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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?"
...those people are so soft and squishy.
...Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own!
In other news, SuSe eyes Redhat customers, Carl Jrs eyes McDonalds' customers, and Bubs' Concessions Stand eyes Kmart customers.
"at any point we could be bought out by microsoft and your customer service could cease to exsist."
that'll learn all you blind-accept-button-pushers
/* No Comment */
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.
What about those of us using oracle behind our Higher Ed information systems. Supposedly it's already been designed to run on SQL Server so I guess MS doesn't even have to eye us, we are jumping in with both feet. Unless Oracle just plans to shut down that portion of Peoplesofts products, that's probably what will happen to us.
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.
Don't get me wrong - I like competition, but I like fair competition, based on merits. It reminds me of my high-school football team; the football was some sort of "regulation size and colour," and so the high school chose its school colours such that one of them matched the ball colour perfectly. When we played home games, we got to pick whether we would wear the light or the dark-coloured jerseys, and of course, we chose the ones that matched the ball. It made it very difficult for the other players to tell who had the ball, and made diversionary fakes a lot easier. When we played away, our opponents would choose the dark colour, so that our team wore the light (and very contrasting) colour jerseys. Net result? We won a lot more home games, and by higher margins. Hardly what I'd call "fair."
Mod this -1, Long-winded.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
Corporations loath vendor lock-in as much as you or I. Why haven't open source ERP packages, like compiere (http://www.compiere.org/), taken off???
"...fleeing possible service contract increases and and uncertain future...."
Yeah - for definite price increases and certain reaming....
That's like saying 'serial killer eyes next victim.'
Yeah sure. Like they did so well with Microsoft Money. Let's face it- they don't know beans about financial software, much less ERP. And they don't have the galactic network of partners and pimps like the other bigs do. So they'll jump in, lose their assets, and jump out. Like they always do. Windows, Office. That's pretty much it.
Nice, but Microsoft has always been traditionally lax on its enterprise business software side. CRM, ERP and accounting stuff have never been its strongpoint. While it's bought itself into these markets in recent years (Great Plains acquisitions etc.) it's not got to the point where it's fully integrated these bought-in products into its product line successfully.
So while they could hoover up fleeing Peoplesoft customers, they're currently not selling them a de facto MS product. Some might see this as good, but in all honesty, recently acquired software tends to be the old stuff with a sticker on it.
The MS selling point of full integration with other MS products won't be there yet, at least not in current versions...
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
I would find that amusing. Especially if it lead, directly or indirectly, to the falling-by-the-wayside-with-vultures-circling-the- carcass of Great Plains packages such as Solomon. Three years on and I'm still scarred.
VB3! IT WAS WRITTEN IN VB3 FFS!!!!
You're doing it wrong.
The Microsoft offer "is barely worth the paper the press release was written on," Shepherd said. I think the end of the article sums it up succinctly.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Hmmm... with Microsoft web products, I often get 500 errors.
My employeer launched their new Peoplesoft HR website last month, and I 500 errors every couple of clicks...
So, since MS is really good at serving 500 errors, I'm sure they will be an excellent replacement for Peoplesoft's products.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Few other companies care to use FUD marketing of the sort Microsoft is the master of. Novel may indeed want Red Hat customers, but they are not going to make an announcement of Red Hat's impending doom that will be echoed by an unbelievable chorus of PC pulp pushers and pundits with Dido qualifications. The uncertainty here is about as manufactured as IBM's supposed abandonment of OS/2 before M$ was able to get it's next OS in order. In that case, the same pundits did the same kind of echoing and were dead wrong. IBM's sales of OS/2 were greater than any other software available at the time and they held onto OS/2 for years and several releases afterwards.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Short version: PeopleSoft is ERP software that sits on top of just about any database out there (we run on top of Oracle where I work; I was working on top of SQL Server today in a class I'm taking. I know it runs on DB2, and it's built to be platform independent.) ERP software is what large and medium businesses (maybe small businesses too, but I don't see a small business tossing down a couple million to get a PS installation) use to track everything from the wage one gets paid to the pens used by the secretaries to the orders going out the door.
"ERP".
Bill, excuse yourself after you eat, please. Gosh. That's not right.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Now whether or not they're competitive in the larger markets is an open question. Perhaps with some time/experience they'll get better at it; customers in the CRM field are usually demanding and have a strong hand at shaping features. As they develop new markets in various industries, MS will learn alot.
...until Microsoft chooses a more pronounceable name than "Axapta".
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
This is the same reason I'm most worried about EA/vivendi's little slurping sprees trying to eat up the gaming industry. Unnatural consolidation in any market helps no one but the largest consolidated players.
In particular, consolidation in an industry helps Microsoft. Only a healthy market can resist takeover by Microsoft, and vice versa.
I think this project can gain a lot of ground from this Peoplesoft fiasco if it improves its marketing... and doesnt require users to use Oracle as a backend ($1500 is a lot of money for little people). I think there is currently work going on for porting this to postgres though.
Oops, sorry... ERP != CRM.
I like bubbles.
This is classic Microsoft strategy. Use the monopoly revenues from Windows and Office to dump other products at a loss until they get enough market share that the new products are self-supporting. They probably figure that it's worth a try.
Axapta what?
...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.
I hope PeopleSoft is wiped from the earth. I'd take Microsoft's unpleasant, buggy software over PeopleSoft's completely unusable atrocities any day.
Dude!
just thank god it's not a duplicate post.
Am I the only one left who has no fucking clue what PeopleSoft is
This is PeopleSoft:
You're looking for a job, and each of the potential employeers have a brand new Job website, but they all look strangly familar. You find job you like and decide to apply. You need to register for an account. Ok, type in Username, email address, password, and password again to verify.
Ok, it's sending an email to you to verify your email address. 5 minutes later, the email isn't there. An hour later you are still waiting. Hmmm... 2 hours later email still isn't there. OK, time to go outside. I'll apply for this job tomorrow.
Next day, you finally get an email from "Peoplesoft " with your account information. Great!
You log in, and fill out a couple small forms. Cool! They let you submit your resume and they'll automatically populate the webform using the contents of your resume! Oops! Your resume is in RTF or PDF format and their website only accepts MS Word documents. Fuck... but this is for a Unix sysadmin job. Ok, well I have a pirated version of MS Word around here somewhere...
So you reformat your resume using MS Word, and submit it to the Resume wizard. Dang, the stupid wizard put your job title as "TheLastCompany IworkedAt, Inc", the company name as "2003, 2004" and it trimmed off the last few lines describing all your job duties... dang I need to fix that up. Maybe it would have been better to type in all this stuff by hand in the first place...
WHen you're done with all the manual editing and hit the Submit button, you feel like you accomplished something.
And immediately afterwards, an email is sent to the HR STaff, and PeopleSoft has fucked up the formatting so much it looks worse then the ASCII rendering of the goatse.cx image... the HR assistant prints out your resume and adds it to the stack of 300 other resumes for a dozen different positions.
Later, you don't aren't considered for the job because you wrote a sentence in proper English like this:
"Researched, designed and configured web load balancing scheme using Apache webserver."
Some fucktard got the job instead, because they
wrote a resume to receive a high score with the keyword "Apache" and "Load balancing", like this:
"Researched load balancing scheme using Apache webserver"
"Designed load balancing scheme using Apache webserver"
"Configured load balancing scheme using Apache webserver"
"I'ma fucking apache god. APACHE APACHE APACHE APACHE"
That, my friend, is PeopleSoft.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
No. There are none. If there were, they wouldn't last. And no one in their right mind would want to use one. Ever.
See this (much deservered) +5 Insightful post for a better understand of the issues
Long story short: the volunteer coders would need to put together a project where: "The system flexability, business knowledge requirements, legal issues, tax issues, GAAP requirements, Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, etc. would overwhelm any small team.", all with 24x7x365 support
Anonymous to avoid stealing the author's well-deserved kudos.
"Axapta" sounds like something Bill the Cat would say. Who knows, perhaps Bill ended up as VP of ERP.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and the US are the Romulans
Is that anything like the /. 503 errors?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"starts being more competitive with its Axapta product"
Ah, never heard of it...
Guess that answers that question...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Am I the only one left who has no fucking clue what PeopleSoft is or what Axapta is? Is this some sort of database thing?
Axapta is an ERP system. It was originally started in Denmark by a company called Damgaard. The company merged with Navision Software in 2000, and Navision was then purchased by Microsoft.
It's a powerful package; AFAIK it can run on either Oracle or SQL Server.
You can find a detailed review here or, if you only want the differences from other products, go here.
http://www.kualiproject.org/
if a university's going to move off of peoplesoft, and they can stick it out, this might be a safer move than signing in blood with MS.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
People! Microsoft is not buying Peoplesoft. Oracle bought Peoplesoft already. Microsoft is talking about stealing Peoplesoft customers who would otherwise be under support contracts with Oracle.
Huh? The words "Enterprise", "Resource", and "Planning" appear all over in Microsoft's marketing materials. It's just some mix and match, and, like magic, we got ERP!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Fleeing the oppressive Oracle to attain the safety of Microsoft seems to me like fleeing oppressive California for the safety of Stalinist Russia.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
If the whole Warp crusade looked more like a sleek Ferrari than a twisted hippy anti-war rally, OS/2 might command a large share of the desktop today.
Tune in here on Tuesday my friend: http://www.oracle.com/peoplesoft/launch_18jan05.ht ml
That's exactly what's going to happen.
Oooooh... sounds like somebody's bitter and out of work.
PeopleSoft eRecruit is certainly one of the more-hyped aspects of their HRMS suite (which is just one of PeopleSoft's product lines), and it is one that it is relatively easy to find fault with (I could go on for days, in great detail). However, having been involved with eRecruit in several capacities (I've been hired through it, been a hiring manager and interviewer using it, implemented it, customized it, and was the troubleshooter brought in to unfuck a whole bunch of really bad code that made it into the shipped product (yes, I worked at PeopleSoft before the dark times...), I can say with certainty that the above description assumes that an unqualified and rather stupid applicant got passed over by an unqualified and rather stupid hiring manager for a job that was filled by a different unqualified and rather stupid applicant and the whole transaction happened using a PeopleSoft system implemented by rather stupid and unqualified consultants (sorry, was that last bit redundant?).
Define a system by its problems... not by yours. The fact that you can't get a job is not PeopleSoft's fault.
the original poster wasn't failing to appreciate MS's enterprise experience, they were noting that Microsoft has little credibility in the Enterprise Applications space - and Enterprise Applications are not just applications run in an Enterprise.
MicroSoft has very little credibility in this space and almost no presence among the larger ERP implementations. You are just as clueless or misinformed as you accuse the original poster of being.
Although I'm no fan of SQL Server, I have to disagree with the original poster's statement in one regard, however. SQL2k has been gaining credibility rapidly in the Enterprise Application space (including as a back-end for PeopleSoft). It's gained considerable ground on Oracle in certain portions of the marketspace, although it's nowhere near overtaking them.
It means more people vulnerable to furure viruses and the like due to a closed-source Microsoft product. Frankly, I wouldn't touch that with a 20-foot pole.
I used to work at SAP. To put this in perspective, Microsoft currently has about 2% market share in the entire ERP market and 0 customers in the fortune 500. The only place they have any traction is the small business segment which is an area that the big players have typically overlooked because the customers just can't afford the costs associated with EXTREAMLY complex, HIGHLY customized software.
You'd think that since small business are small, their requirements for ERP software wouldn't be that difficult. It actually turns out that their business processes are just as complex as the big guys - the only difference is that they can't afford the army of consultants required to get the software to fit their busniess needs. QED.
All your base are belong to us!
That was just a sob story by Be. Apple had been giving them some support, presumably because they were considering buying Be before they purchased Next instead. Why spend money supporting another company's product when it doesn't provide you any benefit?
Notice the lack of hand-holding didn't stop Linux and BSD coders from developing for the Macs of the time. Also note that some of the cloners were offering to put Be on their machines (Power Computing, IIRC).
And I have to honestly say it is one of the smelliest turds of a piece of software that I have ever had the displeasure to be saddled with.
Here's a quick example: you open a list of 1000 items that are displayed in a grid. You want to see the 500th item. You'd think that you just grab the scroll bar and scroll down to the middle, right? WRONG!!! That will take you to about record 20. If you want to go the the 500th item, you'll have to hit PgDn about 100 times. And each time you hit PgDn, you'll have to wait about half a second for the grid to redraw. If you have your doctorate in mathematics you might be able to figure that you're looking at about a minute to just to scroll down a short list of items. Seriously. And it's all like that. I don't know how people write software that badly.
I've never used Peoplesoft, but I cannot imagine that it is even conceivable that it could be any worse than Axapta.
speaking as somebody who had to administer said package for several years in the early 21st century
So, did you manage to get the heck out of Fargo, or did you have to go find work at SEI?
Google does have a monopoly on web searches, and Apple has a monopoly on HD based music players. There is nothing illegal or immoral about it. However if you have a monopoly it is illegal and immoral to do some things that would otherwise be normal competition.
Thus Apple perhaps should be forced to open up their iTunes music format to anyone. (though this is dependant on keeping the monopoly, since HD based music players are easy to make it is questionable if they can keep it in the long run)
I can't think of anything google is doing right now that a monopolist is not allowed, but they do need to be careful because when I discover that I will be against google.
MS has no credibility in the enterprise space.
None.
And they earned it, too.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Oooooh... sounds like somebody's bitter and out of work.
Hey there, it's a joke... laugh.
I am employeed (no thanks to PeopleSoft), and I usually get a job offer if I can get my foot in the door. Trouble is,
Sure I'm bitter, but that's because the only time I notice PeopleSoft software is because it's in my way-- today I couldn't enter my vacation hours because I'm getting 500 errors in the new PS system. And I've seen some of the results that HR passed on because eRecruit said it was a good match-- and yes, they really did print out a ton of ASCII Resumes...
Sure, I realize that PS produces decent software, and these are implementation problems, but it's pretty clear that the PeopleSoft salesfolks oversell the capabilities of their software, and the decisions to implement are made by HR managers who don't understand what "Keyword ranking" means.
Plus, I've had one too many drinks with some engineers over at PS, and with PS customers who work with implementing PS at several large institutions (But they don't trust the results that it provides for hiring searches).
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I can see the marketroids now: "Alpaca is fast and lean, able to scale to new heights, and it's warm and fuzzy, just like all Microsoft products. Alpaca: It's no goat!"
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Microsoft has announced an intent to pick up some of the PeopleSoft customers currently fleeing from possible support contract increases and an uncertain future
Because the future is always certian when it comes to Microsoft software products!
Wait now, we use use PSFT in house! Doh!
In all seriousness, i'm not that impressed with peoplesoft... We use the HR, Helpdesk and eRecruit packages... I've been the prime DBA for the latter two. You can say what you want about Oracle products being complex, unwieldy but it provides tremendous flexibility. If you know what your doing there's a ton of stats and debugging info available to you. Psft on the other hand is an absolutely nightmare to tune.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
No freaking kidding. I work for a mid size (18 employee) consulting firm. We are looking for something to replace MS CRM for ticket tracking and Time Slips for time management. We'd love to have an enter it once get the info out as many ways as possible system, it just doesn't exist. We want to be able to create a ticket, enter notes and expenses, and be able to generate bills, customer satisfaction surveys, and knowledge base entries. There isn't anything even remotly like that out there, and the time and expense to build it just isn't justified for this sized firm. I'm sure we aren't the only service firm our size that would like something like this but no one seems to even be looking at it as a potential market. I mean you have something nice on the financial side with Quickbooks, why isn't there something that's a step up for when you need to do Customer Relationship Management?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
wasn't one of the arguments that Oracle used in their trial for the merger with Peoplesoft was because of competition... how Microsoft had plans or intentions on entering the market, and was thus a threat? and how it was revealed that they had, at one point, plans to buy SAP, which did not pan out? how ironic if Microsoft were to do just that, entering the market, thus giving validity to Oracle's conjectures. please excuse me if there are inaccuracies in my statements, i'm working from memory, and my memory may not be serving me well.
The biggest player in the market is not Oracle, its pawn Peoplesoft or Microsoft.
The biggest player is SAP, and they will be extracting their due.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
That will increase you ironic levels.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Once you go over 20 employees in a company the processes and procedures to be followed are as complex as a company woth 5000 employees, what changes is the liability the company incours if they screw up.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Iron.
Iron.
Iron.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
m$ is fast spreading it's tentacles everywhere !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
It seems to me that as a consulting firm, you must be able to generate more money than e.g. a transport company.
I worked in a transport company with 20 people, and I did the IT, which was based upon a minicomputer with a relational database and a rapid application development, with programming in COBOL.
It seems they started out with a custom built solution, done by an external company, and delivered completely with sources, so that the local IT responsible could update and add applications.
It seems that as a consulting company with the necessary knowledge of the requirements, you should be able to hire one or two persons, help them with the requirements and the design, and then pass the rest of the work to one person doing updates and adding functionality.
The biggest problem is not programming, it is domain knowledge transfer from you to the person doing the programming and the maintenance.
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.
What important features did you find Oracle to be lacking, that SQL Server/mySQL had? My employer is significantly smaller (300 employees worldwide), but we gross $50+ million a year and we're just starting the ERP evaluation process, upgrading from an 80s package using a version of Oracle so old, it's not even relational. As such, any info I learn about ERP and can pass along to my boss is muy helpful.
Microsoft Eyes; What do you want to see today?
The Frying pan into the FIRE! YIKES!
Your Average Joe
It still runs on Oracle. Microsoft highly recommends running Axapta on SQL Server though. The new version (Axapta 4.0) is coming out in June or July and will see what happens with support of Oracle DB then.
MBS said they will write a completely new softare based on the best features of their current products. They even pulled many programmers from Axapta and Navision teams to start working on the new software. But they returned back to their former projects in a few months' time. According to MBS the new products is expected around 2008 and it is curently known as Project Green.
Fleeing the oppressive Oracle to attain the safety of Microsoft seems to me like fleeing oppressive California for the safety of Stalinist Russia.
I don't think it is the more open support of Oracle they're trading for Microsoft's. I think it is the higher cost of support. A more appropriate metaphor would be that they are fleeing the high property values of oppressive California by heading to the low property values of Stalin's Siberia.
I could be wrong--I didn't RTFA.
The biggest problem is not programming, it is domain knowledge transfer from you to the person doing the programming and the maintenance.
You hit the nail right on the head. This is why there is such a huge trend to use standard software. Custom code just leads to headaches, even when done in house and is why so many people have headaches when they upgrade their ERP systems.
All your base are belong to us!
Interesting. I've worked with the PeopleSoft application for 6 years now, and I've been on installs that take 4 months to 1 and 1/2 years. I find PeopleSoft's GUI to be much better than any other I've seen.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
Sort of like a wolf eyes sheep, it'd scare the heck outta me!
Microsoft is expected to support the DOJ's position that Microsoft doesn't compete in the high-end ERP market that is dominated by the three largest rivals, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP AG.
Microsoft held firm in its testimony that it has no plans to move its current enterprise application software products into Oracle's large enterprise space, despite Oracle's defense attorney holding up a number of Microsoft documents which outline the high-functioning product migrating into that market.
Oracle PeopleSoft Trial
Oracle Pre-empts Microsoft Testimony
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Microsoft has announced an intent to pick up some of the PeopleSoft customers currently fleeing from possible support contract increases and an uncertain future.
This is like a big whale (Oracle) is about to get bitten by a pirana (Microsoft) and the customers will have to pay, and pay and pay.
Now if the companies invested in open source or their own source code built on an open POSIX based system then these vendors would not be able to do this. If you had the source you don't have to worry about a vendor going in a direction you don't like.
If you do buy commercial closed source products, get a source code escrow in the contract where if they decide not to support it or get bought out you get a copy of the source. This way they are sub-par to open source. If you can't get this escrow - know the risk going in.
Besides, how hard would it be to write a HRS system anyway? A recipe of OpenLDAP, MySQL, PHP, C and Java....
When did not knowing anything about a problem domain ever stop any company from shipping software? I just pity the early adopter's though...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
One presumes MS know what they're doing, but this is certainly a weird gambit.
Have you lost your mind?
Heres a link to Microsofts announcement:0 5/01-10MBSMigrationPR.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jan
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I think most people here are missing the point. The ERP market is consolidating. The features and functionality for HR, AR, AP, etc...are all similiar. Microsoft is offering a lower cost alternative to business' that have already invested in the Microsoft business solution. If they can get customers to defect from Oracle, they gain market share with SQL Server. And for anyone who has worked with Axapta and says that it's the worst software ever, check out Oracle apps. They are, without question, the biggest piece of crap ever developed. You don't like the grid functionality of Axapta? How do you think these packages work? They compile SQL code open connections to a database, return recordsets, close the connection, flush the cache, and then do it all over again. This is not unique to Axapta. Axapta actually returns recrodsets faster than PeopleSoft becasue it compiles SQL natively for SQL Server...there's no figuring out what kind of database the SQL needs to be issued to the db as....with ORacle, you're jsut lucky if you can get the goddamn applications to run for five minutes before they crap out. Maybe that JDBC fetch is just too much for the Oracle DB?
you're kidding me? Mac OS X is going to take over windows? oh man..that's good stuff...LOL...I bet everyone at Redmond is terrified of OS X.... Solaris...LOL...LOL...LOL..Sun will be lucky to survive as a company in the coming year. McNeally has run that business with some monkeys, an abacus, and a dart board.
Because I'm not a programmer, I'm a systems engineer who designs and fixes complex networking systems. I have taken quite a few programming classes but I'm really not that good at it and I don't enjoy doing it as a profession (hacking around is different). That and none of our customers are professional services people so we would have no customer base to sell such a solution to.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Desktop and server, Apple and Sun have given Microsoft a solid challenge for the next several years. Tie in Linux, and Microsoft is really looking isolated. They are the only one who isn't UNIX. They are the only one not competing on merit. They are the only one who really have only one product worth anything, and that is Office. All the other products are fads or can be done as well elsewhere more inexpensively. I thought I would never have said this, but the modern UNIX/Linux destop is as good as Windows is, right now. The only thing propping up Microsoft is Office lock-in, their WMA lock-in. How long is that going to last as more customers get pissed off over their incompetence towards security?
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
PeopleSoft ERP stuff (and I suspect this is true of SAP and Oracle, too) is exceedingly complicated. The only way to truely comprehend the complexity of it all is to work with it on the technical side. After a year of working with it, you will look back on that year and realize that all the knowledge you've obtained comprises only a small fraction of the everything there is to know about the system. Part of the complexity is simply due to the wide variety of business practices that exist throughout the world. Another contributing factor is the constant updating that must be done to ensure that the software keeps up with the equally complex and ever-changing legal requirements for businesses. On top of that, these are commercial software companies, and just like others, they constantly redesign their products to stay ahead of the competition.
:)
And yet here I am about to take a permanant position in this field after 3 1/2 years as an intern and consultant. What the hell am I thinking?
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
I like the way the course registration system actually has to take nights and Sundays off, because the POS software can't do backups and/or data integrity verification while online.
The user interface is a combination of random bullshit with absolutely no rhyme nor reason underlying anything. The comp. sci. department regards it with utter contempt and uses it as an example in the software design courses of what not to do when designing a system.
CRM and ERP is a very weak field, populated by incompetent companies with long track records. Basically, they rewrite it from scratch through consulting for every company. SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc., are made for the consultants, not the clients. And if Microsoft could get the clients, they could get the consulting. And I'd find it hard to believe that Microsoft would do a worse job than, say, Peoplesoft at developing custom apps for businesses.
PeopleSoft ERP is an exceedingly complicated application because it is poorly designed and cobbled together from thousands of different custom installs. But ERP is not a really complex task. Business practices are varied. Trying to fit them all into one package with years of cruft is what's complex.
What's wrong with Money? I always thought it's pretty decent for non-computer folks to use. And it's now the market leader?
They have two quite good products, which they purchased in Denmark, Scandinavia. The products are "Conorde Axapta", and Navision Attain. They were formely owned by the company "Navision Damgaard" which Microsoft purchased about two years ago. Both products are mature and technologically reasonable goods products. They hold a market share of approx 70% of the total market in northern europe for such software. I am not a fan of those products, but they actually contain long feature-lists and have many satisfied customers. Navision Attain can not be considered an ERP platform - its more a "book keeping" application. Concorde Axapta contains features and functionality that compares with many other ERP systems, including SAP, Baan, and others.
Microsoft starts being more competitive with its Axapta product?"
The giant bought a company instead of inventing its own product. I guess most software innovator's big dream is something like "when I grow up I'm gonna be bought out by Microsoft".
True, I should have added that in as well. I mean, hell, the modules on our system that have been around for a while still use COBOL extensively. Fortunately, the newer modules do not. I think I've heard the upcoming version of Financials moves further away from it as well. Now if only they'd find something better than SQR...
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...more server crashes ...more late paycheck deliveries ...more accounting mistakes.
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wee modded down for anti-hate-hate! thank you mods!