Allchin's Last Hurrah
Jim Allchin, whom Redmond magazine dubbed "Mr. Windows," is not leaving
Microsoft quietly or disloyally. Instead, he's going out of his way to extol
the virtues of his baby, otherwise known as Vista. Allchin is trying to
rally
the ISV troops to get behind Vista and forget about those other desktop
OSes. ("What other desktop OSes?" is my unfortunate answer.)
I'd like to know what ISVs and corporate developers will do with Vista. Will
we see fundamentally different apps once Vista, .NET 3.0, Web services and dynamic
languages take hold? What would you like to see? IT pros and developers are
free to tell me at the bottom of this column or at [email protected].
Come On and Zune Zune Zune a Zune
The iPod is definitely cool, but far from amazing. It stores songs, pics and,
if you've got the scratch, cheesy, low-res videos. For now, though, no one does
it better. It simply works (and my kids have the ear damage to prove it!).
Microsoft thinks it can one-up
the iPod with Zune. Like the Nintendo DS, Zune is wireless so folks can
share tunes. The hope is that listeners will fall in love and buy the songs
they hear. I'm sticking with my cassettes, LPs and 8-tracks for now.
Just What Is Spam?
The Spamhaus Project is standing on principle, and despite a
$12 million judgment against it, the organization refuses to take e360Insight
off its spam list. e360 claims users can opt out of its e-mails at any time.
Spamhaus is sticking to its anti-spam guns.
Live Goes Live
A couple of weeks ago, I tried Microsoft's
Live Search and was as unimpressed as I am with the beta of Live Mail (the
old Hotmail is faster and less flaky). Live Search should be better than the
beta as it is in commercial release in over 40 markets. I did some quick searches,
and all I've got to say is Redmond best get to indexing!
Pet a Dog, Petaflop
Back in the day, everything was about MIPS. Then PCs got us into megahertz.
Soon, we'll be talking about flops – metaflops, to be precise. A petaflop
is a quadrillion
operations a second. These computers, stuffed with as many as a million
processors, will be set to work on huge, perplexing, important scientific questions
-- like who created God and how Oprah got so famous.
New Coke
My son David is a fan of the Mac, Black Flag and open source. His favorite beverage?
Open Cola.
Unfortunately, he loves only in theory, as the Canadian company is out of business.
I guess that's what happens when you give your recipe away!
About the Author
Doug Barney is editor in chief of Redmond magazine and the VP, editorial director of Redmond Media Group.