For his annual keynote at the Microsoft Wordwide Partner Conference, taking place this week in Los Angeles, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner wasted little time challenging Microsoft’s many competitors. He flouted the supposed weaknesses of Cisco, IBM, Google, Oracle and others, letting attendees know that Microsoft is gunning for these companies’ business.

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IDG News Service — For his annual keynote at the Microsoft Wordwide Partner Conference, taking place this week in Los Angeles, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner wasted little time challenging Microsoft’s many competitors. He flouted the supposed weaknesses of Cisco, IBM, Google, Oracle and others, letting attendees know that Microsoft is gunning for these companies’ business.

“I am grateful for those competitors. It is fun going after them in a big way,” he said.

Turner even took the opportunity to criticize some of Microsoft’s old technologies, such as Windows XP and Office 2003.

As the COO, Turner oversees Microsoft’s worldwide sales, marketing, and services. And at the WPC conference, his role is to rally Microsoft partners to march into battle against

competing companies. This year, however, Turner seemed even more eager than usual to call out competitors by name and list their putative deficiencies.

Google was one of the first companies Turner savaged, particularly in regards to its online office suite, Google Docs. “Two years ago, all of the headlines said Microsoft was in big trouble,” he said. “Guess what? It hasn’t happened.”

He criticized Google for hidden fees in Google Docs, which Microsoft competes against with its own recently launched Office365. Turner claimed that Google’s annual fee of $50 per user per year is “only the tip of the iceberg.” Customers may incur additional fees, the nature of which Turner did not specify.

He also touted Office365, taking the time to quote an article from a trade magazine, stating that “Office 365, frankly, is to Google Apps as XBOX 360 Live is to Pong.”

“Office365, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing but a Google butt-kicker,” he said, adding that Office365 had already gained 5 million licensed users. He also mocked Google Talk as an “inferior messaging system.”

Discussing Cisco, Turner extolled the audience to go after that company’s profitable teleconference business. “Think about all the years that Cisco has been milking those high margins — 75, 80 percent margins — on its unified communications product,” he said, adding that Microsoft’s partners could offer a lower-cost alternative through Microsoft’s Lync unified communications offering.

Another target was IBM. Turner notes that Microsoft has migrated 4.5 million users off of IBM’s Lotus Notes, and expects to migrate another 5 million this year, all in favor of Microsoft Exchange.

Taking aim at Oracle, Tuner rhetorically asked: “How many happy Oracle customers are you talking to?”

“There is a tremendous opportunity for us to really go after the Oracle customer right now,” he said. He posited that SQL Server was a lower-cost and more secure alternative to the Oracle database.

Ballmer promises Lync won’t be harmed by Skype purchase

Skype will be thoroughly integrated with Microsoft’s Lync communications software, assuming regulators approve the $8.5 billion acquisition, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said this week.

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Lync, which is being sold both as a server product and a cloud-based service, will not lose any prominence in the Microsoft software lineup once Skype comes on board, Ballmer said in a keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles.

Microsoft Lync: Take to the cloud or keep it in-house?

“With the combination of the power of Lync and Skype under the same umbrella, we think we’re going to be able to do even more fantastic things together,” Ballmer said.

Small businesses and enterprises deploying Lync will gain a secure form of communication with consumers and businesses because of integration between Lync and Skype, the latter of which offers Internet-based chats and voice and video calls, he said.

“I’ve been asked by partners if this Skype acquisition somehow means we’re not serious or enthusiastic about Lync,” Ballmer said. “Quite to the contrary. One of the great motivations in acquiring Skype is to enable the enterprise to have all the control it wants in communication and collaboration through Active Directory and Lync, and yet be able to connect people within enterprises to consumers, businesses and trading partners around the world. Lync, in some sense with Skype is a strategy that will allow the consumerization of IT to really proceed with full vim and vigor.”

Microsoft’s purchase of Skype is still waiting for regulatory approval, so the integration between Lync and Skype can’t happen yet.

“Just like with any big acquisition, we have contact with Skype, certainly,” Kirk Gregersen, Lync senior director, told Network World in an interview after Ballmer’s speech. “We just can’t start the integration until regulators have approved things.”

Gregersen says he’s not a Skype user himself, but that “for a lot of people there is obviously great value, for the 600 million Skype users out there. As Steve said, connecting all these people is great value both for the enterprise customers and those consumers out there.”

Lync Server is positioned as a replacement for legacy PBX phone systems, and Ballmer praised the product’s momentum. Lync provides “eye candy” to enterprise customers just as Xbox Kinect does to the consumer market, he said.

“Seventy percent of the Fortune 500 is now on Lync,” Ballmer said. “Certainly if you look at a product from Microsoft that is growing most quickly, it is Lync in the enterprise.”

While the exact nature of Skype’s future integration with Lync remains unclear, there is also uncertainty over when the cloud-based version of Lync will become as robust as its on-premises sibling.

Lync Online, part of Office 365, is not yet a full PBX replacement, Microsoft acknowledges. The company’s advice for Office 365 customers who want a robust unified communications platform is to deploy Lync Server within their own networks.

Lync provides three types of workloads: messaging and presence, conferencing, and voice, says Ashima Singhal, Lync group product manager. Lync Online users get the same IM, presence, and audio, video and Web conferencing capabilities – including desktop sharing – as customers who deploy Lync in-house, but the cloud-based voice capabilities are not as robust, she says.

After taking a lot of flak for Windows Vista, Microsoft has recently released beta versions of two of its most popular products–Windows and Internet Explorer–in an attempt to recover lost ground.

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The past few years have not been easy for Microsoft. The company that’s been synonymous with operating systems on computers has had to take a fair deal of flak from critics, users and has even been at the receiving end of a European Union (EU) adverse judgement. Added to that are the woes of the ongoing recession. And on the mobile front, its OS, Windows Mobile, is struggling against newcomers like the mobile versions of Mac OS and Google’s Android (very rashly dismissed as a ‘press release’ by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer). Perhaps it would be fair to say that the Redmond giant is not short of challenges at the moment.

The Vista albatross

There are many who feel that Microsoft’s problems began with Windows Vista. Launched a couple of years ago amidst a lot of hype, the OS has become a burden to the company. While tech experts might point to flaws in the structure of the OS and its security issues, the biggest reason for its relative lack of success (Microsoft will roll out reams of information to claim that it is in fact a huge success) is that the operating system was a pain to use for mainstream users who were more than content with its predecessor, Windows XP.

Redemption through Win 7 and IE 8?

But if there is one thing we know about Microsoft, it is that for such a big company, it moves incredibly fast to address problems. The immensely successful Windows XP had in fact come hot on the heels of the less-than-impressive Windows Me and had promptly made people forget the problems posed by the latter. In what seems to be a similar move, the company has released betas of its next version of Windows, Windows 7 and its browser, Internet Explorer (IE) 8. While we have given neither product a really extended trial yet, the little we have seen of both seems to indicate that they are significant improvements over their predecessors.

The improvement in Windows 7, in particular, is stark. While the dazzling exterior of Vista has been maintained (and some might even say, made to look better), resource hoggers such as the Windows Taskbar have been removed. Microsoft has also added its Ribbon interface (seen in Office 2007) to its staple Paint and Word Pad applications, making them much more user-friendly. Those concerned about security might like the Action Center, which displays a number of security and maintenance features in a single menu–saving time and making them far simpler to manage. While its system requirements seem to be on the same lines as Vista’s on paper, a number of people have told me that it actually runs perfectly well on systems that struggled with Vista.

Before hitching up with Windows Phone and Windows 8, Microsoft’s cross-platform rich Internet application framework gets a modest upgrade

Microsoft Silverlight has had a topsy-turvy year. Apparently doomed or at least marginalized by HTML5, Silverlight found a foothold in Windows Phone and has more recently emerged as a key component of the Jupiter application framework and programming model for Windows 8. If Silverlight has become less important as a rich Internet application (RIA) framework, it has become more important to Microsoft’s desktop and mobile platforms overall.

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In the meantime, the cross-platform RIA framework is still kicking — though development has clearly slowed. More evolutionary than revolutionary, the “new” capabilities in Microsoft’s Silverlight 5 beta merely incorporate existing Microsoft technologies and port functionality previously seen in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).

[ Also on InfoWorld: Microsoft offers developers early access to Windows Phone “Mango.” | Keep up with the latest developer news with InfoWorld’s Developer World newsletter. ]

More than a year has gone by without a major Silverlight release, and with none due until late 2011, I expected the forthcoming version 5 to be a major rev that would cement Silverlight’s superiority over Adobe Flash. Instead, I was disappointed to find that many promised Silverlight 5 features are still missing or meager. Even the included code previews for satellite projects — such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) RIA Services and Expression Blend — do little more than gussy up existing capabilities.

In short, the Silverlight 5 beta looks more like a dot revision with feature creep than a major upgrade. Rather than extending Silverlight to continue hammering away at Adobe Flash, Microsoft seems to be working toward a desktop smackdown with itself — adding Windows-specific platform invocation calls, Component Object Model (COM) support, and untethered file system access that push Silverlight deeper into the domains of .Net and WPF.

This blurring of these lines shouldn’t come as a total shock. After all, Silverlight was originally code-named WPF/Everywhere. Plus, it undoubtedly makes good fiscal sense for Microsoft to consolidate internally with Windows 8 and a new version of Windows Phone on the horizon. Microsoft has said that the next version of the Windows Phone OS (aka Mango) will sport the Silverlight 4 runtime, and that there will be no support for running Silverlight applications in the Windows Phone browser.

Silverlight 5: Improved tools
I appreciate that Silverlight 5 is prerelease, and perhaps I shouldn’t be looking at it so critically. Stepping in from the big picture, there are a number of improvements to Silverlight’s runtime and development tools that shouldn’t be ignored.

I installed the Silverlight 5 Tools Beta to Visual Studio 2010 SP 1. The Beta included the Developer Runtime, SDK, and a new preview of WCF RIA Service v1 SP2. Instead of Visual Studio, you could use Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1 as the development platform.