Office Standard 2010 Key What's keeping the Micros

Wall Street analysts,Office Standard 2007, the media as well as other armchair pundits are full of suggestions for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. We;re quick to advise him to tweak Microsoft;s tablets so that they run some thing other than Windows, hurry up with that first Windows Telephone 7 update,Windows 7 X64, and carry the Kinect to Windows faster instead of later.But are these the sorts of issues that Ballmer and his top management crew certainly invest most of their time considering? Maybe not.A source of mine passed on to me some data that seems to occur from Microsoft;s own scorecarding program through the end of 2010 that detailed some superior priority locations for Microsoft;s revenue and marketing people. Not also astonishingly — in spite of all the public noise around the company;s consumer products — enterprise wares (which still result in the majority of Microsoft revenues) are getting a lot of internal attention.Yes, Microsoft;s Business Division (the Office team) had a bang-up Q2 FY2011, as the most recent earnings statement made clear. But according to the scorecarding information and facts I saw — which, as some have reminded me, is a small sample from inside the company, and not true of all areas — some Microsoft managers consider Exchange;s license and revenue growth over the last several years to be “anemic,” even though Exchange is currently a $2 billion business.(If you;re wondering about Microsoft;s hard-core push to sell Exchange Online and to win education accounts over to online services, slower Exchange Server growth is seemingly at least part of the reason. Microsoft execs view education as a key early adopter of cloud-based services, and e-mail is “the gateway application” for schools.)On the SharePoint front, the public story is that gross sales continue to be phenomenal,Windows 7 Discount, with more than 100 million SharePoint licenses having been sold to 17,000 customers. However, internally some managers are warning that the income focus on servers has been low “because revenue-based incentive compensation does not reward selling relatively low-priced servers.SharePoint license growth rates have dropped in the past year, and “########## CALs” — Client Access Licenses sold without servers attached — are now at 40 percent of the total, the aforementioned Softies acknowledged. To counter, Microsoft is counting on its higher-end search products, like Quickly Search and its SharePoint for Internet Sites SKUs for growth.Though not specifically called out by the scorecarders, the changing software distribution models are another watch point for the company. Microsoft traditionally derives about one-third of its revenue and half of its products via preloads from the OEM channel. But the emergence of cloud computing along with other new business models is shifting that mix, creating new competitive pressures and changing customer preferences.Microsoft is already no doubt properly on its way toward delivering the next versions of Exchange and Exchange Online, given that Exchange 2010 RTM;d in October 2009 and Service Pack 1in the fall of 2010. And the next version of SharePoint (SharePoint 15, I;d assume),Office Standard 2010 Key, also is moving along the dev schedule,Office 2007 Ultimate Key, I;d think.