Microsoft is revealing all sorts of cloud stuff at this week's PDC. If you want to read about it, you'll just have to help drive traffic to the RCPmag.com Web site (and, honestly, Mike Desmond's story is very much worth a read). Oh, and by the way, there are new Office and SharePoint betas this week, too.
What we like best about this week's PDC news is that Microsoft now has an Azure-related project code-named Dallas. Dallas is more or less your editor's hometown (it's actually Midlothian for you RCPU trivia buffs out there) and was, of course, the setting for one of the most epic TV dramas of all time.
We at RCPU love the "Dallas" theme song. In fact, we're pretty sure we want it to start playing every time your editor walks into a room. But, upon searching for Dallas stuff, we remembered a great tune about Texas that used to open a popular local human-interest show in DFW. We can't find the original Boston Pops recording of "Hill Country Theme," but a version by the Reivers, out of Austin, isn't bad, or you can hear it with lyrics sung by the legendary Willie Nelson. Yee-haw!
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/19/2009 at 1:22 PM1 comments
Cloud CRM pioneer Salesforce.com -- which, incidentally, is doing pretty well financially -- introduced this week a Facebook-like corporate app called Chatter. Naturally, this got us to thinking of the old "Simpsons" episode in which Bart and Lisa have a hockey rivalry (here's a funny scene from it) and Apu tells a forlorn Milhouse to "keep up the chatter!" (True "Simpsons" nerds can find the reference buried somewhere here.)
Anyway, Facebook for work? Isn't that called LinkedIn, and isn't everybody in Sweden already a member of it or something like that? We'll see what Salesforce.com, an innovative company, can do with this thing.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/19/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
More than a little trouble, actually, as Microsoft's loss in an intellectual-property case there could have ramifications for Windows 7.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/19/2009 at 1:22 PM1 comments
RCPU's thoughts and prayers are with the Microsoft co-founder and Pacific Northwest sports investor, who got some bad news this week. We've had enough of bad news and don't want to hear any more for a while after this, thank you.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/18/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Betas of HPC (high-performance computing, naturally) Server 2008 R2 and Excel 2010 are out for the fiddling pleasure of folks who like their computing performance high.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/18/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Already? It's been not quite a month since Microsoft finally let Windows 7 into the wild, and wouldn't you know that hunters are already taking shots at it.
Or, at least, they can see the targets on its back. This week, Microsoft offered advice on how to deal with a zero-day vulnerability that appears to be the new operating system's first post-release flaw.
The problem, as you surely know by now, is with the SMB networking protocol in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft says that anybody who knows how to put up a decent firewall shouldn't feel the effects of the flaw, which could include denial-of-service attacks. (Hey, where were those denial-of-service attacks on Vista when we needed them? Heh heh. OK, that's the last one. We promise. Probably.)
Perhaps more worrying, though, is the potential for Trojan attacks to follow a Windows 7 activation hack that somebody came up with last week. The idea is -- as it usually is with a Trojan attack -- that Trojans could disguise themselves as Windows 7 activation hacks and fool users. However, Microsoft has said that if the Windows 7 activation Trojans are as harmless as the current USC Trojans, users should have no reason to worry. (OK, Microsoft didn't really say that. But it's kind of true.)
All of this is, of course, pretty much par for the course when it comes to Windows, and nothing here seems serious enough to warrant panic. But these stories are just an example of how complex an OS really is and how quickly and easily ne'er-do-wells can find a way to ruin it.
And they do makes us wonder whether the risks of cloud computing -- so well-documented here and elsewhere over the last couple of years -- are really that big of a deal after all. And it makes us wonder how much longer the huge, complex OS as a concept has to live...but that's another entry for another time.
What's your take on Windows 7 security? Have you had any serious problems with it yet? Send your stories to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/18/2009 at 1:22 PM2 comments
Remember the old Prudential Insurance ads that encouraged customers to "get a piece of the rock"? (Yes, we just spent about 20 minutes watching old '70s commercials. It's all in a day's work.) Well, the cloud is the new rock, and everybody wants a piece of it.
No stranger to the cloud, IBM enhanced its hosted offerings this week with the introduction of Smart Analytics Cloud, a business intelligence-heavy play that features technology acquired by Big Blue from former BI vendor Cognos.
Armonk (hey, we're always calling Microsoft "Redmond," right?) is setting up Smart Analytics Cloud as being available either in a pure hosted model or as an on-premises "private" cloud with hardware housed inside a company's walls and software distributed to users as a service. Not unlike...well, a mainframe, in some ways.
We're not surprised, of course, that IBM is upping its cloud ante. But this cloud stuff isn't just for traditional technology vendors. Amazon is a major player, and now AT&T, one of the most venerable names in American business (not unlike IBM, of course, except that AT&T isn't really a tech vendor per se) is expanding its cloud products.
Despite battling a cloud-services outage this week, AT&T is touting its relationships with VMware and Sun and moving from cloud-storage offerings to cloud computing; its new product carries the catchy name Synaptic Compute as a Service (SCaaS, we suppose). SCaaS uses Sun hardware and virtualization software from the market giant, VMware.
For Microsoft partners, as if this wasn't obvious enough already, the beefing up of one company's cloud offering (IBM) and the serious entry of another (AT&T) into the game shows that the cloud is going to be a battleground (battle-air?) the likes of which Redmond has not encountered before. This race is wide open, and the old Microsoft pitch of Windows ubiquity and everything working better together won't hold much water (air?) in the cloud.
Redmond, of course, is all over this stuff these days, although it's still working out (and not without controversy) how it's going to share the cloud wealth with partners. Still, though, Azure is no sure thing -- not with everybody trying to get a piece of the cloud.
Who's your choice for the front-runner in cloud computing? What do you think of Microsoft's strategy? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/16/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Microsoft has paid a fair amount of lip service over the years to opening up to open source, while at the same time making patent threats and generally mixing its messages. Well, evidently, Microsoft is more interested in open source than anybody at the company realized.
Apparently, a Windows 7 download utility contains code protected by the open source General Public License version 2, meaning Microsoft can modify the code -- which Redmond says came from a third-party -- but then has to release the modified code to the open source community. Amazingly, that's what Microsoft plans to do.
For more on how this happened and how somebody sniffed it out, check out the Q&A here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/16/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
We all knew that Microsoft has been systematically getting rid of 5,000 or so employees (while hiring others at the same time). Well, what might be the last of the bloodletting seems to be taking place now. What's interesting about that is, apparently, the total number of layoffs will actually exceed 5,000.
Should we take this as some sort of sign? Or is this just Microsoft carrying out the last phase of its plan to kind of, sort of slim down? The company's latest earnings report pleased Wall Street but still showed (not unexpected) declines in revenues and profits.
Nevertheless, Microsoft is still a big company. Take a look at the chart in this TechFlash article; it indicates that Redmond had not quite 20,000 employees back in 1995 and now has more than 90,000. We at RCPU hate to see people lose their jobs and would never advocate that Microsoft get rid of any more employees. The truth is, though, that Microsoft is still a bloated company, weighed down by its desire to dominate every category in the software industry (and a few others) all the time.
Cutting a little fat in terms of product lines probably wouldn't be the worst thing for Microsoft. And we hope that the new folks who are coming in are at least moving into roles with Azure or something related either to the cloud or to Microsoft's flailing mobile efforts.
We've long heard here and there that Microsoft doesn't recruit the quality of employee it used to get because the company's once-lucrative stock options -- apparently a big chunk of an employee's compensation in Redmond -- aren't so lucrative anymore. The company's stock has been largely flat for years now.
One way to boost a stock price is to cut costs, of course, and that's exactly what Microsoft is trying to do with these layoffs. Again, we hate layoffs, but if there's any silver lining to this scenario, it's that Microsoft might just be able to shrink itself enough to become more focused, more efficient and less bloated and to get its stock price moving up again. That could lead to improved recruitment and ultimately to more innovation and better management. And all of that could lead to bigger profits for Microsoft partners.
Anyway, that's a very long-term take on a tiny news story. But it'll be worth watching Microsoft's personnel moves in the months and years to come as the company seeks to establish a desired level of staff and expenditures. This is new territory for Microsoft. Until now, the company had been all about growth. How Redmond navigates these choppy new waters will have a lot to do with its future and those of its partners.
What's your take on Microsoft's financial condition? How does it affect you? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/05/2009 at 1:22 PM1 comments
After the Sidekick fiasco, beleaguered T-Mobile had to deal with another pack of angry users this week, although it does seem to have resolved a service outage that affected about 5 percent of its customers.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/05/2009 at 1:22 PM2 comments