Rob Enderle

Windows 7 Deployment Best Practices

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:39:59 GMT

This week, I and my colleagues are at the IT Business Edge Midmarket CIO Summit, where we are focusing on the needs and concerns of CIOs in mid-sized businesses and government organizations. I’m doing the talk on Windows 7 deployment best practices and to prepare for that talk, I’ve interviewed around 10 companies that have either deployed Windows 7 or are in trials with it. In Don Tennant’s CIO panel last night, he asked how their trials were going and the CIOs who responded gave answers that are consistent with what I have found. The trials are going vastly better than expected and a high percentage of CIOs appear to be major fans of the offering. Given that I couldn’t find a single CIO that liked Windows Vista, this is certainly a dramatic change.

Let’s talk about what is going right and I’ll make recommendations at the end.

CIOs Reporting Great Experiences with Windows 7 - See What They've Learned

The Advantage of a Maintenance Release

Windows 7 is a Maintenance Release -- and Maintenance Releases historically -- are more reliable and vastly better liked by IT and users than the initial release of a new product. Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows 7 were all maintenance releases and generally were better received than Windows 95, Windows NT and Windows Vista. Windows 2000 and Windows ME were exceptions. Windows 2000 was a primary release but because of the massive testing for Y2K it actually went in reasonably well, and Windows ME should have been a second Maintenance Release but they made too many changes and didn’t do enough testing and it was horrid. As a result, Windows 2000 behaved more like a Maintenance Release and Windows ME a primary, almost a 1.0, release. The first was widely deployed; the second was avoided like the plague.

A Maintenance Release seems to work better because it focuses on tuning and user-interface simplification. The core aspects of the product remain largely unchanged from the prior service patched product. As a result, the Maintenance release is a vastly more mature product out of the gate. Windows 7, based on testing results, is behaving consistently well, like a Maintenance Release should.

Key Benefits

The review and deployment sites indicated they were seeing a number of strong benefits with Windows 7 over Windows XP. These benefits include much stronger IT control, which has resulted in better reliability for the product because there are fewer employee-driven problems. IT can better block unapproved activities and IT is better able to remotely correct mistakes that do get through.

CIOs appear to be using Windows 7 to significantly extend their PC use cycles for at least another three years and for up to 10 years total. They are seeing performance improvements and getting good installation results on hardware that is up to seven years old.

Security improvements, particularly for government sites, are one of the big reasons for moving to the product and Bitlocker is being used widely in the trials and deployments to protect company data. In addition, the protections against malware are making it much harder for employees to install it, reducing breakage.

With the reduction or elimination of support for Windows XP, problems with that platform are now increasing and the quality of support for Windows 7 appears higher. This is consistent with Microsoft practice, as it tends to put its best support resources on the new platform and discontinue support for any platform that is two versions back. Sites are reporting almost no driver issues -- they had been experiencing increasing driver problems with new hardware and Windows XP as core vendors stopped doing driver updates for XP some time ago.

One feature of Windows 7 that dovetailed very well with Windows Server 2008 is Branch Cache for companies that were using it successfully to improve remote office performance. Windows Server 2008, in most cases, was either being rolled out before or concurrently with Windows 7 in most of the sites I spoke with.

Next page: Beware Hardware Life Cycles

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EMC vs. Google: There Should be No Competition

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:23:59 GMT

I’m often fascinated by battles between mismatched companies. Either firms that are vastly different in size and power (Netscape-Microsoft for instance), or in this case, companies that are vastly different in capabilities.

EMC and Google are effectively at war over a concept. That concept is whether cloud computing, particularly as it relates to storage, should be public or private. The apparent mismatch is that EMC is a storage company, the top company selling traditional enterprise storage. Whatever Google is, it isn’t a storage company, and while it appears to focus on the end user, it mostly gets paid by advertisers. EMC has as a core goal protecting customer’s data; it is what its business is about. Google has as a core goal indexing and making all information available to everyone. There is a clear, and to me, alarming disconnect in these two goals.

Google largely leads on being really cheap, but I think there is a huge problem when you decouple revenue from the product. Companies tend to respond to financial pressures. For EMC, these come from IT customers, for Google, advertisers. EMC has no apparent conflicts of interest, has Google massive apparent conflicts between the privacy needs of its users and the information needs of its actual paying customers. Let’s talk about that.

EMC Virtual Storage: A Strategic Dialog

Today I’m watching a presentation by Pat Gelsinger on EMC Virtual Storage, which follows the traditional rules of enterprise products. This means it's heavy on performance, flexibility and technology layered under a solid business-problem statement. Pat, whom I’ve known for years, is one of the few folks that can actually make technology sound interesting. Many of us thought of him as the heart of Intel, and he appears to have transitioned that passion to his new company, which he helps run.

The core of this piece was the flexible use of federated resources and the clear message was on agility gained through improvements to management, data-movement speeds, and more effective resource management. It's a solution that's robust, scalable, highly reliable and secure. EMC also tends to present things that are well cooked. In this case, it is more of a vision, but that vision ended with a request to go out and ask our customers what they think about the initiative and to seek feedback.

It is very clear who EMC’s customer is, the enterprise IT manager. And EMC has one of the strongest quality-control organizations in the industry.

Price wasn't mentioned, though, partially because this is more of a vision then a product. This technology certainly isn’t cheap, but for an enterprise vendor like EMC, the price tends to match the value and it leads with the value. Also, because solutions tend to be highly customized, price is different for each customer and not an easy topic to explain to a large audience.

Google Cloud Services

Thanks to Google’s CEO, Google wants a piece of the enterprise. However, when Google presents a product, it tends to lead with the price (free or really cheap), present end user capabilities and products that appear to be works-in-progress. Google regularly gets pounded for privacy violations and is under investigation by a number of government agencies for actions that appear to put various groups at risk.

Google presentations tend to be done by the engineering groups that came up with the idea. These offerings, for the most part, are generally focused on consumers, but there is no apparent early dialog with those consumers. Instead, the ideas seem to percolate inside of Google as something that might be fun to do. Wave and Buzz are both perfect examples. The first is hard to understand and the latter easier to understand and through that understanding, privacy risks were quickly identified. Google does do beta tests, but it tends to respond more effectively to regulators. There is no evidence that Google actually knows what an industry analyst is or speaks regularly with CIOs.

In short, Google doesn’t appear to be well coupled with its consumer audience, and there is no evidence that it engages with the enterprise market in any deep way. Google's CEO, who came from enterprise companies, helped develop Sun’s failed strategy, and was unsuccessful at Novell. My biggest problem with Google, particularly in this space, is the sense that it is hypocritical with regard to security and privacy. When CNET showcased that Google was making personal information available on the Web by showcasing information on Eric Schmidt found by using Google, Google responded punitively in an effort to cover the problem up and didn’t move to correct it.

It isn’t really clear who Google’s customer actually is. Advertisers pay the bills (look at this revenue chart), but most of the products are focused on providing services to others. I think there is a fundamental problem with this model, particularly for enterprises, and we’ll get to this in a moment. There is no real evidence that Google even monitors customer satisfaction and likely views customer use as a similar metric. (It is, but it is a lagging metric).

Google generally leads on price and there appears to be a subtle implication that, given that its solution is very cheap or free, you should accept the offering. In short, if it is cheap or free, what are you complaining about? You are getting what you paid, or in most cases, didn’t pay for.

The Problem with Decoupled Price

There is no magic product and Harry Potter doesn’t fly in and create an enterprise offering. Someone is paying the bill to create it and that someone is going to want value. When you decouple revenue from the product, it becomes very difficult, and you can see this with Google, to stay focused on quality and customer satisfaction. We saw this with Microsoft and IE6. It was free and Microsoft didn’t put much focus on it. As a result, IE6 became a massive security, reliability and management problem.

This suggests that the problem isn't Google, but the model of decoupling revenue and profit from the products being sold. Apple, in the consumer space, fully couples revenue with its products and maintains an extremely low level of complexity so that it doesn't get distracted. The results are the highest margins and customer satisfaction in the segment.

In the enterprise space, EMC maintains this same coupling and focus and also enjoys some of the highest financial success and customer satisfaction in the storage space.

Wrapping Up:

In watching EMC today, I was struck by the fundamental differences between a traditional vendor and a company that came out of the dot-com. I watched so many companies fail because they believed that advertising revenue could solve all problems, including the lack of a business plan. Google has successfully shown how to make the dot-com advertising model work, but the result has been relatively low-quality products with huge privacy and security problems -- not to mention an increasing level of government concerns and intervention. That just doesn’t sound like the qualities we admire in an enterprise vendor.

In the end, while we can all be motivated by a good deal, free or cheap comes at a cost. For storage, that cost, in terms of data security and system reliability, appears to be too high. I do think there is a fix: likely a company-forced coupling of customer satisfaction and requirements to the product plan. But I know that revenue coupling works and that vendor focus on my needs remains a requirement when I make a product choice. I’m guessing that you feel the same way.

The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:10:50 GMT

The PC is clearly going through changes. Apple is surging and spent the last several years distancing itself from the idea (and name) of PC. Its coming iPad is more appliance-like and more dependent on Web service. While netbooks kind of bounced on a similar concept and now are more like notebooks, the coming wave of smartbooks suggests another try. Eric Schmidt, who I’m convinced is trying to destroy Google, popped up suggesting that the PC was dead in three years. While I agree with the direction, and actually wrote on the death of the PC model and the Apple-driven side of this, the timeline and comment reminded me more of how often we are wrong when predicting change like this.

Let’s chat about why the PC is in decline but why it will likely remain a powerful player for the rest of this decade.

It comes down to the fact that, except for some bleeding-edge types, we don’t much like change.

Death of the Mainframe: Circa 1980s

I was at IBM at the time that IBM itself seemed to declare the death of the mainframe era. Analysts and companies alike claimed that the mainframe was dead, to be replaced by client/server computing. Around two and a half decades later, the mainframe is still around and it is still one of the largest and most profitable businesses IBM has. Far from being dead, it is now a showcase for some of the most cutting-edge technology density, energy management, and cooling technology in the market. While client/server went the way of a heavy focus on price, eliminating much of the R&D budget for revolutionary advancement, the mainframe’s strong margins allowed for changes that make the mainframe of today arguably more technologically advanced than its newer client/server counterparts.

Some of the most important and mission-critical applications in the world still run on mainframes, which remain at the top of reliability and availability performance metrics in the areas where they are in use. Given how profitable this is for IBM, it is very likely that a decade from now mainframes will remain both relevant and powerful in the market. They aren’t dominant and won’t be, but they aren’t dead, and won’t be, either. In a way, in a world transitioning to appliance computing, mainframes may be the ultimate appliance.

We often forget that change comes hard. The more complex the ecosystem, the harder that change is to make. The mainframe ecosystem was one of the most complex. As a result, despite our predictions, the mainframe is arguably healthier now than it was at the end of the '80s.

Fax Machines

Back in the 1990s, the market moved to e-mail. It was clear that the death of the fax machine was imminent. But we're still talking about it today.

You can scan documents and pictures, in color, and transfer them electronically faster and more efficiently over e-mail. Fax machines aren’t secure and bypass electronic document controls, making them ideal for intellectual property theft; a simple mistake can easily send otherwise confidential documents to the wrong fax machine with no ability to recall them. (Granted, recall doesn’t work that well with e-mail, either).

Nearly two decades later, fax machines remain common, though they're clearly declining, and while they may be built into printer/scanners, they generally are favored for written document exchange, particularly where signatures are required. Their rate of decline is glacial. Back when I was forecasting e-mail deployments, they were also the key technology holding back e-mail because, for many, they were good enough.

Death of the PC Is Premature

There is no doubt that the PC is changing. A bunch of us put forth our visions for the future for Windows and while there was some disagreement as to whether Microsoft could change, there was no disagreement that it needed to change this platform for it to remain relevant. However, when you realize that the vast majority of the installed base is back on Windows XP and will remain there for at least two or three years, you’ll realize that this is not a market that moves quickly. We measure its moves in decades. Eric Schmidt is likely off by a factor of 10 in terms of predicting the death of the platform. However, that doesn’t mean that the PC isn’t in decline. Or that, like the mainframe, it will need to go through massive changes to survive.

Developer interest is clearly shifting to things like the iPad, iPhone, Android, and even the new Windows Series 7 platforms. The father of the modern PC, IBM, left the market and the parts suppliers are vertically integrating. Microsoft, at least for the consumer segment in their stores and smartphones, is setting hardware specifications and changing who actually owns the customer. This suggests the PC is attempting to evolve. Like the mainframe, it may not be dead in our lifetimes. The question of relevance remains in play and clearly the iPad, smartbooks, and Google will have a lot to say about how relevant the PC is in the future. Still, the PC won’t go without a fight and we really don’t like change that much.

Wrapping Up: The PC Is Waiting

Coincidentally, while I was finishing this, I got an e-mail from one of my oldest friends on a conversation between Iran Air Traffic control and a USMC FA-18 fighter pilot that went like this:

(Note: this could be a version of the warship lighthouse story.)

Iranian Air Defense Radar: 'Unknown aircraft you are in Iranian airspace. Identify yourself.'
Aircraft: 'This is a United States aircraft. I am in Iraqi airspace.'
Iranian Air Defense Radar: 'You are in Iranian airspace. If you do not depart our airspace we will launch interceptor aircraft!'
Aircraft: 'This is a United States Marine Corps FA-18 fighter. Send 'em up, I'll wait!'
Iranian Air Defense Radar: (no response .... total silence)

Suddenly, I want to toast a Marine. However, given the limited success of alternatives to the PC to date, the USMC pilot’s response it so on point. Before we can forecast the death of the PC, there needs to be a real challenger. Until then, like that USMC pilot, the PC won’t be going anyplace.

Novell for Sale: Another SCO Moment Coming?

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:16:06 GMT

There is a $1 billion offer on the table to buy Novell from Elliott Associates. The company’s financial performance doesn’t support this kind of price (it is 115 percent over the value of Novell as of January 4th). The investors making the bid are known for flipping companies -- basically repackaging them to turn a nice profit rather than run them long-term. Now, after the dust settled in the SCO litigation, it appeared that Novell owned the key intellectual property in question. Is there a chance these investors are looking to try to hit the jackpot as SCO did or any other reason that Linux or other open source offerings are at higher risk? If so, or if not, who is the most likely company to acquire Novell and why? Let’s explore that today.

By the way, Andrew Updegrove takes an interesting look at this, as well, and adds Oracle to the mix of potential buyers (I think Oracle will need to digest Sun first, but he could be right).

Novell Today, SCO Tomorrow?

This would seem an unlikely outcome. As SCO demonstrated, the path of litigation, while apparently very attractive, is also very expensive. It requires a set of skills that SCO’s management clearly didn’t have. The investing group behind this deal doesn’t appear to be one that lives on litigation. They are known as a group that starts with a small investment in troubled properties and then uses that investment to foment change. This makes it unlikely they would go down a litigation path. The risks are too high and their expertise is more in seeing value that is not realized, making that value more visible, and then finding a buyer.

Novell’s Value

Novell’s IP lies at the core of solutions provided from companies that include IBM, HP, Dell, Google and Microsoft. Any change in the operation of the company could adversely affect, in some cases to a significant degree, the ongoing successful operations by any and all of these companies, with the exception of Google. But Google may actually value Novell higher than any other firm and, if Google’s value is high, Microsoft could take an interest. Let’s start with the hardware OEMs.

IBM/HP/Dell

All of these companies have programs to package and sell Novell and Red Hat offerings. These offering form the core of each company’s Linux efforts. Dell, because it's still competitively light on services, likely has the highest dependency on Novell’s own service organization. HP and IBM would likely prefer to deny the other access to Novell’s solutions to get a higher percentage of the available income.

However, all know that if one of them buys the firm, the available market for the solutions drops dramatically because the cross-vendor advantage that Novell now has would slowly evaporate. Only IBM, of the three, has a software operation that could absorb Novell easily, reducing the cost and the risk of doing the acquisition. This fact makes it the most likely to make the initial move. However, having seen Oracle steal Sun from it and feeling, in hindsight, kind of glad it did (given how badly that acquisition has gone), it seems doubtful that IBM can get the approvals it needs to buy Novell. It might find Red Hat a more economical path, given that IBM doesn’t have a great desire to acquire Novell’s greatest asset, its Microsoft partnership.

Google?

Google’s solidly on an open source path; owning the key IP underneath many of its offerings would likely give it some valuable piece of mind. However, the greatest value to Google would likely be in breaking the Novell/Microsoft relationship, while using Novell/Microsoft contacts and Novell enterprise sales presence (to both IT and the OEMs above) to jumpstart into the enterprise business (particularly in Microsoft accounts it wants so badly). In one step, it would do Microsoft considerable damage and put itself in a position that it otherwise would take them years, if not decades, to accomplish. Packaged right, Novell could be very attractive. However, Google is on this silly one-acquisition-per-month plan and that likely makes it much harder to make reasonably large acquisitions like this one. Don't forget, Google's CEO used to run Novell (badly) and likely knows it better than most.

Microsoft Counter

Buying Yahoo would effectively put the company out of business unless a credible arm's-length relationship could be created. Structurally, such a thing is possible. From a perception standpoint, doing such an acquisition successfully, defined by retention of the customer base, would be incredibly difficult. Microsoft couldn’t even effectively buy Novell to shut it down to deny Google the relationship. Key Novell employees would likely cross over to Google, allowing that company to gain most of the benefit for a fraction of the cost of purchase. Antitrust limitations are likely to kick in as well, reducing Microsoft’s reasonable counter-strategies significantly.

OEM White Knight?

Lenovo, Acer, MSI or another Microsoft partner could step in and take Novell to help Microsoft (which could co-fund) deny Google the property and to become closer to Microsoft. But many of these companies also may want to have a Google relationship, and such a move would make such a relationship problematic. However, the end result for these firms, which currently don't have much software, could better match up against Dell and HP, and create an additional partnership opportunity with IBM for group efforts. This seems the best path for a Microsoft counter because it maintains the arm's-length relationship, allows the partnership to continue and possibly even be enhanced, and seems to avoid most antitrust exposures.

Wrapping Up

Novell is clearly in play and has a high intrinsic value both for its intellectual property ownership and connection to UNIX/Linux. Mining that potential will require a good deal of finesse and the greatest benefit would be had by a combination of the unique Microsoft relationship, enterprise engagements, and intellectual property. It seems unlikely that Novell’s board will turn down this offer, given what happened to Yahoo when it turned down a similar deal. As a result, Novell being sold seems all but certain; who will eventually own the company is still largely up in the air. However, neither open source nor Linux is in any significant near-term danger; long-term all depends on who the eventual buyer is and what they intend to do with the property. One thing is sure; Novell will be changing a great deal over the coming months.

Apple and the Ethical/Business Problems of Child Labor and Other Unsavory Practices

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:15:23 GMT

Apple seems to be having supplier problems.

Last week Wintek, one of Apple’s suppliers, was reported to have been using a chemical, n-hexane, which had poisoned 49 workers. This week there is an issue with suppliers who use child labor to make Apple products. Either of these problems could affect any company that uses suppliers in areas with lax regulation, doing potential substantial damage to that company’s brand and products.

Child labor is particularly problematic because the fix is to fire the underage employees, who may be the only wage earners in their families. The whole problem may be artificial. This doesn't help our own Don Tennant, who was already regretting buying an iPhone (and getting lots of feedback).

Steve Jobs has argued this isn’t Apple’s problem, but a world problem with regard to priorities and a general lack of enforcement by local agencies. I agree that this has resulted from policies that seem to focus more on appearance than reality. Apple, in effect, got nailed for trying to police the problem itself. However, while his statements are accurate, they don’t absolve Apple or any other company focused tightly on costs for being part of the problem.

The Problem of 'Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell'

Companies are under heavy pressure to find the lowest-cost providers and typically are free to look globally to find them. While they often have guidelines for things such as green practices, bribery and child labor, there tend to be few in regard to enforcement. Companies tend to know who violates these guidelines, but often adopt a "don’t ask, don’t tell" stance with these suppliers to optimize margins and assure profits.

The problem isn’t that these practices go on, but that their existence and the related risks aren’t properly assessed against the savings that these low cost suppliers provide. In short, while the benefits, largely financial, of working with these suppliers are well understood, the risks aren’t -- and this leads to lopsided decisions that don’t take these risks into account.

This week it happened to Apple, a company known for being incredibly controlling, but it could happen to any firm using outside suppliers. So what should be done?

Risk Assessment

The first step would be to determine the risk, but the “don’t ask, don’t tell” practices make this difficult. Risk assessment should begin in a virtual sense. What I mean is that if components are being built in areas such as China where unacceptable practices like this are common, then simply assume they will at some point be discovered and assess the cost of this discovery. This should give you a baseline risk that is reasonably accurate.

Risk Mitigation

This then would suggest some mitigating practices such as packaging PR responses designed to deal with the problem both retroactively and proactively. These might include philanthropic efforts focused on green activities or protecting children in the affected areas. However, if the problem is extreme -- involving physical abuse, death or suicide -- it is doubtful any mitigation will be adequate. In addition, if one of the mitigating acts actually makes the problem worse -- as might be the case if children were fired and then starved along with their families -- your company might go from being indirectly to directly responsible for the unfortunate and image-damaging acts.

Whether the firm was held accountable should likely be secondary to the reality of the now double crime against the children and families, but it certainly didn't look like it in this case.

This Is a Complex Problem with a Simple Solution

At the core of the problem is a tight focus on price above all else. The “all else” part needs to be revisited, as is any belief that the company can effectively police suppliers. Any attempt to police suppliers might create more problems than it would solve or might only shift the behavior to another part of the firm. This would suggest the combination of a severe penalty coupled with a general hands-off approach to compliance auditing with regard to any issues outside of component quality.

The severe penalty could be termination with prejudice for the contract with charges for any resulting costs the company incurs if the supplier is found to have violated any of the critical rules related to child labor, bribery or caustic chemicals, for instance. The termination could last for three, five, 10 years, or indefinitely.

This should raise the risk for non-compliance unacceptably high. However, I wonder whether it might be wiser to simply avoid areas where these practices are common, so that political pressure is put where it needs to be, on effective government enforcement.

Wrapping Up

Too often I see companies take a blind eye to their suppliers and act like practices that are common in a region don’t apply to them or these favored suppliers, even though they may know this isn't true. In an Internet age, I think that is increasingly problematic. Even if governments don’t take action, competitors and activist groups are more than capable of making these unsavory practices visible.

Maybe it’s time to step back and think about what the company should stand for, whether price should overrule all else, and whether the ecosystem that surrounds your business should be something you are proud of. The caution is that if Apple, one of the most image-conscious and controlling firms on the planet, has a problem with its suppliers, it is likely you do as well.

It may be time to put “don’t ask, don’t tell” aside and do something about it.

Are Employees Getting Ready for an Apple-Led Revolt?

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:02:08 GMT

I’m looking at a survey by enterprise mobility services vendor iPass that fomed the basis of a column by Sam Diaz over at ZDnet in which iPass surveyed around 1,000 mobile workers who make up about a third of its customer base. The survey results, coupled with this week’s news on Palm, suggest that Apple will be the only mobile vender left standing in a few months. While that's unlikely, it does point to the problem and the power of perceptions.

The Power of Apple Marketing

Be aware that surveys like this aren’t very reliable because the population in the sample isn’t representative of any particular geography. However these results resonate with similar work I’m seeing from other analysts. Interest in Apple and Apple’s products is increasing dramatically and interest in other platforms is dropping off. Interest in laptops seems to be dropping sharply, and there doesn’t seem to be much defense from laptop vendors who, themselves, are jumping on smartphones.

While there are a lot of Android phones, only a small fraction of users are interested in them because they haven’t been in the market long enough to have a sustaining impression, and only the Verizon Droid is well marketed. The iPhone has been high profile for three years and the Blackberry phones most employees have are out of date. Even those that aren’t don’t provide an app store or Web experience as good as folks think the iPhone will be. This is the power of sustained marketing to maintain perception of a highly popular product.

It is interesting to note that while the trends towards Apple are stunning, few people in this survey were actually using an iPhone. Folks wanted an experience they believed to be superior, but few had actually seen.

The iPad

Nearly a quarter of the employees wanted to use an iPad for work. Given that this product isn’t even out, we know with some confidence that none has actually used one for work. This suggests that unless something is done, a lot of iPads will be coming in the door and employees will expect a good experience, even though the products likely won’t be able to provide it.

What this Survey Means

It suggests folks are truly unhappy with their laptops because 64 percent appear to want to replace them with something else. Apple's powerful marketing is producing a “grass is greener” response, prompting them to ask for something else, though they don't fully understand the limitations of these new products. If we gave them iPhones and iPads, most would likely remain unhappy because their expectations are unreasonable and not based in actual experience.

Showcasing Opportunity and Risk

Clearly a large group of unhappy users creates an opportunity for vendors to provide a better enterprise/business solution than Apple. But to capitalize on this, vendors will need to market their advantages. A strategy of "build it and they will come” likely won’t do well in the face of powerful Apple marketing -- and Apple plans to ramp up its efforts soon.

Employees' dissatisfaction likely results from the companies' attempts to extend the lifecycle of mobile products, leaving workers struggling with aging notebooks and smartphones. Recall that PCs gained popularity in the '80s as a response to employees' struggles with unresponsive IT departments and aging mid-range and mainframe computers.

This level of dissatisfaction generally comes before a line revolt. If IT shops ignore employee disatisfaction, line organizations may start deploying solutions on their own, reducing substantially both the budget and internal authority for IT, much like the similar trend several decades ago.

Wrapping Up

If you haven’t surveyed your user base, it might be time to do so and, based on the response, prioritize improving the satisfaction scores. Being blindsided by organizations that have concluded that IT has little value -- and I’ve been through this -- isn’t a lot of fun. This survey suggests some groups will start to get blindsided shortly.

A Tale of Two Windows 7 Deployments: Security, Hardware Lifecycle, Support Benefits

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:09:35 GMT

Learn first-hand how leading technology providers are developing midmarket technologies to solve key business and strategic challenges.

In preparation for the MidMarket CIO Forum next month, we are collecting case studies on successful projects. Since I’m doing the talk on Windows 7 deployments, I’m collecting information on several of them. These first two are still in the testing phase. While I was writing this up, a story broke about Windows 7 problem from a CTO that didn't exist. I can’t recall a version of Windows where anyone went to this effort to write a story on made-up problems, suggesting that Windows 7 might be living up to expectations, but let's see what testing is showing.

The Companies

The two companies are about the same size, around 500 people, but in vastly different businesses. Thiele Kaolin Co. works with kaolin a magical clay-like material used in everything from paper to cosmetics. Meanwhile, upscale home builder Wilshire Homes operates in Austin, Houston and San Antonio, Texas.

Both companies use XP at the moment for productivity applications and neither considers itself to be bleeding edge in its use of technology. Both have relatively simple ecosystems, however, Thiele Kaolin runs some manufacturing processes on old PCs using old applications.

Both companies are relatively centralized, though Thiele Kaolin is multinational and has small remote offices. Wilshire Homes’ staff is split between San Antonio and Austin. Both are largely Microsoft shops.

Testing

Thiele Kaolin put 10 machines using Windows 7 into production with IT staff to assure critical applications, drivers and scripts worked. Wilshire Homes did lab testing and a majority of IT staff has moved to Windows 7 on their home systems. All indicated they were pleased with the results.

Results

Both companies sailed through compatibility testing. Wilson Homes indicated there were no problems, though Thiele Kaolin found that a few very old applications might require XP mode or an older operating system to work correctly. Thiele Kaolin’s CIO Mark Bailey indicated this was a problem for two or three machines running manufacturing-control applications and shouldn't hold up the general rollout in mid-year.

Win Hansen , CIO of Wilshire Homes, found critical applications ran without issue and plans to begin rollout during the same time period. He was particularly complimentary of the new Windows MAP (Microsoft Assessment and Planning) Toolkit, which he found a big help in resolving pre-deployment problems. Because of budgetary concerns, he plans to roll out Windows 7 department by department as resources become available over a longer period of time.

Benefits Driving the Rollout

Both cited security as a benefit -- both had had problems with employees turning off XP settings or otherwise picking up and loading viruses. The primary benefit for Thiele Kaolin, however, was extending the life of existing hardware, which typically would be replaced at three years and, post rollout, would be extended to five years. The primary benefits for Wilshire Homes were balanced between security and the need to be off Windows XP before Microsoft ends support for it. Wilshire plans to roll out in a mix of new and relatively recent existing hardware (about 50/50).

Both indicated significant performance improvements, particularly during boot-up with Windows 7. Both companies had found Windows Vista unacceptable for deployment. Both said that even though they were moving from XP to Windows 7, rather than from Vista, they expect the employee learning curve to be slight.

Wrapping Up

Overall, these two companies help confirm what is likely a major rollout of Windows 7 around mid-year and the hope that hardware cycles might be significantly extended through its use. As is typical for maintenance releases, there appear to be few problems and testing is going surprisingly well. This supports the typical best practice of avoiding major releases of operating systems and instead deploying maintenance releases like XP and Windows 7 to assure a more seamless experience. It is interesting also to note that neither plans to deploy Office 2010, although both said they might do so later, depending on user need and budget. Certainly this is a big change from the '90s when Windows and Office always went hand in hand.

I’ll try to run down some actual deployments in the next few days and post what I find out.

The Microsoft Whoops Phone and iPad: The Danger of Naming

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:35:33 GMT

I have a rule about product naming and, since I came up with it, I call in the Enderle Rule (creative, huh?). That rule is: “When it comes to product naming, the only thing everyone will agree on is the person who came up with the name is an idiot.” I thought of this rule as I watched the coverage of the iPad, which has an uncomfortable connection to a woman’s hygiene product (I think Apple needs more women in high management positions), and the Windows Phone Series 7 name which, when turned into an acronym, WPS, sounds like “Whoops.”

Let’s talk about why naming is a real bi…, er, problem and why, when someone is looking for a person to come up with a name, you should start running and not look back until you are in a country without an extradition treaty.

My Naming Experience

One of the jobs I've held was in marketing for IBM. I shared responsibility for a product that had been in development for years. It had no name. This was becoming a problem because we were getting close to launch and it is pretty hard to do a launch if the thing you’re launching doesn’t have a name. Now at IBM back then, and I’m sure at other companies, there was an unwritten rule that you didn’t volunteer for anything. Apparently, I missed the meeting on that because I volunteered to take the responsibility for getting the name done. This remains one of the worst decisions I've ever made in my life.

You see, there had been an internal contest to select a name for the product. The thousands of folks who worked in and around the product had some interesting ideas. Unfortunately, in this “contest,” the only name most seemed to like was the one they came up with themselves. On top of that, as in a lot of big companies, executive management felt that these folks got a vote since they worked on the offering.

Cost of Vetting

It takes about $10,000 to $20,000 to vet a name. Given that this was to be an international product, the cost typically drifted to the high side. IBM didn’t want any litigation, so vetting had to be aggressive. This meant that any name that looked even remotely attractive was already taken or meant something really nasty in a foreign language. After burning through a lot of money, I came up with three names that passed and were memorable. These names had to be vetted with the engineers who, remember, only liked the names they came up with and thought the names I had come up with reminded them of diseases or medical products.

I knew I was trapped so I took what the product did -- distributed storage management -- and turned it into an acronym, DSM, which was not pronounceable. Nobody loved it but nobody hated it. After the first naming pass, folks were already thinking I was mentally challenged. Think of Peterbilt, a very successful truck company, going through this naming process: "OMG, doesn't that imply you are building with your .... ?!?"

Just One More Letter (for the CEO)

At the time, we were planning to spin the division out and the name for the new company was AdStar. Believe me, I had sympathy for the poor fool who came up with that name, which coincidentally had the same first letter as the General Manager’s last name. So I added the A to the front and the product name became ADSM. We launched. As some of you know, there is no AdStar company and the division never spun out. Sigh…

Acronyms Suck

At IBM, we did a lot of studies. One of them was on acronyms and it clearly showed that customers hated them, they were really a problem to market, they were hard to remember, and you could have several divisions and companies using the same acronym for different things. Also, some acronyms, when spoken, make unfortunate words, which makes you feel sorry for the folks that make the Field Change Kit or FCK. Takeaway: Acronyms suck. However, they are vastly easier to get through internal and external approval processes, which is why big companies have so many of them.

Wrapping Up

One of the big problems with branding in particular and marketing in general is that it often seems that everyone thinks they are better at it than the folks doing the job. This gives you an amazing number of critics and a rather pitiful number of supporters. So just remember that when you see something stupid in a product name, life could be worse. You could be the idiot blamed for coming up with it.

Also remember: If someone asks you to come up with a product name, run away.

Windows Phone 7 Series: The Hard Stuff Is Yet to Come

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:55:20 GMT

In a smartphone world that was increasingly defined by Apple and Apple clones, Microsoft needed to step out. It could have, as it initially did with Windows, create an Apple clone that was better than Google’s Android platform, but instead Microsoft went back to the drawing board and created something quite different. This was a nice suprise to a lot of folks, but different is vastly riskier. That's exactly what Apple did when it created the iPhone, which stood in sharp contrast to the other phones then in the market. As a result, Apple virtually took that market over. Can Microsoft do this with Windows Phone Series 7, or more appropriately, will it?

The Problem with Being Different

Apple convinced the market that it wanted something different with the iPhone through a core strategy of initially presenting the product in a compelling way, then marketing its unique advantages in a way that wrapped lines around buildings. Microsoft has only done this once with a platform product, with Windows 95. It did it to a lesser degree with the Xbox, but that was a complete offering. Windows Phone Series 7 is neither a standalone operating system nor a complete system, so Microsoft can’t even own the launch of the actual devices.

At the iPhone introduction (it's worth watching again) Steve Jobs held up a compelling device and got people focused on the actual product. Compare that with Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 launch, where there was no real hardware to excite the audience.

Fortunately, the presentation of the OS was actually very attractive and it seemed relatively easy to use.

Re-establishing Trust

Because Apple builds, controls (owns the user experience), and markets the iPhone itself, trust isn’t that important. Apple typically dictates terms to its carrier partners, which is likely why a bunch of them, including AT&T, were on Microsoft’s stage. However the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like HTC have been drifting over into Google’s camp because of past disappointments with the Windows Mobile Platform. So getting these companies to commit resources back to Microsoft for initial phone development and marketing will be more difficult. But Google isn’t managing trust very well at the moment, causing some to drift back. It has blindsided many of its partners with the announcement of the ChromeOS and Nexus One, and has a tendency to operate unilaterally, which doesn’t make its partners any more comfortable.

Microsoft will need to re-establish trust -- something it has struggled with for two decades -- if it wants the support of phone OEMs.

Accessories

Part of Apple's success in the market this decade can be attributed to a robust portfolio of accessories. Granted, this appears to make a bigger difference with iPods, rather than iPhones, but it is still important that the devices work well with a variety of things to pull out and better use the digital content core to the device.

Microsoft has Sync, which could be a competitive advantage if it were more broadly used, but it lacks the needed partner advancements into the non-automotive accessories segment.

Phone Design

Difference needs to extend to the phone design as well. To doing this much work on the user interface and experience, and yet come to market with a bunch of me-too iPhone-like devices would likely repeat the Google mistake. Some of these phones need to be really different and showcase the strengths of this platform. Products like the Dell Mini 5 come to mind as potential offerings, but Dell appears to be going in Google’s direction. (Dell was on stage, but what it is doing with this platform has yet to be announced).

If this is just an iPhone with a different user interface, it still might do better than Google, but it would forever fall under Apple’s shadow. It has to be both attractive and different. Inability to successfully do that destroyed PlaysForSure and hurt the first versions of Zune.

Marketing

People have to want to buy these phones, and there will be lots of competition. Certainly the carriers want alternatives to the iPhone, much like retailers wanted alternatives to the iPod. But as Zune showcased, that doesn’t get you much unless buyers flock to the devices. The initial presentation of the platform, while one of the better ones that Microsoft has done, didn’t create the kind of initial passion that the iPod, iPhone and even iPad did.

While Windows 7 marketing has been good, this is vastly more difficult for Microsoft because it has to coordinate with the hardware OEM and the carrier. Apple does this alone, and the lack of complexity certainly shows in the results. The successful Droid campaign was done by Verizon without much help from Google or Motorola. Someone has to step up to this requirement, and Microsoft may not be able to, the OEM may not be able to afford to, and the carrier may be unwilling to, given other carriers may have similar devices.

Business

Microsoft shared a business focus with Research in Motion on its platform, and certainly this new platform won’t abandon the centralized control and security from that partnership. This is one of Microsoft’s sustaining advantages. However, t could be repeating the mistake it made in launching Windows XP by being focused on consumers first and businesses late in the cycle.

People tend to be binary with these devices: Either they are consumer- or business-focused. Microsoft’s initial Windows Phone 7 presentation screamed consumer, which could jeopardize the perception that Microsoft is a better business solution. But if it does a poor job in correcting this problem, consumers might find the device less attractive as well.

Wrapping Up: High Degree of Difficulty

Microsoft announced with the Windows Phone 7 Series a surprisingly good platform that exceeded expectations. However, there's a high degree of difficulty surrounding a platform like this, which requires the tight coordination of carriers and hardware OEMs without being dictatorial. This is one of the reasons Apple did its own phone, killed the Mac clones in the '80s, and why Microsoft killed PlaysForSure and did the Zune.

Google did demonstrate that with the right partner (Verizon), you could create some excitement, but even that effort isn’t generating anywhere near the numbers in volume or profit that Apple enjoys. The launch of the Windows Phone 7 series is a good start, but the really hard work is yet to come.

Unified Communications Case Study: 50 Percent Savings in Midmarket Example

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:29:54 GMT

Learn first-hand how leading technology providers are developing midmarket technologies to solve key business and strategic challenges.

In preparation for our MidMarket CIO IT Forum next month, we are collecting case studies on successful projects. This one is on Tridel, a Canadian midmarket builder of condominiums. It reported savings in the 50 percent range for networking and telephone by unifying the systems supplying both services as well as increased customer satisfaction at the same time. While the company's project is still in process, its initial savings are impressive and worth sharing.

Environment

While Tridel is small, it also is relatively complex. Each of its 20 active projects is a separate company with its own unique identity under the umbrella of the larger corporate entity.

It had aging Nortel PBXes that had become too expensive to maintain and that required expensive dedicated trunks at each location, leaving little budget for a data connection. That connection was one high-speed DSL link per site, which easily became saturated with data use and couldn’t effectively be monitored. As a result, much of the high-bandwidth data use was likely unauthorized as well. This unauthorized use of the Internet led to a proliferation of viruses, excessive downtime and support costs, money that could have been better used elsewhere.

This was an expensive mess that was difficult to manage and less than satisfactory for the each of the working companies.

The Bidders and TCO Analysis

To address the problem, the company decided to merge the data and voice problems into one VoIP/networking RFP and seek bids from Nortel, Cisco, Avaya, Shoretel, along with a OCS (Microsoft Office Communications Server) solution bid.

Each was asked to look at five-year costs for its proposed solution so the company could compare not only initial costs, but also costs over a reasonable period of time. This analysis included energy use. This extended analysis tended to penalize vendors who low-balled initial bids in order to lock in high annual service fees.

The Result

Nortel wasn’t competitive, which is interesting given it was largely a Nortel PBX that was being replaced.

Cisco was too complex and expensive to service. While the solution was compelling, it was seen as overkill for this kind of deployment. Implementation costs for Cisco were four times that of the winning bid.

Avaya had a very low initial cost, but the cost of services made it too expensive over the five years. It was generally seen as not competitive.

The OCS bid had an inside track because Tridel isn’t just a Microsoft shop, it is heavily invested in Exchange. The solution, however, was not well packaged by Microsoft, and although the solution was one of the most interesting and highly considered, it was felt that it was not quite ready for prime time and there was risk in being an early adopter.

ShoreTel, a midsized U.S.-based vendor, won the bid with a solution that was well-designed for Tridel’s needs and the most cost-effective over the five years.

Benefits Achieved

By implementing an IP-based system and aggregating both data and voice calls, the sites could eliminate the expensive trunks and drop in dedicated T1 lines, which dramatically improved network speeds. They could hub the remote resources using MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) and monitor use, which virtually eliminated unauthorized use of equipment and effectively eliminated the massive virus problems.

They could better direct calls to centralized attendants, assuring that after-hour callers -- who could be investors or buyers -- were handled better. This also eliminated the need for after-hours attendants. The result was an 80 percent reduction in phone line cost and an estimated savings of 50 percent of the historical combined cost for networking and telephony. Against these savings, the cost of the implementation was considered negligible.

The company already is seeing unanticipated additional benefits from the extra bandwidth, such as the ability to collocate or centrally locate servers and to provide for both better redundancy and lower-cost aggregated server and storage solutions. And it believes it has just scratched the surface with the savings and flexibility this solution provides.

Videoconferencing Didn’t Take

The company did a trial with videoconferencing, but decided the technology simply wasn’t used enough to justify a deployment. The target for this, interestingly enough, wasn’t employees, but aging tenants whom the company believed wouldn’t want to travel. I think this illustrates two things: First, new technology typically doesn’t move well with older audiences, and that to make people use a new technology, both incentives to use it and penalties for bypassing it need to be in place. For tenants, the latter would be nearly impossible to implement.

Wrapping Up: Unified Communications Was a Great Investment

Tridel and CIO Ted Maulucci showcase an intelligent approach to the problem and solution. They didn’t just chase VoIP, they chased a solution that best matched the size and type of company and that could save the company money initially while making it more agile and effective strategically. The result was unanticipated benefits, rather than the more typical unanticipated problems after rollout. That result is the very definition of a best practice.

IBM Power7 and Apple's ARM A4: The Advantages of Having Your Own Processor

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:35:39 GMT

A lot of things change in a decade. At the end of the '90s, it seemed clear that Intel's Itanium was going to dominate the UNIX world and that the proprietary processors would give way to the inevitable. Itanium slipped badly and, while most of the other custom processors went by the wayside, IBM stuck with Power. Today, it announced Power7, a significant improvement on its platform and one that continues to differentiate it well at the high end.

At the other end of the spectrum, and effectively bracketing Intel, is ARM. Here, Apple recently announced its own version of this processor called the A4. This appears to be less of an advantage for Apple initially because, unlike where Power plays in the low-volume, high-cost space, ARM plays in the low-cost, high-volume space that would typically benefit a common provider.

Power7: The Sun Killer

Power7 is IBM’s SPARC killer product and was well positioned to go after the UNIX opportunity that Sun lost largely through mismanagement. I could go on at length on the subject of mismanagement, but in the end IBM, by having solutions that could easily move on the opportunity created by Sun’s collapse, was able to get more of the resulting benefit than HP was. Granted this wasn’t just hardware. It included a tighter initial focus on the opportunity and the fact that IBM appeared to be co-resident in more Sun accounts because Sun had made massive inroads into IBM’s accounts in the '90s when IBM was having issues. A lot of payback came to IBM this past decade.

In addition, even though most thought mainframes would collapse in the '80s, they actually went through somewhat of a resurgence because the platform had advantages in reliability and scalability in an ever-more-connected world, and proved to be reasonably successful as a consolidation platform during the past decade. It also turned out to be vastly easier to move older legacy mainframe applications to newer mainframes than to rewrite them. This, too, helped assure that this platform survived.

By focusing on energy-efficient performance for this latest class of processor, companies like the Australian Broadcasting Corp. have reported a 25 percent reduction in total cost of ownership, according to IBM numbers. Additional benefits include dropping the server footprint 35 percent and an 80 percent improvement in the time it takes to set up new customer environments. This all works because the space that Power7 occupies tends to be relatively custom and favors unique advantages in power savings and I/O, both of which IBM is expert at. Core to the success is that the kind of system IBM builds favors a low-volume unique part because of the unique nature of ever-larger enterprises that would be likely to favor these very large systems. In short, this is a market with only two very different power players right now: IBM with a vertically integrated solution and Intel, which largely relies on HP to build around its platform. The IBM approach seems to have been the more successful.

Apple A4: Keeping a Secret

The ARM space is made up of technology specialist companies that design chips and then share fabrication facilities to manufacture them, spreading out the cost. Intel doesn’t yet play in this space in volume, though it hopes to enter it with a future version of the Atom processor. Each of the companies, which include Qualcomm, Marvell, Freescale and others, competes rather aggressively on price, performance and overall solution. In fact, the ARM space is less about processor than it is about the SOC (System On Chip) nature of the solution.

The products that play in this space tend to be subsidized by carrier charges, have incredibly thin margins, and compete on price as much as on user experience. The buyers tend to look at the overall solution and don’t seem to care that much about the technology that surrounds it. In short, this is a market that would seem to favor the non-vertically integrated approach that appears to surround PCs and consumer appliances, making Apple’s move to do its own processor seem foolish. However, while IBM’s products are often heavily tested against their unique uses, Apple’s products are largely defined by Apple itself, and the user experience defines the offering, not specific benchmarks. In addition, with Apple, the big problem has been leaks. The more people involved in a design, the more likely that design will leak out and be copied in China (working copies of the iPhone were available there within days of its first release). By doing its own part, it can substantially reduce the opportunity for a technology leak on a new product and have the option of switching over to a more common ARM part for future versions of a new product to contain costs as the product matures.

Apple will sacrifice some performance to gain better secrecy, but given that it is involved in a market that is less measurement oriented than IBM’s, this is likely a good tradeoff. The iPhone, which was successful despite performance and carrier shortcomings, is proof of this. Granted the release of a potential iPad-killing iTablet in April for Europe (where Apple is weaker), based on Intel's new Atom part, likely will have us revisit this decision later in the year. Intel can keep a secret.

Wrapping Up: IBM and Apple – Similar Destination, Different Path

Both companies got to the conclusion of having a specialized part along different paths and both decisions can be justified competitively. IBM’s decision is justified by the unique nature of the market that Power7 occupies, which favors very power-efficient, scalable platforms that can take on the massive virtualized loads of today and tomorrow. Apple’s decision is justified by the need for absolute secrecy and the reality that a leak could turn an incredibly successful product into an also-ran. Both companies stand as testament to their ability to make unique decisions, which allow them to lead their respective industries even though those industries are vastly different.

How iPad Potentially Drives Employee PC Ownership Trend

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:23:32 GMT

Learn first-hand how leading technology providers are developing midmarket technologies to solve key business and strategic challenges.

The iPad, as with all Apple products, isn’t really focused on business use yet. Much like the iPhone, it will find its way into corporations through employees who buy them, though.

Over at our CTO Edge site, writer Wayne Rash thinks you should be ready for these things. Given that it will be better at rendering Web pages and forms than most any phone, including the iPhone, and that companies continue to shift corporate applications to the cloud, I wonder whether it eventually would start to make sense for many to use employee-purchased iPads, or similar devices, instead of laptops.

Employee Purchase Trend

In preparation for our Mid-Market CIO Forum in mid March, we asked 140 IT executives if they were actively considering employee purchase and 31 (or 22 percent) indicated they were. This is higher than I’ve seen in prior surveys, suggesting this trend may be increasing. The increasing needs to cut capital expenditures and to better contain support costs are driving this trend. The latter happens because the employee, upon purchasing the hardware, becomes directly responsible for the break/fix part of hardware support, potentially lowering the related corporate expense significantly.

Given that many of the programs being considered include Macs as options and that iPhones increasingly are being allowed in corporations, why not kill two birds with one stone and approve iPads?

The iPad Option

TechRepublic did a survey of CIOs asking whether a business case can be made for a tablet like the iPad, and the majority said yes. If you think about how much is currently offered on the Web and how much is forms-based, a product like the iPad could provide the core portable technology that most employees need without the risks or costs of a company-purchased laptop computer.

This idea of a computing appliance is hardly new. Oracle and Sun came up with the idea of a thin client more than a decade ago, but the cost of the devices and the idea that they would have to be hardwired and not portable was wrong-headed during a time when laptop computers were ramping to displace desktop PCs.

It is kind of amazing that the concept has effectively been reborn in a product that is vastly (based on the media coverage) more appealing to consumers and apparently (based on this survey) also vastly more interesting to CIOs.

This last is likely because the product can be purchased by employees and uses the existing PC-based ecosystems, but doesn’t require millions in network and server upgrades to make them work.

The Evolution of the Mobile Chubby Client

The iPad isn’t really a thin client because many of the initial applications and content will run locally. It's more of a chubby client, thinner than a traditional PC operating system and more appliance-like, but vastly more capable than the machines that Oracle and Sun initially imagined.

The question is: Will Apple, Google, or Microsoft initially move on this opportunity successfully? This is Microsoft’s market to lose, but the internal Windows 7-embedded effort is under fire and likely will go the way of other products, as this New York Times article highlights. Google still needs to pick a platform because conflicts between Chrome OS and Android are confusing the OEMs who are trying to embrace the offering. Meanwhile, Apple is still solidly focused on the iPad as an entertainment device, which managers and CIOs will hardly find endearing.

Wrapping Up

Indicators still point to a fundamental change over the next decade favoring employee purchase of hardware and a hardware shift to more appliance-like devices. The cell phone model has been very successful and costs for products like netbooks are often even less than some smartphones today. Companies increasingly will find it hard to justify the capital outlay for new employee hardware given that employees will increasingly buy their own, better hardware anyway.

iPads might start the employee-purchase wave, but it is unclear which of the major vendors will finally benefit. With the OEMs working with Microsoft and Google, and Apple clearly getting most of the initial interest, this is still anyone’s game -- one Microsoft could win if it got around its fiefdoms, as IT Business Edge's Ann All put it. But we need to consider whether it is time to either embrace or fight this employee- and Apple-driven change. Employees will be showing up with these things in a few months regardless.

Can Google or Microsoft Compete with the iPad?

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:08:21 GMT

Even with Apple’s success with the iPhone, success with the iPad isn’t a given. The company has left a lot of openings with its first-generation product, which has clear limitations. This suggests that the iPad won't hit its stride until its second or third generation. Despite having more resources, though, neither Google nor Microsoft has shown the ability to compete with Apple successfully in smartphones. So does that change with this new tablet?

It is interesting to note that this new tablet is more anti-PC then the traditional Mac platform is, and many think it will help redefine computing, including me. But with the PC, while Apple clearly started the wave, Apple didn't ride it well, even in the early years. Apple initially was passed by Commodore, which later failed, suggesting its success this time is far from certain.

Let’s look at how Microsoft, Google and their relative ecosystems stack up against Apple. We will assume iPhone-level execution for Apple, since the iPad has not actually shipped yet, and assume Android phone-level execution for Google, since its tablets also have yet to hit the market. While RIM has come the closest to matching Apple's customer loyalty and execution on smartphones, there is no indication that it is planning a tablet, so I’m leaving it out of this comparison.

Areas of Comparison

There are four areas of comparison that the iPhone’s success has identified, by order of importance: customer experience ownership; marketing (demand generation); design; and richness of ecosystem (application store/accessories/content, etc.).

Customer experience ownership is the consistent high-quality experience the customer gets with the product regardless of who supplies the specific component.
Demand-generation marketing is how excited customers get about the offering and how much they adjust their buying behavior to buy into the product ecosystem.
Design is the look and feel of the product including core accessories, software, appearance of the device and ease of use.
Richness of ecosystem is the depth and breadth of the applications and ecosystem that surround the device allowing it to perform additional tasks, integrate with other products (cars/receivers etc.), and perform unique tasks (both for work and entertainment). It includes content as well, including movies, books, games and music.

Apple

Apple aggressively owns the customer experience, turning off multitasking to preserve application speed and battery life, making sure the phones stay locked to their preferred carrier, aggressively reviewing applications for approval, and even assuring the buying experience in most cases through Apple stores and online. While not perfect, particularly in the application-approval area, it goes further than any other vendor to control and assure customer experience.

Apple puts the entire company behind a new product during launch, shifting the entire company to its introduction and initial demand development. From the way the product is presented, to placement on TV, to sampling, to aggressive traditional and online marketing programs, Apple is unmatched in the segment in both amount spent on demand-generation marketing and the quality of execution.

Product design is seen as an Apple strength. However it often trades off the appearance of the device against other drivers, such as making sure it owns the royalties from its ecosystem (unique docking) and the reliability of the product (Apple often favors attractive finishes over more robust ones). Apple generally is regarded as a company that pushes the design envelope, but in ways that most return buyers find very attractive and acceptable in terms of risk.

Apple enjoys one of the richest ecosystems in its segment, from the largest application store to the deepest selection of accessories from third parties. This class of product produces massive income from additional sales in accessories, applications, games and content.

Google

Google passes the customer experience over to the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), who have had some success. HTC has seems to have come closest to Apple in assuring the customer experience, but remains far from closing the gap. For the tablet class, Google appears to prefer the ChromeOS platform over Android, which would tie the related products more closely in to the cloud, and Google’s strength there could close this gap. But the ChromeOS is far from production, vastly different in execution to Android and difficult to assess as a result.

Google leaves marketing to the OEM or carrier. The effort on Droid, driven by Verizon, showed that this model could be competitive, but, so far, that phone has not approached the iPhone's profit and revenue numbers. Google’s own branded phone, the Nexus One, has underperformed expectations in this regard even though, based on specifications, it is a superior offering to the Droid.

Product design is left to the OEMs as well, who tend to favor robust materials over more attractive ones. Without the needed marketing to drive home this advantage, it hasn’t proved to be one. While the phones are increasingly attractive, it is clear the OEMs are learning how to provide a consistent hardware/software offering, and the related experience generally lags.

Google has a relatively weak ecosystem. Google is more lenient in its applications, but falls far behind Apple in terms of application breadth and depth, though it often is seen as having higher-quality applications. Accessories don’t seem to bridge phones very well, though the Android phones do tend to use more common interfaces like USB that might provide a consumer advantage at a cost to Google.

Microsoft

Microsoft also shares the customer experience with the OEMs and has been trying to move tablets into the market since 2003. They've been received poorly outside of vertical markets, though. Microsoft did create a potentially more cohesive Windows variant called Origami, but failed to finish it. The OEMs struggled with related products, causing it to fail. With smartphones, like Google, Microsoft shares ownership of the experience between carriers and OEMs. That has hurt ease of use and, partially as a result, this platform has been in decline. It's now positioning Windows, not Windows Mobile, at the tablet market.

Windows 7 marketing has been competitive; Windows Mobile marketing has not. Traditionally Microsoft does little demand-generation marketing, leaving that to the OEMs, who generally aren’t in Apple’s league with marketing of this type. The competition in its ecosystem tends to drive heavy price competition, leaving little budget to pitch the platform and contributing to the lack of excitement surrounding Microsoft’s smartphones and tablets.

Product design is left to the OEMs. As with Google, this typically leads to lots of inconsistencies between hardware and software, and excess complexity. As a result, the products are harder to sell, and potential customers often find them intimidating. The only products for which Microsoft approached Apple’s level of execution are the Xbox and Zune, and it had to break out of this shared OEM model to do so.

Microsoft has a strong Windows-based ecosystem of software, content, games and accessories in the PC space that also generally apply to tablets. However, these accessories vary from vendor to vendor, and while they use standard interfaces like USB, integration with cars and receivers is far less common as a result. Microsoft has more partners and has demonstrated with products like Ford Sync, so it would seem the company could outperform Apple here, but it has not.

Wrapping Up

The Apple iPad is a first-generation product and, as such, leaves substantial room for someone else to step in and improve it. However, neither Google nor Microsoft has demonstrated broadly the needed capabilities to bring out a real competitor. Google, with the ChromeOS and a more robust back end, could create something potentially more advanced. Microsoft, which has been in the tablet segment since 2003, brings to the competition experience and a more mature platform, but it lacks Apple's focus.

Microsoft with Zune and the Xbox has shown it can create products that could compete, but only by breaking the model that made the company successful. Google has conflicting platforms -- Android and ChromeOS -- targeting this segment, and you might argue that Microsoft should use Windows Mobile rather than Windows 7 as its platform now that we have seen the iPad.

Both Microsoft and Google have, with partners, vastly more resources than Apple. But if they can’t focus those resources at the key elements that make this solution successful, the resulting complexity will once again be a disadvantage and allow Apple -- or someone like RIM or Amazon -- to own this emerging segment more successfully.

Snorkel (Sun + Oracle) vs. IBM: The Enterprise Battle of This Decade?

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:20:06 GMT

In some ways Oracle, by acquiring Sun, has created a company that on paper looks very similar to the direction that IBM was going in the 1960s but with software, not hardware, in the lead. However, there is a big difference between where a company is going and where it is. At Oracle’s event this week, Larry Ellison demonstrated a Steve Jobs-like strategy where you lead with perception and follow with product.

What folks tend to forget is that for product decisions, perceptions generally trump reality and Oracle’s expertise in managing them could trump IBM’s superior competence and maturity in existing products. This is how I think the two will come to battle.

Snorkel in Three Steps

Oracle seems to be taking a page from Steve Jobs' book in the initial engagements, which suggest three steps: first on perception, second on promise and third on product.

On perception, Oracle will position the inadequate Sun products (if they were adequate, Sun would have been doing better) as better than they think they actually are. This is exactly what Jobs did when he took over Apple. He knew the products weren’t competitive, but he positioned them competitively and won over enough customers to keep Apple afloat. Oracle likely will do the same thing while furiously working to redesign the lines to better optimize for the vision Oracle is building for.

The second step will be to position what will be very immature offerings as mature, leveraging both the Sun and Oracle brands to showcase experience and product maturity. But these products will be new concepts, so Oracle will wrap the companies with services and contain any problems so buyers simply won't realize how immature these offerings actually are.

Finally, Oracle will bring out very well-tuned competitive offerings that have been tested in the market and likely will stand up well against competitors and differentiate by being better with Oracle software. It should be able to reach this superiority because of the unique tight relationship inside of Oracle and tuning on both sides. At the earliest, it will complete this phase in 24 months, which will require bridging cultures quickly and connecting the hardware and software groups intimately in the first six months post-merger. (I should point out that such integration typically takes more than two years by itself, but Oracle is one of the best at this.)

IBM’s Exposure

IBM’s products through all of this will be superior, but IBM lacks the ability to fight (exempified here) the kind of image fight Oracle will be starting. To combat Oracle, IBM will need to closely couple the software and hardware groups on message and product development. These are effectively separate companies under a corporate umbrella. The umbrella, or corporate marketing, should be the entity that drives the competitive response, but it has weakened significantly over the past decade and may be unable to provide the necessary response.

We saw a similar mismatch on the consumer side in the Apple Mac vs. PC campaign. Microsoft was unable to effectively respond to Apple’s attack until it brought on board Kathleen Hall to head its marketing response. Kathleen was a leading agency-trained marketing expert.

For IBM to produce an effective and timely response, it will have to overcome Oracle’s superior messaging and either take the market in a different direction or get to where Oracle is going faster and better. The do that, it must more closely couple IBM software and hardware and let software lead in product direction. That would be easier than trying to figure out and execute an integrated strategy on the former because it is already defined.

Wrapping Up: Oracle Will Lead on Messaging and Lag on Product

Unless the companies that compete with them match on messaging, this will work to Oracle’s benefit. Recall that Apple started the past decade doing this and ended up kicking a lot of Dell and Microsoft butt. A message-oriented attack is difficult for engineering types to counter because they don’t fundamentally get that perception is 100 percent of reality and that it actually doesn’t matter that much if your solution is more mature or better if folks believe the other guy's solution is the better deal.

Oracle’s attack on this market might be vapor, but it knows how to effectively use vapor as a weapon. IBM might not have a good defense. Oracle must execute quickly, which given the mess Sun is in, won’t be easy. IBM must dramatically improve its ability to counter the message and tie two divisions more closely together. That won’t be easy either. IBM should win, but the market is full of examples when "should" didn't win.

At the Core of Why Apple is Outperforming Microsoft

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:24:06 GMT

If I were to describe two companies, one that is heavily leveraged by partners with global consumer and corporate scope and another that is largely U.S.-centric and largely limited to the consumer market, you might assume the first company was more successful. And up until the end of the past decade, you would have been right by choosing Microsoft. However, the past decade was clearly Apple’s, and the smaller company in terms of growth and mind share clearly outperformed the company that should be vastly more powerful.

I think this comes down to two things that define Apple’s success: It is focused on a clearly defined customer and it tries fewer things, but provides enough resources to ensure their success. Let’s explore that as we wait for the historic launch of Apple's risky Tablet.

Apple vs. Microsoft on Products

Looking at the consumer space, Apple has launched a lot of products in the past decade. The iPod Shuffle and Nano, the iPhone/iPod Touch, AppleTV, and the iMac refresh were all major launches. The company switched to Intel for PCs. Each product had its own moment, each came with a demand-generation marketing campaign and only AppleTV failed. Only Jaguar was a major release, with the other operating system releases being minor, and Apple grew in PC market share throughout past decade.

During this same time in the consumer market, Microsoft launched Origami, Zune 1, 2 (two sizes) and Zune HD (each dramatically different), Xbox and Xbox 360, Tablet PC, Media Center, Media Extenders, Home Server, Pocket PC 2000, 2002, Windows Mobile 5.0, 2006, 6, 6.5, Portable Media Center, Mira (wireless tablet), Plays for Sure (preceded Zune), Media Room, Home Media Extenders, Auto PC and Sync. We should likely add that Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 were all major releases for the consumer segment (XP replaced ME). And I’m sure I’ve missed some things because there were so many.

To my count, Apple launched seven products, six of which were successful and one, AppleTV, did better than most in its class, but didn’t meet expectations. Microsoft launched 26 major products, two of which did well and dominated their segment (XP and Windows 7), Xbox 360, Zune HD, Media Room, and Sync did reasonably well, and most of the rest did not do well at all. About six products out of 26 did well or reasonably well compared with six out of seven for Apple. That's the same number of successful products, but Apple's six took the company higher than Microsoft's likely because Apple put its entire support behind seven, while Microsoft diluted its support across 26.

This gives us a success rate of 86 percent for Apple and about 23 percent for Microsoft. Had Microsoft done fewer products, but provided them better resources, its hit rate certainly would have been higher.

Microsoft was First, Apple Better

If you look back at a number of products Microsoft created, it often had the idea first, but simply couldn’t get the complete product to market or create the demand needed to move it. Pocket PC and Portable Media Center clearly preceded and anticipated both the iPhone and the iPod Touch but didn’t enjoy the focus Apple’s products had, and Origami and Mira anticipated the pending Apple Tablet by nearly a decade, but Mira was crippled by being PC-focused. Origami was delivered unfinished, was never completed, and was under-marketed.

You could argue that Microsoft beat Apple significantly in creativity in these cases, but it showcased that it doesn't matter who gets the idea first, but who delivers it to market successfully.

Lessons Learned: Is Google More Like Apple or Microsoft?

It is interesting to watch the oft-repeated mistake of scattering the market with products, thinking surely one will be successful. It reminds me of something one of my combat instructors told me about focused effort when I was taking training in Arizona with automatic weapons.

He said that if you take the time to aim and focus on your target, you’ll win (meaning being left alive) more times than if you just spray bullets in the general direction of a target. Evidently with products, too, concentration and focus make a bigger difference then just tossing lots of stuff into a market. Apple has clearly demonstrated that.

Google seems to be more on Microsoft’s path than Apple’s. Its list of products either out or in the pipeline is daunting, but its ability to drive these markets successfully seems increasingly questionable. Google has the Android platform, but it isn’t a huge success yet, and the company has clearly damaged its potential by already releasing news on ChromeOS . Its Nexus One got a lot of positive buzz initially, but it felt like the company had moved on long before it was a certified success.

This suggests Google is repeating Microsoft’s mistakes -- mistakes likely to be very expensive. That's something Google's CEO should be thinking about.

Wrapping Up

The mistake and lesson here, which is one that can be applied broadly to business decisions, is “if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well.” I’d also add the word "completely." There are also three pillars to a product: the physical product, the services that surround and assure the customer experience, and the demand-generation marketing that convinces people that it is something they want. Apple is strong on all three pillars. Most others fail on most of them, and that is why Apple’s success is relatively rare in the market.

You’d think this wouldn’t be a hard lesson to learn, but watching companies like Sony and more recently Google, evidently it is harder than I think. At the core of the difference between Apple and Microsoft aren’t resources, intelligence or creativity, it is focus. Microsoft plays, but Apple plays to win.