This wasn't the Steve whose job was rumored to be on the line. In fact, he really never seemed to go by Steve at all, but we needed to call him that in order to come up with a clever headline that would create some confusion with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Unlike Ballmer, who has been under fire for many quarters for years now, Stephen Elop was a standout at Microsoft as head of the company's Office and Dynamics product lines, among others. That must be why Nokia chose Elop to be its next CEO.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 13, 20100 comments
Sasquatch? No, Office Communications Server, which is now named Lync Server 2010 in honor, presumably, of that guy from the Mod Squad (who spelled it Linc, but we couldn't resist a late-'60s TV reference. All you over 50s say what!) .
Posted by Lee Pender on September 13, 20100 comments
You know that it's a slow news day when Windows XP cracks the headlines, but you also know that the operating system is alive and well when its death is reported over and over again.
There's no free support left for Windows XP, and soon, Dell, once again one of the industry's leading PC makers after having survived a bit of a dip, will stop offering XP as the pre-loaded OS on its machines. Evidently, Dell doesn't really want to stop selling XP on its boxes. Read between the lines (or just read the actual lines) of a Dell blog post on the XP issue, and it seems pretty clear that Microsoft is the puppet master in this scenario.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 09, 201013 comments
So, that Microsoft-Yahoo search deal? It's kind of working a little bit! With Bing now running Yahoo, Microsoft's consumer-search market-share numbers now seem, at least, to be marginally less pathetic than they used to be. Keep on foisting that sword at those windmills, Don Microxofte.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 09, 20100 comments
Lee Majors cannot be happy about this. Just a generation (or two?) ago, the tastefully named gentleman was the Six Million Dollar Man -- better, stronger, faster, etc. And nearly worthless compared to a guy who basically got bounced from his last job.
Mark Hurd didn't sustain severe injuries in a test-flight crash and come back as a bionic man (as Majors's Steve Austin character did in the '70s, in case you didn't know), but he did suffer a pretty hard fall after leaving the CEO post at HP under a cloud of bizarre circumstances and sexual-harassment accusations.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 07, 20101 comments
Maybe this prediction will be as wrong as all the dire warnings about Hurricane Earl were. We can hope, right?
Posted by Lee Pender on September 07, 20100 comments
Let's not kid ourselves here. It's blazing hot outside by New England standards; your editor is working on a cover story for Redmond magazine on the 25th anniversary of Windows; Labor Day weekend is fast approaching, and Hurricane Earl might very well blow us right off the East Coast this weekend.
Today is not the day for bloviating, philosophizing or entertaining here at RCPU. It's a day to, quite literally, "mail it in," which is what we're doing. Absent any news of significant interest for commentary, we're leading with the fairly mundane but not unimportant story of Microsoft publishing a fix (not really a patch...but something) for a DLL flaw that's been running amok lately.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 02, 20100 comments
What? There's a Southern Virginia now? We thought that outside of the D.C. area, Virginia was just kind of a myth... Only kidding. We at RCPU love Virginia. It's gorgeous. And it's going to be home to a new Microsoft datacenter (although how it beat out your editor's native state of Texas, we'll never know).
Posted by Lee Pender on September 02, 20100 comments