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Today Microsoft announced that they had acquired the Teamprise assets from SourceGear:
Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will purchase the Teamprise-related assets of SourceGear LLC, which enable developers using the Eclipse IDE or operating on multiple operating systems, including Unix, Linux and Mac OS X, to build applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Development organizations will benefit from increased integration in heterogeneous environments, as well as reduced time and complexity associated with application development tasks. Functionality from the Teamprise Client Suite will be integrated into the Visual Studio product line beginning with Visual Studio 2010.
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The Teamprise technology will be available in the Visual Studio 2010 wave. Customers will be able to jointly purchase the Teamprise Client Suite technology, updated to work with Team Foundation Server 2010, and one Team Foundation Server client access license. Customers with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN also will receive the Teamprise Client Suite technology as part of their original subscription purchase. SourceGear will continue to provide support for Teamprise products and sell its latest release of the Teamprise Client Suite until the Microsoft solution becomes available.
Teamprise consists of the following:
Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse. The Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse allows developers to perform all their source control, bug tracking, build and reporting operations from within Eclipse and Eclipse-based integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Rational Application Developer, JBoss, BEA Workshop and Adobe Flex Builder.
Teamprise Explorer. Teamprise Explorer combines all the functionality available to Eclipse developers using the Teamprise Plug-in into a stand-alone, cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) application that is perfect for team members working outside of an IDE, such as graphic designers, quality assurance testers and project managers.
Teamprise Command-Line Client. The Teamprise Command-Line Client provides a cross-platform, nongraphical interface to Team Foundation Server, making it perfect for scripting and build scenarios or for developers who prefer a command-line interface.
This seems like an novel play by Microsoft to extend the market for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to non-Microsoft developers. On the face of it that seems unlikely until you consider developers in large shops with heterogeneous environments whose management might be receptive to a single uniform tool for all their development management needs. View this as a move on IBM’s Rational products that provide much the same functionality plus providing a Microsoft foot in the door the next time a large enterprise needs to make a development platform decision.
There is hope for the T-Mobile users of Microsoft subsidiary Danger’s Sidekick smartphone that have been hit with an apparent datacenter disaster – Microsoft’s Roz Ho says they "have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage." Users shouldn’t expect to get their data too soon however as there is no schedule for restoration other than an update on the availability of a schedule promised for Saturday.
Not unexpectedly class action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of Sidekick users and I am sure that both T-Mobile and Microsoft lawyers are busy scrutinizing whatever service level agreement covered Microsoft’s operation of the Sidekick cloud service for T-Mobile customers. As for the Sidekick itself, all new sales have been halted.
The 1 million users of smartphones from Microsoft subsidiary, Danger, Inc. got a nasty surprise over the weekend:
A server meltdown over the weekend wiped out the master copies of personal data — including address books, calendars, to-do lists and photos — accumulated by users of T-Mobile’s formerly popular Sidekick smartphone.
This computing calamity allows Sidekick owners only a faint hope of backing up the information currently on their devices, and none of recovering anything they’d trusted to online storage. And it leaves T-Mobile and the operator of the Sidekick’s data service, a Microsoft subsidiary formerly known as Danger, Inc. — oh, the irony! — with some serious explaining to do.
Glitches in cloud computing services are not overly rare, but this one was rather unique:
But it is one of the few times a cloud-computing vendor didn’t have any backups — even though the Sidekick’s design leaves users without any easy way to copy their data to their own computers, and even though Microsoft and Danger should have known to run a new backup cycle when a bout of service glitches set in the week before Sidekick users’ data vanished down the bit bucket. It’s one thing for a distracted, inexperienced person at home to forget to back up data until it’s too late; it’s another for a company with the resources of Microsoft to make the same mistake.
Presumably, Microsoft is regretting the rumored US$500 million they spent acquiring Danger, Inc. in February 2008, but they should have done their own due diligence both before and after they bought the company. It may also have a deleterious effect on the rumored Microsoft "Pink" phone which is supposedly based on Danger, Inc designs.
Update: T-Mobile is holding out hope that some user data may still be restored and giving $100 credits to users with a significant loss of data. If you lost your business contact list, calendar, to-do list, and photos, would $100 cover your loss? In the meantime, Sidekick users are instructed not to remove the battery or reset their Sidekicks.
Another day, another Microsoft leak reported by the folks at Gizmodo. This time it is two models (Turtle, Pure) of Microsoft’s long rumored Pink phone:
These phones are going to be made by Sharp, who’ll get to share branding with Microsoft. Sharp produced the Sidekick hardware for Danger, who was bought by Microsoft two years ago. Pink will be primarily aimed at the same market as the Sidekick, and the branding and identity for it is highly developed, pointing toward a later stage in the development cycle.
The prior relationship between Danger and Sharp is the only reason we can think of why Microsoft stuck with Sharp for the new phones, and perhaps why they look so much like remixed Sidekicks. The youth bent is somewhat surprising, if Pink is going to be their big consumer phone play, building off the expertise of Danger and members of the Zune team.
We mentioned the Danger acquisition in February 2008 at which point it looked like just a software play. The Sharp-Danger Sidekick itself was billed as a "hiptop" device that was smaller than a laptop or netbook but bigger than a cell phone, and the photos of the apparently chunky Pink phones do nothing to dispel that same impression. Moreover, the idea of a new form factor is a convenient way to avoid overtly antagonizing Microsoft’s main line cell phone partners who are dutifully licensing Windows Mobile. Still, would you want to buy your smart phone OS from a serious competitor?
So is Pink Microsoft’s answer to the iPhone or just a demo? Time will tell.
