Not to give away any trade secrets here or anything, but we're putting together a story for the November issue of Redmond on Windows 8. (By the way, if you'd like to contribute to the story with a comment or observation, e-mail [email protected]. But hurry -- the deadline is approaching very rapidly.)
Pulling this story together has meant taking a long, hard look at the forthcoming operating system and trying to get to the bottom of it somehow. What your editor has discovered, though, is that Windows 8 isn't just an OS. It's kind of a collection of OSes under one roof, and with it Microsoft might be trying to do too much and reach too many audiences. (Then again, Microsoft does a lot of that these days.) It is, metaphorically speaking, bottomless. More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 03, 201120 comments
Legend has it that when Jimmy Page was forming a rock combo in the late '60s, he asked Keith Moon, then drummer for The Who, how he thought the band would go over with fans. "Like a lead balloon," Moon is said to have replied -- meaning not so well.
As it turns out, Led Zeppelin -- yes, that's where they got the name, or so the story goes -- went over pretty well after all. The band's sound was a pretty radical departure from a lot of what was popular at the time, but it worked. Zep remains one of the most influential bands in rock history, as anybody who's reading this probably knows very well. More
Posted by Lee Pender on September 21, 20114 comments
Once there was Wintel. In the days when "Seinfeld" was new every week, the Dallas Cowboys were Super Bowl contenders and people actually listened to Everclear on the radio (we can't explain everything), Microsoft and Intel ruled the world. Rarely has such a forceful and dominant partnership existed. Windows and Intel chips literally ran most of the planet's PCs. And PCs were just about all anybody had back then for computing.
These days, though, the nature of computing has changed, and so has the Wintel partnership, which is now trying to be more about mobile devices and less about crusty old PCs. It's not really even Wintel anymore, at least not in the sense it was 15 years ago, but it's still one of the best partnerships Microsoft has going. More
Posted by Lee Pender on September 15, 20113 comments
Not long ago, somebody mentioned the name Corel to your editor. "Corel," he thought. "Wait, is Corel still around? Surely not. It didn't survive the early 2000s bust, did it?"
Actually, it did. We're just not sure how. The predictions were so dire for the Canadian firm in the late '90s -- when times were still good -- that we at RCPU distinctly remember one very well-known and well-respected analyst telling your editor that Corel probably didn't have more than six months to live. That was in 1997, or maybe 1998. You get the point. More
Posted by Lee Pender on September 09, 20113 comments
Gah, we were all ready to do a mock Zagat review in response to this news, but apparently Google beat us to it. Newman! Uh, we mean, Google!
You know what? Let's do it, anyway. More
Posted by Lee Pender on September 08, 20110 comments
With sincere apologies to Dana Carvey, it's time for the return of the Grumpy Old Blogger.
So, here's what I hate about social networking. Consider the following scenario, one I've experienced many times. I see a friend I haven't seen in, say, a month. Maybe two. And I ask how she's doing.
"Well," the reply snaps back, "if you ever looked at Facebook, you'd know that I went to California last month."
"Oh, really? Where in California?" I inquire with half-hearted interest.
"It was all on Facebook. I put up all of my pictures, and I had a link to my blog. You need to get on Facebook once in a while!" More
Posted by Lee Pender on August 31, 201111 comments
Google and RIM are down. HP is out. Right now, Apple has a stranglehold on the tablet market not seen since...well, not seen since Microsoft took control of the market for PC operating systems, which it still has.
HP last week just surrendered to Apple and the iPad, killing the TouchPad (and thus bringing it to life for the first time, but we'll get to that) and announcing that it's done making devices with the webOS operating system on them. More
Posted by Lee Pender on August 25, 20115 comments
When I was in high school (in the early '90s; I'm not that old, no matter how grouchy I tend to be), I had to write an essay for a contest. The topic was as follows: "Agree or disagree: The world has changed more in the last 100 years than it did from the time of Christ until the end of the 19th century." I agreed. Wholeheartedly.
I won't (and can't) reproduce the essay for you here. My guess is, given my disdain for brevity, I wrote a lot, and the judges didn't read all the way to the end of my ramblings. At some point, they probably gave up; in any case, I won the competition. There's a lesson in there somewhere: If you can't beat them (whoever "they" are), grind them down. (Also, growing up in a small town means that there are fewer competitors to beat in an essay competition.) More
Posted by Lee Pender on August 24, 20114 comments
Darn it, Microsoft, you're going to ruin the whole thing. Well, you won't be alone -- after all, you're certainly not the only vendor to suffer an outage of cloud-based applications lately. But every time the sky falls and the cloud goes down, it hurts the whole cloud computing model.
This week's outage seems especially bad, not so much because of how long it lasted (although it was hours, apparently), but because of what actually went down. Office 365, Microsoft's long-awaited, almost-brand-new online productivity suite, was part of the crash. Office 365 is meant to be the successor to BPOS but only seemed to live up to the last three letters of its predecessor's name this week. Oh, and if you wanted to stay on BPOS and not move to Office 365, too bad. Office 365 is coming to BPOS users -- if Microsoft can keep it up and running. More
Posted by Lee Pender on August 18, 20110 comments
Something just doesn't seem right here. We've long defended the importance of intellectual property and patents in this space, noting that IP is the lifeblood of capitalism. And we still believe that it is. But this is just weird.
Most of you know by now that Google's announced intention to buy Motorola for $12.5 billion isn't really about Motorola's hardware, manufacturing facilities or expertise in making smartphones. It's about patents -- pretty much entirely about patents. In fact, with Apple and Microsoft teaming up to try to whack Google with the patent stick and destroy Android, the whole smartphone business is now, apparently, about patents. More
Posted by Lee Pender on August 17, 20113 comments
Many years ago -- well, back in the mid-'90s -- your editor slipped into a conference room where a demo of Office (or maybe even Windows 98) was taking place at a trade show. Somebody from Microsoft was showing how speech-recognition software would work integrated into Office and Windows.
Or not work, as the case was. The demo went about as well as those recent negotiations on the debt ceiling, and somebody in the audience asked when speech might actually be integrated into a release of Office or Windows. Not for quite a while, the Microsoft person said. It wasn't ready. Your editor strolled back to the press room and wrote a brief story on the whole deal -- and, for some reason, that little story got picked up all over the Web (such as it was back then). People were fascinated, we suppose, by the notion of speech recognition being native in an OS -- or even working at all. More
Posted by Lee Pender on August 15, 20111 comments
No, really. Apple is, for now, the biggest company in the world in terms of market value. What a turnaround this is from the dark days of 1997, when Bill Gates floated Steve Jobs a bundle of cash just to keep Apple alive and keep regulators away from Redmond.
Of course, Gates might have been better off letting Apple die. The Department of Justice came knocking on his door with papers, anyway, and now Apple has left Microsoft not just in its rearview mirror but in the dust created by its dust. So, what does this mean for Microsoft, once the Montreal Canadiens to Apple's Boston Bruins? (Yep, snuck another one in.) More
Posted by Lee Pender on August 10, 20112 comments