Oh, the jokes we could make about Skittles and Mountain Dew, but we're going to give developers a break this week as they attend the Microsoft MIX10 conference in Las Vegas.
After all, there is a bunch of stuff going on at MIX, and some of it might even interest partners. Let's start with Silverlight, which is taking analytics to a new level, as Kathleen Richards explains at RCPmag.com. Going beyond simple Web analytics, Silverlight's new Analytics Framework tracks what users do with Silverlight both in a browser and outside of one. It's all part of Silverlight 4, which Microsoft will likely make available this week.
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 15, 20100 comments
Fascinating story
here
(to us, anyway) about the first company to register a .com Internet domain. Some firm called Symbolics, one of those old Route 128 companies that made Greater Boston the hub of the technology industry until somebody wisely decided to move to the sunshine of California, tacked a .com onto the end of its name on March 15, 1985, and started a revolution. Of course, not many people noticed back in 1985, but that's history for you. As for Microsoft, the article says that it didn't register Microsoft.com until 1991 -- when there still weren't that many people online.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 15, 20100 comments
Seriously, folks, just get IE8. Or Firefox, or something. If you do insist, though, on running older versions of the browser, rest assured that Microsoft is
hard at work tackling a flaw
that affects both versions 6 and 7.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 15, 20100 comments
Why can't
Patch Tuesday
just be simple for once? This month's batch of patches also came with a
warning of a zero-day bug
for IE 6 and 7 (but if you're still using IE 6, really, what could you be thinking?).
Posted by Lee Pender on March 11, 20101 comments
Well, here's a piece of
good news
. The folks at Ovum say that 2010 should see a jump in IT spending. Not a big jump, but we'll take what we can get.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 11, 20100 comments
Another of those unusually accurate (most of the time) TechARP.com
reports is out
, this one suggesting that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 will be available by the fourth quarter of this year.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 10, 20100 comments
Admit it, you remember the
"Dancin' Homer"
episode of the Simpsons from…well, some years ago. In the episode, Homer becomes a successful mascot for the Springfield Isotopes baseball team and gets a call from a major-league team in Capital City.
As always, calamity ensues. For our purpose here, try to recall one memorable scene from the episode in which the Simpson family drives into Capital City and marvels at the Cross-Town Bridge. Not to state the obvious, but a cross-town bridge is pretty useless; most bridges cross bodies of water or maybe large highways. A cross-town bridge, in theory, would only cross perfectly good streets and would be superfluous—although Oklahoma City, apparently, actually has one. Who knew? (People in OKC, we suppose.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 10, 20102 comments
Allison Watson, head of Microsoft's partner group held a brief presentation this morning to partners about Microsoft's commitment to cloud computing. There's more info here.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 10, 20100 comments
It's understandable that folks went a little nuts over the Apple iPad. Apple has, after all, brought us the iPod, the iPhone and the iPod Touch over the last decade or so, and those are mostly pretty cool (and very successful) gadgets.
But besides the fact that the iPad looks ridiculous, it has also started a flood of articles about how tablet computing is going to take over the world. We don't get why that would happen. But first, the hype. Apparently, the iPad has sparked a tablet "war" (beware: a video featuring an Australian accent plays in this link), with every big vendor under the sun, including Microsoft developing its weapon for battle.
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 10, 20109 comments
Partners, enjoy the next couple of months as much as you can because things are going to get a little crazy after that. May 12 will be the true first day of 2010 for Microsoft, with the company releasing a raft of products for availability to businesses that day.
Office 2010 will be the star, of course, but the other 2010-branded offerings that will take the stage on May 12 will include SharePoint (arguably a much bigger deal for the channel than Office), Project and Visio.
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Posted by Lee Pender on March 08, 20100 comments
Windows Essential Business Server, we hardly knew ye. In fact, not many customers knew ye at all. As Scott Bekker explains, the mid-market-focused EBS (we only call it “WEBS” because we like making references to actual webs) never really found a niche. And its late-2008 introduction couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time for the economy. Microsoft hyped this thing big time a couple of years ago, but Redmond and its partners just couldn’t spin enough of an argument for WEBS to convince customers to get stuck into it. So, Microsoft is clearing away WEBS and will make up for its absence with other servers and capabilities.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 08, 20100 comments