Bill Gates retired last week, though he remains Microsoft's chairman. Some chairmen
have a soft touch, are more figurehead than figure. I expect Bill will be different,
that he'll err on the side of being a strong rather than a weak chairman.
Over the years, I've been asked many times what Microsoft would be like without
Gates. My theory was that Microsoft wasn't so much focused on a single product
as it was on building an integrated system, like a quilt. Each piece didn't
have to be better or as good as the competition's; it just had to fit better.
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Posted by Doug Barney on July 02, 20080 comments
Microsoft has been on an openness kick of late for two reasons. One is of a
legal nature; Microsoft's toughest legal foe is the European Union, which has
been suing and fining the company for years. The U.S. government, though far
less active under the Bush administration, is another thorn. And, lastly, Microsoft
competitors have been suing over antitrust.
The other reason is the reality that open source exists and IT likes it.
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Posted by Doug Barney on July 01, 20080 comments
Unless you were living in a bio-dome or were in a Nick Hogan-induced coma, you
must have heard that Bill Gates retired last week.
I've been fortunate enough to cover Microsoft for the last 20-plus years, and
have never been disappointed with the company's drive, personality, toughness
or brainpower. This culture came directly from chairman Bill.
Some employees even took to looking like Bill, acting like Bill and talking
like Bill. Bill even invented his own vocabulary: "Golden" was good,
"random" meant your thinking was scattered or stupid, and "bandwidth"
was your ability to concentrate and deal with something.
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Posted by Doug Barney on July 01, 20080 comments
Some of you who downloaded XP SP3 got a little surprise:
corrupted
registries
. The problem is that security software such as Norton anti-virus
wants to use the same registry entries that the service pack is trying to delete.
The result? Wireless connections that no longer connect and random restarts.
(I thought this was just a feature built into all desktop versions of Windows.)
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Posted by Doug Barney on July 01, 20080 comments
Microsoft did the near unthinkable last week: It shipped a major product --
early!
Yup, Hyper-V
is in manufacturing, two months earlier than we expected. (Truth be told,
we usually expect these products to slip several times, so August to us would've
been early.)
This is an industry-changing event. Microsoft is unequalled in building third-party
communities, and I expect VMware vendors to add Hyper-V -- and for more traditional
Windows third parties to jump in, as well.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 30, 20080 comments
Internet Explorer gets lots of knocks for vulnerabilities, but its main rival,
Firefox, isn't perfect, either. The most recent rev, Firefox 3.0,
has
a hole
that could let a hacker run code on your computer. Details haven't
been released, as the Mozilla Project hasn't finished its patch yet.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 23, 20080 comments
Every year, Microsoft holds a contest for the best leading-edge PC designs.
I love seeing the cool ideas that come from college students around the world.
My only beef? These puppies never make it to market.
The
latest round of designs, which will likely never be produced, include the
Napkin PC, a Backpacker's Diary and a computer built for pre-schoolers.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 23, 20080 comments
Bill Gates is retiring this week to spend his time helping save the world (that's
no joke -- the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation does amazing work).
The editors at our sister publication Redmond Developer News, aimed
at corporate software development managers, decided
to find out if Gates was as good at making software as he is at making money.
Longtime analyst guru Will Zachmann took up the challenge and spoke to a who's-who
of software to see just how good Gates was at the craft.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 23, 20080 comments
Doug wrote
yesterday
about Microsoft's much-touted Hyper-V. But a few of you aren't
buying into the hype:
Hyper-V is still in beta, has no live migration, has no farm concept
with automatic load balancing and HA, no over-committing of resources, requires
an installation of at least Server 2008 Core Edition, has restricted x86/x64
OSes, is dependent on specific CPUs, is unable to throttle or isolate the
root domain from VMs, and -- to top it off -- it's basically a Xen knock-off.
In fact, it is so similar to Xen (down to the problems), that I wonder how
much open source code crept into this closed-source product.
It amazes me, the giddiness with which people are approaching this pre-1.0
product and clearly inferior technology. The Microsoft Machine with its adherents
are at work here, but it's certainly not amazing technology. Maybe one day,
a few years from now.
-Anonymous
"Hyper-V Poised for Greatness"? Rhetoric. Don't get taken by
the Microsoft advertising juggernaut. It will stop at nothing to make us all
think the Hyper-V will challenge VMware ESX or even Citrix Xen in the short-term.
It will be a challenger in the long-term, but is definitely not enterprise-ready
in its current form.
-David
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 17, 20080 comments
At last week's Tech-Ed, Microsoft VP Bob Muglia crowed about Hyper-V. You can
test him at his word, as the hypervisor is nearly here; beta testers can get
the
latest
release candidate
, meaning it's almost all set to go.
Topping the list of new features are better management of Linux VMs, fewer
bugs and snappier performance. You can get the software through Windows Update.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 16, 20080 comments
Google is pretty darn impressive. It has no huge staff of well-paid journalists,
yet it makes millions selling ads that surround today's media. As a journalist,
I think Google is parasitic -- the tape worm of the media world.
Given all the free cash involved, it's no wonder Microsoft wanted in on this
kind of action. But Microsoft last week decided it no
longer wanted to pay $40 billion-plus for Yahoo just so it could copy Google.
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 16, 20080 comments