It's not just XP that Microsoft wants to put to bed. Mary Jo Foley reports that Redmond is also putting out notices that support for Windows Server 2000 and 2003 will change (and end, in the case of 2000) relatively soon, as well. More details straight from Microsoft are here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/17/20090 comments
This might not seem like big news at first glance, but it's important to your editor. So, indulge us. Dr. James Cash, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, will end his tenure as a Microsoft board member (on friendly terms; no controversy here) on Nov. 19.
Dr. Cash is a remarkably accomplished man, who still sits on the boards of lots of big companies and carries a lot of influence in the business world. What most folks might not realize, though, is that he's part of the Boston Celtics' ownership group. But well beyond that, James Cash was the first African-American to play basketball in the old Southwest Conference and one of the conference's first African-American athletes, period.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/17/20090 comments
Well, who knew? All those Windows Update patches and operating system fixes haven't been all that useful after all. Applications are where the real security risk is. It's apps, I tell ya! Apps are what the hoodlums are lookin' to rub out! Why, I oughta...
Sorry, we slipped into '30s gangster mode for a second there. But speaking of bad guys, apparently they're not attacking the OS (read: Windows) the way they used to. More and more, they're going after desktop apps, which tend to remain largely unprotected in enterprises.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/16/20091 comments
IBM is, not unreasonably, ditching Microsoft Office for hundreds of thousands of its employees and sticking them with IBM's open source Lotus Symphony. It's perfectly reasonable, of course, for IBM to want its employees to use its own products (or, at least, not to use competitive products), but we hope for IBM's sake that these folks don't have problems communicating with the rest of the world, which uses Office. (The Open Document Format should solve any of those problems, though...right?)
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/16/20090 comments
Microsoft Office poobah Stephen Elop sat down recently for a video interview with Redm...actually, with The Wall Street Journal -- but we'll get Elop again one of these days. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, the WSJ video is here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/16/20090 comments
Momentum is one of those intangibles that can end up being massively important. In business, in sports, in daily life in general, people who can create or capitalize on momentum can accomplish a lot. It's hard to say -- in a non-scientific way, since we do know that there are actual scientific formulas for momentum -- what the feeling of momentum really is or how it develops and flows, but we know it's there.
Sports fans know all about momentum -- especially football fans, who were able to breathe again last weekend with both college ball and the NFL in full swing. (As well as high school football. Here's a completely indulgent shout-out to the Midlothian High School Panthers from Midlothian, Texas. Proud to be a Panther...go blue!)
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/15/20095 comments
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are (or, we suppose, "is") back, and both personalities apparently work on open source messaging at Microsoft.
First, Microsoft slams Linux for breaking patents and shakes down Novell and lots of other Linux vendors for protection money; then, Microsoft gets all fuzzy with open source, issuing a sappy white paper about open source software (OSS) and now sponsoring a whole open source foundation aimed at bringing OSS folks and proprietary vendors together. (By the way, if you don't click on any other link in this edition of the newsletter, click on that last one. It's a fantastic story about the whole foundation thing.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/15/20091 comments
Finally, jurisprudence swings Microsoft's way, mostly. A court said last week that $358 million was just way too much money for Alcatel-Lucent to win in a patent-infringement case against Microsoft...and struck down the penalty. The case isn't over, though, as there will be a new trial now to determine just how much Microsoft should pay for having broken Alcatel-Lucent patents, something everybody outside of Redmond seems to agree that Microsoft did.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/15/20090 comments
Well, some Patch Tuesday that was. Just as Microsoft unleashes a passel of critical patches, another huge -- and thus far un-patched -- bug pops up.
The main target of this one seems to be Vista, so not many users will have to worry about it (heh heh). But it also affects Windows Server 2008 (although not Windows Server 2008 R2, apparently) and the Windows 7 release candidate (although not Windows 7 itself...apparently), so it's serious enough to merit a mention.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/10/20090 comments
Scandal! Microsoft is sending out marketing materials to retailers that -- gasp! -- make Windows look better than its competitors. Will this bully's reign of terror ever end?
Seriously, this week, the trade press and the conblogeration (it's sort of a combination of conglomeration and blog -- we like it better than blogosphere) went nuts over materials Microsoft sent to Best Buy employees. These propaganda pieces touted Windows 7's advantages over Linux and the Mac.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/10/20095 comments
It's rare -- very rare -- that we do this sort of thing, but we're going to run a couple of atypical e-mails this week. First of all, there's one from David (more on him in a minute), whose thoughts we ran in a post about browsers not long ago. We had to cut David's post for length (no, we don't have completely unlimited space), and David took the time to complete his thoughts on the blog post itself. Thank you for that, David.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/10/20090 comments
OK, so it's much more likely that the economy is to blame than VMware is, but server revenues were down pretty sharply year-over-year in the second quarter of 2009.
While most of the 30 percent overall drop in revenues is likely down to companies having smaller IT budgets or putting off spending, some of it -- according to an analyst at IDC, the firm that prepared the revenue report -- is the result of server and software virtualization.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/09/20092 comments