Whatever unified communications is, everybody wants a part of it.
Yesterday
,
we told you about Oracle cutting into the Notes-Exchange dance, which isn't
strictly speaking a unified communications story, really...but it sort of is.
Or, at least, we think it is. After all, messaging, calendaring (we still love
the fact that "calendar" is a verb now) and "collaboration"
all seem pretty UC-ish to us, even if Oracle's new suite doesn't currently appear
to delve quite as much into voice, Web conferencing and other nifty Web-whatever-point-oh
functions as offerings from Microsoft and Cisco do.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/25/20080 comments
We've always been amused by the English tendency to identify with soccer clubs
by saying, "I'm West Ham" or "I'm Chelsea" or "I'm
Stockport County," rather than saying, "I'm a (fill in the club here)
fan." It's as if the fan himself or herself is the living embodiment of
the club, a personification not just of an organization but of a way of life.
It's with that sense of amusement that we watch Microsoft's "I'm
a PC" ads, which strike back at Apple's brilliant and exhaustively
documented Mac Guy-PC Guy campaign. The ads are pretty good, really, even if
we don't recognize most (any?) of the celebrities in them. In fact, although
this isn't saying much, these might be the best Microsoft ads ever.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/25/20080 comments
E-mail
risk management
, that is. Remember that "Seinfeld" episode where
George can't stand reading because every time he reads he hears his own voice,
so he buys a book on tape about risk management, and the voice on the tape ends
up sounding just like his voice? Yeah, that was a good one.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/24/20080 comments
It's Software Usage Management (that's a product, not a category) for .NET.
Careful, the
press
release
opens as a .PDF document.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/24/20080 comments
In case you missed it -- and if you follow this sort of thing -- Microsoft
is
buying
back $40 billion
of its stock to try to get its stagnant (and sinking) share
price moving upward again.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/24/20081 comments
Oracle doesn't get a lot of virtual ink here at RCPU, but there's no question
that Larry Ellison's company is a monster, one of a few dominant firms in the
industry along the lines of Microsoft (of course), IBM, Cisco, Google and maybe
a couple of others. So, when Oracle does something significant, it matters -- and
this week at its OpenWorld show, Oracle did something significant.
Or, at least, it could be significant. The database titan has just stormed
into the Notes-Exchange war with what seems at first glance (although we haven't
actually seen it) like a nifty new
suite of collaboration software.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/24/20081 comments
It'll be a short-ish RCPU today, but we'd like to lead off with a topic we'll
come back to later in the week: Microsoft's marketing efforts. By now, you all
know about Redmond's ad campaign shifting from Bill and Jerry to the very PC
Guy Apple parodies so skillfully in its ads. More on that in future editions.
For today, though, we were shocked to see that a branding survey this week
placed Microsoft as the No.
3 brand worldwide, behind only Coca-Cola and rival IBM. Now, there are a
lot of branding surveys out there -- really, a whole lot -- and we understand
that they take a lot more into account than just how clever a particular ad
campaign is or how much a company gets hammered in the blogosphere.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/23/20080 comments
With apologies to Willie Nelson: Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be
investment bankers (if there is such a thing anymore). Make 'em
be
IT folks
instead.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/23/20080 comments
Very often, we use the royal "we" here at RCPU even though the same
person writes the newsletter 90 percent of the time because "we" just
sounds a little more elegant and perhaps less arrogant than "I." (Besides,
we do have an editing and production team -- all your editor does is type.)
But today, when we use the word "we" to describe folks waiting on
Windows 7, we're not just talking one person or even a few people. We're talking
about the masses of people who have rejected Vista (in which RCPU is, to be
fair, presently included) and are more than a little curious to see what its
successor will look like.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/18/20086 comments
Channel titan Ingram Micro is caught up in the economic slowdown with everybody
else, apparently, and
lowered
its third-quarter earnings
outlook this week.
Incidentally, we're still looking for comments on
how
you're handling
what we think we can safely call a financial crisis. Send
them to
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Posted by Lee Pender on 09/18/20081 comments