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.
At first, Gartner gurus predicted a dismal first part of this year, which was actually pretty good. So if they were wrong on this, perhaps they should take a closer look at their projections for 2010.
A big driver for the uptick? Inexpensive netbooks. I expect to be in on this action and hope to snap up a Windows 7 netbook as soon as one's available!
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.
I'm wondering if Microsoft really has to do this. Do any real enterprises opt for cheaper consumer versions of Windows? You tell me. What makes high-end versions of XP or Vista better for big shops, or can one really get away with large volumes of consumer machines? Your expert opinion always welcome at [email protected].
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.
The same David that got me into Digg told me about the new Digg toolbar, which is more of a closed system. When you click on a story -- it may even be written by me -- it opens in a window within Digg itself.
I know how my company's contracts work and I don't remember myself giving my employer all rights, and then doing the same for Digg. Trade publishers already provide free content. But when did this extend to competitors who turn our stories into free cash?
Google is still making billions from others' content. For example, let's say you search on "Active Directory." Even though hundreds of results are from Microsoft, it's Google that takes the ad money from the search pages. Even if you did an AD search after getting excited about stories from the Web site of my magazine. The parasites make the easy dough.
What do you make of all this, and what's your favorite aggregation site? My favorite destination site is RedmondReport.com. Check it out and let me know what you think! Send thoughts and URLs to [email protected].
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.
Is SharePoint the big deal I think it is, or am I a victim of Microsoft's cruelly efficient marketing machine? You tell me at [email protected].
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.
What's interesting about the show is that many of the Germans -- Klink, Schultz and Burkhalter, to name a few -- were played by Germans of Jewish descent who escaped the Nazis. What's even more interesting is how convincing they are as German officers. Makes you wonder how different these races really are and exposes the idiocy and evil of the Holocaust.
Clary, himself a French Jew, survived Buchenwald and remains a fine actor and hero to this day.
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?)
Not only that, but Microsoft's share of search moved from an embarrassing 9.1 percent into the double digits at 12.1 percent. The share is still small, but is moving in the right direction.
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.
I clearly see Symantec's anger; Microsoft is trying to take over a market others pioneered. On the other hand, this move has been coming for years, giving security vendors plenty of time to react. Do I sound conflicted? You bet. Where do you come down? Send your thoughts to [email protected].
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.
Diskeeper believes that server disks that support a bunch of VMs should be as efficient as possible, and has a new tool, V-locity, that helps do just that for Hyper-V.
Is defragging important? Do the built-in Windows tools do a good enough job? Render your verdicts at [email protected].
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."
Speaking of the Foundation, 20 minutes after finishing this item, I got an e-mail message in French from "The Bill Gates Foundation." I called upon all my high school French skills and was able to determine that I won 250,000 Euros from a Foundation lottery. Tres bien!
I have 48 hours to e-mail one of the lottery officials. His name? Robert Clary. Now, that name sounds familiar. Can anyone tell me who Robert Clary is and why he's famous? Or do you know nothing, nothing! Send your answers to [email protected].
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.
The culprit? Botnets that deliver this garbage, often from our very own PCs! The only thing missing from the research? A solution!
Posted by Doug Barney on June 24, 20096 comments