Microsoft Research has gotten many a bum rap from the business press. Journos
who are fixated on stock prices and product launches just don't understand why
Redmond would invest billions researching "a best-first alignment algorithm
for automatic extraction of transfer mappings from bilingual corpora" or
do a "comparative study of discriminative methods for re-ranking LVCSR
N-best hypotheses in domain adaptation and generalization." (When you put
it that way, I'm not so sure either!)
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/03/20071 comments
Microsoft's plan to take over the anti-virus/security software from those who
created it has moved into overdrive with the
release
of Forefront Client Security
.
I've been critical of this move on the grounds that partners -- including Symantec,
McAfee and Sunbelt -- together saved Windows from the unrelenting peril that
is viruses. Once they showed the way, it was easy for Microsoft to do the exact
same thing, competing with the very vendors that helped keep Windows running
in the first place! We tackled this and other issues in our January cover story
"Unfair
Fight."
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/03/20070 comments
Versions of Windows have always suffered and benefited from the use of old code.
The benefit is backward compatibility. The suffering comes from a failure to
move fully forward, slow performance and security holes.
After Trustworthy Computing, many of us thought that Vista would be different.
And in most cases it is. But not every hunk of code is new and that leaves pieces
of Vista vulnerable.
I learned all this from Redmondmag.com contributor Steve Swoyer, who explains
that old code from Windows 2000 led
to the recently reported mouse cursor vulnerability.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/03/20070 comments
Savvysoft
isn't
so savvy when it comes to trademarks
.
The company, realizing that Microsoft hadn't registered Excel as a trademark,
launched a product called "TurboExcel," and then tried to finagle
Microsoft into paying heaps of dough to keep the name "Excel."
It didn't work, and now TurboExcel, which runs on top of Microsoft Excel, is
called "Calc4Web."
Not the catchiest name I've ever heard, but it sure does beat Windows Live
Hotmail. Is it Windows, is it Live or is it Hotmail?
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/02/20071 comments
Love is a wonderful thing, except when it clouds your judgment and makes it
impossible for you to let go of what you've already lost. And no one loved their
computers more than the owners of Commodore Amigas.
The fact that Commodore went utterly bankrupt and that the machines have been
pretty much dead for over a decade didn't stop these users from dreaming, and
the true believers from plotting a comeback.
The latest scheme comes from Amiga Inc., which promises to deliver two
brand-new PowerPC-based models.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/02/20073 comments
The word "Ubuntu" may mean a universal bond that unites humanity,
but these days it also refers to the tight ties between the Ubuntu desktop version
of Linux and Dell, which will
preload
the OS onto PCs and laptops
for any customers who ask.
Desktop Linux has long been maligned for its lack of driver support. Nowadays,
that rap is also given to Vista.
I'd love to run a new Dell Ubuntu box alongside Vista and see if that old Linux
knock still holds up. If any of you have tried 'em both, give us your verdict
at
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/02/20070 comments
I got a couple of reminders last week from Microsoft about how Windows Genuine
Advantage (WGA) works and why it's so important (at least to Microsoft).
The company is hoping I'll pass on this information about anti-piracy to customers
and partners so we can all do our part in protecting Microsoft's revenue stream.
But in reading the description, I was left with a nagging doubt. I'm not an
anti-piracy technology guru, so the need for WGA to regularly check the software
after it was initially confirmed as legit is puzzling.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/01/20070 comments
The
second
beta of Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)
shipped a few days ago,
and Microsoft says it is an utterly different product from beta 1.
VMM is a tool that helps track performance and manage virtual machines. And
if Microsoft wants to keep pace with VMware, it better get products like VMM
right.
In fact, I can't think of a company that has been so successful, despite being
in Redmond's crosshairs. Well, maybe Google!
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/01/20070 comments
There are a whole lot of big areas where Microsoft's strategy is unclear. Software-as-a-service
(SaaS) is one of them. Instead of showing leadership, Microsoft is allowing
companies such as Salesforce.com to define what SaaS is and how it's done.
Microsoft
finally went on the record, and while it didn't lay out a grand SaaS strategy,
it did define its idea of how a SaaS app is architected.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/01/20070 comments
In a recent editorial, I argued that
print
is far from dead
, and pointed out that the Redmond Media Group launched
three print pubs in the space of 25 months.
Now the editor in chief of PC Magazine,
Jim Louderback, is seeing things my way.
A PR man/blogger from Edelman PR had the unmitigated gall to write that he
tosses his free copy of PC Mag right into the garbage. This PR man/clown
apparently never paused to reflect on the countless pitches his company makes
to PC Mag, literally begging to get into Louderback's pages.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/30/20070 comments
Sometimes, journalists write provocatively just to be provocative. The Web
site
Light Reading
did this early in its life, and now it seems that
The
Register
out of the U.K. is doing the same thing.
Last week, just before Microsoft's earnings report, The Register posted an
eight-page diatribe arguing that Steve
Ballmer should be replaced with someone like Lou Gerstner, who ran IBM in
the '90s.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/30/20070 comments