and other sites, in addition to the high-definition digital airwaves.  TWC and Fox did work out a deal, but it still seems likely that customers’ already high cable bills will increase as a result.  Look for formative developments this year in a not-free but reasonably-priced TV over Internet platform.  If the cable companies are smart, they’ll shift business emphasis to their ISP product and building a TV-friendly platform on top of it for delivery of TV programming on an a la carte basis.

Windows Home Server Will Continue its Quiet Progress

Aside from an all-but-forgotten file corruption bug in the first release, the Windows Home Server platform has been great success story, but the story itself has had limited exposure.  WHS boxes in a variety of form factors are available not only from HP (the “anchor” OEM, in effect), but also Asus, Acer, Lenovo and other PC manufacturers.  I think it’s the best home network backup product out there, and that’s really just the beginning.  Media Center integration is evolving nicely, and the advent of Atom-based WHS machines means ultra-low price points are part of the mix now.  When version 2.0 of the WHS OS is released, things should really heat up.  The question is whether Microsoft will stay in modesty/stealth mode on this product or whether they’ll really start to promote it.

News Corp.'s Pay Walls Won't Work

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (owner of 20th Century Fox, the various Fox TV networks, the Wall Street Journal, a slew of tabloid newspapers around the world, and other media properties) will push hard this year to start charging Internet surfers for its content.  The Wall Street Journal, which News Corp. acquired relatively recently, has always charged for the majority of its content and Murdoch now sees fit to apply the WSJ formula to other properties’ sites as well.  As much as I agree in principal with this policy, I don’t see it working out well.  The Internet has fostered a culture of entitlement whereby people look at content disparagingly if it’s made available only on a subscription basis.  WSJ has bucked that trend, but its content, and readership, are more more specialized than that of most media sites.  Content form the NY Post, News of the World and Fox News just doesn’t have the same dedicated, affluent audience.

.NET 4.0+ Will Impress Developers and Establish a Benchmark in Maturity

As much as I (and others) have lamented that .NET is becoming bloated and reaching middle age, the fact remains there’s some very good stuff coming in .NET 4.0. New bits like the Reactive Extensions and the Parallel Extensions, and fit/finish releases like ASP.NET MVC 2 and Entity Framework “4” (it’s really version 2 as well) bring both innovation and iterative refinement to Microsoft’s bet-the-company development platform.  And Visual Studio 2010’s surprisingly robust support for SharePoint development will give .NET something no other platform has: straightforward development for a high-barrier-to-entry corporate collaboration platform.  As an aside, I find it interesting that many of Microsoft’s would be eulogists neglect to mention .NET when they describe the last 10 years as Microsoft’s “lost decade.”  That’s because a success like .NET doesn’t fit the narrative of an obituary.

Netbooks Will Recede (but Thin and Light Notebooks Will Gain)

I bought a netbook this year, and I really liked it.  But then I, as other attendees and speakers at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference, became the lucky recipient of an Acer Aspire 1420P Dual Core Celeron machine.  Ever since, the only thing I’ve done with the netbook is install Windows Updates patches and back it up.  The thin/light notebook category, when compare to netbooks, offers machines that are only slightly bulkier/heaver, have comparable battery life and yet offer the display capabilities and processing power that chase away most of the compromises.  The great thing about netbooks is that they’ve forced down the price points on their high-powered brethren (a sub-$500 ThinkPad, anyone?), even considering the higher cost of non-Starter Edition Windows 7 licenses.  So netbooks have been important, without a doubt, but I still see them as an endangered species.

LAMP Stack Will Continue to Grow and Microsoft Will Do Something Interesting With It

Facts are facts: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)  has gained huge popularity in the last few years.  WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! effectively use PHP as their scripting languages and Microsoft has nothing to counter them (SharePoint is a great product, but designed for a very different customer).  Meanwhile, while it may seem otherwise, Microsoft does know the score, and has gone to great lengths to make PHP easy to install and run well on Windows Server, easy to integrate with SQL Server 2005 and 2008, and even offered sanctioned support for PHP and MySQL on its Azure cloud platform.  What comes next?  A credible open source Web publishing product?  Support in Visual Studio for PHP? New, robustly-supported tools and techniques for script-and-markup style programming in ASP.NET and/or a standalone toolkit for ASP.NET MVC development?  I think one of these initiatives, or something comparably accommodating of scripter Web development support on Windows, will emerge in 2010.

Microsoft Partner Companies will Begin to Roll-Up/Consolidate

At its 2009 Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft made clear its distaste for a slew of boutique-sized solution providers in its channel, with so many of them getting a Gold Partner designation.  Look for Microsoft to prioritize its partner engagements such that larger firms, with bigger geographic footprints and more license revenue-generating prowess, get the most attention.  Expect corresponding consolidation to occur in the partner ecosystem, such that shops with deep technical expertise and those with big selling engines come together.

Oracle Will Have a Tough Year

Maybe its ironic ownership of the open source database MySQL will cause an existentialist crisis for Oracle.  Perhaps its impending entrance into the margin-challenged hardware business will mess with Larry’s head.  Maybe Oracle’s late-(if ever)-to-the party position in the cloud computing market will be hard to transcend.  And maybe, just maybe, the shrinking willingness of customers to continue paying exorbitant licensing fees will put a wrinkle in Oracle’s quarterly results winning streak.  On the other hand, maybe Oracle will put it all together, making its disparate products and acquired company business units work well together.  No matter what though, Oracle’s path forward will be about as simple and straight as New York’s Taconic Parkway.  It might be just as scenic and interesting though.

Whether or Not You Believe in the Cloud, It Definitely Exists

I’ll conclude with something less of a prediction and more of an observation, regarding the cloud.  There’s already a glut of predictions out there about it, and I’m afraid I have little original to add to them.  It’s hard to tell how successful cloud offerings will be in 2010, and to what extent they will enable a new layer of entrepreneurial services and companies.  But it stands to reason that most companies will at least think about the cloud as they pursue just about every effort in new and existing products, services and personnel.  That will be impactful no matter what.

I think 2010 will still be a tough year for our industry.  But I think we’ll start to slope upwards to better times.  And 2010 will be the year when much groundwork for success is done.  Let’s keep an analytical eye, and we’ll be better set for better times.

posted @ Sunday, January 03, 2010 9:31 PM | Feedback (0) |