May 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft, Home Depot pull a GM with its failed book-scanning effort
They say give a man a fish and he has food for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will have food for the rest of his life.
Well I say, teach an American car company how to make an SUV and it will have lots of money for a day, a year, or even several years. But teach American car company executives economics and maybe a little geology and they will have an expanding business for generations. I hope it's not too late for the U.S. automakers, but maybe that ship has sailed.
Nevertheless, the advice still has lots of truth in it for the rest of us. Including Microsoft, which has made the same mistake as the automakers.
Microsoft is shutting down its very ambitious attempt to scan in every book in the entire world and make them available for search with its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects.
What went wrong?
The same short-sightedness that afflicts the car industry. Live Search Books was a fish for its customers. A giant, unwieldy whale -- useless to most people -- that serves a very limited audience.
Instead Microsoft should be doing at least one of two things.
Number one in my book would be trying to gain an understanding of why Google search is so popular. Not in terms of an easy-to-use UI but going deeper to understand why search itself has become, almost overnight, part of our culture. Part of a world culture.
Search represents a need for answers, but why is that significant?
It goes without saying that Microsoft should have focused all its attention on building a fantastic, easy-to-use search engine that would offer something everyone can use for any purpose.
While you may nod in agreement and shake your head in chagrin at GM and Microsoft, I would suggest that you look at your own company and see if it doesn't harbor some of the same short-sighted attitudes. Is your company buying point solutions rather than trying to figure out what the bigger issues are?
To me, it seems that the American business has lost its competitive edge.
Here's another example of the same issue: Home Depot's CEO is using the slowdown in the housing market as the excuse for not meeting its quarterly forecasts.
"The housing and home improvement markets remained difficult in the first quarter; in fact, conditions worsened in many areas of the country," said Frank Blake, chairman and CEO.
I say, shame on him.
Why wasn't Home Depot planning on this day months and months ahead of time when the economy first showed signs of weakness? Why, for example, hadn't Home Depot used all the data it had on its millions of customers to send out targeted e-mails and flyers to promote home improvement classes in every store, with a discount to those who attend, on how to install flooring, build a deck, or renovate a kitchen?
Those of us in high tech may just have a skill that the sales and marketing executives could use. High tech has always been enamored with the idea of being able to run "what if" scenarios.
But there is obviously a disconnect between what IT knows and what sales and marketing knows.
Sales and marketing, it appears, goes for the fish of the day and seems to keep extending bait until the pond is fished out.
On the other hand, it is incumbent upon IT -- which has been trained to look further down the road, such as with capacity planning, risk management, business continuity -- to put itself in the game and take some responsibility for strategic management and planning rather than staying on the operational sidelines.
Businesses should act that way as a rule, and use that IT resource to do so.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on May 28, 2008 03:00 AM
October 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Gates continue to talk about what's needed in unified communications
Gates live -- at Bill Graham Auditorium -- talks about Microsoft's new unified communications offering.
"Software innovation is being brought to the business phone call." Gates still continues to call it a phone call. Very old school.
Gates alludes to AT&T.
[See also: Bill Gates live from San Francisco | Microsoft: The next AT&T? | Video: Bill Gates launches OCS | Bill Gates launches OCS, part II | Bill Gates launches OCS, part III ]
Once you picked a PBX vendor that was it. Even if they didn't make a lot of money on an initial sale, Gates said, if you wanted to move a phone, that cost. Gates says it cost him $700 and a week's lead time to move a single phone.
Gates described that when AT&T ran the only telecommunications network, directory and environment, there wasn't much you could do.
"People just accepted this as the way it was."
This was the way it was in the PC industry as well, says Gates. But now Bill claims companies like Microsoft and Intel changed those types of monopolistic practices. Hmmm.
Now, says Gates, because each layer uses a specialized company and technology the single company strangle hold is broken.
We are witnessing a revolutionary change from the vertical to the horizontal. Now you can take digital services and put it beside the PBX so you can get presence and other benefits with your PBX, Gates told the audience.
However, Gates sees this as an interim step. Part of the communications evolution.
According to Gates the PBX will eventually disappear and we will have a 100 percent transformation to software based communications.
"This is as profound as the shift from the typewriter to the PC," Gates said.
The level of innovation you unleash when you get communications on to a software platform is unlimited, Gates told the audience.
While Gates claims the cost savings for UC comes from reducing phone time such as reducing the time people have to be put on hold until the right person is found, plus it adds the richness of screen sharing, which reduces the need for travel, again Gates seems to miss a major business point.
Jeff Raikes, came on stage and he too seems to miss the point. Raikes says business users waste 37 minutes a day making calls to people who are not around. "That adds up to 30 hours a year," said Raikes.
Big whoop. The real cost savings will come from embedding presence and identity into enterprise applications like ERP or CRM applications.
Knowing presence in Word or a PowerPoint might be nice but if you are an insurance company mid-level exec waiting for an approval, you can save days not minutes in an approval process by finding the right person.
Perhaps this wasn't mentioned because the Microsoft UC system is all about the desktop and adding yet another application to it. Rather it should be about integration and embedding these UC capabilities into other applications.
Gates seems to have missed the main point of cost savings, that is reduced time due to presence. It is about embedding UC into a workflow to reduce the time spent in routing and approvals.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on October 16, 2007 09:30 AM
October 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Company unveils its unified communications platform, vies for "21st century dial tone" dominance
Enterprises looking to step into the 21st century by dumping their legacy PBX systems have some big names after their wallets, as Microsoft today will follow Cisco, Siemens, and IBM into the unified communications (UC) fray by officially announcing the final pieces of its UC platform.
With Chairman Bill Gates and President Jeff Raikes standing by, Microsoft will unveil OCS (Office Communicators Server) 2007 for the back end and Office Communicator 2007 for the client side. Essentially an upgrade to LCS (Live Communications Server), OCS will provide a platform for IM, voice conferencing, videoconferencing, and presence.
Exchange 2007 delivers messaging, calendaring, mobile e-mail, and voicemail capabilities to round out Microsoft's two-component UC vision.
Of course, no announcement would be complete without a parade of partner and customer testimonials. Expect them to be 100 percent ga-ga over the platform.
According to Kim Akers, unified communications general manager at Microsoft, the two most important UC components are presence and identity.
Some analysts, however, believe the spotlight should be narrowed, singling out presence as the star of the show.
Whereas identity manages access rights, presence gives users insight into others' availability. And it is this dynamic capability that many analysts feel will quickly become a critical element of any workflow that requires human intervention.
What's behind the enthusiasm over presence? The answer comes from Akers: "Presence detection can be embedded into the business logic of the workflow."
That way, if any one of five people has signoff privileges at a given stage in a chain of events, a business rule based on presence could find out whether any of the five is currently available to move the process along, thereby avoiding long delays.
Brent Kelly, senior analyst at Wainhouse Research, calls presence the "dial tone of the 21st century."
In other words, presence, not the dial tone, is what we will use to contact people. If you like, you can call it an "intelligent" dial tone.
Instead of trying to call a colleague, hoping you can reach them, presence will tell you when he or she is available and whether they are at their desktop or on a mobile device.
"He who owns the presence technology will own the rest of the solutions platform, or at least have a major influence over it," Kelly says.
And this is where competing UC technologies play a major role, as each of the three major players -- Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM -- has its own presence solution.
Microsoft believes a server-centric model offers the most cost-effective platform. Cisco is betting that a network-centric solution will help it sell enterprises lots of hardware.
IBM, in the meantime, is proposing a bit of a hybrid. Its Sametime is software-centric but differs from Microsoft's solution in two distinct ways.
First, IBM has partnered with both Cisco and Siemens to tap their networking hardware. Second, IBM has based Sametime on the Eclipse development platform.
According to Wainhouse's Kelly, Eclipse offers developers a better development environment than Microsoft does. Because its code is open source, ISVs and corporate developers can do more with the platform.
"From developers I have spoken with, it is easier to integrate with Sametime than with Microsoft," Kelly notes.
Moreover, because Microsoft puts the intelligence in the server rather than the network, it puts companies at risk of losing local capabilities in the event that the central system goes down.
Jamie Stark, technical product manager for the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft, counters that OCS can be structured so that "if any single server role goes down or becomes unavailable, the request would fall to a secondary server. If critical components like mediation servers, gateways, and front ends go down, users will not experience broad disruption, as the functions will be taken on by other servers in the pool."
Cisco, on the other hand, builds redundancy into the local switch so that if the Cisco communication manager goes down at a central point, users will still be able to call locally and perhaps even call out.
Stark's defense aside, Wainhouse's Kelly says that Microsoft is aware of the local usability problem and has promised to fix it by next year.
In any event, Microsoft claims its server-based solution is more cost-effective than competing UC solutions, mainly due to its ability to increase IT productivity.
Up until now, communications infrastructures have remained separate, meaning that companies have to had to manage multiple directories to provision a user. While it is true that nowadays directories can exchange information, each directory still has to be managed by someone with domain expertise in a particular communications area.
By basing its UC infrastructure on AD (Active Directory), Microsoft believes it has put an end to the need for that kind of specialization.
"You don't have to have different people to maintain many sets of infrastructures. It is all built on AD," Microsoft's Akers says.
Of course, because Microsoft owns the productivity application space, integration here will also be very handy. Roll your mouse over a name in a Word document and a pop-up window will tell you whether the person is available. Click on the name and the system will ask whether you want to IM, conference in, dial out, or e-mail the person.
IBM Sametime has an equivalent solution for Microsoft Office. The company last week announced it will do the same for Symphony, its own productivity suite.
If you thought Microsoft's ownership of the desktop was big, think about this: Whoever owns the UC platform will in essence become in this century what AT&T was in the last.
UC could be even bigger than Windows, IBM Global Services, and Cisco's routers and switches all rolled into one.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on October 16, 2007 03:00 AM
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