Daily Archives: July 14, 2011

Microsoft, Tech

Microsoft COO Goes on Competitor-Bashing Spree

For his annual keynote at the Microsoft Wordwide Partner Conference, taking place this week in Los Angeles, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner wasted little time challenging Microsoft’s many competitors. He flouted the supposed weaknesses of Cisco, IBM, Google, Oracle and others, letting attendees know that Microsoft is gunning for these companies’ business.


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IDG News Service — For his annual keynote at the Microsoft Wordwide Partner Conference, taking place this week in Los Angeles, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner wasted little time challenging Microsoft’s many competitors. He flouted the supposed weaknesses of Cisco, IBM, Google, Oracle and others, letting attendees know that Microsoft is gunning for these companies’ business.

“I am grateful for those competitors. It is fun going after them in a big way,” he said.

Turner even took the opportunity to criticize some of Microsoft’s old technologies, such as Windows XP and Office 2003.

As the COO, Turner oversees Microsoft’s worldwide sales, marketing, and services. And at the WPC conference, his role is to rally Microsoft partners to march into battle against

competing companies. This year, however, Turner seemed even more eager than usual to call out competitors by name and list their putative deficiencies.

Google was one of the first companies Turner savaged, particularly in regards to its online office suite, Google Docs. “Two years ago, all of the headlines said Microsoft was in big trouble,” he said. “Guess what? It hasn’t happened.”

He criticized Google for hidden fees in Google Docs, which Microsoft competes against with its own recently launched Office365. Turner claimed that Google’s annual fee of $50 per user per year is “only the tip of the iceberg.” Customers may incur additional fees, the nature of which Turner did not specify.

He also touted Office365, taking the time to quote an article from a trade magazine, stating that “Office 365, frankly, is to Google Apps as XBOX 360 Live is to Pong.”

“Office365, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing but a Google butt-kicker,” he said, adding that Office365 had already gained 5 million licensed users. He also mocked Google Talk as an “inferior messaging system.”

Discussing Cisco, Turner extolled the audience to go after that company’s profitable teleconference business. “Think about all the years that Cisco has been milking those high margins — 75, 80 percent margins — on its unified communications product,” he said, adding that Microsoft’s partners could offer a lower-cost alternative through Microsoft’s Lync unified communications offering.

Another target was IBM. Turner notes that Microsoft has migrated 4.5 million users off of IBM’s Lotus Notes, and expects to migrate another 5 million this year, all in favor of Microsoft Exchange.

Taking aim at Oracle, Tuner rhetorically asked: “How many happy Oracle customers are you talking to?”

“There is a tremendous opportunity for us to really go after the Oracle customer right now,” he said. He posited that SQL Server was a lower-cost and more secure alternative to the Oracle database.

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Microsoft: Buy Windows 7 today, keep same PC for Windows 8 upgrade

Microsoft may lower hardware requirements for Windows 8

Any computer running Windows 7 will be upgradable to Windows 8, Microsoft said today while pledging to keep hardware requirements level or even lower when the next version of Windows comes out.

 

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Microsoft says it has sold more than 400 million Windows 7 licenses, but Windows XP is still nearly twice as commonly used worldwide. Yet Microsoft has already shown two technical previews of Windows 8, and announced today that a further preview of Windows 8 is coming in September. Therefore, Microsoft has a balancing act to convince businesses and consumers to upgrade to Windows 7 despite the promise of a new operating system around the corner.

“Two-thirds of business PCs are still on Windows XP. Moving these users to Windows 7 is important and urgent work for us to get after together,” Tami Reller, corporate VP and CFO for Windows, said at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The conference is Microsoft’s opportunity to talk to partners about how they can make money together.

Windows 8 could be released next year, so to prevent businesses from holding on to their cash Microsoft is arguing that users should upgrade now and use the same PC to run Windows 8 later.

“Whether upgrading an existing PC or buying a new one, Windows will adapt to make the most of that hardware,” Reller said. Windows 8 is for “the hundreds of millions of modern PCs that exist today and for the devices of tomorrow.”

As we learned earlier this year, Windows 8 will be optimized for both touch-screen tablets and PCs. Microsoft announced at January’s Consumer Electronics Show that it will support the ARM architecture, a lower-powered chip for mobile devices, and last month Microsoft showed off the new tablet interface.

“Windows 8 is a true re-imagining of Windows, from the chip to the interface,” Reller said. Despite the re-imagining, Microsoft will keep system requirements flat or reduce them. To run Windows 7, PCs need at least a 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 16GB available disk space and DirectX 9 graphics.

Windows 7 tablets exist today, but regardless of Microsoft’s advice, consumers are better served waiting for Windows 8 tablets to hit the market because they are likely to be more advanced and it’s not yet clear whether Microsoft can create something better than Apple’s iPad. The “buy today, upgrade later” advice should be applied to PCs only.

While a Windows 8 release date hasn’t been revealed, Microsoft said today it will provide another technical preview at the BUILD Conference in Anaheim, Calif., Sept. 13-16.

The conference will “show modern hardware and software developers how to take advantage of the future of Windows,” Reller said. “It is the first place to dive deep into the future of Windows.”

Windows 8 will feature a start screen composed of applications represented in “tiles,” which Microsoft believes are more useful than Apple’s iPad icons because they are capable of providing details such as the current weather or state of an application. The traditional interface of Windows XP and Windows 7 will also be there for desktop-oriented applications.