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On November 14th at 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET I will be participating in a free webinar on Unified Communications with Eric Krapf of Business Communications Review and VoiceCon, and Hardy Myers of AVST.
The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg has published his review of Leopard: Leopard: Faster, Easier Than Vista. I haven't gotten a copy yet, my iMac G5's hard drive is almost full and I'm not able to free up the 10 GB of space needed to install until I can move some stuff around.
But with all the attention on Mac, including Apple's huge sales growth (3Q sales up 34% over a year ago), a lackluster response to Vista, I wonder if it means we're on the cusp of an inflection point in the PC market. Increasingly I'm hearing from enterprise folks a growing interest in moving from Windows desktops that cost a fortune to support to either an application infrastructure based on some combination of virtualized apps, web-based apps, and thin-client desktops based on Linux, or Mac. It used to be rare to see a Mac in public, now the are everywhere. A recent poll of college students by SurveyU noted that 44% of college students planned to buy a Mac for their next computer purchase (with 23% currently using Mac)
I don't have any hard data on Macs in the enterprise, but at the recent Cisco analyst's event in Toronto about a quarter of Cisco folks had Macs. I also recently spoke to a friend at a large service provider who told me that the entire engineering group was in the process of moving to Mac. I've heard that Macs are prevalent at places like Google as well. It's rare that I come across anyone in the tech industry who wouldn't rather use a Mac if given the choice. I wonder as Macs gain a huge percentage of the college market, if we'll see greater demand in the overall enterprise space for Macs instead of Windows machines. (See: "What Apple's Leopard Means To The Enterprie" on PCWorld.com for some other examples of enterprises considering switching to Mac).
But Apple still doesn't have an enterprise strategy, nor do they have a network of resellers/partners who can support Mac environments in the enterprise market. There are still many business apps that won't run on a Mac (yes, you can run them in emulation using Parallels with a licensed copy of Windows, but that adds a tremendous amount of money to the cost of each desktop). It seems there is a huge opportunity that's there for the taking (by either Apple or a partner).
Perhaps it will take more efforts by folks like IBM Lotus, who are rapidly achieving parity in Mac and Windows (and Linux) environments to see the enterprise make a shift. I'm also curious to see how the growth in interest in Macs (and thin clients) impacts Microsoft's OCS strategy, which at this point requires XP or Vista to take advantage of presence and rich-media communications capabilities.
Last night's episode of The Office featured Dwight Schrute on Second Life. Perhaps the funniest part was that Dwight created an exact copy of his "real" life, except he gave himself the ability to fly.
Virtual World News has more, including screen shots of the virtual "Schrute".
As our thoughts are with the people of Southern California today, please consider donating to the American Red Cross or other local charities.
Today Microsoft "officially" launches Office Communications Server 2007 at a big event in San Francisco which will include an appearance by Bill Gates.
I posted a quick take on Collaboration Loop, see:
And I've got a more detailed version in this month's Business Communications Review.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Unified Communications
There were two interesting announcements this week on the unified communications front. NEC announced today an agreement with Unisys whereby Unisys will integrate NEC's products into Unisys's communications and collaboration portfolio. Meanwhile, earlier this week HP announced a new services portfolio for unified communications, bundling its own offerings (such as Halo telepresence) with products and platforms from partners including Cisco and Microsoft.
I think these moves reflect a rapidly changing landscape for UC in that buying demand is increasingly coming from end users, not from IT. Most vendors and providers now realize that their best hope of growing in the UC market comes not from push-selling to IT, but rather from creating pull-based demand by working directly with lines of business to assist them in using UC to solve specific business challenges and improve bottom line results. We've seen a pretty dramatic trend in the last year, it's rare now that I hear a UC vendor talk about product features. Rather, we now get buzzwords like "Business Transformation" as the driver for UC.
Given this new reality, it's not surprising at all that the system vendors increasingly are looking to grow partnerships with companies in the application space who often have a better understanding of specific business and vertical challenges and opportunities, and who have contacts with end users and lines of business.
We've already got Google, Zoho, and ThinkFree, but now the market for Web-based office suites seems to be exploding. This week Microsoft announced "Microsoft Office Live Workspace" which as best I can tell is a hosted version of SharePoint, allowing users to store and share documents with others, however MOLW doesn't include document creation capabilities of its own, rather one must use another editor. And now we get news that Adobe has bought Virtual Ubiquity, owners of the Buzzword web-based office suite.
Why all this interest in a market dominated by Microsoft Office? Perhaps vendors finally believe that the world is ready for web-based document management and creation services? I'm still not convinced. The average user will likely stick with Microsoft products, while the tech-savvy user will move to OpenOffice, Symphony or NeoOffice. The real question is whether or not small groups of users will use on-line document sharing services rather than continue to rely on e-mail to forward copies of documents around to each other. On that last point, I still need to be convinced.
Dan York blogs about issues in using Skype in hotel networks. See:
Last week while in Toronto for the Cisco UC analyst's conference, I found that my Verizon Blackberry 8830 "World Phone" didn't work in my hotel room, so I used Skype on my IBM T42 laptop without any headset to call home a few times via the in-room Internet connection. The call quality was just fine. But it will be interesting to see if the issues Dan raises are localized to a few hotels or chains, or become a wider issue.
Technorati Tags: skype
