What Gartner Research says about Microsoft's Business Stratgey

[dequire]

Not exactly eye-opining for those who have looked at Microsoft from an objective POV, but interesting nonetheless!

Gaughan said Microsoft was clear about its strategy, but less than transparent with customers when it came to software licensing.

“This is a platform story,” he said, describing Microsoft’s strategy. “They are a platform company first and foremost. They continually ask themselves, how do we drive platform and how do we protect our cash cows, Office and Windows?

When approaching Microsoft, consider that Windows is the core – and Microsoft will do everything to protect that core.”

New functionality and integration is drip fed through to users of the core Windows, Office and SharePoint platforms, he noted, using the example of Lync (unified communications) integration, which “drives value into investments customers have already made,” but CIOs should be mindful that this again only aims to protect the core.

Original link here.

So what value does Microsoft actually bring to the table, except that people possess a sheep-mentality and really don't do their homework from a TCO perspective as to what's right for their business? Microsoft stopped delivering a compelling business case long ago IMO.

[sealbhach]

Re: What Gartner Research says about Microsoft's Business Stratgey

Gartner Group are part of the Wintel establishment - I would not expect them to be impartial in their analysis.

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[SteveRiley]

Re: What Gartner Research says about Microsoft's Business Stratgey

Gartner Group are part of the Wintel establishment - I would not expect them to be impartial in their analysis.

Did you read the full article? Dennis Gaughan, the analyst who delivered the briefing, is certainly no vendor shill. In the section on Microsoft he notes their market share loss and expects it to continue. In the conclusion he recommends that everyone should avoid becoming a one-vendor shop. Sage advice.

So what value does Microsoft actually bring to the table, except that people possess a sheep-mentality and really don't do their homework from a TCO perspective as to what's right for their business?

TCO calculations often fail to capture productivity losses and benefits, which, while measured in soft dollars, truly do end up costing or saving real money.

While I agree with Gaughan's avoid-single-shop advice, let's narrow our range of consideration to email-calendar-messaging-phone. Compare Exchange+Outlook+Lync to any of its competitors. First, there are none. Yeah, you could build something out of parts, but these three products really are very well integrated. A competent sysadmin could build and deploy the suite across a medium-size organization in two or three days, and there exists a wealth of knowledge for doing that. An organization choosing E+O+L can be productive (i.e., generating revenue) very quickly.

Want to do achieve the same thing with parts? Good luck with that. I know an organization that's been fighting with (against?) Novell eDirectory, Lotus Notes, and Avaya one-X Communicator. It's one massive WTF, employees are agitated and angry, and the CFO is tracking lost money by the day on a spreadsheet!

So perhaps the actual values are simplicity and ubiquity. A company trying to compete in the business of manufacturing framistans isn't in the business of innovative selections of back-office IT products. It wants to make money selling framistans! So for basic plumbing like unified messaging and calendaring, it's in the best interests of most organizations to go with what most people know and just get the damn thing done.

[GreyGeek]

Re: What Gartner Research says about Microsoft's Business Stratgey

.... Compare Exchange+Outlook+Lync to any of its competitors. First, there are none. ....

Want to do achieve the same thing with parts? Good luck with that. I know an organization that's been fighting with (against?) Novell eDirectory, Lotus Notes, and Avaya one-X Communicator. It's one massive WTF, employees are agitated and angry, and the CFO is tracking lost money by the day on a spreadsheet!.
...

Where I worked we used Lotus Notes. We had over 200 database tables integrated into LN. The gal who administered it sat in the cube next to mine. She had little work to do, so she spent most of her time writing software. In my experience LN was one smooth piece of software. It made scheduling, group email, documentation etc..., among us 500 users a piece of cake.

Our current Governor campaigned on "efficiency and economy", two virtues he felt the current Tax Commissioner lacked, even though she brought the state through a $700M shortfall. After he was elected he replaced her with TWO, a TC and an Assistant TC. The first thing the new TC did was to ask a gal in personnel for a list of all employees, their ages and salary, which was illegal discrimination. He followed up by laying off older, high salaried people. The Assistant TC had trouble learning how to use Lotus Notes, which would suggest brain damage on her part, so she decreed that 10,000 of the state's 13,000 employees switch to Exchange+SharePoint, because she was used to that. 10K LN licenses thrown out and that many Exchange licenses purchased. Very economical... NOT! All 30 of our severs were in our department under our control, managed by our IT staff of six. We were in the process of dropping our Novell servers and moving to Linux servers. That program was stopped and all servers were converted to Windows with "Active Directory". We became a Microsoft shop, the most expensive route one could take, and all the servers were moved to the state CTO's office.

To make matters worse, Exchange did not have a tool that could integrate the 200 databases in LN into Exchange+SharePoint. We tried several 3rd party tools, but the ones that appeared to be best were outside our budget. The gal who administered LN was assigned to "help" administer Exchange+SharePoint, but that person didn't know how to do squat. Her conclusion after getting it loaded & setup was that Exchange/SharePoint wasn't near the tool that LN was, and that SharePoint was a coconut Monkey trap. Once you get in you can't get out ... but the same could be said for LN.

Anyway, productivity dropped to less than half, costs more than doubled, and nothing was efficient. Emails disappeared into the infinte bit bucket. So often that I suspect some of using Exchange as an excuse for not actually having sent an email. My own experience was that Exchange wasn't as logical or well laid out as LN, was a lot harder to archive or recover, but I retired before I had a chance to really get into it. Most of what I've heard since then has been "it's all right, but it isn't anywhere as good as LN."

To bounce a server one had to call or email the CTO, or walk the several blocks there and doing it yourself. Who ever set up the servers didn't know how to configure Windows because every time you changed directories with Windows Explorer you'd have to wait more than 30 seconds for the list to populate, even if you had looked at that directory five minutes ago. Before, network downtime was almost non-existent. Afterward, folks were often "rewarded" with mini-vacations of an hour to half a day because they couldn't get online to do their work. People who remembered how smoothly things used to run could only shake their heads in disbelief.

My estimates of the cost of conversion, at the time, were $2 to $3 Million, with about $750,000 in regular license fees.

If anything, this is a lesson in the high cost of poor IT staff. The owner of an MSCE may not necessarily own a brain.

[SteveRiley]

Re: What Gartner Research says about Microsoft's Business Stratgey

Notes, on its own, is actually a pretty cool product. It suffered from poor marketing, and perhaps being a bit too early for its time. My buddy's challenge is trying to get it to use something other than its own directory and integrate with a third-party soft-phone system.

Your story, though, is a perfect illustration of how to do everything wrong: migrate a system that was working perfectly, eliminate skilled staff for cheaper replacements, and do this under the auspicies of a politically-motivated government agency. No wonder it sucked!

[GreyGeek]

Re: What Gartner Research says about Microsoft's Business Stratgey

....
Your story, though, is a perfect illustration of how to do everything wrong: migrate a system that was working perfectly, eliminate skilled staff for cheaper replacements, and do this under the auspices of a politically-motivated government agency. No wonder it sucked!

Perfect analysis.