FT.com / Technology - What IT means to me: ‘I’m a fan of IT, but I’m still a bit cynical’
What IT means to me: ‘I’m a fan of IT, but I’m still a bit cynical’
By Stephen Pritchard
Published: April 2 2008 02:23 | Last updated: April 2 2008 02:23
Alan Middleton has the builders in. The London headquarters of PA Consulting, where Mr Middleton is chief executive, smells of fresh paint. Hoardings in the lobby and atrium show how the new, extended offices will look, with space for more staff and – vitally – more space for meetings, too.
Perhaps surprisingly for a CEO who has done much to bring his company into the digital world, meetings matter for Mr Middleton. On his watch, PA has become one of the first management consultancies to build a presence in Second Life, the online virtual world, providing experience that PA has drawn on to build virtual worlds for clients.
Mr Middleton previously served as head of IT for PA, overseeing significant advances in the company’s technology infrastructure and its ability to support remote and mobile working. He has backed investment in knowledge management, blogging, wikis and podcasts at PA. But he still puts much store on face-to-face meetings.
“I am not fearful of IT,” he explains. “I live in a 17th century house which is fully automated: the heating, light, sound system and even the garden. I can switch on the electric blanket from Hong Kong and toast my wife! In that sense I am a fan of IT, but I’m still a bit cynical.
“I get very frustrated by people’s dependence on e-mail, and everything else that reduces personal contact, but I’ve not been able to reduce it. We are a people business and we need to bring people together.”
Connecting people, he says, should really be why large companies invest in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and knowledge management systems.
“Our system captures who was in the team that worked on a project,” he says. “We publish that information internally, so I can run a simple search to find out who knows what. At that point we have a human bond, I ring that person and say ‘give me a hand’. The human link is simple but very powerful knowledge management.”
Such systems, Mr Middleton concedes, fall short of the sophistication often demanded by the knowledge management purists, with their multi-tiered systems and complex tables of metadata that require hours of consultants’ time to fill out. Yet they work. “If you come at it purely from an IT angle, these projects will fail,” he says.
According to Mr Middleton, PA’s internal business system Mipac (management information, planning and control) is driven by one objective: to connect people.
The first generation of Mipac, created in 1995, used Microsoft Exchange for messaging and accounting; and for HR, one of the first UK installations of PeopleSoft. On top of this came KnowledgeNet, the company’s knowledge management system, and the whole was linked by a hard-wired global network at “enormous cost”.
“That was five to eight years ahead of its time,” says Mr Middleton. “We still use the same business solution, but have evolved to what you would expect: lower cost, delivering the same functionality on new technologies and over IP networks and VPNs.”
PA was also an early adopter, and advocate, of mobile working. “We had some of the early [Apple] Macs and the first Mac laptops; I ruined several suits carrying those,” recalls Mr Middleton. “Then we moved to Toshiba laptops. Within a year, we had 2,500 consultants using them. At that time, it was a genuine business advantage and a differentiator.”
The challenge for chief executives, he suggests, is to keep up with technological change and not to become too satisfied with the status quo.
“Attitudes to technology are age-dependent,” he says. “If we have a partner joining us from another firm, he or she will say that our core stuff is fabulous and makes their life hugely easier. That is the traditional role of IT.
“But our younger people have a different view. I think that this is happening everywhere: the existing generation see new joiners as anarchists, while the younger generation sees existing business people as fuddy-duddies.
“People joining see technology as bringing the capability to interact with others, an enabler for their networking and zany ideas. This is a healthy tension that will drive change.”
One example was a presentation, eight years ago, of something that looked like today’s mobile e-mail devices.
“A partner from the PA Technology Centre held up a thing that we had built: a Palmpilot with a GSM module,” says Mr Middleton.
“He told us this was the future, and that in a few years we would all have a device with a camera on it, access to our diaries and corporate e-mail. It would be a phone and we would use it to surf the web – and that it would be about the size of a cigarette packet. Many said that the chap must be past his sell-by date. But he was right.”
One way companies can learn to spot such changes is to ensure their future managers spend time in IT.
Mr Middleton firmly believes that time spent running an IT project is just as important for executives as, say, a spell in finance.
All too often, large companies ask senior executives to “sponsor” IT projects, but those executives often lack the depth of knowledge, not to mention the time, to do so effectively.
At the same time, Mr Middleton has sympathy for the plight of the CIO, who is expected to innovate but also to deliver more with less.
“In recent times, by and large, CIOs have been squeezed really hard on cost. That is in a sense counter-intuitive, as revenues and profitability have been looking great in most organisations, yet CIOs were still being pushed to cut costs. “Now, as the world wobbles, the danger for CIOs is that the very things that bring value to the bottom line, the innovative things, have been squeezed in the last six years and there is no financial or human capacity left.
“Our business leaders are saying ‘be more innovative and funky’ but there is not a lot of bandwidth to play with.”
Increasingly, companies will look beyond conventional sources of business technology to deliver that innovation. PA, for example, has turned to social networking and user-generated content to help its own business.
“We are looking at how to further our knowledge management through the power of social networking techniques – such as Facebook and Bebo – in a business context. These approaches and technologies will need to reach their second generation before they are fully usable, but they offer exciting opportunities,” he says.
PA’s excursion into virtual worlds, in the shape of Second Life, raised eyebrows both within and outside the company, but has resulted in business wins from organisations as diverse as telecoms operator Telenor and the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
“We built the Hong Kong Jockey Club in Second Life, new branch layouts for banks and have shown how it can be used to train oil tanker drivers and emergency services when responding to forecourt incidents,” Mr Middleton points out.
“We were the first management consulting firm to develop a presence in Second Life. When we started doing that, people said ‘It’s for the birds’. But I said that in 1994 about the internet. Yet within three years, you were dinosaurs if you were not online.
“I’m sure we’ve all made mistakes like that time and time again. If you don’t respond to the opportunities offered by the relentless change, then you’ll struggle.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
Learning to use SharePoint – could this be like learning to snowboard?
After a week of fantastic spring break skiing at Whistler in British Columbia, I returned to work and was reminded that training alone is not enough to help users successfully build their own SharePoint collaboration sites. It’s a bit like my friend Drew describes learning to snowboard, which he says is “easy to learn but difficult to master.” I’m now convinced that SharePoint has this same characteristic – easy to learn but very difficult to master. Why? ...
...Because most organizations end up with just enough time to train users on the basic features and functions of the tool, not on information architecture and design best practices so that they can optimally build sites. You know, the kind where people can actually find information instead of having it buried in the same useless folder hierarchy that existed on the file shares SharePoint is replacing. Training in the “how to” functions in MOSS 2007 is not enough – site builders, who in many organizations are not going to be IT folks but rather “regular” end users, also need to understand information design best practices.
Here are just a few concepts that can improve the end-user designed sites I have reviewed:
- Tab Navigation: Sub-sites can be more easily organized and visible by leveraging the out of the box tab navigation that comes with SharePoint. On one end user-designed site I reviewed recently, the site designer had multiple sub-sites but they were only visible in the left hand navigation, which, due to a lengthy list of libraries, etc., required a lot of vertical scrolling to find. Grouping the sites on meaningful tabs (and sub-tabs) would have created a much more usable site.
- Consistent Use of Metadata: In a series of sites in the same site collection (designed for the same group of end users), metadata should be consistently applied. On this same site, some document libraries used a field called Keywords to categorize documents and others used a more functional term to categorize documents using the exact same values. All libraries should have used the functional term.
- Limited Use of Folders: I’ve mentioned this in earlier posts, but folders are not the only way or often not the best way to organize information in a document library. On many sites that I’ve reviewed in the past, I’ve seen folders with no documents, folders with one document, and folder hierarchies that are impossible to decipher (often, even for the original designer!). SharePoint training really must include best practices for content organization or we’re going to have SharePoint sites that are as difficult to understand and navigate as the file shares they are designed to replace.
- Consistent Page Layouts: One of my clients described navigating the SharePoint sites in her organization as an “adventure.” Every site uses a different structure – for example, some sites have Announcements web parts in the upper left, some in the upper right, some show 10 items and take up way too much screen real estate and some show just the 3 to 5 most recent items. I shudder to think about how an external partner who works with multiple groups in this organization will react when it seems like they are working with 10 companies, not one! Just because you CAN change the organization of the web parts on your site around doesn’t mean you should! Organizations need to build a collection of templates that work for their business and encourage users with design privileges to understand the value of the templates for their end users – creating a balance between “creativity and productivity,” with an emphasis on the latter.
SharePoint is a fantastic end user tool. The “no code” capabilities are a great way to empower end users to create their own collaboration sites, without requiring IT intervention. But, IT can’t just provide basic skills training in the features of SharePoint without also helping site designers learn to master the best practices of site design. Drew tells me that any downhill skier can probably learn to snowboard almost as well as they ski but they have to really devote 3-5 solid days to master the techniques enough to fully enjoy the experience. They clearly can’t be an expert in 3-5 days, but they can certainly have more than just the basics. I think that’s how we have to look at SharePoint training – all site builders need to learn the basic skills first, but then they absolutely have to dedicate enough time to learn the best practices for site design and information architectures or their sites will just not be usable.
...Because most organizations end up with just enough time to train users on the basic features and functions of the tool, not on information architecture and design best practices so that they can optimally build sites. You know, the kind where people can actually find information instead of having it buried in the same useless folder hierarchy that existed on the file shares SharePoint is replacing. Training in the “how to” functions in MOSS 2007 is not enough – site builders, who in many organizations are not going to be IT folks but rather “regular” end users, also need to understand information design best practices.
Here are just a few concepts that can improve the end-user designed sites I have reviewed:
- Tab Navigation: Sub-sites can be more easily organized and visible by leveraging the out of the box tab navigation that comes with SharePoint. On one end user-designed site I reviewed recently, the site designer had multiple sub-sites but they were only visible in the left hand navigation, which, due to a lengthy list of libraries, etc., required a lot of vertical scrolling to find. Grouping the sites on meaningful tabs (and sub-tabs) would have created a much more usable site.
- Consistent Use of Metadata: In a series of sites in the same site collection (designed for the same group of end users), metadata should be consistently applied. On this same site, some document libraries used a field called Keywords to categorize documents and others used a more functional term to categorize documents using the exact same values. All libraries should have used the functional term.
- Limited Use of Folders: I’ve mentioned this in earlier posts, but folders are not the only way or often not the best way to organize information in a document library. On many sites that I’ve reviewed in the past, I’ve seen folders with no documents, folders with one document, and folder hierarchies that are impossible to decipher (often, even for the original designer!). SharePoint training really must include best practices for content organization or we’re going to have SharePoint sites that are as difficult to understand and navigate as the file shares they are designed to replace.
- Consistent Page Layouts: One of my clients described navigating the SharePoint sites in her organization as an “adventure.” Every site uses a different structure – for example, some sites have Announcements web parts in the upper left, some in the upper right, some show 10 items and take up way too much screen real estate and some show just the 3 to 5 most recent items. I shudder to think about how an external partner who works with multiple groups in this organization will react when it seems like they are working with 10 companies, not one! Just because you CAN change the organization of the web parts on your site around doesn’t mean you should! Organizations need to build a collection of templates that work for their business and encourage users with design privileges to understand the value of the templates for their end users – creating a balance between “creativity and productivity,” with an emphasis on the latter.
SharePoint is a fantastic end user tool. The “no code” capabilities are a great way to empower end users to create their own collaboration sites, without requiring IT intervention. But, IT can’t just provide basic skills training in the features of SharePoint without also helping site designers learn to master the best practices of site design. Drew tells me that any downhill skier can probably learn to snowboard almost as well as they ski but they have to really devote 3-5 solid days to master the techniques enough to fully enjoy the experience. They clearly can’t be an expert in 3-5 days, but they can certainly have more than just the basics. I think that’s how we have to look at SharePoint training – all site builders need to learn the basic skills first, but then they absolutely have to dedicate enough time to learn the best practices for site design and information architectures or their sites will just not be usable.
FT.com | Tech Blog | Taking aim at Microsoft’s cash cow
FT.com | Tech Blog | Taking aim at Microsoft’s cash cow
Taking aim at Microsoft’s cash cow
Google’s anti-Microsoft strategy continues to unfold. Today brings news that its online Docs applications will soon step beyond the Web and onto the desktop. (This is accomplished with the Google Gears browser plug-in, which lets you access internet applications while offline by using the hard drive as a cache - a company representative offered to “whitelist” me so I can start using it today, but the less privileged among you will have to wait until this feature becomes generally available over “the next few weeks.”)
Google likes to cloak its new product features in uplifting rhetoric: the company only looks to delight its users, it isn’t motivated by the sort of competitive strategy that other companies employ, and so on. But the evolution of Docs has always looked like a very deliberate plan hatched with its Redmond rival in mind.
Early on, CEO Eric Schmidt talked down the capabilities of Docs as a rival for Office: the main attraction was the ability to share documents, spreadsheets and other files over the Web, and anyway browser-based apps were very poor relations of their desktop cousins.
Then, nearly a year ago, the tune changed. Having rounded out Docs into an Office-like suite of apps, Google said it was adding “applications” to its corporate mission statement (alongside search and advertising.) For good measure, Schmidt said that online apps were starting to become a real alternative to desktop software since browser technology had advanced far faster than he had expected (what a surprise!)
Extending Docs offline looks like the next step. Giving users the ability to write, edit or view files while not connected to the Web (any changes are automatically synchronised with the version on Google’s servers once the machine goes online again) removes one of the main disincentives for using Docs.
Google’s leaders have at times given tell-tale hints about the real strategy here. Last year Mr Schmidt conceded that while many companies might not yet consider adopting Google’s applications, they were still likely to use the threat of switching away from Office as a way to get a better deal out of Microsoft. Thanks to the new offline capabilities, this negotitating leverage is about to get stronger.
March 31st, 2008 in Internet, Software | Permalink
Taking aim at Microsoft’s cash cow
Google’s anti-Microsoft strategy continues to unfold. Today brings news that its online Docs applications will soon step beyond the Web and onto the desktop. (This is accomplished with the Google Gears browser plug-in, which lets you access internet applications while offline by using the hard drive as a cache - a company representative offered to “whitelist” me so I can start using it today, but the less privileged among you will have to wait until this feature becomes generally available over “the next few weeks.”)
Google likes to cloak its new product features in uplifting rhetoric: the company only looks to delight its users, it isn’t motivated by the sort of competitive strategy that other companies employ, and so on. But the evolution of Docs has always looked like a very deliberate plan hatched with its Redmond rival in mind.
Early on, CEO Eric Schmidt talked down the capabilities of Docs as a rival for Office: the main attraction was the ability to share documents, spreadsheets and other files over the Web, and anyway browser-based apps were very poor relations of their desktop cousins.
Then, nearly a year ago, the tune changed. Having rounded out Docs into an Office-like suite of apps, Google said it was adding “applications” to its corporate mission statement (alongside search and advertising.) For good measure, Schmidt said that online apps were starting to become a real alternative to desktop software since browser technology had advanced far faster than he had expected (what a surprise!)
Extending Docs offline looks like the next step. Giving users the ability to write, edit or view files while not connected to the Web (any changes are automatically synchronised with the version on Google’s servers once the machine goes online again) removes one of the main disincentives for using Docs.
Google’s leaders have at times given tell-tale hints about the real strategy here. Last year Mr Schmidt conceded that while many companies might not yet consider adopting Google’s applications, they were still likely to use the threat of switching away from Office as a way to get a better deal out of Microsoft. Thanks to the new offline capabilities, this negotitating leverage is about to get stronger.
March 31st, 2008 in Internet, Software | Permalink
Friday, March 28, 2008
Microsoft SharePoint taking business by storm
Versatile Microsoft server may not be perfect, but it is attracting interest as tool to address anything from collaboration to process management
Microsoft's SharePoint Server is on a billion dollar juggernaut to potentially become the next must-have technology, offering companies tools for building everything from collaborative applications to Internet sites and potentially handing Microsoft its next cash cow.
I have not seen anything like this since the early days of [Lotus] Notes," says Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group. In those days, corporate users were enamored with a shiny new technology that seemed to have infinite uses. "The talk [around SharePoint] is getting strategic now and people are talking about it as a middleware decision," Gotta says.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is the fastest growing product in the company's history and seems to have as many uses as a Swiss Army knife. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management (ECM), business process management and business intelligence.(Compare collaboration products.)
Just last month, Microsoft added a hosted alternative to fuel adoption. There is a "perfect storm," observers say, around SharePoint in terms of the popularity of Web-based computing, demand for less-expensive ECM and portal tools, collaboration technology and integration around Microsoft's Office suite.
The attention is a wake up call for competitors, especially IBM/Lotus, as SharePoint could pull customers to other Microsoft software because it is closely integrated with Microsoft's unified communications stack, its e-mail server, Office and Office applications including back-end file sharing repositories for Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
SharePoint was first introduced in 2001 to less than lukewarm reviews as SharePoint Portal Server. In 2003, a stripped down version was offered for free as part of Windows Server 2003 R2, which made it easy for users to test drive the software and soon end-user created team worksites began popping up all over corporate networks.
In 2008, SharePoint has evolved into the prototypical Microsoft tool – good enough for small-to-midsize businesses, adaptable to large enterprises, and, most important, plenty of financial opportunities for third-party independent software vendors and systems integrators.
Partners involved in everything from directory management to archiving to single sign-on are reporting that SharePoint is improving their own revenue.
In March, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief software architect, said SharePoint had passed 100 million licenses sold, had attracted 17,000 user companies, and eclipsed $1 billion in sales for his company.
Many critics dispute the licensing number but not the message that SharePoint is on fire.
SharePoint, however, isn't without issues that users should consider, including the fact that it does not scale well given the way it stores data in SQL Server, a concern Microsoft is working to answer in the next version likely to ship in 2009.
Or that its social networking tools are considered rudimentary, that SharePoint's portal capabilities still don't measure up to enterprise-class platforms and that the server takes customizations to make it truly sing.
"I think there is going to be some buyer's remorse," Gotta says.
SharePoint does many things, but scaling is not one of them. SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server in what amounts to one universal table, which leads to lots of on-the-wire traffic and a Microsoft recommendation of only 2,000 items per list. By contrast, IBM WebSphere permits hundreds of millions of items per list.
The social networking tools are uninspiring and Microsoft is partnering with NewsGator (feed reader) and Atlassian (wiki) to cover bases, which will lead to inevitable feature clashes as SharePoint evolves.
"Compared to what is out there today, Microsoft's Web 2.0 tools look old and very static and are clunky and difficult to use," says Oliver Young, an analyst with Forrester.
But Young says those limitations and others are speed bumps not show-stoppers.
"I'm not sure I've seen anything that has taken off this big, this quickly. SharePoint 2007 has just blown up," he says.
Late last year, an IDC survey of 300 users found 61% were deploying SharePoint enterprise-wide, and that 28% of those using SharePoint in departments now are expected to expand usage to the enterprise within the next 12 months.
Current users can attest to that transition saying they have persevered from SharePoint's early days to what is now a tactical platform.
In 2006, Brad Marshall, corporate IT director for Bowen Family Homes in Duluth, Ga., backed into SharePoint as part of a hosting deal centered on Microsoft Exchange. Marshall did not like what he had originally seen in Windows SharePoint Services, which offered team workspaces and file sharing for free as part of Windows Server 2003.
But having SharePoint Portal 2003 hosted eliminated some technological limitations and development chores and eventually resulted in a business process workflow application for selling homes that cut up to two days the time it took to do the same process using the old paper-based system.
"We have it down today where in a push we could get it done in less than an hour," Marshall says. The company has built eight to 10 applications on SharePoint, including vacation and performance-review programs.
But Marshall says customizing SharePoint is mandatory and he has used tools from CorasWorks to make that easier.
"If it was just regular, out-of-the-box SharePoint we might not be using it today to be honest," he says.
What's also becoming important are add-ons from partners.
"One of the things we find is people bought SharePoint and they have not figured out the power that is there," says Brian Kellner, vice president of product development for NewsGator. "We help make that more obvious and simple."
Others are building on features that users will need when they begin to harvest that power, such as Symantec with its archiving system, Enterprise Vault.
"In the last year IT has become more aware and more concerned in having a managed approach to SharePoint," says Dave Scott, group product manager for Symantec.
Microsoft for its part compares the popularity of SharePoint with an application that has helped define its success.
"We see tremendous momentum just like Office in the early days when people said this is a new way to work," says Tom Rizzo, director of SharePoint. Consulting firm Accenture has built a Facebook-like SharePoint application to find experts, Ford Motor Co. uses SharePoint for its dealer portal, and the Marines have deployed collaborative applications to aid their efforts in Iraq.
Rizzo says SharePoint has so many entry points for users that Microsoft calls it a business productivity server. He says the next version will show investments in social computing and new features he would not disclose.
"The beauty of SharePoint is that it hits a number of sweet spots," Rizzo says.
It also hits competitors between the eyes.
"I think the most interesting trend to watch for this year and next is how IBM/Lotus reacts to this SharePoint phenomenon," says Harry Wong, CEO and founder of Casahl Technology, which has been helping users migrate either to or from Microsoft and Lotus messaging platforms for years.
Wong says SharePoint is proving to be a powerful leading punch for Microsoft to sell IBM/Lotus users on migration to Exchange and Microsoft's entire slate of collaboration tools.
IBM/Lotus is countering with a similar product called Quickr, and just like Microsoft with Windows SharePoint Services, is giving users a free version to get started.
To be successful, Wong says Lotus has to sell customers on Quickr vs. SharePoint; on Lotus Notes 8 and its Outlook-like interface and integration with Lotus Sametime and Connections; and convince bigger Domino shops the J2EE version of Quickr will provide the scale that SharePoint lacks
"IBM/Lotus has the weapons to defend against Microsoft SharePoint if IBM/Lotus acts quickly and aggressively," he says.
As the battle emerges, it might begin to look like the messaging wars the two fought in the 1990s, but given the breadth of the technology the prize could be much bigger.
Microsoft's SharePoint Server is on a billion dollar juggernaut to potentially become the next must-have technology, offering companies tools for building everything from collaborative applications to Internet sites and potentially handing Microsoft its next cash cow.
I have not seen anything like this since the early days of [Lotus] Notes," says Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group. In those days, corporate users were enamored with a shiny new technology that seemed to have infinite uses. "The talk [around SharePoint] is getting strategic now and people are talking about it as a middleware decision," Gotta says.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is the fastest growing product in the company's history and seems to have as many uses as a Swiss Army knife. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management (ECM), business process management and business intelligence.(Compare collaboration products.)
Just last month, Microsoft added a hosted alternative to fuel adoption. There is a "perfect storm," observers say, around SharePoint in terms of the popularity of Web-based computing, demand for less-expensive ECM and portal tools, collaboration technology and integration around Microsoft's Office suite.
The attention is a wake up call for competitors, especially IBM/Lotus, as SharePoint could pull customers to other Microsoft software because it is closely integrated with Microsoft's unified communications stack, its e-mail server, Office and Office applications including back-end file sharing repositories for Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
SharePoint was first introduced in 2001 to less than lukewarm reviews as SharePoint Portal Server. In 2003, a stripped down version was offered for free as part of Windows Server 2003 R2, which made it easy for users to test drive the software and soon end-user created team worksites began popping up all over corporate networks.
In 2008, SharePoint has evolved into the prototypical Microsoft tool – good enough for small-to-midsize businesses, adaptable to large enterprises, and, most important, plenty of financial opportunities for third-party independent software vendors and systems integrators.
Partners involved in everything from directory management to archiving to single sign-on are reporting that SharePoint is improving their own revenue.
In March, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief software architect, said SharePoint had passed 100 million licenses sold, had attracted 17,000 user companies, and eclipsed $1 billion in sales for his company.
Many critics dispute the licensing number but not the message that SharePoint is on fire.
SharePoint, however, isn't without issues that users should consider, including the fact that it does not scale well given the way it stores data in SQL Server, a concern Microsoft is working to answer in the next version likely to ship in 2009.
Or that its social networking tools are considered rudimentary, that SharePoint's portal capabilities still don't measure up to enterprise-class platforms and that the server takes customizations to make it truly sing.
"I think there is going to be some buyer's remorse," Gotta says.
SharePoint does many things, but scaling is not one of them. SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server in what amounts to one universal table, which leads to lots of on-the-wire traffic and a Microsoft recommendation of only 2,000 items per list. By contrast, IBM WebSphere permits hundreds of millions of items per list.
The social networking tools are uninspiring and Microsoft is partnering with NewsGator (feed reader) and Atlassian (wiki) to cover bases, which will lead to inevitable feature clashes as SharePoint evolves.
"Compared to what is out there today, Microsoft's Web 2.0 tools look old and very static and are clunky and difficult to use," says Oliver Young, an analyst with Forrester.
But Young says those limitations and others are speed bumps not show-stoppers.
"I'm not sure I've seen anything that has taken off this big, this quickly. SharePoint 2007 has just blown up," he says.
Late last year, an IDC survey of 300 users found 61% were deploying SharePoint enterprise-wide, and that 28% of those using SharePoint in departments now are expected to expand usage to the enterprise within the next 12 months.
Current users can attest to that transition saying they have persevered from SharePoint's early days to what is now a tactical platform.
In 2006, Brad Marshall, corporate IT director for Bowen Family Homes in Duluth, Ga., backed into SharePoint as part of a hosting deal centered on Microsoft Exchange. Marshall did not like what he had originally seen in Windows SharePoint Services, which offered team workspaces and file sharing for free as part of Windows Server 2003.
But having SharePoint Portal 2003 hosted eliminated some technological limitations and development chores and eventually resulted in a business process workflow application for selling homes that cut up to two days the time it took to do the same process using the old paper-based system.
"We have it down today where in a push we could get it done in less than an hour," Marshall says. The company has built eight to 10 applications on SharePoint, including vacation and performance-review programs.
But Marshall says customizing SharePoint is mandatory and he has used tools from CorasWorks to make that easier.
"If it was just regular, out-of-the-box SharePoint we might not be using it today to be honest," he says.
What's also becoming important are add-ons from partners.
"One of the things we find is people bought SharePoint and they have not figured out the power that is there," says Brian Kellner, vice president of product development for NewsGator. "We help make that more obvious and simple."
Others are building on features that users will need when they begin to harvest that power, such as Symantec with its archiving system, Enterprise Vault.
"In the last year IT has become more aware and more concerned in having a managed approach to SharePoint," says Dave Scott, group product manager for Symantec.
Microsoft for its part compares the popularity of SharePoint with an application that has helped define its success.
"We see tremendous momentum just like Office in the early days when people said this is a new way to work," says Tom Rizzo, director of SharePoint. Consulting firm Accenture has built a Facebook-like SharePoint application to find experts, Ford Motor Co. uses SharePoint for its dealer portal, and the Marines have deployed collaborative applications to aid their efforts in Iraq.
Rizzo says SharePoint has so many entry points for users that Microsoft calls it a business productivity server. He says the next version will show investments in social computing and new features he would not disclose.
"The beauty of SharePoint is that it hits a number of sweet spots," Rizzo says.
It also hits competitors between the eyes.
"I think the most interesting trend to watch for this year and next is how IBM/Lotus reacts to this SharePoint phenomenon," says Harry Wong, CEO and founder of Casahl Technology, which has been helping users migrate either to or from Microsoft and Lotus messaging platforms for years.
Wong says SharePoint is proving to be a powerful leading punch for Microsoft to sell IBM/Lotus users on migration to Exchange and Microsoft's entire slate of collaboration tools.
IBM/Lotus is countering with a similar product called Quickr, and just like Microsoft with Windows SharePoint Services, is giving users a free version to get started.
To be successful, Wong says Lotus has to sell customers on Quickr vs. SharePoint; on Lotus Notes 8 and its Outlook-like interface and integration with Lotus Sametime and Connections; and convince bigger Domino shops the J2EE version of Quickr will provide the scale that SharePoint lacks
"IBM/Lotus has the weapons to defend against Microsoft SharePoint if IBM/Lotus acts quickly and aggressively," he says.
As the battle emerges, it might begin to look like the messaging wars the two fought in the 1990s, but given the breadth of the technology the prize could be much bigger.
Will Content Management Be Most Affected By Open Source? - Content Management Blog - InformationWeek
Will Content Management Be Most Affected By Open Source? - Content Management Blog - InformationWeek
Will Content Management Be Most Affected By Open Source?
Posted by George Dearing, Mar 26, 2008 04:35 PM
Some of open source's biggest proponents were probably gloating this week over some results from North Bridge Venture Partners' annual open source survey (PDF). Most of the findings weren't terribly prophetic, but there were a few that caught my eye.
Apparently the respondents singled out the content management market as the segment with the highest chance of being turned upside down within the next five years. The drama, however, is well under way, with a cast of thousands being led by companies such as Alfresco, Acquia, and a cottage industry of solution providers pitching Web platforms like Joomla, DotNetNuke, and Drupal.
Throw in the bevy of SaaS providers delivering content capabilities via cloud computing and you've got even more disruption. Will all these choices add up to more confusion for customers? I doubt it. With Web standards continuing to be ironed out and open source business models maturing quickly, companies can go as commercial (read proprietary or on-premise) or open source as they choose without the dreaded vendor lock-in.
It's pretty clear that the social Web is driving the demand for open source frameworks and with the mindset of "social publishing" continuing to be on Web agendas everywhere, look for community-led expansion and innovation to accelerate.
Smart companies realize the social part of the Web isn't leaving the party anytime soon and have made their demands clear. They want to be their own media companies, creating and distributing content globally on their own terms. If vendors can't provide the tools, they'll find their own.
« Squeezing Costs Out Of IT | Main | Helpstream Helps Those Who Help Themselves »
Will Content Management Be Most Affected By Open Source?
Posted by George Dearing, Mar 26, 2008 04:35 PM
Some of open source's biggest proponents were probably gloating this week over some results from North Bridge Venture Partners' annual open source survey (PDF). Most of the findings weren't terribly prophetic, but there were a few that caught my eye.
Apparently the respondents singled out the content management market as the segment with the highest chance of being turned upside down within the next five years. The drama, however, is well under way, with a cast of thousands being led by companies such as Alfresco, Acquia, and a cottage industry of solution providers pitching Web platforms like Joomla, DotNetNuke, and Drupal.
Throw in the bevy of SaaS providers delivering content capabilities via cloud computing and you've got even more disruption. Will all these choices add up to more confusion for customers? I doubt it. With Web standards continuing to be ironed out and open source business models maturing quickly, companies can go as commercial (read proprietary or on-premise) or open source as they choose without the dreaded vendor lock-in.
It's pretty clear that the social Web is driving the demand for open source frameworks and with the mindset of "social publishing" continuing to be on Web agendas everywhere, look for community-led expansion and innovation to accelerate.
Smart companies realize the social part of the Web isn't leaving the party anytime soon and have made their demands clear. They want to be their own media companies, creating and distributing content globally on their own terms. If vendors can't provide the tools, they'll find their own.
« Squeezing Costs Out Of IT | Main | Helpstream Helps Those Who Help Themselves »
Microsoft Sharepoint wird strategische Plattform und bedrängt IBM - Produkte + Technik - Software - computerwoche.de
Microsoft Sharepoint wird strategische Plattform und bedrängt IBM - Produkte + Technik - Software - computerwoche.de
Microsoft Sharepoint wird strategische Plattform und bedrängt IBM
Seite 1 von 628.03.2008
Mit "Sharepoint Server" liefert Microsoft Unternehmen ein Werkzeug für viele Zwecke, vom Erzeugen kollaborativer Applikationen bis zum Bau von Internet-Sites. Das Produkt dümpelte lange Zeit vor sich hin, könnte sich aber zu einer der wichtigsten Lösungen des Konzerns entwickeln.
Zwar ist Sharepoint nicht neu, doch erst mit der Version 2007 scheint das Produkt so richtig abzuheben. "Ich habe nichts Vergleichbares gesehen, seitdem Lotus Notes auf den Markt gekommen ist", so Mike Gotta, Analyst beim Beratungs- und Marktforschungsunternehmen Burton Group gegenüber der amerikanischen CW-Schwesterzeitschrift "Network World". Als das heutige IBM-Produkt vor vielen Jahren auf den Markt kam, schienen die Möglichkeiten der neuen Technik grenzenlos. Geht es nach dem Analysten, dann zeigen sich Firmen heute vom Microsoft-System begeistert: "Unternehmen messen Sharepoint eine strategische Bedeutung bei und nehmen das Produkt als Middleware wahr", so der Analyst weiter.
Microsoft Sharepoint wird strategische Plattform und bedrängt IBM
Seite 1 von 628.03.2008
Mit "Sharepoint Server" liefert Microsoft Unternehmen ein Werkzeug für viele Zwecke, vom Erzeugen kollaborativer Applikationen bis zum Bau von Internet-Sites. Das Produkt dümpelte lange Zeit vor sich hin, könnte sich aber zu einer der wichtigsten Lösungen des Konzerns entwickeln.
Zwar ist Sharepoint nicht neu, doch erst mit der Version 2007 scheint das Produkt so richtig abzuheben. "Ich habe nichts Vergleichbares gesehen, seitdem Lotus Notes auf den Markt gekommen ist", so Mike Gotta, Analyst beim Beratungs- und Marktforschungsunternehmen Burton Group gegenüber der amerikanischen CW-Schwesterzeitschrift "Network World". Als das heutige IBM-Produkt vor vielen Jahren auf den Markt kam, schienen die Möglichkeiten der neuen Technik grenzenlos. Geht es nach dem Analysten, dann zeigen sich Firmen heute vom Microsoft-System begeistert: "Unternehmen messen Sharepoint eine strategische Bedeutung bei und nehmen das Produkt als Middleware wahr", so der Analyst weiter.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Microsoft SharePoint taking business by storm
Microsoft's SharePoint Server is on a billion-dollar quest to potentially become the next must-have technology, offering companies tools for building everything from collaborative applications to Internet sites and potentially handing Microsoft its next cash cow.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 [Computerwoche Wiki]
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 [Computerwoche Wiki]
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) ist eine datenbankbasierte Plattform mit der sich robuste, webbasierte Zusammenarbeits-, Intranet-, Extranet- oder Internetportale realisieren lassen.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) ist eine datenbankbasierte Plattform mit der sich robuste, webbasierte Zusammenarbeits-, Intranet-, Extranet- oder Internetportale realisieren lassen.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Media Cos. Battle Web Portals on Ads - Forbes.com
Media Cos. Battle Web Portals on Ads - Forbes.com
NEW YORK - Traditional media companies trying to stem the flow of advertising dollars to Google and other large Internet companies are increasingly building ad networks of their own, anchored by their brands.
NEW YORK - Traditional media companies trying to stem the flow of advertising dollars to Google and other large Internet companies are increasingly building ad networks of their own, anchored by their brands.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Nedstat partnership
Nedstat partnership
SDL Tridion today announces it has signed a formal partnership with Nedstat, European leader in web analytics. The partnership includes an integrated tag management approach for SDL Tridion R5.3 and Sitestat, the core web analytics product of Nedstat. The integrated web analytics software is called the ‘Sitestat Enabler’.
SDL Tridion today announces it has signed a formal partnership with Nedstat, European leader in web analytics. The partnership includes an integrated tag management approach for SDL Tridion R5.3 and Sitestat, the core web analytics product of Nedstat. The integrated web analytics software is called the ‘Sitestat Enabler’.
Monday, March 17, 2008
FT.com / Technology - A bright future in the cloud
FT.com / Technology - A bright future in the cloud
A bright future in the cloud
By Shane Robison
Published: March 4 2008 17:36 | Last updated: March 4 2008 17:36
Nicholas Carr is right – the future of computing lies in the internet cloud. The technology industry is shifting to a new model in which people and businesses no longer install packaged software applications on their computers. Instead, they use their web browsers to access a wide range of “cloud services”, available on demand over the internet.
Without question, this marks an exciting new era in computing.
But there is a risk of over-simplifying this picture. The “cloud” itself – a vast data-processing infrastructure – represents a critical foundational piece. But on its own, it cannot deliver the rich experience that people and companies want as they look for a better way to access information, enjoy content, and communicate.
To realise the full potential of this new model, the IT industry needs to think about the cloud as a platform for creating new services and experiences that we have yet to imagine.
For example, cloud services could eveolve that are intelligent enough to anticipate people’s needs. In this next phase, searching will be done for users, not by them. This would be accompanied by a seamless, consistent experience across all of the different devices users own, and all the on-demand services they care about.
This leaves the IT industry with a lot of hard work to do. It requires a new set of core building blocks to deliver this new category of services; it needs smarter devices and more intelligent networks; and software will be the “secret sauce” that powers these new services and shapes the quality of the user experience.
The power of the cloud happens when there is continuous interaction between a device – smartphone, laptop, TV – and the network. A simple example: it is 2pm and your calendar shows you are booked on a flight to Toronto at 6pm. Your device should anticipate this trip and gather relevant information – weather forecast for the Toronto area, status update on the flight, recommended route to the airport based on latest traffic conditions, and so on. In this scenario, the step forward is the pervasive, proactive and personalised nature of cloud services.
Some may say they heard this during the 1990s internet bubble but at that time it was not possible to use the internet as a platform for anything more than static pages. Broadband changes all that but brings us to the need for a higher level of intelligence built into devices and networks, and the software that ties everything together.
Nicholas Carr correctly points out that the shift to cloud computing will dramatically reduce the cost of IT. But this shift goes far beyond cost savings; it marks a quantum-leap in the user experience.
Much attention so far has focused on software as a service, a proven model for making software applications available on demand over the internet – it frees customers from the expense and hassle of having to install and maintain applications locally.
But Saas is the tip of the iceberg. In the future, everything will be delivered as a service, from work life to entertainment to communities. In an “Everything as a service” world individuals and businesses will customise their computing environments and shape their experiences – from individual consumers to the largest global enterprises, which will increasingly turn to dynamic cloud-based offerings to meet their most demanding computing requirements.
As we approach the tipping point where computing moves into the cloud, there are five trends I believe worthy of close attention:
1. The digital world will converge with the physical world: Starting in about 1995, the mantra was, “Everything is virtual. Geography is irrelevant”. But from 2008, factors such as your physical location will mean a lot. Cloud services will be increasingly aware of context, down to details such as time, weather, where a user is headed, and which friends or business colleagues are nearby.
2. The era of device-centric computing is over. Connectivity-centric computing will take centre stage. The question “When am I going to get that one device that does everything I can imagine?” will be flipped on its head as any number of devices will provide easy access to all services and content. Devices become interchangeable, with cloud services becoming the focal point.
3. Publishing will be democratised. A global internet population of 1.2bn people now has the tools to produce everything from books and magazines to music and videos. This represents a massive disruption of old publishing models. People will soon be able to print on demand any book ever published; warehouses of physical inventory in the publishing world will no longer be necessary.
4. Crowd-sourcing is going mainstream. Fortune 50 companies will access top talent on a global basis via the internet, saving millions of dollars in professional areas as diverse as accountants, advertising professionals, attorneys, engineers, etc. Reputation systems will lower the risks involved by exposing poor performers.
5. Enterprises will use radically different tools to make key business decisions, including systems to predict the future. A merger is taking place between the structured data that fuels business intelligence and the unstructured data of the web. This combination will advance business intelligence. At the same time, market-based systems enabling accurate predictions of the future will become common practice in the enterprise.
By moving from the desktop to the cloud, we have an opportunity to reshape the computing industry and, more importantly, create more dynamic services that enrich lives and improve how we do business.
To realise this potential, we must innovate by building a higher level of intelligence into the next generation of devices, networks and software. When we are successful in providing a dramatically better user experience, we will be poised for the next wave of growth.
Shane Robison is executive vice president, chief strategy and technology officer, HP
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
A bright future in the cloud
By Shane Robison
Published: March 4 2008 17:36 | Last updated: March 4 2008 17:36
Nicholas Carr is right – the future of computing lies in the internet cloud. The technology industry is shifting to a new model in which people and businesses no longer install packaged software applications on their computers. Instead, they use their web browsers to access a wide range of “cloud services”, available on demand over the internet.
Without question, this marks an exciting new era in computing.
But there is a risk of over-simplifying this picture. The “cloud” itself – a vast data-processing infrastructure – represents a critical foundational piece. But on its own, it cannot deliver the rich experience that people and companies want as they look for a better way to access information, enjoy content, and communicate.
To realise the full potential of this new model, the IT industry needs to think about the cloud as a platform for creating new services and experiences that we have yet to imagine.
For example, cloud services could eveolve that are intelligent enough to anticipate people’s needs. In this next phase, searching will be done for users, not by them. This would be accompanied by a seamless, consistent experience across all of the different devices users own, and all the on-demand services they care about.
This leaves the IT industry with a lot of hard work to do. It requires a new set of core building blocks to deliver this new category of services; it needs smarter devices and more intelligent networks; and software will be the “secret sauce” that powers these new services and shapes the quality of the user experience.
The power of the cloud happens when there is continuous interaction between a device – smartphone, laptop, TV – and the network. A simple example: it is 2pm and your calendar shows you are booked on a flight to Toronto at 6pm. Your device should anticipate this trip and gather relevant information – weather forecast for the Toronto area, status update on the flight, recommended route to the airport based on latest traffic conditions, and so on. In this scenario, the step forward is the pervasive, proactive and personalised nature of cloud services.
Some may say they heard this during the 1990s internet bubble but at that time it was not possible to use the internet as a platform for anything more than static pages. Broadband changes all that but brings us to the need for a higher level of intelligence built into devices and networks, and the software that ties everything together.
Nicholas Carr correctly points out that the shift to cloud computing will dramatically reduce the cost of IT. But this shift goes far beyond cost savings; it marks a quantum-leap in the user experience.
Much attention so far has focused on software as a service, a proven model for making software applications available on demand over the internet – it frees customers from the expense and hassle of having to install and maintain applications locally.
But Saas is the tip of the iceberg. In the future, everything will be delivered as a service, from work life to entertainment to communities. In an “Everything as a service” world individuals and businesses will customise their computing environments and shape their experiences – from individual consumers to the largest global enterprises, which will increasingly turn to dynamic cloud-based offerings to meet their most demanding computing requirements.
As we approach the tipping point where computing moves into the cloud, there are five trends I believe worthy of close attention:
1. The digital world will converge with the physical world: Starting in about 1995, the mantra was, “Everything is virtual. Geography is irrelevant”. But from 2008, factors such as your physical location will mean a lot. Cloud services will be increasingly aware of context, down to details such as time, weather, where a user is headed, and which friends or business colleagues are nearby.
2. The era of device-centric computing is over. Connectivity-centric computing will take centre stage. The question “When am I going to get that one device that does everything I can imagine?” will be flipped on its head as any number of devices will provide easy access to all services and content. Devices become interchangeable, with cloud services becoming the focal point.
3. Publishing will be democratised. A global internet population of 1.2bn people now has the tools to produce everything from books and magazines to music and videos. This represents a massive disruption of old publishing models. People will soon be able to print on demand any book ever published; warehouses of physical inventory in the publishing world will no longer be necessary.
4. Crowd-sourcing is going mainstream. Fortune 50 companies will access top talent on a global basis via the internet, saving millions of dollars in professional areas as diverse as accountants, advertising professionals, attorneys, engineers, etc. Reputation systems will lower the risks involved by exposing poor performers.
5. Enterprises will use radically different tools to make key business decisions, including systems to predict the future. A merger is taking place between the structured data that fuels business intelligence and the unstructured data of the web. This combination will advance business intelligence. At the same time, market-based systems enabling accurate predictions of the future will become common practice in the enterprise.
By moving from the desktop to the cloud, we have an opportunity to reshape the computing industry and, more importantly, create more dynamic services that enrich lives and improve how we do business.
To realise this potential, we must innovate by building a higher level of intelligence into the next generation of devices, networks and software. When we are successful in providing a dramatically better user experience, we will be poised for the next wave of growth.
Shane Robison is executive vice president, chief strategy and technology officer, HP
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Gartner Magic Quadrant Reports for Portals & Social Software
Gartner Magic Quadrant Reports for Portals & Social Software
Research Report:
Gartner Magic Quadrant Reports for Portals & Social Software
Gartner - the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, published two new Magic Quadrant Reports:
Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, 2007
Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007
BEA Systems has been positioned in the “leaders” quadrant of the Horizontal Portal Products 2007 Magic Quadrant report. Leaders “have a full range of capabilities to support all portal deployment scenarios, and have demonstrated consistent product delivery over a considerable period to meet customer needs, significant product innovation and continued success in selling to new customers.”
BEA provides a broad range of application and portal infrastructure services that are designed to simplify development and management of portal solutions, and help improve user effectiveness. In addition, BEA is one of the most innovative vendors, and continues to aggressively introduce new technologies in support of emerging customer needs, providing the best-of-breed portal solutions and user experience.
The second report, Team Collaboration and Social Software 2007 Magic Quadrant, was published for the first time ever and covers new Web 2.0 technology initiatives and vendors.
BEA has a long tradition of providing excellent portal and collaboration solutions and now became one of the pioneers in the Web 2.0 space. Our recent products, AquaLogic Ensemble, Pages and Pathways provide cutting-edge solutions for creating mashups, blogs, wikis, content tagging and much more.
Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, 2007
http://bea.com/content/news_events/white_papers/BEA_Gartner_MQ_Horizontal_Portals_2007.pdf
Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007
http://bea.com/content/news_events/white_papers/BEA_Gartner_MQ_Collab_and_Social_Software_2007.pdf
Research Report:
Gartner Magic Quadrant Reports for Portals & Social Software
Gartner - the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, published two new Magic Quadrant Reports:
Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, 2007
Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007
BEA Systems has been positioned in the “leaders” quadrant of the Horizontal Portal Products 2007 Magic Quadrant report. Leaders “have a full range of capabilities to support all portal deployment scenarios, and have demonstrated consistent product delivery over a considerable period to meet customer needs, significant product innovation and continued success in selling to new customers.”
BEA provides a broad range of application and portal infrastructure services that are designed to simplify development and management of portal solutions, and help improve user effectiveness. In addition, BEA is one of the most innovative vendors, and continues to aggressively introduce new technologies in support of emerging customer needs, providing the best-of-breed portal solutions and user experience.
The second report, Team Collaboration and Social Software 2007 Magic Quadrant, was published for the first time ever and covers new Web 2.0 technology initiatives and vendors.
BEA has a long tradition of providing excellent portal and collaboration solutions and now became one of the pioneers in the Web 2.0 space. Our recent products, AquaLogic Ensemble, Pages and Pathways provide cutting-edge solutions for creating mashups, blogs, wikis, content tagging and much more.
Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, 2007
http://bea.com/content/news_events/white_papers/BEA_Gartner_MQ_Horizontal_Portals_2007.pdf
Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007
http://bea.com/content/news_events/white_papers/BEA_Gartner_MQ_Collab_and_Social_Software_2007.pdf
Monday, March 10, 2008
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Microsoft learns to love the net
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Microsoft learns to love the net
Microsoft learns to love the net
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: March 9 2008 22:03 | Last updated: March 9 2008 22:03
It is nearly 2½ years since Bill Gates warned that a “services wave” was about to break on the internet that would be highly disruptive to established technology companies such as Microsoft.
The man he put in charge of devising a response to that technological sea-change now says the results of this long-awaited push, which amount to an fundamental overhaul of Microsoft’s business, are about to come into focus.
That it has taken Ray Ozzie this long to feel confident enough to promise that changes are at hand – the actual results are still under wraps and will become clear only in the coming months – is a testament to the difficulty of turning around a behemoth such as Microsoft.
“When I came in I saw a lot of things still focused on the enterprise, a lot of things still focused on the desktop, that I really wanted to change,” said Mr Ozzie, who arrived at the company three years ago and was later named chief software architect. “But the problem was that a lot of the company was still occupied in shipping the existing products they were working on.”
It was only after the latest versions of Windows and Office, Microsoft’s biggest cash-cows, were completed in late 2006 that the real planning could even begin on a new generation of products and services designed around the internet. “You’ll see many pieces this year, and you’ll continue to see things happen beyond that,” Mr Ozzie said.
So what does Microsoft have up its sleeve?
Central to its internet push is the extension of its existing computing platform, which currently resides on desktop PCs and servers, to the internet. As Mr Ozzie says: “Essentially, Microsoft’s a platform company.” It is the many developers who write programs to run on its software who account for its entrenched position.
The company’s new internet platform will rest on hardware (the new data centres it has been racing to build) and software (a new range of services, such as storage and processing delivered over the internet). One of those software services – an online version of the SQL database – was announced last week, but the main push is expected to be unveiled at the company’s developer conference in October.
“I assume that some number of years from now most major enterprises and many independent developers will be running their services in our data centres,” Mr Ozzie said. “They will, because there aren’t many people who have the capacity and the number of business reasons we have to build out that infrastructure.”
While Microsoft doubled its data centre capacity last year, though, Mr Ozzie ruled out a “step function” that would involve bringing a vast new bank of computing power on stream at one time. “It would be kind of insane to build too far ahead of what you need – you would buy hardware that was outdated by the time it was deployed,” he said. Also, the sheer difficulty of creating reliable internet services made it sensible to move slowly.
“If you look at any of the companies that have been experimenting with service delivery, and infrastructure for service delivery, you realise very quickly that you can take people’s businesses down by not having the right service quality of the right architecture at the back end,” he said. “There are no delays here. We want to be a long-term player.”
Meanwhile, consumers are also likely to see new services in the coming months as Microsoft extends its computing platform to the internet.
The most intriguing hint Mr Ozzie dropped last week was for something he termed a “device mesh”. To judge by comments by him and others familiar with Microsoft’s thinking, this would provide a way for consumers to link all of their computing devices over the internet – such as their PCs, smartphones, games consoles – so that personal data can be accessed from any of them.
The company has already registered internet address www.mesh.com, and is understood to be planning to use this as a location where consumers will be able to go to register their devices for the new services and set the levels of information they want to access from different places.
It is with new services such as these that Microsoft hopes finally to prove that it can turn the internet to its advantage, rather than seeing it as a disruptive threat to its existing businesses.
“Any time in my entire career that I have been through a technology transition – every single time someone was afraid of one of those technology transitions cannibalising [their existing business],” Mr Ozzie said. “If you think about it the right way it ends up in net growth. It doesn’t mean the old thing doesn’t change, it transforms in some way, shape or form.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Microsoft learns to love the net
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: March 9 2008 22:03 | Last updated: March 9 2008 22:03
It is nearly 2½ years since Bill Gates warned that a “services wave” was about to break on the internet that would be highly disruptive to established technology companies such as Microsoft.
The man he put in charge of devising a response to that technological sea-change now says the results of this long-awaited push, which amount to an fundamental overhaul of Microsoft’s business, are about to come into focus.
That it has taken Ray Ozzie this long to feel confident enough to promise that changes are at hand – the actual results are still under wraps and will become clear only in the coming months – is a testament to the difficulty of turning around a behemoth such as Microsoft.
“When I came in I saw a lot of things still focused on the enterprise, a lot of things still focused on the desktop, that I really wanted to change,” said Mr Ozzie, who arrived at the company three years ago and was later named chief software architect. “But the problem was that a lot of the company was still occupied in shipping the existing products they were working on.”
It was only after the latest versions of Windows and Office, Microsoft’s biggest cash-cows, were completed in late 2006 that the real planning could even begin on a new generation of products and services designed around the internet. “You’ll see many pieces this year, and you’ll continue to see things happen beyond that,” Mr Ozzie said.
So what does Microsoft have up its sleeve?
Central to its internet push is the extension of its existing computing platform, which currently resides on desktop PCs and servers, to the internet. As Mr Ozzie says: “Essentially, Microsoft’s a platform company.” It is the many developers who write programs to run on its software who account for its entrenched position.
The company’s new internet platform will rest on hardware (the new data centres it has been racing to build) and software (a new range of services, such as storage and processing delivered over the internet). One of those software services – an online version of the SQL database – was announced last week, but the main push is expected to be unveiled at the company’s developer conference in October.
“I assume that some number of years from now most major enterprises and many independent developers will be running their services in our data centres,” Mr Ozzie said. “They will, because there aren’t many people who have the capacity and the number of business reasons we have to build out that infrastructure.”
While Microsoft doubled its data centre capacity last year, though, Mr Ozzie ruled out a “step function” that would involve bringing a vast new bank of computing power on stream at one time. “It would be kind of insane to build too far ahead of what you need – you would buy hardware that was outdated by the time it was deployed,” he said. Also, the sheer difficulty of creating reliable internet services made it sensible to move slowly.
“If you look at any of the companies that have been experimenting with service delivery, and infrastructure for service delivery, you realise very quickly that you can take people’s businesses down by not having the right service quality of the right architecture at the back end,” he said. “There are no delays here. We want to be a long-term player.”
Meanwhile, consumers are also likely to see new services in the coming months as Microsoft extends its computing platform to the internet.
The most intriguing hint Mr Ozzie dropped last week was for something he termed a “device mesh”. To judge by comments by him and others familiar with Microsoft’s thinking, this would provide a way for consumers to link all of their computing devices over the internet – such as their PCs, smartphones, games consoles – so that personal data can be accessed from any of them.
The company has already registered internet address www.mesh.com, and is understood to be planning to use this as a location where consumers will be able to go to register their devices for the new services and set the levels of information they want to access from different places.
It is with new services such as these that Microsoft hopes finally to prove that it can turn the internet to its advantage, rather than seeing it as a disruptive threat to its existing businesses.
“Any time in my entire career that I have been through a technology transition – every single time someone was afraid of one of those technology transitions cannibalising [their existing business],” Mr Ozzie said. “If you think about it the right way it ends up in net growth. It doesn’t mean the old thing doesn’t change, it transforms in some way, shape or form.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Friday, March 07, 2008
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Monitor | The battle for Wikipedia's soul | Economist.com
Monitor | The battle for Wikipedia's soul | Economist.com
Monitor
The battle for Wikipedia's soul
Mar 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The internet: The popular online encyclopedia, written by volunteer contributors, has unlimited space. So does it matter if it includes trivia?
IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content” on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online. But Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.
Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen—and they are rather poorly edited.
Inclusionists believe that the disparity between Pokémon and Solidarity biographies would disappear by itself, if only Wikipedia loosened its relatively tight editorial control and allowed anyone to add articles about almost anything. They argue that since Wikipedia exists online, it should not have the space constraints of a physical encyclopedia imposed upon it artificially. (“Wikipedia is not paper”, runs one slogan of the inclusionists.)
Surely there is no harm, they argue, in including articles about characters from television programmes who only appear in a single episode, say? After all, since most people access Wikipedia pages via search, the inclusion of articles on niche topics will not inconvenience them. People will not be more inclined to create entries about Polish union leaders if the number of Pokémon entries is reduced from 500 to 200. The ideal Wikipedia of the inclusionists would feature as many articles on as many subjects as its contributors were able to produce, as long as they were of interest to more than just a few users.
Deletionists believe that Wikipedia will be more successful if it maintains a certain relevance and quality threshold for its entries. So their ideal Wikipedia might contain biographies of the five most important leaders of Solidarity, say, and the five most important Pokémon characters, but any more than that would dilute Wikipedia's quality and compromise the brand. The presence of so many articles on trivial subjects, they argue, makes it less likely that Wikipedia will be taken seriously, so articles dealing with trivial subjects should be deleted.
The rules of the game
In practice, deciding what is trivial and what is important is not easy. How do you draw editorial distinctions between an article entitled “List of nicknames used by George W. Bush” (status: kept) and one about “Vice-presidents who have shot people” (status: deleted)? Or how about “Natasha Demkina: Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision” (status: kept) and “The role of clowns in modern society” (status: deleted)?
To measure a subject's worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. So an article in an international journal counts more than a mention in a local newspaper; ten matches on Google is better than one match; and so on. These rules are used to devise official policies on particular subjects, such as the notability of pornographic stars (a Playboy appearance earns you a Wikipedia mention; starring in a low-budget movie does not) or diplomats (permanent chiefs of station are notable, while chargés d'affaires ad interim are not).
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has himself fallen foul of these tricky notability criteria. Last summer he created a short entry about a restaurant in South Africa where he had dined. The entry was promptly nominated for deletion, since the restaurant had a poor Google profile and was therefore considered not notable enough. After a lot of controversy and media coverage (which, ahem, increased the restaurant's notability), the entry was kept, but the episode prompted many questions about the adequacy of the editorial process.
As things stand, decisions whether to keep or delete articles are made after deliberations by Wikipedia's most ardent editors and administrators (the 1,000 or so most active Wikipedia contributors). Imagine you have just created a new entry, consisting of a few words. If a member of the Wikipedia elite believes that your submission fails to meet Wikipedia's notability criteria, it may be nominated for “speedy” deletion—in other words, removed right away—or “regular” deletion, which means the entry is removed after five days if nobody objects. (To avoid deletion or vandalism, many highly controversial articles, such as the entries on the Holocaust, Islam, terrorism or Mr Bush, can be “locked” to prevent editing or removal.)
If your article is selected for deletion, you may choose to contest the decision, in which case you may be asked to provide further information. There is also a higher authority with the ultimate power to rule in controversial cases: the Arbitration Committee, which settles disputes that the administrators cannot resolve.
Debates about the merits of articles often drag on for weeks, draining energy and taking up far more space than the entries themselves. Such deliberations involve volleys of arcane internal acronyms and references to obscure policies and guidelines, such as WP:APT (“Avoid Peacock Terms”—terms that merely promote the subject, without giving real information) and WP:MOSMAC (a set of guidelines for “Wikipedia articles discussing the Republic of Macedonia and the Province of Macedonia, Greece”). Covert alliances and intrigues are common. Sometimes editors resort to a practice called “sock puppetry”, in which one person creates lots of accounts and pretends to be several different people in a debate so as to create the illusion of support for a particular position.
The result is that novices can quickly get lost in Wikipedia's Kafkaesque bureaucracy. According to one estimate from 2006, entries about governance and editorial policies are one of the fastest-growing areas of the site and represent around one-quarter of its content. In some ways this is a sign of Wikipedia's maturity and importance: a project of this scale needs rules to govern how it works. But the proliferation of rules, and the fact that select Wikipedians have learnt how to handle them to win arguments, now represents a danger, says Andrew Lih, a former deletionist who is now an inclusionist, and who is writing a book about Wikipedia. The behaviour of Wikipedia's self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as “wiki-lawyering”.
Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that this deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia's early days is giving way to hostility and infighting. There is already some evidence that the growth rate of Wikipedia's article-base is slowing. Unofficial data from October 2007 suggests that users' activity on the site is falling, when measured by the number of times an article is edited and the number of edits per month. The official figures have not been gathered and made public for almost a year, perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia's health.
It may be that Wikipedians have already taken care of the “low-hanging fruit”, having compiled articles on the most obvious topics (though this could, again, be taken as evidence of Wikipedia's maturity). But there is a limit to how much information a group of predominantly non-specialist volunteers, armed with a search engine, can create and edit. Producing articles about specialist subjects such as Solidarity activists, as opposed to Pokémon characters, requires expert knowledge from contributors and editors. If the information is not available elsewhere on the web, its notability cannot be assessed using Google.
To create a new article on Wikipedia and be sure that it will survive, you need to be able to write a “deletionist-proof” entry and ensure that you have enough online backing (such as Google matches) to convince the increasingly picky Wikipedia people of its importance. This raises the threshold for writing articles so high that very few people actually do it. Many who are excited about contributing to the site end up on the “Missing Wikipedians” page: a constantly updated list of those who have decided to stop contributing. It serves as a reminder that frustration at having work removed prompts many people to abandon the project.
Google has recently announced its own entry into the field, in the form of an encyclopedia-like project called “Knol” that will allow anybody to create entries on topics of their choice, with a voting system that means the best rise to the top. Tellingly, this approach is based on individualism rather than collaboration (Google will share ad revenues with the authors). No doubt it will produce its own arguments and unexpected consequences. But even if it does not turn out to be the Wikipedia-killer that some people imagine, it may push Wikipedia to rethink its editorial stance.
Monitor
The battle for Wikipedia's soul
Mar 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The internet: The popular online encyclopedia, written by volunteer contributors, has unlimited space. So does it matter if it includes trivia?
IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content” on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online. But Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.
Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen—and they are rather poorly edited.
Inclusionists believe that the disparity between Pokémon and Solidarity biographies would disappear by itself, if only Wikipedia loosened its relatively tight editorial control and allowed anyone to add articles about almost anything. They argue that since Wikipedia exists online, it should not have the space constraints of a physical encyclopedia imposed upon it artificially. (“Wikipedia is not paper”, runs one slogan of the inclusionists.)
Surely there is no harm, they argue, in including articles about characters from television programmes who only appear in a single episode, say? After all, since most people access Wikipedia pages via search, the inclusion of articles on niche topics will not inconvenience them. People will not be more inclined to create entries about Polish union leaders if the number of Pokémon entries is reduced from 500 to 200. The ideal Wikipedia of the inclusionists would feature as many articles on as many subjects as its contributors were able to produce, as long as they were of interest to more than just a few users.
Deletionists believe that Wikipedia will be more successful if it maintains a certain relevance and quality threshold for its entries. So their ideal Wikipedia might contain biographies of the five most important leaders of Solidarity, say, and the five most important Pokémon characters, but any more than that would dilute Wikipedia's quality and compromise the brand. The presence of so many articles on trivial subjects, they argue, makes it less likely that Wikipedia will be taken seriously, so articles dealing with trivial subjects should be deleted.
The rules of the game
In practice, deciding what is trivial and what is important is not easy. How do you draw editorial distinctions between an article entitled “List of nicknames used by George W. Bush” (status: kept) and one about “Vice-presidents who have shot people” (status: deleted)? Or how about “Natasha Demkina: Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision” (status: kept) and “The role of clowns in modern society” (status: deleted)?
To measure a subject's worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. So an article in an international journal counts more than a mention in a local newspaper; ten matches on Google is better than one match; and so on. These rules are used to devise official policies on particular subjects, such as the notability of pornographic stars (a Playboy appearance earns you a Wikipedia mention; starring in a low-budget movie does not) or diplomats (permanent chiefs of station are notable, while chargés d'affaires ad interim are not).
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has himself fallen foul of these tricky notability criteria. Last summer he created a short entry about a restaurant in South Africa where he had dined. The entry was promptly nominated for deletion, since the restaurant had a poor Google profile and was therefore considered not notable enough. After a lot of controversy and media coverage (which, ahem, increased the restaurant's notability), the entry was kept, but the episode prompted many questions about the adequacy of the editorial process.
As things stand, decisions whether to keep or delete articles are made after deliberations by Wikipedia's most ardent editors and administrators (the 1,000 or so most active Wikipedia contributors). Imagine you have just created a new entry, consisting of a few words. If a member of the Wikipedia elite believes that your submission fails to meet Wikipedia's notability criteria, it may be nominated for “speedy” deletion—in other words, removed right away—or “regular” deletion, which means the entry is removed after five days if nobody objects. (To avoid deletion or vandalism, many highly controversial articles, such as the entries on the Holocaust, Islam, terrorism or Mr Bush, can be “locked” to prevent editing or removal.)
If your article is selected for deletion, you may choose to contest the decision, in which case you may be asked to provide further information. There is also a higher authority with the ultimate power to rule in controversial cases: the Arbitration Committee, which settles disputes that the administrators cannot resolve.
Debates about the merits of articles often drag on for weeks, draining energy and taking up far more space than the entries themselves. Such deliberations involve volleys of arcane internal acronyms and references to obscure policies and guidelines, such as WP:APT (“Avoid Peacock Terms”—terms that merely promote the subject, without giving real information) and WP:MOSMAC (a set of guidelines for “Wikipedia articles discussing the Republic of Macedonia and the Province of Macedonia, Greece”). Covert alliances and intrigues are common. Sometimes editors resort to a practice called “sock puppetry”, in which one person creates lots of accounts and pretends to be several different people in a debate so as to create the illusion of support for a particular position.
The result is that novices can quickly get lost in Wikipedia's Kafkaesque bureaucracy. According to one estimate from 2006, entries about governance and editorial policies are one of the fastest-growing areas of the site and represent around one-quarter of its content. In some ways this is a sign of Wikipedia's maturity and importance: a project of this scale needs rules to govern how it works. But the proliferation of rules, and the fact that select Wikipedians have learnt how to handle them to win arguments, now represents a danger, says Andrew Lih, a former deletionist who is now an inclusionist, and who is writing a book about Wikipedia. The behaviour of Wikipedia's self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as “wiki-lawyering”.
Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that this deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia's early days is giving way to hostility and infighting. There is already some evidence that the growth rate of Wikipedia's article-base is slowing. Unofficial data from October 2007 suggests that users' activity on the site is falling, when measured by the number of times an article is edited and the number of edits per month. The official figures have not been gathered and made public for almost a year, perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia's health.
It may be that Wikipedians have already taken care of the “low-hanging fruit”, having compiled articles on the most obvious topics (though this could, again, be taken as evidence of Wikipedia's maturity). But there is a limit to how much information a group of predominantly non-specialist volunteers, armed with a search engine, can create and edit. Producing articles about specialist subjects such as Solidarity activists, as opposed to Pokémon characters, requires expert knowledge from contributors and editors. If the information is not available elsewhere on the web, its notability cannot be assessed using Google.
To create a new article on Wikipedia and be sure that it will survive, you need to be able to write a “deletionist-proof” entry and ensure that you have enough online backing (such as Google matches) to convince the increasingly picky Wikipedia people of its importance. This raises the threshold for writing articles so high that very few people actually do it. Many who are excited about contributing to the site end up on the “Missing Wikipedians” page: a constantly updated list of those who have decided to stop contributing. It serves as a reminder that frustration at having work removed prompts many people to abandon the project.
Google has recently announced its own entry into the field, in the form of an encyclopedia-like project called “Knol” that will allow anybody to create entries on topics of their choice, with a voting system that means the best rise to the top. Tellingly, this approach is based on individualism rather than collaboration (Google will share ad revenues with the authors). No doubt it will produce its own arguments and unexpected consequences. But even if it does not turn out to be the Wikipedia-killer that some people imagine, it may push Wikipedia to rethink its editorial stance.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Erweiterte Open Text-Lösung beschleunigt Social Computing und Collaboration unternehmensweit
Erweiterte Open Text-Lösung beschleunigt Social Computing und Collaboration unternehmensweit
Open Text, globaler Anbieter im Enterprise Content Management (ECM), präsentiert auf der CeBIT in Halle 3, D09 seine neue Lösung Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration. Mit diesem umfassenden neuen Angebot an Tools für Online-Communities, Social Computing und Echtzeit-Collaboration hebt Open Text Web 2.0 auf eine neue Stufe: Enterprise 2.0.
Das neue Angebot ist Teil einer ganzen Serie von Produktinitiativen, die Open Text im Rahmen seiner umfassenden, ebenfalls heute vorgestellten Enterprise 2.0-Strategie bereits auf den Markt gebracht hat und bringen wird. Das Ziel dieser Strategie besteht in der Weiterentwicklung von Organisationsstrukturen durch den unternehmensweiten Einsatz leistungsstarker Social-Computing-Werkzeuge. Open Text stattet die neue Generation seiner Collaboration- und Weblösungen mit Web 2.0-Funktionalitäten wie Wikis, Foren, Blogs, Tagging, Moderation, Online-Communities und Echtzeit-Collaboration aus, die Unternehmen im Rahmen breit angelegter ECM-Strategien einsetzen können. Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration folgte den leistungsstarken Angeboten an Weblösungen von RedDot, der Open Text Web Solutions Group, die alle mit der Livelink ECM-Plattform und anderen gängigen Content Repositories integrierbar sind.
"Große Unternehmen operieren heute auf hart umkämpften globalen Märkten und müssen eine internationale und zunehmend mobile Belegschaft managen. Transparenz, Collaboration und der Austausch von Wissen sind daher wichtiger denn je", so Cheryl McKinnon, Director, Collaborative Content Management bei Open Text. "Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration gibt Unternehmen einen Leitfaden zu Enterprise 2.0 im Rahmen einer breit angelegten ECM-Strategie an die Hand. Gleichzeitig eröffnet das Produkt neue Wege, um die Zusammenarbeit und Produktivität der Mitarbeiter zu verbessern und die Kundentreue zu steigern."
Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration verbindet Menschen, Prozesse und Inhalte unternehmensweit und lässt eine Arbeitsumgebung entstehen, in der die Mitarbeiter problemlos Ideen, Erfahrungen und Wissen in Echtzeit austauschen können. Die Lösung verbindet eine zuverlässige Wissensdatenbank mit Funktionalitäten für Projekträume, Umfragen, Nachrichtenticker, Aufgaben und Projektmanagement. Community-Applikationen mit speziellen, unternehmensweit skalierbaren Tools und Echtzeit-Collaboration sowie Newsletter, FAQ, und Veranstaltungskalender fördern den Austausch von Expertise und Best Practices.
Die Collaboration- und Community-Tools sind zusammen mit sämtlichen Inhalten in einer intuitiv bedienbaren Umgebung zugänglich. Das fördert die Zusammenarbeit und gleichzeitig werden Projektinformationen im darunter liegenden ECM Framework erfasst. Sicherheit, Zugriffskontrolle und Aufbewahrungsregeln werden unter Nutzung der bereits vorhandenen nativen Sicherheitsmechanismen und ohne zusätzliche Administrationsschicht durchgängig angewandt. Die damit ausgestatteten Mitarbeiter können schnell und sicher bereichs- und aufgabenübergreifende Teams bilden, ausgetauschtes Wissen erfassen, Prozesse managen und Projektfristen selbst über Abteilungs- und Ländergrenzen hinweg zuverlässig einhalten.
- Verbreitung von Expertenwissen und Best Practices in Communities: Unternehmen können effektiv ihre Wissensinseln miteinander verknüpfen und Mitarbeiter, die vor ähnlichen Zielen und Herausforderungen stehen, zusammenbringen. Neue Ideen und Chancen lassen sich in Support-Netzwerken kommunizieren, Standards und Best Practices können festgelegt werden, die Zusammenarbeit mit Kunden und Partnern wird effektiver. Zudem können mit Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration sichere Records Management-Kontrollen auf Inhalte aus der Community-Umgebung angewandt werden.
- Agilere Unternehmensstrukturen durch Projektmanagement: In eigenen Projekträumen können sich Mitarbeiter voll und ganz auf ihre Arbeit konzentrieren. Projektleiter können flexibel Teams zusammenstellen, neue Teammitglieder über eine Browser-basierende Benutzeroberfläche hinzufügen und ihnen verschiedene Rollen und Aufgaben zuweisen. Alle relevanten Projektinformationen - Pläne, Dokumente, Aufgabenlisten, URLs etc. - werden zentral im Projektraum gespeichert und vorgehalten. Die Kommunikation der Projektmitglieder kann innerhalb so genannter Threaded Discussions erfasst, in gängige E-Mail-Systeme integriert und auf dem Desktop bereitgestellt werden.
- Echtzeit-Zugriff auf Menschen und Informationen: Echtzeit-Funktionalitäten ermöglichen die flexible und vor unerlaubtem Zugriff geschützte Zusammenarbeit im Unternehmen. Unterstützung für Teambesprechungen, Instant Messaging, Screen- und Applikationssharing sowie gemeinsam genutzte Arbeitsräume verbessern das Arbeiten im Team und erhöhen die Produktivität.
Verfügbarkeit
Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration wird im Mai 2008 verfügbar sein. Weitere Informationen sind unter http://www.opentext.com/... erhältlich.
05.03.2008, Katalin Balogh
Open Text, globaler Anbieter im Enterprise Content Management (ECM), präsentiert auf der CeBIT in Halle 3, D09 seine neue Lösung Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration. Mit diesem umfassenden neuen Angebot an Tools für Online-Communities, Social Computing und Echtzeit-Collaboration hebt Open Text Web 2.0 auf eine neue Stufe: Enterprise 2.0.
Das neue Angebot ist Teil einer ganzen Serie von Produktinitiativen, die Open Text im Rahmen seiner umfassenden, ebenfalls heute vorgestellten Enterprise 2.0-Strategie bereits auf den Markt gebracht hat und bringen wird. Das Ziel dieser Strategie besteht in der Weiterentwicklung von Organisationsstrukturen durch den unternehmensweiten Einsatz leistungsstarker Social-Computing-Werkzeuge. Open Text stattet die neue Generation seiner Collaboration- und Weblösungen mit Web 2.0-Funktionalitäten wie Wikis, Foren, Blogs, Tagging, Moderation, Online-Communities und Echtzeit-Collaboration aus, die Unternehmen im Rahmen breit angelegter ECM-Strategien einsetzen können. Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration folgte den leistungsstarken Angeboten an Weblösungen von RedDot, der Open Text Web Solutions Group, die alle mit der Livelink ECM-Plattform und anderen gängigen Content Repositories integrierbar sind.
"Große Unternehmen operieren heute auf hart umkämpften globalen Märkten und müssen eine internationale und zunehmend mobile Belegschaft managen. Transparenz, Collaboration und der Austausch von Wissen sind daher wichtiger denn je", so Cheryl McKinnon, Director, Collaborative Content Management bei Open Text. "Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration gibt Unternehmen einen Leitfaden zu Enterprise 2.0 im Rahmen einer breit angelegten ECM-Strategie an die Hand. Gleichzeitig eröffnet das Produkt neue Wege, um die Zusammenarbeit und Produktivität der Mitarbeiter zu verbessern und die Kundentreue zu steigern."
Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration verbindet Menschen, Prozesse und Inhalte unternehmensweit und lässt eine Arbeitsumgebung entstehen, in der die Mitarbeiter problemlos Ideen, Erfahrungen und Wissen in Echtzeit austauschen können. Die Lösung verbindet eine zuverlässige Wissensdatenbank mit Funktionalitäten für Projekträume, Umfragen, Nachrichtenticker, Aufgaben und Projektmanagement. Community-Applikationen mit speziellen, unternehmensweit skalierbaren Tools und Echtzeit-Collaboration sowie Newsletter, FAQ, und Veranstaltungskalender fördern den Austausch von Expertise und Best Practices.
Die Collaboration- und Community-Tools sind zusammen mit sämtlichen Inhalten in einer intuitiv bedienbaren Umgebung zugänglich. Das fördert die Zusammenarbeit und gleichzeitig werden Projektinformationen im darunter liegenden ECM Framework erfasst. Sicherheit, Zugriffskontrolle und Aufbewahrungsregeln werden unter Nutzung der bereits vorhandenen nativen Sicherheitsmechanismen und ohne zusätzliche Administrationsschicht durchgängig angewandt. Die damit ausgestatteten Mitarbeiter können schnell und sicher bereichs- und aufgabenübergreifende Teams bilden, ausgetauschtes Wissen erfassen, Prozesse managen und Projektfristen selbst über Abteilungs- und Ländergrenzen hinweg zuverlässig einhalten.
- Verbreitung von Expertenwissen und Best Practices in Communities: Unternehmen können effektiv ihre Wissensinseln miteinander verknüpfen und Mitarbeiter, die vor ähnlichen Zielen und Herausforderungen stehen, zusammenbringen. Neue Ideen und Chancen lassen sich in Support-Netzwerken kommunizieren, Standards und Best Practices können festgelegt werden, die Zusammenarbeit mit Kunden und Partnern wird effektiver. Zudem können mit Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration sichere Records Management-Kontrollen auf Inhalte aus der Community-Umgebung angewandt werden.
- Agilere Unternehmensstrukturen durch Projektmanagement: In eigenen Projekträumen können sich Mitarbeiter voll und ganz auf ihre Arbeit konzentrieren. Projektleiter können flexibel Teams zusammenstellen, neue Teammitglieder über eine Browser-basierende Benutzeroberfläche hinzufügen und ihnen verschiedene Rollen und Aufgaben zuweisen. Alle relevanten Projektinformationen - Pläne, Dokumente, Aufgabenlisten, URLs etc. - werden zentral im Projektraum gespeichert und vorgehalten. Die Kommunikation der Projektmitglieder kann innerhalb so genannter Threaded Discussions erfasst, in gängige E-Mail-Systeme integriert und auf dem Desktop bereitgestellt werden.
- Echtzeit-Zugriff auf Menschen und Informationen: Echtzeit-Funktionalitäten ermöglichen die flexible und vor unerlaubtem Zugriff geschützte Zusammenarbeit im Unternehmen. Unterstützung für Teambesprechungen, Instant Messaging, Screen- und Applikationssharing sowie gemeinsam genutzte Arbeitsräume verbessern das Arbeiten im Team und erhöhen die Produktivität.
Verfügbarkeit
Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration wird im Mai 2008 verfügbar sein. Weitere Informationen sind unter http://www.opentext.com/... erhältlich.
05.03.2008, Katalin Balogh
Strategiewechsel der SPD Ein Fundament der Lüge - Deutschland - sueddeutsche.de
Strategiewechsel der SPD Ein Fundament der Lüge - Deutschland - sueddeutsche.de
Ypsilantis Beteuerung, auf keinen Fall mit der Linken kooperieren zu wollen, war eines ihrer zentralen Wahlversprechen. Wenn sie dieses jetzt bricht, tut sie das auch deswegen, weil sie unbedingt Ministerpräsidentin werden will.
Ein Kommentar von Kurt Kister
Ypsilantis Beteuerung, auf keinen Fall mit der Linken kooperieren zu wollen, war eines ihrer zentralen Wahlversprechen. Wenn sie dieses jetzt bricht, tut sie das auch deswegen, weil sie unbedingt Ministerpräsidentin werden will.
Ein Kommentar von Kurt Kister
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Microsoft opens online services to small, medium companies - SiliconValley.com
Microsoft opens online services to small, medium companies - SiliconValley.com
Microsoft, facing a threat from Google, IBM and other rivals, is ramping up its online services, which are hosted applications that manage such things as e-mail, calendars and video conferencing.
Microsoft, facing a threat from Google, IBM and other rivals, is ramping up its online services, which are hosted applications that manage such things as e-mail, calendars and video conferencing.
Cebit 2008 sueddeutsche.de
Cebit 2008 sueddeutsche.de
Cebit 2008
Das Spezial zur weltgrößten Computermesse
Auf der Cebit, die vom 4. bis zum 9. März in Hannover stattfindet, präsentieren knapp 5900 Aussteller auf insgesamt 241.000 Quadratmeter Hallenfläche ihre Neuheiten. In diesem Jahr gliedert sich die Messe in vier Themenbereiche: Technik- und Infrastruktur, Soft- und Hardware für Geschäftskunden, öffentlicher Sektor und digitales Leben. Wir zeigen die Highlights und berichten über die wichtigsten Trends und Themen.
Cebit 2008
Das Spezial zur weltgrößten Computermesse
Auf der Cebit, die vom 4. bis zum 9. März in Hannover stattfindet, präsentieren knapp 5900 Aussteller auf insgesamt 241.000 Quadratmeter Hallenfläche ihre Neuheiten. In diesem Jahr gliedert sich die Messe in vier Themenbereiche: Technik- und Infrastruktur, Soft- und Hardware für Geschäftskunden, öffentlicher Sektor und digitales Leben. Wir zeigen die Highlights und berichten über die wichtigsten Trends und Themen.
Cebit Ideen von gestern - Computer - sueddeutsche.de
Cebit Ideen von gestern - Computer - sueddeutsche.de
Nach sechs Jahren kommt Microsoft-Chef Steve Ballmer wieder nach Hannover - mit Konzepten, die er schon vor sechs Jahren präsentierte. Auch der Gegner heißt immer noch Google.
Nach sechs Jahren kommt Microsoft-Chef Steve Ballmer wieder nach Hannover - mit Konzepten, die er schon vor sechs Jahren präsentierte. Auch der Gegner heißt immer noch Google.
FTD.de - IT+Telekommunikation - Nachrichten - Merkel macht den Weg frei auf der Cebit
FTD.de - IT+Telekommunikation - Nachrichten - Merkel macht den Weg frei auf der Cebit
Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel hat mit dem traditionellen Rundgang die Cebit für das Publikum eröffnet. Ihr erstes Ziel auf der weltgrößten Computermesse war der Stand der französischen IT-Industrie.
Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel hat mit dem traditionellen Rundgang die Cebit für das Publikum eröffnet. Ihr erstes Ziel auf der weltgrößten Computermesse war der Stand der französischen IT-Industrie.
Monday, March 03, 2008
Google Pressures Microsoft With Team Collaboration Tool
Google Pressures Microsoft With Team Collaboration Tool
Google expanded its suite of personal and group productivity tools by adding a persistent collaboration repository to Google Apps. This move increases the pressure on Microsoft and once again alters IT pricing economics.
Google expanded its suite of personal and group productivity tools by adding a persistent collaboration repository to Google Apps. This move increases the pressure on Microsoft and once again alters IT pricing economics.
FT.com / Companies / IT - Microsoft line extended to small business
FT.com / Companies / IT - Microsoft line extended to small business
Microsoft line extended to small business
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: March 3 2008 05:03 | Last updated: March 3 2008 05:03
Microsoft will on Monday take the wraps off a new service designed to repel Google’s incursion into one of its core markets, selling software applications to small and medium-sized businesses.
The plan will involve delivering a service over the internet for small companies to do things such as manage corporate e-mail and let workers collaborate on documents, rather than requiring them to buy the software. Users of the new internet services will be charged a flat annual subscription fee per worker.
The move marks a response to Google’s launch a year ago of a set of online applications for business customers, for a fee of $50 a year for each worker. Google executives have suggested that even if companies don’t end up using their services, the presence of an alternative could still lead companies to negotiate lower prices from Microsoft.
Chris Capossela, head of Microsoft’s Office desktop applications and related server software businesses, dismissed the threat from this new low-priced competition. He refused to disclose what Microsoft would charge for its online services, but said: “We’re really not worried about cannibalisation.”
The new Microsoft services involve two of its main server products – the Exchange e-mail software and SharePoint, which is used to manage documents centrally and make it easier for workers to collaborate.
Internet-based versions of this software were made available to big companies last year. It will now be extended for a test period to the smaller companies that have traditionally formed the backbone of Microsoft’s business.
In spite of the experimentation with offering online versions of its server-based software, Microsoft has so far retained its traditional business model for its dominant Office suite of PC applications.
It is counting on the functionality of its software to counter Google. “Looking at their software, it’s incredibly basic,” said Mr Capossela. “It isn’t good enough for a 50-person company.”
He also said Google, which has been building a sales force to improve relations with business customers, had a long way to go before being taken seriously as a business software supplier.
“The reality is, it takes a very long time to build the credibility with [chief information officers],” he said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Microsoft line extended to small business
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: March 3 2008 05:03 | Last updated: March 3 2008 05:03
Microsoft will on Monday take the wraps off a new service designed to repel Google’s incursion into one of its core markets, selling software applications to small and medium-sized businesses.
The plan will involve delivering a service over the internet for small companies to do things such as manage corporate e-mail and let workers collaborate on documents, rather than requiring them to buy the software. Users of the new internet services will be charged a flat annual subscription fee per worker.
The move marks a response to Google’s launch a year ago of a set of online applications for business customers, for a fee of $50 a year for each worker. Google executives have suggested that even if companies don’t end up using their services, the presence of an alternative could still lead companies to negotiate lower prices from Microsoft.
Chris Capossela, head of Microsoft’s Office desktop applications and related server software businesses, dismissed the threat from this new low-priced competition. He refused to disclose what Microsoft would charge for its online services, but said: “We’re really not worried about cannibalisation.”
The new Microsoft services involve two of its main server products – the Exchange e-mail software and SharePoint, which is used to manage documents centrally and make it easier for workers to collaborate.
Internet-based versions of this software were made available to big companies last year. It will now be extended for a test period to the smaller companies that have traditionally formed the backbone of Microsoft’s business.
In spite of the experimentation with offering online versions of its server-based software, Microsoft has so far retained its traditional business model for its dominant Office suite of PC applications.
It is counting on the functionality of its software to counter Google. “Looking at their software, it’s incredibly basic,” said Mr Capossela. “It isn’t good enough for a 50-person company.”
He also said Google, which has been building a sales force to improve relations with business customers, had a long way to go before being taken seriously as a business software supplier.
“The reality is, it takes a very long time to build the credibility with [chief information officers],” he said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
At CeBIT Tech Show, a Green Undercurrent - Forbes.com
At CeBIT Tech Show, a Green Undercurrent - Forbes.com
HANOVER, Germany - Amid the sharp displays and booths offering up the latest gadgets and gizmos at the annual CeBIT trade and technology fair, the key undercurrent is the greening of the industry.
HANOVER, Germany - Amid the sharp displays and booths offering up the latest gadgets and gizmos at the annual CeBIT trade and technology fair, the key undercurrent is the greening of the industry.
Friday, February 29, 2008
FTD.de - Medien+Internet - Nachrichten - Google bringt neues Konkurrenz-Produkt zu Microsoft heraus
FTD.de - Medien+Internet - Nachrichten - Google bringt neues Konkurrenz-Produkt zu Microsoft heraus
Google verschärft die Konkurrenz mit Microsoft: der Suchmaschinenbetreiber erweitert seine Internet-basierten Office-Anwendungen "Google Apps" um ein neues Werkzeug zur Erstellung von Webseiten. Microsoft will sich nicht abschlagen lassen und zieht mit.
Google verschärft die Konkurrenz mit Microsoft: der Suchmaschinenbetreiber erweitert seine Internet-basierten Office-Anwendungen "Google Apps" um ein neues Werkzeug zur Erstellung von Webseiten. Microsoft will sich nicht abschlagen lassen und zieht mit.
Emerce - Technologie nieuws: Google neemt Microsoft Sharepoint onder vuur
Emerce - Technologie nieuws: Google neemt Microsoft Sharepoint onder vuur
Google lanceert een dienst waarmee medewerkers van bedrijven online omgevingen kunnen maken om locatie-onafhankelijk met elkaar samen te werken. Daarmee neemt het Microsoft Sharepoint op de korrel. Het Nederlandse YesHello.com haakt in op de groeiende behoefte onder bedrijven om diensten online uit te besteden.
Google lanceert een dienst waarmee medewerkers van bedrijven online omgevingen kunnen maken om locatie-onafhankelijk met elkaar samen te werken. Daarmee neemt het Microsoft Sharepoint op de korrel. Het Nederlandse YesHello.com haakt in op de groeiende behoefte onder bedrijven om diensten online uit te besteden.
Microsoft Matches Google With SaaS for E-Mail/SharePoint
Microsoft Matches Google With SaaS for E-Mail/SharePoint
Responding to the threat from Google, and sensing a significant business opportunity, Microsoft has announced substantial plans for an Exchange and SharePoint software-as-a-service model.
Responding to the threat from Google, and sensing a significant business opportunity, Microsoft has announced substantial plans for an Exchange and SharePoint software-as-a-service model.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The truth is in there – but will you be able to find it?
Reprinted with permission by Media Revenue Services Limited.
© THE FINANCIAL TIMES LIMITED 2007 Not to be reproduced without authorisation.
DIGITAL BUSINESS OPINION
PERSONAL VIEW
The truth is in there – but will you be able to find it?
The data mountain doubles each year, but to what end if it cannot be understood? Mike Lynch seeks answers
The shift from processing a simplified world ordered for a computer to comprehending the rich unstructured life that human beings are used to – with letters and e-mails and video – is now unstoppable.
Until now, computers ruled the roost. Humans had to use data in the rows and columns that computers dictated. As humans, we have been trained to underspecify and processes have been dumbed down, which is not reflective of our natural behaviour.
But the tide has turned and computers have to understand data in human form, the way we use and process information: phone calls, e-mail, instant messaging, text messages and so on.
All of this unstructured data, which currently represents more than 80 per cent of information held within organisations, is about shades of grey as opposed to the black and white of computer-speak.
We are being overwhelmed by data – every year the amount in the world approximately doubles – but information technology is not making it any easier to get to the meaning of that data.
If the first wave of computing successfully brought intelligence to structured data, the second wave of computing will bring meaning to all data, whatever format it comes in.
A concept called meaningbased computing will allow businesses to understand the concept and context of what people are doing, whether on a website, in a Word document, a phone call or an e-mail.
According to research by Deloitte, 20bn gigabytes of new digital data will be created this year. The impact on the workforce is remarkable. Buyers can shop the entire world without leaving their desk, sellers have access to markets that were once beyond reach and the amount of information collected about customers,
competitors and markets is unprecedented.
Yet being unable to access and derive meaning from this data in a timely and efficient manner can prove costly to businesses.
In business, information can be the key to survival and competitive success.
The company that gets its hands on that vital piece of information for a crucial decision first is the one with the competitive edge. But the volume of information
means they rarely find what they are looking for – assuming they know what it is that they are trying to find in the first place.
When it comes to understanding e-mails and other forms of unstructured data, technology is needed to weed out the most pertinent information, based on contextually linking ideas and concepts, as opposed to just keywords.
For example, fraudsters rarely
tag their e-mails “fraud” and a
single keyword search for “fraud”
will not necessarily uncover all
relevant information.
However, a tool that analyses
data to uncover fraudulent
activity would recognise inconsistencies
in financial data, uncover
e-mails that have been started as
a draft and completed by another
user to avoid traditional search
methods and connect the contents
of a voicemail with a credit
card transaction and a follow-up
e-mail.
For a company such as Arup,
a global firm of designers and
business consultants, relevant
content is of crucial importance.
Employees have highly specific
and specialised areas of interest,
from structural engineering to
planning consultancy, that extend
far beyond the definitions
that could be explained by simple
keywords.
Arup aims to link people and
information “in context”, in realtime,
using concepts identified
from explicit profiling of natural
language to provide what we call
“implicit querying”.
Rather than stopping work,
going to a search engine and creating
a query, employees simply
ask to see content similar to what
they are reading, be it an e-mail,
Word document or web page,
and automatically have related
information delivered to their
desktop.
Another good example is BAE
Systems. The company was typical
of many large multi-national
businesses, struggling with the
vast amount of internal information.
However, when it discovered
that more than 80 per cent of
networked employees were wasting
30 minutes a day retrieving
information, while 60 per cent
were spending an hour or more
duplicating the work of others,
BAE Systems set out to identify
and measure the link between the
individual, user productivity and
information technology.
It discovered that engineers
were working in different parts of
the country on precisely the same
problem – a wing construction
issue. One group found a solution
and established best practice,
which was transferred to another
plant by a network based on
meaning-based computing, with
multi-million pound savings.
Meaning-based computing signals
the dawn of the next phase of
interaction between humans and
computers and paves the way for
computers to go one step further
and automatically deliver relevant
information to us without
us having to ask or search for it
– or without us even knowing
what we are looking for in the
case of criminal investigations or
compliance.
This automatic processing
of data will ultimately drive
efficiency, productivity and profitability,
and will mean that we can
continue to extract knowledge
rather than drown in the sea of
ever-increasing information.
The IT industry is currently
undergoing a revolution larger
than any it has ever seen. This
revolution is not about architectures
or processors but is a
fundamental shift in the form of
information itself.
Computers will fit to our world,
not us to theirs.
▪ Dr Mike Lynch is chief executive of
Autonomy
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 24 2007
© THE FINANCIAL TIMES LIMITED 2007 Not to be reproduced without authorisation.
DIGITAL BUSINESS OPINION
PERSONAL VIEW
The truth is in there – but will you be able to find it?
The data mountain doubles each year, but to what end if it cannot be understood? Mike Lynch seeks answers
The shift from processing a simplified world ordered for a computer to comprehending the rich unstructured life that human beings are used to – with letters and e-mails and video – is now unstoppable.
Until now, computers ruled the roost. Humans had to use data in the rows and columns that computers dictated. As humans, we have been trained to underspecify and processes have been dumbed down, which is not reflective of our natural behaviour.
But the tide has turned and computers have to understand data in human form, the way we use and process information: phone calls, e-mail, instant messaging, text messages and so on.
All of this unstructured data, which currently represents more than 80 per cent of information held within organisations, is about shades of grey as opposed to the black and white of computer-speak.
We are being overwhelmed by data – every year the amount in the world approximately doubles – but information technology is not making it any easier to get to the meaning of that data.
If the first wave of computing successfully brought intelligence to structured data, the second wave of computing will bring meaning to all data, whatever format it comes in.
A concept called meaningbased computing will allow businesses to understand the concept and context of what people are doing, whether on a website, in a Word document, a phone call or an e-mail.
According to research by Deloitte, 20bn gigabytes of new digital data will be created this year. The impact on the workforce is remarkable. Buyers can shop the entire world without leaving their desk, sellers have access to markets that were once beyond reach and the amount of information collected about customers,
competitors and markets is unprecedented.
Yet being unable to access and derive meaning from this data in a timely and efficient manner can prove costly to businesses.
In business, information can be the key to survival and competitive success.
The company that gets its hands on that vital piece of information for a crucial decision first is the one with the competitive edge. But the volume of information
means they rarely find what they are looking for – assuming they know what it is that they are trying to find in the first place.
When it comes to understanding e-mails and other forms of unstructured data, technology is needed to weed out the most pertinent information, based on contextually linking ideas and concepts, as opposed to just keywords.
For example, fraudsters rarely
tag their e-mails “fraud” and a
single keyword search for “fraud”
will not necessarily uncover all
relevant information.
However, a tool that analyses
data to uncover fraudulent
activity would recognise inconsistencies
in financial data, uncover
e-mails that have been started as
a draft and completed by another
user to avoid traditional search
methods and connect the contents
of a voicemail with a credit
card transaction and a follow-up
e-mail.
For a company such as Arup,
a global firm of designers and
business consultants, relevant
content is of crucial importance.
Employees have highly specific
and specialised areas of interest,
from structural engineering to
planning consultancy, that extend
far beyond the definitions
that could be explained by simple
keywords.
Arup aims to link people and
information “in context”, in realtime,
using concepts identified
from explicit profiling of natural
language to provide what we call
“implicit querying”.
Rather than stopping work,
going to a search engine and creating
a query, employees simply
ask to see content similar to what
they are reading, be it an e-mail,
Word document or web page,
and automatically have related
information delivered to their
desktop.
Another good example is BAE
Systems. The company was typical
of many large multi-national
businesses, struggling with the
vast amount of internal information.
However, when it discovered
that more than 80 per cent of
networked employees were wasting
30 minutes a day retrieving
information, while 60 per cent
were spending an hour or more
duplicating the work of others,
BAE Systems set out to identify
and measure the link between the
individual, user productivity and
information technology.
It discovered that engineers
were working in different parts of
the country on precisely the same
problem – a wing construction
issue. One group found a solution
and established best practice,
which was transferred to another
plant by a network based on
meaning-based computing, with
multi-million pound savings.
Meaning-based computing signals
the dawn of the next phase of
interaction between humans and
computers and paves the way for
computers to go one step further
and automatically deliver relevant
information to us without
us having to ask or search for it
– or without us even knowing
what we are looking for in the
case of criminal investigations or
compliance.
This automatic processing
of data will ultimately drive
efficiency, productivity and profitability,
and will mean that we can
continue to extract knowledge
rather than drown in the sea of
ever-increasing information.
The IT industry is currently
undergoing a revolution larger
than any it has ever seen. This
revolution is not about architectures
or processors but is a
fundamental shift in the form of
information itself.
Computers will fit to our world,
not us to theirs.
▪ Dr Mike Lynch is chief executive of
Autonomy
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 24 2007
CoreMedia - Enterprise 2.0 Report (free download): German companies are experimenting successfully with Web 2.0 technologies, but are not yet maximizing efficiency
CoreMedia - Enterprise 2.0 Report (free download): German companies are experimenting successfully with Web 2.0 technologies, but are not yet maximizing efficiency
Enterprise 2.0 Report (free download): German companies are experimenting successfully with Web 2.0 technologies, but are not yet maximizing efficiency
Hamburg, November 06, 2007 – CoreMedia and Berlecon research present their new report on Enterprise 2.0 in Germany which concentrates on the use of Social Software for knowledge-intensive companies (Enterprise 2.0). The report reveals a profound lack of efficient communication and information despite a fast-growing need. Without a cross-company integration of new Web 2.0 technologies (approx. 95 %) businesses cannot tap the full potential of Enterprise 2.0.
Go to CoreMedia’s blog to read the conclusions drawn from the study by Nicole Dufft, Director Berlecon Research. Let us know what you think! If you would like to take part in the discussion, you can log in using your Facebook account or by using an OpenID (e.g. from AOL, Wordpress or another provider of OpenIDs).
Enterprise 2.0 Report (free download): German companies are experimenting successfully with Web 2.0 technologies, but are not yet maximizing efficiency
Hamburg, November 06, 2007 – CoreMedia and Berlecon research present their new report on Enterprise 2.0 in Germany which concentrates on the use of Social Software for knowledge-intensive companies (Enterprise 2.0). The report reveals a profound lack of efficient communication and information despite a fast-growing need. Without a cross-company integration of new Web 2.0 technologies (approx. 95 %) businesses cannot tap the full potential of Enterprise 2.0.
Go to CoreMedia’s blog to read the conclusions drawn from the study by Nicole Dufft, Director Berlecon Research. Let us know what you think! If you would like to take part in the discussion, you can log in using your Facebook account or by using an OpenID (e.g. from AOL, Wordpress or another provider of OpenIDs).
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Xparo entwickelt mit contentXXL CMS neues Extranet für Mercedes Benz Österreich
Xparo entwickelt mit contentXXL CMS neues Extranet für Mercedes Benz Österreich
Die wichtigste Ressource im Direktverkauf ist, neben der Ware selbst, die möglichst detaillierte Kenntnis über das Produkt. Um auch alle Verkaufs- und Servicestellen in Österreich mit eben solchen Informationen versorgen zu können, hat Mercedes Benz Österreich mit dem Business Content Management System contentXXL alle angeschlossenen Händler und Werkstätten mit einem umfangreichen Extranet versorgt. Umgesetzt wurde das Projekt von der Xparo GmbH aus Nürnberg.
Die wichtigste Ressource im Direktverkauf ist, neben der Ware selbst, die möglichst detaillierte Kenntnis über das Produkt. Um auch alle Verkaufs- und Servicestellen in Österreich mit eben solchen Informationen versorgen zu können, hat Mercedes Benz Österreich mit dem Business Content Management System contentXXL alle angeschlossenen Händler und Werkstätten mit einem umfangreichen Extranet versorgt. Umgesetzt wurde das Projekt von der Xparo GmbH aus Nürnberg.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
CeBIT 2008: contentXXL präsentiert CMS Release 3.5 mit Web 2.0-Funktionen und SharePoint Integration
CeBIT 2008: contentXXL präsentiert CMS Release 3.5 mit Web 2.0-Funktionen und SharePoint Integration
Die contentXXL International GmbH präsentiert auf der CeBIT 2008 (04.- 09.03.2008) in Halle 4, Stand A26, Platz 40 die neue Version des Microsoft .NET basierten Content Management Systems (CMS) contentXXL. Im Mittelpunkt des Release 3.5 steht das neue »Web 2.0 Premiummodul«, das verschiedene Web 2.0 Funktionen zusammenfasst. Dieses beinhaltet eine Kommentar- und Bewertungsfunktion sowie kategoriebasierte Tag Clouds (zu Deutsch: Schlagwortwolken). Des Weiteren packt contentXXL International eine neue Rechtschreibeprüfung für über 30 Sprachen mit einem zentralen, per Web erweiterbaren Unternehmenswörterbuch (Dictionary) in das neue Release.
Abgerundet wird die neue Version 3.5 durch ein neues Modul, das den kostenlosen Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express nahtlos in contentXXL integriert. Der Microsoft Search Server 2008 ist eine Lösung für die unternehmensweite Suche, die Microsoft auf der CeBIT 2008 erstmals vorstellen wird. Ebenfalls unterstützt contentXXL bereits das neue Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.
Die contentXXL International GmbH präsentiert auf der CeBIT 2008 (04.- 09.03.2008) in Halle 4, Stand A26, Platz 40 die neue Version des Microsoft .NET basierten Content Management Systems (CMS) contentXXL. Im Mittelpunkt des Release 3.5 steht das neue »Web 2.0 Premiummodul«, das verschiedene Web 2.0 Funktionen zusammenfasst. Dieses beinhaltet eine Kommentar- und Bewertungsfunktion sowie kategoriebasierte Tag Clouds (zu Deutsch: Schlagwortwolken). Des Weiteren packt contentXXL International eine neue Rechtschreibeprüfung für über 30 Sprachen mit einem zentralen, per Web erweiterbaren Unternehmenswörterbuch (Dictionary) in das neue Release.
Abgerundet wird die neue Version 3.5 durch ein neues Modul, das den kostenlosen Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express nahtlos in contentXXL integriert. Der Microsoft Search Server 2008 ist eine Lösung für die unternehmensweite Suche, die Microsoft auf der CeBIT 2008 erstmals vorstellen wird. Ebenfalls unterstützt contentXXL bereits das neue Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
FT.com / In depth - Microsoft warns Yahoo on $42bn offer
FT.com / In depth - Microsoft warns Yahoo on $42bn offer
Microsoft warns Yahoo on $42bn offer
By Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: February 11 2008 14:28 | Last updated: February 11 2008 23:44
Microsoft described Yahoo’s rejection on Monday of its unsolicited offer as “unfortunate”.
The software company warned that it was prepared to bypass the internet company’s board to complete a transaction currently valued at $41.8bn. Microsoft was responding to a Yahoo statement that the software group’s February 1 proposal “substantially undervalues” the internet company.
Analysts had speculated that the Yahoo board was holding out for a higher offer than the $31 per share originally proposed. But, sensing that Yahoo was in a weak position, Microsoft said its offer was “full and fair” and gave no indication that it would raise the price.
Microsoft shares had slipped 1.2 per cent to close at $28.21 as Wall Street anticipated a higher offer. They gained 0.25 per cent in after-hours trade following the group’s firm line. Microsoft’s statement said: “Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of both parties.”
The software group has been sounding out Yahoo’s largest shareholders, principally Capital Research & Management, which holds an 11 per cent stake and is also an investor in Microsoft. The company’s next step could be to make an exchange offer for Yahoo shares to stockholders, turning its approach hostile. It could also launch a proxy contest to try to unseat the board. “Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realise the value inherent in our proposal,” its statement warned.
Analysts feel Yahoo investors would settle for a higher offer from Microsoft.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Microsoft warns Yahoo on $42bn offer
By Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: February 11 2008 14:28 | Last updated: February 11 2008 23:44
Microsoft described Yahoo’s rejection on Monday of its unsolicited offer as “unfortunate”.
The software company warned that it was prepared to bypass the internet company’s board to complete a transaction currently valued at $41.8bn. Microsoft was responding to a Yahoo statement that the software group’s February 1 proposal “substantially undervalues” the internet company.
Analysts had speculated that the Yahoo board was holding out for a higher offer than the $31 per share originally proposed. But, sensing that Yahoo was in a weak position, Microsoft said its offer was “full and fair” and gave no indication that it would raise the price.
Microsoft shares had slipped 1.2 per cent to close at $28.21 as Wall Street anticipated a higher offer. They gained 0.25 per cent in after-hours trade following the group’s firm line. Microsoft’s statement said: “Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of both parties.”
The software group has been sounding out Yahoo’s largest shareholders, principally Capital Research & Management, which holds an 11 per cent stake and is also an investor in Microsoft. The company’s next step could be to make an exchange offer for Yahoo shares to stockholders, turning its approach hostile. It could also launch a proxy contest to try to unseat the board. “Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realise the value inherent in our proposal,” its statement warned.
Analysts feel Yahoo investors would settle for a higher offer from Microsoft.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Saturday, February 09, 2008
FT.com / In depth - Yahoo poised to reject Microsoft bid
FT.com / In depth - Yahoo poised to reject Microsoft bid
Yahoo poised to reject Microsoft bid
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: February 9 2008 20:29 | Last updated: February 9 2008 20:29
Yahoo intends to reject Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for the internet company, according to a person close to the situation.
Yahoo’s board held its first formal meeting on Friday to discuss the February 1 offer, which is currently valued at $41.5bn. It has decided the $31 a share on the table massively undervalues the company, this person said.
The Silicon Valley company is expected to send a letter to Microsoft on Monday detailing its position, including the concern that any takeover could be overturned by regulators.
It is understood Yahoo would be unlikely to give serious consideration to an offer of less than $40 a share. Shares in Yahoo closed on Friday at $29.20.
Yahoo’s rejection of the bid could set the scene for a protracted struggle for the company. Microsoft could launch a proxy contest and seek to replace Yahoo’s board at its annual meeting in June.
But Yahoo’s move could also give it time to come up with alternatives that might satisfy shareholders disappointed with its poor financial performance. It is understood to be considering handing over its search advertising to Google, a move that would generate considerable revenues and cost savings. Another option would be to sell off its holdings in China and Japan to generate a special dividend.
So far there has been no indication of any ”white knight” coming to Yahoo’s rescue, with News Corp and NBC among those ruling out a possible counter-bid.
Yahoo is being advised by Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. Moelis & Company, a Los Angeles-based mergers and acquisitions boutique, has also joined the team.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Yahoo poised to reject Microsoft bid
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: February 9 2008 20:29 | Last updated: February 9 2008 20:29
Yahoo intends to reject Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for the internet company, according to a person close to the situation.
Yahoo’s board held its first formal meeting on Friday to discuss the February 1 offer, which is currently valued at $41.5bn. It has decided the $31 a share on the table massively undervalues the company, this person said.
The Silicon Valley company is expected to send a letter to Microsoft on Monday detailing its position, including the concern that any takeover could be overturned by regulators.
It is understood Yahoo would be unlikely to give serious consideration to an offer of less than $40 a share. Shares in Yahoo closed on Friday at $29.20.
Yahoo’s rejection of the bid could set the scene for a protracted struggle for the company. Microsoft could launch a proxy contest and seek to replace Yahoo’s board at its annual meeting in June.
But Yahoo’s move could also give it time to come up with alternatives that might satisfy shareholders disappointed with its poor financial performance. It is understood to be considering handing over its search advertising to Google, a move that would generate considerable revenues and cost savings. Another option would be to sell off its holdings in China and Japan to generate a special dividend.
So far there has been no indication of any ”white knight” coming to Yahoo’s rescue, with News Corp and NBC among those ruling out a possible counter-bid.
Yahoo is being advised by Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. Moelis & Company, a Los Angeles-based mergers and acquisitions boutique, has also joined the team.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Semantische Suchmaschine auf der CeBIT
Semantische Suchmaschine auf der CeBIT
Im entscheidenden Moment die richtige Information parat zu haben, dafuer durchforstet ConWeaver die Datenbanken des Unternehmens. Die am Fraunhofer IGD entwickelte Software sucht nach mehr als nur dem eingegebenen Begriff und unterstuetzt die Anwender dabei, bessere Suchergebnisse zu erzielen. Vom 4. bis 9. Maerz ist die intelligente Suchtechnologie ConWeaver auf der CeBIT in Hannover zu sehen.
In der heutigen Wissensgesellschaft sind Informationen ein Schluessel zum Erfolg. Der Berg an zur Verfuegung stehenden Daten waechst stetig. Nutzer stehen zunehmend vor der Herausforderung, die benoetigte Information schnell und im richtigen Moment zu finden. Mitarbeiter kostet es taeglich viel Zeit, Daten aus Kunden-, Lieferanten- und Expertendatenbanken herauszufiltern. Fuer das Unternehmen entstehen so unnoetig hohe Kosten.
Das Fraunhofer-Institut fuer Graphische Datenverarbeitung IGD entwickelte mit ConWeaver eine semantische Suchmaschine, die bei Suchanfragen effizientere Ergebnisse liefert. Die Software durchforstet parallel saemtliche Datenbanken, Server und das gesamte Intranet. Sie sucht nach dem eingegebenen Begriff, verwandten Terminologien und dessen Uebersetzungen. Die Technologie erzeugt anschliessend automatisch ein semantisches Wissensnetz aus verschiedenen Unternehmensdaten.
ConWeaver verfuegt ueber mehr als 200 Analysemodule. Diese passt das Programm mit Hilfe sogenannter Analyseworkflows spezifisch auf die Kundendaten an. Die so entstehenden Wissensnetze und damit die semantischen Suchfunktionen stimmt die Software mit den jeweiligen Anforderungen der Kunden ab. Ein so erstelltes firmenspezifisches Wissensnetz nutzt und pflegt ConWeaver als semantischen Suchindex fuer alle angeschlossenen Datenquellen.
"Im Gegensatz zu herkoemmlichen Suchmaschinen kann ConWeaver sowohl unstrukturierte als auch strukturierte Informationsquellen effizient durchsuchen", erlaeutert Projektleiter Dr. Thomas Kamps. "Auf seine Anfrage erhaelt der Nutzer keine ungeordnete Ergebnisliste, sondern eine vollstaendige, aggregierte und strukturierte Antwort."
Aus dem erfolgreichen Projekt hat Dr. Kamps mittlerweile die ConWeaver GmbH gegruendet. Unter dem Titel "Semantische Suche" ist die marktreife Technologie ConWeaver vom 4. bis 9. Maerz 2008 auf der CeBIT in Hannover vor. Dieses und weitere interessante Exponate sind am Gemeinschaftsstand der Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Halle 9, Stand B36 zu sehen. Die Halle ist taeglich von 9.00 bis 18.00 Uhr geoeffnet.
07.02.2008, Dr. Thomas Kamps, Fraunhofer-Institut fuer Graphische Datenverarbeitung IGD
Im entscheidenden Moment die richtige Information parat zu haben, dafuer durchforstet ConWeaver die Datenbanken des Unternehmens. Die am Fraunhofer IGD entwickelte Software sucht nach mehr als nur dem eingegebenen Begriff und unterstuetzt die Anwender dabei, bessere Suchergebnisse zu erzielen. Vom 4. bis 9. Maerz ist die intelligente Suchtechnologie ConWeaver auf der CeBIT in Hannover zu sehen.
In der heutigen Wissensgesellschaft sind Informationen ein Schluessel zum Erfolg. Der Berg an zur Verfuegung stehenden Daten waechst stetig. Nutzer stehen zunehmend vor der Herausforderung, die benoetigte Information schnell und im richtigen Moment zu finden. Mitarbeiter kostet es taeglich viel Zeit, Daten aus Kunden-, Lieferanten- und Expertendatenbanken herauszufiltern. Fuer das Unternehmen entstehen so unnoetig hohe Kosten.
Das Fraunhofer-Institut fuer Graphische Datenverarbeitung IGD entwickelte mit ConWeaver eine semantische Suchmaschine, die bei Suchanfragen effizientere Ergebnisse liefert. Die Software durchforstet parallel saemtliche Datenbanken, Server und das gesamte Intranet. Sie sucht nach dem eingegebenen Begriff, verwandten Terminologien und dessen Uebersetzungen. Die Technologie erzeugt anschliessend automatisch ein semantisches Wissensnetz aus verschiedenen Unternehmensdaten.
ConWeaver verfuegt ueber mehr als 200 Analysemodule. Diese passt das Programm mit Hilfe sogenannter Analyseworkflows spezifisch auf die Kundendaten an. Die so entstehenden Wissensnetze und damit die semantischen Suchfunktionen stimmt die Software mit den jeweiligen Anforderungen der Kunden ab. Ein so erstelltes firmenspezifisches Wissensnetz nutzt und pflegt ConWeaver als semantischen Suchindex fuer alle angeschlossenen Datenquellen.
"Im Gegensatz zu herkoemmlichen Suchmaschinen kann ConWeaver sowohl unstrukturierte als auch strukturierte Informationsquellen effizient durchsuchen", erlaeutert Projektleiter Dr. Thomas Kamps. "Auf seine Anfrage erhaelt der Nutzer keine ungeordnete Ergebnisliste, sondern eine vollstaendige, aggregierte und strukturierte Antwort."
Aus dem erfolgreichen Projekt hat Dr. Kamps mittlerweile die ConWeaver GmbH gegruendet. Unter dem Titel "Semantische Suche" ist die marktreife Technologie ConWeaver vom 4. bis 9. Maerz 2008 auf der CeBIT in Hannover vor. Dieses und weitere interessante Exponate sind am Gemeinschaftsstand der Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Halle 9, Stand B36 zu sehen. Die Halle ist taeglich von 9.00 bis 18.00 Uhr geoeffnet.
07.02.2008, Dr. Thomas Kamps, Fraunhofer-Institut fuer Graphische Datenverarbeitung IGD
Microsoft v Google | When clouds collide | Economist.com
Microsoft v Google | When clouds collide | Economist.com
THE collision of two clouds is a gentle affair—except, that is, in the digital skies of the technology industry. But such a virtual collision is the best image to keep in mind when trying to understand why Microsoft, the world's largest software company, has bid a whopping $44.6 billion for Yahoo!, an ailing online giant. As computing moves online, the sources of power and money will increasingly be enormous “computing clouds”, as the cognoscenti call them, hosted on the internet. The Yahoo! deal is mainly about inflating Microsoft's cloud so that it can at last match that of its most dangerous rival, Google.
To be sure, the merger, which would be the internet industry's biggest since the ill-fated union of AOL and Time Warner in 2000, is far from a done deal. As The Economist went to press, Yahoo! had yet to reply formally to the offer, other than to say that it was considering it. Indeed, its management, which has spurned previous overtures from Microsoft, is said to have been looking into alternatives to the takeover, including selling off some units and even considering an alliance with Google. A rival bid is possible, but so far no one appears inclined to enter into a bidding war with deep-pocketed Microsoft; its offer values Yahoo! at $31 a share, a 62% premium over its closing price before Microsoft's bid was made public. And then there is the inevitable antitrust review, which promises to be lengthy, particularly in Europe.
If Microsoft does manage to swallow Yahoo!, it risks a severe bout of post-merger indigestion, as happened with AOL and Time Warner. (This week Time Warner's new boss, Jeff Bewkes, said he planned to spin off AOL's shrinking internet-access business.) Microsoft will have to combine or eliminate overlapping products and services. There will be cultural problems to overcome, too. Yahoo! is an online-media company that prides itself on its fun-loving ethos and has built its business on open-source technology, whereas Microsoft attracts hard-charging geeks and makes its money from proprietary software. So combining the two firms' technology infrastructures to make further savings will also be tricky.
Since Microsoft must know all this, the fact that it still wants to buy Yahoo! is nothing less than an admission that it needs help to catch up with Google. The latter is best known for its search engine, but it was also the first company to build a huge computing cloud—a nexus of hardware, software, data and people which provides online services. In Google's vast data centres, the computing equivalents of power stations, hundreds of thousands of machines are cleverly linked to act as one. Google collects vast amounts of data from its users and from the web. And it has hired an army of bright engineers to devise new services that make use of these resources.
Most importantly, Google has figured out a way to make money from its cloud. By giving away its services, the firm creates plenty of space for targeted advertising, mostly in the form of small text-boxes related to users' search queries. These are auctioned, and buyers pay only if users click on their advertisements. Google has thus created a virtuous cycle. As the largest search engine, Google attracts more advertisers and can serve up more relevant advertisements. This in turn attracts more users and advertisers, and so on.
In recent years Microsoft has tried to create a comparable cloud of its own. It is investing heavily in infrastructure and has built data centres around the world. It is also trying hard to catch up with Google's services, notably internet search. It recently strengthened its position in display advertising, a subset of the online-ad market that is smaller than search-based advertising, but is expected to grow quickly. In May Microsoft bought aQuantive, an online-ad agency, after Google agreed to buy DoubleClick, a leader in display.
Yet it has little to show for its efforts. In search, for instance, Microsoft's worldwide market share in December 2007 was 2.9%, according to comScore, a market-research firm, compared with 62.4% for Google (and 12.8% for Yahoo!). Microsoft's online business has yet to turn a profit. Yet what worries the firm's management most is that Google is pulling ahead in online advertising and may soon corner this crucial market, particularly once its acquisition of DoubleClick is completed. Despite fierce lobbying by Microsoft, American regulators have approved the deal, and their European counterparts are expected to follow suit soon.
Ironically, Microsoft argues that Google will benefit from the same advantage that has long made it almost impossible for any other firm to compete with its own Windows operating system, and which played an important role in successful antitrust cases against the software giant. Since so much software is written to run on Windows, it is difficult for competing operating systems to enter the market. Similarly, if too many publishers and advertisers adopt Google's online-advertising platform, rivals will not be able “to mount a credible competitive challenge”, as an internal Microsoft document puts it.
Having failed to keep DoubleClick out of Google's clutches, Microsoft now hopes that Yahoo! will keep it from being left in the dust. If it succeeds, the takeover would expand Microsoft's cloud, though not to the size of Google's. The combined firm's websites would attract over 290m unique visitors per month in America—slightly more than Google, according to Nielsen Online, another market-research firm. Yet Microsoft-Yahoo! would have a market share of only 18% in search advertising and 30% in display, according to Oppenheimer, an investment bank.
Still, the takeover would give Microsoft greater clout in other areas. One is web-based e-mail, where the merged entity would have 80% of the American market. It would be equally dominant in instant messaging. Since Yahoo! also offers many other services, such as Flickr, a photo-sharing site, Microsoft would control the world's biggest directory of registered internet users—a valuable asset as it develops new cloud-based services.
Nonetheless, the transaction could be good news for Google, at least in the short term. Google will most certainly try to lure away Yahoo!'s best staff. The integration effort will distract Microsoft's management and take time. Google has already launched a lobbying campaign to block the merger, arguing that it could undermine innovation on the internet—though neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! has done anything terribly innovative online lately. Indeed, the more Google complains about threats to innovation, instead of just getting on with doing it, the more it sounds like Microsoft used to.
THE collision of two clouds is a gentle affair—except, that is, in the digital skies of the technology industry. But such a virtual collision is the best image to keep in mind when trying to understand why Microsoft, the world's largest software company, has bid a whopping $44.6 billion for Yahoo!, an ailing online giant. As computing moves online, the sources of power and money will increasingly be enormous “computing clouds”, as the cognoscenti call them, hosted on the internet. The Yahoo! deal is mainly about inflating Microsoft's cloud so that it can at last match that of its most dangerous rival, Google.
To be sure, the merger, which would be the internet industry's biggest since the ill-fated union of AOL and Time Warner in 2000, is far from a done deal. As The Economist went to press, Yahoo! had yet to reply formally to the offer, other than to say that it was considering it. Indeed, its management, which has spurned previous overtures from Microsoft, is said to have been looking into alternatives to the takeover, including selling off some units and even considering an alliance with Google. A rival bid is possible, but so far no one appears inclined to enter into a bidding war with deep-pocketed Microsoft; its offer values Yahoo! at $31 a share, a 62% premium over its closing price before Microsoft's bid was made public. And then there is the inevitable antitrust review, which promises to be lengthy, particularly in Europe.
If Microsoft does manage to swallow Yahoo!, it risks a severe bout of post-merger indigestion, as happened with AOL and Time Warner. (This week Time Warner's new boss, Jeff Bewkes, said he planned to spin off AOL's shrinking internet-access business.) Microsoft will have to combine or eliminate overlapping products and services. There will be cultural problems to overcome, too. Yahoo! is an online-media company that prides itself on its fun-loving ethos and has built its business on open-source technology, whereas Microsoft attracts hard-charging geeks and makes its money from proprietary software. So combining the two firms' technology infrastructures to make further savings will also be tricky.
Since Microsoft must know all this, the fact that it still wants to buy Yahoo! is nothing less than an admission that it needs help to catch up with Google. The latter is best known for its search engine, but it was also the first company to build a huge computing cloud—a nexus of hardware, software, data and people which provides online services. In Google's vast data centres, the computing equivalents of power stations, hundreds of thousands of machines are cleverly linked to act as one. Google collects vast amounts of data from its users and from the web. And it has hired an army of bright engineers to devise new services that make use of these resources.
Most importantly, Google has figured out a way to make money from its cloud. By giving away its services, the firm creates plenty of space for targeted advertising, mostly in the form of small text-boxes related to users' search queries. These are auctioned, and buyers pay only if users click on their advertisements. Google has thus created a virtuous cycle. As the largest search engine, Google attracts more advertisers and can serve up more relevant advertisements. This in turn attracts more users and advertisers, and so on.
In recent years Microsoft has tried to create a comparable cloud of its own. It is investing heavily in infrastructure and has built data centres around the world. It is also trying hard to catch up with Google's services, notably internet search. It recently strengthened its position in display advertising, a subset of the online-ad market that is smaller than search-based advertising, but is expected to grow quickly. In May Microsoft bought aQuantive, an online-ad agency, after Google agreed to buy DoubleClick, a leader in display.
Yet it has little to show for its efforts. In search, for instance, Microsoft's worldwide market share in December 2007 was 2.9%, according to comScore, a market-research firm, compared with 62.4% for Google (and 12.8% for Yahoo!). Microsoft's online business has yet to turn a profit. Yet what worries the firm's management most is that Google is pulling ahead in online advertising and may soon corner this crucial market, particularly once its acquisition of DoubleClick is completed. Despite fierce lobbying by Microsoft, American regulators have approved the deal, and their European counterparts are expected to follow suit soon.
Ironically, Microsoft argues that Google will benefit from the same advantage that has long made it almost impossible for any other firm to compete with its own Windows operating system, and which played an important role in successful antitrust cases against the software giant. Since so much software is written to run on Windows, it is difficult for competing operating systems to enter the market. Similarly, if too many publishers and advertisers adopt Google's online-advertising platform, rivals will not be able “to mount a credible competitive challenge”, as an internal Microsoft document puts it.
Having failed to keep DoubleClick out of Google's clutches, Microsoft now hopes that Yahoo! will keep it from being left in the dust. If it succeeds, the takeover would expand Microsoft's cloud, though not to the size of Google's. The combined firm's websites would attract over 290m unique visitors per month in America—slightly more than Google, according to Nielsen Online, another market-research firm. Yet Microsoft-Yahoo! would have a market share of only 18% in search advertising and 30% in display, according to Oppenheimer, an investment bank.
Still, the takeover would give Microsoft greater clout in other areas. One is web-based e-mail, where the merged entity would have 80% of the American market. It would be equally dominant in instant messaging. Since Yahoo! also offers many other services, such as Flickr, a photo-sharing site, Microsoft would control the world's biggest directory of registered internet users—a valuable asset as it develops new cloud-based services.
Nonetheless, the transaction could be good news for Google, at least in the short term. Google will most certainly try to lure away Yahoo!'s best staff. The integration effort will distract Microsoft's management and take time. Google has already launched a lobbying campaign to block the merger, arguing that it could undermine innovation on the internet—though neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! has done anything terribly innovative online lately. Indeed, the more Google complains about threats to innovation, instead of just getting on with doing it, the more it sounds like Microsoft used to.
Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google | Giants in combat | Economist.com
Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google | Giants in combat | Economist.com
THIS was the week that seemed to confirm the new balance of power in the technology industry. Computing is moving online, away from the desktop—and away from Microsoft, the desktop-software leviathan, to Google, master of online search. Microsoft's determination not to lose the struggle became clear when it bid $44.6 billion in cash and shares for Yahoo!, an ailing internet giant (see article). If the deal goes ahead, it will reshape the technology industry and clear the way for a straight fight between Microsoft and Google for dominance in the internet era. But whether Microsoft's bid succeeds or fails, it changes how all three firms are perceived.
Yahoo!'s status as the also-ran that seemed poised to inherit the internet, but failed to keep up with the changing technological times, is cemented. Microsoft, which has never made an acquisition on anything like this scale, has in effect conceded that it cannot compete with Google on its own; its bid highlights its own weakness almost as much as Yahoo!'s. Meanwhile, Google's objections to the proposed deal on antitrust grounds—even though the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! would still trail far behind it in both internet search and advertising—show that the firm has failed to grasp that it, not Microsoft, is now regarded as the industry's Goliath.
Microsoft is the larger company by market capitalisation, of course, being worth some $270 billion, compared with Google's $160 billion or so. But the software market in which Microsoft mainly operates offers far weaker growth prospects than the intertwined search-and-advertising market dominated by Google. The search giant's pre-eminence in these fields is not related to a proprietary technological lock-in (internet users can easily switch between search engines); its market share falls far short of the 90% that Microsoft boasts in desktop operating-systems and office-productivity software; and it is not a convicted monopolist. So to call Google the new Microsoft is, in many ways, unfair. But it is undeniably the company that other technology firms and media giants are now most scared of—including Microsoft itself. Google's growing market share in search, and hence its clout in online advertising, make it look unstoppable.
Searching for scale
What particularly worries Microsoft is the prospect that software will increasingly be delivered as an internet-based service, supported by advertising. Google already offers a few such services, and is venturing onto Microsoft's patch. Microsoft's counter-attack has failed to make headway. Despite repeated relaunches, its search engine has a worldwide market share of 2.9%, against Google's 62.4%. Microsoft's share of online advertising is equally puny. Hence its bid for Yahoo!, the number two in search and advertising.
The two talked about a merger or partnership in 2006 and 2007, but at the time Yahoo! still hoped that Panama, a new system for placing advertisements next to the results of internet searches, would enable it to catch Google. Panama has failed to live up to expectations, however, and Yahoo!'s latest results caused its share price to fall to a four-year low on January 30th. Microsoft duly pounced. Unless a rival bid emerges, which is unlikely, or Yahoo! tries to save itself from the beast of Redmond by outsourcing its search-and-advertising operations to Google, Microsoft seems likely to get its prize.
Just how anti-competitive would a Microsoft-Yahoo! merger be? It is true that the combined firm would dominate the markets for instant messaging and web-based e-mail, but neither is lucrative. In the markets that really matter—search and advertising—the Microsoft-Yahoo! combination would still trail far behind Google, which is hoping to extend its reach in advertising even further by buying DoubleClick. The danger remains that Microsoft will somehow exploit its desktop monopoly to push Google aside. But how, exactly? Microsoft is being closely monitored by regulators, and if there were any way for it to use its desktop monopoly against Google it would surely have done so by now. Buying Yahoo! does not help it in that respect—and the deal may well backfire anyway. Microsoft has never done a merger of this size, and the two companies have very different cultures: there could be an exodus of engineers to other firms, including Google.
From a regulator's point of view, there are two decisions to make. The immediate one—whether to let a Microsoft-Yahoo! tie-up go ahead—is simple enough: creating a more convincing counterweight to Google can only be good for competition. (By contrast, a tie-up between Google and Yahoo! would constitute a worrying concentration of power.) If Microsoft tries any of its old tricks, it should be punished. As for the longer-term question—what to do about Google?—the answer is essentially the same. Like Microsoft, Google has enormous power in its market, so regulatory vigilance is necessary. But so far nobody, despite much grumbling, has shown that Google is abusing that power. So leave Google alone too, and prepare for an epic battle between the two tech titans.
THIS was the week that seemed to confirm the new balance of power in the technology industry. Computing is moving online, away from the desktop—and away from Microsoft, the desktop-software leviathan, to Google, master of online search. Microsoft's determination not to lose the struggle became clear when it bid $44.6 billion in cash and shares for Yahoo!, an ailing internet giant (see article). If the deal goes ahead, it will reshape the technology industry and clear the way for a straight fight between Microsoft and Google for dominance in the internet era. But whether Microsoft's bid succeeds or fails, it changes how all three firms are perceived.
Yahoo!'s status as the also-ran that seemed poised to inherit the internet, but failed to keep up with the changing technological times, is cemented. Microsoft, which has never made an acquisition on anything like this scale, has in effect conceded that it cannot compete with Google on its own; its bid highlights its own weakness almost as much as Yahoo!'s. Meanwhile, Google's objections to the proposed deal on antitrust grounds—even though the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! would still trail far behind it in both internet search and advertising—show that the firm has failed to grasp that it, not Microsoft, is now regarded as the industry's Goliath.
Microsoft is the larger company by market capitalisation, of course, being worth some $270 billion, compared with Google's $160 billion or so. But the software market in which Microsoft mainly operates offers far weaker growth prospects than the intertwined search-and-advertising market dominated by Google. The search giant's pre-eminence in these fields is not related to a proprietary technological lock-in (internet users can easily switch between search engines); its market share falls far short of the 90% that Microsoft boasts in desktop operating-systems and office-productivity software; and it is not a convicted monopolist. So to call Google the new Microsoft is, in many ways, unfair. But it is undeniably the company that other technology firms and media giants are now most scared of—including Microsoft itself. Google's growing market share in search, and hence its clout in online advertising, make it look unstoppable.
Searching for scale
What particularly worries Microsoft is the prospect that software will increasingly be delivered as an internet-based service, supported by advertising. Google already offers a few such services, and is venturing onto Microsoft's patch. Microsoft's counter-attack has failed to make headway. Despite repeated relaunches, its search engine has a worldwide market share of 2.9%, against Google's 62.4%. Microsoft's share of online advertising is equally puny. Hence its bid for Yahoo!, the number two in search and advertising.
The two talked about a merger or partnership in 2006 and 2007, but at the time Yahoo! still hoped that Panama, a new system for placing advertisements next to the results of internet searches, would enable it to catch Google. Panama has failed to live up to expectations, however, and Yahoo!'s latest results caused its share price to fall to a four-year low on January 30th. Microsoft duly pounced. Unless a rival bid emerges, which is unlikely, or Yahoo! tries to save itself from the beast of Redmond by outsourcing its search-and-advertising operations to Google, Microsoft seems likely to get its prize.
Just how anti-competitive would a Microsoft-Yahoo! merger be? It is true that the combined firm would dominate the markets for instant messaging and web-based e-mail, but neither is lucrative. In the markets that really matter—search and advertising—the Microsoft-Yahoo! combination would still trail far behind Google, which is hoping to extend its reach in advertising even further by buying DoubleClick. The danger remains that Microsoft will somehow exploit its desktop monopoly to push Google aside. But how, exactly? Microsoft is being closely monitored by regulators, and if there were any way for it to use its desktop monopoly against Google it would surely have done so by now. Buying Yahoo! does not help it in that respect—and the deal may well backfire anyway. Microsoft has never done a merger of this size, and the two companies have very different cultures: there could be an exodus of engineers to other firms, including Google.
From a regulator's point of view, there are two decisions to make. The immediate one—whether to let a Microsoft-Yahoo! tie-up go ahead—is simple enough: creating a more convincing counterweight to Google can only be good for competition. (By contrast, a tie-up between Google and Yahoo! would constitute a worrying concentration of power.) If Microsoft tries any of its old tricks, it should be punished. As for the longer-term question—what to do about Google?—the answer is essentially the same. Like Microsoft, Google has enormous power in its market, so regulatory vigilance is necessary. But so far nobody, despite much grumbling, has shown that Google is abusing that power. So leave Google alone too, and prepare for an epic battle between the two tech titans.
Monday, February 04, 2008
FT.com / Companies / UK - Autonomy up on subprime business lift
FT.com / Companies / UK - Autonomy up on subprime business lift
Autonomy up on subprime business lift
By Maija Palmer in London
Published: January 29 2008 23:55 | Last updated: January 29 2008 23:55
Shares in Autonomy rose 7 per cent after the search software company reported a 62 per cent rise in annual profits and said most of the world’s leading banks were considering using its software to prepare for lawsuits related to the US subprime mortgage crisis.
The Cambridge-based company held firm its forecast for 10-20 per cent growth in 2008 in spite of fears of a global slowdown.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, said: “We have not seen any effects of slowdown yet and even if there is a downturn, we feel comfortable with our estimates.
“We have very little exposure to consumer markets and the financial sector, and 90 per cent of our business is driven by regulatory requirements.”
He said that any slowdownwas likely to be offset by benefits from the subprime crisis, which is creating a new market for Autonomy’s software.
Autonomy’s technology allows companies to sift through unstructuredinformation such as e-mails, Word documents and even telephone call recordings, helping companies prepare for court cases.
Earlier this year, Autonomy signed a $70m (£35m) deal – by far its biggest contract to date – with Citigroup as the bank wrote off more than $18bn in subprime-related losses and braced itself for potential investor lawsuits.
Mr Lynch said: “Every other major bank – barring one or two exceptions – has the same problem and most of the top-name banks are in the process of doing something with us.
“A lot of organisations are having to spend money quickly.”
Revenues for the year to the end of December rose 37 per cent to $343.5m while pre-tax profits rose to $91.4m from $56.3m the previous year, beating analysts’ estimates. Earnings per share rose from 8 cents to 11 cents.
Revenues were boosted by the acquisition of Zantaz, but Autonomy also registered 20 per cent revenue growth for its core IDOL software as it signed deals with companies such as China Mobile, AT&T and Morgan Stanley and organisations such as the US airforce, Nasa and Nato.
Shares in the company, which have gained nearly 57 per cent over the past year, rose 61p to 906p.
FT Comment
● Barbershops and funeral parlours are generally seen as recession-proof businesses, and to this list we could consider adding Autonomy – which is as close to recession-resistant as it gets in the technology sector. Businesses have to be able to find documents amid their ever-increasing mountains of electronic data – this is not discretionary spending – and if they get sued, they have to find them even quicker. Market concerns have taken a little shine off the shares in the past month and left them looking attractive at about 30 times this year’s earnings estimates.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Autonomy up on subprime business lift
By Maija Palmer in London
Published: January 29 2008 23:55 | Last updated: January 29 2008 23:55
Shares in Autonomy rose 7 per cent after the search software company reported a 62 per cent rise in annual profits and said most of the world’s leading banks were considering using its software to prepare for lawsuits related to the US subprime mortgage crisis.
The Cambridge-based company held firm its forecast for 10-20 per cent growth in 2008 in spite of fears of a global slowdown.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, said: “We have not seen any effects of slowdown yet and even if there is a downturn, we feel comfortable with our estimates.
“We have very little exposure to consumer markets and the financial sector, and 90 per cent of our business is driven by regulatory requirements.”
He said that any slowdownwas likely to be offset by benefits from the subprime crisis, which is creating a new market for Autonomy’s software.
Autonomy’s technology allows companies to sift through unstructuredinformation such as e-mails, Word documents and even telephone call recordings, helping companies prepare for court cases.
Earlier this year, Autonomy signed a $70m (£35m) deal – by far its biggest contract to date – with Citigroup as the bank wrote off more than $18bn in subprime-related losses and braced itself for potential investor lawsuits.
Mr Lynch said: “Every other major bank – barring one or two exceptions – has the same problem and most of the top-name banks are in the process of doing something with us.
“A lot of organisations are having to spend money quickly.”
Revenues for the year to the end of December rose 37 per cent to $343.5m while pre-tax profits rose to $91.4m from $56.3m the previous year, beating analysts’ estimates. Earnings per share rose from 8 cents to 11 cents.
Revenues were boosted by the acquisition of Zantaz, but Autonomy also registered 20 per cent revenue growth for its core IDOL software as it signed deals with companies such as China Mobile, AT&T and Morgan Stanley and organisations such as the US airforce, Nasa and Nato.
Shares in the company, which have gained nearly 57 per cent over the past year, rose 61p to 906p.
FT Comment
● Barbershops and funeral parlours are generally seen as recession-proof businesses, and to this list we could consider adding Autonomy – which is as close to recession-resistant as it gets in the technology sector. Businesses have to be able to find documents amid their ever-increasing mountains of electronic data – this is not discretionary spending – and if they get sued, they have to find them even quicker. Market concerns have taken a little shine off the shares in the past month and left them looking attractive at about 30 times this year’s earnings estimates.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
FT.com / In depth - Google weighs in against Microsoft
FT.com / In depth - Google weighs in against Microsoft
Google weighs in against Microsoft
By Richard Waters in San Francisco and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in London
Published: February 3 2008 19:54 | Last updated: February 4 2008 03:17
Google raised a red flag over Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover offer for Yahoo, on Sunday arguing it could open the way for the software developer to extend its PC monopoly to the internet.
The intervention is the latest example of the growing enmity between the two companies and echoes Microsoft’s denunciation of Google’s proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick.
While Microsoft claimed that deal could give Google inordinate power to control online advertisements as they become the lifeblood of many internet companies, Google believes Microsoft would be in a position to influence the evolution of the web itself.
However, Brad Smith, general counsel of Microsoft, said: “Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the internet.”
Microsoft has not ruled out launching a proxy fight for control of Yahoo by 13 March, the last date it can nominate its own directors to the company’s board ahead of this year’s shareholders’ meeting.
Separately, an alliance with Google is being seen inside Yahoo as one of the main options as the company tries to fight off Microsoft’s unsolicited approach, according to one person familiar with its thinking.
Yahoo rejected the idea of a tie-up with Google last year but has now put it back at the top of its list of options, along with finding ways to realise more of the value from its stakes in Japanese and Chinese joint ventures, according to this person.
The possibility of an alliance between the two internet groups adds to the intrigue surrounding the tussle between Google and Microsoft, and could raise questions about Google’s motivations in publicly attacking Microsoft now.
In a posting on Google’s company blog, David Drummond, its top lawyer, said: “While the internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies – and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”
He went on to question whether a Yahoo acquisition would allow Microsoft, “despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offences, to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the internet”.
Google swung the spotlight on to the “overwhelming” share of the web e-mail and instant messaging markets that Microsoft and Yahoo account for, plus the fact that they own two of the busiest web portals.
“Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ e-mail, IM, and web-based services?” Mr Drummond asked.
Meanwhile, a Google-Yahoo alliance, something discussed but not pursued last year, would enable Google to halt Microsoft’s latest bid to boost its standing on the web.
The idea was receiving serious consideration again this weekend as Yahoo looked at a wider range of options, according to a person close to the company.
Microsoft’s cash-and-stock offer for Yahoo was worth $43bn at the end of last week.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Google weighs in against Microsoft
By Richard Waters in San Francisco and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in London
Published: February 3 2008 19:54 | Last updated: February 4 2008 03:17
Google raised a red flag over Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover offer for Yahoo, on Sunday arguing it could open the way for the software developer to extend its PC monopoly to the internet.
The intervention is the latest example of the growing enmity between the two companies and echoes Microsoft’s denunciation of Google’s proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick.
While Microsoft claimed that deal could give Google inordinate power to control online advertisements as they become the lifeblood of many internet companies, Google believes Microsoft would be in a position to influence the evolution of the web itself.
However, Brad Smith, general counsel of Microsoft, said: “Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the internet.”
Microsoft has not ruled out launching a proxy fight for control of Yahoo by 13 March, the last date it can nominate its own directors to the company’s board ahead of this year’s shareholders’ meeting.
Separately, an alliance with Google is being seen inside Yahoo as one of the main options as the company tries to fight off Microsoft’s unsolicited approach, according to one person familiar with its thinking.
Yahoo rejected the idea of a tie-up with Google last year but has now put it back at the top of its list of options, along with finding ways to realise more of the value from its stakes in Japanese and Chinese joint ventures, according to this person.
The possibility of an alliance between the two internet groups adds to the intrigue surrounding the tussle between Google and Microsoft, and could raise questions about Google’s motivations in publicly attacking Microsoft now.
In a posting on Google’s company blog, David Drummond, its top lawyer, said: “While the internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies – and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”
He went on to question whether a Yahoo acquisition would allow Microsoft, “despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offences, to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the internet”.
Google swung the spotlight on to the “overwhelming” share of the web e-mail and instant messaging markets that Microsoft and Yahoo account for, plus the fact that they own two of the busiest web portals.
“Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ e-mail, IM, and web-based services?” Mr Drummond asked.
Meanwhile, a Google-Yahoo alliance, something discussed but not pursued last year, would enable Google to halt Microsoft’s latest bid to boost its standing on the web.
The idea was receiving serious consideration again this weekend as Yahoo looked at a wider range of options, according to a person close to the company.
Microsoft’s cash-and-stock offer for Yahoo was worth $43bn at the end of last week.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Friday, February 01, 2008
Ready to Rumble: Microsoft-Yahoo! vs. Google | AMR Research
Ready to Rumble: Microsoft-Yahoo! vs. Google | AMR Research
The last minutes of January were barely off the clock when Microsoft made a $44.6B cash-and-stock bid for Yahoo!. Microsoft is offering $31 per share, a 62% premium over Yahoo!’s closing stock price January 31. If I were Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang, having recently stepped back into the lead role only to deal with executive departures, disappointing results, and layoffs, I’d be ecstatic that Steve Ballmer has taken Mick Jagger’s offer and has come to “my emotional rescue.”
When I saw the news flash on a television as I entered the gym, I had three reactions:
First, it’s a lot of money for a company that continues to fall far behind Google in revenue, market share, market valuation, profitability, and mindshare. The offer is nearly seven times last year’s revenue.
Second, can Microsoft recoup its investment? I use My Yahoo! every day … for free. When I talked about this with one of the investment gurus who belongs to my gym he said, “If Yahoo! provided the same services for just a penny per subscriber per year, they would lose 50% of their base immediately.” While I’m not sure that’s true, his point is that we’ve come to expect Yahoo! and Google functionality will be free. The cost is offset by the paid ads that no one admits to clicking on.
Third, can Microsoft retain the key Yahoo! developers and sales stars? There is so much venture money in Silicon Valley chasing proven talent that it may be hard for Yahoo! employees to accept Microsoft’s planned retention packages in lieu of the opportunity to join the next Google. How ironic is that?
On the flip side, if Microsoft really wants to slow or stop Google in its march across the enterprise, did it have any other choice? As I was trying to finish writing, Jonathan Yarmis and Jim Shepherd came to my office arguing passionately that this deal makes sense for Microsoft. To make sure his points were heard, Jonathan teamed with Chris Fletcher and Jim Murphy on a companion piece.
Zimbra as hidden jewel for Microsoft Live?
When I think of Yahoo!, I think of my portal. In considering the Microsoft-Yahoo! combo, I initially overlooked Zimbra. Yahoo! bought the collaboration software vendor last September for $350M. I first wrote about Zimbra, last April, saying:
“When I first saw it, my reaction was that this is what SAP and Microsoft are trying to do with Duet. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite is designed to allow PC users to add or build new capabilities on top of their preferred desktop standard (like Microsoft Outlook or any of its competitors). The company provides a wide range of Zimbra-developed and third-party “zimlets” that allow users to access Google maps, VoIP services, data sources (such as Wikipedia and catalogs), enterprise applications, and third-party services such as travel.”
Zimbra’s software would be ideal for extending—some would argue saving—the Microsoft Live initiative. It certainly sets up an interesting play against Google Apps. Does Microsoft Zimbra escape the scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Justice?
Meanwhile, Google shares get walloped
Ironically, Google employees with options at ridiculously high strike prices may be looking for the next Google, too. Shares of GOOG were getting spanked at opening February 1. By 11:30 a.m., the stock was trading at $513.01, down $51.29 or more than 9%. This is a far cry from the peak of $747.24 reached last November. At the current price, Google still enjoys a market cap that tops $160B. That’s more than $100B higher than SAP ($57.58B) and $56B higher than Oracle.
While some of the sell-off might be because of the threat of Microsoft emerging as a stronger competitor, the market has reacted negatively to Google’s recent earnings report. The company said that 4Q07 profits and paid clicks had grown slower than the previous three quarters. A fierce debate has ensued over whether Google will be helped or hurt by the long-predicted U.S. recession.
What do you think?
Is Steve Ballmer making a smart bet, or could he have waited six months and bought Yahoo! at a fraction of today’s price? If the deal goes through, will Microsoft be able to keep Zimbra or will it be seen as having too much power on the desktop? Is Google’s recent slower growth rate in profits and paid clicks a sign of saturation or just part of the ebb and flow of its dynamic business model? As always, I welcome your feedback and ideas—brichardson@amrresearch.com.
The last minutes of January were barely off the clock when Microsoft made a $44.6B cash-and-stock bid for Yahoo!. Microsoft is offering $31 per share, a 62% premium over Yahoo!’s closing stock price January 31. If I were Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang, having recently stepped back into the lead role only to deal with executive departures, disappointing results, and layoffs, I’d be ecstatic that Steve Ballmer has taken Mick Jagger’s offer and has come to “my emotional rescue.”
When I saw the news flash on a television as I entered the gym, I had three reactions:
First, it’s a lot of money for a company that continues to fall far behind Google in revenue, market share, market valuation, profitability, and mindshare. The offer is nearly seven times last year’s revenue.
Second, can Microsoft recoup its investment? I use My Yahoo! every day … for free. When I talked about this with one of the investment gurus who belongs to my gym he said, “If Yahoo! provided the same services for just a penny per subscriber per year, they would lose 50% of their base immediately.” While I’m not sure that’s true, his point is that we’ve come to expect Yahoo! and Google functionality will be free. The cost is offset by the paid ads that no one admits to clicking on.
Third, can Microsoft retain the key Yahoo! developers and sales stars? There is so much venture money in Silicon Valley chasing proven talent that it may be hard for Yahoo! employees to accept Microsoft’s planned retention packages in lieu of the opportunity to join the next Google. How ironic is that?
On the flip side, if Microsoft really wants to slow or stop Google in its march across the enterprise, did it have any other choice? As I was trying to finish writing, Jonathan Yarmis and Jim Shepherd came to my office arguing passionately that this deal makes sense for Microsoft. To make sure his points were heard, Jonathan teamed with Chris Fletcher and Jim Murphy on a companion piece.
Zimbra as hidden jewel for Microsoft Live?
When I think of Yahoo!, I think of my portal. In considering the Microsoft-Yahoo! combo, I initially overlooked Zimbra. Yahoo! bought the collaboration software vendor last September for $350M. I first wrote about Zimbra, last April, saying:
“When I first saw it, my reaction was that this is what SAP and Microsoft are trying to do with Duet. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite is designed to allow PC users to add or build new capabilities on top of their preferred desktop standard (like Microsoft Outlook or any of its competitors). The company provides a wide range of Zimbra-developed and third-party “zimlets” that allow users to access Google maps, VoIP services, data sources (such as Wikipedia and catalogs), enterprise applications, and third-party services such as travel.”
Zimbra’s software would be ideal for extending—some would argue saving—the Microsoft Live initiative. It certainly sets up an interesting play against Google Apps. Does Microsoft Zimbra escape the scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Justice?
Meanwhile, Google shares get walloped
Ironically, Google employees with options at ridiculously high strike prices may be looking for the next Google, too. Shares of GOOG were getting spanked at opening February 1. By 11:30 a.m., the stock was trading at $513.01, down $51.29 or more than 9%. This is a far cry from the peak of $747.24 reached last November. At the current price, Google still enjoys a market cap that tops $160B. That’s more than $100B higher than SAP ($57.58B) and $56B higher than Oracle.
While some of the sell-off might be because of the threat of Microsoft emerging as a stronger competitor, the market has reacted negatively to Google’s recent earnings report. The company said that 4Q07 profits and paid clicks had grown slower than the previous three quarters. A fierce debate has ensued over whether Google will be helped or hurt by the long-predicted U.S. recession.
What do you think?
Is Steve Ballmer making a smart bet, or could he have waited six months and bought Yahoo! at a fraction of today’s price? If the deal goes through, will Microsoft be able to keep Zimbra or will it be seen as having too much power on the desktop? Is Google’s recent slower growth rate in profits and paid clicks a sign of saturation or just part of the ebb and flow of its dynamic business model? As always, I welcome your feedback and ideas—brichardson@amrresearch.com.
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