Your editor will be out next week on vacation, eschewing cell phone, computer,
online news aggregators and quite possibly even television. Filling in will
be
RCP
Editor in Chief Scott Bekker who, like David Letterman on the
old "Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson, always does such a wonderful
and entertaining job of spelling the regular host. Fortunately, unlike the great
Johnny Carson, your editor is not currently dead and will return with a new
edition on Oct. 23. In the meantime, please welcome Scott into your inboxes.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 12, 20070 comments
Let's rip right into reader e-mails in this Friday edition. The big news this
week was SAP's planned buyout of Business Objects (say it as a subject and verb,
and suddenly it's a pretty funny name), which had us
pondering
whether Microsoft might make
a big business intelligence purchase of its
own.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 12, 20070 comments
Keith Ward brings you
Part
2
of his already popular list of the most overlooked features of Windows
Server 2008.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 11, 20070 comments
At this point, even we're tempted to say put up or shut up. Steve Ballmer is
back
in patent shakedown mode
, this time throwing Red Hat up against the wall
and threatening to shove it in the trunk of the car and drive it into the woods
for a good working over. Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 10, 20070 comments
You don't have to believe this story if you don't want to, but it really is
true. Almost six years ago, your editor got a (short-lived) job as a documentation
writer with Business Objects, the big French maker of business intelligence
software. On a dreary January day in 2002, his second day with the company,
your editor went to a huge, companywide confab on the edge of Paris. While listening
to a standard state-of-the-company presentation, he turned to the (completely
disinterested) person sitting next to him and said, "This company sounds
like a perfect acquisition target for SAP!"
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 09, 20070 comments
It's old-ish news by now, but an
EU
court's ruling against Microsoft
in the company's antitrust case generated
some comments we haven't yet run.
William is all for placating the EU...and then letting the free market take
hold:
"Why doesn't Microsoft just give in to the EU and provide them with
their requested stripped-down product? In the meantime, let our free enterprise
system do its job. If Microsoft gives the EU a choice between the full-blown
Microsoft product or a stripped-down version -- which, by the way, should
cost more in order to customize the software to meet [the EU's] needs -- we
all would see just how far the EU would really take this issue. Isn't that
what free enterprise is all about?"
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 05, 20070 comments
It's all you this Friday, literally. We're clearing out a backlog of our finest
reader e-mails and then heading off into an 85-degree afternoon. In October.
In New England. Hooray for global warming!
Anyway, regarding our post about XP
hanging on a little longer, we actually got a little Vista love in return...sort
of. Diane says:
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 05, 20070 comments
Here's something to keep the wheel turning on the rumor mill: The Mini-Microsoft
blog, that anonymously written periodical that calls for a leaner, meaner Microsoft,
has disappeared from Facebook. Mary Jo Foley
has
the details
.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 04, 20070 comments
Another week, another set of stories on Microsoft and Google. This week, Microsoft
threw another jab at its dominant search rival with the
purchase
of Jellyfish
, an online shopping company of some sort. Really, we just like
this story because it contains the following direct quote:
"We purchased Jellyfish.com," Microsoft search and advertising
platform group vice president Alex Gounares said in a written reply to an
AFP inquiry.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 04, 20070 comments