Dell's share is falling, and
its
reliability is worse than that its competitors'
-- coincidence? Once again, as Denis
Leary would say, "I DON'T THINK SO!"
Word gets around as to what works, and what breaks. Dell is a superb company,
but if I was spending my own money (as opposed to Redmond magazine's cash) I'd
shy away from the dudes from Dell. I've had too many of their machines, and
too many motherboard replacements. Of course, I'm saving my change for a Mac
laptop. I'm waiting for Leopard and Vista to both ship and I'll be dual-booting
in style.
Posted by Doug Barney on October 25, 20060 comments
Hewlett-Packard may be horrible at corporate spying, but apparently it's pretty
darn good at making PCs, or at least selling PCs.
HP
is now No. 1 in PC sales
, bumping off Dell. I'm not sure how many folks
decided not to buy from HP after the spying scandal, but I'm pretty confident
that the battery-bursting-into-flames brouhaha cost Dell more business. The
unsung hero was Apple, which boosted shipments some 30 percent and now has 6
percent of the market share!
Posted by Doug Barney on October 25, 20060 comments
XP Service Pack 3 is coming --
in
two years
. For many people, it won't matter, as they'll be on Vista, Mac
OS10 or Linux. But for those creaky old XP boxes, a service pack would be very
much appreciated. I'm still looking for help with all my Windows 98 machines.
Posted by Doug Barney on October 25, 20061 comments
My favorite bits of software are all old. Deluxe Paint for the Amiga was wild,
and word processor XyWrite -- despite its sometimes bizarre use of keystroke combos
(alt-F9 for help? Who's the ad whiz that came up with that?) -- was also pretty
cool. Now my favorite e-mail client, Eudora,
got
86-ed by its owner Qualcomm
More
Posted by Doug Barney on October 24, 20060 comments
Recently, many thousand iPods shipped with a computer virus, but do you think
the folks from Cupertino admitted their fault the way Redmond does each and
every Patch Tuesday (and often in-between)? As Denis Leary might say, "I
DON'T THINK SO!"
Instead,
Apple
blamed Windows
. It seems that one of the iPod manufacturers had a Windows
box, and that's how the RavMonE.exe virus got installed on so many of the tiny
Apple music players. Of course, the iPod itself is fine, but because the machine
is an external drive, your PC could get infected. Maybe iPods should come with
McAfee or Microsoft OneCare!
Posted by Doug Barney on October 24, 20060 comments
Microsoft offered an olive branch to its newfound security competitors by promising
more information about APIs and such, making it easier to disable Vista's security
dashboard to let McAfee or Symantec act as the anti-virus default. But are these
competitors grateful? Nah.
They're
still spittin' mad!
(And I'm still confused as to why security is still a
Vista add-on. I say either build it in for free, or leave it to the third parties.)
These vendors also claim they still can't get good info about the 64-bit version
of Vista -- but if it's as buggy as 64-bit XP, then I wouldn't worry.
Posted by Doug Barney on October 24, 20060 comments
One way to keep Office out of the features wars with free open source tools
is for Microsoft to push the suite as a development environment and as a front-end
to enterprise applications such as ERP. This week,
Microsoft
made its pitch
for Office to front-end supply chain back-ends.
Microsoft has a small share of the supply chain software market today, but
I predict it will be a major player in years to come.
Posted by Doug Barney on October 19, 20060 comments
The Mozilla folks tossed around some pretty wild market share numbers for their
browser (in the upper teens, as I recall) but I knew better. In my mind, I kept
saying it was a point or two over 10! Days later, research from Net Applications
had me patting myself on the back (this habit is so bad, my rotator cuff is
permanently shot!). It turns out
Firefox's
share worldwide is 12.46 percent
More
Posted by Doug Barney on October 19, 20060 comments
Corporate customers aren't exactly sitting on pins and needles waiting for Vista.
IT is a bit more wait-and-see -- as in, wait for the bigger bugs to be worked
out, security holes plugged and a service pack tested and shipped! Microsoft
isn't so patient. Redmond is telling IT that
the
sooner it upgrades, the sooner it'll save money
More
Posted by Doug Barney on October 19, 20060 comments
The fine folks from Mozilla Corp. stopped by last week to show off
Firefox
2
. We made them all gourmet coffee, cleared off the conference table and
had a little sit-down. Just so they knew where we stood, I mentioned the three
to four articles we wrote telling IT to move to Firefox and disable IE until
its security improves (we haven't taken a stand on IE7, but if it's secure and
great, we'll start writing articles about how to move to IE7 and disable Firefox!).
More
Posted by Doug Barney on October 19, 20060 comments
Port80 Software claims that
Microsoft's
IIS 6 outshines Apache
in market share 54 percent to 23.3 percent in corporate
environments, and that IIS share is growing dramatically. I don't doubt this
research, but I
will
point out that Port80 is a Microsoft partner!
Posted by Doug Barney on October 19, 20061 comments
IE7
is here!
For IE users, this is a no-brainer. If it's not far more secure
than IE6, I'll eat my hat -- my chocolate-frosted, ice cream cake hat. Unfortunately,
I don't think I'll be chomping on this puppy, as Microsoft has had years to
spruce up IE's protections. De-emphasizing ActiveX is certainly one giant leap
for mankind.
Posted by Doug Barney on October 19, 20062 comments