Well, here's a piece of
good news
. The folks at Ovum say that 2010 should see a jump in IT spending. Not a big jump, but we'll take what we can get.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/11/20100 comments
Why can't
Patch Tuesday
just be simple for once? This month's batch of patches also came with a
warning of a zero-day bug
for IE 6 and 7 (but if you're still using IE 6, really, what could you be thinking?).
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/11/20101 comments
It's understandable that folks went a little nuts over the Apple iPad. Apple has, after all, brought us the iPod, the iPhone and the iPod Touch over the last decade or so, and those are mostly pretty cool (and very successful) gadgets.
But besides the fact that the iPad looks ridiculous, it has also started a flood of articles about how tablet computing is going to take over the world. We don't get why that would happen. But first, the hype. Apparently, the iPad has sparked a tablet "war" (beware: a video featuring an Australian accent plays in this link), with every big vendor under the sun, including Microsoft developing its weapon for battle.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/10/20109 comments
Another of those unusually accurate (most of the time) TechARP.com
reports is out
, this one suggesting that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 will be available by the fourth quarter of this year.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/10/20100 comments
Admit it, you remember the
"Dancin' Homer"
episode of the Simpsons from…well, some years ago. In the episode, Homer becomes a successful mascot for the Springfield Isotopes baseball team and gets a call from a major-league team in Capital City.
As always, calamity ensues. For our purpose here, try to recall one memorable scene from the episode in which the Simpson family drives into Capital City and marvels at the Cross-Town Bridge. Not to state the obvious, but a cross-town bridge is pretty useless; most bridges cross bodies of water or maybe large highways. A cross-town bridge, in theory, would only cross perfectly good streets and would be superfluous—although Oklahoma City, apparently, actually has one. Who knew? (People in OKC, we suppose.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/10/20102 comments
Allison Watson, head of Microsoft's partner group held a brief presentation this morning to partners about Microsoft's commitment to cloud computing. There's more info here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/10/20100 comments
Windows Essential Business Server, we hardly knew ye. In fact, not many customers knew ye at all. As Scott Bekker explains, the mid-market-focused EBS (we only call it “WEBS” because we like making references to actual webs) never really found a niche. And its late-2008 introduction couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time for the economy. Microsoft hyped this thing big time a couple of years ago, but Redmond and its partners just couldn’t spin enough of an argument for WEBS to convince customers to get stuck into it. So, Microsoft is clearing away WEBS and will make up for its absence with other servers and capabilities.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/08/20100 comments
All of the sudden, Microsoft is pretty into this cloud thing. Steve Ballmer said last week that Microsoft is “all in” with regard to the cloud. That’s a fairly big turnaround from a couple of years ago, when Microsoft was playing down the pure cloud and hyping its “Software Plus Services” hybrid strategy. S+S still lives, we’re sure, but we did notice that the phrase didn’t appear anywhere in the RCPmag.com article about Ballmer’s cloud declaration. Is Redmond playing catch-up again? It sure seems that way, but fortunately for the Microsoft channel, nobody has anything close to an insurmountable lead in this cloud race.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/08/20101 comments
Partners, enjoy the next couple of months as much as you can because things are going to get a little crazy after that. May 12 will be the true first day of 2010 for Microsoft, with the company releasing a raft of products for availability to businesses that day.
Office 2010 will be the star, of course, but the other 2010-branded offerings that will take the stage on May 12 will include SharePoint (arguably a much bigger deal for the channel than Office), Project and Visio.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/08/20100 comments
March comes in like a lamb for Patch Tuesday, with only a couple of important fixes on the slate.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/08/20100 comments
This doesn't seem like the least obvious point someone could make (or has made) about cloud computing, but it's probably a good one to keep in mind, anyway.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/04/20100 comments
Novell, a company now based in your editor's city of current residence (Waltham, Mass.) has a suitor. A hedge fund based in New York (Boo! Just kidding) wants to buy the one-time Microsoft rival and current Microsoft patent partner for $2 billion.
Novell is...thinking about it, we suppose, but meanwhile a bidding war among bigger tech vendors could be in the offing. Exciting times in Waltham.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/04/20100 comments