There's a new SDK for this touchy computing model, which users are still getting a feel for. (Insert your own line about hands-on experience.)
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/12/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
OK, we're not here to argue the EU's contention that Intel and Microsoft are nasty monopolists that must be punished, although we're pretty sure we disagree with the vast majority of it. What we don't understand is why the "competition" folks in Europe have to choose right now to try to cripple a couple of companies that help drive the worldwide economy.
In this economy, is this really the best time to start lightening the wallets of companies that, despite some cuts (at Microsoft, anyway) still employ tens of thousands of people and are (again, in Microsoft's case) actually still hiring? Would forcing these companies to fork a bunch of cash over to the EU really help foster competition and spark the economy? Would it add jobs? We're just not sure how it would, and it seems as though those things should be top priorities right now. (And on top of that, the U.S. is looking at jumping back into the antitrust game in a serious way, too.)
There's a good article about all this in America's best non-Redmond Media Group magazine here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/12/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Here's another first for Microsoft. Shortly after the company reported its first revenue shortfall, it's now issuing its first bond offering.
Microsoft people say that the company doesn't need the money. In other words, this isn't a desperation move. All Redmond is doing, the folks there say, is taking advantage of the company's good credit rating to offer a bond at a time that makes sense given market conditions.
We're willing to accept that statement, given that Microsoft still has big cash reserves and, despite some recent stumbles, is still a profitable company bringing in loads of revenue. So, there's no panic here for now, but this bond offering is worth monitoring nonetheless.
And it got us to thinking, for some reason, what a "Buy Microsoft Bonds" poster might look like. We at RCPU are fans of the old war bonds posters from World Wars I (see here and here) and II (see here and here). Sure, they were propaganda, but they were made for good causes and included some tremendously arresting designs.
We wanted to mock up a "Buy Microsoft Bonds" poster of our own, but we have few (OK, no) photo-editing skills. So we're hoping that some of you out there will play with the old war bonds posters a bit and come up with some "Buy Microsoft Bonds" propaganda. We'll post the best entries (if we get any) this week or next. Send them, as always, to [email protected]. And have fun!
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/12/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Ingram unveiled new
Seismic services at its conference in your editor's hometown of Dallas this week. It's a bit of a rough time for Ingram, as it is for everybody, but the company's most recent financial numbers did manage to beat Wall Street's expectations despite showing a big (but obviously not unexpected)
drop in year-over-year quarterly revenue.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/07/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
First of all, friends, bravo to you. It's fairly rare that your editor actually takes the time to read his own blog posts online (there is just so much to do here -- seriously), so it was a very pleasant surprise to notice this week that the comments sections after a bunch of
these posts have been getting a pretty good workout. Your thoughts e-mailed to
[email protected] are always appreciated, and we promise to get better about running them here, but we also love it when you get some conversations of your own started in the blog entries themselves. So, thanks, and keep up the good work.
Now, as for those e-mails: We've had tons of them lately, and we're way behind on getting them into the newsletter. So you'll be seeing more in the next few weeks, but please do keep contributing and throwing more onto the pile -- like this one, for instance, from Paul, who writes about downgrades from Windows 7 all the way back to XP (most likely, as far as we can tell, in response to this blog entry). Sayeth Paul:
"I do not know what Microsoft considers a downgrade, but if it wants to make it a real possibility, it needs to enlist the help of the OEMs: Dell, HP, etc. I am an independent computer technician. I custom-build my own line of computers and not one of them has had Vista. I have only had one person ask me for Vista. I have had many people ask me to downgrade their name-brand computers from Vista to XP, but it cannot always be done. If the OEM has not released drivers for XP, then you cannot run XP. I had one client who thought I could write drivers for him. I do not even want to think about that insanity, even if I was a programmer. Another hitch in downgrading is that you must purchase XP to do the downgrade. So it would cost one of my customers $150 plus tax for XP and my $90 flat-rate charge for reinstalling the OS. Also, most of the bundled software will not be available for your downgraded computer.
"If they don't want Vista, I would rather give them Linux. They can have Ubuntu Linux for free. If you get the proper version, it comes with free support for its lifetime. Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox and many other software bits all included with the free OS. I have a friend to whom I gave Ubuntu loaded on a low-end Pentium IV, and he loves it. For the same effort it would take to learn Vista, you can learn an excellent OS such as Ubuntu."
Paul, first off, you've provided us with a wonderful segue to the next e-mail. And as for your comments, we see where you're coming from. We're hoping that Microsoft's cooperation with OEMs on Windows 7 is much, much, much better than it was for Vista. It'll need to be because, as you say, Linux is getting better and providing a more realistic alternative all the time.
Oh, Linux might never have even double-digit market share -- especially in the enterprise -- but as we've seen from the netbook craze, it doesn't take all that much of a dip in Windows revenues to put a dent in Microsoft's finances. In fact, that leads us into our next e-mail (again, thanks for the transition, Paul) from Rob, who addresses the notion of netbooks in the enterprise:
"We are seeing some interest in netbooks, selling only the XP Home ones so far. We have had customers inquire about XP Pro on them, and we've sold a number of Atom-based desktop machines with XP Pro. Once XP goes away and the only reasonable option is a crippled version of Windows 7, I expect to see Linux become MUCH more popular."
Full disclosure here: Your editor's netbook (we won't say which one it is, only that it does run XP) finally arrived and has been magnificent thus far. At a price of about $360 -- and that included shipping and an upgrade to 2GB of memory, which your editor's wife skillfully installed -- what's not to like about the deal? A lot of office workers, maybe most, use a couple of Microsoft Office applications and a browser every day (and maybe Solitaire for the old-school types), and that's about it. Why all the expense, then?
Again, if OpenOffice.org or Google Apps is compatible enough with Microsoft Office, and if Linux is free and fairly stable these days (and if there are enough people who can support it, which might be an important point), why spent hundreds of dollars per PC plus hundreds more in software per user? Without any sort of volume discount, a pretty nifty netbook running Linux available for $250 is a reality today. Eventually, CIOs, CEOs and boards of directors are going to start wondering why their companies spend so much on the technology basics.
We're advocates for the Microsoft channel here at RCPU, and we don't want to see anything take money out of the pockets of Microsoft partners. And while we're far from predicting some sort of netbook-Linux revolution in the enterprise, we can see the model becoming more popular as companies continue to cut costs. A lot of Microsoft's business model simply comes down to convincing people that they really need Windows and Office, preferably the latest versions running on a powerful laptop. Well, do they? It's getting to be a serious question.
That's enough babbling for this week. Thanks to Paul and Rob for their contributions, and to you other folks who have written to us at [email protected], keep an eye out here for your e-mails. And keep popping those comments into the blog entries. We'll try to jump into the conversation now and then.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/07/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
So, it's going to be possible to run virtual XP inside Windows 7. Neat, huh? Yeah, but only if your system specs allow it -- and
a lot won't, apparently.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/07/2009 at 1:22 PM2 comments
Next on the list of Microsoft partners' favorite third-party programs is one from Redmond's still sort of new rival,
VMware.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/07/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
This week, lots of folks celebrated Cinco de Mayo, which is as good an excuse as we can think of to down some cervezas and devour some Mexican food, not that we ever need an excuse to do that.
Of course, Cinco de Mayo isn't Mexican Independence Day, as many Americans think it is. Cinco de Mayo celebrates a Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862; Mexican Independence Day actually occurred about a half century before that battle. (A kid who grows up in Texas as the son of a Spanish teacher just knows this stuff.)
Confused? Well, that's normal -- Mexican history is actually fairly complicated, not unlike (segue...here it comes...) the five announcements Citrix released on the first day of its Citrix Synergy conference, which happened to be on May 5. That's right; Citrix put out cinco press releases for Cinco de Mayo. Unfortunately, that's where the "cinco" similarities end, and Citrix has, thus far, provided neither cerveza nor Mexican food. Alas.
For the record, five press releases is way too many for one editor's feeble mind, so we're just going to focus on a couple that seem like the most interesting. They go together like cerveza and Mexican food. The first announcement concerns Citrix Dazzle, which is a "self-service app store for corporate employees," or so said Wes Wasson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Citrix, on a conference call with the press this week.
The idea behind Dazzle is that applications such as Microsoft Office sit in a corporate datacenter rather than being installed on individual clients. Users just go out and use them when they need them; the apps and the information within them rest on a server. Wasson described Dazzle as a "lightweight storefront that sits in front of existing XenApp and other delivery products" and allows IT folks to expose [applications] in a much more elegant way." Lovely!
Partnering with Dazzle is Citrix Receiver, which, despite the disappointment of not having been chosen in the recent NFL draft, still manages to be useful. Receiver is a free software client that "makes accessing virtual desktops for virtual apps as easy as turning on your TV set," Wasson said, and pushes out application updates automatically so IT folks don't have to.
The Dazzle-Receiver combo doesn't just work on PCs, either. It works on the Mac OS and, yes, even on the iPhone. Download Citrix Receiver on any compatible device (and there are lots of them, with more to come), and you're a URL away from using any app in your company's arsenal without downloading the app at all. The app is running in the company's datacenter using Citrix's XenApp infrastructure; only Receiver resides on the client.
This sounds for all the world to us like the "internal clouds" we keep hearing about. Instead of having applications and data reside in some third party's datacenter, they sit in an on-premises, corporate datacenter, but users still use applications as a service rather than running them on the client. It's kind of a do-it-yourself Software as a Service model, and the idea is to reduce the burden on IT of having to constantly update and manage applications on users' computers. It's also easier, in theory, to track which users are running which applications and how often, and purchase virtual licenses accordingly.
We're guessing that VMware and probably even Microsoft can offer a similar experience (although, to be honest, we don't know for sure -- but we're sure they'll tell us at some point), but the Citrix offering is nicely branded and packaged and seems to present to partners a pretty good opportunity for implementation revenues. After that, if this thing works the way it's supposed to, the system should mostly take care of itself, but we're guessing that partners might be able to pick up some maintenance revenue along the way.
We like the cloud here at RCPU. We like it almost as much as we like cerveza and Mexican food. OK, that's not true, but we are fans of the cloud model. What Citrix is offering is intriguing because it doesn't require outsourcing but still offers and easy-to-manage (supposedly), service-oriented model. That's why we chose those two press releases from Citrix's Cinco de Mayo selection. The others, plus some that came out after Cinco de Mayo, are here if you really want to get into the spirit of the holiday.
Have you set up an internal cloud for a customer? Are you hearing a lot of buzz about this model? What did you do for Cinco de Mayo? Reveal all at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/05/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Service Pack 2 and development kits for SharePoint Server and SharePoint Services
came out late last week (just in case you missed them). SharePoint is massively popular, but it's not alone in the collaboration market. Oracle is at least trying to ramp up a competitor with
Beehive. We'll see how that goes.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/05/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Microsoft partners like some third-party partner programs more than others. One of them is the program at
Lenovo.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/05/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It's a possibility, apparently, as
another round of previously announced cuts begins.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/05/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
First off, a note totally unrelated to anything else in this entry: It has been a long time -- way too long -- since we've run reader e-mails here at RCPU. So we're going to get back to that next week. But despite having received some great responses thus far, we still need your input on all sorts of issues: Microsoft downgrades, Oracle buying Sun, the power of netbooks or whatever else crosses your mind. Send your thoughts to
[email protected].
This hasn't been the most exciting news week of all time, but we do, at least, have some channel news to offer. Distribution giant Tech Data revealed this week that it has made some acquisitions in Europe, including buying part of a company with the ominous name Man and Machine.
Man and Machine sounds to us like the title of some '50s documentary or sci-fi film about the impending perils of technology, or maybe about how robots will completely enslave humans by the year 1975. (Has that actually happened, by the way? How often do you break away from your laptop or smartphone? Anyway...) We can hear the trailer now: "Man and Machine...a duo bound for conflict." Of course, our (very few) female readers would probably like the company better if it were called Person and Machine, and we don't blame them -- but that sounds a lot less scary.
Also in Tech Data news, the company is giving ISVs a hand by helping them navigate the Microsoft ISV Royalty Licensing Program. Presumably, this has nothing to do with teaching the crowned heads of Europe how to drive.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/30/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments