Channel Beat: More Headaches With Office 365

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In this week’s top stories, Microsoft is calling Office 365 its fastest-growing product in history, but partners are complaining about growing pains.

Microsoft’s former head of Windows engineering, Steven Sinofsky, took to Twitter to vent his frustration about being unable to sign up for Office 365. That incident came only a week after Microsoft got heat for outages and poor communication.

Partners are asking for better support from Microsoft, which has seen 4.4 million users subscribe to its 365 Home edition in just more than two years on the market.

For the first time ever, tablet shipments will exceed PC shipments by the end of 2015, Gartner said in a report this week. Gartner predicts 316.6 million PC devices will sell by the end of next year, while more than 320.9 million tablets will sell. Tablet shipments are expected to jump 24 percent by the end of this calendar year.

IDC released second-quarter PC numbers this week, with U.S. shipments up almost 7 percent. HP held onto the top spot domestically, and four out of five of the top PC makers experienced double-digit growth during the quarter.

Shipments worldwide dropped 1.7 percent, with Lenovo leading the pack and holding on to nearly 20 percent of the global market. HP and Dell followed, respectively. Dell is No. 2 in the U.S., which IDC attributes to boosted channel relationships and privatization.