For those of you who are into this sort of thing, apparently Microsoft's Office
Open XML standard, which seems to fluctuate somewhere between "American
Idol"-level popularity and Michael Vick-level unpopularity, is moving back
toward the "American Idol" side of the metaphor
with
the ISO standards organization
More
Posted by Lee Pender on August 28, 20070 comments
One of Microsoft's key business intelligence components is
due
very, very soon
...much sooner, in fact, than the next version of SQL server
-- a fact that somehow becomes a point of faux-controversy in a news story written
at a slow time of year.
Posted by Lee Pender on August 23, 20071 comments
Hey, it's August, and as we've said recently in this space, there's not a heck
of a lot going on. Since many of you are probably on vacation anyway, and not
even reading this, we're going to let the good folks who've taken the time to
write in do our work for us.
We'll commence with a couple of comments about Office 2007, which is now under
slightly (very slightly) more
competitive pressure from Google. Office lovers, turn away -- you might
not like what you're about to read, but we're just running what we've received.
If you like Office 2007 (and we're quite sure that many of you do), let us know.
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Posted by Lee Pender on August 23, 20070 comments
It has, we'll freely admit, been a long, long, long time since we've watched
what's known as "professional wrestling." And by long time, we mean
at least a couple of decades, probably longer, reaching back to our much younger
days. (Seriously, we're talking King Kong Bundy, Gentleman Chris Adams, Iceman
King Parsons here --
the
old Dallas Sportatorium crowd
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Posted by Lee Pender on August 22, 20073 comments
OK, we'll admit that this isn't the most important story of all time from a
partner perspective, but we're throwing it in because 1) It's August, and news
is slow; 2) It's pretty interesting; and 3) We love the fact that the analysts
at Gartner actually use, presumably with a straight face, terms such as "trough
of disillusionment."
Anyway, Garter says, probably quite correctly this time, that home networking
stuff is
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Posted by Lee Pender on August 22, 20070 comments
One of Microsoft's more high-profile but (thus far, anyway) less successful
attempts to be cool, the Xbox video-game console, still isn't turning a profit...and
probably won't for
a while
, Redmond honcho Kevin Turner revealed this week.
Posted by Lee Pender on August 21, 20070 comments
From the "unintended consequences" file: Popular Internet telephony
provider Skype says that a
massive
number of restarts
following Microsoft's Patch Tuesday caused last week's
colossal 48-hour lapse in Skype's service. Microsoft, on the other hand,
isn't
so sure
Posted by Lee Pender on August 21, 20072 comments
In the glow of a late-summer morning, they seemed so happy together. Steve
Ballmer and Cisco CEO John Chambers spent yesterday morning verbally nuzzling
each other and chatting happily
with
the aptly named Charlie Rose
. (Yes, he's the guy who hosts a show on PBS
that we don't watch but claim we do in order to sound more sophisticated than
we really are. Hey, don't the reruns of "King of the Hill" come on
at the same time? We have our priorities.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on August 21, 20070 comments