Microsoft tackles 'new world of work' at summit
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Microsoft preached its "new world of work" mantra at the company?s Global High Tech Summit 2007 conference in San Jose, Calif. on Thursday.Noting synergy between the disciplines of business and IT, the event is intended for professionals from both realms, said Tyler Bryson, Microsoft's newly announced general manager of the U.S. Manufacturing Industry portion of the company?s Industry Solutions Organization."At Microsoft, we believe that alignment [of business and IT] is critical to innovation," Bryson said. Also featured at the event were speakers from chipmakers Intel and Freescale Semiconductor, who talked about modernizations to their systems and processes.Trends are accelerating, such as globalization and market growth that are creating a new world of work, Bryson said. Other relevant trends include the pressure to improve operation performance, quality-driven regulatory compliance, and rapid cycles of product innovation.Globalization and technology create entirely new ways that people think about work, and everyone must adjust and respond, said Bryson. "The world is transforming what it means to be at work," he said.The morning's presentations had a bent toward high-tech manufacturing. Bryson said the National Association of Manufacturers expects a 40 percent turnover in the manufacturing work base; companies must cope with transferring knowledge to employees."Most manufacturers are reporting a shortage of skilled workers," he said. A culture of innovation must be created that can attract the best talent, said Bryson.New tenets of work, according to Bryson, include creating a culture of innovation, empowering the workforce, driving operational excellence, running a customer-centric business, using compliance as a tool of transparency, and operating in a global environment.At Freescale, the company is undertaking several upgrades, including moving to a single global instance of SAP for supply chain operations. Freescale is what Janelle Monney, senior vice president of business operations at the company, described as "a 50-year-old startup" that was part of Motorola until 2004.The company also has initiatives in manufacturing and business intelligence, she noted. Freescale's business intelligence platform is intended to bring multiple data streams altogether into a single data warehouse."One of the key objectives of IT is to turn data into information for decision-making," said Monney.Also, employees can access e-mail on cell phones equipped with Windows OSes, she said.With Intel, the company is extending itself to accommodate three market opportunities: mobile Internet devices, consumer electronics, and development of low-cost PCs, said Stuart Pann, an Intel vice president and co-general manager of customer fulfillment, planning and logistics."One of our goals is how do we configure the supply chain to take advantage of these new opportunities," Pann said.Intel is running a new manufacturing process on Intel systems and Microsoft operating systems at its high-volume plant in Arizona, Pann said. "That is virtually run on Intel architecture and on Microsoft operating systems, so we've made the transition over the years, and we've found that the combination of these two products is more than robust enough to run $3.5 billion factories," said Pann.Among other improvements, the company is developing a new workspace that is a fundamental change to the company's cubicle culture, he said. Phone booths will be created, more privacy options will be offered, and the company will get rid of underutilized office space, said Pann.Also, author and consultant Geoffrey Moore, managing director of TCG Advisors, lectured on the challenges of finding a competitive advantage and innovation in a marketplace that faces frequent commoditization."You must innovate in order to continue to sustain advantage," Moore said.Differentiation also is important, he said. Apple with its iPod has customers acknowledging it is different, he said. But past differentiation can erode so that a company?s core competency is no longer core, he said."Our friends at Dell are dealing with that right now," with the industry catching up and Dell having to reinvent itself, said Moore.Microsoft officials briefly noted the company's new unified communications platform, which features Office Communications Server and provides such capabilities as IM, voice, and videoconferencing.
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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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Steve Ballmer says Microsoft is going to be a force in new technology areas, one of these days. Really.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft says it will focus on four key areas to improve interoperability between its own software and other vendors' products.
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Microsoft's  founder is expected to detail the company's plan for computer management software and announce a long-awaited Windows update tool.
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Microsoft Corp.&#039;s best-known business software is for creating spreadsheets, documents and presentations, but the company is hoping to convince corporations that it also can be the one-stop shop for sophisticated communications technology.
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A global summit aims to lay the groundwork for a new structure of internet governance. Participants, however, have very different visions for the future of broadband deployment, net telephony and other web technologies. By Wendy M. Grossman.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's top executive outlined the company's plan to transition from a traditional software company to offering software plus services for the first time on Tuesday, giving some roadmap details for how the strategy will play out in the next year. In a keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shed more details on the plan other executives, such as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, have been teasing out over the past year -- but not many more. He gave a time frame for the early part of the transition but mostly echoed what other executives have said about Microsoft's slow transition to adding hosted business services to its traditional software portfolio. "For software plus services, the time is now," Ballmer said, finishing off the first of a raft of keynotes on the first day of Microsoft's annual partner conference. He said that over the next year, Microsoft will continue to sell mostly on-premises software, but there will be more evidence of the transition to its hybrid model as the year goes on. Since Microsoft began talking about its plan to gradually transition to offering more hosted services last year in a speech by Ozzie at its TechEd Conference in Boston, many noted that the company had no choice. With such an entrenched business in enterprise and consumer desktop software, it would be impossible for Microsoft to be as nimble in offering hosted services as rivals like Google and Salesforce.com, which started their businesses as Web-based services providers. And a warmer reception for hosted services is clearly the direction the enterprise market is heading as businesses become more comfortable accessing Web-based services beyond the traditional consumer staples of e-mail and search that have been popular for years. The transition to providing more services will touch every part of Microsoft's business, but some changes will be more obvious than others, Ballmer said. The user interface will be an important place for innovation in this area, and Microsoft's Silverlight technology is the cornerstone of that, he said. Microsoft introduced Silverlight, a browser plug-in that allows for rich video and interactive media experience to be delivered within Web sites, in April. A solid services platform on which partners can build services and also that they can resell with Microsoft managing and hosting them also will be a clear sign of the transition, Ballmer said. Microsoft already is offering a combination of consumer-oriented services, such as Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Local Search, but will begin bulking up its portfolio of enterprise services as well, he said. Microsoft already has unveiled business services like Exchange Hosted Services for enterprise messaging and Office Live hosted service for small businesses. There will be new and expanded services like these as Microsoft progresses further with its software plus services strategy, Ballmer said.
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer launches the Windows update, plus new Office and Exchange, at an event in New York.
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Microsoft Corp. partners introduced to the company&#39;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.
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Microsoft Corp. is continuing its push into the enterprise-level development market with a new framework and tool for Visual Studio Team System.
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Two weeks ago, Microsoft tested its "four toolsets for interoperability" message on the public and the press, which included an interview with BetaNews. That message has apparently been given the green light, as Corporate VP for Emerging Business Dan'l Lewin fired a shot across the bow last Thursday, in a blog posting directed toward Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen.
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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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Forget the people lining up at Best Buy to get Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system. The real selling took place yesterday in a packed ballroom at the Washington Hilton, where more than 3,000 people from local companies and government agencies gathered to catch a glimpse of the new software....
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As the Microsoft and Apple execs get ready to share the stage at a conference next week, we look at other times the tech titans have done a joint bill.
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(InfoWorld) - Software giant Microsoft is focusing on selling to global technology manufacturers with a software suite it promoted at a Silicon Valley forum on Thursday. Microsoft showed off 2007 versions of its Office software suite for business functions, SQL Server database management system, Office SharePoint Server program for project collaboration and other products at its first-ever Global High Tech Summit in Santa Clara, California. Microsoft hopes to grab a piece of a growing market for IT spending by technology manufacturers next year. Fifty-nine percent of high-tech manufacturers surveyed by AMR ResearchÂ said they planned to increase their IT spending in 2007, averaging a 4.1 percent increase. An earlier survey about 2006 plans had shown only 42 percent planned to increase their spending, and they said they would boost it by an average of just 3.2 percent. Companies have already invested in technology to automate manufacturing processes, but now they are investing to be able to adjust production to changes in demand, said Eric Austvold, research director at AMR, in Boston. "They want to know how you create an agile supply network that ramps up a product to volume [production] quickly," Austvold said. The quicker a company gets a product to market, the more units it can sell. Microsoft is targeting product development, supply chain management, customer relationship management and operational performance, said Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, to about 400 participants at the daylong forum. Microprocessor maker Advanced Micro DevicesÂ uses a variety of Windows-based software in its chip fabrication plants and will upgrade to the new Vista operating system when it becomes available next year, said Tom Sonderman, director of automated precision manufacturing technology for AMD, in Sunnyvale, California. "Once we get Vista and get into 64-bit computing, you begin to raise the bar on the things we can do," said Sonderman. "There is an ongoing desire for us to have more computing power in the fab." Also at the event, Microsoft and IntelÂ jointly proposed anÂ open, interoperable industry standardÂ for document sharing based on the Office Open XML formats. The two companies presented the proposal to RosettaNet, a technology standards group. The Microsoft-Intel standard conflicts with one promoted by Adobe Systems. "They pushed Adobe aside with this announcement," said AMR's Austvold. "Adobe has been doing this already with a proprietary standard. This announcement trumps that and says, 'We [Microsoft] have got a standard we think is more open,' [although] I think thatâs debatable."
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Globalization will allow for more specialization and improvement to the way people learn, Microsoft chairman says at Edinburgh forum.