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MVM
join:2001-03-29
Calgary, AB

1 recommendation

Link Logger to lorennerol

MVM

to lorennerol

Re: [News] Nadella to be new Microsoft CEO and Gates kicked off board?

So you're saying they have jacked up the prices every quarter for the last 4 quarters by 15% to make their double digit growth, really??

Haters will hate. Everybody claims that everything is wrong with Microsoft and yet Microsoft continues to roll right along making money and growing nicely. To bad every company wasn't running as 'poorly' as Microsoft.

Blake
dave
Premium Member
join:2000-05-04
not in ohio

dave

Premium Member

Indeed, but their fortunes are still fairly closely tied to a declining market - the desktop PC. It's unclear to me whether they can get beyond that, given the mess that is Windows 8. My opinion, FWIW, is that one OS for server-desktop-touch is spreading it too thin.

Ballmer's trouble is probably that he is a business major, not a technologist.

And, as a side issue, why are you so fond of calling everyone who disagrees with you a 'hater'? I'm a long-time Microsoft follower, have used every NT version since pre-release 3.1 to pre-release Win8, and a former MVP. My opinion that they've lost their way has nothing to do with 'hate'. Big corporations do sometimes become prisoners of their previous success; the question is, can they recover when the marketplace changes?

Apple's actually a good case in point; they used to be a computer company, and they were basically waffling around producing a bunch of crap after their founder was ousted and a businessman was put in charge. Apple recovered from that in a spectacular manner.

Focusing on last year's revenue seems to be short-term thinking of the kind you're accusing investors of having. It's product strategy for the coming decade that ought to matter.

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

1 edit

Wily_One

Premium Member

said by dave:

Indeed, but their fortunes are still fairly closely tied to a declining market - the desktop PC.

Indeed, this is their biggest challenge, and they are clearly aware of it. Their response has been the Surface, Windows RT, the new Windows Phones, the subscription/cloud model for Office, and the whole Metro UI mess forced onto every device they make.

Of all the above, most have not been overly successful. I take it the updated versions of Surface are selling, but no one wanted the incompatible RT-based units. Windows Phone has gained more market share, (probably mostly at the expense of Blackberry) but is still way, way behind Apple/Android. Most Office customers are locked in, but not a lot of growth if they have no reason to upgrade. And resistance to Windows 8 is evident in Microsoft's efforts to distance itself from it as fast as possible.

Now all this negativity doesn't mean Microsoft is going out of business any time soon, but it should certainly be of concern to investors and the new CEO.

The one unit within Microsoft that you can truly call a winner is Xbox. The irony is it essentially is a PC in a different set of clothes.

Kramer
Mod
join:2000-08-03
Richmond, VA

Kramer

Mod

said by Wily_One:

The one unit within Microsoft that you can truly call a winner is Xbox. The irony is it essentially is a PC in a different set of clothes.

I would imagine their server division is hugely profitable. I do see tremendous growth potential in their cloud services too. I'm seeing a lot of people either transition from on-premise Exchange to Office 365 (Exchange in the clouds+Office if needed and wanted) or just upgrading from dirt cheap mail services. There are a lot of very small businesses out there running Exchange on their own server and it is hard to argue with $4/month/account when you really look at the costs. Of course Google gets a lot of this business too.

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One

Premium Member

said by Kramer:

I would imagine their server division is hugely profitable.

I'm sure it is, but the topic was MS efforts to move beyond the traditional desktop PC. I guess you can throw servers on the backend of the cloud that all these mobile devices will connect to into that mix.
Kearnstd
Space Elf
Premium Member
join:2002-01-22
Mullica Hill, NJ

Kearnstd to Wily_One

Premium Member

to Wily_One
said by Wily_One:

The one unit within Microsoft that you can truly call a winner is Xbox. The irony is it essentially is a PC in a different set of clothes.

I think this is in part because XBOX is just like Apple products, Everything that happens on the Xbox results in some amount of money for MS. PCs are a one shot deal, Once they get you or the OEM for the OS install there is no obligation to use anything related to MS afterwards MS does not for example get a cut of every game installed on a PC via steam or CD.

Interesting enough I think the PC decline is just a fad, Right now people want mobile but I think the PC will make a resurgence as people find that the resolution of video they want is not possible over the pitiful excuses for internet bandwidth offered here in the US. MS if smart will find a way to seize this part of the market with some kind of "Local Cloud" formula where you have tens of TB in the desktop or attached to an XBOX and any device in the house can consume that cached content.

4K(of respectable non bit starved quality for multiple users at once) will need local caching unless you are on Google Fiber or living in South Korea.
scross
join:2002-09-13
USA

scross to Wily_One

Member

to Wily_One
said by Wily_One:

The one unit within Microsoft that you can truly call a winner is Xbox.

Apparently not everyone would agree with you on this. About all I've heard over the past few years is how Xbox is a big financial drain on Microsoft, while Android might actually be a money maker for them.

»www.forbes.com/sites/eri ··· op-xbox/

BillRoland
Premium Member
join:2001-01-21
Ocala, FL

BillRoland to Kramer

Premium Member

to Kramer
said by Kramer:

said by Wily_One:

The one unit within Microsoft that you can truly call a winner is Xbox. The irony is it essentially is a PC in a different set of clothes.

I would imagine their server division is hugely profitable. I do see tremendous growth potential in their cloud services too. I'm seeing a lot of people either transition from on-premise Exchange to Office 365 (Exchange in the clouds+Office if needed and wanted) or just upgrading from dirt cheap mail services. There are a lot of very small businesses out there running Exchange on their own server and it is hard to argue with $4/month/account when you really look at the costs. Of course Google gets a lot of this business too.

I would never recommend Office 365 hosted e-mail to anyone other than very small businesses who have few users and no IT support. We migrated to it earlier this year and user satisfaction went way down, it can be painfully slow and there are outages several times a week.
BillRoland

BillRoland to Kearnstd

Premium Member

to Kearnstd
said by Kearnstd:

Interesting enough I think the PC decline is just a fad, Right now people want mobile but I think the PC will make a resurgence as people find that the resolution of video they want is not possible over the pitiful excuses for internet bandwidth offered here in the US. MS if smart will find a way to seize this part of the market with some kind of "Local Cloud" formula where you have tens of TB in the desktop or attached to an XBOX and any device in the house can consume that cached content.

I completely agree. I have to wonder how much of this decline in the PC is a result of Windows 8.

Can't help but wonder if people will start re-thinking the move of everything they have to "the cloud" with the on-going revelations of how the NSA is sifting through all of it and greedy for more.
lorennerol
Premium Member
join:2003-10-29
Seattle, WA

lorennerol to BillRoland

Premium Member

to BillRoland
said by BillRoland:

I would never recommend Office 365 hosted e-mail to anyone other than very small businesses who have few users and no IT support. We migrated to it earlier this year and user satisfaction went way down, it can be painfully slow and there are outages several times a week.

Not to mention that the only support option is to post in forums "moderated" by what appears to be a bunch of idiots who can do little more than copy/paste entirely irrelevant or useless links.

$4/month*10 users*12 months/year*5 years life of a server= $2400 for five years of crappy, crippled email hosting for ten users; self-hosting is less expensive. Do you REALLY think MS would be pushing this if it meant lower revenue for them?

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One to scross

Premium Member

to scross
said by scross:

said by Wily_One:

The one unit within Microsoft that you can truly call a winner is Xbox.

Apparently not everyone would agree with you on this. About all I've heard over the past few years is how Xbox is a big financial drain on Microsoft...

That could be, but I think MS is taking the long view. As the Forbes article suggests, this is a way to make the Xbox the hub of the home entertainment market. Time will tell if they can pull off what Sony failed to do.

Kramer
Mod
join:2000-08-03
Richmond, VA

1 recommendation

Kramer to BillRoland

Mod

to BillRoland
Been running it here since September. I've had 100% up-time since then so far as I know. I put it in an office with approximately 20 users over two offices. No downtime reported since November. No complaints about speed. Thought about Apps, but they are Outlook-centric and had been complaining about IMAP slowdowns and problems with Google. Probably installed it on another ten or so computers over a couple more offices. No reports of downtime since just before Christmas. One of those offices has complained about speed but they have a 3MB Internet connection with 5 users. I've read about Office 365 problems earlier in the year when they migrated to Exchange 2013... people constantly being disconnected. Apparently they had nowhere near the server capacity they needed. I think those problems are pretty much resolved. I pretty much agree though on VSBs 50 seats or less. This guy agrees »betanews.com/2013/03/15/ ··· s-email/ On the other-hand there is a long list of large companies and government bodies using the service. You are making me sound like a fan boy and that is far from the case, but I think it is far better now than being described here.
Kramer

2 edits

Kramer to lorennerol

Mod

to lorennerol
said by lorennerol:

Not to mention that the only support option is to post in forums "moderated" by what appears to be a bunch of idiots who can do little more than copy/paste entirely irrelevant or useless links.

This is just pure baloney. I have had to call Microsoft twice in the last 4 months with Exchange Online issues. In both cases I got someone on the phone within 5 minutes (probably 3 or less actually) who immediately started working on the problem. In both cases I got numerous follow-up phone calls to the point of being obnoxious, as I had already tried to close the trouble ticket with an email. To say they were persistently trying to resolve my problem would be an understatement. The quality of the support wasn't top shelf in one case, but if I wasn't happy with any one support person they constantly emailed me possible other contacts. I can't believe I started ripping MS a new one earlier in this thread and now find myself defending them. I agree with you regarding the forums although I have found some very useful information posted by users. You don't get any help from MS in there though. When they do post it almost as if a machine did it. You need to start a trouble ticket or call them and start one.

Despite the confusing array of plans and prices and add-ons that make dealing with Microsoft a PIA, they have a pretty good product here that hopefully will be cleaned up from a marketing angle once Ballmer leaves.

Edit- from the support link on the portal:
For the United States, telephone support is provided in English 24 hours a day, every day.

Toll-free: 1-800-865-9408
intok (banned)
join:2012-03-15

intok (banned) to dave

Member

to dave
said by dave:

Indeed, but their fortunes are still fairly closely tied to a declining market - the desktop PC.

I don't get why people keep parroting wallstreet pundit speak. The Desktop and Laptop market segments haven't declined. They just hit market saturation.

For most people their Core2 or Athlon X2 box w/ 2-4Gb of ram and XP or Vista is still running everything they want just fine and any new versions of their software don't bring it to it's knees like was the case in the 90's and early '00's where clockrate and capacities increased like mad.

The heaviest task most people do with their home systems these days is HD video playback, something that their old machine can still do well and will be able to handle new formats like H.265, VP9 and Daala with nothing more then a $40 GPU upgrade desktop or MiniPCIe DSP on their laptop should it have an open slot as many do.

The problem Microsoft has is keeping these people buying new versions of Windows, with XP support ending these people get 3 options, buy a new machine, try and install Win7 or 8.1 or install Linux. Installing Win7 or 8.1 will be more trouble and cost then it's worth on most of these old boxes, but Linux would allow them to run the same hardware till it just up and dies or needs the aforementioned GPU/DSP update for modern video codecs.
intok

intok (banned) to Wily_One

Member

to Wily_One
said by Wily_One:

That could be, but I think MS is taking the long view. As the Forbes article suggests, this is a way to make the Xbox the hub of the home entertainment market. Time will tell if they can pull off what Sony failed to do.

Sony only failed to do so with the PS3 because the other stupid parts of Sony, the Music and Movie side, got in the way of their new tech as per usual. If you remember the early demos and interviews they wanted it to be a full HTPC, but the MAFIAA perts of Sony made sure nothing interesting could come from the computer entertainment part of the company.

BillRoland
Premium Member
join:2001-01-21
Ocala, FL

BillRoland to Kramer

Premium Member

to Kramer
said by Kramer:

Been running it here since September. I've had 100% up-time since then so far as I know. I put it in an office with approximately 20 users over two offices. No downtime reported since November. No complaints about speed. Thought about Apps, but they are Outlook-centric and had been complaining about IMAP slowdowns and problems with Google. Probably installed it on another ten or so computers over a couple more offices. No reports of downtime since just before Christmas. One of those offices has complained about speed but they have a 3MB Internet connection with 5 users. I've read about Office 365 problems earlier in the year when they migrated to Exchange 2013... people constantly being disconnected. Apparently they had nowhere near the server capacity they needed. I think those problems are pretty much resolved. I pretty much agree though on VSBs 50 seats or less. This guy agrees »betanews.com/2013/03/15/ ··· s-email/ On the other-hand there is a long list of large companies and government bodies using the service. You are making me sound like a fan boy and that is far from the case, but I think it is far better now than being described here.

I am not opposed to the concept of Office 365, and there are some good things about the service that I like. The storage capacity is awesome. Its definitely easier on us in IT to not have to manage an Exchange server; whenever there's a mail problem we can dump it off on Microsoft and that's the end of it. Having said that, you must be lucky enough to be on a better tenant than we are. I work in a business with hundreds of users, all on Office 365, and we deal with outages of some kind several times a week. The Exchange Online 2013 upgrade was a disaster, auto-discover did not update server settings for ANYBODY and had to manually repair the Outlook profiles for everyone, it took over 6 months for them to migrate us to EOP from FOPE and we had to escalate it several times before anybody at Microsoft figured out was holding up the upgrade. We're not even doing anything fancy like AD Federation/SSO.

Kramer
Mod
join:2000-08-03
Richmond, VA

1 edit

Kramer

Mod

I obviously haven't been dealing with the scale you have, but like I said, the Exchange aspect of Office 365 has been pretty good for me. Roll-out was difficult in some cases and auto-discover was an issue with a few PCs, but not many. Microsoft had better get all this right and I think they will eventually. It bites into their enterprise market in a big way. A fairly typical business that writes letters, processes email, and keeps data updated in databases is finding more and more opportunities in the clouds. A completely non-Microsoft shop while unlikely a few years ago, is becoming more prevalent now. Microsoft is becoming irrelevant in many markets they were basically the only solution for a few years ago. They obviously know they must replace this business. They are just so darned big and heavy, I'm not 100% sure they are capable of this. One of the bigger contenders for the CEO position wanted to break up the company. I think that is a wise idea, but it wasn't for him:)

If I had to run my business off an iPad or Android tablet, it would be possible now. Let's say I wanted to use Microsoft software like Office 365. No problem with the email, but what about Word, Excel, etc. Forget it. Yes they have a version of Office for the iPhone, but there is nothing for the iPad. I have installed the Android version and it is a joke. They are protecting their revenues while at the same time reducing them in the future. It is a shortsightedness that continually seems to afflict that company.

Let me just give you one example locally where Microsoft is becoming irrelevant. Our local MLS system is used by thousands of real estate agents. During the last good number of years they were forced into using a MLS system that would only run with a number of Active-X components installed in IE. I can't tell you how much money I have made dealing with various issues getting those components installed or dealing with IE issues they would naturally face. For years, you couldn't use a Mac or an iPad or Chrome or Firefox. Yes they had work-arounds, but they were bad ones. But this week they finally dumped the system in favor of something much more universal. I haven't gotten my hands on it yet, but my understanding is the system is quite good. Here we had 5000-6000 people in one metropolitan area that were tied to Microsoft with probably 10 thousand or more devices. Now they are as free as birds. Microsoft can kiss a lot of that business goodbye.

BillRoland
Premium Member
join:2001-01-21
Ocala, FL

BillRoland

Premium Member

Click for full size
Just to illustrate the point.

Kramer
Mod
join:2000-08-03
Richmond, VA

Kramer

Mod

Go a little deeper. They don't have any plans to fix the problem for almost 2 weeks. I was looking at that two hours ago. The problem concerns rules and can be worked around using Powershell (which I am not too good at). It has had zero effect on what I do, but I could see an admin going bonkers. But then for a person this bothers there aught to be a decent proficiency in Powershell. Problem solved with time wasted.
Kramer

Kramer to BillRoland

Mod

to BillRoland
Speaking of transport rules. I don't know if you know this but when you buy an Office 365 Business subscription you don't get them. I learned this the hard way. I just got a 4 dollar a month Exchange plan for myself a few months before Rolling it out to an office of about 20 users a few months later. That office had no need for anything but the $4/user plan. Then i needed to implement it in an office with 5 or 6 users some of which would benefit by the Office subscription model. So I signed up for a free trial of office 365 business. I started to poke around exchange and found a lot of features missing that I was used to. The interface was completely different. Big pain canceling that account and figuring out how I could get the Exchange I wanted. I must have talked to 4 ms reps everyone giving me a different answer. Finally got someone that explained it all to me. What I needed was the $4 month enterprise exchange accounts plus an add on for $12 per month that gave you Office. Then you get the transport rules. $1 more per month with no discount for annual payment. Their array of plans, options and sub-options is so dizzying that spin in a centrifuge would seem motionless. That's what happens when you get too big.

dib22
join:2002-01-27
Kansas City, MO

dib22 to BillRoland

Member

to BillRoland
said by BillRoland:

I would never recommend Office 365 hosted e-mail to anyone other than very small businesses who have few users and no IT support.

All the people I recommended it to have had no real issues, and some have been using it since october, the only real issue I got a call on turned out to be a billing issue with the client.

...and you hit the nail on the head... small businesses with few users and no IT is where it works perfectly (especially when they are already used to the exchange ecosystem).

If they want exchange I recommend the microsoft solution and if they want non-exchange they get google apps. The uptime on both has been exceptional (much better than other smaller resellers from the past due to the excellent internet peering that ms and goog have).