Coming to a Microsoft Shop Near You: More Macs

8:19 AM Monday June 29, 2009

Tags:Apple, Microsoft, Technology

You could almost hear the groans from PC-centric IT teams when Apple made the announcement: the latest version of the Mac operating system, Snow Leopard, will offer out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007. It's bad enough that more employees want to trade their BlackBerry in for an iPhone; this means folks who love their home Macs will want to connect to the office Exchange server to get their calendar, email, and tasks.

As a result, in smaller organizations with tech-savvy early adopters, the sight of a glowing Apple logo will become much more commonplace. But in corporate environments? Not so much. Yet.

Snow Leopard's Exchange support doesn't require the closest thing to a Mac version of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft's own Entourage. Instead it will use the Mac's built-in Mail, iCal, and Address Book applications to access Exchange data.

When hooked up to your server, Mac's Mail application can create Exchange notes and to-do, as well as auto-complete recipient email addresses pulled from Exchange's Global Address List. The Mac's built-in calendaring application, iCal, can show your co-workers' and conference room availability via Exchange. You can also create and accept Exchange invitations to events and meetings using iCal and Mail. Mac users who are used to features like Spotlight and Quick Look for their personal data will get them for the information stored on their Exchange server, too.

The user transition over to the Mac might not be completely smooth, though. For example, there's no word on how or if Snow Leopard will deal with existing Microsoft Outlook PST files, which means it probably won't. This could be a deal-breaker for users with years of email archived on their work PCs in Microsoft Outlook.

Of course Apple says that no IT help is required to get Exchange set up. The fine print: your company's Exchange server has to have the "Autodiscover" feature turned on, and particularly security-minded administrators may not be willing to do that.

Either way, IT teams know that the more platforms they have to support, the more work there is for them and the bigger their range of expertise needs to be. In large corporate environments with big investments in a PC-centric infrastructure, where IT support maintains standard PC images and configurations to minimize workstation maintenance, the answer to "Can I use my Mac?" might just be a "No," or at best, "You can, but we won't be available for tech support."

But as Mac sales continue to increase, and more employees, managers, and execs ask to use their Mac on the road or in the office, that answer might change over the next one to two years.

Are Macs in use in your organization? Will Snow Leopard's release this September make a difference? Tell us about it in the comments.

Can't happen quick enough. ;)

The initiator

"I'm just here to learn."

Learning is fine. Listening is good. Consensus is natural.

But initiating is rare and valuable and essential.

How often do you or your brand initiate rather than react? How often do you tweet instead of retweet? Invent rather than exploit?

Microsoft is dying

Posted by Jonny on July 24th, 2009 under Apple, News, Opinion

Look, I try – I really do – to maintain this little hobby blog’s focus on digital media and music, but if we’re looking at technology then we’ve got to address this point:

Microsoft is dying.

It seems to offer no innovation. Its operating systems aren’t sufficiently user-centric. About the only great product it sells – the Xbox – is so heavily subsidised the company loses money on the range.

Look at the corporate results. Microsoft’s sales fell another 17 per cent in the just gone quarter as profits slid an astonishing 29 per cent. And the management – rather than self-disclosing their own inability, point to a weakness in global PC and server markets as cause.

Isn’t it truly the case that it’s a weakness in demand for Microsoft’s own offerings to global PC and server markets . Compare and contrast the company’s fortunes with those of Apple in the same period.

Apple’s third quarter financial results constituted the best non-Christmas quarter for revenue and earnings in Apple’s entire corporate history.

Read that again, “entire corporate history”.

Revenue, margins and Mac sales climbed, with iPhone sales reaching 5.2 million – up 626 per cent. Gross revenue reached $8.34 billion for profit of $1.23 billion.

Gross margin was 36.3 percent, up from 34.8 percent in the year-ago quarter.

Apple sold 2.6 million Macs, representing a four per cent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. 1.75 million notebooks sold during the quarter, up 13 per cent from the 1.553 million it sold in the same period last year. Desktop sales fell from 943,000 to 849,000, year-on-year. iTunes sold its 8 billionth song in the second week of July, Apple executives said.

Over at Microsoft we see a different story. Sales fell 17% to $13.1 billion in the company’s fourth quarter ended June 30, far short of analysts’ forecasts of $14.4 billion. That’s the second consecutive decline.

The software giant said its fourth-quarter net income fell 29% to $3.1 billion.

And if we quickly add it up. Microsoft holds c.80 per cent of the computer OS market and offers a horde of ancillary products, and plays in a host of different to Apple areas.

But Apple, with its c.5 per cent share, returned profits of $1.23 billion.

How does a dominant company manage to become so bad at making money?

Shareholders may be curious.

I think Microsoft is dying.

10 Ways Microsoft's Retail Stores Will Differ From Apple Stores

Brennon Slattery, PC World

Feb 13, 2009 9:20 am

Artwork: Chip Taylor

Microsoft announced plans to open retail stores, hoping to boost visibility of many of its products and its brand. The move seems to be an effort to mimic the success that Apple has had with its retail stores. The news is just too tempting not to have some fun with. So here are some yet-to-be-officially-revealed details about the Microsoft stores.

1) Instead of Apple's sheer walls of glass, Microsoft's stores will have brushed steel walls dotted with holes -- reminiscent of Windows security.

2) The store will have six different entrances: Starter, Basic, Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. While all six doors will lead into the same store, the Ultimate door requires a fee of $100 for no apparent reason.

3) Instead of a "Genius Bar" (as Apple provides) Microsoft will offer an Excuse Bar. It will be staffed by Microsofties trained in the art of evading questions, directing you to complicated and obscure fixes, and explaining it's a problem with the hardware -- not a software bug.

4) The Windows Genuine Advantage team will run storefront security, assuming everybody is a thief until they can prove otherwise.

5) Store hours are undetermined. At any given time the store mysteriously shuts down instantaneously for no apparent reason. (No word yet on what happens to customers inside).

6) Stores will be named Microsoft Live Retail Store with PC Services for Digital Lifestyle Enthusiasts.

7) Fashioned after Microsoft's User Account Control (UAC) in Vista, sales personnel will ask you whether you're positive you want to purchase something at least twice.

8) Xbox 360 section of the store will be organized in a ring -- which will inexplicably go red occasionally.

9) DreamWorks will design a scary in-store theme park ride called "blue screen of death."

10) Store emergency exits will be unlocked at all times so people can get in anytime they want even if the front doors are locked.

I know but they just make it so easy...

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I got this in a piece of email spam but it does look intriguing. I would love to use it but not sure (yet) if company policy will allow it. Still....looks cool!

Wish I was there.......

Google Announces Google Chrome Operating System

Wednesday July 08, 2009 02:41 AM EST
Written by Arnold Kim

Google announced that they are getting into the Operating System business with Google Chrome Operating System. The new OS is described as their attempt to "re-think" what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS will be an open source, lightweight operating system that is initially targeted at netbooks.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

The new OS will run on both x86 and ARM chips. The first netbooks will begin shipping with the OS in the second half of 2010. In the long term, Google does expect that Chrome OS will work anywhere from small netbooks to full size desktop machines.

While Microsoft has the most to lose from such direct competition from Google, Apple will also be affected by Google's move into this space. In fact, Google's ultimate goal seems to be the same target market as Apple's. They are specifically shooting for ease of use and accessibility:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

The Web will be a central part of the new operating system, and demonstrates the importance of supplying a robust browser experience. Google's work on the Chrome browser will carry over into the new OS.

I thought I felt a disturbance in the force....

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Microsoft Outlook to remain HTML non-compliant

Microsoft has confirmed that its premier email client, Outlook, will remain non-compliant with web standards in the next version of MS Office due out in 2010.

The statement comes in response to a campaign launched by the Email Standards Project , asking Microsoft to provide Outlook with text rendering that complies with web standards (like almost every other major email client on the market — see a list of them ), and to reverse the decision made in Office 2007 to use Word’s text engine rather than an HTML-compliant editor to compose emails.

MS Word does not provide support for key elements of CSS design tags like float, margin, padding, background-image and many more. You can quickly get a sense of the problem by looking at this image of an email displayed by Outlook 2000 and 2007:

In a post on the Outlook Team Blog , the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Office Communications and Forms Team William Kennedy says that,

…while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents.

Of course, a lack of web standards is not the only problem Outlook causes for Mail.app users, perhaps not even the main one.

The Campaign to fix Outlook is not giving up. You can read more about it on its web site or, if you twitter, make your compliant known that way.