There sure have been a lot of announcements at Microsoft's Professional Developers
Conference this week. We say that with a touch of incredulity because the PDC
always struck us as being a tad esoteric and not having the broad-based appeal
of, say, Tech-Ed.
OK, granted, Azure
is more of a development platform than anything else, so it makes sense to announce
it to developers. But it's also a critical part of an overall SaaS -- sorry,
S+S -- strategy, so we might have expected an unveiling at a different, somewhat
more inclusive conference. (And that goes double for Windows
7, even though developers will take some interest in it, as well.) Oh, well...it
all ends up on the Internet, anyway, right?
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/30/20080 comments
Finally! Microsoft Office is going Live...for real this time. Microsoft announced
this week at the PDC in L.A. that there will be
browser-based
versions
of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, with a beta probably available sometime
in 2009.
But let's read the fine print from the CNET article linked above:
"Microsoft will offer browser-based Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in
two ways. For consumers, they will be offered via Microsoft's Office Live
Web site, while businesses will be able to offer browser-based Office capabilities
through Microsoft's SharePoint Server product."
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/29/20081 comments
It's getting serious now, this cloud computing stuff. It's not just the up-and-coming
vendors or the Web-era giants (think Google and Amazon) that are offering some
sort of Software-as-a-Service model. Oh, no.
As
of this week
, there's an old-school player in this game in a serious way:
Microsoft.
Microsoft is investing
heavily in the cloud with Windows Azure. And some observers, at least, including
one at analyst firm Forrester,
believe that enterprises are ready to get serious about SaaS and start using
it for critical applications rather than just messing around and experimenting
with it. SMBs, presumably, are way ahead of their enterprise counterparts in
terms of SaaS adoption, mainly because the cloud is a good model for modest
SMB budgets.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/29/20081 comments
Microsoft seems ready to stop pretending that Vista will ever gain wide acceptance.
Just take a gander at
this
story's headline
: "Microsoft vows Windows 7 will fix Vista mistakes."
Mistakes? Vista? Anyway, Microsoft did demo
Windows 7 at PDC this week, and it does seem kind of cool.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/29/20081 comments
So that's what Ray Ozzie was working on all this time. At its Professional
Developer Conference in L.A. this week, Ozzie and Microsoft took the wraps off
of Azure, which Redmond calls an
operating
system for the cloud
.
A what? Yeah, we weren't too sure what that meant, either...and we
weren't alone. But the basic idea is that this cloud OS -- of which Steve
Ballmer has spoken a few times recently -- will provide a platform for developers
who want to create hosted applications. (Really, it seems more like a development
platform than an OS...but we digress.) Microsoft will then conveniently host
for customers those very applications in its datacenters.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/28/20080 comments
We've been saying for a while now on RCPmag.com that the economic downturn
that is wrecking finance, insurance, real estate and a bunch of other industries
seems to have only dealt a glancing blow to technology. And with Microsoft announcing
earnings today, we got an idea of just how hard tech's getting hit.
It seems as though we've pretty much been right thus far. If Microsoft is any
indication -- and we feel safe in saying that it is -- the current economic
storm is knocking over a few trees in tech but not ripping roofs off of businesses
or tossing cars around. Microsoft's numbers for its first fiscal quarter of
2009 beat Wall
Street's expectations and reflected a solid trend upward, generally speaking.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/23/20080 comments
HP's got a new line of Blade workstations and thin clients out. There are loads
of details about the new lineup
here
.
A major target for HP's Blade business is financial traders -- you know, like
the ones who used to work on Wall Street. Ha ha. Actually, though, there are
still some traders out there, and according to HP folks they might very well
be using Blade workstations in the near future. The financial downturn, HP officials
told RCPU in a phone chat this week (see -- original reporting!) has led to
an increase in interest in HP's wares.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/23/20080 comments
One of the perils of putting together RCPU the way we do is that we rely a
fair amount on other people's reporting. Our general approach here is to take
the biggest or most interesting news stories of the week and add some commentary
and perspective to them -- hopefully with a touch of flair and maybe a few
pop-cultural references that the over-30 crowd will understand.
What we don't often do, though, is go and get stories ourselves. That's mainly
because your editor's responsibilities -- now more than ever -- range
well beyond just writing RCPU three times a week. So, from time to time, you'll
see us quote somebody from a first-hand interview, and we're quite specific
about the fact that we're doing that when it does happen. But, most of the time,
we're trusting that we're using credible sources for our base-level facts, and
that the folks who write the stories we link to know what they're doing. And,
most of the time, that works just fine.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/23/20083 comments
You love these, and we love these. So let's just jump in. Our good friend,
Doug, who has been a big help to both
RCP
the magazine and RCPU in the
past, gets us started:
"When I started my company, I bought a Dell Latitude D820 with a
dual core Intel processor, 2GB RAM and a 256MB Nvidia video controller. The
laptop only registered a 3.1 on the 'Vista experience' meter and was slow
from the start. However, since I need to know Vista in order to support my
customers, I kept it and learned to live with it. I considered wiping the
system and downgrading to XP Pro from Vista Ultimate (which isn't ultimate
but a waste). Recently, I've had some physical issues with the system, and
as a result of troubleshooting with Dell, I decided to delete the system partition
and install XP Pro.
"Do I still need to support customers using Vista? In a word, no.
Out of all the systems I've sold and supported over the last year, I can count
the Vista systems on one hand. Heck, I can count the Vista systems on one
finger. My two main vertical markets are health care and financial services.
The software vendors for both of those markets still either require or highly
recommend XP. So, I'm swearing off Vista. My business customers (99 percent
of my customers) will continue to buy XP Pro preinstalled from Dell. If Microsoft
doesn't extend the end-of-life again next July, then I'll probably buy software
assurance licenses for them and manually install XP Pro on new systems until
Windows 7 becomes the new standard..."
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/23/20082 comments