Infosys landed this week what must be just about every partner's dream -- Microsoft's own IT contract. Yes, Microsoft entered into a three-year deal to outsource its IT operations to its long-time, India-based partner.
We're going to be writing more about this in the weeks to come, and we'd love to hear your take on it. Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/14/20106 comments
Apparently some folks were surprised last week when their copies of Office Mobile 2010 beta just kind of stopped working, although Microsoft says that it had put the cutoff date for the beta in the product's fine print. (You do read those user agreements, don't you?)
Well, apparently this little incident rankled enough users that Microsoft actually apologized for it. And while this might not be that big of a deal (and while it's technically not even an error on Microsoft's part), we still contend that it's a symptom of the greater mess that is Microsoft's mobile "strategy."
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/14/20101 comments
Many times we've said in this space that Google Apps has great potential to do some damage to Microsoft Office. They key word there, though, has always been "potential."
In our experience at RCPU (and we use Google Apps every day), the package is fine for quick-and-dirty work but not anywhere near robust (there's a ‘90s word we don't hear too often anymore) enough to handle serious, day-to-day chores. This week, though, that might have changed -- or, at least, started to change.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 04/14/20103 comments
Forgive us for this fairly major departure from partner-oriented content, but we just couldn't let this pass unnoted: Wow, Microsoft, you really know how to reach the youth market. OK, we'll give you credit for the Xbox, but other than that, your record is kind of bleak. And it only got worse today.
Seriously, your new line of phones (which only adds to your complete mess of a mobile strategy) is called Kin. Really? Kin? You should have just stuck with Pink, the "code name" you used for this project for so long. So, now, we have not only Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Phone 7 (aside from, possibly, some other version of Windows Mobile to come -- you've lost us there, Microsoft), we also have Kin. Kin!
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Posted by Lee Pender on 04/12/20106 comments
Skittles and Mountain Dew all around! If the developers will please stop crunching code for a few seconds, they'll notice that Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4 and .NET Framework 4 are all now available. Go ahead and wear your ironic t-shirt to the launch party -- which will happen online, of course, so you won't have to leave your chair.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/12/20100 comments
A whopping 11 fixes for 25 vulnerabilities means that there's been some messed-up stuff in Microsoft software recently. Hopefully the patches will take care of it.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/12/20100 comments
OK, so, apparently when Apple comes out with something, no matter how ridiculous it looks (or is), everybody has to have one. And then every other vendor has to make one. This week, word is that Google is getting ready to launch an Android tablet computer. Google will have to get in line with everybody else because suddenly there are (or will be) a lot of dumb-looking computers out there.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/12/20104 comments
Ambitious little document-sharing cloud vendor Box.net has raised an additional $15 million in venture funding for its fight to dethrone Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, which just happens to be a billion-dollar business for Microsoft these days. Well, $30 million -- Box.net's total venture haul to date -- is a start, we suppose. A pretty small start…
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/08/20101 comments
The sieve in Redmond has another leak flowing through it. This time, it's Windows 7 SP1, a version which is now apparently all over the Web. It doesn't seem to be all that exciting, and the leaked SP doesn't seem to answer the few smoldering (they're not exactly burning) questions, mainly about USB 3.0 support and improved Bluetooth and Wi-fi capabilities, surrounding SP1. But if you want a little peek at it, take a look for yourself.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/08/20100 comments
Computing standards have always perplexed us a little bit. What we at RCPU have never been able to fully figure out is why standards are so important? Oh, we understand the importance of them in theory, but in practice? Well, it seems to us that the biggest dog in the pack pretty much sets a de facto standard.
Such was the case with Microsoft for a long time until Redmond got all worked up about industry standards a few years ago and rammed its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format through as an international standard. Dominant regimes have, generally throughout history, wanted to give the impression of credibility -- it's one of the reasons why the Soviets had "elections," even though only one party was eligible to appear on the ballot. So, maybe Microsoft was going for the credibility angle.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 04/08/20106 comments
Redmond columnist Mary Jo Foley tells us that the new Dynamics CRM offering is available as a hosted application or as an on-premises deployment. As you might imagine, it has lots of functionality aimed at organizations that aren't actually supposed to make a profit.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/08/20102 comments