2010: The Year in Review

 

2010 was an outstanding year for Microsoft, our customer and
our partners since it was a year filled with great product releases, some
amazing customer wins and deployments and also some tremendous partner
offerings and success stories.

Cloud Momentum

In 2010, we saw the growth of cloud momentum from Microsoft
starting with the All
In declaration by Steve Ballmer at the University of Washington to the Office
365 Launch and everything in between. 
Below are a couple of key moments for cloud momentum from Microsoft
throughout the year:

Click the image to play the PDC 10 Keynote Video

 

Click the image to view the Office 365 Demo

Watch Bob Muglia's IT Paradigm Video - Cloud Power!

 

Office 2010 Released and Momentum

It was an amazing moment when we released Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Exchange 2010.  Office
2010 has become the fastest selling Office in our history, SharePoint
continues to delight customers and partners and Exchange is
growing leaps and bounds!

I'll share two of my favorite videos for Office 2010 for the
year. 

1. Office 2010 the Movie:

[View:https://www.youtube.com/v/VUawhjxLS2I]

2. What if the Founding Fathers did use Microsoft Word?

[View:https://www.youtube.com/v/xw_1I1oYApw]

 

Lync 2010 Released

If you haven't experienced Lync (it's a combination of Link and Sync), you're missing out. 
It combines together voice, video, web conferencing, IM and
presence.  I use Lync every day and with
its presence integration integrated into Outlook and SharePoint, connecting
with other folks is always just a click away. 
Check out one of the best videos that explains Lync for the newbie:

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjPBHZm9Tb8]

 

Microsoft Growth in Government and Education

It was an amazing year to see Microsoft's growth in the
Government and Education space.  We
announced BPOS
for Government and Live@EDU continues to take education by storm.  From what I hear from customers, the move to
the Microsoft cloud is driven by lowering costs and increasing productivity.  Mayor Bloomberg of New York said it best:

"To deliver
services efficiently and function at the highest level, City employees need the
same technological resources that top private sector businesses provide to
their employees," said Mayor Bloomberg. "Through our partnership with
Microsoft, we've found ways to offer our employees Microsoft's newest,
state-of-the-art computing tools while reducing costs to taxpayers."

Read the full release from the NYC government.

From Albany to Stonybrook, Suny encompasses 64 campuses with over 465,000 students who can now take advantage of Live@EDU from Microsoft!  Learn more by reading here.

120,000 users. .
. I would say that's Organic!  Read about
what the USDA is doing here.

"Migrating an
enterprise of USDA's size and complexity from multiple environments, across multiple
agencies, requires not only a trusted enterprise-ready solution, but also a
partner that is able to work with us and navigate everything from archiving to
authentication to mobile phone support," said Chris Smith, chief information
officer at USDA. "USDA's IT modernization will allow us to streamline our
operations and help us use taxpayer dollars more efficiently. With a focused
cloud road map, we saw a clear opportunity to help achieve our cost savings and
consolidation goals and tap into the promise of the cloud."

Scotch Tape, the Bundt Pan, Wheaties, Bisquick and Green Giant vegetables. . .   They all were invented in Minnesota and now the next generation of collaboration and communication is on the list since the great state of Minnesota is moving to BPOS!

 

Web Apps Everywhere - SkyDrive, Facebook

I couldn't have a year recap without talking about the Office Web Apps.  If you haven't tried them, pop over to SkyDrive and give them a try.  In fact, if you prefer to try out Office Web Apps and have a Facebook account, navigate over to docs.com and see how Office Web Apps can integrate with Facebook with the click of a button!  Join the over 20M users who have given the Office Web Apps a try!

A Little Competitive Fun

How could I recount 2010 without talking about the
competition?  In 2010, we brought you the
new website - WhyMicrosoft.com -
which compares Microsoft's offerings with the competition.  Combined with the website is the WhyMicrosoft
blog that you're reading. 

Of course, there was also the Computerworld
interview that I did that got the folks at Appirio,
a Google premier partner, so riled that they
did a parody of it!   I'm surprised
they didn't draw some devil horns, a black eye and a moustache on my picture in
the article! I'm always happy to debate the merits of Microsoft's approach versus
the competition.

 

 

Coming up tomorrow. . . . My New Year's Resolutions!