Microsoft Goes Head-to-Head With IBM 274
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on Microsoft's latest announcements that it is going after large-business computing, a realm that IBM currently has a stronghold on." From the article: "In both cases, the company has fashioned 'enterprise' versions of the products with additional security and collaboration-enabling features for sale to large businesses. Microsoft has spent $20 billion over the past three years on these upgrades, and Ballmer says it will spend $500 million over the next year marketing them to corporations. 'We're unlocking the next wave of growth for Microsoft,' Ballmer predicted during a press conference after his speech." We've previously discussed Microsoft's plans for IBM.
Not Quite Yet (Score:5, Interesting)
They tried this a few years ago with Unisys? (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as an IBM competitor... (Score:2, Interesting)
You do realize that in some spaces, such as application servers, IBM can't even win in a fair fight until they start *giving away free consulting* from IBM Global Services in order to push the adoption of their software, right?
As for mainframes... I don't know who is investing in new mainframes. All of my customers (government & financial) seem to be going with clusters of blade servers.
IBM has a good story because they do have their hands in every kind of technology, from processors and hardware to operating systems, open source, and enterprise software... but in the enterprise space, the story isn't about the software, it's about IBM pushing consulting.
So don't underestimate Microsoft. And don't think they are the only thorn in IBM's side. :-)
Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
SCO (Score:2, Interesting)
Though, of course, the same could already be said of Microsoft's generous donations to SCO at the time SCO's frivolous lawsuit began against IBM..
Which leads me to something interesting. Microsoft quietly gives a large deal of money to a group who seems to have completely devoted their entire business 100% to legally punishing IBM for making Linux part of their business strategy-- a group which seems to be violating at least the Lanham Act in the process of doing so. Shortly after (a couple years) Microsoft announces plans to attack IBM head on in the market where Linux is relevant to IBM's business strategy. This means that Microsoft performed direct and possibly illegal actions to damage IBM's ability to compete in this market as a prelude to entering the market themselves, just a few short years after losing (but not being sentenced or in any way punished from) a major antitrust case.
I wonder whether the courts will or can pick up on that.. there have been subpeonas related to Microsoft's involvement in SCO funding but it is unclear whether it will actually come out in the court case.
Re:Giant Heads (Score:2, Interesting)
What the DOJ did in 2001 is protect a free market by agreeing with a D.C. court of appeals. The court of appeals saw written and verbal testimony by hundreds of economists, that concluded that breaking up Microsoft would not protect consumers, and is counter productive to a free market economy.
What has been gained from the break up of the big bell? We had over a decade of artificially inflated prices due to "connection fees" the "baby bells" where all imposing on each other, followed by mergers back into large geographically dominant super powers. And it cost tax payers how many millions of dollars to do?
Forced government regulation such as this on a company is a very dangerous precedent, and provides no tangible benefits to the consumer. In the end innovation wins. We're seeing this with Firefox gaining ground on IE and VoIP taking market share from the bells. Government regulation did not cause these products to become available, nor did it influence people to use them, talented people with innovative ideas did.
For more in depth analyses of how this type of government regulation is bad for consumers and our economy I'd recommend: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-296es.html [cato.org]
Re:Not Quite Yet (Score:3, Interesting)
z/OS UNIX System Services is UNIX95, XPG4, and XOpen compliant. What's neat about it is that you get the reliability of a mainframe with the flexibility of a UNIX system. You can have your legacy mainframe applications talk to your modern POSIX-based applications.
Disclaimer - I work for IBM, specifically within the USS product. That doesn't stop me from thinking it's a nifty product though
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a very basic task you can do on any email application on earth except Notes: Sort by subjectline!
Now here's the part where you tell me, "but Notes isn't just for email! It does DB apps also!" Which would be a valid argument except for two points:
1) IBM *sells* Notes as an email solution, so whether or not it just does email, it's inexcusable for it to do email this poorly.
2) Notes sucks for DB applications, too, compared to competing products. It's probably a wash with Access, but give me Filemaker over Notes any day of the week! The *only* unique feature Notes has, which works maybe half the time, is that it can automatically convert a Notes DB to run over the web using Java. Of course, this crashes/freezes constantly using Sun's Java, and Microsoft's Java is no longer available for XP, so for practical purposes that feature is useless. In addition, Notes DBs are a complete pain to develop... here's a typically error message from Notes for "debugging" purposes: "Object Attribute not found." What object? Which attribute? What operation produced the error? Why the hell are you showing this to my end users when they know even less about it than I do? (These errors come up in Lotus-developed DBs, BTW, not just custom ones.)
IBM wouldn't know usability if it smacked them on the head. When I brought up a usability issue (the "Edit.." option for attached files in email easily can cause data loss and there's no way for an admin to disable it [1]), the developer on the board actually *insulted my users* for not being able to figure out the mysterious undocumented process you need to do to get the Edit... option to work.
I pull my full support behind ANY company that can help the world be rid of the Notes scourge.
1) The bug is as follows: open up a email in Notes with an attached Word file, hit Edit. The Word file opens. Now delete the email from Notes, then save your changes in Word... Notes immediately deletes the temp file it opened in Word, losing any changes your user makes without warning and without any chance of recovering the changes. Lotus claimed it worked this way because the client didn't know whether the file in Word was still open or not, which *might* be excusable if Notes at least kept the temp file around so I could recover the changes and/or allowed the admin to disable the Edit button, but it does neither. Our small organization has lost probbaly 100 man-hours to this bug, imagine how much time a large organization is losing!
Re:Not Quite Yet (Score:2, Interesting)
Calling z/OS a UNIX because it has USS is like calling Windows a UNIX because it has CygWin available. When people talk about mainframes and the important stuff that runs on them, they're talking about subsystems like CICS, IMS, DB2, MQ, etc., which are at their hearts pure native z/OS programs, typically written in PL/X (internal IBM language) which may call out to USS services but generally are doing low level MVS stuff like POST, WAIT, PC, SVC and going cross memory in AR mode - very non-UXIXy.