Microsoft has about 80,000 employees, but the company supports far more people
than that -- 1,800 times more, according to
research
house IDC
. Microsoft-related jobs account for over 40 percent of all IT
positions.
I tend to believe these numbers as they were nailed down by John Gantz, an
analyst I've respected since I got into this business 23 years ago.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 22, 20070 comments
Sun has been pretty sassy as of late. Even though Scott McNealy is no longer
running things day-to-day, the company is still trying new things, pushing utility
computing, Java, open source, supercomputing and virtualization.
On the last front, Sun is fully supporting Xen, now owned by Citrix. Sun is
building its own hypervisor, which is really an extension of the Xen tool. Sun's
goal is to create a hypervisor that works great in heterogenous environments.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 15, 20070 comments
Hewlett-Packard is an interesting and often underrated software player. And
with so much software and so many server platforms, the company has long been
helping IT organizations look at their infrastructures from top to bottom and
devise a plan to make them more efficient (similar to Microsoft's three-year-old
Infrastructure Optimization model).
Now, HP is moving
parts of its Business Technology Optimization products to a services model.
This way, if you want to optimize through new HP products -- but don't want
to buy and manage a bunch of new services -- you can simply order up some services.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 15, 20070 comments
Steve Ballmer, a clear expert in the field of computing, is now officially a
media guru. At a recent speech, Ballmer claimed that in 10 years,
all
media will be digital
, including all things print.
From the narrow world of technology, this is not an entirely ridiculous notion,
though a recent survey by Visual Studio Magazine shows that for many
subjects, readers prefer print to Web by a ratio of 2 to 1. Maybe in 10 years,
that ratio will become even.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 15, 20070 comments
Patches are great for those who use them -- and install them quickly. But for
those who ignore patches, gosh help ya. The old hacker trick of dissecting patches
and exploiting the holes continues, and often it takes only a day for jerks
to build and release an exploit.
That's just what happened last
month and again last week, when exploits came out on the second Wednesday
of the month (and the patches on Tuesday). The advice here is to take patches
seriously and install them quickly.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 15, 20070 comments
Tomorrow is another Patch Tuesday, and Microsoft is getting set to
ship
seven patches
, four of which are deemed critical. The patches run the gamut,
repairing everything from Windows Server to IE (it wouldn't be Patch Tuesday
if this puppy didn't get a fix or two), to Outlook and XP. The bulletins also
address SharePoint and spoofing.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 08, 20070 comments
Microsoft is releasing a whole heap of .NET 3.5 source code. Does this mean
you can create your own .NET distribution? Not bloody likely. In this clear
step in the right direction, Microsoft is
allowing
developers to look at .NET source code
to help understand how it works and
where problems may lie. But changing the code is still very much a no-no.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 08, 20070 comments
Microsoft's licensing may among the most complex the software world has ever
seen, but that doesn't give you the right to violate any of its many terms.
The most recent example is an extension to Windows Genuine Advantage with the
catchy name "Get
Genuine Windows Agreement." And since everything at Microsoft turns
into an acronym (even BG), let's call this new plan GGWA.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 08, 20070 comments
A new exploit is aimed at
tricking
the world's highest-ranking executives
into giving away precious corporate
secrets. The spam/phishing scheme is based on e-mails with the names and titles
of these bosses, and come with a Word doc promising a better job. Once opened,
the hackers can gain access to the computers of the rich and powerful, and thus
get at confidential files.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 08, 20070 comments
Advocates for "green" IT focus on efficient hardware, using virtualization
to put more apps on fewer servers (the old power-supply-per-app equation) and
making sure PCs and laptops have proper power management.
Now the Green Data Project is
suggesting you look at the data itself. The idea is that we store a lot of data
we don't really need, and then back up and archive all this junk. Disks, arrays,
NAS boxes and SANs all take power, and the more we can reduce the growth of
these devices (scaling back may be an impossible task), the more we can contain
greenhouse gases.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 01, 20070 comments
Consumers haven't had much to say about Vista. They just head on down to Wal-Mart,
buy a new machine with Vista and go home to compute.
IT is a tougher lot. You guys are waiting for Vista to prove its compatibility,
performance and ease of learning.
IT (even in my own company) is sticking to XP. Microsoft is getting this message
and -- like it has done so many times with so many products -- is extending
the life of XP. (Anybody remember how many lifelines Microsoft threw NT's
way?)
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 01, 20070 comments
Microsoft is serious about keeping up with Google. It's not just a matter of
money (in this case, billions), but more an issue of pride. If Google beats
Microsoft in search, it legitimizes all of Google's other efforts.
Microsoft -- which, I understand, does much better in search in places like
Europe -- is revamping
Live Search. Instead of tricky new techniques, Microsoft is improving the
basics, increasing the amount of sites it searches for matches. It also features
new fuzzy approaches that better understand how badly we spell and gives us
what we want anyway.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 01, 20070 comments