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Microsoft have been very successful in transitioning their commercial clients to Office365 in Australia. Their focus is now probably on growing Azure as fast as
by apapli 9y ago
Microsoft have been very successful in transitioning their commercial clients to Office365 in Australia. Their focus is now probably on growing Azure as fast as possible, as well as other key areas such as Power BI and Dynamics365. And of course doubling down on building out their developer ecosystem, where they lost so much mindshare under Ballmer for the better part of a decade at least.
Not suprised to read this, they probably have a bunch of folk still selling their "old tech" and need to move them on (or reskill, where there are job openings).
- arethuza 9y agoYes, given how rapidly all of their products are becoming cloud focused with on-premise a secondary focus it is hardly surprising that they are having to restructure their sales teams. It's a completely different commercial offering.
- Pxtl 9y agoIt actually stings a bit as a dev at a shop that really needs onprem - every time I see new TFS features that are cloud-only I feel a bit snubbed.
- arethuza 9y agoI think a lot of people are going to be feeling that pain over the next few years - MS has really gone all out for cloud based services.
- scirocco 9y agoHow about Azure Stack? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/
- arethuza 9y agoIsn't that a rather small subset of Microsoft's online services?
- youdontknowtho 9y agoIt is, but its a pretty core set of functionality.
- youdontknowtho 9y agoThat's where they would say that the cloud is architecture and not a place. I really think that for most Microsoft shops that Azure stack is the only way that they should be thinking about on-perm systems.
- mulletbum 9y agoThey do with my business. They constantly come in to try to add more services on to our O365 model. However, it's like talking to old salespeople about a new product they have never used. It's like pulling teeth and my team has to come up with their own solutions instead of Microsoft selling us a complete one. I for one am happy to hear they are doing this.
- Spooky23 9y agoIf you want to amuse yourself, ask Microsoft how to install Visio and/or Project with Office 365 Office without spending any money on "upgrading" your license.
- illumin8 9y agoThey have an online version of Visio now, so that trick will only work with Project... Of course, they are probably launching an online version of Project as well.
- Spooky23 9y agoYou cannot mix editions in many circumstances. There is a "Click to Run Perpetual" install method now, which doesn't work with multiple activation (i.e. Citrix/VDI) mode.
- dongerelite 9y agoSharedComputerActivation has been around for a while now and the C2R + Visio bug was fixed in mid 2016.
- Spooky23 9y agoTell my Microsoft SE and DSEs.
- mulletbum 9y agoThey do with my business. They constantly come in to try to add more services on to our O365 model. However, it's like talking to old salespeople about a new product they have never used. It's like pulling teeth and my team has to come up with their own solutions instead of Microsoft selling us a complete one. I for one am happy to hear they are doing this.
- jhardcastle 9y agoThe article mentions their increasing focus on Azure. I'm amazed by the number of people we're talking about. If you follow the links in the article back a few years, it appears Microsoft has laid off close to 30-40,000 people in the last 4 years, less than half of which were from Nokia. But with a global workforce in the range of 120,000 people, I guess that's not completely out of proportion.
- skinnymuch 9y agoIf that number doesn't include the new layoffs. Then I dont know, ~20K lay offs excluding Nokia and including this new one does seem like a lot for 120K employees. Over 15% in 4-5 years.
- martijn_himself 9y agoThe good part is perhaps that all these applications are going to have to be rewritten at some point in the future on a different platform. I'm a Microsoft developer on Dynamics and it is unbearable (comparable to SharePoint). The gap between a native consumer and 'enterprise' application experience only seems to be widening.
- pc86 9y agoAs a developer who has to use Dynamics I can't even imagine having to develop on it. My heart goes out to you.
- WorldMaker 9y agoI have a great sympathy for any developer that must work with/on/for Dynamics. I've been Dynamics-adjacent enough to see some of the pain secondhand and lucky enough not to experience it firsthand. The very well maintained MSDN documentation pages for X++ are some of my favorite pages to send to developer friends as the developer equivalent of "ghost stories" when you sit around fireside chatting about the Daily WTF or MUMPS.
- arethuza 9y agoThe X++ stuff is for the product formerly known as AX though? Based on my experience with AX its a lot nicer than JDE or SAP.
- WorldMaker 9y agoTo my knowledge, X++ has been supported by the entire Dynamics line at various points in time. I remember hearing some complaints about it in Dynamics CRM more than a decade ago... To be fair to X++, yes most everything its competitors do are worse, but being the best at being the worst is a strange and dubious honor. Similarly, X++ has done a lot of work to somewhat keep up with the times including a deeper integration into/with the .NET CLR allowing for better interop with Microsoft's DevDiv languages, etc. That's part of what makes it such a good ghost story is that it is well maintained, has good intentions, has been somewhat modernized and more. But it's still a chimera of a language whose origination story was "we need bits of C++, XML, and SQL smashed into the same language".
- ams6110 9y agoThey can see the writing on the wall. For both consumers and business users, a PC with a full OS is a liability compared to a lightweight client machine and cloud services (either hosted in Azure or on-premises). The wheel has circled back around to the early 1990s. Remember client-server? Only now, it's practical. The universal client (web browser) is all most users need. The nightmare of managing local installations of the client software is gone. Management of user PCs, drivers, updates, dealing with malware, is all going to be a thing of the past.
- balls187 9y ago> The wheel has circled back around to the early 1990s Try late 60's with time-sharing.
- ams6110 9y agoTrue, but that's more like the web of 10 years ago when the client side was dumb and everything was processed and rendered on the server.
- drudru11 9y agoRight - the Ken Olsen quote.
- mikestew 9y agoThe difference being that if you, the vendor, make a piggish mess of JavaScript soup, you only hurt yourself because it runs on your machine. Today, Google doesn’t care the GMail tab is hogging all the resources of the machine on which it executes because they’re my resources, not Google’s.
- pjmlp 9y agoYeah, I remember the JavaOS for the NC (Network Computer) and the terminals sold by Sun and Oracle. What I hate on the so called universal client is that we could have had a proper solution with XHTML and all the XML semantic derivatives, instead we get a document model pretending to be an UI framework. WebComponents seem to still be WIP.
- Spooky23 9y agoIn my experience, which is similar to experiences that friends and colleagues in other places have had is that Microsoft started cracking down on EA audits in the last two years. That's always a sign of dying business models. Oracle is the same boat... I've been told that the poobah salesguys don't even get paid on non-cloud sales.
- oblio 9y agoEA audits?
- rusanu 9y agoprobably Enterprise Agreements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Enterprise_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Enterprise_Agreement
- oblio 9y agoIn that case it's not necessarily a bad sign. Adobe did the same thing before and during its cloud transition and it seems to be fine. I feel that these audits are basically collecting money that's already on the table, even though the practice itself might seem petty. Microsoft also seems on track for a successful cloud transition.
- cwyers 9y agoSeems like a case of the hammer and the anvil -- get people used to paying actual license costs for shrinkwrap software, and not considering "we can pay for X seats and use X+250 copies" as one of the benefits of shrinkwrap over cloud.
- youdontknowtho 9y agoMicrosoft and Oracle are in very different positions. I d heard that same thing, though, on Azure being what gets sales people bonuses.
- mc32 9y agoThat's pretty good reasoning. One other area it'd be nice for them to tackle and simplify is their licensing scheme --even their own people are not always sure what licensing applies where. They seriously need to streamline that aspect of their business --granted this affects mostly their legacy business but that isn't going away overnight.
- ganoushoreilly 9y agoI agree, but on the plus side, smaller firms and newer businesses are able to take advantage of the newer model, which is both easier for clients and more profitable for MS. I'm actually looking at dumping Google Apps for biz and migrating to O365 myself due to the integrations with Azure AD etc.