Windows 8 will succeed, but Microsoft could still fail

April 26, 2012 by 9 Comments

image courtesy of OnLive

I couldn’t agree more with M.G. Siegler’s post “The Slow Decay of the Microsoft Consumer” over on TechCrunch. He makes a few good points, but this point really got me thinking: “Windows 8 could be better for the company, or it could be worse. The world is drastically different than it was even just three years ago…While Microsoft is going all-in…on their tablet strategy with Windows 8, there’s no indication it will actually work. If it doesn’t that could significantly hurt the Windows Divisions’ numbers.”

Windows 8 will successfully create a “Post-PC” platform for Microsoft by merging their desktop and tablet strategies into a very functional and usable operating system. However, by doing this, Microsoft may have not considered the financial consequences and the impact this strategy will have on a $20 billion dollar per year business.

The current Windows business model is based on consumers paying for Windows on new machines as well as paying for major Windows upgrades. Microsoft also encourages customers to upgrade flavors of Windows, like moving from Windows Home to Windows Home Premium to gain access to new features and functionality. This business model will not work in a Post-PC world because the platforms of the two largest players, namely iOS and Android, are essentially free!

That’s because the platform itself is no longer the revenue generator. The platform is simply the delivery method for revenue generating services like movies, TV shows, music, books, apps and, most of all, advertising. Apple has iTunes/iCloud/iAd and Google has Google Play/Ads/AdMob which are integrated into iOS and Android and that generate billions in revenue. More importantly, if Apple or Google were to add another revenue generating service, they simply provide consumers with a free upgrade of the platform so they can consume that new service.

Microsoft is in a much different position:

  • Microsoft may be able to sway consumers initially to buy into the Windows 8 platform, but Microsoft will not be able to force consumers to pay $199 for future upgrades. Microsoft will need to give more for less to gain on Apple’s 100 million iPad head start!
  • Microsoft is seeing the impact from iOS and Android free upgrades on the Windows Phone platform. Microsoft initially provided Windows Phone 6 customers free upgrades to Windows Phone 7. Now, consumers are demanding those same phones be upgraded to Windows Phone 8 for free. Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place: either upgrade for free and lose millions in revenue or charge for the upgrade and risk losing revenue because customers find Apple and Android a better value.
  • Microsoft must build revenue generating services that Apple and Google already have today. Microsoft has struggled to provide media related services in the past and Google is finding out it’s not as easy as simply releasing a BETA service and hoping people sign up.
  • The numbers below paint a pretty stark picture. Microsoft will need to continually update Windows so that it can compete against Apple and Android and have the flexibility to provide additional revenue generating services to the largest possible audience. However, forcing paid upgrades on consumers will not accomplish this as consumers will simply stay on previous versions, just as desktop consumers are sticking with Windows XP versus moving to Windows 7.
    • Windows
      • Windows 7 – 57%
      • Vista – 8%
      • Windows 2003 – 1%
      • Windows XP – 34%
    • iOS
      • iOS 5 – 74%
      • iOS 4 – 25%
      • iOS 3 – 1%

As M.G Siegler pointed out, Microsoft is “all-in”. I believe Microsoft will succeed in building a very usable and functional post-PC platform that will make for an enjoyable experience, both on the desktop and on tablets. What has me most concerned, is Microsoft’s ability produce revenue generating services to replace the inevitable loss of Windows licensing revenues once customers demand what Apple and Android already provide– free upgrades.

That is my take, what do you think? Will Microsoft be able to charge for upgrades when others don’t? Will Microsoft be able to catch up to the leads they’ve already given to Apple and Google?

Filed under SmarterTools, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , , ,

Speeding Up Your Response Times – Ticket Resolutions

April 24, 2012 by

A key to providing a high level of customer service is the ability to get information to your customers and end users quickly and efficiently. You may have the best system in the world for gathering important information for end users, but if it still takes your agents hours to reply to tickets or live chats then the amount of information you have becomes rather irrelevant.

There are a few simple tools that can assist with both the accumulation of important information as well as facilitate the distribution of that information, quickly, to end users and customers. With today’s tip we’ll focus on one way to make sure your users are not only well informed but that they receive their information in a timely manner.  Over the next few weeks we’ll cover other time-saving tips, so stay tuned.

Ticket Resolutions as Time Savers

Perhaps one of the lesser-known features of SmarterTrack is the ability to add resolutions to tickets. What that means is that an agent can add instructions, be it a simple explanation or step-by-step walk through, on how a particular issue was resolved. That resolution is then stored with that ticket.

The bigger benefit is that these resolutions are fully indexed, just like ticket content. That means that ticket resolutions, along with KB articles, are available as resources to assist agents who are troubleshooting similar issues. Agents can see any and all potential ticket resolutions that are associated to the contents of the ticket they’re working on. By using a pre-existing resolution, agents can greatly reduce the time it takes them to reply back to customers since the agent doesn’t have to spend the time looking for a way to solve the customer’s issues – it’s already been done for them!

A recent real world example can help demonstrate the power of using ticket resolutions to save time.

As you many know, Microsoft released an update to Office for Mac about a week or two ago. This update included changes to Outlook for Mac that happened to break SmarterMail 9.x’s implementation of Exchange Web Services.  Once we got a ticket in from a customer experiencing issues, it took one of our support agents about 90 minutes to work through various scenarios until he concluded that the recent Office update caused the problem.  The simple solution was to simply roll back the update.

However, during that time, a second ticket came in. As that second ticket was being worked on, the original agent heard the new agent talking about the issue and asked if the second customer had installed the Office update. It turns out they had.

This caused our agents to work up a resolution for the issue that they added to both tickets. When additional tickets started coming in, that resolution was instrumental in our support agents getting responses and resolutions out to our customers quickly. Adding the resolutions to those two tickets literally saved upwards of 40 hours of troubleshooting.

Had this issue been more widespread, had it affected an incredibly large number of customers or if it required a longer-term solution, the issue resolution could have easily been turned into a canned reply, a news item post on the portal or a knowledge base article. It could even have been turned into all three, thereby making sure customers received a consistent, concise and easy explanation for issues and their resolution, regardless of how the customer was communicating with agents.

So there you go, both a simple time saving feature and a current, real world example of how it was used. Of course, here at SmarterTrack.com we’re using the latest version of SmarterTrack so we have the added benefit of seeing issue trends using the trend cloud. Having that AND the ability to apply previous ticket resolutions is an even greater time saver, but more on that, and other time saving features, in future posts.

Filed under SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, SmarterTrack.com Tagged with , , , , ,

Microsoft’s Problem(s)

April 17, 2012 by 15 Comments

Everyone knows Microsoft has lost its vision and direction in the consumer market and is years behind most industry leaders, with the Xbox as the possible exception.  But few know that Microsoft is facing the same loss of vision and direction with its server and enterprise business.

Microsoft is losing the battle of the Web

Microsoft's IIS is in red

Lets start with a little shock value: At the start of 2009, Microsoft’s IIS software was responsible for hosting about 35% of the websites on the Web. As of March 2012, Microsoft is now at approximately 13.5%. This is a 62% drop in the last 3 years and has had, and will continue to have, a significant impact on Microsoft’s future. This drop is even more dramatic when you consider the history of the Web and Microsoft IIS. As a former hosting provider myself, I remember starting my hosting business back in 1995 running Windows NT 3.51. It’s true that over the last 17 years, IIS suffered a number of issues. Today, however, it is a VERY solid and stable Web server platform. So why is Microsoft becoming as obsolete in the hosting industry as it has in the mobile phone and tablet industry? (Yes, Windows 8 shows some promise for tablets, but when it is released it will still be years behind iOS and Android in terms of availability and adoption – those are years it can’t make up). Microsoft has done a number of things to make Microsoft a viable platform and has overcome a lot of obstacles. However, in many cases each change for the better seems to precipitate a change for the worse.

Changes for better and worse

  • While Microsoft was slow to adopt open source development technologies such as PHP and Perl, they DID adopt them into the IIS/Windows realm, which is something you can’t say of the open source community with relation to Microsoft technologies like .NET.  (The MonoProject does exist but has not been well supported).
  • They introduced the Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA), which made all hosting and service providers pay monthly royalties versus one-time expenditures. SPLA itself isn’t bad but there were some pricing blunders, like one in 2009 that could have doubled the costs for hosting providers (anyone remember the authenticated/non authenticated license fiasco?), that really put the fear of God into many Microsoft hosting partners. Some proposed upcoming changes may have an even greater effect on the viability of hosting Windows products, like changing SQL Server 2012 SPLA pricing to be based on the number of processor cores a server has versus the number of physical processors.
  • They had security vulnerabilities that made it difficult to isolate many customers on one web server for shared hosting. Over the last several years they have solidified the Windows server OS through the ability to set .NET permissions on app pools and made it easier to manage multiple single app pools sites on a a single server as well as mange resources by site, thereby increasing security and performance in higher density environments.
  • They were initially slow to respond to hosting companies and the hosting model. They tried to force their own ideal of Windows hosting onto the community without listening to existing Windows hosts. For a few years, however, they actually made an effort to start a conversation with Windows hosts. Nevertheless, I get the impression from talking to partners that his conversation is, once again, turning a bit one-sided.
  • And more recently, they started competing against their hosting partners with Office Live, Azure, Office365 and more. Microsoft always had a semi-contentious relationship with hosting partners. On the one hand they did what they could to make it easier on hosting providers but, all the while, many providers knew that Microsoft was going to benefit most from whatever changes were made. Whatever positive change Microsoft made for partners was closely followed by some other announcement, like when they announced that with every Office Live sign up users received a free website and free hosting for it, that was in direct competition to what partners were offering.

Many of these obstacles still exist but what Microsoft really seems to lack is a hosting division that really wants to commit to winning the “website count” battle. At one time the hosting division at Microsoft was VERY focused on this goal and we were often told that was how funding for the division was determined. I get the impression that this is no longer the case.

Hosting as a channel to the SMB

The hosting industry is an important channel for Microsoft as it allows them to access small and medium sized businesses, web developers and designers, and a number of enterprise customers. With a continued drop off in website count there will be a transition from not only IIS-based web servers but also many other server roles that are crucial to the hosting industry. This includes things like mail servers, application servers, cloud servers, virtualization servers and more. With the drop off, the impact on revenue for Exchange Server, .NET and Visual Studio, Hyper-V and Windows Server is clear but, bigger than that, will be the lack of a channel to reach the small and medium sized businesses and the design and development community, which is huge.

And I don’t think that Microsoft can make up for this loss by transitioning their focus to services like Office365. Microsoft is having an incredibly difficult time reaching small and medium sized businesses through their online services. Many SMB’s like the ability to have choice and go to hosting companies that may be local and close to their offices (or at least in their same city), that speak their language, that offer professional services beyond just hosting a website, that offer live and accessible customer service and support, and more. These are areas that Microsoft can’t compete. By focusing on the hosting market and by focusing on their hosting partners, Microsoft was spreading their technology and not only securing and increasing revenues on the server end, but they were also protecting their phone, tablet and desktop prospects.

What happened to “developers, developers, developers“?

The developer also plays a huge role in this. Microsoft has always done a great job creating opportunity for developers to build businesses around extending Windows and its overall platform. As Microsoft dwindles in its popularity the desire to work with Visual Studio, .NET and Windows in general will also decrease. As it is, many developers want to make the shift to OSX and want to avoid having to code to multiple machines and platforms. By moving to open source technologies such as Ruby, PHP, Perl, etc. they have this flexibility.

What does this all mean for Microsoft? Well, they are losing from all angles. Although their enterprise division is reporting growth, these “website count” issues will start to impact that business over time. In addition, it will impact the development division and eventually their desktop and consumer divisions will feel the pinch. As it stands, Microsoft’s own online services are years away from replacing their hosting partners and the personal and customizable services that hosting providers offer to small and medium sized businesses.

That’s my take, anyway. What are your thoughts? What does Microsoft have to do to start regaining market share in the hosting business and avoid becoming obsolete?

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterStats, SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Road Testing the iPad – Final Thoughts

April 3, 2012 by

Derek Curtis and I on a conference call with the office.

With only 48 hours left on my trip, I feel I have experienced enough to write the last blog post and finish up my thoughts on the iPad and how it performs on the road. So, as I sit here in a cafe in Rome I offer you a summary of my almost 3-week experience with the new iPad while traveling through Germany, France, the Netherlands and Italy.

The miles have been plentiful and transportation methods varied: plane, train, automobile and boat. The locations have been as different as can be with heavily populated cities, very rural cities and even cities set on water, such as Venice’s different islands. The one constant, however, has been the iPad and its impeccable performance. Overall I am really, really impressed with how it’s performed for me, regardless of the circumstances of its use.

Review of the new iPad for consumers

As a consumer, I’m concerned about some of the hardware aspects and how they affect standard usage. I’m also an avid user of various media (movies, video chat, photos, etc.) and the iPad excels in this area. Add in the simplicity and power of iOS and you have a pretty powerful combination. That said, there are a few items I want to note:

  • With over 50 different wi-fi connections that I’ve used, including the one on the train from Amsterdam to Paris, the iPad has performed flawlessly. This is contrary to a few of the Android devices I’ve used, including the Android phone I carry with me every day.
  • The AT&T cellular service has stayed well connected all throughout Europe.
  • Battery life was impressive, giving me a good 6 to 8 hours of continued use. However, I did notice the 100% battery issues some people are reporting. This will hopefully be resolved in a future update.
  • The new iPad does get hotter than the 1st and 2nd generation iPads. It’s not awful but it’s probably as hot as it should get without being uncomfortable.
  • The higher-resolution screen makes many tasks, like remoting into my iMac, much easier and more efficient. It also makes reading easier on my aging eyes.
  • Having access to a data plan and using the GPS functionality allowed me to always have maps and directions on a big screen. However, turn-by-turn navigation is much better on my Android phone. Even so, having an interactive map on the big, beautiful iPad screen  was awesome.
  • I used FaceTime and Skype to talk to the kids back home. So while I was away from home, using these on the iPad made is feel like I was still there with them.
  • Photostream allowed the family to see all of the pictures we took. Images went to our iMacs at home, to the iPhones of our children and even to the iPad my grandparents (try to) use–all in real time. I originally thought that Photostream was going to be a less than useful feature when it was announced. Boy, was I wrong! Allowing us to keep our family up-to-date on what we were doing and giving them the ability to see what we were seeing, practically in real time, was a great way to share the whole experience.
  • During downtime, it was nice to watch a movie or TV show on Netflix or Hulu or listen to music on the device or using iCloud/iMatch.

Review of the new iPad for business and the enterprise

Now, from a purely business perspective, here are some additional impressions:

  • VPN worked perfectly with our Microsoft RAS servers, unlike the constant issues we have when connecting with Android. I’ve been using VPN not only for business, but also so that I could watch Netflix and listen to Pandora–services that can’t normally be accessed from international IPs. It’s a great work around and the iPad worked flawlessly!
  • The native NT authentication in Safari is another lifesaver. Android’s lack of compatibility with NT authentication is one of the main reasons it isn’t being adopted in the enterprise.
  • The cellular data efficiency of iOS is outstanding. Using data on an international plan is VERY expensive, but iOS did a great job managing data activities and using wi-fi as the default alternative whenever it was available. As a result, I was able to keep the iPad on and get emails and notifications immediately while traveling overseas. I see this as a major benefit over using a MacBook Air on a trip like this.
  • I can’t say enough about the applications that are available, not to mention their quality. Dropbox, WebEx, Evernote, LogMeIn, RDP Lite, Kindle, Facebook, Tweetbot, IM+, Around Me, Quick Office, Hulu, Netflix and Atomic Web were among the most common third-party applications I used the last few weeks. The quality and usability of these apps played a major role in an overall great experience.
  • The ability to work on servers when necessary, write or review any document at the office, do simple coding in PHP or jQuery mobile, instant message with employees or even have conference calls and view presentations with and without video were all possible with the iPad, much to my surprise.
  • And usability isn’t the only area that is impacted but efficiency is as well. For example, something I appreciate in the Atomic web browser is the ability to remove images from webpages and also use the Google web mobilizer to strip webpages down to just the necessities (namely just to display content). This probably saved me hundreds of dollars on the trip, as condensing pages down to just text decreased my data usage.

So after all of this, how is the new iPad for business use?

I’m absolutely amazed at how capable the iPad is and I have to say that the results gave me a greater insight into the future of computing and where things are headed. Just like many others, I wondered what role a tablet can play in both our business and personal lives. I used a tablet for testing our products or reading the occasional website or even reading a book at night, but this test helped me see that the much-discussed “post PC era” is really here and the tablet will replace the computer for a large percentage of consumers. This is especially true for consumers who are on-the-go.

More importantly, this was primarily a test of a business use case, and I can easily state that the iPad (and eventually tablets in general) are more than capable for business use. I’m a bit of a unique case as I tend to want to do more with a tablet than most business owners. I can’t see the CEO of a management consulting firm, for example, needing to VPN into a server to modify DNS or other items; but even with my advanced testing, the iPad performed flawlessly. Tablets are here to stay and the post-PC era is creeping ever closer.

Filed under SmarterTools, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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