The third-best browser (at best) on the market finally stopped its market-share slide in May, actually picking up a bit of share at the expense of Firefox and Chrome. Why? We have no idea.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 03, 20101 comments
A popular Microsoft rebate offer is back for June, which just happens to be the last month of Microsoft's fiscal year. Scott Bekker has details here.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 03, 20100 comments
The headlines all said that HP was cutting 9,000 jobs, but did you read past the first paragraph of the story? Check this out from the story linked above:
"The Palo Alto, California-based company plans to replace about 6,000 of the eliminated positions with workers in different countries."
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 02, 20105 comments
We still think that they look ridiculous (and your editor still doesn't have one and isn't shopping), but people apparently love these iPad tablet thingies. Apple's currently selling them at a pace of about a million per month. That has left other computer makers racing to get tablets out the door -- Asustek and Micro-Star are talking about putting them out -- and Microsoft is wondering how on earth it's going to catch Apple in this market. Hey, Microsoft, how about Windows 7 tablets that work (almost) as well as iPads but are a lot cheaper and accessible for regular folks? Just a thought… And don't try to be cool this time. Just be functional. We don't need another Zune, thanks.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 02, 20107 comments
The brain-melting heat in Greater Boston this week got us to thinking about summer and that staple of the greatest of all seasons: The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.
This year, the WPC will take place in Washington, D.C., which will no doubt be boiling by the time July rolls around. (Here comes a dreadful segue…) But the action inside the conference center should be pretty hot, with Microsoft (hopefully) providing updates on everything from the progress of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to its further explanation of exactly what "all in the cloud" means.
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 27, 20100 comments
It's a tool for corporate finance-management reporting, and while it's just for the new version of GP at this point, it'll ultimately work with other products in Microsoft's barbershop quartet of ERP suites.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 27, 20100 comments
Most of us know that statistics are one of the famous three types of lies -- but they manage to be interesting, anyway. So we couldn't help but notice this week that Apple is close to becoming the world's most valuable technology company.
That spot, of course, has had Microsoft's name on it for years now. But while Redmond has floundered with its efforts to develop cool consumer technologies, Apple has re-made its name with its various and near-ubiquitous "I" devices. Suddenly Anthony Michael Hall's declaration as Bill Gates in the epic film Pirates of Silicon Valley is starting to seem dated. In case you had forgotten (and we really don't know how that's possible), the made-for-TV Gates bellows at Noah Wyle's Steve Jobs: “I got the loot, Steve!”
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 26, 20102 comments
Somebody had to shoulder the blame for the Zune. It turns out that Robbie Bach and J Allard will depart -- on good terms, Microsoft says -- after a couple of decades each in Redmond. They leave behind them a mixed record at best in developing consumer applications. The Xbox is cool but rarely, if ever, profitable. And the Zune…well, we don't even have any jokes left for that device here.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 26, 20100 comments
The saber isn't ratting anymore. It's out now, and it's pointed at one of Microsoft's biggest rivals in the cloud- and enterprise-computing markets.
Microsoft has long threatened rivals (think Linux) with patent lawsuits, but rarely has it actually made good on those threats. Only a handful of times has Microsoft sued anybody for patent infringement without Redmond being sued by the other company first. So, it seems likely that Microsoft is pretty confident in laying down the patent gauntlet in front of one of its mouthier rivals, Salesforce.com.
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 20, 20103 comments