OK, so, since this is a family newsletter, we're not going to make a reference to "that" Saturday Night Live skit when we talk about Microsoft's cloud in a box. But, yeah, we thought of it too.
Despite the notable absence of Justin Timberlake, Microsoft is talking boxes these days, at the same time that it's saying that it's "all in" for the cloud. How does that work, exactly? Well, Microsoft plans to put the cloud in a box (there's that phrase again -- but we're resisting temptation) with the forthcoming Windows Azure Platform Appliance.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 08/30/20100 comments
Right after Microsoft said that it couldn't patch a problem in Windows involving DLL load hijacking, guess what happened? Attacks involving DLL load hijacking popped up all over the place.
Posted by Lee Pender on 08/26/20100 comments
Red Hat has a cloud platform. It has a target competitor for that platform: Microsoft Azure. And it has a huge challenge ahead.
The darling of the open source world revealed this week that it has developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS, of course -- but not that Paas, or even this one) offering, primarily aimed at companies looking to create "hybrid" clouds, or mixed Internet-service and on-premises IT environments.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 08/26/20100 comments
Windows turns 25 this year, and we'll be celebrating the operating system's big birthday in Redmond and RCP, online and in print. We'd like to get your memories of the first Windows launch, stories about the early days of the OS or even thought on where Windows is going. Send your thoughts to [email protected]. As always, we won't publish anything in the magazines without notifying you first.
Thanks,
Lee
Posted by Lee Pender on 08/25/20100 comments
If anything is going to derail the cloud-computing train, it'll be cloud computing itself.
Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite -- the cloud versions of Exchange, SharePoint and other tools that Microsoft itself hosts -- went out for a couple of hours on Monday. A couple of hours might not sound like a big deal, but it's a pretty long time to be without e-mail or SharePoint access. And, more to the point, two hours would be a virtual eternity if a truly critical system -- something like an ERP application or suite -- were involved.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 08/25/20102 comments
It's really pretty amazing that despite the presence of plenty of cheap (or free) alternatives, expensive and bloated Microsoft Office still rules the desktop -- but it does. There's a lot to be said for familiarity, we suppose.
Posted by Lee Pender on 08/23/20101 comments
Oh, if only Tiger Woods could have delayed the public outing of his indiscretions, we'd be able to make quite a few golf-related jokes here. But with Tiger as stale as a July 4 cake (you have one every year, don't you?), we'll just have to settle for writing about some company called 3Par without making any silly golf references.
After all, we don't know much about golf here at RCPU. We didn't know much about 3Par, either, until today, when news broke that HP and Dell were in a billion-dollar battle to buy the company. Apparently, HP has won the war with a $1.6 billion bid, meaning somebody at 3Par headquarters is swilling champagne right about now.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 08/23/20100 comments