After last week's nearly $106 million patent-infringement verdict against Microsoft, plaintiff VirnetX wasted no time in
hitting Redmond with another lawsuit
. This time, Windows 7 is in the crosshairs.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 22, 20100 comments
Microsoft is getting ready to give pricing advantages to Software Assurance customers for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure access to Windows, and it's also
boosting its partnership with Citrix
to improve Redmond's desktop-virtualization capabilities. All of this is good news for partners who are looking at desktop virtualization as a way to get people away from XP and on to Windows 7.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 22, 20100 comments
A
hole
in Microsoft's Virtual PC hypervisor? Surely not, says Redmond... It's more of an
unlocked door
, really.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 22, 20100 comments
The first salvo might have missed, but the gates to the castle appear to be open. Novell has rejected a $2 billion acquisition offer from a New York-based hedge fund, but the bidding for the company might have only begun.
The company turned a cold shoulder on Elliott Associates, but it is now considering its options -- in other words, probably looking for a buyer. Check out this bit from a Novell statement quoted in Jeff Schwartz's RCPmag.com story:
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 22, 20101 comments
Gladys Rama, who has been the editor, producer and overall guru of RCPU for several years now, is abandoning us here at 1105 Media to pursue her dream of traveling the world. Seriously, doesn't that sound fantastic? Applause to you for that, Gladys.
If you've ever wondered why I use the first-person plural in this newsletter, it's because RCPU is about a whole lot more than just me. Gladys has been the lynchpin of this operation, keeping RCPU running smoothly and mostly keeping me sane over the last few years. Not only is she one of the finest editors I've ever worked with, she has also put up with every lousy pun, every ridiculous YouTube link and every obscure pop culture reference I've dropped into this space over the years. For that, she deserves a combat medal of some sort.
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20101 comments
VirnetX is in the money--or it should be soon enough given its
big win over Microsoft
in a patent case this week . Those ol' Tyler Roses were in bloom for a patent plaintiff again, as a Texas jury awarded VirnetX almost $106 million and said that Microsoft had infringed on patents related to VPN technology. We can hear the open source crowd laughing (again) from here--you live by the patent and die by the patent, eh, Microsoft? Well, die is a very strong word--Microsoft can produce $106 million the way we at RCPU can produce pocket lint. But know this: If you're sued for patent infringement in Tyler, Texas, just settle or something because you are going to lose.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20101 comments
It's not a Hyper-V problem, but the researchers at Core Security say that the
Virtual PC hypervisor has a hole in it
so big that your editor could fit through it even after spending a couple of hours at a free breakfast buffet.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20100 comments
If there's one company that moves more glacially than Microsoft, it's SAP. And if there's one company that moves more glacially than SAP, it's IBM. After talking up public cloud platforms for quite a while, IBM finally has one. We like the name: IBM Cloud. Tasteful and easy to say. Whether it'll compete with Azure, Amazon, Google and the rest is less clear, but it's rarely a good idea to bet against IBM.
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20100 comments
Maybe this gives us a hint as to why Microsoft is trying so hard to get its mobile platform into working order. The market for mobile applications is about to take off like a rocket, one study says.
OK. So, the sponsor of the study is...an application store. Still, if they're anywhere close to accurate, the numbers here are pretty staggering. Check out some of these figures from the BBC story linked above, guv'na:
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20100 comments
So, about that upgrade to Windows 7...you might be doing it sooner than you'd planned if you're interested in Microsoft's next browser release.
Reports coming out of this week's big MIX10 developer conference suggest that IE9 is going to be super-cool and might actually out-perform Firefox (your editor's choice) and Google Chrome. Microsoft is, as it seems to be with everything these days, "all in" for IE 9 and the emerging HTML5 standard, which it'll use in development of the browser. Cool, right?
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 17, 20106 comments
With Google looking to possibly pull out of China, would Microsoft be the beneficiary of the vacuum that Google's absence would leave? Maybe, some
experts are saying
...
Posted by Lee Pender on March 17, 20100 comments
Stop us if you've heard this one before:
SAP is talking about hosted and on-demand applications
. Sound familiar? It should. SAP blew smoke about hosted apps for years and then introduced its Business ByDesign offering, which, aside from being grammatically ambiguous, was a bit of a catastrophe. In fact, RCPU has heard that the company pretty much scrapped the whole project (and its staff), although there's still a
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 17, 20101 comments