Microsoft is Killing Kin

I am not surprised. I have a friend that works on Kin team and he told that they got the marketing and training of Verizon reps all wrong. They missed their sales targets considerably. Also this shows how difficult the entry into this consumer phone market is at this time. That’s why Microsoft’s best bet is the enterprise.

Microsoft marketing in general should really take some lessons from Apple. For example, SharePoint materials/main website could be so much simpler. I know that SharePoint offers a lot and it’s difficult to describe everything. That’s why it’s better to describe less.

Also, I recently saw a leaked presentation on Windows 8 and it was fifteen slides long. Do you really need 15 slides to describe something that can be done in at most five?

  • Fast start up time
  • Facial recognition/automatic login
  • Ability to use external Displays (TVs) easily
  • USB 3.0 support
  • Fast switch between accounts

I promise that my next post is going to be technical. :)

SharePoint Integration Looks Promising on Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 will have some interesting integration with SharePoint. The demo below focuses on Word. I would be curious to see exactly how InfoPath integration works because it is going be a killer app for business use. Instead of writing custom apps, business users will be able to create forms linked to SharePoint and collect data via mobile devices (probably offline too).

I am not sure that Windows Phone 7 will take off on the consumer side right away (too much competition), but for business, it’s going to make a case.

They just need to get rid of white and blue text on the black background. Google has proved that black text on white background works better.

Intuit Site Down

Intuit – when cloud computing does not work

As a company, we rely on a number of Intuit services as well as their accounting software. Generally, we like to host our own applications if we believe that we can do a better job than the external provider. In the case of Intuit, they have been decent with their online services but not that great. I believe a big part of it is that they outsource too much themselves.

It’s amazing that most of their sites have been down for 20 hours now. This situation gives a bad reputation to online/cloud services.