Apple is the No. 1 Client Device

A report out by Canalys on the final quarter of 2011 puts Apple ahead of HP as the preferred client device amongst corporates and consumers. Who would have ever thought that? Apple as the domain of geeks and marketing agencies is officially a thing of the past. Ty, you were right all along.

Some will say that this is wrong accounting as it includes iPads and iPhones in the total - but this is the entire point about the rapidly shifting client device market in corporations, the device is fast becoming the choice of the user not the company.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a real phenomenon and it is helping Apple become a corporate standard in a world traditionally dominated by PCs and Microsoft. 

Learn a lesson, everyone. There is not a penny of discount given for Apple products whether it be an iPod, iPad, iPhone or a Mac and they are top of the range end user prices. The PC market has been long rated as a commodity market and wags will tell you that Apple would never become a corporate standard as resellers and Apple itself never negotiate. That's another myth busted as Macs continue to grow and take market share off all the main players like HP, Dell, Lenovo and the rest. The PC market is no longer a price sensitive, high competition market - Apple have redefined the way to sell.

How did Apple do it? By winning the hearts, minds and wallets of real users through innovation, ease of use and entire new ways to buy products and applications. Incredibly, real users have gone back into corporations and not asked but demanded that their tablets, smartphones and, now, Macs be attached to the network even if they foot the bill themselves.

Microsoft, HP, Dell, everyone, never saw this coming that not just Apple but their operating system would take a massive chunk of the world dominated by the PC. Recent figures released by Microsoft show that they can no longer rely on consumers for their profit - now they are being squeezed in corporations.

The pace of change is incredible and none of the mighty companies saw it coming. Apple is the No. 1 client in corporations.

Pinch yourself, it's real.

Apple Doubles Everything

In stark contrast to Microsoft's earnings announcements, there were considerable crowings at Apple. Microsoft showed that without a strong enterprise performance, their overall numbers would have looked pretty grim and now it seems there will almost certainly be my predicted earnings drop in 2012 at some point.

But Apple just plough on. In fact revenue over doubled comparing the last quarter to the same last year with 118% growth to record over $46bn in revenue. And profit rose the same degree to $13bn and they added $17bn of cash in the quarter too.

Over 37m iPhones were sold and 15m iPads putting Apple back at No. 1 in both categories while Macs shipped over 5m units rising a steady 21% as the PC industry took a noticeable dive in shipments and earnings.

Considering there is a pipeline of amazing new products on the horizon, Apple's future looks very rosy. There may be a few green faces in Seattle. After a long and clever plot, Apple is now a serious product in the eyes of corporations despite the fact it is expensive and it doesn't run Windows.

Now who would have predicted that 10 years ago? OK, other than Ty.

Is Microsoft doomed in its Current Form?

It seems Microsoft has had a dose of reality in the last week. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Tami Reller, the CFO of the Windows division, has warned that PC shipments will be lower than an already gloomy forecast in this quarter. In her case, she put this down to supply problems in the Thai flood regions where the high waters are still causing havoc to component makers, particularly on hard disks. Some UK distributors have plenty of servers but no disks which will impact their sales in the next few months.

Finally, it seems that the penny is dropping at Microsoft. Their figures are actually dependent on the shipment of PCs to a very high degree. I have illustrated before that Windows itself and Office Productivity products constitute the majority of the revenues and profits generated at Microsoft and these numbers are directly dependent on the number of client devices sold into homes and corporates. As PC sales alarmingly decline, so will Microsoft revenues and profits - in their very heartland.

Microsoft is a well spread company, for sure. But with servers taking a decline lately, Windows Server, already under severe attack by Linux, is also suffering. All this is occurring as Apple see sharp increases in the sales of its PC-like devices while tablets and smartphones continue to boom - all these devices coming with largely Apple and Google operating systems.

The threat also is that corporations are wising up. They have paid through the nose for arguably second rate products in their companies for too long. PCs which seem to fail conspicuously in less than 3 years, an operating so clunky it takes 5 minutes to load up each morning, office productivity tools which seem to suspend and crash for no perceivable reason, occupying ever expanding disk space.

Apple may charge top dollar for their hardware but you get a robust operating system, rich in features and free utilities of high quality which takes seconds to load up or resume, no matter what state you left it in. And office suite software is far cheaper with a breadth of products available at below £20 a pop - except Microsoft Office for Mac which is £189 but at least half the price of the PC version and many times better.

The fact is that tablets and smartphones are changing not just the array of client devices and how we use them for home and work but they are changing the way we buy software. Suddenly, we have a plethora, a vast hypermarket of innovative, low cost and clever software available to us that costs just a few pounds to buy. And we buy tons of the stuff. Finally, we are finding there are alternatives to the status quo that has frankly held us back for years in terms of real productivity.

Steve Jobs called it the post-PC era. I would liken it to the IT version of a 'renaissance' as people dream up all sorts of clever software and just punt it out in volume.

But there is a new trend. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is the consumerisation of IT. This is the concept that we buy our smartphones and tablets, even PCs ourselves and bring them to work as devices of choice to work with and demand access to the corporate networks and all its facilities and data. In the old days, at job offer time, we were told you would get a salary package and then a PC and phone would be provided. Already in the US, job offers go out with no PC or phone provided but the recruits are invited to bring their own.

This is one reason why Apple as a PC, tablet and smartphone provider and its counterparts in the tablet and smartphone arena are doing so well in the corporate world as users rebel against the constraints of the old PC world and flourish in the new post-PC era.

These are worrying trends for Microsoft. I heard of story of a Microsoft executive going into an Apple store to bait the salespeople with a new Nokia Lumia with its noddy-like tiling on the front having already arrived late and behind the market. It must have been a pathetic sight as an army of Apple customers looked up from their iPhone 4S devices and thought, 'whatever'.

This is part of the problem with Microsoft. This ingrained belief of impregnability and that users really have no place to go, so they swallow whatever Microsoft do and say. It's a Windows world, it's an Office world. The Spanish bank BBVA has proved that this is not necessarily the case in choosing to migrate its entire 110,000 staff to Google Apps for Business after a successful trial - encouraging all their employees to ditch the past. They have embraced the advantage of the Cloud to run their company by allowing the web to be the platform, not the PC which unshackles users from being given sub-standard machines and to choose a device of their own.

15 months ago, I bought the top of the range Lenovo Thinkpad - a great machine in terms of weight, PC sexiness and performance. Its battery life was always rubbish even though it was advertised as 10 hours and even though it runs Windows 7 its performance has degraded over time as I have found with every PC I have ever owned - it's as if they get fatigued from running rubbish software. Yesterday, as I walked into the atrium of a Microsoft building, it literally died. One minute I was looking at the presentation I was about to give, the next it was blank and dead. It still is dead.

In supreme irony, I had my Macbook Pro tucked in my bag (having not wanted to antagonise by using it) and latched onto the guest wifi and loaded up the same presentation from Dropbox. In seconds, without skipping a beat, I hooked up to the projector using my convertor cable and without pressing any button the projector and resolution was detected and my presentation was given. Jaws hit the table when they saw the Mac and I expected to get escorted out by security but when they saw how their own software behaved on a Mac with so many more options on how to run a slideshow from a PC and time your delivery, they were impressed.

But they still don't get it. Even when the graphs point out the clarity of the numbers and trends, they don't seem to get the fact that their very heartland, the core product set of the company is under persistent threat not by their customers but by users. No amount of canoodling with the CIO will make a difference. Users are rewriting corporate policy and deciding the future IT strategy.

I predicted that Microsoft will make a profits warning in 2012 and Keller's announcement prior to Q2 results was seeding some bad news. At some point, a hole will appear in that lucrative area that Microsoft has depended upon for years. If nothing else, the price of MS Office has to collapse in the future - nobody is going to pay the kinds of prices of the past for that product for the future. 

I predict that Microsoft will survive but not in the same form. It will have to radically change and find new ways to make money. Right now, it's not at all clear how they will do that. Is it time for management change? Maybe that's the starting point. 

But what do I know?

BYOD Threat to Enterprise Security

BYOD or BYOT (bring Your Own Device or Technology) is a huge trend in corporations. As yet CEO/CIOs don't really understand the full implications or don't care that much, according to some research, but the growth in smartphones and tablets being brought into the enterprise network set up promises to be one of the biggest threats to security in the coming years.

Imagine the CEO's iPad going missing complete with an auto-connection to Dropbox on several applications and some local files with only so much as a 4 number PIN protecting it if anything at all. It couldn't happen? It has - the European President of a $24bn global company did just that. And not a single IT person could do a thing to prevent any data loss.

Apple now has thing's like Mobile Me and Find the iPhone with iCloud as back up which start to solve some of the issues but realistically they go nowhere near the kinds of security set up required to satisfy Corporate or Public Sector Governance on data controls and security. As the astronomic growth in smartphones and tablets continues unabated, this is going to become a major issue going forward.

Enter Bradford Networks from the US. This company has a specific solution for the BYOD craze and it's Network Sentry product addresses this issue. 

Bradford Networks' Network Sentry product manages IT assets like iPads and provisions customised security policies to control things like unauthorised network access especially in the case of a device falling into the wrong hands. Bradford Networks have specific market sector solutions for the enterprise, healthcare and education. It may mean some sacrifice in privacy for users as the product monitors activity but in reality corporations need to wrestle back control of the security of data and Bradford Networks offers a resilient way of doing this.

Bradford Networks has also joined in the SaaS market - not Software but Security as a Service with its Bradford.cloud solution for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). What Bradford.cloud does is to provide a protection layer on Private Cloud networks provided by MSPs so they can understand what devices are connected to the Private Cloud and manage their security from a single console.

Bradford Networks are at the forefront of delivering the highest level of security to enterprises both on premise and in the Cloud and have a unique answer to the growing question on security the BYOD brings for resellers and Managed Service Providers.

For further information, call +44 207 193 2356.

Microsoft fails - Apple wins?

Yesterday I explored the hypothetical case of Microsoft collapsing. While I am not a Microsoft 'Arnageddonist', as I think $60bn of cash should buy them some path to safety, I do argue in my 5 predictions for 2012 that Microsoft will see revenues and profits stall in 2012 as pressure grows on Windows sales as PC shipments continue to fall while there will be increased pressure on Office products due to corporates questioned pricing models and the rise of new alternatives plus less PC shipments to sell them on. I do believe Microsoft needs a radical change in plans and I think that requires new management throughout. It has to break out of the rut its in. It may not be so vulnerable in large corporations but in the higher margin heartland of SME and consumer, Microsoft is at extreme risk to the likes of Apple and Google.

A sobering thought - 97% of UK companies are classified as SMEs, employing the largest share of the workforce and there are millions of consumers out there. That is where Google will sustain its attack in the places where free and low cost products and services are readily accepted. Microsoft are incredibly vulnerable down there in its long tail of untouched users.

But if Microsoft were to fail, would Apple gain and become the flag bearing IT giant of the future? Right now it is the US' most valuable company with more cash than the US Treasury. Not bad for a company that almost expired around 10 years ago. So would Apple be the company to take over Microsoft's mantle of IT giant and dominant force in the IT industry?

I don't think so. However, I am a recent convert to Apple and I love the company and the products. I am fully kitted out with Macbook Pro, iPad2 and iPhone 4 with IR keypad and somewhere we still have an iPod and iPod Shuffle. Now the whole triumvirate of products are bound together by iCloud which backs me up.

The clue was in the series of products. Apple has a strong base, which is how it came up by stealth on Microsoft, in the consumer market. This can also be a curse as the need to sustain the longevity of products and find the next new ones is a ceaseless and sapping task. Smartphones has been a productive area but there is intense competition from all angles and Apple cannot always sustain it's position on mere gadgetry. Just this morning, I am experiencing battery drain on what is now my third iPhone to show the same problem. Quality needs to match usability once the fad value is over.

And iPad. What a fantastic product. In the heat of taking it on, I off loaded around 80% of my work onto the device, forsaking my PC. Full of warm feelings, I switched my PC to Apple Macbook Pro and it has been a huge success for me. So much so that I now only use my iPad2 for around 10% of my work - mainly blogging and viewing documents.

The usefulness of tablets needs to be enhanced if they are truly going to take up the long term slack in the PC market and Apple's growing market share in the business world actually threatens the iPad in the same market.

In the final analysis, Apple is a superb innovator in the user experience and will always have its place as an end device of choice amongst users. The brand is cool and the products are always one step ahead. That may change but the wave is worth riding. But beyond that, Apple has no real binding to the mainstream infrastructure that sits at the heart of networks and computing today. It doesn't make servers or network stuff, not much software for interactivity, it's pretty much an end device company only and proud of it. It's operating system is different to the standards and there is always the annoying incompatibilities at the edge of things that just irk the corporate user and makes the full user experience just short of the nirvana expected for the outlay.

Should Microsoft falter then Apple will indeed benefit but it will not be the defacto standard that Microsoft has been. But what it will do is to continually challenge the status quo and set standards on the user experience that have been sorely missing from the Microsoft world from which we are slowly emerging. I think it will also, along with Google, challenge the absurd amounts of money we have all continued to pay for ropy old office productivity products that really are not that special. In fact, there will be a real software revolution as more products appear for less cost doing more.

Steve Jobs called this the post PC era and he was right. Microsoft will stumble and it will be the mark of the management to see if it can make this just a minor slip up or whether it will be a slow decline or the collapse that some foretell. Whatever happens next has to be good for the industry and even if they do not emerge as giants, we have a great deal to thank Apple for in shaking us all out of the malaise of accepting second best as the only way.

In my other predictions for 2012, along with MS issuing a profits warning before the end of the year, I predict Groupon will fail and get bought for a fraction of its IPO price, aggregators will rise as a force in computer channels as the Cloud takes a grip, corporate AppStores will arise in the face of the BYOD phenomenon and Google will see sales of its Google Apps for Business rise to between $500m and $1bn of annualised sales by the end of 2012.

New Cloud developments? Keep a close eye on two companies called Okta and independenceIT. 

Buying Software in the Future

Steve Jobs was an incredible man - I think we all agree on that. But to my mind, amongst all his innovations and acumen what he did to converge the mobile and computing market was stunning. I think it was just the first steps in an exciting journey.

Recently, the CEO of Tech Data asserted that smartphones were the products to watch in the next year or two and he knows a thing or two about products as his company sells around $25bn of Hi-Tech kit a year. So it seems the world is set to ride the tsunami of mobility products - smartphones and tablets to the fore.

This has been much the domain of the consumer until recently when we all started to turn up to work with these products that we bought with our own money and insisted they should be put on the network and to heck with the security risks. This 'Consumerisation of IT' or 'BYOD' thing is becoming a huge issue but it brings opportunity.

So what did Steve Jobs do that was so amazing? Well Vodafone and the likes had toyed with sending applications and things to the phone for a while but it was all a bit disjointed and ineffective. Jobs turned it all on its head. He brought the world of computing to the mobile industry by not just inventing a great smartphone but by re-inventing how applications were to be delivered to the phone and he encouraged hundreds of companies, small and large to develop Apps. And he cut out the phone companies from the action. And he cut out the channel from the action too. It was all owned and delivered by Apple - just as he had done with iTunes, the App Store revolutionised the way software is delivered first to phones and then to tablets - and where next?

Unlike Microsoft who opened up the PC market for everyone to develop in, Apple opened up the phone but took on the role of software distributor by providing the only outlet to get the product. And it takes a sizeable cut of the sale for doing so - much more than a distributor would. By creating this bond with its customer, Apple has also become the fastest growing Cloud storage company in the world when they delivered iCloud. Suddenly the bonds with Apple get stronger and it spreads across the spectrum of Apple iPhone, iPad and Mac computers. This is a superb business model for the future as you can just layer on more products and services easily.

So is this the template for the future of PC software purchases? As yet there has been no great move by a single large company to try to emulate Apple but there are few parallels in the PC industry other than Apple themselves. This leads me to think that the software hypermarket company of the future has yet to emerge.

I can imagine a company setting up an AppStore software hypermarket and aggregating as much software as possible for consumers and small businesses to buy - both traditional perpetual licence software and Cloud based. Such a company could cut out traditional channels as Apple have done. It's not as easy to do as Apple have farmed their own base in doing so whereas there are loads of PC vendors out there. 

That's why I think the software store of the future will be independent of vendors and potentially not of the channel today. Now who could that be? Amazon? Google? Wal-Mart?

Calx Europe is a Business Acceleration company specialising in working with vendors and channel to develop and implement strategies in the Cloud market. Call +44 (0) 207 193 2356 for a no obligation discussion.

Shifting Sands in the PC World

In a matter of just a few months we have seen the IT 'Client' market change dramatically. The definition of this is what we use on the desktop to compute with - desktop, laptop, notebook and now tablet.

We all knew that tablets are trending - Apple will likely manufacture and sell 20 million iPads this quarter alone and by 2014 it is reckoned that of the total 1.3 billion PCs on earth, over a quarter will be tablets. To reflect this, Gartner Group issued some appalling figures on the PC market for last quarter - of notebooks alone, there was a 53% drop in sales and PCs fell by 21%.

It is very clear that despite industry pundits trying to dismiss the Apple iPad and other tablets as just fancy gadgets with no business worth, the tablets are very quickly becoming productivity and relaxation tools. Finally, the world of computing is truly reflecting what mobile workers does - we work and relax while we travel.

The Apps are getting better. While I type this I am also keeping an eye on the Ireland v USA RWC game in the ITV Player window. I use Evernote to capture my research and notes for all meetings and projects in handy notebooks that synchronise over all devices immediately over The Cloud - at just £27 per year for the Premium version, it is one of the best productivity tools on the market. I use Pages to generate lose documents and blog articles on my iPad and then upload them into my blog as it is easier and quicker using things like WordPress or Blogpress. I can open and review large PowerPoint presentations in my iBooks App as PDFs. Realistically the only two things I don't do well are spreadsheets and presentation building where the world is dominated by Microsoft Office although I like the functionality of both Numbers and Keynote.

It's the cost that gets me. I have yet to pay over a few quid for any App - even the iWorks suite cost less than £20 in total on the iPad. It's revolutionising the way we work and buy Apps because at no time has any corporate restriction or IT manager defined what App I use. I just buy them.

The outcome of this is that I have changed my workhorse laptop from Lenovo PC to Apple MacBook Pro. From here there is no turning back. I have the iWorks suite installed for £14 each but Office Mac Home & Business for around £180 is simply the best suite from Microsoft for years. Apple is steadily getting back on executive desks and Steve Jobs' incredible journey of rescue has got Apple back into mainstream computing by the back door.

No one could have predicted all this in just a short period. Edifices have crumbled and the once mighty HP has not only surrendered early in the tablet market, it has capitulated in the entire PC market - a $43bn business to the company - as the death knell of the PC market sounds.

Channel players will be sanguine. As long as everyone needs clients, there will always be need for resellers and distributors. Right?

It's rapidly becoming unclear how that looks in reality. If Apps and the Cloud will be the main 'shop' by which everyone buys product - perhaps bespoke App Stores for corporations - then where does the channel get the incremental sales from? The infrastructure will change dramatically and more of the delivery of products may well change too.

App vendors like Google will be salivating as they are reckoned to be the winners in the tablet operating system market with Apple as No 2, the obvious follow on thought will be that Google Apps will become more prevalent as a result. With Google Android getting a huge share of the Smartphone operating system, this seems to be logical. For Apple, iCloud will lead the way for serving their applications and business needs.

I haven't mentioned Microsoft in all this. They have proved with Office for Mac that they can innovate again but their future in the tablet market operating system market is put at just 13% and this may be less if they cling onto the hope that tablet users want full versions of operating system and applications - and for the usual big money. 

Google Apps at $50/user/month and iWorks at perpetual licence costs of less £20 have defined the future of software. 

It will be very hard to predict what happens from here. But the channel needs to start thinking. The issue is 'clouded' by Cloud generally as traditional vendors try to stake out their roles. But Cloud is a great deal more than this. It's about how products will get to users and what they will pay also. And as client technology changes so dramatically and quickly, the future is arriving faster than we would all like.

So much of what is written about the Cloud tries to translate what we do today to a world of tomorrow. Vendors talk of 'transformation' of worlds of software from on-premise to Cloud and how resellers must do this and that. 

The reality is rapidly evolving that the new world will have little to do with the old world. Transforming existing software into the Cloud may be one option but there will be many more. In the last year or so, thanks to the tablet's explosive start, thousands of innovators are starting up and charging little amounts for cool software.

There is a strong argument that says that the winners of the world of tomorrow will be new vendors who will throw off the need to adhere to legacy, solve the issues of integrating into corporate directory structures and explode lower cost, clever office software to be used on any device, anywhere.

There is also a strong argument that says the new channel of distribution of software generally has yet to emerge. 

Many of the channel players today are standing around waiting for some light to emerge which they can follow to lead them to what the future holds. Many look to their vendors for the answers but some of these vendors have ploughed their own furrow without channel following the likes of Google and Salesforce.com ahead of them. 

It's a pretty confused state. Or is it?

At Google and Apple, life isn't very confused at all. This is client technology and these companies have worked out exactly how they will make and deliver their products to all the users. Out of the box, my Apple MacBook Pro worked with my Microsoft Office 365 and absorbed all the iCalendar and directory structures without a hitch. I cut the umbilical chord to the PC world but for one application - my Sage accounts. That will be solved soon as I trial NetSuite.

Apple will launch iCloud next year and this will likely revolutionise how I do all those things for the future.

So if Apple will have around 38% of the tablet market and Google 40% and their shares of smartphones will around the same - and the total number of these devices used by consumers and corporate clients will be around half the number of PCs in the world today, what is the future for the PC as we know it? And what is the future for the world that PCs live in technically?

This is the issue facing channel players today. Sticking with the strategy of staid software and hardware companies may not be the brightest of ideas. Some of these mega-companies don't really want channel players for the future so a question channel players should all ask themselves is, 'Why should I help you sustain the past if you don't want me for the future?'

It's as well that software vendors think about that particular question. 

Microsoft Bites Back

No, Ty and others, don't switch off yet or send haranguing messages. Hear me out, I haven't gone mad yet. Well, at least, not completely.

I have moved from the Dark Side to the sunny world of Apple by buying a MacBook Pro 13" and it's the cat's whiskers and it looks good too. All that a laptop should be and more. OK, so forget the spiel on battery life as it is no better than my old Lenovo and it's heavier but what a brilliantly designed machine. It comes with ton of useful software, you can get complete iWorks suite for business for a little over £40 and it set up with my Microsoft Office 365 hosted server easily. I was up and running within minutes to enjoy the 'always on' world of Apple with its innovative way to see your desktop, find files, buy software - it's the future for sure.

And then there is Microsoft. I bought Office for Mac and it's simply superb. You can get all the iWorks equivalent for just £70 if you shop around - Excel, Word and PowerPoint. But it's not the tired old staid versions you find on the PC - this is Office for Mac 2011 and it is Microsoft back at its best. Innovating, clever, sassy and so good - these applications once again are great to use.

Having sat with the Apple email, address book and calendar for a while - all of which came with the machine and synchronised easily with my hosted Exchange, I tried the upgrade to Office for Mac Business which gives you Outlook. This was expensive at £125 and for any extra it gives you over the resident Apple programs it's not worth it. But if you are stuck in a rut with Microsoft and long for having the full Office suite, then bite the bullet and buy it. It's brilliant.

Remember I had upgraded to Office 2010 in my £189 per year MS Office 365 implementation - well Office for Mac 2011 is just a load better. It looks good, performs brilliantly and its full of Microsoft innovation and cleverness. Why can't we get things like this on PCs?

Everything was so simple to set up - all my contacts and calendar were immediately imported from MS Office 365 and then I got the benefits of the new look Office for Mac things. Go look at the templates for new documents, look at the contact cards, look at the ease with which you can organise your Outlook with simple tabs. It's just a league different to their old stuff.

The Down Side

Well I had to play to my new Apple friends in the audience. Why oh why was Office for Mac not offered as an alternative download for the Office client in MS Office 365? I have had to buy the whole thing again instead of porting my existing, expensive licence. That's just dumb and profiteering - the world is changing, wise up.

Then there is SharePoint. Microsoft - why did you lob this into Office 365? It is just so brainlessly useless for small businesses. On the Mac you are given MS Connections as part of Office for Mac and it links to a SkyDrive and SharePoint - well the latter doesn't  'see' my Office 365 SharePoint server. How stupid is that? 

But the no cost alternatives are SO MUCH better - Dropbox is just so great and Box.net is similar to SharePoint. For instance, I tried setting up my SharePoint Workspace so my accountant can see all my accounts spreadsheets for my quarterly VAT returns. But you can't easily mimic your file structure and you are limited to the number of files in the Workspace and that you can download at a time. So we use Dropbox instead - it took a minute to set up and we share a folder which syncs with my desktop. No cost.

And here's a daft point. Office for Mac 2011 can't interface with Exchange 2008 or below. Microsoft's legacy is going to pull it away from being able to migrate people successfully into the Cloud because of that haphazard and nightmarish upgrade path it used where it made backward compatibility not possible to try and force people to upgrade. Now its left with users all over the place and an inconsistent and nightmarish story for Cloud which its own salespeople are not capable of articulating.

Watch out for Google and Apple then because neither worry about such corporate atrocities. It is at the dilemma of upgrade that Microsoft remain horribly exposed. The cost of moving to Cloud then to Apple has been daftly prohibitive and maybe be a waste anyway. If iCloud delivers on half of what it promises, I cannot see myself staying with Microsoft at all.

The Good Side

If you are currently a hosted Exchange customer with Microsoft product then MS Office 365 is a good move forward. It makes sense for a small business. If you are a small business and you run your own Exchange server, consider hosted Exchange and Office 365 - it really takes all the IT nastiness away and the flexibility is great. The cost justification is there also but don't rely on Microsoft to articulate it because they don't seem to understand the fundamentals of real business so ask people like me what difference it makes over 3 years. I am a user and I have worked it out. Microsoft salespeople are lost in the morass of their own world and struggle with the actual concept of business - really it's not a good place to be in trying to sell Cloud.

MS Office 365 working with Apple for Mac is AWESOME. It's a tragedy that it isn't offered as a client alternative in MS Office 365 but hopefully blogs like this will make Apple think again.

Let's hope the next step is for Microsoft is to produce innovative new versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint to compete with Apple's iWorks suite at the same price. There isn't that far to go and let's hope we see them on the Apple iPad too. If Microsoft could get there, then they are showing that they can once again be kings of the office. If they stick to their PC mantra, they risk being taken out.

It's crunch time and they need to think hard on their MS Office 365 strategy. Think the way you designed the Apple versions and use that as your starting point not the PC. It will make a huge difference.