This June is the 20th edition of TechEd. The June issue of Redmond magazine will preview this year's show. We'd like to hear from you about your past experiences, and what you're looking for at this year's show.
Reach out to me directly at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/25/20120 comments
This week Microsoft made its SkyDrive cloud storage service better -- then made it way worse. First, the good part: You can now upload folders and bigger files, files as huge as 2GB. The bad news: New users can only upload three of these puppies, as the new limit for the free service is 7GB, down from the formerly generous 25GB.
Compared to Google Drive, SkyDrive is downright roomy. Google only offers 5GB on the house.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/25/20126 comments
Recently we went through a short list of all the names Windows has gone through. It's a lot. I came up with nine separate names for Windows, but clever readers quickly corrected me, like this list from Marc:
Runs under PC/MS-DOS:
- Windows 1.0
- Windows 2.0, 2.10, 2.11
- Windows 3.0, 3.1
Then it splits to:
- MS-DOS kernel (Win32s, co-operative multitasking):
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/23/20128 comments
Readers stuff our suggestion box with what bugs them about Office 365:
Just setting up a simple 30-day trial was not as easy as you would think -- some information was hard to find and confusing when you found it. Microsoft needs to make this much simpler to get wider-spread adoption.
-Anonymous
My chief complaint with Office 365/SharePoint in general is how shielded it is from the public Web. I really wish there was a real app store (PinPoint directory is a joke) and third-party Web services that can access/sync my data in a meaningful way. Where is the integration story with the popular MailChimp Web service? Where is the ability to make and receive calls using Lync client with a Skype business account? Why can't we use Lync to chat with customers on our ecommerce site?
-John
My favorite gripe of all time: 'Too many features.' Oh please Microsoft, if you just allow us to do less; make it less powerful... eh... who is that? Google?
-Dan
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/23/20121 comments
Poor, poor Microsoft. It's stock is stalled worse than Paris Hilton driving a stick. Oh, and every pundit with a keypad or blog is talking about the end of Redmond hegemony and the total dufosity of Steve Ballmer.
Despite all this Microsoft's bean counters report that each and every quarter come up with more beans. This quarter Office and the Windows division both came through swimmingly. Surprisingly, entertainment, which contains the red hot Xbox and Kinect, faltered.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/23/20121 comments
Most of my cars are old -- and I plan to keep it that way. My VW camper is a '72, my 928 is from 1980 and the Land Cruiser shipped from Japan my junior year of high school is from 1978. The rig that gets the most miles is either the '95 Bronco with more rust than a Bering Sea wreck or a '95 Cadillac sedan.
Despite the high cost of gas, it looks like I'm going to have to keep these crates running. That because in a few years our precious government may well mandate that all our new cars have black boxes that will tell exactly what we were doing when an incident occurred. If you want this intrusion out of your own car, you just broke the law!
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/23/20127 comments
I've talked to over a dozen people about Office 365 and, like a cable news panel, everyone's got a different opinion.
I did an extensive report based on Redmond Report readers' experience and found that serious Microsoft IT pros loved Office 365 because it matched the on-premise equivalent pretty much feature for feature and was managed much the same way as the software it replaced.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/20/201210 comments
If you read the above headline thinking Nathan Myhrvold is an ex-genius who worked at Microsoft, you'd be wrong. Nathan is a current genius who used to work at Microsoft.
Bear with me for a bit of history -- I've been writing about this stuff for 28 years. so I tend to ramble more than Dickey Betts (whom I'm distantly related to on my mother's side):
You may remember that when Bill Gates shelled out $171 million for Groove, he really didn't care all that much about the software. He wanted Ray Ozzie's gray matter.
Gates had done this before: Some two decades ago, IBM had a multitasking kludge for PC-DOS called TopView. Microsoft wanted the same thing in its back pocket and found a company called Mondrian. Even better, Mondrian had brothers Nathan and Cam Myhrvold -- both total braniacs. This is what Bill really fell in love with. Nathan eventually became Bill's first chief software architect.
One project the long-retired Nathan worked on that never panned out was video on demand. But just recently it came to light that more than 20 years ago Myhrvold pitched Gates on a pocket-size phone that would "consolidate all personal communication -- telephone, schedule manager, notepad, contacts, and a library of music and books, all in one. It would record and archive everything you asked it to," says Men's Journal magazine. Bill passed on the project. Geniuses aren't always smart, and in this case I'm talking about Bill. Even Ken Jennings got a few questions wrong.
What, in your humble estimation, was Bill's biggest mistake? Confide in all of us at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/20/20125 comments
Like Robert Blake, Google, it seems, can get away with just about anything. It takes photos of our homes, sniffs passwords and Wi-Fi MAC addresses, parses our e-mail, sells our data, co-opts the media and sells ads around content that isn't Google's. No big.
But apparently when you bypass a setting in Apple's browser, you are in for it! Well, in for it at least a little.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/18/20123 comments
Microsoft's next round of products have names that follow no known patterns in the universe. I'm taking about Windows 8, IE 10, "Office 15' and "SharePoint 15." How did all these unshipped products come by these names?
In the case of Windows, it went through this short list; Win 1, 2 3, then 95, 98, XP, Vista, 7 and soon 8 (with a little Windows ME tossed in for good measure). Makes less sense than a Foster Broks dinner speech.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/18/201210 comments
Readers share their wishes, predictions and thoughts on Microsoft's future tablet entries:
ARM tablets running Windows 8 can not join domains or be managed by anything key management tools used at the enterprise-level (well, except for Activesync -- but that does not count as a software management tool, as no AD policies or System Center tools can touch it). This extremely aggravating detail means that most of the affordable, big-battery-life tablets for the enterprise won't be manageable. I am certain that management all over the world is going to be buying Windows 8 tablets at Best Buy for $300 and then get ticked at their IT guys because they can't put their tablets on the network and give them access to their files -- even though the guy next to them has a domain-integrated Intel tablet running Windows 8 (at twice the price). RRRRRgh...
-Garry
I think MS will do better than expect in the tablet market, especially in the enterprise because of all the enterprise features (connecting to domain, central management of policies, disk encryption, integration with Exchange, etc.). I just hope they change their mind and include the same Enterprise features on their Windows on ARM (WOA) as well. Not all enterprise users will need the full-blown i86 tablets. Once Microsoft gets a hold on the enterprise tablet market, then it will start being taken more seriously in the consumer market. MS will be OK as long as it does not fight the competition where it already has a stronghold, but make first priority to make Win8 tablets the tablet of choice for businesses (which no one has a real stronghold on yet).
- 80s Rocker
What I'm hoping for in a Win 8 tablet: I'd like enterprise support, tools to manage my servers and a decent Exchange client. I'd like a file system that I could see/manipulate/control.
I'd like to get out of Apple's balance sheet.
-Greg
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/18/20120 comments
Readers share their thoughts on Microsoft's changed attitude on open source:
I'm still reading your newsletter -- I always look for it on Friday afternoons to give me a short and often humorous break from endless meetings (yes, even on Fridays).
As for Microsoft and inter-operability, Microsoft has moved a long way toward working with open source. I think this is more driven by the same dynamics that always has driven them: money. (And don't get me wrong, I don't think there is a thing wrong with Microsoft making tons of money -- that just helps Bill cure more of the world's ills.) Here are two small pieces of evidence to support this:
1. Redhat is now a $1 billion dollar company and 2) mobile app sales is expected to grow 1200 percent over the next five years and most of those are not expected to be from MS (at least right now).
I look at this as a strategic opportunity for Microsoft. Remember when the Mac came out (1984), Microsoft had a steady operating system called, yep, MS-DOS. Microsoft didn't release Windows 1.0 until 1985 and it was NOT the raging triumph that it is now. Microsoft battled for every scrap of market share. I'm looking for the same type of battles here.
Microsoft has a solid lineup of tech: Xbox, Kinect, Windows Phone 7 (it is worth looking at), Sync and the new Windows 8 operating system. If it can bring all of this together and win mindshare (and market) through collaboration at first, it will be repeated what it did years ago.
Dang, I'm getting old.
-Joe
This shows that Microsoft is putting all hands on deck to offer an alternative vision of computing to the Apple ecosystem. Partnerships like this fuel a new generation of leaders to build value on all platforms. Embrace and extend.
-Larry
Given Microsoft's previous track record, I'm not prepared to give them kudos or even an at-a-boy. You have to wonder if the usually nefarious Microsoft is just trying to gather more intel (small 'i') on Open Source projects to see where best to use its growing patent portfolio to beat down it's competition. If Microsoft is really looking for interoperability, then it should start porting some of its major components (such as Office and SQL Server) to other platforms.
-Anonymous
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/16/20121 comments