If Disneyworld is the Magic Kingdom, then Orlando is Faketown. Nothing here
is real. It's all plastic...with a theme.
That's not to say that Orlando can't be a pleasant place to hang out. The sun
has just broken through the clouds this afternoon after a day or two of cloudy
gloom, but the highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s have made for a nice break
from chilly Boston. And, after an excursion last night with an unidentified
fellow employee of 1105 Media and another gentleman who's an Orlando local,
your editor discovered that there are establishments in this town that don't
have anything to do with Disney characters, water slides or movie studio theme
parks.
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 12, 20080 comments
We
told
you last week
that Microsoft is talking a lot about document format interoperability
these days and that part of what it's trying to do in order to be -- or at least
seem -- more open is have its document format, Office Open XML, accepted as
a standard by the ISO (and, perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. delegation to
the ISO
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 11, 20082 comments
Microsoft still has more than $40 billion burning a hole in its pocket for
the proposed Yahoo acquisition -- although Ray Ozzie told the
Financial Times
(why doesn't anybody every come to RCPU with news like this? Never mind -- we
know why) that even if Microsoft does swallow Yahoo, Redmond will
take
its time
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 11, 20080 comments
RCPU will be in Orlando, America's capital of culture and sophistication, this
week for Microsoft's Convergence conference. So, instead of breaking up our
newsletter coverage the way we've been doing it since January -- industry news
on Tuesday, product news on Wednesday and channel news on Thursday, with a general
rant leading off each day's edition -- we'll be bringing you all Convergence,
all the time on Wednesday and Thursday.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 11, 20080 comments
The big distributor's results for its fourth fiscal quarter were strong, and
its stock price
jumped
accordingly
this week.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 06, 20080 comments
If the European Union's
constant
brow-beating of Microsoft
has had a positive effect, it's that Redmond has
opened itself up to letting its products work at least a little bit better with
those from other vendors.
Now, on the one hand, that's not all good news for Microsoft and its channel.
After all, the "better together" pitch that Microsoft has used for
years is a little bit weaker than it used to be. Prior to Microsoft's new era
of semi-openness, a decent pitch when selling one thing from Microsoft was that
a customer might as well buy everything else from Microsoft, too, because nothing
works with a Microsoft product quite as well another Microsoft product.
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 06, 20080 comments
A new CDW survey gives us the chance to use one of the great hackneyed phrases
in journalism: cautiously optimistic. Anyway, that's pretty much how IT decision
makers feel about 2008, the
survey
indicates
.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 06, 20080 comments
So, now, it's Office Live Workspace that's open for
worldwide
public beta
-- with the possibility of winning $100,000 hanging tantalizingly
in the air.
It's just another day and another SaaS-related announcement for Microsoft (remember
this
one from earlier this week), which has rapidly gone from lost on SaaS to
gung-ho on the hosted model -- although we'd still like to see Redmond clean
up the mess that is "Live" branding. With Microsoft now challenging
Google's supposed domination of all things Web, observers are starting to wonder
whether Redmond can really keep up with its Silicon Valley rival. One even posits
that Microsoft is chasing online dollars (in vain) out
of jealousy toward Google.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on March 05, 20081 comments
You can go ahead and
throw
it
against a wall if you get a blue screen, we suppose.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 05, 20080 comments