{"id":550526,"date":"2006-10-17T07:23:06","date_gmt":"2006-10-17T07:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/550526-ballmer-microsoft-pushing-for-simplicity.html"},"modified":"2006-10-17T07:23:06","modified_gmt":"2006-10-17T07:23:06","slug":"ballmer-microsoft-pushing-for-simplicity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/550526-ballmer-microsoft-pushing-for-simplicity.html","title":{"rendered":"Ballmer: Microsoft pushing for simplicity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font size=\"2\">The company&#8217;s goal is to provide users with software that has &#8216;click-to-run characteristics\u2019 inside their firewalls, Ballmer said during a question-and-answer session with Gartner analysts at the consulting firm&#8217;s Symposium\/ITxpo 2006 conference. <\/font><\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\">Ballmer discounts the competitive threat posed by software delivered over the Internet free of charge by vendors such as Google. &quot;Most people, for the foreseeable future, are still going to want to run enterprise IT as enterprise IT,&quot; he says.<\/font> <\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\">Nonetheless, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Microsoft<\/a> is developing its own online offerings, such as Windows Live and Office Live. Greg Barkee, director of technology at Providence Health System, says that it will be interesting to see where Microsoft and rival vendors take the concept of Internet-based applications.<\/font> <\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\">&quot;We are still pretty fat-client-centric,&quot; Barkee says. &quot;Any time you can improve speed [and] efficiencies, it is a good thing, especially in the enterprise. [But] from what we continue to see, Microsoft&#8217;s products seem to get bigger, fatter, [with] larger disk space and larger memory requirements.&quot;<\/font> <\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\">While Ballmer talked about improving applications, one conference attendee says that what Microsoft needs is improved software licensing.<\/font> <\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\">&quot;It needs to get better on licensing,&quot; says S-E. Haugen, vice-president of IT at Strohl Systems Group. &quot;You cannot address licensing in a short session, and it is definitely nothing [Ballmer] wants to talk about, because it is a sore point.&quot;<\/font> <\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\">Haugen says that Microsoft&#8217;s products are &#8216;sold in so many flavours and fashions\u2019 that it is hard to keep track of them. For instance, he says that he has been unable to get consistent answers from resellers about licence fees, such as the cost of licensing the SQL Server database to run on a Windows server with four processors. <\/font><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/vb\/showthread.php?t=56039\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Discuss this article<\/a> <\/p>\n<p \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, says that the software vendor plans to give all of its applications an &#8216;Internet-style simplicity&#8217; as part of a move to offer them in hosted environments to corporate users.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-550526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550526"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}