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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
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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.
That's like saying 'serial killer eyes next victim.'
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
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
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.
I hope PeopleSoft is wiped from the earth. I'd take Microsoft's unpleasant, buggy software over PeopleSoft's completely unusable atrocities any day.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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.