Last April, the economy was crashing worse than a Lindsay Lohan SUV, and critics were predicting the fall of the Redmond empire. I wrote a long essay, "The Strength to Endure," arguing that Microsoft would be just fine.
Microsoft's latest earnings report backs my case, as rampant Windows 7 sales have Microsoft bean counters working overtime. Not only did Microsoft pull in nearly $19 billion (with an impressive net income of nearly $7 billion), but sales rose 60 percent compared to a year ago.
In fact, this is Microsoft's best quarter ever! Driving this success is some 60 million Windows 7 licenses. Xbox Live is no slouch, either, with 23 million current members (I have a pretty rabid one in the house).
How will Microsoft do in the coming decade? Let us know by writing [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/01/2010 at 1:17 PM4 comments
Readers ponder the future of the Oracle-Sun deal, from where money will be invested to Oracle's approach to the cloud:
It's going to be interesting to see how all of this pans out. I wonder which products Oracle is going to maintain. I didn't get a chance to watch the press conference, but a buddy told me that they're going to increase R&D from $2 billion to $4 billion. That's never bad. We'll just have to wait and see where that money's funnelled.
Sun had been putting some serious coin into developing VirtualBox, trying to get it to a point that it will compete with tier 1 virtual hosts. Will Oracle allow funds to be directed there (to a losing battle, in my opinion)? This could be a good thing. I'm looking forward with cautious optimism.
-Cory
So Oracle wants a cloud version of OpenOffice. So Larry doesn't think the cloud is a joke anymore?
-Cameron
In the spirit of last week's Hugo Chavez debacle, here's some more outrage (only this time, a little more tongue-in-cheek):
Oracle held a press conference "longer than a Joe Biden diatribe"? You must have your vice presidents confused. Surely you meant to say "an Al Gore diatribe." And how dare you compare a ruthless dictator like Joe Biden to Larry Ellison? The nerve of you!
-Anonymous
But do you think that you will now be attacked by the Democrats or risk having a visit from the Secret Service by using Biden as an example? You really know how to live dangerously.
-Jeffrey
And Howard gives his vote for favorite defunct tech company, only this one is for all the wrong reasons:
Burroughs, because it was just so terrible. The equipment was terrible, the service was terrible, the pay was terrible, the customers hated us after they bought the equipment. But Burroughs did one thing right: They only hired very young, inexperienced sales guys who just kept smiling.
-Howard
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/01/2010 at 1:17 PM2 comments
Blogger Bob Evans recently took offense when Doug compared Larry Ellison's epic-length conference detailing the Sun deal to a "Hugo Chavez-style five-hour company and press event." But many of you, like Doug, think he doth protest too much:
When I read your piece that used the Hugo Chavez metaphor, it didn't even occur to me that you were trying to picture Larry Ellison as a tyrant. It was obviously a reference to long-windedness. It is amazing how aggressively people that are carrying a large chip around can find such odd things to become upset about.
-Anonymous
I never looked at it in that light, nor after reading about Evans' reaction does it readjust your position or mine.
-Rick
It never occurred to me to compare Larry to Hugo, but I immediately got the analogy for the long press event. Now that I think about it a little more, doesn't Larry own and fly a MiG? I hear Chavez is buying.
-John
I have been following you and Evans for about the same time (10 years, give or take a few months). I have noticed that while you have remained even-keeled and humorous, I have found Evans' stuff getting more and more hostile. I haven't read the article yet, but I will tonight. I am appalled at Evans. He sounds like a pompous ass.
Kudus to you for being the bigger person. I, however, will not be so diplomatic. He is definitely going to get an earful from me.
-Rich
I got the joke the first time (even though I admire Larry and despise Hugo). It seems Mr. Evans has given us reason to update the saying "Don't speak before you think" to "Don't blog before you think."
Of course, it just could be that, like so many commentators out there today, he hears what he wants to hear, sees what he wants to see, and HATES anyone who doesn't see or hear it his way!
-Ron
I may disagree with you at times, but I have never doubted your journalistic integrity. Continue to stay above the name-calling that the Internet seems to degenerate to.
-Ed
As a longtime reader and part-time journalist, you were correct in the facts and logic of your initial discourse. In addition, you have long used correct journalistic practices and your precise use of the English language could only have been misinterpreted by someone with an axe to grind. Congratulations on taking the high road!
-Glenn
Microsoft's Brad Smith is pushing Congress to pass laws to increase cloud computing security, but Hans doesn't think legislation is the answer:
Having been in IT for many years (I was in DP before it became fashionably known as IT) my take on the cloud security issue is this: Any data put into, on, thru or otherwise uses clouds to transport or store data must take into consideration that the cloud is, by definition, unsecure. If you're so concerned about your data being usurped by someone while in the cloud, then stay the hell out of the cloud.
If this passing of laws each time someone comes up with a new idea to store or move data keeps up, we will be faced to have lawyers looking over our shoulders with each keystroke or cursor movement. Let's put some common sense back into this industry! Lawyers are getting their pockets lined everywhere -- let's NOT get them involved here.
-Hans
Got a beat-up car you just can't part with? Doug's got his '96 Ford Bronco; here are some of yours:
I used to have a clunky daily driver. It was a 1981 Oldsmobile Delta 88. I bought it from the original owner's son in 1991 with only 51K miles on it. But eight years later, it had over 230K miles and had seen better days. Both rear quarter panels were rusted, two out of four wire wheel hub caps were missing, the paint was peeling away on the trunk and the passenger side was banged up (the result of skidding into a mailbox while trying to avoid hitting a dog in the road). Also, the AC no longer worked and the speedometer cable was broken.
Yet, prior to it getting stolen (yes, it was stolen), I could still squeeze out 20 MPG on the highway for such a big car (V8, 305, 5L), and the engine did not burn or leak a drop of oil. That car owed me nothing.
-Rich
'95 Mustang 3.8L base model. It received a '96 engine from the wrecking yard when the original one lost oil pressure. Paint coming off in sheets, driver's seat has holes and broken springs, and there are pieces of tortilla chips and granola bars in every nook and cranny (that last part I can fix). No rust, though, so maybe your Bronco wins.
-Gary
I think I saw a rebuilt '96 Ford Bronco crushing a bunch of cars on a monster truck rally commercial. Sometimes, the old, rusted-out jalopies get rebuilt and trounce the competition.
-Chris
And Chris adds his thoughts on Project Vulcan, a more "social" version of Lotus Notes that IBM is developing:
Lotus Notes a social animal? You bet. Better to say, however, that IBM Lotus is a social software company -- for the enterprise, that is. And sure, that includes the e mail/collaborative app client called Notes.
-Chris
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/29/2010 at 1:17 PM0 comments
Sometimes, stories like the one I'm about to bring you turn out false. But I'll proceed in assuming it's true. Apparently, an ex-Microsoft worker inadvertently posted release dates for nearly all important products Redmond is working on.
Here's a rundown of the leaked dates: Windows 8 will be out July 2011, Office 2012 a year later, and SQL Server 2011 in -- you guessed it -- 2011!
These dates may be real Microsoft dates, but software is software. As a young journalist, I liked nothing better than to clobber companies for missing dates. Now that I've been doing this for 25 years, I've learned a thing or two about software. For one, I still can't write it, and for two, it's unfair of me to be critical when people who can write it take longer than they thought they would to finish.
My hunch? Real or not, these dates are meaningless. Do you care about or believe release dates? Express yourself at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/29/2010 at 1:17 PM2 comments
Oracle held a press conference longer than a Joe Biden diatribe this week to explain to the world just what it intends to do with Sun. I'm talking five solid hours of exec-speak.
Now, I'm usually not happy when a cool, independent company gets bought, but Oracle is probably the best buyer for Sun. Like Sun, Oracle is feisty and pushes more envelopes than my local post office.
The good news is that Oracle wants to maintain the Sun brand, but only for "some products." Most of the messaging revolved around integrating Sun into Oracle, thus reducing any hope for Sun independence. More good news is that Oracle remains committed to both Java and Solaris.
In classic Oracle style, the company used the acquisition of Sun to go right after Microsoft. In particular, Oracle wants to go after the Office franchise with a cloud version of OpenOffice. I've used OpenOffice briefly and talked to Redmond Report readers about it, and it's pretty solid software. The only beef is that it's too much like Microsoft Office!
I hate to see Sun go, but I'm interested to see what Oracle does with all this technology. Is Sun-Oracle good for our industry? Let us know at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/29/2010 at 1:17 PM1 comments
Doug asked readers recently to share their favorite late, great tech companies. Here are some more:
NeXT.
-Anonymous
Ricochet and Digital Equipment Corp. (the originator of 64-bit).
-Al
Mine is Wang Laboratories of Lowell, Mass. I was there in 1983 when Wang had 300 employees and Dr. Wang would go around and pay office visits to all the cubicles, asking how we liked our jobs. I was there when Wang had 35,000 employees around the world in an amazing period of growth. I was there when Dr. Wang was diagnosed with esophageal cancer (he was a chain smoker to the nth degree, with two ashtrays and a cigarette going in both). When he found out, he got rid of all the cigarette machines in the building and did not allow smoking anymore except for one designated room on each floor.
During that time, Chinese tradition forced Fred Wang, the eldest son, to take over the business. He did not want to. Fred wanted to teach business subjects at Harvard Business School. So what happened? Fred surrounded himself with atta-boy-Fred people who agreed with everything he said and, not knowing what he should do, he ran Wang into the ground, insisting on proprietary software (which, of course, did not work with other vendors' software running on all kinds of other vendors' hardware).
As a result, I was there when Wang went back down to 350 employees in 1994, and then I left for other opportunities. I helped many good friends carry their things to their cars as they were laid off. Because so many people were being laid off at once, security couldn't manage it, so people were taking furniture, computers, etc. But who cared? It was an incredible tragedy. And where is Fred now? Teaching business subjects at Harvard Business School. Wang is no more. Well, it sort of evolved into Getronics, but they're in survival mode, with about 350 employees.
-Anonymous
I really miss Hayes modems.
-Rich
I agree that the Amiga was way ahead of its time. I recall Amigas with the NewTek video toaster selling for thousands of dollars for many years because nothing else could touch it.
DEC is long gone, but VMS (now OpenVMS) is alive and well. It follows from Compaq and then to HP, migrating from VAX to Alpha and now to Intel Itanium. I can assure you that it is as powerful, secure and stable as ever. We use it here to run our factories.
-Dave
DEC was a great company. The equipment is rock-solid. In fact, we still have Alphas running VMS in production. I'll be glad when I don't have to deal with MYLEX controllers anymore. Back in the day, they were good, but compared to modern RAID controllers, are a bit short on features.
-Bruce
Phil has a tip for one reader who wondered why it's so complicated to mark a message as "Unread" in Gmail:
The solution to EJ's Gmail gripe is in the Gmail Labs. Click on the little beaker icon in the upper-right corner to get to Gmail Labs, then scroll down about two-thirds of the way to find the "Mark as Read" button and enable it. This has saved me many a click!
-Phil
More letters coming on Friday! Meanwhile, leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/27/2010 at 1:17 PM1 comments
Friends, your faithful scribe has been attacked, reviled, subjected to ridicule and hostility. Bob Evans, senior VP at TechWeb (which, incidentally, competes with nearly every property I run) came across my item about Oracle buying Sun.
In that item I said, "I admit it: I'm a huge fan of Sun Microsystems...But it soon may no longer be a company at all as the European Union this week approved Oracle's proposed $7.4 billion buyout. It's such a done deal that Larry Ellison is planning a Hugo Chavez-style five-hour company and press event next week on the matter."
Evans decided to give me a lesson in journalism. In his mind, I was directly comparing Larry Ellison to Hugo Chavez.
But if you read my sentence correctly, you can see I'm comparing the "company and press event" to a Chavez event. It's a simple metaphor.
Evans lays further groundwork, suggesting that maybe I "got confused and was thinking of Fidel Castro, who like Chavez is also a brutal tyrant but who has legitimately earned his reputation for long-windedness for the past 60 years in Cuba."
Anyone who knows anything about Chavez knows that he loves to give marathon speeches. A quick Google search could have told Evans that.
So Mr. Evans' entire premise is wrong, but he uses it anyway to attack me and one of my properties, saying, "The one and only thing a media brand has going for it is credibility with readers. And when nitwits like Barney write gratuitous and vicious things about a CEO of Ellison's caliber, it just adds to the growing disillusionment so many people have these days with media properties that fail to respect the audiences' intelligence..."
And, as if the reader didn't already know how he feels, Evans calls me "asinine." This guy is pulling out all the stops!
Mr. Evans is also a mind reader, as he makes clear in this passage: "Is Larry Ellison's [sic] everybody's hero? Surely not. Can he be hard-edged and savagely competitive? You bet he can, and those traits lead to another quality of Ellison's that Barney and perhaps others object to: he's one of the wealthiest people in the world."
Let me get this straight. Even though I never maligned Mr. Ellison, somehow Evans thinks I'm jealous of his wealth. Mr. Evans is an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon. Does he teach students to make such leaps of logic?
Now here's a lesson for Mr. Evans, and I won't use words like "nitwit" and "asinine" to make my point. Even in blogs and newsletters, writers have to be careful and statements should be grounded in fact. Evans didn't parse my sentence properly and falsely argued that Hugo Chavez isn't known for long speeches. That double-error is the same kind of shoot-from-the-hip journalism Evans falsely accused me of.
I've been wrong many times, and when I am, I admit it publicly. In fact, loyal Redmond Report readers are the ones that keep me on the straight and narrow.
Mr. Evans is a different animal. He refuses to admit any error and seems quite happy with what he's done. Unlike him, I'll show some class and not say how I truly feel.
Yesterday, I posted a comment on Evans' blog, to which he responded in a rather evasive manner. When I tried to respond, the system blocked my post. I'm still shut out of the comments section. I'm not sure if this is a glitch or censorship, but unlike Evans, I'm not going to jump to any conclusions.
Whether you agree with me or Bob, feel free to share your comments on his blog. Of course, as a loyal Redmond Report reader, you're more than welcome to write me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/27/2010 at 1:17 PM21 comments
In 1999, while at Network World, Carolyn Marsan and I interviewed Vint Cerf about IPv6. Cerf was beseeching the entire industry to move as quickly a possible to IPv6 since IPv4 addresses were running out.
Thanks to a kludge or two, 11 years later there are still IPv4 addresses left -- but not many. Over 90 percent of all possible IPv4 addresses are in use. At this rate, all of them will be gone by 2013, says the Number Resource Organization.
The good news is that IPv6 has been here for a long time, it works, and companies such as Microsoft are doing a great job supporting it.
I guess the lesson here is we should all get moving on IPv6. Vint Cert will thank you!
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/27/2010 at 1:17 PM12 comments
I used Notes in a past life and didn't much care for it, at least as far as pure e-mail goes. It was clunkier than my rusted-out '96 Ford Bronco (which is my daily driver). But many people love Notes, especially IBM, which is touting an upcoming version that's a bigger social butterfly than the late Truman Capote. (Remember when social butterflies actually had some brains?)
Project Vulcan, a Notes and Domino technology with no set delivery date, aims to help corporations build their own social networks, both for internal use and customer outreach. The technology also lets employees track who is doing what, a feature similar to the activity streams in SharePoint 2010.
Who has the clunkiest daily driver? Tell us about your jalopy at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/25/2010 at 1:17 PM1 comments
Nearly three years in the making, SQL Server 2008 R2 is finally on its way. It's due to land in IT shops this May.
Something called R2 doesn't sound that exciting or all that new, but Microsoft often packs a lot of new stuff into these releases. Windows Server 2008 R2, for instance, could have just as easily been called SQL Server 2010.
SQL Server 2008 R2 has some new business intelligence features such as PowerPivot. PowerPivot (can we call it PP?) works with Excel and turns database data into online analytical processing (OLAP) data.
There's way more to this, but I don't have room for an entire treatise. All I can say is that Microsoft thinks PowerPivot is so important, it actually had its own code name: Project Gemini.
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/25/2010 at 1:17 PM1 comments
Microsoft legal eagle Brad Smith is asking Washington to pass laws and revise existing ones to make sure our clouds are safe, secure and private.
There are a number of computer-related laws on the books, but all were written when the predominant style of computing involved hard drives and local processing.
Smith is looking for action in three areas. First, he wants cloud providers to be able to hunt down hackers, something I'm clearly in favor of. Next, he wants information to be as private as possible, in part by making cloud providers disclose privacy policies clearly. Finally, he wants our security acts to take clouds into full consideration.
These are all noble goals. I hope there's real legislation that addresses IT concerns, especially relating to the privacy of corporate data. What laws would you pass? Lobby me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/25/2010 at 1:17 PM1 comments
Doug's item last week about Oracle's impending buyout of IBM had readers reminiscing about their favorite "defunct" tech companies. Here are some of your thoughts:
Don't laugh -- my favorite defunct computer company is good, old Commodore. The Amiga was a masterpiece of its day, and had its engineering team had the same opportunities as, say, Apple to research, refine and innovate, I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find the modern-day Amiga on a par with Cray while priced like a netbook.
Well, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but you get my point...maybe?
-Tom
When Commodore Computers went out of business, it was a huge blow to innovation. The Amiga was way ahead of its time. My memories may parallel the stories about the big one that got away, but I believe the Amiga was doing tricks back in the '80s that the clones couldn't do until the next decade. Heck, the Commadore 64 was doing things with 64K of memory (thats kilo, as in thousand) that my Windows beast still chokes on with four gigs of memory.
-T.L.
My favorite defunct company is Javelin Software, which reinvented the spreadsheet as a personal OLAP cube 25 years ago. Their IPO was scheduled for a week after the mini stock crash in 1988 and that ended them. They were bought by IRI who let them stagnate, then IRI was bought by Oracle who killed off the Javelin line.
Shortly after that, Lotus released Improv which was a virtual clone of Javelin ported to the NeXT and later Windows.
-Mike
DEC and the the DEC VAX/VMS operating system wins my award for what is sorely missed these days. Intrusions? Not a chance. Downtime? Minimal to none. Time between outages was often measured in years for issues that were OS-related (most downtime was due to putting in a new version of something that was just developed).
DEC had industrial-strength computing at cheap prices long before Intel came around and mucked it up. The hardware had built into it from DAY ONE the ability to prevent memory access hacks. It is my understanding that unless you had physical access to the system, you couldn't even hack into it unless you guessed a weak password.
-Bruce
Loved my Prime super-minis. Used them for over 20 years and about nine years past the closing of the company. Much of the software developed on Primes during the '80s continues to run on our second round of IBM AIX equipment.
-Stephen
Greg throws his two cents into the Google-Microsoft cloud debate:
Interesting thoughts on the positions Google and Microsoft take regarding the cloud. But neither appear to be viewing the debate from the point of view of the end user, whose data is the fodder for this entire debate.
What are users interested in? Fundamentally, as I see it, we want ease of use and data security: we want what we want, when we want it, and we want it secure. Neither cloud nor local storage provides both perfectly, so it stands to reason that the user should have the option to use either method when they find it apropriate. To that end, I think Microsoft stands on more solid ground than Google in this debate.
-Greg
And Mel takes issue with one reader's comment last Wednesday about how the U.S. might be affected by China's censorship practices:
Mel states that "Obama-nation" might "follow suit" with the Chinese and censorship. Puleeeze! There are many things to dislike about Obama but denial of freedoms are not among them. He and his followers opposed the usurping of our rights under the previous administration. Please keep political conjecture out of this forum.
-Earl
Check in on Wednesday for more reader letters. Meanwhile leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/25/2010 at 1:17 PM0 comments