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Steve
Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, Booed at Project Server
Technical Conference
On Tuesday, October
30, 2007, Mike Angiulo, General Manager for the
Microsoft Project Business Unit, announced that
the Project Server 2007 SP1 may not be released
until March or April of 2008. Here is how this
information was "cajoled" out of Mr. Angiulo.
At the end of a keynote speech given by Steve
Ballmer, Microsoft CEO at the recent Technical
Conference, a question was asked of Mr. Ballmer
during the Q&A regarding when the Project Server
2007 SP1 will be released. Mr. Ballmer looked
at Mr. Angiulo and Mr. Angiulo answered that
that information would be announced in three
weeks. Part of the audience (ourselves
included) immediately booed (it sounded like a
typical English parliament session with very
clear feed back about Mr. Angiulo’s attempt to
dance around an important issue on everyone’s
mind).
From what
we saw, Mr. Ballmer cast a "strong" glance at
Mr. Angiulo, who recovered quickly and gave the
audience the information it was asking for;
“when will Microsoft fix some of the many
problems with Project Server 2007 and publicly
release the fixes as SP1?”
We
do not know that last time Mr. Ballmer was
booed, but we are thinking it has been awhile.
As for the answer to the question….
Mr. Angiulo said
that a firm release data for SP1 will be
announced in three weeks but SP1 could be as
late as March 2008.
One reason for the
late release of SP1 conveyed by Mr. Angiulo was
"we (Microsoft) wanted to release it with Office
SP1, due in the March/April timeframe."
Never can we
remember a Microsoft Project or Project Server
service patch released along with Office service
patches. As a customer I would be pretty
irritated about this excuse. If Microsoft has
fixed something like core functional problems
and thoroughly tested the fix, then not
releasing the service patch to the entire user
base isn’t being customer focused - an attitude
typically associated with market dominance and
we have only ourselves to blame for that.
Frankly, we were
disappointed in that response from Mr. Angiulo,
and with all the little tips throughout the
conference from Microsoft folks on ways to deal
with functional and technical problems. Like the
following tip for opening a project that is
“stuck in check-out” when you have already saved
it, closed it, and checked the project in. Here
is the tip: “Open the project in read only,
close it, and then try to open it again.” We got
lots of those little snippets of wisdom during
the conference and some we have tested without
the expected results.
As for the success
of the Microsoft Project Technical Conference,
it failed to gain much momentum, provided little
value, cost too much and finally fizzled out on
Wednesday afternoon with people walking around
asking, “Is this it?” It is our strong opinion
that the conference tended to parallel most EPM
deployments when they have not been planned
well, not driven from the top-down, and without
with a strong performance management system in
place. Clearly, the EPM product group is not
being managed well and the result is:
-
An EPM 2007
system with far too many problems that are
not being publically addressed, and
-
The most
lack-luster industry conference we have ever
attended.
Maybe this post from
the product group blog says it all, they are
simply “closed for the season” but still taking
license fees. See:
http://blogs.msdn.com/project/
 Next year, we think
they should consider holding the conference in a
location that could support the technical
requirements of their guests…maybe a city that
can at least provide internet service at the
conference site, a little more coffee and a few
more chairs and tables… maybe in a city like
Mountain View next to Google.
By the way, as the
Project blog states, they are “hard at work
designing the next version of Project Server”
and Mr. Ballmer did provide a demo. Stupid us,
we thought they would be working hard to address
all of the EPM 2007 issues, problems, and bugs.
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