From the Somebody Must Care About This file comes a story about the
uncertain
status of Windows Mobile 7.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/11/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Well, failures of
driver
installations, to be specific...and printers in particular did not fare
well.
By the way, many thanks to those of you who have written to share your opinions
of Vista SP1 for Redmond magazine's reader review. We're a little late
following up with you (sorry about that), but someone from the magazine will
be in contact this week.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/11/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Don't press any panic buttons or anything, but some of the projections coming
out of mega-vendor Cisco
don't
sound too positive -- even if they also shouldn't be too surprising.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/06/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It's a tough time to be...well, anything in business right now, it seems. But
it's a really tough time to be a startup business, what with credit markets
still tight and so forth. But there's some hope for those companies trying to
get a technology infrastructure up and running, and it's coming from Microsoft.
BizSpark
is a program through which Microsoft is providing lots of technology and services
with no up-front costs to companies that are fewer than three years old and
earn less than $1 million per year in revenue. It's a shot over the bow of open
source for Redmond, which has at times in the past had trouble convincing small
companies that the total cost of ownership for Microsoft technology is less
than that of open source.
Well, nothing's cheaper than free, and free is the initial price tag that BizSpark
carries. Of course, the idea is to get small and emerging firms hooked on Microsoft
by offering something free up-front -- not exactly a novel concept, but historically
a pretty effective one in lots of different markets. The timing of it seems
pretty good, too, and BizSpark will also include reasonable
credit terms for when money does inevitably change hands.
Windows Azure is, or can be, prominently involved in the plan, and hosting
partners will also have a role as providers of low-cost hosting to BizSpark
customers. And if BizSpark does start a fire that burns open source, the entire
Microsoft partner community could end up benefiting from the introduction of
a new generation of small companies into the Microsoft fold. That could end
up providing a little relief for everybody.
Are you participating in BizSpark? If so, how? Tell us at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/06/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Well,
one
says, anyway...a blogger who takes a pretty long look at the successor to
the forlorn Windows Vista.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/06/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
With the aftermath of the U.S. election in full bloom (by the time you read
this), NFL playoff races heating up and much of the country basking in unusually
warm fall weather, we're going to head back a few months and make...an Olympics
reference! Or, at least, a track and field reference, which might as well be
an Olympic reference. (Seriously, though, doesn't it seem as though the 2008
Olympics happened about 17 years ago? The shelf life for an event is short in
our YouTube culture.)
Anyway, did you ever watch one of those middle-distance races in which one
runner would dart way out ahead of everybody else, only to get caught about
three-quarters of the way through the race and finish fifth? We're fairly sure
that this runner is called the rabbit -- he or she sets the pace early in
a race but never really has a chance to win it.
We're wondering here at RCPU whether Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com -- pioneers
in Software as a Service -- are starting to grow floppy ears and a fluffy tail.
Salesforce.com has done a pretty solid job of leading the SaaS-based customer
relationship management race, but a few big-name competitors are starting to
catch up. Microsoft, of course, is among them, not only with Dynamics CRM online
-- a direct competitor to Benioff's company -- but also with the whole Azure
S+S platform.
And there are others starting to leg it forward in the SaaS scramble. SAP,
Oracle -- they should have Salesforce.com looking over its shoulder at least
a little bit. But this week, at the company's Dreamforce show in San Francisco,
Benioff spoke
with the confidence of a runner who'd already lapped his foes. He took more
shots than Sarah Palin in a forest full of moose -- at Oracle, at SAP...but
less so at Microsoft, which he (for once) treated with a bit more caution.
We like Benioff and Salesforce.com here at RCPU because the CEO is a quote
machine and because the company is a pretty genuine pioneer in what could eventually
become a pervasive computing model. But we can also see this trailblazer going
the way of Netscape...or, more likely, Lotus: snapped up eventually (although
probably not in this economy) by a larger competitor but still continuing to
produce innovative technology. That second scenario doesn't seem so bad, actually,
at least for customers and Salesforce.com partners.
But Benioff won't hear of it. Salesforce.com is building or planning to build
datacenters worldwide and ramping up its offerings to compete with the other
runners in the race. Benioff's got bluster, and he's got a lead. But does his
company have the kick to finish off the race? We'll see.
What has your experience been with Salesforce.com? Have you worked with the
company as a partner or customers? Let us know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/05/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
So if Vista's got much better security than XP, what's posing a threat to the
pariah operating system? Uh,
Microsoft's
own ActiveX, actually. And who's making that claim? Er...Microsoft. Yeah.
That's a little awkward.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/05/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It's called
Services
Connector, which sounds like part of a highway off-ramp or something.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/05/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Identity and security might sound like topics to discuss with a therapist,
but at Microsoft they're key components in a burgeoning product line. Redmond
this week announced that it's adding some capabilities to a couple of identity
and security applications.
First off, there's Identity Lifecycle Manager, which combines identification
management and certificate management -- sort of the chocolate and peanut butter
of security, as we once
called them, much to the amusement, apparently, of some folks in Redmond.
Anyway, ILM2 -- the "2" part is just a code name for now -- is
in release-candidate mode as of this week. Scheduled for general availability
in the first half of 2009, ILM2 will include a nifty integration with Microsoft
Office that will expand ID and certificate capabilities outside the bounds of
IT to regular folks.
For example, a "knowledge worker" (as in a non-IT person, as if IT
people have no knowledge) will be able to grant or deny an employee permission
to use a network or application via, say, an automatically generated e-mail
in Outlook. In other words, an IT person won't have to do it -- a non-IT manager
will have simple, Office-based control over who gets to do what, and IT will
have control in turn over what the manager gets to do.
"One of the greatest security risks enterprises have is loss of identity,"
John Chirapurath, director of marketing for the Identity and Security Division
at Microsoft, told RCPU in a phone chat late last week. "When somebody
leaves an organization, how does IT know? It's really the knowledge worker who
knows."
There's a customization opportunity there for the channel, Chirapurath, better
known as J.G., said. "ISVs can expand and extend our solution," he
said. "At the same time, there is also a very powerful services story.
Partners can look at the problem of identity management in a holistic fashion
and design the right processes and self-service capabilities so you do identity
management right from day one."
Microsoft's also updating another product, Intelligent Application Gateway,
with Service Pack 2 for the application. "ILM is really all about identity
and certificate management and self service," J.G. said. "IAG is about
using those identities and governing access."
IAG SP2 adds virtualization to the mix, as it'll run as a virtual machine on
Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor. It'll also grant partial access to certain applications,
alleviating the "all-or-nothing" nature of access that exists today,
J.G. said.
"Today, access is all or nothing," J.G. (and yes, we like calling
him that) said. "It becomes a very complex problem because either you have
to give [users] all access or no access [to an application]. IAG provides intelligence
to that access -- very fine-grained access." A customer could, for instance,
access an order-fulfillment part of an application but nothing else, J.G. said.
With SP2, IAG will also support Firefox, as well as Linux and the Mac OS. "Access
is not a Microsoft-centric problem," J.G. said. With IAG SP2, hopefully
it won't be a problem at all -- or certainly not one worth talking to a therapist
about.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/04/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Andrew McLennan finally got tired of being ripped off, so he started a security
company.
Well, it didn't happen exactly like that, but McLennan's experience as a video
game developer did eventually lead to his founding of Metaforic,
a maker of anti-tamper software. During his time at Steel Monkeys, a Belarus-based
game developer, McLennan saw the company's products hacked, cracked and available
for illicit sale literally before Steel Monkeys had released them in some markets.
"We had so much stuff pirated, it was ridiculous," McLennan said
in a robust Scottish brogue. "We had stuff available in Russia before it
was available in the U.K. We did get kind of fed up -- you'd spend nearly two
years working on something and then see it stolen from you."
So, with funding from the Scottish government, McLennan founded Glasgow-based
Metaforic, which launched in the U.S. in late October and has an office in San
Jose, Calif. McLennan, the company's CEO, said that MetaFortress, the company's
flagship product, can "stop any hack in its tracks."
But there's more to MetaFortress than just the fact that it prevents hacking,
piracy, theft and reverse-engineering, McLennan said. Not only does MetaFortress
do all of those things, but it does them in a way that's easy to deploy and
doesn't significantly affect application performance.
Instead of requiring eight weeks to six months, as some other applications
do, MetaFortress adds protection to an application in an hour by automating
the process of adding protection, McLennan said. "Because we're so easy
to use, we've become easy to adopt."
Beyond that, McLennan added, while most anti-tamper tools reduce the performance
of the applications they protect by anywhere from 5 to 20 percent, MetaFortress
clocks in at a 0.2 percent performance downgrade. And, he said, while competitors
protect an application for anywhere from a week to a month, Metaforic's product
offers three to 18 months of protection.
And MetaFortress isn't just for game developers. Metaforic is targeting the
enterprise with its product, selling not only to ISVs but also to companies
that do internal app development or want to protect critical elements of their
infrastructures. The company is looking for partners, too -- both for traditional
partners and for companies that might want to OEM MetaFortress. Channel members
in the financial and government fields are of particular interest, McLennan
said, because "they're difficult industries to get into."
Still, McLennan admitted that nobody's perfect. MetaFortress isn't un-crackable,
he said -- it just provides better protection for longer than competing products
do. "We're not claiming we're uncrackable," he said. "The hacker
has to do everything manually. All we're trying to do is bore the attacker to
death."
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/04/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
There sure have been a lot of announcements at Microsoft's Professional Developers
Conference this week. We say that with a touch of incredulity because the PDC
always struck us as being a tad esoteric and not having the broad-based appeal
of, say, Tech-Ed.
OK, granted, Azure
is more of a development platform than anything else, so it makes sense to announce
it to developers. But it's also a critical part of an overall SaaS -- sorry,
S+S -- strategy, so we might have expected an unveiling at a different, somewhat
more inclusive conference. (And that goes double for Windows
7, even though developers will take some interest in it, as well.) Oh, well...it
all ends up on the Internet, anyway, right?
Anyway, between Azure and Windows 7, PDC has been the most eventful Microsoft
show for quite a while. We've commented ourselves into carpal tunnel syndrome
this week writing about it, so for the last RCPU of the week, we're just serving
up links to stories you might have missed:
There was a Windows
Server 2008 R2 preview.
Live Mesh
and Live Framework got some air time.
Redmond Developer News's Kathleen Richards brings us a story on cloud-based
SQL services.
And here's
something about Visual Studio for the Skittles and Mountain Dew crowd (the PDC
target audience, after all).
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/30/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments