A Microsoft Office official Andrew Kisslo may be the Dennis Miller of software (without Miller's obscure and inane references to Boswell). Kisslo blogged about the Google Docs upgrade, ridiculing exciting new features such as being able to move spreadsheet columns and have a margin ruler in a word processor (a feature that seems to have disappeared, at least as a default, in Word 2007).
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/16/20104 comments
One of the problems with cloud apps is they are only as fast as the servers that house them, the network that carries them and the PC that ultimately runs them. Google is hoping to increase their performance with tweaks to Google Docs that speed their JavaScript processing, not just making them snappier but able to handle larger files as well.
Google is also adding a bunch of new features so Google Docs can compare more favorably with Microsoft Office. One tweak seems pretty simple to me -- the word processor now has a margin ruler.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/16/20103 comments
Microsoft is a lot like the British -- under withering fire the company keeps a stiff upper lip and simply plods on. That is exactly what Redmond is doing in the mobile phone market with the upcoming release of Windows Phone 7, which I hear is pretty good.
But Redmond isn't about to wait for 7 -- it wants more mobile territory now, and is invading the youth space to get it. The Kin phones, made by Sharp, are built from the get-go with social media in mind. They have sliding keyboards and store data, such as photos, in the cloud. This is actually designed not just to store more stuff, but to make it easier to upgrade to new phones since you simply have to download all those items to the new device.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/14/20101 comments
Until this week, when a Service Pack stopped being supported it actually stopped being supported. Under a new policy, when a Service Pack stops being supported, Microsoft will offer limited support in the form of quick and dirty troubleshooting.
But Microsoft will only go so far. If it can't fix the problem quickly, it will advise customers to move onto the next Pack or product revision.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/14/20102 comments
Microsoft is full of thousands upon thousands of software geniuses. And who knows Microsoft products better than Microsoft itself? That's why I am blown away by the news that Microsoft is outsourcing a good deal of its IT to Bangalore-based Infosys.
Infosys will support apps, infrastructure, PCs and take over the help desk.
It turns out that for years Microsoft has outsourced these functions to a bevy of partners. I just didn't know it. Now all that work is consolidated under Infosys.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/14/201011 comments
A regular to Doug's Mailbag comments on what the FCC/Comcast court ruling spells out for Net neutrality:
For Comcast and all other cable operators, the issue is network stability. Why should a neighborhood of 100 (or 1,000) Comcast customers be at the mercy of one customer who decides to turn on three or four computers in his home and start a massive peer-to-peer file-sharing download?
The cable company needs to be able to throttle back certain kinds of traffic in order to keep a small number of customers from negatively impacting performance for a large number of customers.
Networks are built on average loads, not peak loads, like the electric company, the gas company or the water company. If network operators cannot regulate a handful of abusive customers, who saturate their network at certain times of the day, they cannot guarantee any of their customers reliable service at any time of the day.
The cable provider's ability to control how many hours of porn you download (or even which porn you download -- or which TV station you watch) is a peripheral issue because demand will drive which services you can access.
The threat is not that Comcast has the technical ability to do that. The threat is that the Patriot Act permits the U.S. government to ask them to do that without presenting them a warrant served in a public court. And even worse, legislation protects them from being sued even if the government action is illegal and the network provider complies anyway.
There is simply too much money to be made for Comcast, or anyone else, to care what you do with their service, as long as your use of their service is not detrimental to others who also expect a certain level of service from the same provider.
Thanks for the opportunity to comment.
- Marc
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/14/20101 comments
If you are responsible for patching at your shop, clear your schedule tomorrow cuz it's going to be a monster. Eleven patches will fix more than two dozen problems. Best tell the family you'll be late for dinner.
As usual, remote code execution fixes lead the charge, but denial of service, spoofing and elevation of privilege attacks also get their fair share of attention.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/12/20104 comments
Microsoft promised that Office 2010 would be fully compliant with the ISO/IEC 29500 document standard otherwise known as Office Open XML (OOXML). Now before we get into this discussion, can we use real English to describe these things rather than random numbers and letters? Is that possible please?
So here's the back story: Office 2010, due any time now, was supposed to support the ISO file format standard. For some reason, it doesn't fully implement the format, and now Microsoft says that support will come with Office 15, which isn't even on our radar screen.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/12/20102 comments
A couple of readers chime in on Doug's analysis of Microsoft's decision to discontinue Itanium versions of Windows Server 2008 R2:
As I recall, Intel did not have the x64 chips compatible w/ x86 -- AMD did. That's what led to the Opteron rush -- they were still compatible, Intel's offerings were not. And unless I am remembering incorrectly, Intel licensed that backwards-compatible technology from AMD...
Unfortunately, it's my anniversary, and I have husbandly duties to attend to, otherwise I would attempt my own fact-checking, but I think you're wrong about the history of Itanium and the x64/x86 chips…
-Dave
Well, being a long time DEC customer, we moved through versions of Digital's/Compaq's/HP's Tru64 UNIX. So when the Alpha chip began reaching EOL, we had to move to another UNIX and HP made licensing very attractive, so we went to HPUX on Itanium. We had thought very hard about Linux on x64, but being used to solid operating system support underneath our ERP apps and because HP said Linux just wasn't mainstream enough for ERP, we choose HPUX (Itanium). It's been solid for us, but I believe if we have a chance to make a jump in the far future, we will probably opt for x64 and Linux.
I saw the writing on the wall for Itanium when it took too long for updates, Red Hat dropped support and now the Microsoft situation.
Microsoft is all about market share and having ran Windows NT on Digital's Alpha processor (Alpha 1000a and the NT only Alpha 5305, which was simply an Alpha missing the firmware to support Tru64 and VMS) and running Digital's Clustering for Windows NT, Â I never really took Microsoft's support of Itanium seriously.
-Roy
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/12/20100 comments
Exchange 2010 shipped only five months ago, but already Microsoft is looking to trot out tweaks. SP1 will enter beta this June and will feature new management functions and a tool that imports .PST files. In case you hadn't heard, Exchange 2010 has a whole new way of dealing with personal folders and archives. The .PST import is really just a bridge between the old and the new.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/12/20100 comments
IE 8 came out just last year, and already beta testers are getting excited about IE 9. In fact, over 700,000 folks just like you have downloaded the developer preview. The new rev has a speedier rendering engine and HTML5.
The fast creation of a new IE shows that Microsoft remains 100 percent committed to the browser market, and would likely be embarrassed if it ultimately lost to FireFox or even worse, Chrome.
I still hear complaints about IE, but I use it for about 10 percent of my browsing and for me it works just fine.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/09/20106 comments
With Intel and AMD announcing their new processor chips this past week, Doug turns to you to see which side of the fence you're on:
As a good American, I've always got to support the underdog. I try to use AMD where I can and there isn't much performance cost. It serves us well to have these two competing. Each inspires the other to greater efforts.
-John
I usually go with what seems best when I purchase (or which is more readily available), as I don't believe that one is substantially better than the other.
-Charlie
I prefer a chip that works!
-Bill
I used to sing the praises of AMD but I started getting upset that I had to over clock the AMD based processor to get the speed that they said it was capable of. If I buy a 3 GHz processor it should be a 3 GHz processor without over clocking.
I also can't help but to wonder how much of a 64-core processor we could actually use. We run a grip of statistical analysis software and even of the most advanced applications we have do not know how to utilize 4-cores, let alone 64. Until the software geeks start writing code that utilizes these cores, it looks like we're heading for another case of hardware technology having to wait for the applications to catch up.
BTW my vote is for Intel.
-Christian
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/09/20102 comments