Brands become huge when they're used as common words. A Kleenex is a tissue
to most -- doesn't matter who cut down the trees to make it. A Coke is a cola,
and most of us would gladly accept a Pepsi or even an RC if the real thing wasn't
available.
And when we search the Internet, we don't MSN Live Search it -- we Google it,
baby!
And that ubiquity is the main reason why Google
is the most valuable brand in the world today, two places ahead of Microsoft.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 24, 20070 comments
A week or two ago, I asked faithful Redmond Report readers if they
love
or hate the Office ribbon interface
. First, I want to thank the 50 or so
folks that took the time to write. Your work was not in vain.
About half of your letters were posted in the newsletter, and I showed the
other half to an Office product manager when I was in Redmond last week. His
eyes bugged out a bit when he saw just how disruptive the new interface is.
While many would never return to the standard toolbar, most of you wish Microsoft
would go back in time and reverse its decision to go with the ribbon.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 24, 20070 comments
Late last week, news broke that
Dell
was once again offering XP
to home users wary of Vista.
Offering old OSes is old news for the corporate market which upgrades far more
slowly than power users, gamers and your run-of-the-mill teen. But critics have
come out of the woodwork, arguing that the Dell move means that Vista has entirely
stalled. I don't think that's true at all.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 23, 20070 comments
The Google train keeps a-rolling, pulling in more money, more press and more
search market share.
All this momentum pushed
revenues to $3.6 billion for the latest quarter with profits of over a billion
dollars (who says software doesn't have healthy margins?).
While pundits see Google as perhaps the future of end user software, the vast
majority of Google's dough comes from good, old-fashioned ad dollars, which
are spent in new-fashioned ways.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 23, 20070 comments
Always spunky AMD put a hurt on Intel with faster chips for game PCs, cheaper
prices, a killer 64-bit strategy and by leading the dual-/multi-core charge.
You had to know Intel wasn't going to take this guff forever, and you were
right. The chip giant took the gloves off and whacked AMD soundly with even
lower prices, an aggressive dual-core plan and by leveraging its many OEM relationships.
All that helped drive
AMD results down faster then a 2001 Enron share price, as AMD lost over
$600 million in its latest quarter.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 23, 20070 comments
We talked last week about a
Windows
Server DNS vulnerability
that has had IT hopping -- both hopping to fix
it and hopping mad!
Well, folks, Microsoft is on the case, working around the clock to build what
observers call a "mega-patch" which could be delivered before next
month's Patch Tuesday.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 23, 20070 comments
Microsoft dialed into the National Association of Broadcasters convention in
Las Vegas and
showed
off Silverlight
, a new tool for building rich interactive Web apps and for
running TV-quality video in a browser.
The widespread perception is that Microsoft is way behind Google and other
competitors when it comes to Web apps and Software as a Service. But as one
of the founders of Redmond Developer News
magazine, which covers Microsoft's
development tools, I'm not so sure.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 17, 20070 comments
Microsoft, locked in a pitched battle over virtualization with VMware, is
seeing
some key products slip
. Delayed products include Virtual Server 2005 and
a test version of Windows Server virtualization (dubbed "Viridian").
These delays are far from fatal. I expect the VMware/Microsoft virtualization
war to rage for years.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 17, 20070 comments
Microsoft Word can't win for losing these days. First, it has critics like
me who, after two decades, still can't figure out how to use the software properly.
But more problematic are the holes that security experts keep finding. In April
alone, a handful of vulnerabilities were found for Word, including
a big one for Word 2007, the latest and greatest in a long line of Microsoft
word processors.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 16, 20070 comments
I just saved $2,000. I was all set to buy a Mac laptop as soon as Leopard, the
new OS, shipped this spring. Fortunately for my bank account,
Leopard
is being pushed back to this fall
. It seems that Leopard developers are
being switched over to the iPhone project so that it can stay on track to ship
in June.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 16, 20070 comments