SharePoint: A Digital Fever Spreads
November 5, 2008
On November 1, 2008, Information Week ran a thoughtful article called ‘Can Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling’. You can read the full text article by J. Nicholas Hoover here. The article points out that there are 100 million SharePoint licenses now and the product will generate more than one billion dollars in revenue this year. Organizations large and small have embraced SharePoint as what Mr. Hoover calls a ‘Swiss Army Knife’. SharePoint can do collaboration, portal functions, content management, and more. The article cites a number of big name companies that have pushed SharePoint in new directions; for example, a wiki system.
For me the most important point in the article is that Mr. Hoover describes a bait-and-switch aspect of SharePoint that had not occurred to me. As I understand the argument, it is easy and economical to get started with SharePoint, then the for fee versions kick in. Mr. Hoover points out that there are several premium versions of the product. He also points out the concern for lock in; that is, getting out of the SharePoint handcuffs may be more difficult than slipping them on. The notion that SharePoint requires customization before it becomes essential was interesting as well.
Not surprisingly, enterprise software has an upside and downside. Mr. Hoover does a good job of pointing out these aspects of SharePoint. However, after I read the story, I came away with several different thoughts:
- With customization essential to getting full value from SharePoint, how will these tailored experiences be transferred to the cloud computing version of SharePoint?
- Are information technology professionals sufficiently expert to handle a single product that performs such a wide range of functions?
- Will users be able to access services and features without latency that forces some to create time consuming work arounds so an alternative exists when SharePoint experiences a glitch?
For me, these are important questions, and I am baffled how SharePoint training sessions hop over such key considerations. I poked my head into one tutorial about SharePoint, and I thought I was listening to a sales pitch by a Microsoft employee. The presenter was a respected consultant who has what I call SharePoint fever. Microsoft has patiently created a hunger for information about a server platform that I think is one third content management, one third missing, and one third customization. In order to convert vanilla SharePoint into a robust search and content processing system, third party technology is required. The basics in the system are neither easy to configure nor particularly robust. In order to get SharePoint to perform a bandwidth intensive operation such as permit collaboration on a large PowerPoint file, a significant computing infrastructure is required.
Some of the SharePoint fever infected remind me of those people who suddenly understood information because of the graphical browser. Instantly anyone could navigate and explore information. No training or expertise were required. What some people have learned is that a Web experience today is not much different from creating any other software. SharePoint is similar. Behind the sizzle and the snazzy demos is a great deal of technical work.
Personally I don’t see any slow down in SharePoint’s ability to infect users and procurement teams. If Google wants to make headway in the enterprise, it will have to find an answer to SharePoint. Right now, Microsoft is eating Google’s lunch in conference rooms across the world. Score one for Microsoft.
Stephen Arnold, November 5, 2008
Microsoft and Cloud Math
November 2, 2008
Long day in a city with no consonants. Cruising the goodies in my newsreader, I noticed Todd Bishop’s “Microsoft Faces Uncertain Financial Future As It Looks to the Cloud.” You will enjoy the story here. Mr. Bishop reports that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s cloud guru, mentioned thinner margins, which means to me “we’ll make it up on volume.” Then came what for me was the most significant passage in the article:
Those thinner margins could hurt Microsoft’s overall business if cloud computing causes companies to make a big shift away from traditional computer servers. Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business — which sells operating systems, database software and other programs for those servers — has been a financial mainstay for the company. However, Ozzie still sees a big role for those traditional servers inside most companies, even as many applications move online. “People will still run most of their big business systems — the back ends of their big business systems — on premises,” he said.
Two assumptions seemed to fuel Mr. Ozzie’s assessment. First, I am no longer convinced that organizations will want servers “on premises”. The work force demographics favor a more fluid approach to organizing work and the work space. Visit a company run by 20 somethings. What I notice is how few people are working “on premises”. Most of the organizations serve clients and some make things, maybe in a remote land, but the gym shoes and the shirts turn up where they are supposed to be.
Second, I used to think I wanted software on machines I controlled. I moved most of my enterprise software to someone else’s servers, and I just “fired” one service provider and moved data and applications to another server provider more quickly than I could have done this with my own gear. I think other folks will make this shift as well.
The larger question in my mind is, “When.” It is okay to announce new initiative and show demonstrations. Delivering a stable, scalable, reliable product is a different type of work. Microsoft has some housecleaning to do to get Tess’s favorite enterprise software to behave. SharePoint requires certified professionals to do too much manual fiddling to activate basic functions to keep her from growling. Even interface consistency in desktop applications needs work. Some Microsoft professionals have insisted that these are details. That may be true. But if the Azure clouds strike me with a lightning bolt, I will be increasingly difficult to convince that Microsoft can deliver on its promises and make money at the same time. And with the police matter clouding enterprise search, how will that help or hinder the FAST ESP push? There is a difference between announcing and delivering across disparate systems and the cloud when it drifts in.
Stephen Arnold, November 1, 2008
SharePoint and Azure
November 1, 2008
The Microsoft cloud computing initiative is underway and it is early days. My principal concern with cloud computing is that it sounds so compelling. Imagine. Reduce your information technology staff. Get out of the hardware business to some extent. Let someone else worry about upgrading software and stamping out bugs.
According to Arpan Shah’s Web log here, Microsoft SharePoint Services will be part of the Azure Services Platform. You can get more information from Microsoft here. Many details are fuzzy. In the weeks and months ahead, more information will be forthcoming. I have heard that sample code, downloadable executables, and documentation will be provided. Microsoft does a good job of providing information. The challenge for me is finding it.
Before leaving the subject of the link up between Azure and SharePoint, let me capture for my own use the issues that I have with cloud computing in general. (I am an addled goose and this Web log is primarily for me, a digital notepad if you will.)
First, it is expensive to build, deploy, scale, and upgrade cloud infrastructure. I am not sure I can quantify the costs any more clearly than I have in my monographs and studies. CFOs and beancounters don’t understand the non linearity of the costs. I suppose this knowledge will become more widely available after a few of the new entrants in cloud computing explain why their balance sheets are awash in red ink.
Second, the problems of bottlenecking, unexpected faults, and the time required to chase down and figure out problems few or maybe no one has seen before increase over time. Cloud infrastructures are tough to lock down. Every time I turn around a vendor was pushing a firmware update, a point upgrade, or some other piece of software at the data centers in which I was involved. When one of these “fixes” is problematic, I had trouble. What few understand is that the longer the cloud infrastructure operates the more likely there will be unexpected dependencies. These data centers are not workstations, yet many people view them as giant iPods. Crazy.
Third, the client experience is gated by bandwidth and latency. The hottest cloud infrastructure is worthless if the user is trying to access email or some other information via a sluggish network. How stable are network connections in Kentucky? Not too stable. Connectivity is much better in the major European cities. Tokyo is outstanding. But when I have had to work from cities with now vowels in their name, life gets tough. Joburg was okay. Djuma was not. Xian featured great connectivity. Other places in China weren’t so hot, so I used Internet cafes and faced with dial up modem speeds. My guide assured me that the cafe was a broadband hook up. Yeah, right.
What to these three points have to do with Azure and SharePoint. Not much because so far Azure strikes me as a suggestive demo. Down the road, Microsoft will have to deal with SharePoint’s own performance and stability plus the three points I just mentioned.
That is going to be a big, costly job for the folks at Microsoft. The goose issues a gentle quack of support.
Stephen Arnold, November 1, 2008
Exalead’s High Performance Platform: CloudView
October 5, 2008
It’s no secret. When I profiled Exalead in one of the first three editions of Enterprise Search Report that I wrote, I likened the company’s plumbing to Google’s. The DNA of AltaVista.com influenced Google and Exalead. For most 20 somethings, AltaVista.com was one of a long line of pre-Google flops. That, like prognostications about Web 3.0, is not exactly on target.
The AltaVista.com search system was a demonstration of several interesting technologies developed by Digital Equipment Corporation’s engineers over many years. First, there was the multi core processor that ran hotter than the blood of a snorting bull in Pamplona. Second, there was the nifty manipulation of memory. In fact, that memory manipulation allowed Oracle performance in the system I played with to zip right along in the mid 1990s as I recall. And, the DEC engineers were able to index the Internet with its latency and flawed HTML so that a query was processed and a results list displayed quickly on my dial up modem in 1996. I even have a copy of AltaVista desk top search, one of the first of these scaled down search systems intended to make files in hierarchical systems findable. On my bookshelf is a copy of Eric and Deborah Ray’s AltaVista Search Revolution. Louis Monier wrote the forward. He used to work at Google, and, what few people know, is that Mr. Monier lured the founder of Exalead to work on the AltaVista.com project. Like I said, the DNA of AltaVista influenced Google and Exalead. In 1997, some AltaVista engineers were not happy campers after DEC was acquired by Compaq and then Hewlett Packard acquired Compaq. In the fury of the HP’s efforts to become really big, tiny AltaVista.com was an orphan, and an unwanted annoyance clamoring for hardware, money, engineering, and a business model.
François Bourdoncle–unlike Louis Monier, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Simon Tong, among others–did not join Google. In year 2000, he set up Exalead to build a next-generation information access and content processing system. What I find interesting is that just the trajectory of Google in Web search was affected by the AltaVista.com “gravity,” Exalead’s trajectory in content processing was also touched by the AltaVista.com experiment.
A result list from Exalead’s Web search system. Try it here.
When M. Bourdoncle founded Exalead, he wanted to resolve some of AltaVista’s known weaknesses. For example, the heat issues associated with the DEC Alpha chips was one problem. Another was rapid scaling, using commodity hardware, not hand crafted components which take months to obtain.
Exalead now has, according to the company’s Web site, more than 170 licensees. Earlier this week (October 1, 2008), Exalead CloudView, a new version of the company’s platform and new software features.
Paula Hane, Information Today, provided this run down of the new Exalead features:
Unlimited scalability and high performance
Business-level tuning and management of the search experience
Streamlined administration UI
Full traceability within the product
WYSIWYG configuration of indexing and search workflows
Advanced configuration management system (with built-in version control)
Improvements in the relevancy model
Provision for additional connectors with simple and advanced APIs for third-party implementations
You can read her “Exalead Offers a Cloud(y) View of Information Access here. The article provides substantive, useful information. For example, Ms. Hane reports:
One large [Exalead] customer in the U.K. can’t say enough good things about the choice of Exalead—its search solution was up and running in just 3 months. “After performing an extensive three-month technical evaluation of the major enterprise search software vendors we found that Exalead had the best technology, vision and ability to fulfill our demanding requirements,” says Peter Brooks-Johnson, product director of Rightmove, a fast-growing U.K. real estate Web site. “Not only does Exalead require minimal hardware to work effectively, but Exalead has a strong, accessible support team and a culture that takes pride in its customer implementations.”
(Note: A happy quack to Ms. Hane, whom I am quoting shamelessly in this Web log post.)
Phil Muncaster’s “Exalead Claims Enterprise Search Boost” here does a good job of explaining what’s coming from this Paris-based information access company. For me the most significant point in the write up was this passage:
The new line features a streamlined user interface, improved relevancy and the ability to extend business intelligence applications to textual search…
In my investigation of search company technology, I learned that Exalead’s ability to scale is comparable to Google’s. As Mr. Muncaster noted, the forthcoming version of the Exalead software–called CloudView–will put Exalead squarely in the business intelligence sector of the content processing market.
You can get more information about Exalead here. A fact sheet is also available here. Exalead’s Web index is available at www.exalead.com.
I have to wrangle a trip to Paris and learn more about Exalead. I hear the food is okay in Paris. The French have a strong tradition in math as well. I remember such trois étoiles innovators as Descartes, Mersenne, Poincaré, and Possson, and others. In my opinion, Microsoft should have acquired Exalead, not Fast Search & Transfer. Exalead is a next generation system; it scales; and it is easily “snapped in” to enterprise environments, including those dependent on SharePoint. I think Exalead is a company I want to watch more closely.
Stephen Arnold, October 5, 2008
For SharePoint and Dot Net Fans: The London Stock Exchange Case
September 13, 2008
Cyber cynic Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote “London Stock Exchange Suffers Dot Net Crash”. You should click here and read this well-written post. Do it now, gentle readers. The gist of the story is that LSE, with the help of Accenture and Microsoft, built a near real time system running on lots of Hewlett Packard upscale servers, Windows Server 2003, and my old pal, SQL Server 2000. The architecture was designed to run really fast, a feat my team has never achieved with Windows Server or SQL Server without lots of tricks and lots of scale up and scale out work. The LSE crashed. For me the most significant statement in the write up was:
Sorry, Microsoft, .NET Framework is simply incapable of performing this kind of work, and SQL Server 2000, or any version of SQL Server really, can’t possibly handle the world’s number three stock exchange’s transaction load on a consistent basis. I’d been hearing from friends who trade on the LSE for ages about how slow the system could get. Now, I know why.
Why did I find this interesting? Three reasons:
- There’s a lot of cheerleading for Microsoft SharePoint. This LSE melt down is a reminder that even with experts and resources, the Dot Net / Windows Server / SQL Server triumvirate get along about as well as Pompey, Crassus and Caesar. Pretty exciting interactions with this group.
- Microsoft is pushing hard on cloud computing. If the LSE can’t stay up, what’s that suggest for mission critical enterprise applications running in Microsoft’s brand new data centers running on similar hardware and using the same triumvirate of software
- Speed and Dot Net are not like peanut butter and jelly or ham and eggs. Making Microsoft software go fast requires significant engineering work and sophisticated hardware. The speed ups don’t come in software, file systems, or data management methods. Think really expensive engineering year in and year out.
I know there are quite a few Dot Net fans out there. We have it running on one of our servers. Are your experiences like mine, generally good. Or are your experiences like the LSE, less than stellar. Oh, Mr. Vaughan-Nichols asserts that the LSE is starting to use Linux on its hardware.
Stephen Arnold, September 13, 2008
Hosted SharePoint Info
August 7, 2008
Network World’s Mitchell Ashley scooped most Microsoft watchers with “Microsoft Spills the Beans on Hosted Exchange / SharePoint”. Mr. Ashley tracked down Microsoft’s John Betz, Director Product Management for Microsoft Business Online Services. The conversation–available as a podcast here–provides useful information about hosted SharePoint. Mr. Ashley tossed some high, soft, easy to field questions, but several points jumped out at me. These were:
- The cloud play is “Hosted by Microsoft and sold by partners”. Infrastructure is going to be one important key ingredient in this new service stew.
- Pricing has a ceiling of $15 per user. Most folks will pay less. These prices strike me as “pulled from the clouds.”
- Microsoft “will make it all work together. Active Directory will communicate with hosted Exchange and SharePoint. A “new tool will be provided”.
- Trade off for hosted Exchange and SharePoint–give up some control. “We make assumptions and settings on your behalf…. If you want customization, you need on premises Exchange and SharePoint.”
- The Service Level Agreement is for uptime, not transit time or any other network function.
- “We absolutely rely on partners. This is a great opportunity to sell an online service today and get paid forever.” Reason: Support comes from partner or local information technology group. Online services are for organizations that have an IT person on staff. “We’re delivering meat and potatoes. Our partners can put an embellishment upon these services.”
This is a very interesting chunk of information. A happy quack to Mr. Ashley.
Stephen Arnold, August 6, 2008
SharePoint: Anyone Not Baffled, Please, Stand Up
August 5, 2008
For years–even before I wrote the first three editions of CMSWatch’s Enterprise Search Report–I have been pointing out that enterprise search in general is not so useful and Microsoft enterprise search in particular is in the bottom quartile of the 300 or so “enterprise search” offerings available.
In a sense, it’s gratifying that youngsters are starting to look at the reality of information in an organizational setting and asking, “What’s wrong with these vendors and their systems?” You can get a dose of the youth movement in what I call search realism here. Shawn Shell, embracing knowledge about enterprise search, identifies some of the wackiness that Microsoft employees routinely offer about enterprise search or what I call “behind the firewall” search. I am pleased with the well-crafted article and its pointing out that Microsoft has a bit of work to do. I find it amazing that four years after the first edition of Enterprise Search Report, that old information is rediscovered and made “new” again.
Even more astounding is the Microsoft news release about the Fast Search & Transfer acquisition, which became official, on August 4, 2008. You can read the full text of this news release, as reported in AMEinfo here. Quoting Patrick Beeharry, Server and Product Marketing Manager for SharePoint in the Middle East and Africa, AMEinfo reported Mr. Beeharry as saying:
‘With our companies combined, we are uniquely positioned to offer customers what they have been telling us they want most – a strategy for meeting everything from their basic to most complex enterprise search needs. We are pleased to have the talented team from FAST joining us here in the Middle East. Together we aim to deliver better technologies that will make enterprise search a ubiquitous tool that is central to how people find and use information.
Okay, Microsoft is offering a strategy. I don’t know if a strategy will address the problems of information access in an organization. Vivisimo’s white paper takes this angle, and I think that the cost issues I raised are fundamental to a strategy, but I may be wrong. Maybe a strategy is going to tame the search monster and the 50 to 75 percent of the users who are annoyed with their existing search and retrieval system.
I suppose I was not surprised to read in To the SharePoint: The SharePoint IT Pro Documentation Team Blog the essay, “Which Microsoft Search Product Is for You?” You must read this stellar essay here. For me, the key point was this table:
You can see the original here if this representation is too small. The point is not to read the table. My point is look at the cells. The table has 35 cells with the symbol Ö and seven cells with no data. In the table’s 54 cells only seven have data. For me, the table is useless, but you may have a mind meld with the SharePoint team and intuitively understand that High availability and load balancing is NULL for Search Server Express and Ö for Search Server 2008 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. How about a key to the NULL cells and the Ö thingy? (For more careless Microsoft Web log antics, click here. The basics of presenting information in tables seems to be a skill that some Microsoft professionals lack.)
Er, what about Fast Search & Transfer? The day this Web log posting appeared, Microsoft officially owned Fast Search, but it seems to me that either the author was not aware of this $1.2 billion deal, had not read the news story referenced above, or conveniently overlooked how Fast Search fits into the Microsoft search solution constellation. I can think of other reasons for the omission, but you don’t need me to tell you that communication seems to be a challenge for some large organizations.
The net net is that Microsoft has many search technologies; for example:
- Powerset
- Fast Search & Transfer (Web indexing and behind the firewall indexing)
- Vista search
- Live.com search
- The SharePoint “flavors”
- SQLServer “search”
- Microsoft Dynamics “search”
- Legacy search in Windows XP, Outlook Express (my heavens), and good old Outlook 2000 to 2007.
The word confusion does not capture the Microsoft search products. Microsoft has moved search into a manifestation of chaos. If I’m correct, licensees need to consider the boundary conditions of these many search systems. Hooking these together and making them stable may be fractal, not a good thing for a licensee wanting to make information accessible to employees. The cost of moving some of these search systems’ functions to the cloud may be resource intensive. I wanted to write impossible, but maybe Microsoft and its earnest Web log writers can achieve this goal? I hope so. Failure only amps the Google electro magnet to pull more customers from Microsoft and into the maw of Googzilla.
I am delighted to be over the hill. When senility finally hits me, I won’t have to struggle through today’s ankle biters making the old new again or describing symptoms, not diagnosing the disease. Don’t agree? Set me straight. Agree? You are too old to be reading Web logs, my friend.
Stephen Arnold, August 5, 2008
SharePoint: A Six Pack of Servers
July 22, 2008
Mary-Jo Foley, author of Microsoft 2.0 and tireless Microsoft watcher, turns her sharp eye to the polymorphic Microsoft SharePoint Swiss Army knife system. Her “New Studies Highlight the Potential Downsides of SharePoint” is worth reading. You can find the July 21, 2008, essay here. I am fascinated when folks come to grips with the well-wrought SharePoint only to discover its darned complicated.
The most interesting point in Ms. Foley’s essay was:
SharePoint is a collection of six servers that provide document collaboration, portal creation, enterprise search, enterprise content management, electronic forms creation and management and business intelligence functions (analysis and publication of business information).
Okay, six servers, no problem if you have resources (a code word for money, time, patience, and the excitement of trying to find out where SharePoint puts files, scripts, security settings, etc.).
The point of Ms. Foley’s write up is a “new” Forrester study that reports–sit down so you don’t faint–keeping SharePoint customizations to a minimum is a useful tactic.
Ms. Foley cites Janus Boye’s new study. I’m more inclined to flow with Mr. Boye’s analysis. New York consulting firms, like New York lawyers and Canal Street watch dealers, make me nervous.
Now we know. SharePoint is complicated. Perfect for SharePoint consultants and Microsoft fans in information technology departments. SharePoint can be slightly less satisfying for users who want to use a system that is transparent, snappy, and easy to customize.
Complexity may be the fuel that ignites cloud computing, not scintillating salesmanship from Salesforce.com and others in this sector.
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2008
SharePoint Faithful: Infrastructure Updates
July 16, 2008
On July 15, 2008, Microsoft announced three updates that have an impact on our favorite Swiss Army knife for the enterprise. You can download the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) (Download X86, Download X64). These updates provide the features previously shipped in Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express. I know this gets confusing, but for the moment, SharePoint and search are in sync. Among the features are “federated search” which allows the different repositories to be indexed and results displayed in a single results list. Vivisimo offered this function in 2000, and it is a positive step for Microsoft to offer this function. A spiffy dashboard is provided. We have not verified the assertion that the whole SharePoint ecosystem delivers performance improvements. We know that to goose SharePoint, the drill is to scale up and out. The problem, of course, is that budgets are shrinking. Cloud-based SharePoint solutions are starting to look mighty appealing.
Here’s a screen capture of the federated results. Suggestions appear in the right hand column. The central display includes Web pages and docx files. There is no on the fly clustering in this display.
Microsoft has posted some knowledge base articles to explain other enhancements to the SharePoint infrastructure; for example:
Description of the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)
Fixes Included in the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB953750)
Please You will want to scan the SharePoint Team blog. Not surprisingly, there are some installation procedures that must be followed. We clicked on the links but as of 7 pm Eastern time on July 15, 2008, not all the links were active. Check this link to see if the necessary knowledge base articles are available.
Take it from me. Read these documents. A hitch in the git along can ruin a sysadmin’s weekend.
Stephen Arnold, July 16, 2008
MSFT vs GOOG: Cloud Gas War on the Horizon?
July 8, 2008
Mary Joe Foley, author of an interesting book about the “new” Version 2.0 Microsoft, wrote “Microsoft to Sell Hosted Service Subscriptions for $3 a Month”. You can read her essay here in the All about Microsoft information service. This is one of the ZDNet Web logs, which I find pretty darn useful to me.
Her point is the price. But the most interesting passage for me was this:
Over the past couple of years, Microsoft has been attempting to persuade its partners, especially those who’ve built businesses around hosting Microsoft software for their customers, that Microsoft isn’t going to steamroll them with its new managed-service offerings. Microsoft execs have been warning partners to get out of the plain-old hosting business and to, instead, focus on more of the value-add they can provide on top of hosted services.
I am not a Microsoft partner. I have watched as Certified Gold Partners innovated in search and add-ons for SharePoint, to cite two examples. Then, with each new release of SharePoint, the features that partners figured out how to make work and educated the customers to appreciate would migrate into the SharePoint platform.
My conclusion was, “Wow, that’s pretty risky for a partner investing big bucks in a value-add, enhancement, or snap-in gizmo for a Microsoft core product.” Well, this is another example of how large companies in their quest for revenue can take actions that put pressure on partners. When I was in South Africa, one guide told me, “When elephants fight, only the grass gets trampled.” Okay, this price war may not be real, but the price cut is.
The target is Google, Salesforce.com, and other vendors who like Macbooks and OSX.
The “grass” may be pretty sparse right now, but any firm thinking about getting into commodity services via the cloud may want to sharpen their pencils and revisit their business plans.
Kudos for Ms. Foley for snagging this information. I want to add three observations, which is now standard operating procedure for this Web log with two or three readers:
- A dollar amount play is dangerous. The major competitor has a different business model, and I think Google will use it to further provoke Redmondians.
- Customers don’t know whether $3 is too high, too low, or just right. Penetration of for-fee hosted services remains modest. In the enterprise, I saw figures that were in the 10 percent penetration range. This price point may become the benchmark, which if usage spikes could be a big cost hit for Microsoft as it rushes to scale. Google is getting beat up because some of its services are not scaling fast enough. Google’s stuff is free, which muffles the snorts. I will have to wait to see how the service scales, if it even has to scale.
- At least one Certified Gold Partners is making plans for life without Microsoft. I spent time with one big Gold outfit, and I thought I heard words to the effect, “To heck with them.” If this anti Microsoft flu spreads, the result might be quite interesting competitively.
You can get a another interest view of this from ReadWriteWeb here.
Agree? Disagree? Don’t be shy?
Stephen Arnold, July 8, 2008
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
