The revelations from the ongoing and high-profile Vista Capable class action
lawsuit against Microsoft continue. (Check out the entire litany of subpoenaed
e-mails in a huge PDF file
here
.)
Apparently, a surprisingly (to us, anyway) large percentage of Vista crashes
in the operating system's early months were caused by
dodgy
drivers from NVIDIA
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/31/20082 comments
We've heard so much from Microsoft in the last year or so about its hosted
customer relationship management offering that it's hard to say why the news
of a name change for the product didn't arrive until late last week.
Dynamics CRM Live isn't anymore -- well, it isn't "Live," anyway.
The hosted application suite lives, but it's now Dynamics
CRM Online, an altogether better name that helps alleviate some confusion
in Microsoft's branding. Until now, it seemed as though everything Microsoft
did that had even the most remote connection to the Internet was branded as
"Live." Online might not be groundbreaking, but it's simple and descriptive.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/31/20080 comments
Given
this
week's news
that Symantec drivers and Vista Service Pack 1 are getting along
about as well as Microsoft and the European Union, we thought we'd bring you
readers' yarns of frustration and anger about SP1. (Yes, somebody out there
is running Vista and trying to install this service pack. Hey, it came as a
surprise to us
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/27/20083 comments
The provider of tools for SQL Server management has a new deal for Dynamics
partners. Check it out
here
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/27/20080 comments
OK, so not everybody has a
disaster
story or a cautionary tale
to tell about Vista. In the interest of balance,
here are a few happy tales of service packing.
Bob seems pretty pleased so far:
"I've been running Vista since beta 1, and my only complaint is user
access control. Everything else, including better drivers once they became
available (for mainstream hardware), and lots of other pluses made me a convert
on both x86 and x64 long ago. SP1 installed onto an x86 workstation, my main
x64 monster box and my Dell e1505 laptop without a hitch the day it was available
(via MSDN)."
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/27/20082 comments
Ken Schrader's No. 49 car will sport a
big
ol' Microsoft logo
-- and a small-business partner logo, as well. What we're
wondering is if Mr. Schrader should suffer an unfortunate crash during a race
(hey, it happens in NASCAR), will anybody say that he "blue screened?"
Because we would.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/27/20080 comments
With authorSTREAM's
new
product
, you can do it...if you really want to.
But we bet
this
will still get more hits, mainly because your editor has already watched it
about 400 times. (Who can resist Butch Johnson's catch in Super Bowl XII and
a plug for "Tuborg, the golden beer of Danish kings" all in less than
a minute-and-a-half?)
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/26/20081 comments
Oh, it's a slow news week. What better time to drum up a little drama? On top
of much ado about not much regarding the
first
Vista service pack
, this week we have news about ol' reliable XP and its
forthcoming major update.
Apparently, XP SP3 could RTM -- how's that for alphabet soup? -- as
early as April. Now, given that we've all been running XP for the better
part of a decade now -- and given that most people seem to have almost a Brett
Favre level of totally irrational love for it -- it wouldn't seem to be that
big a deal if XP SP3 comes out in, say, June, instead of in April...right? After
all, it's been a while, almost an Olympiad, since the last XP SP.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/26/20084 comments
Another of those brand-strength surveys came out recently (faithful readers
of
RCP
the magazine will remember that we've tackled the
topic
of Microsoft's brand
before) and said that Redmond's mark is
way
down the list
-- 59th, behind Fruit of the Loom -- in terms of brand
strength.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/25/20082 comments
Redmond aims to boost Forefront and OneCare
with
the purchase
of pleasingly named Komoku. It's sort of too bad, though, that
Komoku couldn't have hooked up with Ubuntu Linux somehow, because "Komoku
Ubuntu" kind of sounds as though it could be the name of a guy who might
be a favorite to win the Olympic marathon this year.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/25/20080 comments
Microsoft is mulling over a
special
patch
for a security vulnerability in Word.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/25/20080 comments