After Microsoft announced that R2 of the forthcoming Windows Server 2008 (nee
Longhorn) will only come in a beefy (get it?) 64-bit version, rumors spread
that Microsoft might not release another 32-bit operating system after Vista.
That might or might not be the case, though -- because
Redmond
hasn't decided yet
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/22/20070 comments
Last week, in a
rather
innocuous RCPU entry
, we linked to a study put out by the school of business
at the University of Michigan that suggests that Microsoft's rating for customer
satisfaction is getting worse. We wanted to get your take on that and how it
affects partners.
Let's just say that we touched a nerve. RCPU's inbox quickly filled with e-mails
about dissatisfaction with Microsoft -- although not all of them were as angry
as you might think. Here's the best of what we received, edited in some cases
a bit for length. (And, lest you think we've lost our grammar skills, yes, the
headline of this entry is an allusion to the classic Rolling Stones song. We
hope you knew that already, though.)
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/22/20070 comments
If you're old enough, or just enough of a fan of TV trivia, you might remember
the tastefully named Lee Majors starring in "
The
Six Million Dollar Man
." The actor played a test pilot who was horribly
injured in a plane crash and subsequently rebuilt by the U.S. government with
all sorts of high-performance bionic parts in his body -- hence the reason his
reconstruction cost $6 million, a hefty price tag back in the mid-'70s. (That
kind of money might get you a decent middle reliever today, but we digress.)
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/18/20070 comments
Unlike some other commentators, we're not big fans here at RCPU of referring
to Microsoft as "evil" or "the devil," so let's put the
headline of this entry into context. SAP -- the big, German, still mostly dominant
enterprise resource planning vendor -- has been
snuggling
up to Microsoft lately
, promising better integration between its ERP applications
and Redmond's SQL Server 2005 database.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/17/20070 comments
Before we get to Ballmer's mafia handle, let's look at a few reader e-mails
on other topics.
Colin quite rightly called your editor out for having been too lazy to look
up the old magazine cover with Apple's logo and the word "Pray" on
it that we
referenced last week. Turns out it was Wired, not Upside,
that ran the cover -- and it turns out that the cover's quite famous, as you'll
see from Colin's note:
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/11/20070 comments
Whether or not the latest (and oddly persistent) flare-up of the
Microsoft-to-buy-Yahoo
rumor
turns out to be true -- and we're not betting that it will -- Steve
Ballmer does seem to have a hankering for a bit of shopping. Ballmer said this
week that he wouldn't rule out dropping a bundle of Microsoft's
dwindling
pile of cash
on acquisitions to beef up the company's still-cloudy Software
Plus Services (not to be confused -- or
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/11/20070 comments
As we do sometimes here at RCPU, we're going to throw a topic completely open
to you, the faithful reader. In other words, we'll give you a bit of news and
just let you run with it in e-mail form or as commentary on the blog. (Yes,
this means that we're going to mainly keep our mouths shut on this issue --
for now.)
We did this last summer with Windows
Genuine Advantage and got tremendous
feedback. So here we go again. This week, it's time to Get
Smart, as the topic is business intelligence (clever, huh?).
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/10/20071 comments
Here come those third parties Microsoft has been waiting for on Vista. Virtualization
kingpin
VMware
has released Workstation 6
, the first of its virtualization products to
support Vista.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/10/20070 comments