Cubegeek

Microsoft PPS: Dead.

Nigel Pendse reports the death of Microsoft Performance Point Server:

Despite all the positive auguries, it seems that PerformancePoint Planning has flopped.
Microsoft announced on January 23 that it was to be discontinued. There will be a final SP3 Planning release in mid 2009 to deal with immediate customer issues, but no further enhancements. It is possible that some planning functionality will be added into other Microsoft products, such as Analysis Services and Excel, but this will not be based on the abandoned PerformancePoint Planning product.
The Biz# project will have run for almost six years from commencement to abandonment, with little to show for it apart from some disappointed customers and partners.

Disappointment indeed. It's now official. I can say with finality that I wasted a year in my career. In fact, a lot of good people that I know personally wasted a year and even longer chasing the rainbow that was Microsoft Performance Point Server. It's a damned shame because some very smart people worked very hard and some hard earned money turned out to be a bad investment. I personally know people who went halfway around the world trying to make Microsoft PPS do what it was supposed to do. It's not just the clients of Madoff who are pissed these days. 

I was fortunate to get hit over the head with a brick almost exactly a year ago when my boss made the judicious decision to trim his sails and begin cutting his losses in an ambitious project to corner the consulting market on PPS. We were the consulting vendor of choice. We proved that we could do things with that product that almost nobody else could and we survived on hope, skill and the kind of gallows humor dedication of the dogfaced GI. 

There were several occasions when I had to stop and scratch my head wondering if it was just me or were we pushing ropes. But I'm no quitter. If there was a way to make that stuff work, we were going to do it. Now what I remember of the story can be told. 

First of all, PPS was a decent product. It had particular strengths and weaknesses that you might expect from a version one launch, but in my revised opinion - the kind of opinion I could afford to develop after I left the team, there were certain things that simply doomed it. Only one of them had to do with the technology.

The first and foremost thing that doomed PPS was that it was a Microsoft product and what I learned was that Microsoft, certainly as far as PPS was concerned and probably in general is a technology company, not a product company. That is to say that Microsoft is the kind of company that is well suited to marshal its resources on a global scale with a large existing installed base of interlocking technologies but that ability doesn't scale down. Microsoft is incapable of profiting from small products with small markets, and from a Microsoft perspective PPS was tiny. 

Secondly PPS itself belonged to nobody. Not that there were 'nobodies' in charge of it. In fact there were multiple big somebodies in charge of various parts of it. There lies the problem; there simply was not one integrated product organization that could make decisions in support of the product and then stand behind those decisions internally to Microsoft or externally to consultants and customers. PPS primarily belonged to 'OBA', the guys responsible for Microsoft Office. Now I know BPM people are saying what!?. I did too, but that's the way it went. PPS also depended on Excel, which was another group. PPS also depended on SharePoint which was another group. And of course it depended on SQL Server & Analysis Services, yet another group. So who coordinated all of those development efforts? Effectively nobody. 

Thirdly PPS had no product roadmap. The product roadmap for PPS was basically a function of sales. We throw it out there to 50,000 customers, we expect an adaptation rate of 3% at a price of X per pop, there's your revenue stream. Completely absent from that was a feedback loop. Microsoft didn't care a hoot about what customers and developers might have to say about the product's features or shortcomings. It was as if a mighty focus group or marketing exec had spoken and that was the end of it. So when things went wrong, and believe me a lot of things went wrong, there was no recourse. So nobody inside or outside of Microsoft, situated to support the product knew if, for example, there would be a published API for the product. Nobody knew if there was actually going to be a next release or what the priofities might be in that release. For all the things we knew that worked or didn't work internally to the product, we would be stuck telling our customers - well we don't really know when Microsoft is going to address that. In fact, we didn't even know IF Microsoft was going to address that.

Fourth. PPS just didn't perform. I had guys working the guts of this product and one of the things that was entirely too clever about it was that it had a kind of code generator that would determine whether or not it would use MDX or T-SQL to execute its functions. I don't recall what people have said about how well optimized Microsoft compilers are, but obviously none of those geniuses worked on optimizing PPS. PPS would generate a meta-language that was basically full of crap. Our guys were hand-coding all of the internals and forcing the product to use SQL instead of MDX, period. It was the only way to get it performing worth beans.

I recall a famous meeting I had up in Redmond with some really sharp guys that Microsoft had redeployed from FRX to get on the PPS bandwagon. I didn't like it because it meant that Microsoft was hedging on us as a consulting vendor, but we all figured that the market would eventually take care of us all so we played nice. One of the top three PPS architects in the world was there explaining and demonstrating one of the few successful internal implementations. As we went through the demo the architect did a drilldown in Excel. You know me, I counted seconds for response time. ..6..7..8..9..10. After about 12 seconds we got about 50 rows of data. Let me make that clear, 50 rows with 12 columns, 600 freaking cells. This, I know because I asked, was coming off of a 64bit server. Anybody with any experience in OLAP knows that kind of performance was unacceptable back in 1992. At the time of this meeting, there was only one person who actually had any experience doing any back-end tuning behind PPS. All I could say was, well, FRX has done well in the mid-market, so maybe this isn't so bad. But I knew from that moment on that it would be a cold day in hell before we could beat Oracle, Cognos or even Outlooksoft for Enterprise customers. 

And yet Microsoft people had the nerve to believe that their entry into the market - their purchase of ProClarity was this fearsome move that *prompted* Oracle to buy Hyperion and IBM to buy Cognos. Unbelievable. 

I have to say in retrospect, that PPS was the crappiest product I've ever had to work with for its market. ProClarity was 3 times better by itself. ProClarity as a company may have been destroyed here, but there's an object lesson that the brains behind ProClarity and the organization was much better suited to manage that product than Microsoft. I've come to terms with my frustration with Microsoft. I don't hate them, but I understand why people hate them. I have never, in my entire career, had customers so furious at me for a failure to deliver on promises implicit in a product. I have never seen smart consultants so frustrated by a product's complexity and poor performance. I have never seen businessmen have to tapdance so fiercely to keep everybody on the same page.

I've learned a great deal about Microsoft, people and myself through my experience with PPS. I can say this. When it comes to delivering products and services to the enterprise, Microsoft is better to have as an enemy than as a partner.

To all my friends and associates in Redmond and Century City, to all of my customers and partners in Washginton, Arizona, Oregon and Hong Kong, you know I have great respect and admiration for your courage under fire. I'm sorry to have failed you. I did all that I could, but now you know that Microsoft just didn't back us up. 

Now there's somebody who I have to buy a cow. 

Star May Have Done It Again

In my aging and occasionally useless universe of computing, there are several important galaxies. The most important is the BI galaxy, which is alternately called the DW and the BPM galaxy. That's the one that pays my bills, and with any luck will get my brats through college. In that galaxy are several stars that I pay attention to although there may be others that are brighter and more massive. I try to get into their orbits when I can.

Among those stars are Applied Olap, Tableau and Star Analytics  - some of the brightest people in the Essbase Quadrant. Folks who still build products have my admiration.  

Here at the NorCal OAUG I've seen some familiar faces from Star Analytics.I just happened by Suzanne Hoffman, who keeps track of all of my favorite people and Quinlan Eddy, one of the guys who taught me Essbase.  They are If my guess is correct, he's done it again. Within a few hours I'll know for sure, but he may have just short-circuited my little big idea for the year, which has to do with the automation of back-end processes that feed Hyperion apps. I'll get a demo later and post what I can post. 

The Death of DRM

It took about ten years but it looks as if the death of DRM is pretty much done. Thank God that's over.

The bell started tolling yesterday as Apple declared that the iTunes store is changing its pricing and removing DRM from here on out. That's superb news, but I think that it was Amazon's MP3, DRM free store which truly signalled the beginning of the end. For the past two months or so, I've basically done all my music downloads from Amazon MP3, which while not as slick as iTunes is faster to find a song. 

All of this change reminds me of what may yet be now that these cats are out of the bag. Which is to say, what about Torrents? 

Once upon a time I tried doing that P2P thing. I don't think I stopped for a good long time. What I found was a whole lot of low quality labeling, odd versions of songs and very little of what I really wanted, especially when it came to classical and jazz. I still have multiple versions of songs in my reasonable good sized library at 96Kbps which indicate to me that I got them from one of the old P2P sources. I was a member of eMusic. I toyed with Shoutcast and of course used Winamp for a long time. WinMX was my P2P client but after a while their servers became too slow and unreliable. I'm sure I was done with it by 2002 or so - but certainly starting in 98 a good 10-20% of my MP3 library was gotten through P2P, the rest through ripping my own CDs. 

Interestingly enough the songs I got P2P were songs that I simply couldn't bear to by the album for, like one or two cuts from Blink 182 or the Offspring. Remember those guys? Yep. I still have it at 128. Title 'Keep em Separated'. But the real name of the song is Come Out and Play. I didn't know until I got the disk some time later. These were the pop songs that I had to have and that I think the industry made the biggest fuss about - the same sorts that kid hackers were interested in. 

In fact now that I think about it, the last songs I P2P'd were those from Soul Coughing back in the days they were all that. I probably went through three or four generations of trying to get their stuff before I gave up and found the CDs. The lessons were learned. P2P was for geeks with no money and lots of patience. When it came to good music, I could come up with the buck - for the pop crap, I'd take the P2P version.

Anyway, I'm on the verge of setting up some multiple servers at Vault 107 (The new name, following Fallout, of my at home IT) one of which is going to be a media server. The lack of DRM is useful just for my own peace of mind. I've got three kids buying music from iTunes and some of that could be simplified. But I'm really interested in the implications of being able to have that kind of dedicated server and now sticking a Torrent client/server type of deally there. For me, I'd certainly want that to be a secured circle of trust for my family rather than a defiant Pirate Bay sort of joint.

It does finally come down to money and whether or not business are smart enough to figure out a business plan with the masses that is adequately profitable *and* accessible. The music market has always been a mass market which was always profitable enough to be DRM free, it's just that in the days of Kazaa and prior, a larger percentage of the market was 'hack capable', and this grated on producers nerves. But a large part of the animosity between this small hack capable community, which was essentially all of Computer Science and IT, was generated because of the perception that these grungy Dot Commers were going to eat the entire lunch of old media - and through the entire irrational exuberence of the era, there was reason to believe they were right. Instead it turns out that only somebody like Steve Jobs could make the right product and that he could do so without being the sort of pompous ass that Shawn Fanning was. In the end, Fanning got millions, but not billions and it was the hedge against the possibility of a Fanning like character eating some company like Viacom that created the legal fudge and farce that is now the legacy of RIAA's bitchslapping Congress into complicit submission.

It wasn't really until iTunes exploded the market base with a user friendly interface and kids like mine started trading iTunes music gift cards, that the mass market grew enough with a large enough balance of 'hack incapable' consumers that the economicsof DRM-free digital music made sense enough to back off the legal horse. This is the market teaching a lesson that the DRM hardliners can now easily learn. Let's not forget how many Groksters have gone bust before now. But I think it is also the buildout of VOD and the big fat price elasticity of digital last mile triple-play which has emerged over the past couple years that is making the industry turn the corner.

I should also say that without Netflix and Gamefly, the entire on-demand model would not have emerged. Those two companies have shown that digital distribution on a subscriber basis can be profitable. The DRM dependence of both models, I think, is a bit overstated. I think that the simple fact is that they proved that the market would scale up larger than big media companies thought on-demand would go. In other words, the VOD buildout by big media companies with or without DRM would not have happened had Netflix and Gamefly not proved something. Yes it's true that video arcades are a thing of the past, but that really was a long time coming.

As for the XBox, Microsoft found a very good pricing model that didn't have to change. For a $300 box, and a $50 annual subscription rate online interactive gaming was always a bargain, even on $60 titles. That is simply because it's worth $60 to get 60 hours (at least) on online interactive gaming, which is actually a lot cheaper than your WoW style PC games. The upside of hacking an XBox was not value, simply geek appeal, whereas the upside of getting the latest Blink 182 single for free against the cost of a CD was big.

People also forget that there are a lot of 'hack capable' ways of getting DRM free music that have been grandfathered into other deals. I could get a high quality audio feed from my cable TV's 200 music channels and rip thousands of MP3s without running afoul of any law.

I, for one, support digital watermarking. Even in a DRM-free world, like the open source world, there should be some easy way to get a certifiable product. I would even support a third party service that would plug-in to a good music or video player. I'd actually pay more for a multimedia client that accommodates such a validation service. But anything that limits my ability to take my collection of digital content anywhere for any reason for the rest of my life? Niente!

I don't suppose I could complete this matter without talking about podcasts and Tivo. The habits of the new generation of digital entertainment consumption are set. The genius of Brandon Tartikoff is a thing of the past. It doesn't much matter what time things are scheduled to be delivered, so long as enough people know that it's coming and it's in-season. The other form of this, by the way, are boxed-sets. So long as I can get a 'boxed-set' of any serial content, its value changes. Companies understood this with regard to movies 10 years ago which is why the accounting of 'ultimates' came into practice. 'Ultimates' accounting value content products based on current and residual cashflows, plus as an asset. I haven't looked at that part of the industry in a while, but I don't think that was a mistake. Podcasts enable not only a long tail, but a longer asset value - so does the Netflix library. But the primary change is that the consumer wants control of where and when. Indefinitely. In other words, the consumer wants all entertainment content in their own cloud and they want it available on demand.

Guys in the software business, like me, understand this. And we sit and watch as it take multiple combinations of companies with small parts of small business models do bits of the big picture over multiple years. It's going to eventually go our way. Why? Because we build the technology.

Where Should BI Go Next?

I think of BI as reaching a point at which it can become a great deal more flexible in terms of deployment. The question isn't so much which industry, nor even so much and certainly not why. Rather, I still think the major goal is pervasive BI and broadly applied across functions. "Mashup BI".

Simply stated, 10 years ago, people were asking some of these same questions about the web. Today we take it for granted that one can and should use a combination of websites to create a mosaic of information attending to your concerns. BI has lagged in this pervasive quality.

From a management perspective, I should use BI to focus my employees' attentions on those goals that I perceive coming from internal and external change. My BI platform should serve the purposes of rapid development and integration of these changes. Somehow we have not processed numbers, even given our longevity in the industry better than the web has managed text. Nor have we managed scalability in the database arena as well when it comes to BI - which is a very odd thing considering that we should be first. Yet more data is processed through company websites, especially ecommerce, than through company BI, and BI customers still fuss about performance.

I think this is a consequence of focusing too tightly on single BI applications rather than the entire scope of what company management does to focus the attention of their employees into a measurable performance discipline. If a company is providing access to company information without adding a measurable discipline (or one that is self-evident) then they are wasting employee's time and compute resources. My BI dashboard and internal communications should be every bit as intriguing as what's going on at Twitter. If your company is using Websense, in that regard you're already too late. You're not making the company's business interesting and exciting to your own employees.

Granted this requires a cultural adjustment, but the technology should not be an excuse and we in the profession need to work towards making analytic ubiquity possible at reasonable costs.

Ultimately I think there will emerge higher level abstracts which will obviate some aspects of the scratch building we do today, though the need will continue. You don't see much tweaking in Point of Sale Systems in Retail. It's done - a register is a register. Soon, an accounting department will be similarly commodified as well as all of the standard KPIs necessary. Then restaurant inventories with KPIs regarding the turnover differences between fish and cheese and one with popular wines, linked to afficionado ratings. It's time to start thinking at the next level of business performance abstraction. This requires that BI be strategic - that it be the end vision of capturing and focusing the attention of every employee in every department that has a computer on driving business performance.

Possible Good News for Rolta India

From the Barnett:

Congress should approve Indian nuke deal WORLD NEWS: "Bush to Press Nuclear Deal With India," by Jay Solomon and Niraj Sheth, Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2008, p. A12. ARTICLE: "After Georgia: After Georgia's defeat, the West struggles to deal with a newly belligerent Russia," The Economist, 23 August 2008, p. 41.

I'm for any strategic deals that bring us closer to India and any deals that make nuclear power more accessible and less frightening. Plus U.S. companies like Boeing and Lockheed need the access to markets.

Plus, with the Bush administration killing the proposed nuclear cooperation deal with Russia, effectively denying its atomic industry billions of dollars of market opportunity, the timing couldn't be better in terms of the message delivered: behave well and this is the kind of rewards you can expect and vice versa.

So I'm all for Congress approving this, and believe Bush and Rice's State Department deserve credit on this one.

BI Clouds

Unlike many of my new midwestern colleagues, I spend a lot of time missing planes. In fact, because of a 30 minute delay in Indianapolis yesterday, I won't be able to get home to Los Angeles until about 6pm tonight. Bad luck piles up over time, an early start beats fast running.

So while it might not seem like such a big deal to you, I'm wondering why more companies have not invested in BI clouds. I asked a few folks over the past week and got some blank stares when I talked about cloud computing related to MobileMe. But I hope that will not long be the case, especially as it is clear that Rolta (my new Daddy) is seriously invested in SOA, CA Unicenter type controls, Managed Services and Hosting. It's just a matter of time before it becomes clear that there are a lot of candidate companies for some extraordinarily nice IT around EPM and BI. The sooner the better. Any delay now may keep the whole industry stumbling.

It's all next to impossible to get people in corporate IT to stick to some standards established by the know-it-alls. And I must confess that I've spent a whole lot of time just learning exactly how many PM Methodologies are inferior to the sort Leah Wheelan got us working on a decade ago in AFSG. But the hub and spoke and active data warehouse and Agile JADs can only go so far - that is until you move to the next customer who wants to do it their way. Knowing this, I like most folks haven't even bothered much to listen to the know-it-alls. I mean how many projects have been delayed because the customer says 'yeah we need MDM but nobody wants to pay for it, besides, we've got deadlines'. Meanwhile the hierarchy gets rejects every pass and people invent department codes at will.

Such things would be eliminated by a company that hosts EPM - because we would own the standards, and the hardware, and the network and the security, and before you get into our heavenly cloud, St Peter would make sure you had your master data in order.

I've been thinking about hosted BI since 2003, not that me thinking about it matters much. But I think I've finally found some folks who can and will step up to make that kind of service offering a reality. As with most things, I remain cautiously optimistic and keep asking 'what can go wrong'. As the business case is made or not, I will report.

Welcome TUSC Bretheren

Well now that I have incremented my famousity another iota on the scale, I would like to say hello to all the new folks in my extended professional family. The extension comes as a surprise to me and a number of folks, but not as a shock. The surprise is, of course, the acquisition of WhittmanHart Consulting by Rolta TUSC.

I spent the last 48 hours or so immersing myself in the people and framework of TUSC which is my new parent company. It's going to be, very possibly, the best technical fun in my career. It has been a long time since I've worked with folks who have experience at Bell Labs or in a company run by engineers, so I get the feeling that I'm going to enjoy this time immensely.

But sticking to the title at hand, I just wanted to introduce Cubegeek to TUSC folks or rather EITC folks and tell you what it's all about. It is basically that which I find open-sourceable about the cool things I actually do in my job, some theoretical ideas of things I'd like to see, some biased opinions about the industry and what think is right or wrong in it, and a healthy dose of everyday geekery. I expect that we will soon be hosting some internal blogs with secret sauce, and there is no doubt in my mind that blogs and RSS are the best way to share such info - of course there is not now a secure RSS standard, I would like to see that change.

So feel free to comment on any of the things you see here. I'm always following the few that I get here and the many that I get on my other blogs.

Who's Your Daddy?

The word is on the wires, and my new daddy is Rolta India.

Mumbai, July 29, 2008: Rolta, one of India's leading IT companies, today announced the signing of an agreement to acquire WhittmanHart Consulting, the consulting Division of WhittmanHart Inc., a premier Chicago based company providing value driven solutions in digital communications, process improvement, and enabling technologies, for over 20 years. WhittmanHart Consulting (WHC) is a management and technology consulting services firm that delivers solutions with a unique blend of industry relevance, business process innovation and technology expertise. The company is recognized today as an industry leading provider of consulting services in the Business Intelligence (BI) arena, particularly focused on the Hyperion software technology acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2007. WhittmanHart, Inc. will retain and continue to operate WhittmanHart Interactive, its leading interactive agency, in a standalone capacity.

I have a lot to learn about this particular deal, but in the 90 minute conference call we had yesterday I heard all of the right things said. My outlook is cautiously optimistic. Actually I'm more like enthusiastic but cautious, because basically everything I like about WhittmanHart has just had its capital boosted.

On the one hand, there are few things cooler than being part of a one billion dollar engineering services company, which is how I interpret Rolta. You can't get too far in oil&gas and GIS without having some serious brainage. That's all good. On the other hand, I've never heard of Rolta, have you? I get the feeling that where they're known, they are known well and do well, but elsewhere we'll have to beat down the anti-Indian body shop bias that many of us share in the industry. So we have some serious marketing to do in the US.

Suddenly, I note some very interesting points of synergy between the things I had been highlighting in my discussions with my perspective boss back a couple months ago, and the new synergies created by this asset acquisition. Still, I'm going to hold off patting myself on the back until after the Big Meeting.

So basically my take is this. Friendly takeover. Management synergy. Everything WH Consulting has been it remains, with a new big daddy, a serious, large, integrity-driven and brainy organization. It's definitely a different angle to BI, and the kind that a database guy like me is very excited about. I mean we're going to be doing BI integration with ESRI and such. That's super cool.

One more thing. There's an itch in my mind about the TUSC subsidiary that we're folding into. I swear that I've heard of them somehow, somewhere deep in my Oracle upbringing, but I just can't place them. I take them at their word that they are the premier tuners of Oracle RDBMS.

Once Upon a Time

I was once known to the Yahoo chat board as "olap genius". I have some predictions and stuff that are now going on 9 years old. Check out this one from the archives:

The Hyperion Century
by: olap_genius (30/M/California)  05/01/99 04:00 pm
Msg: 2198 of 12844

I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict the ascendancy of hysl in the coming years. so let me say it now. hysl will enter the fortune 500 within 3 years. i'm not sure what the stock will do. as long as it doesn't do anything to jeopardize the direction of the company - ie put too much control into the hands of scoundrels, then i predict the inevitability of hysl's success.

the reason is that i have just assessed the breadth of applications which are waiting to be built in the space occupied by data held capture in erp systems. it's enormous. hyperion is the only company which is poised to take advantage of all of that data because of its tight partnerships with several key players.

today, any systems integrator worth their salt could take a selection of technologies off the shelf and build killer analytical apps based on data which has migrated from the mainframe transactional systems into the client server systems created by erp. but there are two barriers:

the first is that the gorilla of the erp space, sap, has confounded the process with its proprietary staging of data. right now there seem to be only two players in the industry, acta and sagent, who are prepared and capable to extract that data with any intelligence. acta is delivering on that today with product that is shipping. they are telling stories of building data marts in less time, with less money, and more functionality than legions of consultants have done.

the second problem is that most projects that get this kind of attention are complicated by high rollers. the competent technical consultants are currently outgunned by the less competent management consultants. i get the impression that many data warehouse initiatives are inordinately prolonged by mission statement engineering. this is the inevitable result of not having appropriate experience to make the right decisions. another aspect of this problem is that inappropriate sums of money are directed at pikers and wasteful projects taking market share and credibility away from experts.

Hyperion is set to eliminate these issues and profit from its accumulated experience in doing so.

re: bold
by: olap_genius (30/M/California)  05/03/99 12:40 am
Msg: 2210 of 12844

hyperion will deal with the first problem (the erp data jail) by aggressively partnering with companies like acta and sagent. hyperion will always have a large direct sales force which will multiply the effect of acta and sagent product marketing. and the partnership will also leverage hyperion products into acta and sagent customer bases. as soon as it becomes a done deal - that is to say that best practices in jumpstarting analytic apps out of erp data - then the word will be out and market share takes off from there.

on the second point, hyperion has a significant advantage in that it is investing in and marketing its considerable experience in the financial area. they will have the best of both worlds, an inhouse set of mbas and cpas who can wrangle with the best of the big 5 and a set of dbas and implementation consultants who can match strengths with the outsourcers of the world. with this combination they will be well motivated to execute as a single provider. hopefully market forces will make themselves clear - it will be cheaper to do business with hyperion only as a single point solutions provider, than with outsourcers, management consultants and tech vendors.

Informatica ate Acta and Sagent's lunch and Hyperion abandoned operational OLAP.

The Sad Truth About Microsoft

Cringely writes something about Microsoft that I learned the hard way last year, emphasis mine:

This is not to say that Microsoft isn't still ambitious, but its ambitions are bounded by the company's own success. Starting any business that is perceived as having less than $1 billion in sales ought to make no sense at all for Microsoft unless NOT starting such a business might lead to the company's failure. That's certainly the case with MSN, for example, which is too small for Microsoft to bother with yet too important for Microsoft NOT to bother with. The only logical move for Microsoft, then, was to make the MSN business big enough to matter and the only way they could see to do that was by acquiring Yahoo, which explains this year's failed acquisition. Microsoft's failure to buy Yahoo doesn't change this scenario, either, so look for Microsoft to do something -- anything -- to grow that business, because they can't strategically afford to do the logical thing, which is to kill it.

I think it's really sad when a company like Microsoft makes promises about the kind of presence it intends to have on the industry and doesn't follow through with an ambitious and focused program supporting its partners. That was the distinct and unfortunate feeling that I got working in the PPS market for the relatively short time I was involved. I can recall that Microsoft people speculated that it was their investment in PPS that hastened the consolidation of the BI industry, but I think that was ego speaking, not strong senior management with irons in the fire.

At my current distance from happenings within Microsoft and their partners, I don't have a first hand view of whether or not such things still apply. But out here in Oracle/Hyperion land, we don't think about PPS much. Different universes? Perhaps. But Cringely still resonates.

Microsoft is a culture. It feels today very much like IBM used to in the 80s. As the big pig of the industry thinking that everybody is going to work their way. As Bill leaves, maybe it's long overdue for a huge culture change from the top by an executive team that's ready to really shake them down, split them up and force the pieces to communicate all over again, in the software world. It could be the revolution we all need.

--

Let me add the following explicit corollary. Although I came back a little late this year to get in on the goodness of Kaleidescope and ODTUG, I am so very convinced that the level of information sharing that is bound to come out of the masters our field, like Tow, Roske and Schwartzberg, is going to propel the state of the application art beyond the capabilities of the competition.