COO Turner Stresses Upgrade, Cloud Opportunities In Microsoft WPC Keynote

Microsoft had great success with Windows XP, Office 2003 and Internet Explorer 6, Turner noted. "Those products deserve a standing ovation," he said. "We love those products. But you know what? They're dead They're dead," he said, pointing out that all support for Windows XP ends in 2014.

Turner's annual pep talk to channel partners, usually one of the last WPC keynotes, always focuses on what the COO sees as the channel opportunities for the upcoming year. Upgrading customers to Windows 7, Office 2010 and IE 9 was a major theme of his pitch.

"It is just a tremendous partner opportunity to help customers make that transition," he said, noting there are an estimated 300 million business PCs still running on the decade-old desktop OS.

Not surprisingly, cloud computing was also a focus of Turner's speech and he touted the sales potential of such products as Office 365 and Windows Intune. He also promoted Microsoft's System Center, Hyper-V and SQL Server products for building private cloud solutions. "This is the year to get behind the private cloud in a huge way," he said.

Much of Turner's speech, as always, included some trash-talking at the expense of Microsoft's competition. Microsoft, for example, sees Oracle's customer base as fertile ground as Oracle's next-generation Fusion applications come to market. ("Fusion isn't an upgrade, it's a migration," said Doug Kennedy, Microsoft vice president of Dynamics Partners, in an earlier interview.)

"How many happy Oracle customers are you talking to?" Turner asked rhetorically. "It's a huge opportunity for us. We can rescue Oracle customers in a big way." Microsoft execs have particularly targeted users of Oracle's Siebel CRM applications, for example. "There are no happy Siebel customers in the world. You know that," Turner said.

Turner took aim at Salesforce.com and VMware, arguing that Microsoft has a big price advantage over those competitors. He also said that in Microsoft's last fiscal year Microsoft partners replaced 4.5 million Lotus Notes seats with Microsoft Exchange and other products and he vowed to replace another 5 million this year.

Google is another favorite Turner target. "Microsoft and our partners should not lose a deal to Google," he said. "That's the goal, that's the objective."