We start today with an e-mail from Peter, who writes to us from Melbourne,
Australia, mate, in response to our recent query on whether partners are making
money off Vista. His news is not good:
"Vista might be booming in Redmond, but in our town it seems to be
a lead balloon. We do not know any other partners running it internally, and
none of our customers have the slightest interest in it whatsoever.
"One of our BI [business intelligence, natch --LP] customers,
a large bank, is just now upgrading from NT4 to Windows XP and is very seriously
looking at Linux. Personally, I am quite happy on XP SP2 and have no plans
to move until high-function machines are common.
"The bottom line is we are making nothing off Vista and, frankly,
getting nothing much from the Partner Program either."
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 07, 20073 comments
Break out the Skittles and Mountain Dew! Don your favorite ironic T-shirt!
Developers have some new toys from Microsoft, including an
Open
XML SDK
and a
Visual
Studio Shell
.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 06, 20070 comments
This story is starting to feel so much like a soap opera that we're going to
have to start with a little back story before we get to the news of the week.
So, here we go:
You remember the Microsoft-Novell
SuSE Linux deal, right? There's no need to explain that one, we hope. You
also remember how the Free Software Foundation, which controls the license that
governs the use of Linux, wanted to do
whatever it could to kill, or at least severely injure, the SuSE agreement.
And you remember, too, that Microsoft claims that open source software violates
more than 200 of its patents.
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 05, 20070 comments
Bostonians! New Englanders! Come have breakfast with your RCPU editor and other
members of the
Redmond Channel Partner
staff. Our June 19
RCP
reader breakfast is still on. Check out the details
here
.
There will be more info to come as we have it -- including where we're actually
going to hold the breakfast. Details, details.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 05, 20070 comments
There have been quite a few of items of note thus far at TechEd, including:
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 05, 20070 comments
Almost two months ago
,
while pondering when (or if) Google's nascent productivity suite might eventually
be able to seriously compete with Microsoft Office, RCPU offered this thought:
"No, Google Apps, Docs & Spreadsheets -- and most of the rest
of the tools in the Google productivity arsenal -- aren't quite ready to threaten
Office. But look out. Google's suite is SaaS (Software as a Service) in action.
However, when users aren't connected or the company network is down, it's
more like 'SaaS inaction.' There is no software installed on the client. This
basic fact no doubt has conservative IT folks and users thinking twice about
SaaS altogether."
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 01, 20071 comments
If we're to believe a somewhat cryptic, anonymously sourced
story
that appeared this week
, Novell "won't be punished" by the Free
Software Foundation for making its contentious (to say the very least) SuSE
Linux deal with Microsoft. We'd like to take that to mean that the FSF won't
use the forthcoming version GPLv3, the license that governs Linux use, to stop
Microsoft from distributing SuSE Linux -- something it
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 01, 20071 comments
We didn't get tons of responses to our query as to
whether
you're making much money
off the much-maligned, but apparently not totally
disastrous, Vista operating system, but we did get a few interesting thoughts.
These probably won't go over too well in Redmond, but here they are.
Nat starts us off:
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 01, 20070 comments
Aside from dropping a little nastygram to some of the company's former employees,
Steve Ballmer told a crowd at the D conference (don't worry -- we had to
look
it up
, too) that online advertising and consumer electronics will be
very
big parts of Redmond's future
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 31, 20070 comments