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Gary Edwards

Future of Cloud Computing Survey Validates Microsoft's Strategy - GuruFocus.com - 0 views

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    "But Microsoft is way ahead of Oracle when it comes to the IaaS segment with Microsoft Azure growing at triple-digit speeds for the last several quarters. Oracle's IaaS segment grew only 6% during the latest quarter, a growth rate that exemplifies its weak position in the strongly growing IaaS market. As Office 365 keeps marching onward and upward, Microsoft is gaining an even stronger foothold in the enterprise segment. Its IaaS offering is as good as any other company out there in the segment, something that is also validated by the strong growth numbers it has been reporting in the last two years. As Microsoft keeps expanding its business management software portfolio that includes CRM and ERP, the company will be in a unique position with strong cloud offerings in SaaS-PaaS-IaaS segments that will be unmatchable by its competition. Companies will naturally gravitate toward a single vendor that can take care of several workflows instead of going through the headache of handling multiple vendors and worrying about integrating all of them to work seamlessly. With Microsoft, that won't be a problem, and that's something Nadella is consciously crafting out of the company's many disparate products. But don't get me wrong. The need for multiple SaaS vendors will always be there. Different businesses have different needs, and there will be times when only a niche player would be able to adequately address those needs. But when you have a company that can take care of the majority of the workflows as well as workloads, like Microsoft can, you'd rather keep Microsoft to handle all the heavy lifting while throwing in a few more SaaS companies to address the entirety of your technology needs. There won't be a need to have Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) manage your customer relationships, Oracle handle your enterprise resource planning, Microsoft handle your office productivity suite and Amazon handle your infrastructure. All you need is a few clicks on your Microsoft
Gary Edwards

The Office 365 Story: Is Microsoft leading the way for Cloud Office Applications? - 0 views

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    "Shortly after the start of the millennium, Microsoft stated a goal to be the go-to enterprise platform for the data center. Many in the industry scoffed at the idea that Microsoft could dominate in a market traditionally led by Unix. Today, there are few enterprises that don't have a significant investment in Microsoft servers and infrastructure. Five years ago Microsoft launched Office 365 and, right now, we're seeing a parallel in their move to lead the cloud office application sector. Office and the enterprise applications that support Office 365-Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business - have become ubiquitous in the market. In July this year, it was reported that Office 365 is used daily by over 70 million enterprise users. However, Microsoft hasn't achieved this success without challenges. In 2013, many industry pundits saw Google Apps for Enterprise as the heir apparent for cloud and productivity, but things have changed significantly in the last three years. Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has rebranded to support its 'mobile-first, cloud- first' go-to-market. The move to support Office on the Apple and Google platforms has strengthened its position in the market. Following this success, their next ambition is to enable customers and partners to move to Office 365. Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a number of initiatives to help clients consume Office 365 licenses more effectively. One such program is geared towards securing the license base by motivating renewals and preventing-churn versus a completely new sale. Once a client activates and consumes the licenses on Office 365, they receive ongoing upgrades, renewals, and new features as part of an evergreen service. Employees experience the latest across all their devices. This compares favorably to the historical process of waiting every three to four years for the on-premises Enterprise Agreement to be signed and subsequent refresh of a laptop with a new office applica
Paul Merrell

Microsoft Pitches Technology That Can Read Facial Expressions at Political Rallies - 0 views

  • On the 21st floor of a high-rise hotel in Cleveland, in a room full of political operatives, Microsoft’s Research Division was advertising a technology that could read each facial expression in a massive crowd, analyze the emotions, and report back in real time. “You could use this at a Trump rally,” a sales representative told me. At both the Republican and Democratic conventions, Microsoft sponsored event spaces for the news outlet Politico. Politico, in turn, hosted a series of Microsoft-sponsored discussions about the use of data technology in political campaigns. And throughout Politico’s spaces in both Philadelphia and Cleveland, Microsoft advertised an array of products from “Microsoft Cognitive Services,” its artificial intelligence and cloud computing division. At one exhibit, titled “Realtime Crowd Insights,” a small camera scanned the room, while a monitor displayed the captured image. Every five seconds, a new image would appear with data annotated for each face — an assigned serial number, gender, estimated age, and any emotions detected in the facial expression. When I approached, the machine labeled me “b2ff” and correctly identified me as a 23-year-old male.
  • “Realtime Crowd Insights” is an Application Programming Interface (API), or a software tool that connects web applications to Microsoft’s cloud computing services. Through Microsoft’s emotional analysis API — a component of Realtime Crowd Insights — applications send an image to Microsoft’s servers. Microsoft’s servers then analyze the faces and return emotional profiles for each one. In a November blog post, Microsoft said that the emotional analysis could detect “anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness or surprise.” Microsoft’s sales representatives told me that political campaigns could use the technology to measure the emotional impact of different talking points — and political scientists could use it to study crowd response at rallies.
  • Facial recognition technology — the identification of faces by name — is already widely used in secret by law enforcement, sports stadiums, retail stores, and even churches, despite being of questionable legality. As early as 2002, facial recognition technology was used at the Super Bowl to cross-reference the 100,000 attendees to a database of the faces of known criminals. The technology is controversial enough that in 2013, Google tried to ban the use of facial recognition apps in its Google glass system. But “Realtime Crowd Insights” is not true facial recognition — it could not identify me by name, only as “b2ff.” It did, however, store enough data on each face that it could continuously identify it with the same serial number, even hours later. The display demonstrated that capability by distinguishing between the number of total faces it had seen, and the number of unique serial numbers. Photo: Alex Emmons
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  • Instead, “Realtime Crowd Insights” is an example of facial characterization technology — where computers analyze faces without necessarily identifying them. Facial characterization has many positive applications — it has been tested in the classroom, as a tool for spotting struggling students, and Microsoft has boasted that the tool will even help blind people read the faces around them. But facial characterization can also be used to assemble and store large profiles of information on individuals, even anonymously.
  • Alvaro Bedoya, a professor at Georgetown Law School and expert on privacy and facial recognition, has hailed that code of conduct as evidence that Microsoft is trying to do the right thing. But he pointed out that it leaves a number of questions unanswered — as illustrated in Cleveland and Philadelphia. “It’s interesting that the app being shown at the convention ‘remembered’ the faces of the people who walked by. That would seem to suggest that their faces were being stored and processed without the consent that Microsoft’s policy requires,” Bedoya said. “You have to wonder: What happened to the face templates of the people who walked by that booth? Were they deleted? Or are they still in the system?” Microsoft officials declined to comment on exactly what information is collected on each face and what data is retained or stored, instead referring me to their privacy policy, which does not address the question. Bedoya also pointed out that Microsoft’s marketing did not seem to match the consent policy. “It’s difficult to envision how companies will obtain consent from people in large crowds or rallies.”
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    But nobody is saying that the output of this technology can't be combined with the output of facial recognition technology to let them monitor you individually AND track your emotions. Fortunately, others are fighting back with knowledge and tech to block facial recognition. http://goo.gl/JMQM2W
Gary Edwards

MS Office 365 and its Influence on Business - 0 views

  • “MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats”
  • Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
  • Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted.
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  • Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.).
  • There are three essential reasons why Office 365 will be highly demanded by business: - Business currently needs services for collaborative editing of the huge documents as well as for arrangement and management of their ample quantities; provision of the required safety level in the document workflow systems without additional expenses. Set of the Microsoft services and its integration with MS Office 365 offer solution for these tasks with some minor reservations. -Integration of MS Office 365 with existing services and employment of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions for organization of the document workflow are also the promising trends. -Good results can be expected from employment of the cloud-based Azure platform for extension of the MS Office 365 capacities and building process setup and document workflow systems in the small and mid-sized business environment.
  • But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
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    "Microsoft Office 365: what is important for business to know about the "cloud-based" office? Cloud-based service Microsoft Office 365 has become more and more popular solution for managing document workflow in companies. Subsequently, the number of MS Office 365 subscribers is growing by tens percent every year. For instance in the third quarter of 2015 the cloud-based services Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM became the principal drivers of the profit markup of Microsoft. Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats. Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted. Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.). "MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats" "
Gary Edwards

Pssst! Office 365 customers pay Microsoft up to 80% more over long haul | Computerworld - 0 views

  • Transactional customers buy Office once every five to seven years, said Hood. But by convincing businesses to subscribe to Office 365, specifically the E3 plan, Microsoft can realize an 80% increase in revenue over the years-long relationship. Office 365 E3 includes the core Office application suite, as well as cloud-based Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business, shifting those services from on-premises systems to Microsoft's servers.
  • One expert scoffed at Microsoft's multiplier, which he said was actually a low-ball estimate. "A 1.8x multiplier? How about a 6x or 20x multiplier?" said Paul DeGroot, principal at Pica Communications, a consulting firm that specializes in deciphering Microsoft's licensing practices.
  • DeGroot's point was that Microsoft rakes in much, much more than just an additional 20%, 40% or 80% by pulling customers to the cloud. "I think those numbers are conservative," DeGroot said in an email. "
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  • I always remind customers that Microsoft's internal rationale for the cloud is not superior technology or a better fit for customers, but that they can switch customers from purely transactional strategies -- where they wait for Microsoft to produce value before buying in -- or from standard EAs, where customers can stop purchasing SA but keep using the product -- to a subscription model where the customer owns nothing and must continually pay Microsoft."
  • DeGroot, like many licensing gurus, is often called in when a Microsoft customer grows weary of paying Redmond and wants ideas on cutting costs."We routinely reduce customers' payments to Microsoft by 40%, and the two most recent engagements were 75% lower," asserted DeGroot. The latter, he said, was accomplished by dropping the SA annuity when the customer had no plans to upgrade in the next three years, the length of SA contracts.
  • "Customers can drop SA but keep using the latest products in the full Microsoft stack for the next three years with very little downside," DeGroot added. "That's devastating for Microsoft's revenue stream. But if Microsoft can get them into [Office 365] E3, that can't happen. Microsoft will determine what features are available, when they upgrade to new versions, and how much they pay."
  • In her presentation to Wall Street, Hood also talked about even greater revenue opportunities based on selling more cloud-based services to Office 365 customers.
  • "There is additional 'yield opportunity,' in our language, to add lifetime value here, in addition to adding users," she said. For Hood, "yield" means, in her words, "selling more things on top of an installed unit."
  • the lifetime value of a customer. "When we get a cloud customer completely deployed and get utilization and consumption, it opens up with the first service, it opens up the ability for me to get the other services in there,"
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    "Microsoft loves subscriptions. Moving a corporate customer from "transactional" purchases of Office -- the once-traditional practice of purchasing one-time, perpetual licenses that let workers use the suite as long as their firms want -- to Office 365 rent-not-buy subscriptions results in almost a doubling of revenue for Microsoft. "Over the lifetime, the increased reach, the increased frequency in this example, as well as some yield, adding some incremental services, results in a 1.8 times lifetime value of that user in the transition," said CFO Amy Hood in a meeting with Wall Street last week."
Gary Edwards

It's Time for Microsoft to Reboot Office - WSJ - 0 views

  • But if you’re in my dad’s camp, you don’t need to keep buying new versions of Office. Microsoft hasn’t added a ton of new innovations to typesetting and presentation building—those all work just fine on what you’ve already got. My dad was using Office 2008 for Mac, so I asked him to install 2016. His verdict: It’s not terrible, but he sees no reason to change. (There are also a number of free or cheap basic productivity programs, including Apple’s iWork suite and LibreOffice, that, like Google, can still open and save in compatible Office formats.)
  • There’s a generational divide at work here: A survey last summer by the tech firm BetterCloud found that companies whose employee base averaged between 18 and 34 were 55% more likely to use Google than Office; those who average 35 to 54 were 19% more likely to use Office.
  • But Office 2016 doesn’t give enough reasons for previous Office owners to upgrade. And people looking for rich collaboration don’t need to wait for Microsoft to catch up.
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    "I've purchased the latest Microsoft Office for every computer I've owned. It was a foregone conclusion. Dating back to when Word was white type on a blue screen, I used it so often I could recite the shortcuts. (Thesaurus? Shift-F7.) But Microsoft has run out of reasons to keep me paying. How we get work done on computers has fundamentally changed. For the new Office 2016, Microsoft wants you to pay $150 for collaborative capabilities that others already do better, free. It brings little new to people who rely on deep features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Its mediocrity led me to a larger conclusion: It's time for Microsoft to press Control-Alt-Delete on the whole concept of Office. My relationship with Office started to sour as smartphones carried my work everywhere while my Office files stayed in the cubicle. I began emailing myself instead of fretting about scattered .doc files. Google ran with the work-anywhere idea early. Its free Web-based word processor and spreadsheet allow people in different locations to edit a document together. With Google Docs and Sheets, there's no more emailing drafts back and forth."
Gary Edwards

It's Time for Microsoft to Reboot Office - WSJ - 0 views

  • The target customer for much of Office’s evolution is corporate. But there are 15 million people who pay $70 or more a year for Office updates—and countless more who, like me, have bought Office for a home computer.
  • There’s a generational divide at work here: A survey last summer by the tech firm BetterCloud found that companies whose employee base averaged between 18 and 34 were 55% more likely to use Google than Office; those who average 35 to 54 were 19% more likely to use Office.
  • I'm a transactional lawyer, been using Word since 2002, and I think it's a terrible word processing program.  But we're stuck in it - there's no way out.MS has never fixed the two core horrible problems in Word - Styles and Section Breaks.  They should be removed from the program completely - there is no way to "fix" them.Before you say that they can be learned -- and I have indeed learned them -- here's the reality:  No one but me -- and I mean not one single lawyer or secretary I have ever worked or emailed with -- works correctly with Styles or Section Breaks.  Our long documents are emailed to the lawyers for the other parties, they make changes in their own, different Styles with additional manual formatting, and the documents become a mess.  Since we save and re-use our documents, I have to spend a lot of time cleaning them up, only to see them messed up again by the end of each deal.  And Styles can break by themselves.Word is junk.  Still inferior to 1996 WordPerfect.
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  • Thom - We still have WordPerfect on our office PCs.  We stopped using it because all our clients have only Word.  And no one has WordPerfect.  So what good does it do to make a document in WordPerfect when no one else can open it or revise it.We're stuck with Word, and it is awful awful awful. It was a shock how bad Word was when we switched from WordPerfect in 2002, and Word gets worse with each iteration.And it's not just Styles and Section Breaks; it's so many other things.I could do and edit macros in WordPerfect.  Not Word.Automatic numbering in Word is a failure, and Word does not play nice when we buy "add-ons" to try to fix that.Word does NOT incorporate an Excel spreadsheet easily, and Word's tables are below primitive.Word cannot even capitalize correctly in "Title Case", but WordPerfect could in 1996.
  • What Microsoft needs to do is fix some of the issues it's had for years - creating robust numbered/billeted lists that don't mysteriously change format - word styles that just work instead of changing anytime a word in that style is bolded. I spend more time fixing templates than I do using them in some instances. Word should look at Adobe FrameMaker for some methods on how they could simplify the application while making it more robust.
  • Fowler is correct that workplaces are the bread and butter of Office. Many home users who aren't students really don't need a complete office suite. But they never did - that's nothing new.
  • @Kevin Morgan, the problem is that everyone uses Office and Word.  They are compatible with offices across the world.
  • @Timothy D. Naegele @Kevin Morgan I think that the problem is that users (neither companies nor individuals) have pushed for standard formats such as open documents.  When you are tied to a particular standard, you are stuck with the platform.
  • @Vance Burks  Vance there are several very specific examples of things that make my teeth grind right here in Mr. Fowler's article.  I ran into exactly the same things. The biggest thing that bugs me about Office 365 is that you never know whether your document, or your edits are going to be there when you come back.  It relates to their decision to hold back the full feature set of the product, and the way they sync.  It's a flawed product architecture. With Google docs, it's sticky and I know that no matter what, my doc and my edits are going to be there when i return.  Also there are the annoying, unnecessary prompts - detailed in this article.  They are sort of Microsoft's signature, a symptom of their culture. I lived in Woodinville-Redmond for almost two years, and I never once met a happy Microsoft employee.  Well, there was one he has 18 patents and worked there for 25 years.  Then they fired him, and now he's unhappy too.  It's a very messed-up company. Unhappy culture.
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    "I've purchased the latest Microsoft Office for every computer I've owned. It was a foregone conclusion. Dating back to when Word was white type on a blue screen, I used it so often I could recite the shortcuts. (Thesaurus? Shift-F7.) But Microsoft has run out of reasons to keep me paying. How we get work done on computers has fundamentally changed. For the new Office 2016, Microsoft wants you to pay $150 for collaborative capabilities that others already do better, free. It brings little new to people who rely on deep features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Its mediocrity led me to a larger conclusion: It's time for Microsoft to press Control-Alt-Delete on the whole concept of Office. My relationship with Office started to sour as smartphones carried my work everywhere while my Office files stayed in the cubicle. I began emailing myself instead of fretting about scattered .doc files. Google ran with the work-anywhere idea early. Its free Web-based word processor and spreadsheet allow people in different locations to edit a document together. With Google Docs and Sheets, there's no more emailing drafts back and forth."
Gary Edwards

Workplace Productivity Battle Being Won By Microsoft - ARC - ARC - 0 views

  • Google Apps is still favored by small companies—deemed to be those with less than 500 employees—with 22.8% of respondents using the tools available, as compared to the 21.4% who have installed Office 365. Once you get past that employee level, however, Microsoft is dominating the space.
  • Office 365 is used by 30% of enterprise-level companies as part of their working practices, a 500% increase from 2014. Google Apps only accounts for 15% of the market, although it is worth noting that both cloud apps have grown from a 5% share only 12 months ago. Private companies tend to go down the Google route, 24% compared to Microsoft’s 21%, but 34% of publicly-traded organizations go for Microsoft over the 22% that use Google.
  • Cloud adoption is at an all-time high and Microsoft is winning over Google. The surprise is that large corporations, even in heavily regulated industries, are gaining confidence in using cloud apps. The increased focus on security, including the emergence of third-party security services from cloud access security brokers , are filling critical gaps, paving the way for broader adoption of cloud apps in the enterprise.
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    "Microsoft's Office 365 is winning the hearts and minds of the workplace, overtaking Google Apps as the preferred productivity tool by an increasing number of business enterprises, a recent report says. According to the second annual Cloud Adoption Report conducted by cloud access security broker Bitglass-subtitled Episode II: Attack of the Clouds and bizarrely using Star Wars as a recurring theme-Office 365 has trebled its user adoption rate in the space of a year from 7.7% in 2014 to 25.2%. Over 34% of organizations with between 500 and 1,000 employees use the Microsoft tool, as opposed to 21.9% who work with Google Apps For Work, an indicator that the authors of the report say confirms that cloud applications are now a significant player. Following a survey of almost 120,000 global companies-both small and enterprise level-the report said that there had been a rise of 20% from last year in the number of businesses that employed a cloud application as their prime productivity tool. In 2014, 28% of respondents used the cloud with that figure increasing to 48% 12 months later. Granted, the sample size had also risen from 80,000 in the first survey, but the results bear out a perception that cloud-based solutions will become the norm."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft has lightweight collaboration, project management mobile apps in the works | ... - 0 views

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    "Flow, Microsoft's lightweight email/chat application that looks as if it will debut on iPhones, seems to be just one of a number of new mobile-first productivity apps the company is building. Microsoft also is believed to be working on a lightweight collaboration and document-sharing app (which may be using "Flip" as its working name), as well as a lightweight project-management application, (which may be known as "Highlander"), according to sources of mine who asked not to be named. Flow, Flip and Highlander are all productivity apps that are aimed at mobile users. My bet is they're all the handy work of the "Do More Experiences" team that is part of Microsoft's Applications & Services group, as that team is focused on redefining productivity and building "next-generation experiences" for mobile platforms, including phones and tablets. One of my contacts said Flip may include some of the features that will be part of the Flow email/chat application, but will go beyond Flow by offering document viewing, editing and collaboration features. Highlander is meant to provide lightweight project management for smaller-sized projects, making it easy for users to update tasks and watch projects' progress, that same contact said. Microsoft already sells a more fully featured project-management application, Microsoft Project."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's phone business is in free fall - 0 views

  • Microsoft is also seeing some gains in its non-Windows related businesses, like Office, Azure and other cloud-based endeavors. Office revenue went up by 7 percent in the commercial sector and 6 percent in the consumer sector, thanks in part to growth in Office 365 adoption. Indeed, Office 365 itself experienced a huge growth, with a jump of 22.2 million consumer subscribers. Azure revenue grew by a whopping 120 percent.
  • In fact, CEO Satya Nadella's decision to push Microsoft's ambitions in the cloud may have saved the company from trouble ahead as it should be able to eke out a living for itself while other PC businesses flounder. For instance, Intel, which makes the bulk of its money with chips for PCs, is having to cut 11 percent of its workforce since the PC market is dying so rapidly.
  • The company also reported that Xbox Live monthly active users has grown by 26 percent year-over-year to 46 million people, and that search advertising revenue has gone up by 18 percent.
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    To no one's surprise, Microsoft isn't turning much of a profit from its phone business. According to its latest quarterly report, the company saw a dip of mobile revenue by as much as 46 percent. It sold 2.3 million Lumias over the past three months, which is a 73 percent drop from this time last year. Sadly, this is an ongoing trend; last quarter, it reported a phone sales drop by as much as 54 percent. Still, the company is making money. Revenue was $20.5 billion while net profit was $3.8 billion. Microsoft also saw growth from its Surface segment, which grew by $1.1 billion over the past three months. That's up 61 percent year-over-year. The company credited the surge in Surface sales to the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book, but there's no word in its report exactly how many of those tablet computers it sold. Windows OEM revenue dipped by only 2 percent, which outperforms the PC market.
Gary Edwards

This 26-Year Old Box.net Founder Is Raising $100 Million To Take On Giants Like Microsoft - 0 views

  • Within the enterprise, if you compare Box to something like IBM Filenet, or Microsoft SharePoint, you get almost a 10x improvement on productivity, speed, time to market for new products. So we saw an opportunity to create real innovation in that space and that's what got us excited
  • We think the market for enterprise collaboration will be much larger than the market for checking into locations on your phone."
  • What you saw with the suite product from Microsoft [Office 365], they're trying to bundle ERP, CRM, collaboration, e-mail, and communication all as one package.
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  • If you go to the average company in America, that's not what they've implemented. They've implemented Salesforce as their CRM, Google Apps for email -- a large number of them, in the millions -- they'll be thinking of Workday or NetSuite for their ERP.
  • best-of-breed aspect
  • social
  • Time is on his side -- and working against Oracle and Microsoft.
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    Good interview but i'm looking for ways to short Box.net.  I left lots of sticky notes and highlights on this page - all of which are under the Visual Document list since i didn't have a Cloud Productivity list going.  I spend quite a bit of time studying Box.net, DropBox and a ton of other early Cloud sync-share-store operations while doing research for the Sursen SurDocs product.  Also MS-Live/Office/SkyDrive and Google Docs Collaboration.  No one has a good bead on a Cloud Productivity Platform yet.  But Microsoft and Google clearly know what the game is.  They even have a plan on how to get there.  Box.net, on the other hand is totally clueless.  What are these investors thinking?
Gary Edwards

Office productivity software no closer to becoming a commodity | ZDNet - 0 views

  • Microsoft continues to have a stranglehold on office productivity in the enterprise: Just 6 percent of companies in our survey give all or some employees an alternative instead of the installed version of Microsoft Office. What's Hot on ZDNet Windows 10: You've got questions, I've got answers Windows 10 Yes, Apple TV will be a HomeKit hub Apple ​A new day, a new Ubuntu smartphone Hardware Will your PC run Windows 10? Use the official compatibility checker to find out Windows 10 Most surprising of all, multi-platform support is not a priority. Apps on iOS and Android devices were important to 16 percent of respondents, and support for non-Windows PCs was important to only 11 percent.
  • For now, most technology decision-makers seem satisfied with leaving employees to self-provision office productivity apps on their smartphones and tablets if they really want them.  Do you think we're getting closer to replacing Microsoft Office in the workplace?
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    "We just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data: One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14 percent) than Google Apps (9 percent).  Just 22 percent of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36 percent have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7. Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13 percent of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5 percent. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13 percent of companies. "
Gary Edwards

Office 365 and Google for Work adoption rates to grow rapidly | CIO - 0 views

  • Large enterprises are slower to fully embrace the cloud, and they're about five years behind their small business counterparts. It will be a full decade before half of the respondents from large enterprises run 100 percent of their IT in the cloud, according to the report. 
  • 66 percent of Google for Work customers who took the survey plan to run all of their IT in the cloud by 2020, compared to 49 percent of Office 365 customers.
  • Google customers plan to fully embrace the cloud quicker than Microsoft's users;
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  • Google's customers also run more cloud applications on average than Office 365 users. However, that is expected to change during the next two years, as companies that invest in Office 365 embrace more of Microsoft's apps, according to the report.
  • Organizations are also moving away from legacy applications and platforms in favor of cloud apps such as Gmail and Outlook.
  • Enterprises customers who participated in the survey run an average of 18 cloud applications today, but that number is expected to nearly triple to 52 applications by 2017, according to BetterCloud.
  • The older the organization, the longer the cloud-transition process, BetterCloud says.
  • Nearly 96 percent of the IT-professional respondents who work at companies that are five years old or younger expect to run all of their IT services in the cloud by 2026, according to the survey.
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    "Cloud-based platforms such as Google for Work and Microsoft Office 365 are far from ubiquitous in today's workplace, but they're seeing rapid adoption, and that trend is going to continue. In fact, more than half of the small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) queried as part of a new survey from BetterCloud plan to run all of their IT services in the cloud within five years. State of the CIO 2015 More than 500 top IT leaders responded to our online survey to help us gauge the state of the READ NOW The corporate adoption rate of complete IT-in-the-cloud infrastructure will more than double during the next two years, according to the 1,500 IT professionals surveyed. Today only 12 percent of the respondents run all of their IT in the cloud, but that number will increase to 26 percent by 2017 and nearly 70 percent by 2025, according to BetterCloud, which sells IT administrative tools for both Google for Work and Microsoft Office 365."
Gary Edwards

Mining the knowledge locked in ECM | IDM Magazine - 0 views

  • The first announcement was that Google open sourced TensorFlow, a type of machine learning system that uses unsupervised learning, i.e. “Deep Learning.” TensorFlow powers Google Photos, Google Translator and backbone features such as search and Smart Reply. Not to be outdone, Microsoft announced that it is a open sourcing its “Deep Learning” system called Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK).
  • Why would Google and Microsoft open their “secret sauces” to the world? There are a number of reasons one can speculate, but anytime you open up your secret sauce, it’s to win over programmer’s minds. In fact, machine learning and specifically Deep Learning subjects are not for the average corporate web application developer. You will need people who have strong mathematics and computer science skills along with machine learning background.
  • The impact of having access to these Deep Learning system capabilities will be truly disruptive, especially in the area of unstructured data. It is true Hadoop has all the underpinnings of a great ECM system with its distributed file system, map/reduce for large-scale data processing. Generating indexes associated with documents is a natural progression since Hadoop abundantly provides these capabilities.
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  • However, ECM is much more than just large volumes of documents that is in need of indexing. ECM involves the whole life cycle of document management that includes: create, capture, indexing, approval (workflow/case management processing), publishing (version management), collaboration (share), archiving & defensible disposal (Records Management) Having Deep Learning capabilities will transform ECM into a more advanced type of product. A product that can determine the content regardless of its content type (image, text, audio, and video). This will shift the technology from a simple content management solution to a knowledge management system.
  • Today, the best ECM systems can do is to classify your content by looking at metadata tags and keywords in documents. As an example, it will not be enough to look at a document and classify it as a legal contract. Deep Learning will take ECM to the next level, by not only classifying the document as a contract but also evaluating it to make sure it is an iron clad contract that has the necessary clauses to assure your company is protected!
  • Deep Learning will also provide Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities. You now have turned your corporate Enterprise Content Management system from a simple unstructured data repository into an oracle of corporate data.
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    By Mitch DeFelice Recent announcements from Google and Microsoft regarding machine-learning capabilities will provide the ability to transform corporate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system from a simple unstructured data repository into an oracle of corporate data. In their book Smart Customer Stupid Companies…Why Only Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them - the authors Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff articulate how customers are becoming "smarter" with technology advancements.  The book presents a sound case that companies that do not evolve with their customers will become irrelevant. There have been two recent announcements that have occurred (November 9th, 2015 and November 12th, 2015 respectively) that have the potential to turn the metaphorical phase "Stupid Companies" to mean literally that.
Gary Edwards

Google adds support for Microsoft Office, Facebook at Work, Slack and others to its sin... - 0 views

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    "Google doesn't just offer its own web-based productivity apps, but it also offers a service for business users who want to use Google as an identity provider for accessing other online services using the widely used SAML standard. Today, Google is adding a few new options to this program, which now includes a number of Google competitors. Among the 14 new pre-configured options are the likes of Microsoft Office 365, Facebook at Work, New Relic, Concur, Box, Tableau, HipChat and Slack."
Gary Edwards

All That Google Touches Is Not Gold: Channel Partners Jump To Microsoft - Page: 1 | CRN - 0 views

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    "Some of Google's most loyal cloud solution providers -- including those who have been working with the vendor since it launched its channel efforts in 2009 -- told CRN it's no longer financially viable to exclusively partner with the Internet giant. A number of those regional Google channel pioneers who had bet big on Apps, the centerpiece of the Google for Work portfolio, told CRN they are adding a Microsoft Office 365 practice. Some are even striking Google from their portfolios altogether. "
Gary Edwards

3 steps to digitizing your work for maximum productivity | CIO - 0 views

  • Why go digital?One advantage for businesses to ditch paper– and perhaps the single most important factor – is convenience. Digital data is both highly searchable, and is also easily transferrable. What’s more, the mature state of cloud services today means that you can expect the information you store online to be available across whatever devices you may own -- be it a smartphone, tablet, PC laptop, Mac computer – or even a Web browser at a cybercafé or hotel lobby when on a vacation.Digital documents are also clearly suited to data backup. Despite the calibration required to get things set up in a way that works for you, it’s infinitely easier to make a copy of digital data versus photocopying stacks of printed invoices or bills. And a growing list of cloud storage services (Dropbox and SugarSync, to name two) have taken document storage a step further by saving multiple versions of a doc so you can revert to earlier versions of a document if necessary.
  • Finally, digitization opens the door to greater levels of collaboration at work by making it easy to collaborate with coworkers on only the relevant data. On this front, an entire generation of online tools are available for a diverse range of tasks such as time tracking (Toggl), project management (Asana) and collaboration (Yammer) – of which all are captured digitally without printing out a single piece of paper.So how should you go about joining the digital document revolution? More like this 12 Evernote hacks and apps for power users 8 time-saving productivity hacks 20 uses for Evernote that you probably haven’t thought of yet on IDG Answers How to disable the Windows button on a Microsoft Surface tablet?
  • 1. Choose a digital notebook systemOne of the starting points for digitizing your business docs is to decide on a platform for filing away notes, ideas and documents. Not only does it serve a critical role as a virtually unlimited digital repository for filing important details, charts, audio clips or screen grabs, a good digital system will make it easy to organize and find the information when you need it.
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  • Microsoft OneNoteThe popular Microsoft OneNote allows you to enter rich text, images, media files or even drawings into fully searchable notebooks. OneNote works on a variety of platforms, including Windows PCs, Mac computers, Android and iOS devices, and even from a Web browser.The strength of OneNote is its support for freeform data, with complete freedom to align (or misalign) text and all supported objects. The latest version also adds Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for images, making it easy to search for specific words within new images, and adds support for Dropbox on top of Microsoft’s own OneDrive cloud storage service.
  • EvernoteEvernote is another popular, free, online note-taking service. It offers effectively unlimited storage, albeit with a monthly upload cap (which is much larger for users willing to shell for one of the two fairly inexpensive tiers). The advantage of Evernote is its support for an incredibly diverse list of platforms, which includes native support on the BlackBerry 10 smartphone, third-party clients for Linux, and even scanners with the capability to scan straight into Evernote.Notebooks can be shared among multiple users – including those without a paid account – while individual notes can be shared publicly with a unique URL. Evernote also saves multiple versions of a document, which ensures that any accidental edits can be undone. Finally, paid users get to work offline, and can utilize the service to conduct text searches through Office docs and PDFs, as well as stored in Evernote.
  • Other optionsFor those of us who keep a to-do list, Trello and Todoist are digital equivalents that can facilitate collaboration with colleagues. Google Keep captures notes, lists, photo and audio via supported Web browsers and mobile devices. Finally, there is the text-only SimpleNote, or even the Notes feature in Microsoft’s Office 365 or an on-premises Exchange Server deployment.
  • 3. Effortlessly digitize legacy dataHaving the tools and the capability to natively capture your notes, docs and the like in digital form is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop receiving paper bills, invoices, statements, receipts, business cards, product brochures and other printed material.One of the best ways to minimize ink-on-paper collateral is to aggressively digitize all documents whenever possible. You have a variety of options. The easiest is to use a smartphone app such as Scanner Pro to quickly capture everything from business cards to paper printouts. Quality may vary, however, depending on such environmental factors as lighting and the quality of your smartphone’s camera.
  • A more robust alternative is to make use of an automatic sheet-fed scanner – such as the NeatConnect Wi-Fi scanner – to scan printed sheets straight to OneNote or Evernote. Portable scanners also exist, such as the battery-powered Doxie Go Wi-Fi and Doxie Flip. The former lets you scan wirelessly to an iPad or iPhone, while the latter is best described as a portable flatbed scanner that can be inverted to scan items that are fixed in place, or which are too thick to pass through a sheet-fed scanner.
  • Finally, the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 is a deskbound scanner that simplifies digitizing magazines and bound books. Items are placed face-up on its scanning mat. The scanning takes about three seconds to dump into a USB-connected computer. Any curvature in the pages is automatically smoothed out via software, resulting in a high quality capture.Depending on your needs, the ScanSnap SV600 could allow you to continue scribbling down your ideas and notes in a physical notebook, yet be able to quickly scan the physical pages into their digital notebook of choice at the end of each day.
  • Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digitizing your work. There are hundreds of tools that exist to facilitate the full range of business activities and processes without ever having to involve a single printed sheet.
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    "From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, the driving factors are collaboration and productivity, as opposed to any ecological or "green" concerns. With this in mind, we take a look at the advantages of going digital, and outline how workers can embrace this new digital-first paradigm to collaborate more, do things faster and work more efficiently than ever."
Gary Edwards

Marc Andreessen is wrong. The IPO isn't dying. | Matt Barrie | LinkedIn - 0 views

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    Excellent explanation of how VC Companies work. CC Jason "Marc Andreessen recently lamented the death of the IPO in the United States, blaming over regulation and short sellers as the reason why the general public no longer gets to share in the spectacular capital returns that earlier technology stocks like Microsoft and Amazon delivered. While over regulation in the US with regimes like Sarbanes Oxley is a major problem, the data from the National Venture Capital Association shows that over the last five years that both the number of IPOs and the total amount offered is actually in an uptrend. In fact, the first quarter of 2014 saw the strongest three month period for new listings since 2000, and Alibaba is imminently coming to market which will lift the trend in 2014 significantly."
Gary Edwards

VC: Dropbox's recent moves show why big companies fail to innovate - Business Insider - 0 views

  • The stack fallacy Sharma first came up with the term "Stack Fallacy" in a blog post earlier this year. Soon the theory was picked up by Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims and Andreessen Horowitz investor Steven Sinofsky. Sharma describes Stack Fallacy as "the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours." In plain English, there are many "stacks" of technology that sit between the foundational server and the end customer. So the server would be one stack, the network would be one, the database and app would each be one, and so forth. Sharma says that a lot of companies often overvalue their level of knowledge in their core business stack, and underestimate what it takes to build the technology that sits one stack above them.
  • For example, IBM saw Microsoft take over the more profitable software space that sits on top of its PCs. Oracle likes to think of Salesforce as an app that just sits on top of its database, but hasn't been able to overtake the cloud-software space they compete in. Google, despite all the search data it owns, hasn't been successful in the social-network space, failing to move up the stack in the consumer-web world. Ironically, the opposite is true when you move down the stack. Google has built a solid cloud-computing business, which is a stack below its search technology, and Apple's now building its own iPhone chips, one of the many lower stacks below its smartphone device.
  • Sharma argues that companies fail to move up the stack because they're too familiar with "the building blocks of the layer up," mistakenly believing they have it all figured out to create a better product. On the contrary, it's far easier to move down the stack because companies are already a customer of the lower stack product and understand what the customers want in that specific layer of technology.
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  • "The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge of the tools, but lack of understanding of the customer needs."
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    "Dropbox made a number of headline-grabbing moves over the past few weeks, but Storm Ventures partner Anshu Sharma's more concerned than impressed. He sees a company that's failing to figure out what customers truly need - falling for what he calls the "Stack Fallacy," a term he coined to describe how successful companies in one area often overvalue what they know and misjudge what they need to build next. "Companies fail when they take the 'what' for granted," Sharma told Business Insider, referring to companies that falsely believe that they already know "what" customers want. "
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