Zune Team better get ready to rumble

Being a former MSFT blue badge, I know how competitive it is in Redmond.  Teams fight to establish and keep their identity and a "takeover" or "merge" with another group is hardly ever looked at as a "win-win" as they try to tell you in the Town Hall meeting.  Someone always lost.

 

With the new WinMo7 series phone I can’t help but wonder what the folks in the Millenium complex are thinking and talking about.  This is an obvious encroachment on their territory and especially since they haven’t been able to really be iPod/iTouch killers and WinMo has never been the iPhone killer…it almost makes sense for Redmond to merge the two.  Zune is a better mp3 product than iPod.  Hands down.  WinMo7 lacks the feature set it needs to be the iPhone killer and integrating the Zune (umm..assimilating is a better word) could possibly give Microsoft what it wanted three years ago.

 

When the phone gets released, what will the Zune team do then?  What new features will be available on the mp3 player the WinMo7 phone wont have?  If the story isn’t compelling, the Zune may be doomed.

SharePoint Connections 2010 Conference – Amsterdam

I was honored to be asked to speak at the SharePoint Connections Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

MSC33: Understanding the Service Application Architecture of SharePoint 2010
Richard Taylor
The architecture for SharePoint has changed considerably. Come to this session to see what the changes are and how to design your SharePoint environment to take advantage of the new services provided by SharePoint 2010.

MSC11: Enterprise Search Overview
Richard Taylor
With SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft has made a major leap forward in new enterprise search options that cover the full spectrum of business needs. This session will provide an overview of the key search capabilities in SharePoint 2010 through demonstrations of new features and example applications.

MSC22: Designing a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan for your SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure
Richard Taylor
What infrastructure plan would be complete without understanding how to recover from a catastrophic occurrence? Come to this session to understand how to design your SharePoint infrastructure to become as redundant and resistant to failure as possible.