Microsoft Kicks Off TechEd 2008 with Gates and Previews
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Some 5,000 developers this week converged on Orlando, Florida, not because they are daring in the face of the beginning of the opening of the hurricane season, but because the TechEd 2008 developer conference is probably one of the last times that they can expect to see Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates do something as mundane as walk down Programmer Memory Lane and make some relatively minor product Microsoft previews. READ MORE >

Dynamics AX 2009 ERP Suite Comes to Market
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It may be nearly six years since Microsoft bought the ERP suites called Axapta and Navision from the two merged Danish ERP software suppliers, Damgaard and the Navision, who merged two years earlier than that, but Microsoft is still operating four distinct ERP software lines. As Microsoft well knows and surely profits from, customers are stubbornly resistant to moving off software they know well, even if they don't always love it. READ MORE >

U.S. Drags Down Server Sales in Q1, But Weak Dollar Helps
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Depending on how you want to look at it, the United States both helped and hurt sales in the global server market in the first quarter of 2008, according to statistics compiled by the box counters at IDC. The jittery economy in the United States has caused companies large and small to pull back on server spending, but at the same time the weak dollar compared to currencies in overseas markets that are experiencing decent growth in server sales as their economies build up and are amplifying the revenues as those sales are booked back in the States for the major server players. READ MORE >

Servers, Storage, Laptops and Weak Dollars Buoy Dell in Q1
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Computer maker Dell is trying to give Wall Street, investors, and customers the impression that it is on the mend, and the weak U.S. dollar is certainly doing its part to make that job a little easier than it might otherwise be. Somewhat revived server sales in the first fiscal quarter as well as the industry trend to upgrade to laptops among companies and consumers alike also did their part to give Dell some revenue growth, and share buybacks helped push up earnings per share, too. The company was sitting on $8.5 billion in cash, but has some pretty big bills to pay, too, from running the business--accounts payable was $4.9 billion larger than accounts receivables. READ MORE >