Earlier this week Microsoft killed it’s retail offering in Equipt as well as the OneCare retail edition and the OneCare Server edition, trial of which shipped with SBS 2008 at a recent launch. Microsoft expects to release a free security suite, Morro, to coincide with the launch of Windows 7.

The commentary on the net has been split between Microsoft failing with a bloated security product and the consumer economy being so terrible that Microsoft’s presence in the retail channel is a waste.

I’d like to offer a third option

Microsoft intends to copy Apple’s successful strategy of providing all the essential and simple apps so that the user doesn’t have to search or buy (or let’s be honest, pirate) their own.

Apple Mac OS X comes with relatively little. But add a $79 iLife or $79 iWork and you’ve transformed your system into a media production machine capable of managing albums and web sites, editing videos or composing music. For $20 more you can install it on up to 5 PCs in the “family”

Microsoft has stated that the cloud based apps are their future. You can see this today in the form of Windows Live family that comes with a single installer and lets you download a lot of free and relatively good software.

It fits the strategy. It keeps the Antitrust lawsuits away. It simplifies and secures Windows 7 usage and improves the experience. It certainly seems like Microsoft is getting their stuff together.

Earlier today Microsoft enabled end-user customers to purchase software and services directly from a Microsoft site, completely bypassing the partner community. While there is a bit about contacting Microsoft Partners for support services if you sit on the site for a few seconds you will be greeted by a popup and a person all too happy to take your money:

Meet Heidi:

There you go. As one of my partners called in and stated today:

“So they just told me not to bother with licensing and IT training on their products anymore, I’m just a sales guy…”

No, that would be Heidi, Bob… Now the last time I told you this was coming I got under a fair bit of criticism. As I said in the past, Microsoft is the only one that truly knows how much value is in the Partner Program and what the bottom tier accounts for. Is this one of Microsoft’s giant mistakes or a well educated business plan change is pretty much their problem.

Not all bad news, you can always come and work for me.

There you have it folks, this is how it all ends.

Over the past 12-18 months Microsoft has gotten a lot of bumps and bruises on this blog, ever since Kevin Turner and Allison Watson outlined the lack of vision for the company that is Microsoft as we’ve known and grown with. At the Worldwide Partner Conference in 2007, Turner announced the Microsoft shift to the more consumer-centric business and at the Wordwide Partner Conference 2008 both Turner and Watson explained where the partner community will remain - below 6% commission on cloud services with opportunities to integrate legacy platforms with the new way of Microsoft software service subscriptions. In November of this year at the Microsoft PDC, Ray Ozzie revived the much criticized Hailstorm .NET failure at the turn of the millennium into a thriving cloud based operating system and renewed the commitment to the developers that choose to build on top of Microsoft.

Yesterday, Microsoft also announced the launch of the Microsoft store where you can purchase software directly from Microsoft.

In a nutshell, in just under 18 months, we have seen Microsoft go from the largest software developer in the world to the largest technology conglomerate in the world with the funds, presence, talent and overwhelming opportunity to seize large shares of the markets that are struggling.

Do you think that bankruptcy of Circuit City and CompUSA had anything to do with the idea that Microsoft needs to go at it alone to reach the end customer? Microsoft’s inability to control the messaging in the retail segment has as much to do with the Vista failure as do the perennial Apple smears against it.

My biggest gripe with Microsoft for years has been in that Microsoft lacked leadership and vision. Ray Ozzie has changed that.

For years Microsoft roamed the post-monopoly-lawsuit desert in search of a hit - with many technologies seen as me-too would-be competitors that failed to catch on. The entire cloud approach, from search to storage, seemed like a neverending collection of summer intern code experiments that lacked in both purpose and refinement. It just seems cool became the norm at Microsoft Live, except none of the cool kids wanted to play with it.

And when it seemed like Microsoft was down for the count it seems something changed with it in a way that absolutely repositioned the company and its direction. Looking at the flow and innovation from Microsoft it no longer feels like a business software company trying to exert it’s will into tangent markets - it seems like a business platform company that wants to be the delivery mechanism for the services.

That is a tough call to make and a huge change in direction - one that has caused a lot of pain as the ship now plows over the partner marketplace that brought Microsoft to it’s prominence to begin with.

So as painful as it is to watch, it is ultimately the right thing for Microsoft and the right thing for the technology marketplace. We (software solutions people) strive to enable easy communication, trust in the computing process and data integrity, and the beauty of this business and profession is that you never stop learning with the constant change.

Microsoft has effectively shot the middleman that stood in the way of their direct relationship with the user - if you were that middle man your days are unfortunately numbered. As more technology jobs are sailed down the pink slip river there is a very bright and positive side to the development - more and more people are not just using but relying on technology for both business and leisure. As complexity is removed and reliability is improved the opportunity goes from “building IT” to “improving IT” and the great news is that the cost of entry in the new world is pretty much leveled.

If you intend to be in business or even employed five years from now I hope you are imagining your role in IT five years down the road.

It’s (almost) Friday so let’s try a little humor.

Who wants to predict the next Apple commercial? You can see them all here, as Apple’s PR and marketing are as big of a product as the iPhone and OS X.

So in tradition of taking infinite potshots at every misguided Microsoft marketing attempt, I think Apple will mock the new Microsoft ads titled “I’m a PC” where ordinary people upload 5 second webcam clips of themselves about how unique they are and how they use a PC, implying (in my humble opinion correctly) that Mac users are pretty much all the same drones.

How do I see this going down? Mac guy walks into the PC guy trying to tape a commercial. The kicker is that the PC guy is weird, obnoxiously pixelated and totally out of context with it’s message.

Where does Apple go with it from there?

“You know PC, Apple Theatre Displays with high resolution…”

“PC, you should get a MacBook with integrated high resolution video and iSight…”

“Why not use any of the latest HDTV cameras… oh, driver problems?

Microsoft is spending $300 million… so far it doesn’t appear they have been able to make it count. Their new life without partners is not off to a great start, talk about taking a wrong moment in the IT cycle to sink your advocates battleship. When your flagship product is on the ropes, you struggle in all measurable Web 2.0 categories and publicly admit at PDC that you’re playing catchup with technology others offer SLAs for and you can’t even preview…

It would seem they would have spent more time trying to make friends than enemies. Benioff is pretty much right on the money, Microsoft - wake up.

Microsoft made a lot of noise about Live last week, but some MSN tricks never die. For example, the new wave of Live apps is beyond broken, but they won’t let you download the old stable ones. So what to do, what to do.

I have a 32bit Vista Enterprise, and after attempting to install Windows Live Suite I am given the following error:

There was a problem with this installation. Windows Live Suite was not installed.

System error details

Code: 0×8000ffff

Description: Catastrophic failure

I found a great blog by Jonathan Kay covering this very issue and the resolution. It also has great tips on removing and adding different live components.

Another out-of-band patch has been issued by Microsoft today and if you are not in the practice of watching out for these things you’ll find your Windows systems rebooting again tonight. Little hidden secret is that most Microsoft patches do not require reboots at all.

Today’s gem comes courtesy of Vulnerability in Server Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (958644) which will reboot your system by default. Here is how to get around that. Click on the link above. Scroll down under Affected and Non-Affected Software and find your OS. Mine is Windows Vista and Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Click on Download and save the file somewhere. Now, just install this with a /norestart switch and you’re done.

If you have UAC you’ll get some nagging, just hit OK:

Done.

Now I realize the jury is out on whether or not it’s faster to just let the system reboot in the wee hours of the night but it’s nice to know that you have options when applying Microsoft hotfixes. 

Meant for CPAs.

Note to self: Don’t mess with Apple. My god, this level of shaming and humiliation that is so in tune with every Microsoft step ($300 million ad campaign, renaming Vista R2 to Windows 7) is just unfair This is likely the funniest thing I’ve seen all year (well, maybe second to “Ghostriding the Whip” series)

Poor Microsoft…

Update: Oh dear god. I just got an email linking to the patent Microsoft was recently awarded. Go on, I’ll let you guess. Based on the last commercial there. Give yet? Patent for realtime bleeping out of profanities. Not ****ing kidding you, this is just got funny on a whole different level!

If you were Microsoft, what would you do? 

Some of the new software we are building at Own Web Now manages it’s own password complexity, sometimes much to the chagrin of the default policies built into Windows Server 2008. You’ve heard about Security By Obscurity, so get ready for the new model: Security by presenting GPOs where you would expect to see them, just disabled and uneditable, forcing you to go modify them in a completely different place - Security By Ambiguity. Where does one modify the local security policy in Windows Server 2008?

Local Security Policy used to be managed through Administrative Tools >Local Security Policy. Things like minimum and maximum password age, minimum length, complexity and so on were tweakable under that console. In Windows Server 2008, those screens are still there but you have no way to edit them:

So, how does one disable all this stuff in Windows Server 2008 because the external application is intended to manage it (and you presumably do not want your policies to break because they override some of Microsoft’s?):

Start > Run > gpmc.msc

This is the Group Policy Management Editor, nifty tool that used to be optional with Windows Server 2003 and XP (free download) is now the way to manage your security policies. 

Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Account Policies

Warning: The security policy outlined above is pretty much suicidal if you don’t enforce password policies through a different tool. Here is a brief description of the Microsoft password policy requirements.

So why did we disable it? Because we wrote our own software to manage the policies, which has the same complexity as Microsoft’s recommendations, but we found that Microsoft will at times even deem it’s own default password policy not to be strong enough, introducing inconsistencies that we were not willing to risk support expenses to narrow down.

Another bad security lesson brought to you by Vladville.

You already know my take on it, but there appears to be more to this topic with the financial community chiming in now:

We wanted to share some thoughts on Microsoft (MSFT), which we closed during the quarter.  We believe that we purchased the shares at an attractive time, and for a good while the investment worked nicely.  As has been our habit of late, we overstayed our welcome as the shares peaked after the company announced a very good September 2007 quarter. 

Since then, management has acted in an overaggressive and almost panicky fashion regarding its online offering.  First, it sought to acquire Yahoo! and then after that failed, it announced extremely high internal investment requirements to pursue this “huge” opportunity (read: “Google-envy”).  We doubt the opportunity is what they say it is and wish MSFT focused on its core strength: software. 

The CEO is a very smart and very wealthy man.  Perhaps, he is so wealthy that he has bigger ideas and aspirations than making MSFT’s shareholders wealthier.  We’ve given up on MSFT for now as we feel better investing in companies where management at least appears to be trying to work for shareholders.

I think David is right on with Microsoft losing focus, losing in consumer web properties, losing in search, losing in media players, losing in… well… everything except software.

Knowing the guy, I never got the sense that he is so wealthy that he has bigger ideas and aspirations that transcend the core business of making money. As an unnamed Microsoft whore pointed out the other day via IM, Microsoft is above all things an insecure, arrogant company that cannot stand not being #1 or an ounce of competition, even if the competition pays it licensing fees and royalties. I am not sure if they are arrogant or just afraid - Microsoft has always stood for a seamless computing experience, so they think that if anyone is to get on their territory their doom will soon follow. That is why you see them trying to spread their wings to nearly anything that runs software.

There is a little more to this, as more and more PDC content comes available every day it reveals what Microsoft is actually up to. Developers are writing software that runs on distributed clusters on the Internet. There is relatively little new stuff showing up on the desktop. Microsoft doesn’t own the Internet, it doesn’t control the Internet, and as far as standards are concerned it doesn’t control any of them or for the most part doesn’t even come close to the 10% share.

What is a company with 90% desktop OS market share to do when it cannot move the developers to develop for its market dominant platform and the choice of OS become irrelevant?

You don’t have to look further than Microsoft’s 10-K which lists their going concerns.

Microsoft is about to enter very dangerous territory: It walks into a fight with tarnished reputation for it’s core business, with multiple losses across a wide variety of markets from search to media, and now it opens a huge front with a 1.0 release on the cloud without the comfort of a huge partner sales force it has just alienated.

One has to wonder if Microsoft’s lack of immediate success and fanboy following for their cloud computing initiatives to be announced at PDC simply leave Microsoft as a giant, yet subpar, technology company on the decline.

As the old saying goes: Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Oh yeah? And where are they now in terms of the way you view hardware and software? Another blue to bite the dust? We’ll know very soon.

tan dan tan dan tan dan tan dan.. Moooortaaaalll Kommmbaaaaat!

Never in my life have I imagined I would see a live human reenactment of the final move in a Mortal Kombat video game. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m in Redmond this week getting the deep dive SBS 2008 training with some other fellow MVPs. This is a scene from earlier today, and in my opinion it is fairly remarkable. I never thought I’d be able to capture the very moment when the persons soul leaves his body at the exact moment he loses all hope for humanity and his vocational contribution to it:

SBS 2008 developer, who wrote the console.exe management interface for Cougar, checks for his pulse while Jeff Middleton, of SBS Migration fame, attempts to explain how a simple schema change would only require 3 lines of code.

Bonus points for the dev for keeping his carcass vertical

Microsoft MVP program, contributing to Microsoft Developer attrition since 1997.

Which brings me to an interesting symbiosis software developers (me) and very passionate users (MVPs) have when it comes to social interaction. In digital interaction (forums, bug sites, trouble tickets) the responses are raw and nearly primal - “This is broken - fix it” with the response “It’s like that by design”. In plain terms the users are telling developers that their software sucks, and the developers are telling the users to stop bitching and go away because it won’t be fixed. It’s a conversation that repeats often so today I asked:

Dana Epp: I bugged it and the bug was closed as “By design.”

Vlad Mazek: How come you guys never let me get away with that?

Dean Calvert: Because we know where you live.

There is something to be said about the personal connection the software has to the way business gets done and value is contributed to both the person designing the software to solve the problem, person implementing the software to help the end user be more effective at their task and the end user who ultimately makes a significant impact with the software to improve something else.

When all three of these individuals connect and are on the same page the results are astonishing.

This is why OWN invests so much in remaining a partner-only company and why Microsoft pours so much money and time in the MVP program and why people continue to put up with difficult problems and people to improve the entire chain.

At Own Web Now we have a picture of Nick Whittome, which I am not allowed to publish, that I put in my IM icon every Friday when we do code reviews. Nick is my residential code review scarecrow - every time you take a shortcut Nick will find it and kick you in the ass about it. Why? Because people like Nick Whittome and Howard Cunningham and Dave Sobel and a few thousand others constantly give us feedback on our solutions. They aren’t paid for this role, nor do their clients pay for them to work with us, nor does this go under the line item under any of the financial reports. And when my team looks at these kick in the balls tickets and bug tracks it is hard not to de-humanize the feedback as a complaint and reflection of personal incompetence. It is hard to differentiate where “you suck” starts and “this would fix the problem” begins.

This, in my opinion, is why working with the vendors, partners, end users and everyone involved in the software consumption cycle is extremely important. Once you get beyond taking the criticism personally you can move on to the positive side of what everything you’ve dedicated at least 8 hours a day goes to. It’s very motivating, in my opinion moreso than money.