Microsoft is a lot of things to a lot of people: a moneymaker for partners,
a blessing and a headache at the same time for users, an easy target for competitors
and antitrust types, and something of an enigma -- of late, anyway -- for investors.
But what Microsoft is not, and never will be, is cool.
We don't claim here at RCPU to be the arbiters of cool. Far from it, actually.
But like anybody else, we know cool when we see it. And we don't see it in Redmond.
We see wealthy, highly profitable, astute, capable, extremely tenacious, energetic
and sometimes even innovative -- but not cool. If anything, the now-famous Mac
Guy-PC Guy commercials that Apple has been running sum up pretty well the public
image Microsoft has developed for itself -- nerdy, uptight and, these days,
a bit bloated.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 07/12/20070 comments
Microsoft this week took the wraps off a major part of its hosting strategy
--
the CRM Live initiative
,
which involves the company itself hosting customer relationship management applications
for customers (and sold through, but not hosted by, partners) at bargain-basement
prices.
Never one to back down to Redmond (quite the contrary, in fact), Salesforce.com
CEO Marc Benioff immediately began running smack about Redmond's new scheme,
or so it said in this
article:
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Posted by Lee Pender on 07/11/20071 comments
A few of weeks ago, your editor was having a chat with one of his colleagues
out in
RCP
's office in sun-drenched, meticulously planned Irvine, Calif.
The colleague mentioned that she had a friend who worked for Microsoft and then
went on to detail a brief conversation with that friend that went more or less
like this:
RCP colleague: So, I Googled [something, it doesn't
matter what] the other day, and
Microsoft friend (interrupting): Don't you mean "Live Searched"
it?
RCP colleague (befuddled): Um...no...
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Posted by Lee Pender on 07/11/20070 comments
We here at RCPU sometimes read things that we wish weren't true, but, sadly,
they are. Such is the case with a gentleman who named his baby daughter (and
congrats to his family, by the way), you guessed it...Vista,
after
the operating system
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/06/20070 comments
Your editor can remember, quite distinctly, his first trip to Seattle. It was
1983, and the city back then was known for vistas that involved mountains and
the Puget Sound, not questionable sales figures and widespread customer dissatisfaction.
(Sorry. That was just too easy.)
But seriously, in 1983, the first thing people thought of when they thought
of Seattle was rain, or maybe the Sound, the mountains or even the Washington
Huskies (who were good back then, for those who have forgotten or just never
knew). Today, though, the first thing that races to a lot of folks' minds when
they hear the word "Seattle" is Microsoft.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 07/06/20070 comments
The Free Software Foundation has
released
version 3
of the license that governs Linux use and, as expected, it appears
to
put
the kibosh
on Microsoft's recent patent-racketeering spree with Linux distributors.
But GPL v3 is no simple document, and it could cause some confusion for vendors
still working under v2 (or deciding whether to
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Posted by Lee Pender on 07/02/20070 comments
Six years ago, when Microsoft bought enterprise resource planning software
vendor Great Plains, it truly found a diamond in the rough -- or, in this case,
on the prairie of North Dakota.
Great Plains brought with it solid functionality, a good reputation for service
and one of the most loyal partner bases in the technology industry. It also
brought with it customers who would walk through fire for founder Doug Burgum,
an old-school technology guy who genuinely seemed to have a passion for his
product and his people.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 07/02/20072 comments
Google is moving deeper into Microsoft's sacred ground -- the channel -- through
a
deal with
Ingram Micro
to distribute the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini.
Redmond surely can't like seeing this. Google is already killing Microsoft
in the consumer search market -- a market Microsoft desperately wants to dominate.
Now, here comes Google storming further into enterprise search, maybe the only
area of search in which Microsoft might have had a built-in advantage for reasons
we hope are obvious (as in, pretty much everybody has a Microsoft infrastructure
with lots of data floating around in it).
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Posted by Lee Pender on 06/29/20070 comments