The Chinese
aren't
such big fans of Windows Genuine Advantage. We're all for fighting piracy,
but is WGA really the best way to do it? Then again, with piracy rates at something
like 90 percent in China (according to the article, anyway), it's hard to blame
Microsoft for trying to fight fire with fire -- even if everybody ends up getting
singed a bit.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/23/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
OK, somebody at MS (MBD President Stephen Elop, actually) says that OCS 2007
R2
could KO
PBX.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/22/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager is
on
the street, and VMware might very well have impressed the Street (or what's
left of it) with what looks at first glance like a
pretty
good earnings report.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/22/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Pirate-themed humor isn't as funny as it used to be, what with
real
pirates making news now in fairly gruesome ways.
So, on Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Day -- which was Tuesday,
in case it wasn't pre-programmed into your Outlook calendar -- we were already
planning to eschew the walk-the-plank, peg-leg-and-eye-patch theme. Then we
noticed that somebody -- from your editor's hometown newspaper (well, Web site,
anyway), no less -- had done
it for us. So, we thank you, The Dallas Morning News, for spicing
up RCPU this week. Yarr and all that to you.
What did we learn about piracy from Microsoft this week? Not that much, really,
that we didn't know already. Piracy, it turns out, is costly for the software
industry and for partners, and Microsoft has a bunch of educational and legal
campaigns in place to fight it. Which is good, of course -- and we're not here
to belittle anti-piracy efforts at all. (Actually, one thing we did learn is
that pirates don't
much like Vista, either.)
In fact, the only reason we're writing about this topic this week is because
it's been an oddly slow news week for the middle of October, and we found a
quote from Microsoft's press
materials just as cringe-worthy as the blogger at the News found
it:
"It turned out that I had unintentionally purchased a counterfeit
copy from an online auction site. The seller had said it was a genuine, unopened
product. I was outraged that he had ripped me off. The WGA program turned
out to be cool, and I got a genuine copy of the software. I think that Microsoft
is the best and I am a Microsoft user for life!"
OK, OK, we're all for combating piracy and all...but "WGA turned out to
be really cool"? Good night. Somebody needs to walk the plank for that
one. Yarr! (Sorry, we restrained ourselves for as long as we could.)
How does piracy affect your business? What do you think of Microsoft's anti-piracy
efforts? Let us know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/22/2008 at 1:22 PM1 comments
No,
really. Here's what he said: "We're not going to have products that
are much more successful than Vista has been."
A financial success, maybe -- but, really, Steve, give this one up. Just
do better with Windows 7, continue to embrace the cloud and let Vista go down
as an unfortunate footnote in Microsoft history. Please.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/21/2008 at 1:22 PM8 comments
No longer raging quite so much at open source, Microsoft is now all about
"mixed-source"
ventures. Here's a long and fairly useful Q&A about the whole thing.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/21/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Lasting fame is rare in our YouTube culture. Gone are the days when
Jaws
or
Star Wars would dominate at the box office for months. Movies come
and go, make millions and then fade off into cultural oblivion.
TV, once the home of massively popular sitcoms that nearly everybody seemed
to watch, is now one bad reality show after another. The "characters"
quickly fade from memory. Music? Well, we wouldn't know much about that here
at RCPU, but it strikes us that today's stars will probably only be famous tomorrow
if their lives go completely off the rails.
And so it goes, albeit much more slowly, with technology. Hype about one category
of technology or another comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and one red-hot trend
eventually gives way to another. If this week's news is any indication, it's
virtualization that's coming off the boil just a little bit, downgrading as
a market from red-hot
to simply growing.
Yes, we know. The economy plays a role in the speed of market growth, but we
suspect that there are other factors at work here. For one thing, virtualization
isn't a novelty anymore, and there's bound to be a bit of market saturation
now that lots of companies have gone from craving it to using it. That's normal.
Plus, we speculate, a few unforeseen concerns -- security
comes immediately to mind -- might be dampening enthusiasm for the technology
just a bit.
What's not slowing, though, is Microsoft's push into the space. The same IDC
report that noted virtualization's slowdown also pointed out Microsoft's gains
in market share in the space with Hyper-V. Apparently Microsoft's, um, aggressive
pricing strategy (better known as under-pricing VMware or giving stuff away
for free) is working, at least to some extent -- which should be little surprise,
as Microsoft has almost always had success undercutting competitor's prices
in new markets.
And, let's be clear -- virtualization is still a hot technology; Gartner even
says that it'll be the hottest
of all in 2009. But it's not quite as red-hot as it has been for a couple
of years. So we're not burying virtualization here by any means -- we're only
saying that it seems to be going from, say, box-office smash to top DVD seller.
Either way, there's still money to be made. And it's still better than reality
TV.
What's your take on Microsoft's presence in virtualization? Are you making
money off of it? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/21/2008 at 1:22 PM2 comments
Its stock price might have tumbled (with everybody else's) during the recent
market freak-outs, but the fundamentals of Google's economy are
still
very sound.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/21/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
We haven't done this in a while, so we're going to drop in a little reader feedback today. We've been a bit low on e-mails lately -- presumably readers are busy yanking their 401K money out of the market or stockpiling non-perishable foods -- so please feel free to contribute on any topic any time to
[email protected].
What that out of the way, we go to Don, who's not wild about the District of Columbia switching to Google Apps:
"I have a serious problem with using Google Apps in the Government situation as you write about. SaaS means using an active Internet connection as we all know, and who knows what information is sent back and forth while in an open session? I can also see the day where terrorist attacks will happen as part of an Internet data scheme rendering the pipes useless. Won't it just be grand that our entire world can't work because the SaaS package can't contact the authentication server to open the package or even open? Our government is already so counter productive maybe this is a perfect match."
Don, our vision of SaaS is somewhat less apocalyptic than yours, but we completely understand your concerns about security. (Of course, just sending documents via e-mail has its perils ... but we do see your point.) Security and privacy are huge issues for the whole SaaS model and are probably holding back adoption of it at this point.
It's hard to say what'll do more to change people's minds: demonstrations of big SaaS implementations that haven't given way to security problems or big service lapses over thousands of hours of use, or a general change in attitude shifting away from the importance of having data on-premises rather than in the cloud. Our guess is that the first will eventually lead to the second -- but we haven't forgotten that SaaS essentially failed in a former incarnation called the ASP model. Still, we think that SaaS will eventually (continue to) be a winner for smaller businesses and easily outsource-able operations of bigger ones. We completely agree with your view of the government, though.
What would a RCPU reader response session be without a Vista e-mail? Our good friend, Mike, sent us one about a month (or could it be six weeks?) ago that we never ran -- but we still like it, so here it is. Mike offers words of wisdom for Microsoft regarding Windows 7:
"An analogy: ME is to the 1990s as Vista is to the 2000s. Hopefully Microsoft will have learned a lesson with Vista that it seemed they learned with ME, but apparently forgot. They need to create what the users need and want, communicate all the benefits clearly, make sure to address potential compatibility issues or concerns as an integral part of the development, and finally, develop a clear understanding of why the new OS is needed. It can't appear that the reason for upgrading is weighted heavily in Microsoft's favor. Sure, they should make money -- they do a darn good job of that -- but they need to do a better job of selling it. The days of people beating down the doors of their nearest retailer at 12:01 a.m. for the latest GA'd Microsoft product are behind all of us. The apparent arrogance of the Vista release should have proven that."
So true, Mike, so true. As always. We need more fuel for the reader fire, folks! Dump some at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/16/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It'll be virtualization and cloud computing that'll top the list of hottest technologies next year, the soothsayers of
Gartner, um, say.
Virtualization Review's Tom Valovic
seems happy enough with No. 1, but he's got a few issues with the rest of the top 10.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/16/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It's Project Kensho, which does some sort of virtualization stuff
better explained by somebody who writes for a virtualization magazine.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/15/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments