Gladys Rama, who has been the editor, producer and overall guru of RCPU for several years now, is abandoning us here at 1105 Media to pursue her dream of traveling the world. Seriously, doesn't that sound fantastic? Applause to you for that, Gladys.
If you've ever wondered why I use the first-person plural in this newsletter, it's because RCPU is about a whole lot more than just me. Gladys has been the lynchpin of this operation, keeping RCPU running smoothly and mostly keeping me sane over the last few years. Not only is she one of the finest editors I've ever worked with, she has also put up with every lousy pun, every ridiculous YouTube link and every obscure pop culture reference I've dropped into this space over the years. For that, she deserves a combat medal of some sort.
I will miss Gladys immensely, and I wish her nothing but happiness and prosperity in her travels and in her life. Thank you, Gladys, for all you've done for me and for RCPU, and bon voyage. -- Lee Pender
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2010 at 1:22 PM1 comments
VirnetX is in the money--or it should be soon enough given its
big win over Microsoft in a patent case this week . Those ol' Tyler Roses were in bloom for a patent plaintiff again, as a Texas jury awarded VirnetX almost $106 million and said that Microsoft had infringed on patents related to VPN technology. We can hear the open source crowd laughing (again) from here--you live by the patent and die by the patent, eh, Microsoft? Well, die is a very strong word--Microsoft can produce $106 million the way we at RCPU can produce pocket lint. But know this: If you're sued for patent infringement in Tyler, Texas, just settle or something because you are going to lose.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2010 at 1:22 PM1 comments
It's not a Hyper-V problem, but the researchers at Core Security say that the
Virtual PC hypervisor has a hole in it so big that your editor could fit through it even after spending a couple of hours at a free breakfast buffet.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2010 at 1:22 PM0 comments
If there's one company that moves more glacially than Microsoft, it's SAP. And if there's one company that moves more glacially than SAP, it's IBM. After talking up public cloud platforms for quite a while, IBM finally has one. We like the name: IBM Cloud. Tasteful and easy to say. Whether it'll compete with Azure, Amazon, Google and the rest is less clear, but it's rarely a good idea to bet against IBM.
Jeff Schwartz has the details of IBM's public-cloud effort at RCPmag.com.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2010 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Maybe this gives us a hint as to why Microsoft is trying so hard to get its mobile platform into working order. The market for mobile applications is about to take off like a rocket, one study says.
OK. So, the sponsor of the study is...an application store. Still, if they're anywhere close to accurate, the numbers here are pretty staggering. Check out some of these figures from the BBC story linked above, guv'na:
"A study done for Getjar, the world's second biggest app store, said the market will grow to $17.5bn (£12bn) in the next two years.
"The study claimed downloads would climb from 7bn last year to 50bn by 2012 -- a 92% year-on-year increase.
"It found there had been a gold rush with the number of app stores rising from four before 2008 to 48 today."
The study also suggests that Apple might not have a chokehold on the app-store market forever--although it's really not surprising to read that in a study sponsored by another app store. Still, the point here is that Microsoft isn't out of this thing yet. If Windows Phone 7 can capture some of the momentum that its desktop cousin has garnered, Microsoft and its partners could be in for some serious app cash in the years to come.
What we want to know now is: How do you plan to profit from this? How do partners get in on the mobile craze and generate revenue from it? We'd love to hear your stories and your plans. Send them, please, to [email protected]. And, yes, we will start running reader e-mail again someday. We promise.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2010 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Stop us if you've heard this one before:
SAP is talking about hosted and on-demand applications. Sound familiar? It should. SAP blew smoke about hosted apps for years and then introduced its Business ByDesign offering, which, aside from being grammatically ambiguous, was a bit of a catastrophe. In fact, RCPU has heard that the company pretty much scrapped the whole project (and its staff), although there's still a
ByDesign page on SAP's Web site.
Well, the German titan's new leadership is saying that on-demand apps will be back on the menu, right there next to payroll software, the balanced scorecard and schnitzel. If SAP can pull it off, Microsoft Dynamics partners might want to watch out for a serious competitor in the SMB ERP space. But we're not holding our breath, frankly.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/17/2010 at 1:22 PM1 comments
So, about that upgrade to Windows 7...you might be doing it sooner than you'd planned if you're interested in Microsoft's next browser release.
Reports coming out of this week's big MIX10 developer conference suggest that IE9 is going to be super-cool and might actually out-perform Firefox (your editor's choice) and Google Chrome. Microsoft is, as it seems to be with everything these days, "all in" for IE 9 and the emerging HTML5 standard, which it'll use in development of the browser. Cool, right?
Well, sure...unless you're part of the majority of the world's computer users that runs Windows XP, which you very likely are (as are we). IE9 and XP are not going to get along, apparently. So you're going to have to have Vis...wait, nobody would do that. You're going to have to have Windows 7 if you want to run IE 9. Dig this quote from the article linked earlier in this paragraph:
"'Building a modern browser requires a modern operating system,' Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said at a press conference at the Mix10 event."
OK, Dean, we get it. And you have a point. XP is old, and given that IE9 will be able to use a PC's processing power to show graphics, most old XP machines probably wouldn't be able to handle the new browser, anyway. Besides, browsers are free, so it's not as though a "forced upgrade" is really going to irk anybody that much, right?
Windows 7 is a hit, but IE9 might just be the final nail in XP's coffin if the forthcoming browser really ends up being as spectacular as it appears it will be. Needless to say, with the browser wars and quite possibly the market share of what Microsoft hopes will be the world's next default OS riding on it, IE9 has some work to do. Will it be up to the task? Time will tell.
What do you want from the next version of IE? Would you upgrade your OS just to use a new version of the browser? Let us know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/17/2010 at 1:22 PM6 comments
With Google looking to possibly pull out of China, would Microsoft be the beneficiary of the vacuum that Google's absence would leave? Maybe, some
experts are saying...
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/17/2010 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Oh, the jokes we could make about Skittles and Mountain Dew, but we're going to give developers a break this week as they attend the Microsoft MIX10 conference in Las Vegas.
After all, there is a bunch of stuff going on at MIX, and some of it might even interest partners. Let's start with Silverlight, which is taking analytics to a new level, as Kathleen Richards explains at RCPmag.com. Going beyond simple Web analytics, Silverlight's new Analytics Framework tracks what users do with Silverlight both in a browser and outside of one. It's all part of Silverlight 4, which Microsoft will likely make available this week.
Then there's the new development platform for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's attempt to pull the rip cord on its mobile operating system's parachute and stop its market-share free fall. The free tools will be based on Silverlight 4 and Microsoft's XNA Framework, which means developers will be able to do...well, all sorts of things.
OK, so, this stuff might be a bit esoteric for most partners. The way we see it is that every advance in Silverlight or even the Windows Phone 7 platform will ultimately mean something cooler to sell to customers down the road, or maybe even right now. It also means more very public innovation coming from Microsoft, which never hurts in terms of the company's perception. So, even if you don't have a taste for Skittles and Mountain Dew, MIX10 is worth watching this week.
What do you want to see come of out Microsoft's MIX conference? Send your thoughts to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/15/2010 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Fascinating story
here (to us, anyway) about the first company to register a .com Internet domain. Some firm called Symbolics, one of those old Route 128 companies that made Greater Boston the hub of the technology industry until somebody wisely decided to move to the sunshine of California, tacked a .com onto the end of its name on March 15, 1985, and started a revolution. Of course, not many people noticed back in 1985, but that's history for you. As for Microsoft, the article says that it didn't register Microsoft.com until 1991 -- when there still weren't that many people online.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/15/2010 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Seriously, folks, just get IE8. Or Firefox, or something. If you do insist, though, on running older versions of the browser, rest assured that Microsoft is
hard at work tackling a flaw that affects both versions 6 and 7.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/15/2010 at 1:22 PM0 comments