Last week's
launch
by Microsoft of Hyper-V
brought out the enthusiasts right out of the gate,
as even gritty bloggers recognized that the hypervisor's price tag as part of
Windows Server 2008 (that is, free) is
pretty
alluring
.
However, as we expected, not everybody is all that thrilled so far. We've been
hearing little tidbits here and there about how VMware and its ESX competitor
don't need to lose any virtual sleep over Hyper-V, but Angelo sent us the most
detailed user review of Microsoft's newest creation that we've seen yet:
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/02/20080 comments
Yes, this should make things much...easier? Microsoft this week introduced
Select Plus
Volume Licensing
, a program intended to simplify and reduce the cost of
licensing for larger organizations. (We'll forgive Microsoft for giving this
program a name that sounds more like the name of a frequent flyer scheme: "We'd
like to board our Select Plus passengers at this time…")
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/02/20080 comments
Your editor is writing this entry from his childhood home outside of Dallas,
a place that always brings back memories of, well, childhood. Now that we're
stretching into the third or fourth inning of summer, a lot of those memories
are of playing baseball and soccer in the backyard and then weaving into the
house completely dehydrated (hey, it gets hot in Texas) and gulping gallons
of water. But one piece of news this week stirred our recollection of another
summer standard: the summer reading list.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/01/20081 comments
It's "Fiji," for heaven's sake. This is a family newsletter! Anyway,
apparently, Microsoft's codename of Fiji -- which the company is using for a
forthcoming edition of Windows Media Center -- isn't actually going down all
that well in...Fiji. Mary Jo Foley
explains
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/01/20080 comments
We say
"finally"
because apparently Symantec was all over it weeks ago.
By the way, should we read anything at all into the fact that Microsoft, which
is now more than a year into its effort to be a security vendor, had a "bug"
that messed up certain Symantec applications? Hmm, should we? Probably not,
but we do like to cause trouble when we can.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/01/20080 comments
You might say that Microsoft's record on getting fixes out to its users is
becoming a little, uh,
patchy
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/01/20080 comments
If there's any constant with MSPs, it's change. Not that that's unusual in the technology industry, but MSPs seem to have changed models and strategies more in the last few years than most other companies in most categories. They even changed their name: remember Applications Service Providers?
Well, the change continues, as companies refine outsourcing strategies. The new thing, apparently, is great big companies using multiple MSPs rather than going with just one or two, and general flooding of competition in the MSP market.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/30/20080 comments
All that noise MSPs have been making about how complicated unified communications can be? Apparently
it was more
than just noise...
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/30/20080 comments
What do companies look for when searching for an MSP? This fairly
comprehensive article
gives us an idea -- which could be useful both for MSPs and the companies searching for them.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/30/20080 comments
In case you hadn't noticed, the first four letters in the word "hyper"
are H-Y-P-E. And, until today, a lot of what we knew about the core product
in Microsoft's virtualization strategy, the Hyper-V hypervisor, was just that:
hype. (Well, hype and the fact that,
as
we've maintained
, Hyper-V sounds like an '80s break-dancing name.)
OK, so that's not entirely true -- the hype part, anyway; we stand by the breakdancing
thing. Hyper-V has been
in beta for a while, and some partners have customers running on it and
have for some time. Microsoft says that a million people have downloaded the
Hyper-V beta and are using the product. (Then again, Microsoft calls Vista a
success.) So, we do know something more about Hyper-V than just hype.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/26/20080 comments
It looks as though Microsoft is going to kill XP after all, despite flickers
of
hope
to the contrary
. In fact, Microsoft officials were pretty adamant about
saying that
XP
isn't here to stay
, although the famous "downgrade" option is
still on the table -- you know, until we're all "ready for Vista,"
which should be any time now.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/26/20080 comments