Category Archives: microsoft

adobe, apple, internet, microsoft, mobile, professional, silverlight, software, software development

Adobe declares glittering results as CEO says Apple’s Flash ban has no impact on its revenue

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Adobe has proudly declared its first billion dollar quarter, $1,008 m in the quarter ending Dec 3 2010 versus $757.3 m in the same quarter of 2009.

I am not a financial analyst, but a few things leap out from the figures. One is that Omniture, the analytics company Adobe acquired at the end of 2009, is doing well and contributing significantly to Adobe’s revenue – $98.4 m in Q4 2010. The billion dollar quarter would not have happened without it. Second, Creative Suite 5 is selling well, better than Creative Suite 4.

Creative Suite 4 was released in October 2008, and Creative Suite 5 in April 2010. It is not perfect, but the following table compares the Creative Solutions segment (mainly Creative Suite) of the two products quarter by quarter from their respective release dates:

Quarters after release 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th
Creative Suite 4 508.7 460.7 411.7 400.4 429.30 432.0
Creative Suite 5 532.7 549.7 542.1      

CS4 drops off noticeably following an initial surge, whereas CS5 has kept on selling. It is a good product and a de-facto industry standard, but not every user is persuaded to upgrade every time a new release appears. My guess is that things like better 64-bit support – which make a huge difference in the production tools – and new tricks in PhotoShop have been successful in driving upgrades to CS5. Further, the explosion of premium mobile devices led by Apple’s iPhone and iPad has not been bad for Adobe despite Apple CEO Steve Jobs doing his best to put down Flash. Publishers creating media for the iPad, for example, will most likely use Adobe’s tools to do so. CEO Shantanu Narayen said in the earnings calls, “We have not seen any impact on our revenue from Apple’s choice [to not support Flash]”, though I am sure he would make a big deal of it if Apple were to change its mind.

Before getting too carried away though, I note that Creative Suite 3, published in March 2007, did just as well as CS5.  Here are the figures:

Quarters after release 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th
Creative Suite 3 436.6 545.5 570.5 543.5 527.2 493.6

In fact, Q4 2007 at $570.5 m is still a record for Adobe’s Creative Solutions segment. So maybe CS4 was an unfortunate blip. Then again, not quite all the revenue in Creative Solutions is the suite; it also includes Flash Platform services such as media streaming. Further, the economy looked rosier in 2007.

Here is the quarter vs quarter comparison over the whole company:

  Q4 2009 Q4 2010
Creative Solutions 429.3 542.1
Digital Enterprise 211.8 274.10
Omniture 26.3 98.4
Platform 47 46.1
Print and publishing 42.9 47.3

In this table, Creative Solutions has already been mentioned. Digital Enterprise, formerly called Business Productivity, includes Acrobat, LiveCycle and Connect web conferencing. Platform is confusing; according to the Q4 09 datasheet it includes the developer tools, Flash Platform Services and ColdFusion. However, the Q4 10 datasheet omits any list of products for Platform, though it includes them for the other segments, and lists ColdFusion under Print and Publishing along with Director, Contribute, PostScript, eLearning Suite and some other older products. According to this document [pdf] InDesign which is huge in print publishing is not included in Print and Publishing, so I guess it is in Creative Solutions.

In the earnings call, Adobe’s Mark Garrett did mention Platform, and attributed its growth (compared to Q3 2010) to “higher toolbar distribution revenue driven primarily by the release of the new Adobe Reader version 10 in the quarter.” This refers to the vile practice of foisting a third-party toolbar (unless they opt-out) on people forced to download Adobe Reader because they have been send a PDF. Perhaps in the light of these good results Adobe could be persuaded to stop doing so?

I am not sure how much this breakdown can be trusted as it makes little sense to me. Do not take the segment names too seriously then; but they are all we have when it comes to trying to compare like with like.

Still, clearly Adobe is doing well and has successfully steered around some nasty rocks that Apple threw in its way. I imagine that Microsoft’s decision to retreat from its efforts to establish Silverlight as a cross-platform rival to Flash has also helped build confidence in Adobe’s platform. The company’s point of vulnerability is its dependence on shrink-wrap software for the majority of its revenue; projects like the abandoned Rome show that Adobe knows how to move towards cloud-deployed, subscription-based software but with business booming under its current model, and little sign of success for cloud projects like Acrobat.com, you can understand why the company is in no hurry to change.  

amazon, azure, cloud computing, internet, microsoft, professional, ruby, salesforce.com, software development

Salesforce.com acquires Heroku, wants your Enterprise apps

The big news today is that Salesforce.com has agreed to acquire Heroku, a company which hosts Ruby applications using an architecture that enables seamless scalability. Heroku apps run on “dynos”, each of which is a single process running Ruby code on the Heroku “grid” – an abstraction which runs on instances of Amazon EC2 virtual machines. To scale your app, you simply add more dynos.

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Why is Salesforce.com acquiring Heroku? Well, for some years an interesting question about Salesforce.com has been how it can escape its cloud CRM niche. The obvious approach is to add further applications, which it has done to some extent with FinancialForce, but it seems the strategy now is to become a platform for custom business applications. We already knew about VMForce, a partnership with VMWare currently in beta that lets you host Java applications that are integrated with Force.com, but it is with the announcements here at Dreamforce that the pieces are falling into place. Database.com for data access and storage; now Heroku for Ruby applications.

These services join several others which Salesforce.com is branding at Force.com 2:

Appforce – in effect the old Force.com, build departmental apps with visual tools and declarative code.

Siteforce – again an existing capability, build web sites on Force.com.

ISVForce – build your own multi-tenant application and sign up customers.

Salesforce.com is thoroughly corporate in its approach and its obvious competition is not so much Google AppEngine or Amazon EC2, but Microsoft Azure: too expensive for casual developers, but with strong Enterprise features.

Identity management is key to this battle. Microsoft’s identity system is Active Directory, with federation between local and cloud directories enabling single sign-on. Salesforce.com has its own user directory and developing on its platform will push you towards using it.

Today’s announcement makes sense of something that puzzled me: why we got a session on node.js at Monday’s Cloudstock event. It was a great session and I wrote it up here. Heroku has been experimenting with node.js support, with considerable success, and says it will introduce a new version next year.

Finally, the Heroku acquisition is great news for Enterprise use of Ruby. Today many potential new developers will be looking at it with interest.

.net, cloud computing, microsoft, sharepoint, windows

Wrestling with Microsoft SharePoint

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I do not know what to think about Microsoft SharePoint. It is kind-of inevitable if you live on the Microsoft platform. At some point the question comes up: how do we get to our documents over the Internet; and while VPN works, it is an awkward solution that means opening a VPN tunnel first and arguably opens up too much from a security perspective; direct internet access is easier and works from any device. Microsoft also has Direct Access, which lets you connect to network shares without a VPN; I have not tried it though it requires Windows 7 which is a serious restriction.

In any case, SharePoint does so much more: search, blogs and wikis, company portal, business intelligence, platform for document workflow applications, office web apps for in-browser editing of Office documents, alerts when documents are added or changed, and near-infinite possibilities for customization, to mention a few features.

The downside is that SharePoint is intricate, sometimes slow, and complex to administer.

I run a miniature Microsoft-platform setup for test and development. The servers are on Hyper-V virtual machines, and include Exchange 2007 (2010 upgrade pending), SharePoint 2010, and ISA Server 2006. I have been trying out SharePoint for some time, and once I figured out how to map a drive reliably I have enjoyed using it as a document repository. I have also tried SharePoint WorkSpace 2010 on a netbook, which is useful for offline work, though the user interface needs attention and it has an annoying limit on the number of items it will download.

The problem I have had though is that the internal URL (eg http://sharepoint) was different from the external URL (eg https://sharepoint.mydomain.com). In consequence, it did not work smoothly on a laptop or netbook that is not always on the internal network.

I spent some time fixing this. I am not sure that I found the best solution, but I found one that works. I extended the SharePoint application to a second web site for ssl access; I set up split DNS so that sharepoint.mydomain.com resolves to the internal server on the local network, and to ISA on the internet; I set up a new listener in ISA for the external URL, and a new policy that redirects to the internal server using SSL throughout; I turned off link translation; I removed all the paths except for /*; I set NTLM authentication. Finally I set Alternate Access Mappings for the new external URL which, thanks to split DNS, also works internally.

If that sounds like jargon, welcome to the world of SharePoint administration. Few things are intuitive or straightforward; which is why, for example, you can find a three part series by the Troy Starr on What every SharePoint administrator needs to know about Alternate Access Mappings.

Another thing that is obvious to SharePoint admins but not to occasional visitors: when you patch SharePoint with an official update, it is not enough to run the patch. You also have to update the configuration with psconfig -update or the configuration wizard, to update the metadata.

And after all that, in my very simple SharePoint setup, I still have warnings in Health Analyzer about missing server side dependencies for WebPart class [8d6034c4-a416-e535-281a-6b714894e1aa] – I am not sure why the Analyzer cannot look up the GUID somewhere and present something more meaningful, nor why the “More information about this rule” link in the analyzer takes you to the SharePoint Server home page rather than anywhere useful.

That said, I am pleased with my setup. It makes getting at documents when out and about very easy, particularly with mapped drive integration. I also found several iPhone clients – Steve McDonnell has a round up – and installed the free Moprise to get started. Performance is rather good; and while it has little advantage over Dropbox for an individual, in a corporate environment it makes sense.

My immediate conclusion is that specialising in SharePoint consultancy and administration is probably a smart move if you have the requisite skills; but that tinkering with SharePoint is something non-specialists are unlikely to enjoy. Shifting the administrative burden to Microsoft by using its hosted SharePoint is attractive, as is using an alternative collaboration and document platform such as Google Apps, though the two platforms are not very alike.

.net, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring, windows

The top Silverlight feature request: implement on more platforms

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One of the things mentioned by Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie in his Firestarter keynote yesterday was that Silverlight 5, the new version set for release in 2011, implements some 70% of what users have voted for. I presume he means the feedback forum here. But look what the top request is – as noted by a comment to yesterday’s post:

image

Looking at the comments, Android is a common request, and relatively easy for Microsoft to achieve given the open nature of that platform.

This was apparently not part of the 70% though. Instead, Guthrie introduced more Windows-only features – showing that concerns about divergence between Windows and Mac implementations when Microsoft announced COM support at the 2009 PDC were justified.

What if Microsoft had purchased Novell, or purchased Mono from Novell, instead of letting it go to Attachmate? It would have enabled Microsoft to unify the Windows and Linux implementations as well as building on the work the Mono team has done on compilation for iOS.

That dream is over though; the Silverlight application strategy seems focused on making it better for Windows-platform corporations.

.net, development, internet, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, Web, web authoring

Silverlight 5 unveiled: more power, more Windows

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Microsoft has announced details of Silverlight 5, a major new release of its browser plug-in and desktop runtime for Windows and Mac. Silverlight is also the primary application runtime for Windows Phone 7, though this update does not apply to the phone yet. Silverlight 5 will go into beta in the first half of 2011, and release is planned for the second half of 2011 – no more than a year or so away.

So what’s in Silverlight 5?

On the media side, there is hardware decoding of H.264 video (an overdue feature) plus enhancements including TrickPlay which enables fast-forward and rewind. There is also remote control support of some kind. According to VP Scott Guthrie, you will be able to stream HD video to a netbook.

The bigger area of change is in Silverlight as an application runtime. Here are the highlights:

  • Text rendering is much improved, with multi-columns, OpenType support, and control of tracking and leading.
  • Postscript vector printing greatly improves printing support, and you can now create a dedicated print view different from what is on screen.
  • A new hardware-accelerated 3D graphics API, as well as immediate mode graphics which lets you render directly to the GPU.
  • There is a 64-bit version of Silverlight 5.
  • WS-Trust support for secure messaging in tandem with Windows Communication Foundation.
  • Databinding enhancements, and support for debugging a binding by setting a breakpoint on it.

Alongside these, trusted Silverlight applications have new capabilities. But what is a trusted application? In the past, Silverlight applications become trusted if they run out of the browser and the user gives permission via a dialog. In Silverlight 5 this changes. A Silverlight application can be trusted within the browser as well, though Microsoft says this only works “when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate”. This implies that the feature is aimed at corporate environments rather than for applets with a broad reach.

Once trusted, an in-browser Silverlight applet has the following additional features:

  • A new web browser control lets you host HTML content within a Silverlight application.
  • Read and write access to My Documents
  • Ability to launch Microsoft Office applications – examples include creating an email message or opening a report in Word
  • Access to COM components – Microsoft gives the example of accessing a USB security key or a bar-code scanner
  • Ability to call native code vith PInvoke (Platform Invoke)

In addition, out of browser applications support multiple windows including child windows, so they can be made to behave even more like normal desktop Windows applications.

You can see the theme here: making trusted Silverlight applications more powerful so that a larger proportion of custom business applications can be implemented in the browser or as Silverlight out-of-browser applications, rather than as traditional Windows applications that require desktop deployment. Put this together with Office 365 and Windows Azure, and you can see how well Silverlight works as a component in Microsoft’s cloud stack – provided users do not have anything inconvenient like an Apple iPad.

But what about the Mac? All these “trusted” features appear to be Windows-only. I asked about Mac support and was told:

We’re evaluating mechanisms for enabling similar trusted applications on the mac.

Fair enough; but the way this is put does suggest that having retreated from any ambitions for broad device reach in statements at the recent PDC conference, it now seems that Microsoft is further retreating from Mac and Windows parity, and moving Silverlight more towards being an application runtime for Windows – though note that there will still be a Silverlight 5 for the Mac and which will have the features that do not require COM or PInvoke.

It is disappointing that there is still no built-in local database support, though there are third-party offerings.

There are a couple of ways to look at Silverlight. Microsoft’s lack of commitment to cross-platform parity and its unwillingness to address broad device support means it does not look good as a broad-reach browser plugin, despite its great features on systems that do support it.

On the other hand, as an alternative to desktop Windows applications Silverlight looks increasingly attractive as its capabilities increase.

More information on the new features here – though note it neglects to mention what will and will not work on a Mac.

development, microsoft, professional, virtualization, visual studio, windows

Migrating from physical to virtual with Hyper-V and disk2vhd

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I have a PC on which I did most of my work for several years. It runs Windows XP, and although I copied any critical data off it long ago, I still wheel it out from time to time because it has Visual Studio 6 and Delphi 7 projects with various add-ins installed, and it is easier to use the existing PC than to replicate the environment in a virtual machine.

These old machines are a nuisance though; so I thought I’d try migrating it to a virtual machine. There are numerous options for this, but I picked Microsoft Hyper-V because I already run several test servers on this platform with success. Having a VM on a server rather than on the desktop with Virtual PC, Virtual Box or similar means it is always easily available and can be backed up centrally.

The operation began smoothly. I installed the free Sysinternals utility Disk2vhd, which uses shadow copy so that it can create a VHD (virtual hard drive) from the system on which it is running. Next, I moved the VHD to the Hyper-V server and created a new virtual machine set to boot from that drive.

Windows XP started up first time without any blue screen problems, though it did ask to be reactivated.

image

I could not activate yet though, because XP could not find a driver for the network card. The solution was to install the Hyper-V integration services, and here things started to go wrong. Integration services asked to upgrade the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer), a key system DLL:

image

However, on restart I got the very same dialog.

Fortunately I was not the first to have this problem. I was prepared for some hassle and had my XP with SP3 CD ready, so I copied and expanded halaacpi.dll from this CD to my system32 folder and amended boot.ini as suggested:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS=”Disk2vhd Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /FASTDETECT /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /HAL=halaacpi.dll

I rebooted and now the integration services installed OK. However, if you do this then I suggest your delete the /HAL=halaacpi.dll argument before rebooting again, as with this in place Windows would not start for me.  In fact, you can delete the special Disk2vhd option in boot.ini completely; it is no longer needed.

After that everything was fine – integration worked, the network came to life and I activated Windows – but performance was poor. To be fair, it was not that good in hardware either. Still, I am working on it. I’ve given the Virtual Machine 1.5GB RAM and dual processors. Removing software made obsolete by the migration, things like the SoundMAX and NVIDIA drivers seemed to help quite a bit. It is usable, and will improve as I fine-tune the setup.

Overall, the process was easier than I expected and getting at my old developer setup is now much more convenient.

microsoft, mobile, professional, windows

As Microsoft releases new tools for Windows Phone, developers ask: how is it selling?

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Microsoft has released Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools – not a lot to report, I guess, except that what you could already do in C# you can now also do in Visual Basic.

Still, when someone at Microsoft asked me what I thought of the Windows Phone 7 developer platform I replied that the tools look good for the most part – though I would like to see a native code option and it seems unfortunate that mobile operators can install native code apps but the rest of us officially cannot – but the bigger question is around the size of the market.

We all know that a strong and large community of developers is critical to the success of a platform – but as I’ve argued before, developers will go where their customers are, rather than selecting a platform based on the available tools and libraries. It is a bit of both of course: the platform has to be capable of running the application, and ease of development is also a factor, but in the end nothing attracts developers more than a healthy market.

Therefore the critical question for developers is how well Windows Phone 7 is selling.

Nobody quite knows, though Tom Warren makes the case for not much more than 126,000, that being the number of users of the Windows Phone Facebook application.

I’m not quite convinced when Warren says:

It’s likely that most users will connect their Facebook account so the statistics could indicate nearly accurate sales figures.

Not everyone loves Facebook; and when I was trying out Windows Phone 7 I found myself reluctant to have it permanently logged in. Even so, I’d agree that well over 50% of users will enable Facebook integration so it is a useful statistic.

Although that suggests a relatively small number in the context of overall Smartphone sales, my perception is that lack of availability is part of the reason, so it is too early to judge the platform’s success. I do not see many Windows Phone 7 in the mobile phone shops that I pass in the UK; in fact it is unusual to see it at all. I am not sure if this is mainly because of supply shortages, or because Microsoft and its partners found it difficult to build expectations in the trade that this would be a sought-after device, or both.

Some bits of anecdotal evidence are encouraging for Microsoft. Early adopters seem to like it well enough. Nevertheless, it is a minority player at the moment and that will not change soon.

Developers are therefore faced with a small niche market. Microsoft has done a fair job with the tools; now it needs to get more devices out there, to convince developers that once they have built their applications, there are enough customers to make it worth while.

adobe, apple, cloud computing, development, internet, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software, software development, Uncategorized, web authoring

HTML 5 Canvas: the only plugin you need?

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The answer is no, of course. And Canvas is not a plugin. That said, here is an interesting proof of concept blog and video from Alexander Larsson: a GTK3 application running in Firefox without any plugin.

image

GTK is an open source cross-platform GUI framework written in C but with bindings to other languages including Python and C#.

So how does C native code run the browser without a plugin? The answer is that the HTML 5 Canvas element, already widely implemented and coming to Internet Explorer in version 9, has a rich drawing API that goes right down to pixel manipulation if you need it. In Larsson’s example, the native code is actually running on a remote server. His code receives the latest image of the application from the server and transmits mouse and keyboard operations back, creating the illusion that the application is running in the browser. The client only needs to know what is different in the image as it changes, so although sending screen images sounds heavyweight, it is amenable to optimisation and compression.

It is the same concept as Windows remote desktop and terminal services, or remote access using vnc, but translated to a browser application that requires no additional client or setup.

There are downsides to this approach. First, it puts a heavy burden on the server, which is executing the application code as well as supplying the images, especially when there are many simultaneous users. Second, there are tricky issues when the user expects the application to interact with the local machine, such as playing sounds, copying to the clipboard or printing. Everything is an image, and not character-by-character text, for example. Third, it is not well suited to graphics that change rapidly, as in a game with fast-paced action.

On the other hand, it solves an immense problem: getting your application running on platforms which do not support the runtime you are using. Native applications, Flash and Silverlight on Apple’s iPad and iPhone, for example. I recall seeing a proof of concept for Flash at an Adobe MAX conference (not the most recent one) as part of the company’s research on how to break into Apple’s walled garden.

It is not as good as a true local application in most cases, but it is better than nothing.

Now, if Microsoft were to do something like this for Silverlight, enabling users to run Silverlight apps on their Apple and Linux devices, I suspect attitudes to the viability of Silverlight in the browser would change considerably.

microsoft

Microsoft removes Drive Extender from new Windows Home Server, users rebel

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Microsoft’s Windows Home Server has a popular feature called Drive Extender [Word docx] which lets you increase storage space simply by adding an internal or external drive – no fussing with drive letters. In addition, Drive Extender has some resilience against drive failure, duplicating files stored in shared folders when more than one drive is available.

Recognising the usefulness of this feature for business users as well as in the home, Microsoft prepared a significantly upgraded Drive Extender for the next version of Windows Home Server, code-named Vail, and for new “Essentials” editions of Small Business Server (SBS) and Storage Server. Anandtech has an explanation of the changes, necessary to support business features such as the Encrypted File System.

The new version is more complex though, and it seems Microsoft could not get it working reliably. Rather than delay the new products, Microsoft decided to drop the feature, as announced by product manager Michael Leworthy. Note the rating on the announcement.

image

Part of the problem is that rather than discuss difficulties in the implementation, Leworthy presented the decision as something to do with the availability of larger drives:

We are also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate, where 2Tb drives and more are becoming easy accessible to small businesses.  Since customers looking to buy Windows Home Server solutons from OEM’s will now have the ability to include larger drives, this will reduce the need for Drive Extender functionality.

He added that “OEM partners” will implement “storage management and protection solutions”.

Unfortunately this was a key feature of Windows Home Server. The announcement drew comments like this:

My great interest in Vail has just evaporated.  Drive Extender is the great feature of Home Server, and what my personal data storage is based around.  I have loved owning my WHS but unfortunately without DE I will be looking for other products now.

A thread (requires login to WHS beta) on the beta feedback site Microsoft Connect attracted thousands of votes in a couple of days.

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One of the concerns is that while Drive Extender 2 may be needed for the business servers, the version 1 is fine for home users. Therefore it seems that the attempt to bring the technology to business servers has killed it for both.

The SBS community is less concerned about the issue than home users. For example, Eriq Neale says:

While I can see how the Home Server folks are going to lament the loss of DE from their product, as cool as it is, removing that technology removes a LOT of roadblocks I was expecting for Aurora and Breckenridge, and that’s good news for my business.

though Wayne Small says:

I know that a few of my fellow MVPs were told of this recently and sworn to secrecy under our NDA, and we honestly were dumbstruck as to the fact it had been cancelled.  I can only assume that the powers that be at Microsoft know what they are truly doing by removing this feature.  On the flip side however, it means that any server backup or antivirus product that worked with Windows Server 2008 R2 will now most certainly work with SBS 2011 Essentials without modification!  See – there is a silver lining there somewhere.

What should Microsoft do? I guess it depends on how badly broken Drive Extender 2 is. Perhaps one option would be to keep Drive Extender 1 in Vail, but leave it out of the business servers. Another idea would be to delay the products while Drive Extender 2 is fixed, presuming it can be done in months rather than years.

Or will Microsoft ignore the feedback and ship without Drive Extender at all? Microsoft may be right, in that shipping a server with broken storage management would be a disaster, no matter how much users like the feature.

cloud computing, microsoft

How will online services impact Microsoft’s partner business?

2010 is the year Microsoft got serious about cloud services. Windows Azure opened for real business in November 2009 – OK, just before 2010 – and CEO Steve Ballmer took to telling the world how Microsoft is “all in” for cloud computing whenever he got up to speak. Office and SharePoint 2010 launched in May 2010 complete with the ability to create and edit Office documents from a web browser. Microsoft also announced Office 365, essentially an upgrade of its existing BPOS offering, offering hosted Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync (Office Communicator). Microsoft also announced Small Business Server 2011, including an Essentials edition, formerly codenamed “Aurora”, which is little more than Windows Home Server plus Active Directory and points small businesses towards cloud services for email and document collaboration.

I’d guess that Microsoft’s cloud conversion is driven in part by the progress Google, Salesforce.com and others have made in persuading businesses that hosted internet services make more sense than maintaining your own servers and server applications in many cases.

But what is the impact on Microsoft partners, who have been kept busy supplying and configuring servers, implementing backup, keeping systems running, and then upgrading them as they become obsolete? On the face of it they have less to do in a hosted world, and although Microsoft offers commission on the sale of online subscriptions, that might not compensate for lost business.

Then again, cloud services offer new opportunities, still need configuring, and look likely to be a source of new business for partners particularly at a time when the majority of businesses have not yet made the transition.

I’m researching a further piece on the subject and would love to hear honest views from partners such as resellers and solution providers about how Microsoft’s online services are affecting partner business now and in the future. Or maybe you think this cloud thing is overdone and it will be business as usual for a while yet. You can contact me by email – tim(at)itwriting.com – or of course comment below.