Thanks to our partners at AssisProTech for pointing this out.

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In recent times, however, the changes in the market in the last 2-3 years have shaken up things. Here are some simplistic ideas/rant.

Consumer market

Apple is the consumer king in the mobile world (it’s strange how a company so closed and monopolist can be such a widespread darling, but I won’t go into that), and the only really strong foothold Microsoft has in this segment that I can see is the Xbox360 in the household (in the US, note, as in Portugal we have no TV content at all).

Windows 7 is a great OS (I still feel Win8 as somewhat lacking in usability), but a lot of tablets will have to be sold to compete with the likes of the iPad, Kindle Fire and Galaxy devices.

Kinect is fun and innovative, but the device is still clearly unexplored, and the good ideas seem to be somewhat limited in scope. It’s one of those things that leaves the impression that works like magic, but when we look at possible applications, there aren’t that many uses (or maybe I’m not looking far ahead enough).

Windows Phone is a great OS, but there’s no penetration at the moment, and who knows if there ever will be one. Microsoft seems to be moving very slowly in adding new/missing features, which is something I wasn’t expecting.

Development

On the development front, I think Microsoft is the strongest player. Great development tools, innovation in languages, .Net is miles ahead of other platforms. And Microsoft is also becoming very good at incorporating ideas from other things out there, which is a very smart move.

Enterprise/Application platform space

The name here is Oracle. Oracle seems to be pursuing the strategy of buying more and more companies, integrating their offer, and they have a very strong application platform offer. I suspect that the sales pitch that it’s all a single “fusioned”/integrated solution is not quite true, but the fact is that it seems to be working in the market. I’ve seen more than one customer strategically decide to go for a Oracle-only approach. They may “crash and burn” if everything does end up in the cloud, but by then then can try to buy VMware and fix that IaaS problem.

As to Microsoft, is has a strong OS offer, a very strong SharePoint offer (but don’t forget Oracle has WebCenter), a very strong SQL Server (&BI) offer, but there seems to be some disinvestment in the application server space (both in Windows Server AppFabric and BizTalk), which is where Oracle is strong. Windows and Office still own the desktop and productivity space, but those top and mid-level managers more and more walk around with their proud iPads.

Cloud

There are a lot of players here, but the first I think is more relevant is Amazon. They are mostly IaaS but also have several interesting PaaS things available. VMware is also a relevant name here – if they can move a VM to the cloud with the flip of a checkbox, they are in the game.

As to Microsoft, even if I doubt it has the market share of Amazon, for me it has the best and most complete offering available, especially in the PaaS space. I expect it to grow and win more adoption in time, also supported by the SaaS things like Office 365, SharePoint and CRM online. The cloud seems to be one of the key bets for Microsoft at the moment, and I hope they succeed.

(side-note: Office WebApps work great, but getting there is somewhat hard, compared to Google Docs, and LiveId’s authentication should be a) much faster and b) simpler).

Google

Strangely, I don’t see Google as a big problem for Microsoft right now, even if they hold an envious space in advertising. From what I read, Bing is very strong and innovative in the search space in other countries, especially in terms of services offered, but in Portugal the textual search is atrocious, and BingMaps seems to be the only really very strong offering. Google seems to have lost its Mojo, anyway, with the privacy issues and Google+’s failure (is it official yet?).

Final notes

With all this said, these are complicated days for a Microsoft-only Systems Integrator like |create|it|. We have WP7 skills but the market doesn’t want them, only iOS and Android applications (MonoTouch/for Android may be the path here). The application platform space seems to be shrinking to Oracle, and SharePoint is no longer the same cash cow it was. As to Azure, it is steadily but slowly gaining adoption.

What to do? maybe shift strategy, turn to the consumer, either the one on the move in a mobile device, or the enterprise one in the SaaS space. Watch this space :).

ps- This is probably not a completely informed post, there are a lot of numbers and knowledge I don’t have and I am NOT an industry analyst, but look at it as a “vox populi” rant.

The post Where’s Microsoft going? appeared first on Blog IT.

Here are some notes on the process:

• The upgrade itself took some time (4-6 hours), and apart from one of the pre-conditions being the uninstalallation of Windows Powershell, it went smoothly;
• Windows Live Writer lost the preview themes, which I had to re-download/update;
• The apps I had pinned to the start menu are gone, as well as the Quick Launch toolbar;
• Apps that seem to be working fine: FeedDemon 2.7, Simp Pro, Colligo Contributor 3.2 Pro, Twhirl, Firefox 3, Word/Excel/PowerPoint, SnagIt, Zune Software, Mesh;
• The Zune Software starts when I plug in the Zune in the USB, but it doesn’t sync. The Zune forums helped: just run the Zune app “as an Administrator”;
• The upgrade process did a strange change to my files: it moved them from C:\Users\jota.CREATE to C:\Users\jota. As you can guess, this caused several problems, with Outlook 2007, Zune, Mesh, and others. Mesh especially was especially troublesome, because it started sync’ing files back to the original location, thus doubling the files. I had to manually move the folders, one by one, and this was not a good experience.
• VMWare Workstation 6.5 worked fine, if ran as an administrator.

Overal, I must say this has been a great experience until now. Things work correctly, no major issues (I do have occasional intermittent wireless network losses, but I can’t pin it down yet to Win7), it doesn’t look like a beta. The only thing I don’t really like is the default display in Windows Explorer. I much prefered it to open in the My Documents folder, not the library list. I’m pleased, anyway.

The post Windows 7 beta – late to the game impressions appeared first on Blog IT.

The post Compare the Editions of Windows Server 2003 appeared first on Blog IT.

But Vista has a separate backup routine that
backs up an entire system.  It is called CompletePC, this backs up the whole
system to a VHD file. 

That's a "virtual hard drive" for Microsoft's desktop virtual machine
manager, Virtual PC. 

You can use something called the Windows Recovery
Environment to restore that VHD to a new piece of hardware or, potentially, you
could just mount it as a virtual system.  Pretty cool.

The post Vista Backups, in Virtual PC/Server Format appeared first on Blog IT.

Try this:
– Click start
– Type: cmd
– Right-click cmd.exe when it appears under Applications
– Click Run As Administrator
– Type the following: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
– Press enter
– Restart your computer

To check autotuning is disabled repeat the above but type: netsh int tcp
show global.

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