Maybe it's got something to do with
rampant
stories about identity theft
, or maybe it's a result (or the cause) of the
return of the horror movie to cultural prominence in recent years, or maybe
it's some sort of unfortunate lingering after-effect of the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks...or maybe we just like to be freaked out. But if any word describes
how we tend to react to things in the United States of late, it's "panic."
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 03, 20071 comments
There's more talk from the Free Software Foundation this week about how it
plans to do everything it can to
undermine
the Microsoft-Novell SuSE Linux agreement
. The FSF is worried that letting
the deal slip by will represent tacit acknowledgment that Microsoft actually
owns some Linux intellectual property and patents (something Steve Ballmer has,
uh,
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 28, 20070 comments
The next step in the evolution of Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI)
-- not to be confused with Dynamics products -- will be here next week. April
1 is the release date for the
System
Center Operations Manager 2007
, part of DSI. The new management software
is the next version of what's now called Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM)
2005.
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 28, 20070 comments
Government agencies have
put
the kibosh on it
, and even Steve Ballmer tried to get investors to
calm
down about it
. Just today, a product manager from one of Microsoft's bigger
ISV security partners (OK, it was Symantec) told us that most companies won't
even seriously start looking at switching to it until the third or fourth quarter
of this year (and that actually sounded a little optimistic compared with other
projections we've heard).
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 27, 20073 comments
In
Pirates of Silicon Valley
,
a movie to which we just love to refer, there's a scene at the end in which
Anthony Michael Hall's Bill Gates peers from a video screen over Noah Wyle's
Steve Jobs at a press conference as Gates announces the investment by Microsoft
that basically saves Apple.
In the background, onlookers and Mac fanatics boo and hiss at Gates' overwhelming
mug. The Big Brother connotation is not exactly subtle, but what do you want
from a made-for-TV movie? (By the way, if Pirates had been a theater
release and not a made-for-TV flick, "I got the loot, Steve!" would
have been one of the great cinematic catchphrases of the late 1990s. Alas.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 21, 20070 comments
Philippe Gaillard (who, it randomly turns out, was a neighbor and rugby opponent
during your editor's days living in Paris) gets it. The president of Neocase,
an ISV that provides support applications and integrates its wares with Dynamics
CRM, explains very succinctly why Dynamics ERP and CRM are getting attention
from so many companies:
"They look [at Dynamics] because they're sick of paying millions of dollars."
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 16, 20070 comments
Forget the news, even though there's a lot of it. Two shocking revelations
emerged from Microsoft's Convergence show in America's most beautiful city today.
First, and perhaps most disturbing, is that one of the editors of this newsletter
(as in one of the guys who reads it and tries to put my ramblings into some
sense of order) owns a Zune, aka "the uncool iPod." Bought it himself.
And likes it. And sort of resents RCPU's incessant pounding of it in recent
months. Who knew?
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 13, 20070 comments
Here are a couple of pieces of good news: Microsoft has two new wrinkles in
its already excellent Partner Program, one an enhancement and one a brand-new
initiative.
For starters, Microsoft now includes hardware in version 3.0 of its popular
Buy Local Program, which helps system builders find customers
in their hometowns. Previous versions of the program offered customers free
software and Web services but stopped short of offering hardware.
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 09, 20070 comments