Microsoft

Apparently February is ‘put the boot into Microsoft’ month. I must have missed the memo. Or perhaps it only got sent to the ex-senior-management@microsoft.com mailing list. In any case it’s been good to see that some have taken the directive to heart. Oh hang on, cancel that – there actually hasn’t been much said by former softies at all. Instead it’s just all the noise of journalists (and Microsoft!) reporting on what one or two (and perhaps three) former softies said. If you haven’t yet written your own second-hand post about the internal woes of working at Microsoft and how they are doomed to failure, you’d better get started. Otherwise people will […]

Good to see that the new dates for the Australian ALM Conference have been confirmed (as per organizer Anthony Borton’s blog post on Monday). It’s now set for 13-14 April 2010 at Luna Park (in Sydney). The conference has a great line up of sessions and speakers, and will be the official Australian launch of Visual Studio 2010. There’s also training and stuff after the event. The cost is $654.50 for the conference which is pretty reasonable in my opinion. In fact, thinking about the cost of attending in comparison to some other events  – eg Code Camp Oz in Wagga (a must-attend event btw) I’d say it […]

After watching the second keynote from PDC last week, I’m now puzzled by Microsoft. In the first keynote, they seemed to get everything right. Embrace open source. Embrace cloud. Embrace what their customers want and need. Embrace strategic change.  In the second keynote they seemed to do the opposite. Steven Sinofsky, in a somewhat self-congratulatory ‘review’ of the ‘lessons learned’ developing Windows 7  bored us to tears with big number telemetry stats and other ‘look at how responsive we are’ reminders, before moving on to Internet Explorer. And whilst I was anticipating an exciting announcement about Microsoft finally getting Internet Explorer right (especially after reading reviews here, here and here), instead […]

One of the core building blocks of Microsoft’s success over the past decades has been its close relationship with partners. The Microsoft Partner Network (previously Partner Program) has helped Microsoft reach (via their partners) every conceivable sector of the myriad markets they service. And in return, Microsoft was known to be very loyal, supportive and even protective of its partners (there’s even books written on how to best work the relationship). But that’s been changing over the last few years. Resellers are feeling the pain the most I expect, as Microsoft opens up its own retail stores, experiments with subscription models and grows its online sales channels (Microsoft Office for example makes […]