RSSMicrosoft to Businesses: Forget IBM
By Ed Oswald | Published March 16, 2006, 3:37 PM
Microsoft will spend $500 million this year alone to spread its latest marketing message called the "People-Ready" business vision. The effort will be used as a backdrop to promote a series of products the Redmond company plans to bring to market over the next year.
Upcoming versions of its Windows Vista operating system, Office 2007, Windows Mobile software, and Microsoft Exchange Server would be promoted. Additionally, the company plans to highlight its offerings in infrastructure software, such as Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the new initiative was an extension of the company's vision to empower customers through software. Additionally, the company is likely looking to recoup some of the $20 billion it spent developing these products since 2003.
"Today we take this to the next level by showing how these tools now work together in new ways to enhance innovation and drive greater value for business," Ballmer said.
The marketing campaign is in direct response to IBM's recent efforts in the enterprise sector. Ballmer says his company is selling technology via software to increase business productivity, whereas IBM is increasingly turning to a consulting-based model.
"We're talking about making people in business more productive every day. IBM is talking about doing a project," he chided. To further this concept, Ballmer demoed many of the products to come to market over the next year, and showed how they would make employees more efficient.
Microsoft's releases would focus on six areas that it sees as areas of greatest need among its customers.
These include unified communications and collaboration, which the company plans to strengthen through SharePoint Server 2007; enterprise search, to manage customers increasing information management needs; mobile communication, improved in the next version of Exchange Server; business intelligence, giving customers new ways to analyze and use company data to their benefit; customer relationship management; and improvements in the infrastructure products that would help to tie all of Microsoft's solutions in a way that is transparent to the employee.
Microsoft said it was mobilizing nearly 640,000 partners worldwide to support the new initiative.
Who cares? I forgot about IBM when they dropped the OS/2 ball at the 1 yard line and walked off the field. They've become a caricature of tech companies that make repeated bonehead decisions, yet somehow manage to convince clueless MBA-types that they're able to deliver. Armies of Global Services consultant wh***s impress them enough to stay afloat. I've worked around them and I've yet to be impressed. Ironically, MS is becoming an IBM clone in that same regard: promise the world, deliver a bucket with a pretty label on it. They both suck. I'm holding out for more competition to put the heat to both. We need more choice and better options.
I'm tired of the meaningless rhetoric. IBM makes some of the funniest commercials I've seen in a while, but that's only because THEY don't make them, their marketing firm does. IBM or MS. Coke or Pepsi. Beatles or Stones. Bush or Kerry. Our choices suck.
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|IBM will one day change, too. They must. Please remember, people once thought the same about IBM when there were servers and clients. Then PCs came along. We heard then, "They're entirely unrelated markets." I think history proved differently. One thing *is* constant about businesses, their environments and their technological needs, they change.
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|This is a total non-Story. They are not in competition at all. IBM targets corps and MS targets everyone else. IBM pushes full integration with legacy, sometimes using an MS solution. MS pushes replacement of legacy with MS products. Two entirely unrelated markets. Look at the profits, neither of them are hurting with their strategies. This just proves that more than 1 strategy has a place in the market.
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|Erm..MS doesn't target big business, corps, and government agencies? That's the area MS and IBM fairly heavily compete against one another.
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|M$ will own us all someday, they have the money, and just like politics, people are too apathetic to do some reading and find out what/who is the best product, you can go down the same street with Intel, 99% of the people you walk up to on the street if you asked them "Name the worlds best processor" most would say Pentium 4 or Intel, American’s especially buy what they are told to buy, and elect who they are told to elect...
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|You're right on!
What makes this even funnier is that this Microsoft-IBM rivalry is all an act. IBM holds a considerable amount of M$ shares and continues to receive royalties from Windows XP (which is NT which IBM co-developed).
If it wasn't for IBM there'd be no $40 billion Bill Gates.
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|"(which is NT which IBM co-developed)"
Wrong.
IBM worked on OS/2 2.x while relegating MS to work on the next generation of that OS which was supposed to be "portable OS/2". THAT product, based on a completely different design than OS/2 ("look Ma - this OS has a multithreaded input queue!!!") was what became NT.
The divorce settlement gave Big Blue limited royalties - from a technical design perspective they had nothing to do with the OS, something we can be duly grateful for (Anyone for massive baroque bloated mainframe GDI engines on the desktop? Thought not).
And you're right: fortunately for us, if it wasn't for IBM's incredible stupidity in the desktop arena, there would be no personal computing industry and mass cheap computing today.
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|And you're right: fortunately for us, if it wasn't for IBM's incredible stupidity in the desktop arena, there would be no personal computing industry and mass cheap computing today.
Commodore provided cheap mass computing in 1982.
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|Hear, hear!
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|"Commodore provided cheap mass computing in 1982."
Nope. The number of folks who owned Commodores (I was one of them) was dwarfed by PC sales in the first couple years after the IBM PC and its clones surfaced. THAT'S mass market acceptance in its infancy.
If anything, Commodore was guilty of even greater criminal stupidity than IBM - the non-marketing of the Amiga.
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|Is that why the C64 was in the Guinness book of world records for a spell?
It was the best selling computer from 1982-what 1989?
Sure, they were morons for not releasing anything that was really greater than the C64 (The C128 was just OK and didn't take the market like the C64 did). They OWNED the home computer market for almost 10 years, in that time IBM was selling PCs, but they were business machines and nothing more then.
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|well i can say one thing about MS without them and there monopoly ridden OS there would be total chaos in the computer world where there would probly be about 1000 OS's and no compatibility at all
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|Not really. All the OSs that have survived to date have been "compatible" with windows products, but total compatability doomed some as well.
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|Everything old is new again. Back in the 90s, IBM thought they ruled the roost and could dicate what users "wanted". MS showed them otherwise - pointedly and painfully.
Now MS is much larger and has the issues inherent with its size that IBM had before. But Big Blue is bigger too and no smarter than it was, despite its whole "open source" schtick. I'm still betting that MS is more "with it" than those dinosaurs in Blue. IBM is about Big Business and much more importantly Big Service Contracts And Consultants - the kind that bleed you dry.
Ballmer is wrong about one thing - IBM has ALWAYS been about the model iterated above. it's not a new thing for them - it's the ONLY thing for them.
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|At the same time, total integration isn't something that I feel is a good thing, either, with out a support and service contract, and consultants, backing it up with credentials...
If MS could have their way, it'd be 1 network, that integrates everything, and "just worked". Well, ok, it makes sense, and it's easier for people to use and manage. And when a single part of it breaks, the whole system comes grinding to a halt. At least with the "open source" 'schtick' as you call it, when my mail server crashes and burns, I can guarantee my (unrelated) database and/or web server isn't going down with it, and that people can still sign on and do their business.
Not everybody does want MS - I admit the world needs them, as a whole, but if I never used another MS product again, I'd be perfectly happy.
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|Quoting: If MS could have their way, it'd be 1 network, that integrates everything, and "just worked".
Gee, I thought that was Google. :)
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|Two sides of the same coin. ;)
Not good and evil, but for Consumers and for Big Business.
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