Redmond To Show Off Hosting Wares

This week marks the HostingCon 2007 conference in Chicago , which, aside from serving as a forum for Microsoft to show off its application-hosting technologies, also sounds like something you might do if you invited a convicted felon over for dinner. (Get it? "Con," like convict? Never mind.)

Posted by Lee Pender on 07/25/20070 comments


Gates: Chinese Pirates Are Great for Microsoft

Interesting little story here in The Times of London, old chap, about how Microsoft actually figured out how to profit from piracy in China. Leave it to Bill Gates and friends to turn a sow's ear into yet another expensive silk purse.

Posted by Lee Pender on 07/20/20070 comments


Microsoft Earnings: Redmond Pays the Cost of Cool

Commenting on earnings only a few hours after they come out (we're writing this on Thursday afternoon, FYI) is a bit like reading the CliffsNotes for a great novel and then doing a book report. Earnings reports from big companies like Microsoft are absolute monsters (seriously, check this thing out ), and they're full of subtle nuances More

Posted by Lee Pender on 07/20/20070 comments


Dell Goes the MSP Route

Michael Dell has come swooping in to try to clean up his mess of a company, and part of his plan includes the purchase of a managed services provider called SilverBack.

Posted by Lee Pender on 07/20/20071 comments


Vista SP1: Your Guess Is as Good as Theirs

Mary Jo Foley tries to slice and dice through the confusion of exactly when the first Vista service pack is going to appear, but even she is having trouble with her Microsoft Ginsu knife blade.

Incidentally, in the interest of balance, we've found a couple of fans of Vista. (See, we couldn't lay off the reader e-mails after all.) Paul writes:

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Posted by Lee Pender on 07/20/20071 comments


Partners Win Redmond's Praise

Squarely in the "in-case-you-missed-it" category, here's a story on last week's Partner of the Year awards doled out at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver.

Out of curiosity, what do these awards mean to you? If you're a partner, do you actively try to win them or partner with companies that have won them? And if you're in IT (and we know you're out there reading), are you more likely to partner with a company that has won an award? Let me know at More

Posted by Lee Pender on 07/19/20070 comments


Some Paradigms Never Shift

Those of you who remember the gilded age of the late 1990s (and before) will simply love an article that's been circulating on the 21 biggest tech flops .

Our favorite tech flop (which did make the article) is speech recognition software, if only because your editor got a bit of a scoop at Comdex some years back by reporting that Microsoft wouldn't be including speech recognition in whatever the next version of Windows was at the time. Hey, it might seem ridiculous now, but it was pretty darn exciting at the time.

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Posted by Lee Pender on 07/19/20070 comments


More Eurotroubles on the Way for Microsoft

Well, here we go again. The European Union, not content to have already hammered Microsoft with all sorts of fines and other hassles (which Redmond has appealed , of course), wants more. This time, "people" (we just love Bloomberg's headline on this one More

Posted by Lee Pender on 07/19/20070 comments


Microsoft Drops Hints With Patent Applications

Want to know what the post-Vista world might look like? We'll bet you do.

Well, Microsoft dropped a hint or two with a couple of recent applications for patents . No word yet on whether the open source folks came up with any of this stuff first.

Posted by Lee Pender on 07/17/20070 comments


Microsoft's Security Dichotomy

Oh, the double-edged sword of security that swings daily in Redmond. On one hand, Microsoft is pumping major resources into its Forefront integrated security suite, the one that 4,000 or so partners are now trying to sell. On the proverbial other hand, though, there's a problem with Internet Explorer 7 (via Firefox, actually), and More

Posted by Lee Pender on 07/12/20070 comments


Redmond Slowly (Very Slowly) Gaining Ground in Search

The bad news for Microsoft search watchers is that Google is extending its market share lead. The good news is that Microsoft is kind of, sort of, catching up with Yahoo a little bit.

Posted by Lee Pender on 07/12/20070 comments


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