Top Five Things Microsoft Got Right

Virtually any technology analyst will tell you that Microsoft has made a lot of mistakes and just plain dumb decisions over its 33 year history. So how did it get to be the largest software company in the world?

Some would argue by conniving, cheating, and copping other companies' innovations. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) certainly has plenty of detractors. However, it's hard to explain its dominance across the board without a tip of the hat to Microsoft's business acumen and key strategies it has stuck with through the years.

That's the topic of a report released Monday by tracking firm Directions on Microsoft, an independent analysis company located in Kirkland, Wash., almost within spitting distance of the software titan's sprawling Redmond, Wash. campus. The brief report is entitled "Five Strategies Microsoft Got Right" and is a compilation of viewpoints from all the Directions on Microsoft analysts.

First on the list: Microsoft was unique early on in deciding that software was more important than hardware. At the time, the report points out, software for an IBM computer would only run on an IBM (NYSE: IBM) computer and that for an HP (NYSE: HPQ) would only run HP software. From the very early days, however, founder Bill Gates and company focused on software that would run on multiple computers – not just those from one hardware manufacturer.

"That was really the first thing they got right … selling [the] Basic [language] separate from the hardware was fairly innovative for the time," Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. Microsoft soon went on to releasing the MS-DOS operating system that became standard on virtually all PCs in the 1980s – not just on IBM PCs as it started out.

A second strategic move by Microsoft that the report identified was the company's early embrace of outsourcing sales to an army of reseller partners in order to grow more quickly than if it had built its own in-house sales force.

"Today, more than 90 percent of Microsoft products are sold by somebody else," the report states. "This partner community, from small mom-and-pop computer shops to the world's largest systems integrators, enabled the company to achieve unprecedented sales volumes with astounding speed without having to spend huge sums to build a direct sales force and consulting practice."

The third successful strategy was to target its software at "the masses" by undercutting competitors on price while producing products that are simple enough to hold down support costs.

"Technologies for the masses [means] that Microsoft takes its technology mainstream by dialing down the cost and cutting back on the complexity so that IT can make it work, even in smaller IT shops," Helm said.

Strategy number four has almost become a mantra for CEO Steve Ballmer, who more than once has yelled out onstage: "developers, developers, developers."

Over the years, Microsoft has gone from courting developers with Basic to locking them in with Visual Studio, the company's integrated development environment and the high-level languages it supports. Visual Studio and the new Azure development platform for cloud computing are the result of decades of hand feeding developers, even when its own development tool groups wanted to keep the technologies private and internal.

Read More..

Why program Microsoft SQL Server from .NET?

Microsoft developers may use LINQ or other data access technologies for applications that implement common business operations. But larger, more specialized applications are good candidates for .NET-enabled SQL Server. Microsoft’s José Blakely, a partner architect for SQL Server, offers three scenarios where programming the database from .NET makes sense:

Deep extensibility in the database. Developers can build core database constructs such as table-valued functions, user-defined aggregates or rich types using a CLR language (such as C# or VB.NET) in Visual Studio. The managed environment is safer and more robust compared with unmanaged extensions (built in C++, for example). And it runs faster and scales much better than similar functionality in Transact-SQL.

A more powerful environment for database developers. They can leverage .NET libraries (such as those for regular expressions, string manipulation and math functions) and use them in SQL Server.

The ability, via the CLR, to write specialized business logic using modern .NET programming languages and run those programs close to the data inside the database. With the very high data volumes being stored in databases—often hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes—managing data in the middle tier is unworkable. Embedding the CLR in SQL Server lets developers move complex business computations to the database.

Read More..