Government agencies have
put
the kibosh on it
, and even Steve Ballmer tried to get investors to
calm
down about it
. Just today, a product manager from one of Microsoft's bigger
ISV security partners (OK, it was Symantec) told us that most companies won't
even seriously start looking at switching to it until the third or fourth quarter
of this year (and that actually sounded a little optimistic compared with other
projections we've heard).
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/27/20073 comments
In
Pirates of Silicon Valley
,
a movie to which we just love to refer, there's a scene at the end in which
Anthony Michael Hall's Bill Gates peers from a video screen over Noah Wyle's
Steve Jobs at a press conference as Gates announces the investment by Microsoft
that basically saves Apple.
In the background, onlookers and Mac fanatics boo and hiss at Gates' overwhelming
mug. The Big Brother connotation is not exactly subtle, but what do you want
from a made-for-TV movie? (By the way, if Pirates had been a theater
release and not a made-for-TV flick, "I got the loot, Steve!" would
have been one of the great cinematic catchphrases of the late 1990s. Alas.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/21/20070 comments
Philippe Gaillard (who, it randomly turns out, was a neighbor and rugby opponent
during your editor's days living in Paris) gets it. The president of Neocase,
an ISV that provides support applications and integrates its wares with Dynamics
CRM, explains very succinctly why Dynamics ERP and CRM are getting attention
from so many companies:
"They look [at Dynamics] because they're sick of paying millions of dollars."
Et voila! There are a lot of reasons why companies of all sizes are looking
at Dynamics, but none is more compelling than the potential for getting serious
functionality without paying the exorbitant prices often associated with enterprise
software. Combine that with Microsoft's integration message, and what could
go wrong for partners selling Microsoft's applications?
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/16/20070 comments
Forget the news, even though there's a lot of it. Two shocking revelations
emerged from Microsoft's Convergence show in America's most beautiful city today.
First, and perhaps most disturbing, is that one of the editors of this newsletter
(as in one of the guys who reads it and tries to put my ramblings into some
sense of order) owns a Zune, aka "the uncool iPod." Bought it himself.
And likes it. And sort of resents RCPU's incessant pounding of it in recent
months. Who knew?
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/13/20070 comments
Here are a couple of pieces of good news: Microsoft has two new wrinkles in
its already excellent Partner Program, one an enhancement and one a brand-new
initiative.
For starters, Microsoft now includes hardware in version 3.0 of its popular
Buy Local Program, which helps system builders find customers
in their hometowns. Previous versions of the program offered customers free
software and Web services but stopped short of offering hardware.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/09/20070 comments
With the next version of
somewhat-maligned
Windows Live OneCare
supposedly
on
the way
, we've had some great reader e-mails on experiences with Microsoft's
fledgling anti-virus suite.
Bill says that he likes it just fine:
"I have it on three home computers: An on-campus university student's,
a World of Warcraft player's and a laptop used for e-mail on business and
pleasure travels. Windows Defender is loaded on all of them and they are all
kept up-to-date. None of them has been affected with anything and I have not
had any trouble with the software. I do not use the backup (I am still making
images with Drive Image 7) nor the defrag (I use PerfectDisk 8).
"I like the invisibility of OneCare and was pleased with the lack
of problems. I will have to check out the AV test results.
"I also use Norton AntiVirus 2007 on three computers with mixed results.
NAV provides annoying messages and on one machine shuts down AutoProtect at
random."
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/08/20070 comments
Funny little story this week regarding Dell. A couple of weeks ago, the
computer maker launched a suggestion-box site called IdeaStorm. (Really,
did somebody get paid to come up with that name? Maybe we should call
this newsletter WordFlood.) Within about 10 days of its launch, IdeaStorm
got bombarded with posts from users demanding that Dell release PCs pre-installed
with Linux. Dell then released a statement saying that it would certify
some of its lines of computers to work with SuSE Linux from Novell, which
is the distribution of Microsoft interoperability fame. So then a bunch
of half-baked stories and blog entries (most of which seem to have disappeared)
came out in the tech world talking about how Dell is going to offer PCs
with Linux pre-installed.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/01/20070 comments
First, Microsoft throws a wrench into Vista upgrades for Mac owners citing
concerns about virtualization and security. Then, VMware, virtualization king
of the jungle, attacks Microsoft for "trying to restrict customers' flexibility
and freedom to choose virtualization software by limiting who can run their
software and how they can run it" (and Mary Jo Foley thinks she might
smell
another lawsuit
). Is Microsoft
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Posted by Lee Pender on 02/27/20070 comments