Microsoft can't boast the ERP (enterprise resource planning) application revenue earned by giants SAP and Oracle, nor equal their breadth of technological capabilities, but its tight focus on small and medium-sized businesses gives it an edge, according to observers and company officials.
While Microsoft does not release specific figures for its Dynamics ERP product line, annual revenues have been estimated at between US$1.1 billion and $1.2 billion, according to Ray Wang, a partner with the analyst firm Altimeter Group.
There is plenty of room for that number to grow, as midsized companies look to replace legacy systems or small ones seek out ERP applications as they grow larger in size.
Microsoft may be having a slow hard slog trying to popularize its Bing search engine, but there's one online market where Microsoft is doing quite well.
A leading Web analytics firm said Friday that Microsoft's Web sites were the most popular with users on the Internet last month.
According to a new report released by comScore, Microsoft's sites, which include mega sites like Microsoft.com, portal MSN.com, and search engine Bing.com, garnered almost 15 percent of all time users spent online worldwide in September. That constitutes a jump of 43 percent from September 2008.
When Microsoft first started talking about building mobile-phone software back in the late 1990s, handset makers that had been in the market for years scoffed. Sure, Microsoft was a huge software developer, but making software for mobile devices is different and more complicated than for PCs, they argued. After all, by the late '90s, some companies had already spent decades developing their mobile platforms.
But Microsoft, with its deep pockets, worked away at it and by last year, after first launching in 2002, Windows Mobile had a respectable 13.9 percent of worldwide smartphone market share, according to researchers at Canalys.
Microsoft has unveiled a fairly significant redesign of the MSN web site, the first overhaul the site has seen in about a decade. The new MSN site incorporates social networking and could breathe some life back into the mostly dead concept of web portals.
The preview of the new design appears to be less cluttered and confusing--which isn't easy to do when also trying to convey as much information at-a-glance on one page as possible. The format and layout are very similar to what Yahoo and Google provide with their web portals, and you can customize it to display the information you want to see in the order you want to see it. Fairly standard stuff.
After nearly two months of life, Microsoft's open source CodePlex Foundation is now gearing up to accept projects, but it still has some work to do.
"We believe we'll move into a more mature state in the spring," Sam Ramji, interim president of the CodePlex Foundation, told InternetNews.com.
Microsoft formally unveiled the CodePlex Foundation in September as an effort to help commercial entities bring open source products to market.
The CodePlex Foundation is a separate but related effort to Microsoft's CodePlex project site, which was launched in 2006 as a site for hosting open source efforts. The foundation is now organizing itself to tackle its mandate of helping commercial open source technology development and adoption.
Microsoft may find the Family Guy too off-color or off-center for sponsorship, but the company seems to have something of a double standard --- it's spent more than $1 million on ads for South Park, and it pays for ads on shows that feature drug dealing, violence, plenty of sex, and bathroom humor.
Microsoft initially said that it was going to sponsor a special titled "Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show," on November 8, and was going to embed Windows 7 pitches directly into the show, rather than using traditional ads.
Today's Microsoft layoffs -- 800 employees -- are surprising. Following the last round, executives seemingly slammed the axe into the chopping block, even though the full number of 5,000 layoffs planned over 18 months hadn't been met.
Late last night, TechFlash first reported that layoffs would be coming today. Microsoft started informing employees today, in what surely has to be an unexpected misfortune. So much time has passed since the last layoffs, the threat of more surely faded. For good reasons. Until these 800 pink slips, there were reasons to be cheerful on the Microsoft campus.
Microsoft is trying to steal away Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM on Demand customers with a new offer that will provide them with six months' access to its own CRM Online application at no charge if they sign a 12-month contract.
Microsoft charges US$44 per month per user for CRM Online Professional edition. That compares to $65 per month per user for Salesforce.com Professional. Oracle CRM on Demand pricing starts at $70 per month per user.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's application is comparable from a feature standpoint and "already about 35 percent cheaper" than the competition, said Brad Wilson, general manager of Dynamics CRM.
Microsoft is adding two new, high-end editions to its SQL Server 2008 Release 2, or R2, line of database products, with features that include support for up to 256 processors.
Meanwhile, Microsoft executives also announced that the next community technology preview of the core product -- SQL Server 2008 R2 -- will begin this month. The previous CTP shipped in August.
The two new premium packages meant for high-end, mission critical processing scenarios are dubbed SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter and SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse, and they are meant for industrial strength datacenter and data warehousing applications.
Although Microsoft leaders have spent years promoting tablet computers with only marginal success, excitement around the form factor is finally building, thanks to technology advancements, a Microsoft executive said. "Bill and I and others at Microsoft have long been proponents of the tablet-based computer," said Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer, referring to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
"We've worked at it diligently now for well over a decade."Gates launched Microsoft's tablet PC platform in 2001, predicting that within five years the tablet would become the most popular form of PC sold in the U.S. That didn't exactly work out.