Microsoft CEO: Merger Strategy Unchanged
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O is still  targeting smaller companies for acquisitions, despite  speculation that now-scuttled merger talks with business  software giant SAP AG SAPG.DE signaled a shift in strategy,  Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday.
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Microsoft Corp. does not plan to change its per-processor software licensing model when hardware containing dual-core and multicore processor technology for the Windows platform becomes available next year.
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By MATTHEW FORDAHL    SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- After years of battling Microsoft Corp...
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LISBON - Customers watching for Microsoft Corp. to make a headline-grabbing buy in the business applications market faced disappointment Tuesday as company Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer ruled out acquisitions of PeopleSoft Inc., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft partners introduced to the company's software-plus-services strategy this week at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) applauded the plan, though they noted a few challenges as the company makes the transition from selling business software to offering more hosted and Web-based services. Microsoft used its annual partner conference, held this year in Denver, as a coming-out party for the strategy, with CEO Steve Ballmer outlining the plan for the first time after other executives have been discussing it publicly for more than a year. It seemed fitting that the company's top executive was the one to deliver the message to thousands of partners who play a significant role in the company's success. "I had no idea how partner-focused Microsoft really is," said Linda Gillis, a first-time attendee of the WPC and director of marketing for Squirrel Systems, a British Columbia company that provides restaurant point-of-sale software and services. This dependency on partners is a double-edged sword for Microsoft as it moves to a more Web-centric services business model versus the software license model it has used successfully for years. The company not only has to revise its strategy, remaining several steps behind competitors such as Google that started business on the Web and have no traditional software business, but it also has to help its partners make changes, too. To do this, Microsoft has been slowly ramping up its hosted services portfolio with a series of both consumer and business services. Executives also said at the WPC that those services will eventually become a full-fledged development platform, being both an OS and platform for new applications on the Web in a similar way that Windows is on the desktop. Gillis said that moving toward offering more services for business in addition to software is the right direction for both Microsoft and its partners. "The addition of services helps to create long-term customer relationships and a recurring revenue stream," she said. Most partners agreed with this sentiment, but some noted challenges that both Microsoft and partners will face as they make the switch. Jay Blazensky, vice president of business development for RingCentral, a Microsoft partner that provides voice services, including click-to-call, agreed that creating repeatable revenue is a definite benefit of the plan. But he noted that a challenge for Microsoft and its partners is to convince sales people to "forgo the larger up-front commission in lieu of a recurring annuity." "Those that buy into the model and are successful -- and patient -- have the opportunity to be enormously successful," he said. Another partner, Joe McDermott of Solution Canvas, said Microsoft's strategy of transitioning services in a calculated and deliberateÂ manner is the only way to make the change, which is necessary because it is what customers are demanding. Solution Canvas has built a service for small law firms using Microsoft's Office Live hosted service. "I think the strategy is the way forward strategically for both Microsoft and [partners] ... because in the end the marketplace will dictate and demand," he said. "End-users are who ultimately matter, and now that we have new Web technologies like AJAX and a rapid application development platform in Office Live, the barriers to powerful online applications are gone." At the same time, McDermott acknowledged that some Microsoft partners will have to learn new skills to take advantage of the new services approach, though the company's "considered pace" for moving to services will help them in that endeavor. While McDermott praised the technologies that enable more hosted services, one of them -- reliable access to broadband -- remains a hindrance not only to Microsoft's services plan but also its competitors' plans, RingCentral's Blazensky said. "It's an industry-wide challenge ... [but] it's maturing every day," he noted.
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(InfoWorld) - Ever wondered why Microsoft software needs continually to be patched and updated? Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie believes it's because software development is still more an art than a science. Mundie was speaking on one of his first foreign trips since taking over the technology strategy and policy roles from iconic company founder Bill Gates, at a press briefing in Brussels late Monday billed as a glance into the future of the technology industry. Expect as many fundamental changes in technology as we have seen over the past 20 years to occur in the next five to 10 years, he said. We are entering a multidevice environment where mobile phones get smart, and people will demand both integration and segregation of their various computing devices, he said. Web services will become vital in this new age and Microsoft "will have to master how to use the Internet and components of the net for software services," Mundie said. But isn't Microsoft racing too fast into this brave new world when its core product, the Windows operating system, can't even function properly without having to be patched up and updated constantly? he was asked. "The problem is that software development is an important endeavor but it has not matured as an engineering process, it's still an art form," Mundie replied. "As the scale of software grows, so does its complexity. Software has to find, in the next five to 10 years, a simultaneous solution to complexity and concurrent (parallel) problems," he added. How does Microsoft feel about having to follow Google's leadÂ in the new environment where Web services play such a central role in mapping the future direction of technology development? Claims that Microsoft has lost its leading position are exaggerated, he replied, just as they were in 1994-95, when Netscape was seen as the next great thing in information technology. Does Microsoft plan to do to Google what it did to Netscape? (Netscape was eclipsed when Microsoft attached its own Web browser, Internet Explorer, to Windows, sparking anÂ antitrust battleÂ with the U.S. department of Justice.) "I hope so," Mundie replied. Antitrust is one policy area that doesn't fall under his remit and he declined to comment on theÂ ongoing disputeÂ with competition regulators including the European Commission. However, he couldn't resist the opportunity to disparage the work of Europe's top antitrust officials. "There is no country, including the European Union and every other part of the European Commission (other than its competition department), that doesn't see Microsoft as an important player in the broad economic realm," he said. He added that the company's ongoing antitrust problems in Europe have not hampered its efforts to influence policy. "I've never felt that people are shunning our involvement because of that dispute," he said. Mundie was in Brussels to give a keynote speech at a conference on European venture capitalism, hosted by Microsoft. During his visit to the European capital he said he met with the staff of European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, as well as civil servants in the information society department of the Commission -- not quite the top level meetings enjoyed by Gates on his occasional visits to Brussels in recent years.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Speaking to analysts and investors yesterday the CEO of soft drinks giant The Coca-Cola Company said there were no immediate plans for any major acquisitions.
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SEPTEMBER 01, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Addressing a gathering of software industry leaders in Boston today, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer touted his company&#39;s vision for a bright future and cast doubt
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It would be a merger whose size and scope could only be rivaled by pharmaceutical companies earlier this decade. But Microsoft's objective now is to somehow convince everyone that the whole of the two companies will somehow be greater than the sum of all the other sums of their parts put together.
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PC maker says mergers and acquisitions aren't the way to succeed.
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Software giant denies abusing its market position and says it has no intention of unbundling IE and Windows.
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Yahoo's reputation for being an edgy startup is years out of date, while Microsoft is stodgy, but not as ossified as many might think. So, should the two merge, reconciling the corporate cultures many not be that difficult.
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Microsoft's CEO tells financial analysts that the company has a plan to take on its major rival. Yahoo could speed up the plan, but it will build its ad business, regardless.
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Mobile phones play an important role in Microsoft&#39;s software plus services vision, CEO Steve Ballmer said Tuesday.Microsoft&#39;s software strategy a few years ago revolved around software that was either embedded on devices or burned onto CDs and shipped to users, he said. Today, however, software works in tandem with the Internet, which can back up and update the software.&quot;There&#39;s no better way then the cell networks of the world to make this model happen,&quot; he said, speaking during the opening presentation at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment conference in San Francisco. He envisions a time when software is wirelessly updated and works in tandem with services hosted on the Internet.But the software plus services concept won&#39;t be different for the PC and the mobile phone, he said. At the top of Microsoft&#39;s innovation agenda is unifying a variety of devices and applications. Microsoft is focused on enabling developers to create single applications that take advantage of phones, desktop computers, the enterprise environment, and the online environment, he said.Microsoft is enabling that in part by offering a consistent platform that developers can use to create applications for the PC and mobile phones. For example, a developer can write a thin client for mobile phones using HTML, Ajax, and, in the future, Silverlight. Microsoft&#39;s .Net and Visual Studio can be used to write rich applications for mobile phones. Microsoft also offers a compact version of SQL so that developers can write applications for Windows Mobile phones for database manipulation.The phone is particularly important in achieving Microsoft&#39;s unified view, he said. &quot;The PC is the most powerful device, but the phone is the most popular,&quot; he said. Particularly in the developing world where PC&#39;s may be cost prohibitive, cell phones may be more widespread.Microsoft is focused on providing software for partners to use and it is working carefully not to compete with them, he said. Unlike Google, Microsoft won&#39;t be participating in the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction. &quot;What would it buy us to own a piece of spectrum?&quot; he said. &quot;It would probably do a lot to alienate the telecom industry. It does not do a lot to advance our goal, which is to take some exciting technology and spread it.&quot;Windows Mobile is a big opportunity financially for Microsoft from two perspectives, he said. If Windows Mobile runs hundreds of millions of devices, that&#39;s a great business for Microsoft, he said. &quot;Also, I don&#39;t think we can serve our customers&#39; broad desire to bring together desktops, devices, enterprise, and online if we ignore the mobile area,&quot; he said.
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Microsoft executives said very little on Friday about the undeniable challenges of integrating the company&#39;s Internet division with Yahoo, largely avoiding the proverbial elephant in the room that could delay or, in some cases, eliminate benefits of the deal.At the heart of the acquisition is Microsoft&#39;s goal of giving its online advertising and online services business a major boost, ending years of business and technology defeats at the hands of common rival Google.Microsoft wants to make sure that as online ad spending doubles to about $80 billion in the next three years, it will be in a much better position to grab a larger piece of the market, specifically in sponsored search, which is the biggest online ad segment and where Google dominates.As CEO Steve Ballmer, President of Platforms &amp; Services Division Kevin Johnson and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said repeatedly during Friday&#39;s news conference, Microsoft wants to swallow Yahoo to accelerate its pace in online advertising. With Yahoo&#39;s online services, engineers, and ad platforms, Microsoft hopes to become a stronger competitor to Google than it is today.That all sounds fine in theory, but Ballmer and his colleagues said little about the energy and know-how they will need to make this proposed $44.6 billion acquisition work, considering that the companies have a significant overlap in online services, markedly different cultures, and an abundance of inflated professional egos at every level.Not to mention that Yahoo these days is far from functioning as a well-oiled machine. Yahoo has been in significant turmoil for more than a year. Seasoned executives who are experts on its business have struggled and largely failed to restore the company&#39;s technical edge and business focus. That&#39;s a mess that Microsoft will inherit and will have to solve in order for the deal to work its expected magic.In short, Microsoft must make sure that, in its quest for scale and speed, it doesn&#39;t end up getting stuck, its wheels spinning, trying to mesh Yahoo with MSN, while Google speeds further ahead. It&#39;s clear that to take advantage of the online ad growth, companies will need to innovate and change quickly, and not be sidetracked by acquisition distractions.Among the many emerging opportunities in online advertising are: the mobile sector, which is expected to go from almost nonexistent to vibrant in the coming years; social Web properties, such as social networks, blogs and social news sites, which haven&#39;t been monetized properly and hold great promise; and video, both in the form of video ads and ads in videos.There were indications during Friday&#39;s news conference that Microsoft may not have taken the time to fully assess the magnitude of the integration complications. Despite Ballmer&#39;s assurances that he personally has thought &quot;long and hard&quot; about the Yahoo acquisition, there is evidently a level of urgency about the move, or else the deal wouldn&#39;t have been an unsolicited offer, as Yahoo has portrayed it.If, as Ballmer indicated, the companies have been in on-and-off talks for about 18 months about a possible acquisition, it&#39;s fair to ask -- as a financial analyst did -- why they couldn&#39;t sit down privately and present, jointly, a more cooked deal. Basically, Ballmer admitted that Google keeps expanding its empire and time is of the essence.&quot;Any large integration process has risks associated with it. We&#39;ve all thought about it. We could have hired [more] engineers, but at the same time the market continues to grow and the leader continues to consolidate positions and there&#39;s nothing quite like putting together two larger sophisticated R&amp;D organizations,&quot; Ballmer said.Along with the inherent opportunity to sell more ads, Nick Patience, managing analyst at The 451 Group, also sees a &quot;potential integration headache&quot; with having to integrate Microsoft&#39;s ad platforms -- AdCenter and aQuantive -- with Yahoo&#39;s. Patience is also skeptical about the possibility of merging search indexes, and believes that the search engines will most likely have to continue to operate independently. Overall, the integration work would represent for Microsoft &quot;a step into the unknown,&quot; particularly since this would be by far the largest acquisition in Microsoft&#39;s history, Patience said.Gartner analyst Allen Weiner also sees potential integration challenges, particularly because he doesn&#39;t think either organization has a powerful leader who can take the reins of the combined entity and lead it into the future. &quot;They need someone like a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates who has the charisma, vision, technical knowledge, and consumer knowledge to lead,&quot; Weiner said.On paper the acquisition has interesting potential, but it will all come down to how the integration is carried out, Weiner said. &quot;It&#39;s all about the execution,&quot; he said. &quot;The devil is in the details.&quot;Despite numerous acquisitions over the past few years in advertising and Web 2.0 technologies, Yahoo has struggled to jump-start its business, said JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg. &quot;At the end of the day, it hasn&#39;t all worked out for them,&quot; he said.While Microsoft executives are stressing that a deal with Yahoo would give it the scale to compete with Google, wrapping the two companies&#39; diverse technologies together won&#39;t be simple, Gartenberg said. &quot;In order to get to that scale, you&#39;ve got to be able to fit all those pieces and parts together,&quot; he said.Despite the integration concerns, Microsoft has good processes in place for managing acquisitions of large companies, said Gartner analyst Mike McGuire. However, it will be key for Microsoft to quickly put a senior management team in place as Google will continue to propel ahead as Microsoft sorts out the details. &quot;They are going to have to start showing some traction, or at least a really solid vision for how they will combine the companies ... early on,&quot; McGuire said.Matt Booth, a Kelsey Group analyst, thinks that the integration challenges will be major but predicts that Microsoft will work through them methodically, starting on the back end and linking services in a way that, as much as possible, is transparent to end-users, be they advertisers, publishers, or consumers. For services that are just too difficult to integrate, they will likely be kept separate. The last thing Microsoft wants to do is drive users away, Booth said.In a research note, Citigroup financial analyst Mark Mahaney said he is skeptical that a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would improve its search products enough to affect Google&#39;s position, since they both have been losing search market share and, in his opinion, seeing a decrease in their search innovation.&quot;Given what would surely be immense integration challenges, it&#8217;s hard for us to see how a Microsoft-Yahoo combination would create a greater technology competitor to Google at least for the foreseeable future,&quot; he wrote.&quot;We could see a scenario by which Google would actually gain more market share due to industry uncertainty over the integration of the deal,&quot; Mahaney added.
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Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer addressed a gathering of software industry leaders here on Wednesday, touting his company&#39;s vision for a bright future
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This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has ruled out acting as the white knight for business software