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Microsoft Eyes PeopleSoft Customers
An anonymous reader writes "According to a couple articles, Microsoft has announced an intent to pick up some of the PeopleSoft customers currently fleeing from possible support contract increases and an uncertain future. What does it mean for the landscape of the ERP market if Microsoft starts being more competitive with its Axapta product?"
What ERP software does Microsoft have which is even capable of playing in this space? The products they acquired after the Great Plains acquisition certainly aren't (speaking as somebody who had to administer said package for several years in the early 21st century.)
One presumes MS know what they're doing, but this is certainly a weird gambit.
You're doing it wrong.
I don't see what's special about this... it makes normal business sense to pick up customers that may be becoming available... it's not even typically unethical in my opinion.
see a Text Widget
Whilst corporations loathe vendor lockin, they love accoutability, especially for huge, towering vertical monoliths of software packages such as ERPs.
If my ERP breaks, I don't have time to read mailing lists and ask in IRC channels for somebody to help me write a patch. I want a butt connected with my boot, preferably somebody senior representing the vendor, and then I want a fix available in a time which meets my SLA.
Anything less is unacceptable.
You're doing it wrong.
...applaud our new ERP overlords. The current players in the field are a blight on the entire IT industry. Has anyone EVER seen a large ERP deployment come in anywhere close to budget, schedule or requirements? This whole sector represents the absolute worst of IT consulting: unfulfilled promises, bloated billings, incompetent staff and crap products. As far as I can tell, the big players keep getting these contracts simply because they are the biggest and not because they have ever produced anything worthwhile.
At best, I consider MS to provide a good prototyping environment and an acceptable, if buggy, desktop. That said, even their products would be a great improvement over the state of that particular sector and it seems that only IBM and MS are big enough to convince the PHBs that they are viable alternatives.
However, based on MS's past behaviours, I think we can look forward to a "good enough" replacement for PeopleSoft to be built into the next version of Windows. MS will forbid OEM's to remove it because they don't want a "confusing user experience." Oh, and it will increase the "Microsoft tax" on your new PC that you were only going to load Linux on.
You have no idea what business PeopleSoft is in do you?
PeopleSoft makes Enterprise Resource Planning software. Microsoft has very little to compete in this segment of business. The big king here is SAP, the German ERP software maker that has 29% of the market. Oracle has bought PeopleSoft after 18 months of intense and hostile negotiation. Microsoft is eyeing PeopleSoft customers for it's Microsoft Business Solutions productline - which is hardly competition in near future.
Try plugging in a MuVo in an Apple machine running iTunes.
...]
... them bastards! I'll never forgive them for such a crime...
Uh, oh! Surprise, it works! It even has it's own little icon (of course it's a brown little turd compared to the shiny white iPod icon)!
Poor thing, it asks me to sync all my library with the MuVo (it won't fit dear!) So I manage the playlists manually... and it works! Sheesh, would you believe it? Out of the box, no drivers, no frills... just the Apple experience, with the competition's hardware.
Oh, it can't play m4a and m4p... but, hey! the MuVo doesn't support it in the first place... should Apple flash it (if it were possible) on the fly to give it a chance against the iPod?
In any case, wasn't the iTMS a device to increase iPod sales? So tell me, why is iTunes integration working so well with competing hardware? Come on, I'm listening... can't hear you...
[... silence
You see... the iPod is simply unbeatable... it just works, Apple doesn't need sleazy tactics to help the bottom line. It floats on its own.
About Google... well, you can use askjeeves... or altavista... why aren't you? Perhaps because they don't hold a candle against almighty google? Thought so...
M$ on the other hand KILLED BeOS (amongst other things)
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
To be more precise people love the illusion of accountability. If your ERP breaks peoplesoft will not do anything for you. You will though get to blame them to the board and they won't hear you cos they are sleeping or scheming to rip off the shareholders.
evil is as evil does
The MS CRM offering doesn't come close to PeopleSoft or SAP. I am a senior programmer for a fortune 500 with 140,000 employees. We recently finished a _very_ long deployment of PeopleSoft HR and PeopleSoft Portal. We looked at what MS had to offer and it didn't even come close. We looked at SAP and we looked at Oracle. All of our mission critical data is in Oracle and the not-to-important-data is in SQL Server or a few MySQL databases. We were actually leaning toward Oracle's product (because we use it as our critical DB), however they didn't have a few _very_ important functionalities that we need for our HR processes, so that left PeopleSoft and SAP.
Converting your whole HR/payroll process (especially when you pay 140,000+ employees every week) to any other system takes a ton of time and a ton of cash. We spent tens of millions on these two systems. There is no way in the world we would redo everything in an MS product.
Our systems are running great. We are about 2 versions behind on the latest PeopleSoft releases. We will probably just upgrade to the last PeopleSoft release and leave it alone. Every upgrade costs tons of money and time.
There is also the fact that were I work, all of our financial data and warehouse is _only_ in Oracle. Will the MS product allow you to work with a non-SQL Server DB (I doubt it)? There is no chance in H-E-L-L that we would take our critical data out of Oracle and put it in MS SQL Server. Then there is the issue of what technology MS built their system on. It has been out for a while, so I will assume it is in old ASP? No thank, we don't want that crap on our network. Java or ASP.Net/C# only please.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Well there are some slight differences.
.DOC format then a PDF. Go to the store almost all the programs are for Windows. Anyone who makes a product that would compete with Microsoft direction Microsoft will make people fear their product or force manufactures to drop it. While it is getting better we still need Microsoft to complete parts of our lives. While we can listen to music in many different ways.
First Microsoft vs. Apple Ipod. The I Pod is a Music Player. Although Nice to have it is not a necessity to most peoples everyday life. While Microsoft windows has became more of an infrastructure to daily life for home and business it is much like the telephone system now. People need to write papers and more accept the
Microsoft vs. Google. Windows Cost money to legally operate, Word costs money. Google is a free service. If a better services comes along people would switch. It is also a thing that we are not forced to use google at most work places. You are free to go to yahoo or others.
In some ways you are right the reason is that Apple and Google haven't been sued for antitrust suits yet. But the reason is that they haven't been sued is because they haven't broken any anti-trust laws. Having 90% market share alone doesn't make you a monopoly. Having 90% market share and actively stopping consumers from switching is.
Think of this senerio...
GM has 90% of the market share of cars. But the other 10% are using other consumers. Ok GM is just a popular car. But if they switched to Ford they will still be able to ride the same roads fill at the same gas station.
But if GM was like Microsoft, The majority of the infrastructure roads, gas stations will only work for GM cars, And if the competitor made there vehecials compatible they will get sued out of business because of 1 GMs size and 2 they own the rights on all the specs so making a copy will break patented etc.
So the other cars will end up more expensive to run because they are forced to drive around the GM infrastructure.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Once you get past the OS and the Internet Information Server, MS has ZERO hold on the horizontal server enterprise application market, so any competition they can bring is by definition "fair". As fair as anything Oracle and SAP will let them get away with. If it brings costs down for the end-user, that's only good for the end-user.
Never ceases to amaze me how many folks want commercial grade support, for open source products, but, want it for free. Folks serious about using open source, pay monthly retainers to open source developers. For that, they get industrial grade software, with lots of input to the development direction, and in general, support is only a phone call or email away.