Microsoft COO: We're still figuring out Software plus Services
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Blog: Kevin Turner tells partners the company is still in the process of figuring out just what the company's services strategy is all about
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Letting people easily share information on their desktops and in back-end systems could greatly boost productivity, says Avanade CTO Ashish Kumar. But we're not there yet.
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Many of Microsoft's partners kicked off last week's Worldwide Partner Conference last week uneasy about the Redmond giant's big push into the software-plus-services arena, but in the wake of the gathering the majority of attendees appear to be upbeat about the possibilities.
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The OS is chugging along on strong PC sales and antipiracy efforts, but Microsoft still faces some grumbling and a long haul in corporate sales.
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That's not all. Microsoft also has new tools geared to help cut costs of managing corporate data.
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SEPTEMBER 14, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. next month plan to provide more details on the work they are doing to make their products interoperable, a Sun executive said yesterday.
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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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Web services are becoming increasingly popular for linking software programs. Now, Microsoft and some other big companies are pitching the technology as a way to manage everything from big corporate servers to mobile phones.
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Software makers are eyeing more ways the one-computer-as-many approach can help businesses and beyond.
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Partners at last week's conference are pleased with Microsoft's focus on software and hosted services.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft this week unveiled a partner program for its Office Live hosted service for small businesses, a product Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner predicted will one day be nearly as important to the company as its Windows client OS. Through the program, Microsoft partners get an Office Live software development kit and various training opportunities so they can build new services that will be available to subscribers on the Office Live Marketplace, said Marja Koopmans, director of partner strategy for Office Live at Microsoft. The company unveiled the program at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver. Microsoft currently has about 50 third-party products listed on the marketplace, Koopmans said. Currently, an Office Live subscriber has to have purchased one of two subscription-based Office Live offerings to buy an application on the marketplace. However, beginning in January, subscribers to the free version of Office Live also can purchase third-party offerings from the marketplace, Koopmans said. Partners also gain access through online forums to Microsoft Office Live engineers for assistance with building new offerings, Koopmans said. In addition to earning revenue by selling new applications, partners can offer consulting services to build Office Live-based Web sites for small businesses, she added. Beginning in January 2008, Microsoft plans to launch an affiliate program for Office Live that will give them revenue-sharing opportunities with Microsoft, Koopmans said. If partners that sell Office Live-based applications on the marketplace refer a customer to purchase an Office Live subscription, Microsoft will share a percentage of whatever the company earns from that customer with the partner. The company will disclose the specific percentage as the program is closer to launching, she added. Microsoft unveiled Office Live in November 2005, and the company is grooming the product -- which gives small businesses tools for building a Web site as well as Web-based e-mail, instant messaging, collaboration and customer relationship management -- to be one of its top sellers. In his keynote at the partner conference Tuesday, Turner said that the hosted service will eventually become one of Microsoft's most popular products alongside long-time top revenue-earners like the Windows client OS and the Office desktop productivity suite. "We do believe it will reach our top three or four largest deployed applications we have around the world," he said. That's a tall order, but at least one partner who is offering an application for small legal firms on the Office Live Marketplace said he thinks Turner's prediction will come true. "The numbers add up and the demand is there," said Joe McDermott, managing director for Solution Canvas Ltd. in Glasgow, Scotland. He said it's been traditionally difficult for small businesses to find IT products tailored to them, and Office Live meets many of their needs. More importantly, he added, broadband is now ubiquitous and more people accept and use online services such as banking, every day. Small businesses are more comfortable going straight to the Web for an IT infrastructure rather than buying and installing products on site themselves. To improve Office Live, Microsoft in the next two months will enhance the service with more options for subscribers to buy ad words on search engines other than Microsoft's Windows Live Search. Currently, subscribers can use the service's AdManager user interface to buy ad words through AdCenter, Microsoft's paid search platform. Microsoft will extend that ability to other search engines, though it is not ready to disclose which ones yet, Koopmans said. In the same time frame, the company will add the ability to build e-commerce sites in Office Live's tool for building Web sites, she added.
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We've passed the midway point here of this week-long affair, and we're noticing the effect that the more practical, toned down, brass-tacks Microsoft - without a glistening new operating system hovering twelve months into the future - is having on attendees.  We look at our five "flashpoint" topics we introduced on Friday, to see how well we were able to pre-gauge the mood of the conference.
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Blog: Kevin Turner tells partners the company is still in the process of figuring out just what the company's services strategy is all about.
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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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Vista's still in its early days, which means plenty of adjustments for Redmond, its allies and competitors.
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Microsoft has launched a partner program around Office Live, which it is grooming to be a major product.
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Software-as-service firm is ready to take on Microsoft in platform development tools, says CEO Benioff.