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Gary Edwards

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

www.businessinsider.com/lion-to-slay-the-giants-2011-8

Box.net Visual-Documents Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity MS-Live Google-Docs The-Great-Transition

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 11
     
    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

Former Apple HTML5 Leader Builds His Own Apps Platform - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...er-apple-html5-chief-build.php

Charles-Jolley SproutCore Strobe Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Most importantly, Strobe.js resolves the problem of scripting that applies to multiple domains simultaneously, leading to the kinds of cross-domain discrepancies that security tools presently associate with hijack attempts, and which newer browsers disallow. HTML5 developers will want their apps to include links to functionality from Facebook, Twitter, and other social services. These links seem simple enough, but their security protocols require logins and virtual sessions - which means the domains of these services' URLs must be addressed somehow.
  • Strobe.js creates a level of indirection, letting apps use Strobe servers as proxies to authenticate themselves on social services and use their APIs, without having to build OAuth functionality directly into their apps, or to force users to log in separately. This is the core of the Strobe Social add-on, which is key to the company's unique business model.
  • Strobe's business model relies on how much and how often deployed apps use Strobe's server-side API. "It works a lot like an analytics system, like Omniture," explains Strobe's Charles Jolley. "Every time you launch an app, it hits our server for an update to see if there's a new version available. That's an API call. If you turn on one of these add-ons to get the server to do social, that's an API call. You buy packages from us based on API calls."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The first 10,000 API calls placed per month on a developer's account are free, as well as the first 10 GB of bandwidth on Strobe's servers. That's to give developers a leg up during the testing phase. Typically once apps are deployed, the bandwidth use will expand to a level worth charging for. Up to 1 million API calls per month, and 50 GB of bandwidth, carry a $19 monthly fee. API calls numbering up to 10 million per month with 250 GB of bandwidth, costs $95 monthly.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Sep 11
     
    The articles about Charles Jolley and Strobe continue.  This time it's ReadWriteWeb.  They do a much better job explaining Strobe and the business model Strobe seeks to implement.  IMHO, Strobe's concept for mitigating the exchange of data across server domains could be ODBC for Cloud Productivity. ODBC and OLE are of course inter-application processes essential to the desktop productivity environment and the creation of compound documents.  I'll try to contact Charles and discuss this. "One of the big reasons I left [Apple] is because I really believe that the next great app ecosystem for mobile especially, but also for PCs and television, is going to be built around HTML5," Jolley tells RWW. "If you look at the people who are building mobile apps today, 70% of those people will say they want to use HTML5. But a lot of them don't make it to market, except for a few large companies like Amazon and Financial Times, most people aren't able to deliver HTML5 apps." The Apple platform for apps delivery is rich and compelling, Jolley points out. Unlike an ordinary "open" platform that, almost by definition now, is all self-service, Apple provides direct, personal business services to help developers organize themselves and get on their feet, even if their employer is already recognized around the world. Then Apple provides hosting and deployment services, managing user entitlements and licenses. It creates an ecosystem and then nourishes the entities that live within it, and that's why Apple's platform works as well as it does. "Apple makes it very, very easy for someone to build an app and take it to market. You have these small groups of one or two people who can create businesses around them. And today with HTML5, that's simply not possible," says Jolley. "Even though there's a huge benefit to HTML5 - you can be in any app store, you can go direct to the consumers, you can build any kind of business model you want - if you're going to reach all the 1.2 billion p
Gary Edwards

Social Wars: A New Hope - The BrainYard - InformationWeek - 0 views

www.informationweek.com/...social-wars-a-new-hope

Enterprise2.0 Venkatesh-Rao Enterprise-Sales-Cycle

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Sep 11
     
    Excellent commentary describing how the Enterprise 2.0 IT sales cycle differs from legacy - enterprise 1.0.  A must read for anyone in the software industry!!!! excerpt: If you think Enterprise 1.0 has been retiring gracefully, handing power over to Enterprise 2.0 in a bloodless succession, you haven't talked to a sufficient number of adequately liquored-up people in the trenches. Or you've been forgetting to take your Dilbert vitamins. To understand how individual battles are playing out in these early days of the war for the soul of capitalism, you need to look at the IT sales cycle, where much of the action is concentrated. Why is it important to look at the sales cycle? Because that's where the mix of privately believed and publicly paraded visions collide. It's where salespeople make the tough decision: whether to pander to customers' (or their own) delusions to close a sale, or make a sincere effort to work with prospects to discover the defensible truths, whether or not they help close the sale. The enterprise IT sales cycle used to have a certain leisurely, ritual-like quality to it. Vendors would slowly discover the organization through networking, build up good relationships with the purchasing and IT organizations, and get to know the middle managers of the organization they were targeting. They'd study the organization chart and figure out the best lines of access to the level at which the decision they wanted could be made. Usually, this meant senior executive: VP or higher.
Gary Edwards

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

www.wsj.com/...ft-to-reboot-office-1444155726

Office-365 Office-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16
     
    "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

The Real Power of Platforms Is Helping People Self-Organize - 0 views

hbr.org/...s-helping-people-self-organize

Uber

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • It’s also interesting to note that Uber doesn’t expect exclusivity from its extended labor force. Many people who drive for Uber also drive for competing services like Lyft. That lifts a key constraint — namely that the company must optimize a fixed amount of a worker’s time. Drivers opt-in to drive the schedules that work best for them — maybe the free time they have between dropping kids off at school and then picking them up. For others, they may opt to work 12-hour-long days. There is no central actor setting the rules such as having to manage artificial constraints like a fixed eight-hour workday. Nothing is pre-planned and everything is left to the market to come up with efficient solutions.
  • they focus on creating a market where people with cars can connect with people who need rides.
  • How does Uber handle the holiday crunch? They let the market solve that issue through surge pricing. At peak times, prices rise — which reduces demand AND increases supply of drivers. Sure, some folks consider this price gouging at times. But it’s interesting to see how the higher fares create incentives for more drivers to hit the roads to meet that demand. Problem solved, again without any preplanning.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It so happens that open source software works very similarly to Uber in terms of stoking active participation beyond any one company’s boundaries. Contributors choose to participate on a project. They may have a job or be in school. Regardless of what they do, they voluntarily opt in to a system, which self-organizes based on the need at hand. As with Uber, there is no preplanning of resources or scheduled shifts; everything is self-organized by volunteers interested in tackling that job at that time.
  • If these participative systems can solve complex optimization problems without central planning, like managing Uber’s logistics or developing the open source Linux kernel, what else can they do? Traditional institutions as we know them today will not exist in their current forms in twenty years. The boundaries of the traditional corporation are becoming more and more porous as the value of centralized planning and coordination declines. That’s a truly disruptive development and something that every organization, regardless of industry, should be paying attention to.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16
     
    "Uber, the car-sharing service, has become ubiquitous. It's now a multi-billion-dollar global business. It's even become a noun of sorts - uberization - which people use to describe a disruptive change to a staid industry ripe for innovation (though, to be sure, the popularization of the word "disruptive" means that it is often used in ways that the concept's author, Clay Christensen, didn't intend). But I would argue that the real reason Uber is disruptive is because it is reshaping how we can think about organizing people, not cars. Uber has shown how you can actually empower many thousands of people to self-organize to tackle a task (shuffling people to their destination in this case) without the preplanning that is the norm in traditional enterprises. Put another way, Uber's business model extends a very complex supply chain beyond the boundaries of a corporation in a way that creates real results without any planning in advance. That is a remarkable example of how technology will reshape how we organize to get work done at scale in the future. For context, I worked at Delta Air Lines for many years before I joined Red Hat, the open source software provider where I am now CEO. When I was at Delta, we spent enormous resources in terms of time and money on planning. Airline operations are a huge optimization challenge. There are hundreds of planes, thousands of pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and ground crews that must be properly deployed for the system to work efficiently. We needed to process reams of data using expensive and sophisticated software and computers to predict demand, know the capabilities of each aircraft type, and to understand each work group's constraints. We also had an army of PhD-caliber people whose full-time jobs involved figuring out this puzzle in a way that we could still make money. Uber's value chain has a similar optimization challenge - it needs to deal with variable demand, thousands of drivers,
Gary Edwards

A Top Silicon Valley V.C. Explains Why Slack Drives Him Crazy | Vanity Fair - 0 views

www.vanityfair.com/...ins-why-slack-drives-him-crazy

John-Lilly Greylock-Partners

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • I’m an investor in a company called Quip. The idea is, if you take Microsoft Office—Word and Excel—and re-do that with modern mobile materials, what does that look like? Suddenly you get this document-construction tool that’s infused with real-time notification and touch-screen collaboration, and it feels much more alive than typing a Word document.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Apr 16
     
    "John Lilly, a partner at Greylock Partners, invests in companies that zhuzh office productivity tools for today's mobile worker. He sits on the board of Quip (a more collaborative Microsoft Word) and Figma (an Adobe Photoshop for the sharing generation), among others. He also led Greylock's investment in Dropbox, along with its stakes in Tumblr, acquired by Yahoo in 2013, and Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012. Before joining Greylock in 2011, Lilly was C.E.O. of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, the Web browser that quietly grabbed share from Microsoft's then-dominant Internet Explorer in the early 2000s. While Lilly is betting on a new generation of Microsoft antagonists, he explains why he isn't writing off the software giant, how new tools will change the way we work, and why he finds Slack so vexing."
Gary Edwards

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

www.engadget.com/...microsoft-q1-2016

Microsoft-numbers

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Apr 16
     
    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

On the Road to Recap: | Above the Crowd | By Bill Gurley - 0 views

abovethecrowd.com/...on-the-road-to-recap

VC

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • New potential investors might also be surprised how few Unicorn executives truly understand their core unit economics. One easy way to spot these pretenders is that they obsessively focus on high level “gross merchandise value” or “multi-year forward bookings” and try to talk past things like true net revenue, gross margin, or operating profitability. They will even claim to be “unit profitable” when all they have really done is stopped being gross margin negative.
  • These companies will one day need real earnings and real profits, and if the company does not proactively address this, you should not be giving them millions of dollars in late stage financings.
  • Perhaps the biggest mistake untapped investors will make is assuming that because there are branded investors already in the company, that the new investment opportunity must be of high quality.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • They use the reputation of the other investors as a proxy for due diligence. There are multiple problems with this shortcut. First, these investors are “pot committed.” They invested a long time ago, and without your money their investment is “at risk.”
  • Second, as discussed, they are already full and nervous. They didn’t call you before when they built their reputation.  Why are they friendly now?
  • The reason we are all in this mess is because of the excessive amounts of capital that have poured into the VC-backed startup market.
  • This glut of capital has led to (1) record high burn rates, likely 5-10x those of the 1999 timeframe, (2) most companies operating far, far away from profitability, (3) excessively intense competition driven by access to said capital, (4) delayed or non-existent liquidity for employees and investors, and (5) the aforementioned solicitous fundraising practices.
  • More money will not solve any of these problems — it will only contribute to them.
  • The healthiest thing that could possibly happen is a dramatic increase in the real cost of capital and a return to an appreciation for sound business execution.
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 16
     
    "April 21, 2016: In February of last year, Fortune magazine writers Erin Griffith and Dan Primack declared 2015 "The Age of the Unicorns" noting - "Fortune counts more than 80 startups that have been valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists." By January of 2016, that number had ballooned to 229. One key to this population growth has been the remarkable ease of the Unicorn fundraising process: Pick a new valuation well above your last one, put together a presentation deck, solicit offers, and watch the hundreds of million of dollars flow into your bank account. Twelve to eighteen months later, you hit the road and do it again - super simple. While not obvious on the surface, there has been a fundamental sea-change in the investment community that has made the incremental Unicorn investment a substantially more dangerous and complicated practice. All Unicorn participants - founders, company employees, venture investors and their limited partners (LPs) - are seeing their fortunes put at risk from the very nature of the Unicorn phenomenon itself. The pressures of lofty paper valuations, massive burn rates (and the subsequent need for more cash), and unprecedented low levels of IPOs and M&A, have created a complex and unique circumstance that many Unicorn CEOs and investors are ill-prepared to navigate."
Gary Edwards

Office 365's corporate takeover is imminent | InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...rate-takeover-is-imminent.html

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 16
     
    "For the past two years, I've been doing a road show about Office 365 with Mimecast to businesses of all shapes and sizes in America and Britain. At the beginning of the show, when I asked the audience, "Who of you has moved or is looking to move to Office 365?" not one hand went up. Fast-forward to a week ago, and more than half the hands went up when I asked the same question. This shift is happening much faster than I would have predicted. [ Considering the move to Office 365? Take these crucial steps before, during, and after for a successful migration. | The InfoWorld review: Office 365 fails at collaboration | Stay up on key Microsoft technologies with the Enterprise Windows blog and Windows newsletter. ] There is no doubt that the driving force behind this shift is Office 365's Exchange Online component. I hear that rationale from everyone I talk to. And it's not only the people I talk to: A recent Gartner survey showed Exchange was overwhelmingly cited as the reason to move to Office 365. Oddly enough, OneDrive for Business was the second motivator, but it was also one of the biggest disappointments thus far. Why? Because, as my colleague Galen Gruman has shown, OneDrive for Business works only partially. Some organizations are motivated by Office 365's preconfigured SharePoint Online to assist with document collaboration and workflow, though the on-premises SharePoint remains much more capable. Skype for Business is making headway for instant messaging and conferencing as well, though it continues to be iffy in multiplatform environments. Then there are the productivity apps -- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- which Microsoft has made work well not only in Windows but also in iOS, in Android, and in OS X. Keep in mind that none of this means Office 365 has triumphed over Microsoft's on-premises services. On-premises Exchange -- IT's biggest reason to adopt Office 365 -- is still the leading email server by far. But over the next year or so, we will see
Gary Edwards

The dumbest things Bill Gates ever said - Business Insider - 1 views

www.businessinsider.com/gs-bill-gates-ever-said-2016-4

Bill-Gates Microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • "One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities," Gates wrote in a memo to Microsoft in 1998.
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Apr 16
     
    Must read fun!
Gary Edwards

You Want to Build an Empire Like Google's? This Is Your OS | WIRED 16 hours ago ... Now... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...t-build-empire-like-googles-os

google-BORG Kubernetes Meso CoreOS

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The Container Revolution The move comes amid an enormous revolution sweeping information technology, one in which big-name companies and startups alike aim to recreate Borg for the rest of the world. Alex Polvi, who runs one of these startups, CoreOS, describes the revolution with a hashtag: #GIFEE, or Google Infrastructure For Everyone Else—which is even catchier. In addition to Mesosphere and CoreOS, a company called Docker is pushing this idea alongside the biggest names in cloud computing: Amazon, Microsoft, and, yes, Google.
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Apr 16
     
    A fascinating explanation of the secret Google OS known as the BORG. Meso and CoreOS are efforts to emmulate the BORG, but in 2014 Google open sourced the BORG foundation in a project known as "Kubernetes". What makes the Borg so incredibly more efficient then "Virtualization" is the use of "containers". Containers can run on the bare metal BORG OS, or, they can run on top of a Virtualized OS.
Gary Edwards

Survey: Businesses Keen on Office 365 Despite Some Qualms -- Redmond Channel Partner - 0 views

rcpmag.com/...ice-365-business-adoption.aspx

Office-365 Gartner

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Office 365 is Microsoft's unified product now. It has evolved quite a bit from the time when the Office suite of applications was first introduced in 1989, Cannell explained. Some capabilities are only available through Office 365 services, such as Groups, Delve and Office 365 Video, he added.
  • The use of Microsoft's 2013-branded products topped the roster among the current survey respondents. SharePoint Server 2013 was used by 47 percent. Exchange Server 2013 was used by 38 percent. In the 2014 study, Microsoft's 2010-branded products had topped the list, Cannell said.
  • The most important Office 365 capabilities included Exchange Online for e-mail and calendar use. In second place was OneDrive for Business, with Office 365 ProPlus ranking third. Office 365 ProPlus is the suite of Office applications offered with various Office 365 subscription plans.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Cannell said he was surprised by OneDrive for Business' top ranking among the survey participants, particularly because it has had some syncing issues. However, he also noted that Microsoft recently announced some improvements along those lines.
  • Office 365 services aren't exactly doing away with the server products. For instance, the survey results aren't indicating strong results showing that Exchange Online adoption has cut into Exchange Server on-premises use. Exchange Server use only decreased by 5 percentage points compared with Gartner's 2014 study result. Cannell speculated that hybrid Exchange use might be an explanation for this somewhat unexpected finding.
  • Organizations should limit the use of OneDrive for Business until it's been proven in the enterprise. Until recently, the OneDrive for Business storage service has been considered broken, although Microsoft has implemented a next-generation sync client to improve it, Cannell said. He recommended testing it before adoption.
  • Organizations still need to develop Office 365 management competencies. In particular, back end systems are still complex to administer, Cannell said. Organizations should test to see how well the service is performing globally, too, he added.
  • Organizations should plan to implement hybrid integration with Office 365 services. Take hybrid integration seriously as it will be a normal state of affairs going forward, Cannell said. Gartner thinks that all enterprises should plan to implement single sign-on directory integration.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 16
     
    "Enterprise adoption of Microsoft's Office 365 suite is very high, according to a recent poll of IT decision makers by market researcher Gartner Inc. About 78 percent of the survey's participants reported their organizations are either currently using or planning to use Office 365 software and services. That figure represents a 13 percentage-point increase from the results of Gartner's last Office 365 study, which was published back in 2014. The results were described in Web presentation Thursday by Larry Cannell, an analyst with Gartner's Technical Professionals Group."
Gary Edwards

Office productivity: Has Microsoft blown it? | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...ctivity-has-microsoft-blown-it

Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Microsoft Office quickly became as much a part of office culture as beige cubicles and office parks, and with the coming of Sharepoint at the turn of the century (trojan horsed free into many companies) we entered the golden age of digital filing cabinets to keep Office docs in. This was genius business strategy by Microsoft: for decades Office has been the golden goose and the de facto business standard 'productivity' tool... extending it to Sharepoint storage infrastructure created another gusher of revenue.
  • Throughout the dot com era, the web 2.0 read/write web era and the explosion of mobility and digital first strategy Microsoft have arguably held the office productivity market back in order to protect the Office golden goose revenues to spectacular financial success.
  • Waves of innovative collaboration software have attempted to loosen this business culture chokehold, with minor incursions made by 'Storage as a Service' vendors, although that area has become a costing race to the bottom.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This brilliant business strategy and marketing hypnosis of the business world by Microsoft is now showing some signs of wearing off as the digital era matures and more people finally start to realize how anachronistic and bureaucratic document driven workflows are.
  • The question is how much longer this can endure as Microsoft's power wains at the center of the office productivity business world.
  • Windows phone has failed - it wasn't even mentioned in the early stages of yesterday's earnings call - and Lync/Skype are old hat in unified communications.
  • Dynamics was until recently a very small facet of Microsoft's world but is being beefed up to compete in the wide open customer relationship management world, Azure is doing well in the cloud infrastructure world but in a very fast moving and quickly evolving space with tight margins.
  • After years of stifling innovation in collaboration, the pace of digital may have finally caught up with Microsoft and left them exposed for now.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Apr 16
     
    "Office productivity: Has Microsoft blown it? Microsoft has dominated the 'office productivity' tools market for decades and is a de facto way of working in most companies. Having significantly held back innovation in the last 10 years, Office is arguably reaching the end of its useful life as modern digital tools make it look like an old bureaucratic anachronism."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft (MSFT) Announces New Office 365 Investments; Includes Skype for Business Mac ... - 0 views

www.streetinsider.com/...11543171.html

Office-365 Skype-for-Business

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The Skype for Business Mac Preview will release in three cumulative stages leading to public availability planned for Q3 of 2016. Today’s initial release lets you see and join your meetings. We’ll soon follow up with additional value, including the contact list and conversations via chat, audio and video. Commercial customers can request an invite to test the new Skype for Business Mac Preview at SkypePreview.com. We’ll start by issuing invites to IT professionals and continue rolling out invites on a daily basis with the goal of rapidly increasing usage before opening up the preview to everyone. To learn more about the Mac Preview, read the Skype for Business Mac Preview blog.Bringing collaboration to the forefront in OfficeThis month’s updates to Office 2016 desktop client bring the collaboration experience front and center. Core sharing capabilities, a new document activity feed, presence information and Skype for Business instant messaging are now all available at a glance in the top right corner of documents that you are sharing with others.
  • Now you can easily see who’s working and where in your documents, as well as quickly start real-time conversations with Skype for Business.The enhanced collaboration experience in Office 2016 includes:People hub—Now you have more visibility into who is actively working in a Word or PowerPoint doc with you. At a glance you can quickly see everyone participating in the document on the ribbon and then, with one click, jump to exactly where they are working.Skype for Business integration—You can click a person’s thumbnail to initiate a Skype for Business IM conversation or see their full contact card. Click the Skype for Business logo to initiate a group chat with everybody currently working in the document.
  • The Activity feed provides access to a full history of document changes, including prior versions.Activity feed—Quick access to the activity feed makes it easy to see what’s been happening in your document, presentation or spreadsheet saved in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. The Activity feed shows you a full history of changes, and you can easily open or even revert to a prior version if you need to.Comments—With one click you can make or view comments in your document or slide. Collaboration flows easily with threaded conversations and quick access buttons that let you reply to or resolve comments, and then mark items as complete.
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  • Yammer external groups are now availableOffice 365 customers can now create external Yammer groups for seamless and secure collaboration across company and organizational boundaries. External groups work just like internal groups by enabling conversations around topics, documents, notes and links that can now extend to customers, partners or people in other organizations. We have put controls in place to ensure the security of information, such as requiring group admin approval before external members are added and allowing Office 365 admins to disable external groups for the organization. Visit “Create and manage external groups in Yammer” to get started.
  • Work smarter and more intuitively on the goWe’re continuing to improve the Office mobile apps so that it’s even easier to be productive anywhere and on any device. Some highlights this month:Edit with speed—New mobile updates provide access to the most popular commands right at your fingertips in Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows Phone, iPhone and Android. These commands appear at the bottom of the screen, tailored for the content you select.
  • Quickly access relevant features based on content you select in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on phones.Record audio into OneNote on Windows Phone—It’s easy to capture a quick audio note on the go with your Windows Phone. Simply tap the paper clip and then the microphone on your keyboard command bar to get started.Use your pen as a pointer—We introduced instant inking earlier this year so you can use an active pen to ink instantly without first selecting a feature or control. This month, we are addressing feedback we heard from customers who wish to keep using their pen as a pointer to select and interact with content. To learn more, see “Draw and annotate with ink in Office 2016.”Get insights at a glance—We expanded Smart Lookup to Word, Excel and PowerPoint on iOS and Android. Smart Lookup is powered by Bing and uses the selected text and surrounding content to give you contextually relevant results. Right click on text and select Smart Lookup to get started.
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Apr 16
     
    "Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) posted the following to its Office blog on Tuesday: This month, we're announcing several new Office 365 investments to help people better collaborate. This includes the much anticipated Skype for Business Mac Preview, new Yammer external groups and improvements in our Office Mobile apps on Windows Phone, iOS and Android. Please read on for details. Introducing Skype for Business Mac Preview Today, we are excited to announce the start of the Skype for Business Mac Preview. This new app offers a simple yet powerful experience that brings our Mac customers into the modern era of Skype for Business. "
Gary Edwards

MSFT Stock: Here's Why the Bears Are Wrong on Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) - 0 views

www.profitconfidential.com/...wrong-on-microsoft-corporation

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Apr 16
     
    "One standout in the cloud business is the company's "Office 365" product suite. Nadella took the old Office suite, which charged users every couple of years for a licence, and moved it to the cloud, where users now pay a monthly fee instead. Microsoft hasn't given a revenue breakdown for Office 365, but in the latest quarter, Microsoft said that revenue grew 63% on a constant currency basis over the same time last year. It also now has 22.2 million subscribers, up from 20.6 million subscribers in the previous quarter. Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler forecasts that the cloud version of Office 365 had annual sales trending to $6.5 billion in the most recent quarter. (Source: "Microsoft Office Shines in the Cloud, Azure Will Be Profitable, Says Bernstein," Barron's, April 8, 2016.) That's out of total commercial cloud revenue that Microsoft reported of $10.0 billion in annualized sales. (Source: Microsoft Corporation, op cit.) So Office 365 is growing like crazy, but that's not the only bright spot in Microsoft's cloud business. In the battle for cloud computing services, "Microsoft Azure" is second to Amazon.com, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMZN) "Amazon Web Services" (AWS). However, Microsoft is starting to gain. While Azure has about 10% of the market to AWS's 30%, Azure is becoming bigger and bigger and it's bound to erode Amazon's lead. In the latest quarter, Azure grew 120% on a constant currency basis, which is almost double AWS's growth. (Source: "How Microsoft's Azure Is Giving Stiff Competition to Amazon's AWS," Yahoo! Finance, April 8, 2016.) Again, Microsoft didn't break down revenue for Azure but according to Bernstein's Moerdler, Azure's annual sales run rate is about $1.8 billion. (Source: Barron's, op cit.)"
Gary Edwards

How to Install Remix OS on PC and Laptop as Dual Boot - Tutorial | TechGlobeX - 0 views

www.techglobex.net/...on-windows-os-x-pc-laptop.html

Remix Android Remix-OS

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 May 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 May 16
     
    "Remix OS is an Android based portable mobile operating system works similar like Windows, OS X and Linux (Ubuntu) desktop operating systems. Remix user interface comes with user-friendly options, features and functions i.e. minimize, maximize and close buttons on every program or software screens, start menu button on desktop home screen, taskbar, windows with title bar, multitasking in multi-windows, notification center, regular software updates etc. Some pre-installed android apps and games such as; Google Play Store, Google Chrome, Microsoft Office, E-Mail App, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Evernote, Keyboard, Advanced File Manager and lots more. Remix OS users can even use mouse similar to Windows, OS X and Linux (Ubuntu) to perform operations like; double-click, left-click or right-click. As currently, Android is officially available for Smartphones and Tablets devices only, being an open-source, Remix OS is very useful for developers, testers and general public users to experience latest Android platform on bigger display screens."
Gary Edwards

Addappt makes your address book smart | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...s-your-address-book-smart.html

Contact-Management

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • How it worksWhen you install the addappt app on your device and verify your email ID, the app stores your profile information on its server. You profile includes only that information that you added to your own profile, including phone numbers, email IDs, physical address, social network. And you can selectively make any property private at anytime. The second step is to get your friends on addappt. You can send invites to your friends and when they join addappt their profile is uploaded to the sever. The app automatically helps people connect using the verified email or verified mobile so all your friends need to do is download addappt and make sure they have one of your emails or mobile. Resources White Paper CloudFlare Advanced DDoS Protection White Paper Don't Let Your Security Strategy Become Irrelevant See All Go Now the magic begins. Addappt will sync your profile with your friends' address books and vice versa. Now when you change anything in your profile on your own phone, it will sync those changes in your friends' address books. No need to send bulk emails or messages. This puts you in control of your information. You determine which is the preferred phone number to or email address to reach you at. Ane addappt also remembers the number you called last and will automatically dial it. Since often we have different channels of communicating with different folks, the app also remembers how you communicated last with someone (i.e., it "adapts" to you).
  • Cool featuresOne feature that is extremely important from a privacy point of view is that addappt uploads only the profile that you added in your address book, stuff like your phone number, email ID, LinkedIn profile, physical address -- whatever you choose and nothing else. No contacts from your address book are uploaded to the sever. Also, and very importantly, your connections never see your other connections and you can’t see theirs. It is all private. I recently discovered another interesting feature of addappt when I was travelling to India and had a local number there. Previously I would have to bulk email hundreds of people in my address book to give them my new, temporary number, only to change it again 4 weeks later. With addappt, I updated my profile and added the temporary local number and, boom,  everyone who was connected with me via addappt had my new local number instantly. When I came back to the U.S., I removed the temporary number from my profile and it automatically removed it from my friends’ address books. And unlike some popular social networking sites, if you quit addappt, your contacts will remain on your device. What you will lose is the ability to keep syncing your contacts. That’s it.
  • New featuresAddappt recently introduced Widgets so your favorite contacts are now available on iOS and Android from anywhere on the phone and you don’t have to open the app. They require no setting and they are live since addappt remembers how you communicated last. They reorder, get removed or added just as within the app. You can also message your friends with one “tapp.” On iOS, you can email URLs from your browser to yourself using the action extension. You can group  contacts very easily and then send a group email, group chat or a group “tapp". Addappt’s  one "tapp" messaging is also available on the Apple Watch. Addappt makes it much easier to share your contact info with people you meet at conferences, for example with a feature called Share My Info.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 May 16
     
    " remember the days before smartphones when managing your contact list was a herculean task. I used to maintain a notebook where I would add phone numbers, email IDs and physical addresses. But people change their contact info all the time and it was close to impossible to keep up. Download the April 2016 Digital Magazine Inside: How companies are making wearables work, why CIOs aren't ready for container tech & much more! READ NOW When we moved to smartphones, the physical address book was gone and along with it the crossed out or hastily erased names and numbers, but the challenges of staying updated remained. I had been looking for a solution where some magical app will keep my address book updated and keep my friends and colleagues informed of my latest contact details without having to send spam mails to everyone I could remember. Then I found addappt, a new way to make your addressbook as smart as is your smartphone. I spoke with addappt founder Mrinal Desai to learn about his background, how the app came to be and how it works. Desai was a very early LinkedIn employee (employee number 15, to be precise). He was LinkedIn's first business development manager. "LinkedIn is basically who I am offline. I build relationships over years and years and I believe that is the way to live life, based on very full and enriching relationships." said Desai. The problem Desai is trying to solve with addappt twofold: On one hand the onus is on the person who is moving to inform "everyone" about the move and send them updated information. On the other hand, you have to keep your address book updated every time someone changes contact info. There were two constantly moving goal posts to chase. "It started getting harder and harder, so for me to get the latest information. One, I have to depend on you, hopefully that you will remember to email me or all your friends in a mass spam-ish way, if you will. Then, I go take it in and I have to remember to now update some
Gary Edwards

Everything Google knows about you - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/-google-knows-about-you-2016-5

Google-History

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 May 16
     
    "When you use Google, you are making a deal. You get to use services like Gmail, Drive, search, YouTube, and Google Maps for free. In exchange, you agree to share information about yourself that Google can share with advertisers so their ads are more effective. For instance, airlines want to target people who love to travel. Children's clothing makers want to target parents. Google uses a lot of methods to learn about you. There's the stuff you tell Google outright when you sign up for its Gmail or to use your Android phone. This includes your name, phone number, location, and so on. But Google also watches you as you scamper around the internet, deducing your interests from your internet searches - what do you search for? click on? - from your use of Google's other services and from other websites you visit. By visiting a hard-to-find page called "Web & App Activity," you can see what Google is watching. Then by visiting a site called "Ads Settings," you can see what Google thinks it knows about you, and you can change what it's telling advertisers about you. Read on for the details:"
Gary Edwards

Google - Web & App Activity - 0 views

history.google.com/history

Google-History

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 May 16
     
    https://history.google.com/history/ Google uses a lot of methods to learn about you. There's the stuff you tell Google outright when you sign up for its Gmail or to use your Android phone. This includes your name, phone number, location, and so on. But Google also watches you as you scamper around the internet, deducing your interests from your internet searches - what do you search for? click on? - from your use of Google's other services and from other websites you visit. By visiting a hard-to-find page called "Web & App Activity," you can see what Google is watching. Then by visiting a site called "Ads Settings," you can see what Google thinks it knows about you, and you can change what it's telling advertisers about you.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft releases public preview of PowerApps business-app building service | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...-business-app-building-service

Office-365 Microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • PowerApps also will integrate with Microsoft Flow, Microsoft's recently-unveiled alternative to IFTTT. Users will be able to trigger flows from within PowerApps.Under the covers, the PowerApps service runs on Azure, and integrates with Azure Active Directory, Azure App Service and Azure Media Services. The PowerApps service connects to Office 365 data via the Microsoft Graph application programming interface (API). It also can access data stored in third-party services via those companies' public APIs via connectors.The tooling framework that's at the heart of PowerApps is based on the Project Siena business-development tools that Microsoft began several years ago and then back-burnered.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 16
     
    "Five months after delivering a limited preview of its PowerApps service for building custom business applications, Microsoft is making PowerApps available as a public preview today, April 29. PowerApps, which was codenamed Project Kratos, is designed to allow business users and business analysts to create custom native, mobile, and Web apps that can be shared simply across their organizations. Examples of just a few of the many types of apps users can create using PowerApps include simple cost estimators, budget trackers, and site-inspection reports. PowerApps connects to existing cloud services and data sources. It's designed to allow users to build apps without writing code or having to figure out integration issues. The custom apps created with PowerApps can be published internally across the Web, tablets and mobile devices, without requiring app creators to go through app stores for distribution"
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