Cisco's splashing the cash again, this time on a company that somehow aids in routing information to mobile devices (hopefully not the Sidekick, which will just lose it, anyway). Cisco's price tag for this venture? Nearly $3 billion.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/13/20090 comments
Microsoft and SAP have long had a funny little history of coopetition in the ERP market, the Duet combo of Microsoft Office and a SAP back end being one example. Well, now Microsoft is sneaking up on its bigger rival (in the ERP market, anyway) by doing a little end-around with Capgemini, which will help Microsoft software integrate with SAP's ERP stuf.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/13/20090 comments
We generally try to stay away from rumors here, but we just love this one. Apparently there's a fair amount of buzz that a hardware company -- which one, we don't know, just a hardware company of some sort -- might be looking to buy Tech Data in order to be a bit less reliant on the shrinking hardware market.
OK, here's the real reason why we love the rumor. It comes from Robert Trigaux of Tampabay.com, who is to be lauded for his excellent use of links in his blog entry on the topic. Yes, that's right! The venerable Mr. Trigaux linked to...RCPU! We're "industry observers" who recently noticed Tech Data's financial rebound! Yes!
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/08/20094 comments
It's a CRM and unified communications -- whatever that is -- combo with an eye on the cloud. If you want to read more about it, you'll just have to click here for Stephen Swoyer's excellent story on RCPmag.com. (Yes, we're trying to drive traffic to the Web site. It's part of why we're here. And while you're on RCPmag.com, have a look around. Stay for a while.)
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/08/20090 comments
If anything Microsoft does deserves the description "underwhelming," it has to be Windows Mobile. Lagging in market share, innovation and general relevance behind several other competitors (not just the iPhone), Windows Mobile is the ne'er-do-well relative of the Windows operating system, the gin-soaked brother-in-law who sleeps on the couch when he gets kicked out of his apartment and just needs a place to crash for a few days, man.
Windows Mobile is, for now, a money drain on Microsoft, a product so forlorn that even Steve Ballmer can't manage to be upbeat about it. So, this week's appearance of some smartphones based on WinMo 6.5, despite Microsoft's officially sunny take on the whole thing, didn't exactly cause a massive, iPhone-style stir. In fact, it mainly seemed to draw attention to how far behind Windows is on the small screen.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/07/20094 comments
The news earlier this week that Hotmail had been caught in a phishing net brought out the Microsoft haters in full voice. But the naysayers seem a bit quieter now that other Web-based e-mail services -- including the sainted Gmail, which, by the way, your editor uses for personal purposes -- have fallen victim to the attack.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/07/20090 comments
Talk about epic fail: Vista was such a disaster that even Steve Ballmer has stopped pretending that it was any kind of success. Ballmer told a U.K. newspaper this week that the company's reputation still hasn't recovered following the Vista debacle. Surely Vista has to have achieved something along the lines of New Coke-level failure now. Or maybe Ryan Leaf drinking New Coke while driving a Yugo. In any case, it's bad.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/07/20093 comments
Hey, you Mac zealots, we know your secrets. We see those PCs hidden in your home offices and those Dell laptops on your living room sofas. We know now that 85 percent of you -- that's a lot -- not only have a Mac but also a PC. So, stop the smug act, OK? (Linux users, you may still be smug...for now.)
And speaking of the smug act, we loved this hilarious bit of commentary on the PC-Mac dichotomy from a grouchy U.K. writer and PC user who hates both the PC and Mac fans -- a position we can understand to a great extent (beware, this is a tad nasty and has a hint of a dirty word or two...but it's also funny).
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/07/20090 comments
Believe it or not, there are still some Lotus Notes users out there -- lots of them, actually -- and IBM is still an e-mail vendor. Now, it's a vendor with a cloud-based e-mail option for the enterprise, something known as LotusLive iNotes.
The name has it all -- the word "Live," a la Microsoft, two words PutTogether, as has been popular in the industry for a while, and the lower-case "i" before the word "Notes" in what we can only guess is a loving tribute to the iPhone (and a bunch of other Apple stuff). Way to make that new service really stand out, IBM. In other news, we're changing the name of RCPU to the "InformatonWorld ComputerWeek iNewsletter." Not really.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/06/20091 comments
No, really. Red Hat has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw software patents.
Outlaw! Now, we're going to go on another pro-patent rant here, but first we'll say this: No, we don't like patent trolls. Yes, the system needs reform so that some make-nothing patent hog can't tear a legitimately innovative company (that actually makes things) to shreds.
But outlawing software patents? Baby, bathwater, throwing one out with the other -- those are the words that come to mind. It's too much. Red Hat's argument is that patents stifle innovation. We would argue that patent trolls do that, but that patents themselves encourage innovation because (in an ideal world) they let the people who invent things make money off of them, which provides pretty good incentive to invent. We won't hold our breath waiting on the Supreme Court to respond to this.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/06/20090 comments