Microsoft Ditches Works

I was never a fan of Microsoft Works. It was just too different from Office in everything from interface to file formats. And that was probably the point -- make it so unlike Office that you had to actually have Office to get anything done.

Microsoft finally gave Works what it long deserved: retirement. In its place, and only available on new PCs starting next year, is Office Starter 2010.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 19, 20097 comments

Xen Zapped

There's a new editor in chief for Virtualization Review -- and he's already making waves.

Bruce Hoard was the founding editor of Network World, and is now driving Virtualization Review and The Hoard Facts blog. Here's more about Bruce.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 16, 20091 comments

Michael Dell Turns on Own Product Line

Nearly everyone is love with netbooks -- they're small, light, cheap, and the battery actually lasts long enough to get some real work done. I've railed several times (selfishly, I'll admit) against Apple for not having affordable laptops or even one netbook in its overpriced lineup.

One man (besides Steve Jobs, apparently) is not a fan of these tiny wonders. Michael Dell is not impressed with the tiny keys, tiny screen and slow performance. Dell (Michael, not the company) believes users are better served by laptops.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 16, 200912 comments

Exchange 2010 and It's Only 2009!

Exchange 2010 might beat its own name to market. The 64-bit-only messaging server is now released to manufacturing so it can be bundled up and shipped to you, the paying IT customer. That puts Exchange 2010 on course for an early November commercial release.

Exchange 2010 requires Windows Server 2008, but it can also interoperate with Exchange 2003 and 2007, so you don't have to move all your servers all at once.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 14, 20090 comments

Green Growing Slow

Green technology, at a high level, makes perfect sense. Not only do we get to help the environment, but we can save gobs of cash at the same time. And that's the real point: Saving electricity means saving money.

So you'd think IT would be jumping all over it. But in the case of green, you have to spend money to save money. And in this economy, spending money today to save tomorrow just ain't gonna happen. Recent Gartner research bears this out. The research giant doesn't blame budgets as much as the failure of current green technologies, such as energy monitoring tools.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 14, 20091 comments

Jealous Wannabe Blasts Ozzie

I'm always suspicious when a journalist, even one with decent technical chops, calls a true technologist a failure and a bum. Computerworld blogger and longtime Redmond watcher Preston Gralla didn't call Ray Ozzie a bum, but he said something worse to an overachiever like Ray: He said Ozzie is a failure.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 14, 20092 comments

Microsoft Skills Are Gold, Pure Gold, I Tell You

The just-mentioned Forrester report argues that Microsoft will be a huge beneficiary of the 2010 tech boom. Recent research for IDC bears that premise out.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 12, 20091 comments

A New Job or Raise in Early 2010?

Are you tired of buying food in bulk, skipping vacations and driving around that old clunker because of the recession? Help may be on the way, says Forrester Research, which predicts that IT will pick up serious steam this winter.

Call 'em crazy, but analysts at Forrester actually believe we'll have a "tech-boom" next year. I just hope it's not like the tech boom we had this year. That turned out to be more of a kaboom -- as in, the market imploded!

Posted by Doug Barney on October 12, 20091 comments

Windows 8 Has Twice the Bits

I've been doing this work so long that I've seen first-hand the move from 16 to 32 to 64 bits (and used my fair share of tortoise-like 8-bit machines, as well). More recently, I've witnessed the rise of multicore processors, which are slowly being exploited by new software.

But like drag racing, the quest for computing speed is never-ending, and the next generation is clearly 128 bits -- with multiple cores, to boot!

Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20098 comments

More Patches Than a 'Three Stooges' Tire

Some patches are good. When I was a teenaged hippie, I had nearly a hundred patches hand-sewn on my jeans. The pants were so frayed, my Swedish grandmother replaced the whole backside, which also soon got patched.

Other patches aren't so good -- patches on inner tubes that fall off faster than a 4-year-old on a two-wheeler, and "Patch Adams" are examples of that.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20090 comments

Windows 7 Government-Approved

The U.S. federal government may not always make the best choices (have you looked at our tax code lately?), but in the case of operating systems, it mimics the best thinking of many of you Redmond Report readers. The feds have largely skipped over Vista and are now gung ho for Windows 7.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 07, 20092 comments

Does SMB Equal Small or Medium-Size Breach?

For those who care about market size, SMB means small to medium-size businesses. For Windows IT mavens, it means Server Message Block, which is a way of sharing files.

Anything that shares is a vector for intrusion, and security gurus believe that Microsoft's SMBv2 is ripe for attack. In fact, code to do nasty things to SMB has already been written. But Microsoft appears nonplussed and may or not patch SMB during this month's Patch Tuesday.

Posted by Doug Barney on October 07, 20090 comments