Ever since you all told me how much you like Windows 7, I've been predicting healthy holiday PC sales and an overall market resurgence. The highly paid eggheads at Gartner now apparently agree, but see the comeback starting early next year, not at the end of this one.
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Posted by Doug Barney on July 01, 20091 comments
Microsoft has a pretty attractive Windows 7 upgrade plan: Buy a Vista machine now and move to Windows 7 for free in the fall. The plan is aimed at small businesses and consumers, and Microsoft hopes to keep it that way by limiting upgrades to purchases of no more than 25 PCs.
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Posted by Doug Barney on July 01, 20097 comments
Doug used to dig Digg, but don't dig Digg no more. Doug used to dig Digg because his boy David dialed Doug in. Dang, but didn't Dave diss Digg's new move and douse his dad's delight.
OK, no more "d"-based alliteration. Here's the deal: Digg is an interesting site that gathers stories from other sources, and I've spotted a few that I've highlighted in this here newsletter. The main Digg site is just like our own RedmondReport.com; it highlights links and clicking on them takes you to the source site -- no scraping and no stealing.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 29, 20094 comments
Recently, we told you about an unpatched SharePoint 2007 SP2 problem. The Microsoft patch army took the field and there's now a fix.
Here's what I find odd about SharePoint. The product is presumably hot; I believe Microsoft has sold over 100 million licenses and cool third parties are coming out of the woodwork. But I've asked several times how you use SharePoint and what you like or don't like, and while I got 40 e-mails about Robert Clary from "Hogan's Heroes," I don't think I've gotten any on SharePoint.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 29, 20096 comments
Microsoft loves when you upgrade. Salespeople are constantly pushing the latest (which hopefully is the greatest); volume licenses, especially Software Assurance, are designed to drive migration; and Microsoft has the Infrastructure Optimization Model, a framework that justifies the adoption of lots of new software.
But upgrading isn't as simple as cranking up a few Windows installers. You have to make sure the new stuff really works. That's where the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit Version 4.0, now in beta, comes in. The new kit focuses on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and helps IT see if existing hardware, peripherals and applications will still work. Sounds like it's worth a look.
Posted by Doug Barney on June 29, 20090 comments
On Wednesday, I wrote a note about a French lottery scam that told me I "won" a goodly amount of Francs (Euros now, I guess) and should contact Robert Clary to collect my winnings.
I asked you all who Robert Clary is, and I think we set a record with the number of responses -- 40 so far! You'll find a couple of them in today's Mailbag. Of course, as many of you pointed out, Clary played Corporal Louis LeBeau on "Hogan's Heroes," a show I try to watch at least once a day.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 26, 20093 comments
Bill Gates is known for his minor love of cars. There's a fairly famous story from the late '80s when Gates bought a Porsche 959, at the time the most sophisticated Porsche on the market. These cars were so rare and so expensive that Porsche had to sacrifice one to a U.S. crash test, which meant that Bill couldn't register his quarter-million-dollar machine.
Bill's new love is even more high-tech, and it hasn't even been built yet. Gates, along with partners, has a patent for an electromagnetic engine driven by particle beams. The engine has pistons just like the six in his Porsche 959, but the pistons create electrical energy rather than directly driving a crank.
Posted by Doug Barney on June 26, 20090 comments
Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, is off to a rousing start, at least according to one measure: paid clicks. Paid clicks are up some 13 percent compared to the old MSN Live Search. (Now, doesn't Bing sound a whole lot better?)
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 26, 20095 comments
Just as we expected, the release of a beta for Microsoft's free anti-virus tool caused a firestorm, with vendors such as Symantec complaining that Microsoft has no real right to be in this market -- and that the product stinks to boot!
This argument defies logic. If the product stinks, why do you care that it exists? Meanwhile, the patch-meisters from Shavlik argue that the big security suites are big on costs and small in agility. So a small tool like the new MS anti-virus package ain't such a bad thang.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 26, 200924 comments
I have to admire Diskeeper. This company thinks of one thing and one thing only: defragging hard drives.
It took me a while to understand just how important it is to organize bits and bytes on our hard drives; for our PCs, defragging gives back a little oomph. But on servers, the difference is more dramatic. And now we're asking our servers to do even more, to perform cartwheels as we virtualize the heck out of these things.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 24, 20098 comments
Money may not buy happiness, but it can buy freedom. And for Bill Gates, having billions means the freedom to invest in wild ideas that may or may not work. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is known for its disciplined approach to investing. It researches the area and puts money where it will do most good. (I'd love for the Foundation to manage our massive federal stimulus program!) I don't think we can praise Bill enough for these works.
But Gates also likes to take a risk or two, and is funding programs that most others turned down. Examples include "a magnet that can detect malaria" and "giving mosquitoes a head cold to prevent them from detecting and biting humans."
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 24, 20093 comments
As a kid, I loved Spam. In the second grade, I nicked a tin of Spam from the cupboard and put it under my pillow so it would be close all night. Of course, I'm taking about the processed pork product. Junk e-mail is a whole other story.
I know all about junk e-mail. I publish my real e-mail address in each newsletter so your mail gets to me fast and direct. That's the best part of my job. But because my address is out there, I get spam -- lots of spam. And for me, in fact for all of us, the spam just keeps on a-coming. Despite the CAN-SPAM Act, junk mail is still on the rise, and May was one of the worst months ever, according to research from Symantec.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 24, 20096 comments