I Know You’ve Got Issues!
IT pros face lots of issues every day, from doing more with less, evaluating
technology, keeping users happy, and dealing with bosses and underlings. What
keeps you up at night? Office politics, dealing with vendors, keeping up with
technology, finding and maintaining talent?
Redmond wants to cover your concerns in our pages. What should we write about?
E-mail me at [email protected]
and I’ll try and get a writer right on it.
New StarOffice Beats Office 12 Out The Door
StarOffice, Sun’s $70 version of OpenOffice, has a new rev that claims
to be even more compatible with Office (wonder if newfound friend Microsoft
is lending a file format hand?), offering a larger spreadsheet space to work
with and the ability to make Visual Basic macros work with StarOffice.
Meanwhile, the OpenOffice folks are beating their chests, claiming the upcoming
OpenOffice 2.0 will be 90 percent cheaper to run. Of course, when the software
is available free of charge, it has a pretty nice head start. As Microsoft has
done with Linux servers, the company I’m sure will release TCO and ROI
studies claiming the free software is far more expensive to operate and offers
far less productivity. And they won’t necessarily be wrong. I have OpenOffice
on a backup computer that also runs Firefox, and so far so good -- but I haven’t
really stressed the open source suite much yet. I’ll keep you posted on
how it goes. http://redmondmag.com/news/article.asp?editorialsid=6956
Get OpenOffice here.
Google Hits the Airwaves
I like Google. Long ago it replaced AltaVista as my favorite search engine,
and its desktop search is pretty decent.
If I lived in San Francisco, I’d probably love the company. That’s
because Google wants to offer
San Franciscans free wireless. This move is fueling rumors that Google wants
to wireless-enable the whole dang county. Of course, being utterly selfish,
I only care about free wireless access in the wilds of North Central Massachusetts.
Of course, with my neighbor’s wide open Linksys router, I already have
it! (I do use my own, just to let you know.)
| Subscribe
to Redmond Report |
This column
was originally published in our weekly Redmond Report newsletter.
To subscribe, click here. |
|
|
Symantec in a BindView
The goal of smallish companies is to make money, which can be through pure profits,
an IPO or to get acquired. It can take a long time to pay off the initial investment
and become purely profitable, and IPOs have gone the way of the dodo. So the
best option is to get bought. Compliance vendor BindView has now taken two approaches:
It went public in 1998 when the market was good and this week announced that
Symantec
will buy it for some $200 million.
Supreme Court Knows Microsoft
If a Microsoft case makes it to the Supreme Court, a
justice or two might have to recuse themselves. It seems that new Chief
Justice John Roberts argued against Microsoft in the government’s anti-trust
case. New nominee Harriet Miers worked the opposite side, representing Microsoft
in a class action suit that claimed MS-DOS was defective. If MS-DOS is defective,
what do they call Windows Me?
About the Author
Doug Barney is editor in chief of Redmond magazine and the VP, editorial director of Redmond Media Group.