Wherever you go in Europe, but especially in France -- where, if we remember correctly, it's the law -- you see menus in front windows of restaurants. Some feature multilingual text; others play to either the locals or snobby travelers by sticking to the country's native language. But they're there -- food and drink options, prices and all.
Yes, Europeans love menus, and now they'll have another to use when they buy new computers. Microsoft and the European Union have finally settled the EU's antitrust lawsuit against Redmond, and, yes, the infamous "browser ballot" (we'd like to think of it as more of a menu) is part of the settlement.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/17/20092 comments
Gotcha headline? Well, maybe, but not by much. Some company in East Texas called BetaNet LLC has launched patent infringement lawsuits against most of the big technology companies we can name. The funny part is that BetaNet seems to be some sort of mysterious operation that nobody wants to discuss. But watch out -- those East Texas juries love to find in favor of patent plaintiffs. Is it too late to go to law school?
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/17/20091 comments
Microsoft bought Canadian software firm Opalis, a company that does datacenter automation, late last week. And there's been more wheeling and dealing in Redmond's calendar fourth quarter, but to read about it, you'll have to boost the RCPmag.com hit count by going here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/16/20090 comments
This is a pretty interesting little model, actually. Amazon's auctioning little unused chunks of its cloud capacity as part of a program called Spot Instances. From Jeff Schwartz's RCPmag.com story linked above, here's Amazon's CTO talking about the plan:
"Customers bid any price they like on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long their bid exceeds the current Spot Price," said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in a blog post. "Spot Instances are ideal for tasks that can be flexible as to when they start and stop. This gives our customers an exciting new approach to IT cost management."
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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/16/20091 comments
There's no way we're getting into this entry without setting the mood with a little classic Janet Jackson asking the question some observers have asked of Ray Ozzie recently: "What have you done for me lately?" (Ooh-ooh-ooh yeah. Oh, yeah. It's in your head now.)
Maybe the better question is, "What has Ray Ozzie done for Microsoft lately?" While we admit that we jumped the gun on what we thought was Ozzie's exit from the critical Microsoft Azure cloud computing project, we're not the only ones wondering about Ozzie's role in Redmond.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/16/20091 comments
Blogging is a funny thing. We at RCPU have always referred to RCPU as a newsletter, in part because it is an actual e-mail newsletter for subscribers (and was before it was ever a blog) and in part because, for us, the word "blog" doesn't carry a lot of credibility. Blogs are like opinions (which are like...something else): Everybody has one, or so it seems.Â
This week, though, RCPU was definitely more blog than newsletter. We took a blog entry from Microsoft (via an entry from one of our sister sites) and misinterpreted what it was saying, thereby making more of a story than what was really there. In this case, the story was Ray Ozzie's apparent exit from Azure development at Microsoft. Well, Ozzie's role in Azure hasn't changed. If you want more detail, read on.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/20091 comments
Joseph A. Osbourn will step down in June and John Tonnison will ascend to the throne of CIO of one of the world's biggest distributors on Feb. 1. Happy retirement, Mr. Osbourn.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/20090 comments
Redmond beefed up its health care IT portfolio this week with the purchase of RCPU's neighbor (sort of), Andover, Mass.-based Sentillion. Redmond magazine columnist and Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley has some insight on how Microsoft is going to fold its new purchase into the health care family in Redmond.
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/20090 comments
It's a done deal in the U.S., but the European Union's regulators still have to approve Oracle's purchase of Sun. And guess who's going to be there to try to put the kibosh on the whole thing? Oh, yes. Microsoft.
What's funny is that, just about the time the Microsoft-in-Brussels news came out on this, the infamous Neelie Kroes, the European Commission's competition commissioner and no friend to Microsoft over the years, started expressing optimism about the Oracle-Sun deal.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/10/20090 comments
We told you during most of 2008 and all of 2009 that cloud computing was not just a model for the future but was here now -- and it is, sort of. But a lot of companies still have doubts about security, uptime and data ownership, meaning the cloud model hasn't yet soared quite as much as we thought it would. (Yes, we jumped the gun a little bit on this one.) But one analyst now says that 2010 could be a breakthrough year for cloud computing, and we all know that analysts never get anything wrong...right?
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/10/20090 comments