Microsoft Office Live

March 24, 2008 from PC World – “Microsoft is synonymous with the ubiquitous Windows operating system. But its Microsoft Office productivity suite pulls in more revenue than any version of Windows. Competition from Web-hosted productivity applications like Google Docs and Zoho Office has changed the rules of the application-suite game, however, threatening Microsoft's desktop application revenues and forcing it to address the growing popularity of Web-hosted applications with new features and products...

If you and a few of your coworkers or family members want to collaborate in a lightweight fashion using Microsoft Office apps, Microsoft's unique response to Web-hosted applications could be a free and easy no-brainer.”

180 View – A few days after PC World’s article on Microsoft Office Live, we read in ChannelWeb - “Google took an important step forward Monday in its rivalry with Microsoft Office Live, reporting that Google Docs will allow users to edit word processing documents offline. Google said users of its Google Docs word processing application can use Google Gears to save and then edit documents without being connected to the Internet.” As Google and Microsoft duke it out, we all benefit from the improvements made in their respective systems.

Web Conferencing at no charge

I (Michael Burns) tried Microsoft SharedView (now in beta), which allows you to invite other people to see your desktop. I was out of town and was able to speak over Skype and share my desktop from my hotel room for 2 hours. It worked well and it didn’t cost me a cent.

It's a (Web) Hit

March 27, 2008 from bMighty - The article offers suggestions to use the internet more effectively such as adding content and collaboration. “Web applications such as Basecamp make it easy for you to create online client project areas that can be branded and designed with the look and feel of your Website.”

180 View – We thought that the Basecamp recommendation looked very interesting. Basecamp’s website (http://www.basecamphq.com/) says “Basecamp takes a fresh, novel approach to project collaboration. Projects don't fail from a lack of charts, graphs, stats, or reports, they fail from a lack of clear communication. Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project.” Anyone out there used it yet?

Amazon – more than books and music

February 21, 2008 from Baseline – “By stepping beyond its circumscribed sphere of selling books, toys, music, DVDs and computers online, Amazon is not just poaching far from its own turf by penetrating an entirely new market, it’s also challenging the established players in the emerging software as a service (SaaS), managed services and grid-computing sectors. It’s as if General Motors suddenly opened up its factories worldwide to allow thousands of companies to make their products using its equipment and facilities…

This past holiday season, Amazon’s e-commerce site handled customer orders for a whopping 5.4 million items on Dec. 10th alone—more than 60 items per second. Its fulfillment network shipped 3.9 million units in a single day. Nintendo’s Wii game systems flew out the doors at an incredible clip—17 per second—when the coveted games were in stock.

Amazon’s e-commerce success hasn’t gone unnoticed on Wall Street. The company’s shares last year soared 135 percent, fractionally better than tech darling Apple’s and nearly three times the stock-value growth of search juggernaut Google.

Both revenue and profit spurted last year, with sales up 39 percent (from $10.7 billion in 2006 to $14.8 billion in 2007), and net income up 150 percent (from $190 million in 2006 to $476 million in 2007). Although its Web services foray has yet to be viewed as a major revenue contributor, Amazon’s computing-services revenues range from $46 million to $92 million, analysts estimate.

Unlike conventional software vendors that must build vast data centers to get into the SaaS business, Amazon is tapping its existing—and often underused—infrastructure. “Amazon has a lot of capacity that sits idle for a lot of the year,” AWS’ Selipsky says. It’s as if a thoroughbred racehorse, restricted to running in cheap claiming races for 50 weeks of the year, suddenly was spurred on to compete in the Kentucky Derby.

Amazon has long been hip to the idea of making a buck off its various e-commerce systems. Nearly one-third of Amazon’s revenue comes from third parties, such as merchants that use its various technologies. “This is a multibillion-dollar business for us,” Selipsky says.”

180 View – The article is interesting in Amazon’s eCommerce metrics but also in the direction the company is taking. Amazon and other companies will provide both the hardware and software and we will pay as we need it.

Microsoft Offers To Buy Yahoo

Feb 1, 2007 from WebProNews – “The world's top software company could boost its online presence dramatically if Yahoo accepts a $44.6 billion bid to be purchased. Microsoft has offered Yahoo shareholders a 62 percent premium on their shares to sell the company. Yahoo's latest disappointing earnings announcement helped to depress the stock price, making it a renewed target for a takeover.

"We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement. With online advertising projected to grow to $80 billion by 2010, Microsoft can grab a larger slice of that pie if it can pull in Yahoo, which ranks as the world's heaviest trafficked web property..."

180 View – This seems like a lot to swallow even for Microsoft. It will take time and more money to integrate products, services and culture.

Internet Traffic Jam

November 28, 2007 from the Globe And Mail – “Anyone who has ever found themselves trapped alongside other frustrated commuters during rush hour knows just how frustrating heavy traffic can be. But with more cars than ever crowding the highways, congestion and lane closures have become an unavoidable reality.

On the Internet, the resource isn't asphalt, it's bandwidth. But similar congestion problems have prompted some Internet service providers in Canada and the U.S. to restrict the flow of certain traffic on their networks.

They argue that bandwidth-intensive applications such as peer-to-peer file transfer programs clog their networks by using a large percentage of their traffic space, which leads to a poor experience for the rest of the customers, the same way a lumbering tractor trailer can impede flow on the highway. Their solution has been to "shape" traffic, essentially slowing down certain kinds of Internet activity while giving other data priority. Most of the traffic being shaped is peer-to-peer traffic.

Depending on the study, peer-to-peer traffic accounts for anywhere from 50 to 90 per cent of online traffic, but emanates from as few as 10 per cent of all users. Much of that traffic is facilitated through BitTorrent, a file-sharing protocol once synonymous with piracy but which recently has developed into a legitimate tool for quickly delivering large amounts of digital content…”

180 View – Most business people we know don’t know anything about BitTorrent and thought they (or you) should know a little about what’s consuming 50-90% of online traffic. We have heard rumours about the internet getting bogged down but we have not seen any evidence or any compelling reports to support this theory.

The Google Phone Is Doomed or...

November 6, 2007 from PC Magazine – “Google finally announced that it would release something it calls the Open Handset Alliance, and 34 companies are already on board! This is the Google phone initiative we've been hearing about. The Google phone is coming!

Over the years, I've noticed that any company, anytime it wants, can now get dozens of other companies to agree to become a so-called strategic partner. This is done only to save the cost of postage for the strategic partner, who gets some lame press release distributed for free.

When I see a bunch of joiners jumping on some unknown, unreleased unfinished pipe dream, I actually laugh.”

180 View – On November 5, 2007, The New York Times hyped “What Apple began with its iPhone, Google is hoping to accelerate, with an ambitious plan to transform the software at the heart of cellphones. The personal computer is climbing off its desktop perch and hopping into the pockets of millions of people. The resulting merger of computing and communications is likely to revolutionize the telecommunications industry as thoroughly as the PC changed the computing world in the early 1980s.”

Isn’t it great to get such diverse opinions about the same thing?

Microsoft 'Unified Communications'

October 16, 2007 from PC Magazine – “On Tuesday, Microsoft officially launched its "Unified Communications" initiative, which promises to treat voice as just another data type that can be routed around an office, much like email…

“The transformation to software-based communications will be as profound as moving from typewriters to word-processing software," Gates said.”

180 View – There are other voices that question the hype. For example Information Week wrote on October 20 – “In introducing Microsoft's unified communications products last week, Bill Gates predicted a change in the way people work "as profound as the shift from typewriters to word processing." Uh-huh--in the same way tablet PCs were to replace pen and paper? We're still waiting…

The mixing of voice, video, messaging, and collaboration capabilities holds great promise for the way people work, but infrastructure upgrades are required. And Microsoft isn't the obvious choice for VoIP; if anything, it has catching up to do. A crowded market of established competitors awaits Microsoft.”

Also on October 16 from InfoWorld – “In light of all the hoopla around unified communications--especially at today's Microsoft UC event in San Francisco --and in light of the fact that the backbone of any UC platform is VoIP [Voice over IP], I just thought I'd inject a brief note of realism into the discussion of the future of UC and the current reality. In other words, when it comes to VoIP, the emperor has no clothes. Or at least let's say he is scantily clad. What do I mean? Simply this. VoIP is not half as good as my old AT&T service. I not only speak for myself here but friends and relatives who are using it as well.”

I personally love VoIP using Skype but it's true that it's not yet 100% - Give it a little more time.

Google Earth Looks Skyward

August 22, 2007 from PC World – “Google Inc. may just be the center of the universe now: A new add-on for its Earth satellite program, called Sky, lets users explore space and see photos of the precise star formation overhead based on their locale.”

180 View – We recommend extreme caution in looking skyward especially if you have a lot of work to do.

The wide world of Wi-Max

June 26 2007 from CNNMoney.com – “(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Wireless Internet service works great - so long as you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot. But what if you could have wireless Internet everywhere you go, available on your laptop and cell phone, at speeds that can leave both DSL and 3G data networks in the dust?

That's what Sprint Nextel customers could get later this year, when the Reston, Va., carrier starts rolling out its $3 billion mobile Wi-Max network.

The promise of Wi-Max, which stands for worldwide interoperability for microwave access, has been talked about for years. Unlike Wi-Fi, which was designed to send signals no farther than 300 feet, only a few Wi-Max transmitters are needed to blanket an entire city with high-speed Internet connectivity.

Fasten your seat belts: The Internet service model of telecoms, cable companies, and cellular operators is about to be disrupted.

Sprint says its new service will go live in three markets - Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington - by the end of 2007. It will be the first U.S. carrier to launch the next-generation network, which already exists in South Korea and is five times faster than current 3G cellular data services. Sprint hopes to have coverage available to 100 million Americans in about 35 regions nationwide by 2009...

Sprint is not the only Wi-Max player. Clearwire, founded by famed cellular entrepreneur Craig McCaw, should have its network up and running in 2008, with coverage for 45 million people. "We're doing for the Internet what cell phones did for voice 20 years ago," says Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff.”

180 View – What do you think the impact will be if the internet is available everywhere? In the ERP world, it will extend the applications to everyone en route, in remote offices or in the field. Construction supervisors will be able to communicate in real time with head office and prevent mistakes made because of a lag in communications; companies that provide services directly to businesses and consumers will be more effective in responding to customer requests…