This looks like an interesting strategy.
Appearantly, Microsoft wants to "rein in" Vista customers, making it
harder to NOT use services like MSN and other Microsoft controlled
venues.
The cited the successes of the new management, based on the acceptance
of the customer base for example:
SQL Server 2005 - nice revenue bump, but pales in unit volumes compared
to MySQL and PostgreSQL. With OpenOffice "base" providing a nice
friendly interface to both (along with Oracle, DB2, and Sybase), it
takes a lot of the "fun" out of SQL Server.
Visual Studio - nice toolkit, and seems to have been purchased by a few
developers - probably as part of the MSDN package. But compare that
unit volume to Eclipse, which is now the foundation of nearly every
competitor's IDE environment. Again, VS may have the revenue hit, but
Eclipse has the unit volumes that blow VS out of the water.
BizTalk 2005 - compared to other SOA projects and EJBs such as JBOSS,
Struts, and Jakarta/Tomcat. Microsoft gets a big revenue hit, but in
terms of sheer unit volumes, these other technologies are blowing away
Microsoft. Keep in mind that revenues are generally broken up by
commercial product such as WebSphere, WebLogic, SunONE, Borland, and so
on. Furthermore, implementations included with Linux distributions
don't even get counted as revenue to these projects.
Windows Server R2 - another nice feature, but with VMWare Player and
VMWare Server now being offered royalty-free along with a choice of
almost 100 Linux powered "Appliances" for that player, Microsoft again
loses in the volume department. VMWare makes their money offering
commercial servers and "secured" Virtual servers as well as "Authoring"
systems such as VMWare Workstation. Many who have used player often
upgrade to Workstation so they can create their own "Appliances".
Vendors of big-dollar products, such as Oracle, WebSphere, and others
have now been offering appliances - which give the user the ability to
test-drive a fully implemented version of the product on a minimally
configured VM - so that they can do evaluations, prototypes, and simple
testing without having to worry about installations, configurations,
and support which will probably be offered as consulting services by
these vendors when the customer decides to deploy commercial
"production" implementations.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's attempts to maximize it's revenue for the few
products it does still sell, and their attempts to exclude competitors,
has made Windows a far less desirable choice and has made Linux far
More popular lately - especially in the server market.
These days, clients are asking for Linux. We don't even have to pitch
them.
They are also far more interested in tools like VMWare "Appliances" for
integrating Linux desktop solutions to Linux server solutions.
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