They sold maybe 1.5 million accounts worldwide the past couple of years. That's nothing. When you think there are 1.6 billion hosted e-mail accounts out there and 450 million on-premises Exchange accounts, 1.5 million is a very poor performance

My primary thought is: I'll get more excited about Azure once they give us some inkling of the pricing -- does it apply to me and my employer, or only to my biggest customers?

The reality is a Web services platform like Azure is as broad in its target as Windows or Windows server is, so it really ultimately targets everybody ... The kind of questions you have to ask in some sense is, 'Where are you targeting first?' We really are going after a couple of major audiences in the early days.

That's going to temper how enthusiastic I am. Why learn it if I never get to use it?

The specifics of that we're still working through, and we'll announce those sometime next year

We believe that Su-Mei's appointment ensures a diversity of knowledge and expertise among China Cablecom's Board of Directors ... Her unique media background, knowledge of the region, management experience and vision for innovation qualifies her as a tremendous asset to our team. In particular, Su-Mei's successful track record in launching new ventures in new markets will be extremely valuable to the entire organization and we are excited about welcoming her to the board.

Awareness has a good track record among large organizations, using its products for customer communities, extranet collaboration and, to a lesser extent, for internal deployments (to support communities of interest, for example). There is some integration with other workplace applications

Going offshore may mean spending less money, but there's always a quality issue ... A company has to make a commitment to building customer relations no matter where the service provider is located. If they don't make that commitment, then it doesn't really matter what service costs, it won't succeed.

When you invest in social media marketing technology, you have to keep in mind your business goal and what you're trying to achieve, then make that goal manifest in the campaign ... Mostly, companies want engage in a two-way dialogue with their market. We recommend that they pick a solution/offering that allows them to achieve the immediate goal and then to scale it, because business goals will change quickly and you do not want get stuck in a dead-end strategy with dead-end technology.