Another fighter jet of a development platform joined the battle for the cloud this week, as Salesforce.com and VMware revealed an effort called…seriously…VMforce.
Aside from sounding like a '70s superhero cartoon, VMforce has some muscle behind it. First of all, Salesforce.com has expanded in recent years from being mainly a provider of hosted CRM to being a pretty legitimate cloud player -- see its Force.com development platform, for instance. And VMware is VMware, still the runaway leader in virtualization technologies.
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 28, 20100 comments
McAfee's recent XP-crashing patch got a lot of press, but the anti-virus vendor is hardly the only one in the category that has had trouble doing what it promises customers it will do. In fact, as this long report notes, the anti-virus game seems to be getting more difficult -- and worse -- all the time.
Posted on April 28, 20101 comments
Microsoft blew away Wall Street expectations with its earnings report last week -- but that didn't help its stock price much. Windows earnings were strong, backed by the performance of Windows 7. However, the critical Server and Tools division showed a bit of weakness quarter-over-quarter, and the Microsoft Business Division (think Dynamics) actually recorded a small revenue shortfall compared to the corresponding 2009 quarter.
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 26, 20100 comments
Weep (or stock up), nostalgia fans, for the venerable floppy disk (which Sony still makes!) will be no more after March of next year. Sony is the last company making the old disks, and it just isn't getting enough demand from people who have been living under rocks for the past 10 years to keep production going. This would be sad if floppies hadn't always been largely unreliable and surprisingly easy to lose. Oh well -- another part of computing history fades into the sunset.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 26, 20101 comments
Microsoft Dynamics is a lot of things -- really, a lot -- but it seems more clear than ever that the hook for selling the enterprise package isn't one of its four enterprise resource planning suites but rather its customer relationship management offering, Dynamics CRM.
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 26, 20100 comments
We're putting together a story for Redmond magazine about the worst experiences you've had with software licensing. Has the Business Software Alliance or Microsoft ever raided your office? Have you had trouble clearing your name? Have you actually had to deal with a problem you didn't even know existed? Send us your worst tales of licensing woe --confidentiality guaranteed, of course. The address, as always, is [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20100 comments
Business Intelligence has been floating around as an industry phrase for more than a decade now, and yet many partners or IT pros would likely be hard-pressed to name 10 people who actually use BI tools.
The promise of BI -- essentially the idea that non-technical users should be able to easily get to and manipulate information that's buried in a database somewhere -- has actually come to fruition. BI software, as overcomplicated as much of it has become, has basically worked pretty well for a while. Some of it isn't even that hard to use. And, yet, BI hasn't really trickled down into organizations the way vendors, partners and IT folks would like to see it trickle.
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20100 comments
Ten countries -- including the U.K., France, Germany and Canada -- have sent a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt taking him to task for what they believe to be lax privacy standards practiced by the search giant. Most of the complaints center on the thus far ill-fated Google Buzz, which Google is no doubt pretty sick of talking about by now. (Think of Buzz as Google's mini-Vista.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20100 comments
Great, now we'll never escape this social-networking stuff. Users will soon be able to (the tool is in beta) create and share Microsoft Office documents in Facebook. Seriously, this is probably a really good idea on Microsoft's part, but we're a bit less than thrilled at the prospect of writing RCPU while getting bombed with messages about what a bunch of people we went to high school with are feeding their kids for dinner.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20101 comments
We still think that the iPad looks stupid, but we can't argue with what Steve Jobs has done with a company that, let's not forget, was as good as dead about a decade-and-a-half ago. The numbers don't lie…
Posted on April 21, 20100 comments
This week, a bit of news. Next week, the show. We love Dynamics here at RCPU. We're just into that heavy, complex, back-office stuff. And we love Convergence -- it's a shame that, due to lots of factors, your editor can't get there in person anymore.
But we can still talk about Dynamics and about Convergence. This week, Microsoft released details of GP 2010, which will be available on May 1.
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 21, 20100 comments
We've said many times here that even when Microsoft is down, it's never out. Redmond might be behind rivals right now in, say, consumer search or mobile operating systems, but Microsoft has been down before and come back to dominate markets. In fact, we're writing a story about that right now: Microsoft's greatest comebacks. For better or worse, which comebacks in Microsoft history have impressed you most? Maybe Internet Explorer burying Netscape? Something else? Send your thoughts to [email protected]. Thanks!
Posted by Lee Pender on April 21, 20102 comments