There's no way we're getting into this entry without setting the mood with a little classic Janet Jackson asking the question some observers have asked of Ray Ozzie recently: "What have you done for me lately?" (Ooh-ooh-ooh yeah. Oh, yeah. It's in your head now.)
Maybe the better question is, "What has Ray Ozzie done for Microsoft lately?" While we admit that we jumped the gun on what we thought was Ozzie's exit from the critical Microsoft Azure cloud computing project, we're not the only ones wondering about Ozzie's role in Redmond.
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Posted by Lee Pender on December 16, 20091 comments
Blogging is a funny thing. We at RCPU have always referred to RCPU as a newsletter, in part because it is an actual e-mail newsletter for subscribers (and was before it was ever a blog) and in part because, for us, the word "blog" doesn't carry a lot of credibility. Blogs are like opinions (which are like...something else): Everybody has one, or so it seems.
This week, though, RCPU was definitely more blog than newsletter. We took a blog entry from Microsoft (via an entry from one of our sister sites) and misinterpreted what it was saying, thereby making more of a story than what was really there. In this case, the story was Ray Ozzie's apparent exit from Azure development at Microsoft. Well, Ozzie's role in Azure hasn't changed. If you want more detail, read on.
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Posted by Lee Pender on December 11, 20091 comments
Redmond beefed up its health care IT portfolio this week with the purchase of RCPU's neighbor (sort of), Andover, Mass.-based Sentillion. Redmond magazine columnist and Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley has some insight on how Microsoft is going to fold its new purchase into the health care family in Redmond.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 11, 20090 comments
Joseph A. Osbourn will step down in June and John Tonnison will ascend to the throne of CIO of one of the world's biggest distributors on Feb. 1. Happy retirement, Mr. Osbourn.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 11, 20090 comments
A Microsoft sales and marketing executive said something this week about stealing Google's lunch, which made us immediately forget what we were going to say about this story and head to the kitchen for a snack.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 10, 20090 comments
We told you during most of 2008 and all of 2009 that cloud computing was not just a model for the future but was here now -- and it is, sort of. But a lot of companies still have doubts about security, uptime and data ownership, meaning the cloud model hasn't yet soared quite as much as we thought it would. (Yes, we jumped the gun a little bit on this one.) But one analyst now says that 2010 could be a breakthrough year for cloud computing, and we all know that analysts never get anything wrong...right?
Posted by Lee Pender on December 10, 20090 comments
OK, so this isn't the most important story for Microsoft partners, but it's just darn interesting. Get this: The German government is going to fund an effort to help Windows users rid their machines of malware.
No, seriously! According to a blog entry by a guy who can read German better than we can, the German government is going to team with ISPs to find infected machines and help users clean malware off of their computers. The leader of the project is Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, which is part of the country's federal government. It's not clear at this point whether Microsoft will have any involvement in this, but we're getting the feeling that it won't -- which makes the whole thing all the more strange.
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Posted by Lee Pender on December 10, 20092 comments
It's a done deal in the U.S., but the European Union's regulators still have to approve Oracle's purchase of Sun. And guess who's going to be there to try to put the kibosh on the whole thing? Oh, yes. Microsoft.
What's funny is that, just about the time the Microsoft-in-Brussels news came out on this, the infamous Neelie Kroes, the European Commission's competition commissioner and no friend to Microsoft over the years, started expressing optimism about the Oracle-Sun deal.
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Posted by Lee Pender on December 10, 20090 comments
Kathleen Richards, your editor's Framingham office mate and editor extraordinaire for the developer branch of the Redmond Media Group family, posted a little blog item on Tuesday afternoon that caught RCPU's eye.
It seems innocuous enough -- and it might be. On the surface, it's just another Microsoft reorg in which the company is combining its Azure business with its Windows Server and Solutions Group. No big deal, right? Maybe not, but dig this from Kate's blog entry:
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Posted by Lee Pender on December 09, 20093 comments
American folk hero and freedom-fighting journalist Stephen Colbert uncovered one of the great stories of 2009 on his show this week: the Windows 7 hamburger currently being served up by Burger King in Japan. (Go about 3:10 into this clip to see what we're talking about.) Yes, the Windows 7 hamburger (which really does have a Microsoft promotional tie-in) has seven -- seven! -- meat patties in between its buns.
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Posted by Lee Pender on December 09, 20090 comments