Shirley, you're joking. No, it's true! It's all over for Jon Shirley at Microsoft,
as the venerable Redmonder is
leaving
the company's board of directors.
Staying on the Microsoft board, however, is Texas Christian University basketball
legend Dr.
James Cash, who also happens to be a former Harvard Business School bigwig
and is part of the team that owns...the World Champion Boston Celtics! And if
you're thinking that we threw this Shirley entry in just as an excuse for a
gratuitous TCU reference and another chance to mention the Celtics, well, you're
right. But we really do love James Cash.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/19/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
We couldn't make this up: Microsoft might be
facing
antitrust action in China.
Um, what now? China? We know that the Chinese economy is pretty wide open these
days, but aren't we still talking about a communist country here with a one-party
government? And Microsoft might be in trouble for being too powerful? Again,
irony...we
love it.
Apparently, though, Chinese officials are denying
that there will be an investigation. We'll see.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/19/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
When most people think of summer, they think sunshine and blue skies. But the
folks at Salesforce.com think about clouds --
cloud
computing, that is. There you go, Salesforce.com, we've just given you a
super-cheesy line for your Summer '08 demo. You're welcome.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/18/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
A backup application for SQL Server or Exchange Server
for
just $1,000 bucks? Believe it -- and it's sold 100 percent through the channel.
Plus, the company is only one letter away from sharing a name with a large Dutch
bank.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/18/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
We really only put
this
in here because we love the word "array."
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/18/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
"For the moment, we are working in a Microsoft environment."
-- Christos Ellinides, the director of corporate IT solutions and services
at the European Commission
If you love irony, you have to love that quote. After years of hacking away
at Microsoft by imposing fines and generally being a nuisance, the European
Commission is looking at itself to find that it's still, at least in part, a
Microsoft shop.
Oh, sure. The EC's been talking about moving to open source applications and
using open standards -- competition czar and Microsoft hater Neelie Kroes harps
on that stuff repeatedly -- and it seems to be happening to some extent.
But there's still a lot of Microsoft applications in the EC's shop. And while
it's not news for a government entity to have a big investment in Microsoft,
it's funny that the EC itself -- tormentor of Redmond for so long -- is still
heavily Microsoft.
Another quote from the same story that struck us came from a guy with the best
title we've run across so far this year: Francisco Garcia Moran, director general
of directorate general (informatics). Apparently Francisco is an EU official,
although it's hard to tell whether he's EU, EC specifically or both.
Whatever. Director general of directorate general (informatics) -- and, yes,
we love the parentheses -- is simply bureaucra-tastic, and it makes your editor
want to change his (unofficial) title to something like editor of editing (newsletter)
or maybe senior editor of the editors senior (magazine). At the very least,
we demand parentheses for all titles in Redmond Media Group.
Anyway, Moran's quote reads thusly: "The European Commission not only
uses Microsoft products...It uses many other products from both commercial suppliers
and from the open source world."
Huh. So the EC has a hybrid atmosphere, then, kind of like thousands (millions?)
of other governments and enterprises around the world. Well, what do you know?
Apparently Microsoft hasn't crushed its competitors altogether. And, apparently,
despite Neelie's most stinging one-liners, Europe hasn't rid itself of Microsoft,
either. We love irony.
Have a thought on Europe, the EC and Microsoft? Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/18/2008 at 1:22 PM1 comments
Unified communications might still be a
fairly
meaningless term for a lot of people, but that hasn't stopped Microsoft
from
releasing
UC apps -- in this case, in hosted form with mega-partner Nortel.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/17/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
"I always feel like somebody's watching me
And I have no privacy"
-- from "Somebody's Watching Me" by Rockwell
If you remember the song from which we took today's opening quote, then you're
probably a pretty big '80s music nerd. And that's a good thing because it's
the nerds we're talking to today -- not so much the '80s music nerds but open
source nerds, although we figure the groups might overlap pretty heavily.
We don't know whether Rockwell was into open source software back in the day,
but the paranoia expressed in "Somebody's Watching Me" wouldn't be
out of place for open source folks today. Big brother is out there, people...and
its name is Microsoft.
This week, Microsoft announced that it's
going to co-sponsor something called the Open
Source Census, a project open source folks have undertaken to figure out
exactly how much of their software is in use in enterprises and encourage folks
to adopt even more of it. Not
exactly a blockbuster thus far in terms of enterprise penetration, the Census
could nevertheless ultimately serve as Microsoft's window (um, no pun intended)
on what is probably its biggest competitor these days.
The folks in Redmond are talking up their census participation in interoperability
terms, saying that it'll be helpful to know where open source software is and
how people are using it so that Microsoft can better fit its applications to
work with open source apps. Of course, there might be just a little bit more
to Microsoft's participation, as this
article keenly suggests (and we quote):
"Of course, the sponsorship can't be entirely altruistic. Hard data
on the shape of open source software usage is difficult to come by since it
can often be downloaded, shared and used at will. With more data, Microsoft
would undoubtedly be able to better understand its open source competitors
and where exactly their weaknesses lie."
Ah-ha! So, Redmond does have a sinister motive! Well, of course it does, and
why shouldn't it? Open source folks are always saying that their applications
are hard to compete with because they're, well, open, and because it's hard
for a proprietary developer to innovate at the speed of the rest of the world.
But there's another side to openness, and this is it -- Microsoft can just waltz
right into the type of market research project that no proprietary competitor
would dream of letting Redmond get near.
In the long run, Microsoft's participation probably won't make a huge amount
of difference to the Census, other than to actually get it up and running in
a serious way. And we wonder, really, to what extent Microsoft will just take
over the whole thing and sort of ditch the "encouraging-the-use-of-open-source"
stuff in favor of pure competitive research. Heck, a real conspiracy theorist
-- although we're not in that category -- might suggest that Microsoft would
fudge the numbers to make open source look less important in the enterprise
than it really is.
In any case, the proprietary monster is on board, open source folks. Microsoft
really is watching you now. You've got something in common with an '80s flash-in-the-pan
pop act after all.
What's your take on the relationship between Microsoft and open source? Open
up at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/17/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Well, we'll bet
this
put a damper on a lot of Patch Tuesday parties.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/17/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
For most of the last 12 years, Alt-N Technologies, based down in Grapevine,
Texas, has been a Microsoft competitor -- a role not easy for any smaller company
to play. Alt-N's bread and butter has been an e-mail product, a competitor to
Microsoft's mighty Exchange. As such, Alt-N isn't a Microsoft partner and has
fairly limited experience working with folks in the Microsoft channel.
Now, however, Alt-N is looking to work with Microsoft partners. It's got a
new product out, SecurityGateway,
which is (to quote the product description directly) an "e-mail spam firewall
for Exchange and SMTP servers."
Marketing Director Kevin Beatty spoke with RCPU not long ago and said that
he'd like to tap into the network of Exchange partners; he's looking for folks
who might want a nifty add-on to the basic product.
"We've really set it up with the interface being very administrator-friendly,"
the affable Beatty told RCPU in a bid to talk up the product. "We've put
a lot of mechanisms in place that allow for domain-level settings down to the
end user level."
Not only that, Beatty said, but it's pretty easy to become an Alt-N partner:
"We don't put a lot of people through big certification processes. We get
them on through a Webinar," he said.
So, there you go, Exchange folks. Check out your editor's fellow Texans at
www.altn.com if you're interested.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/12/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Symantec's new
Veritas
Virtual Infrastructure combines storage management and virtualization...but
just for Citrix, and not for VMware (or, uh, Hyper-V).
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/12/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments