It's a CRM and unified communications -- whatever that is -- combo with an eye on the cloud. If you want to read more about it, you'll just have to click here for Stephen Swoyer's excellent story on RCPmag.com. (Yes, we're trying to drive traffic to the Web site. It's part of why we're here. And while you're on RCPmag.com, have a look around. Stay for a while.)
Posted by Lee Pender on October 08, 20090 comments
If anything Microsoft does deserves the description "underwhelming," it has to be Windows Mobile. Lagging in market share, innovation and general relevance behind several other competitors (not just the iPhone), Windows Mobile is the ne'er-do-well relative of the Windows operating system, the gin-soaked brother-in-law who sleeps on the couch when he gets kicked out of his apartment and just needs a place to crash for a few days, man.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 07, 20094 comments
The news earlier this week that Hotmail had been caught in a phishing net brought out the Microsoft haters in full voice. But the naysayers seem a bit quieter now that other Web-based e-mail services -- including the sainted Gmail, which, by the way, your editor uses for personal purposes -- have fallen victim to the attack.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 07, 20090 comments
Talk about epic fail: Vista was such a disaster that even Steve Ballmer has stopped pretending that it was any kind of success. Ballmer told a U.K. newspaper this week that the company's reputation still hasn't recovered following the Vista debacle. Surely Vista has to have achieved something along the lines of New Coke-level failure now. Or maybe Ryan Leaf drinking New Coke while driving a Yugo. In any case, it's bad.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 07, 20093 comments
Hey, you Mac zealots, we know your secrets. We see those PCs hidden in your home offices and those Dell laptops on your living room sofas. We know now that 85 percent of you -- that's a lot -- not only have a Mac but also a PC. So, stop the smug act, OK? (Linux users, you may still be smug...for now.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 07, 20090 comments
It's getting better out there, right? Well, with financial markets seemingly recovering and, at the same time, the unemployment rate bumping up on 10 percent here in the U.S., the messages are mixed at best. And we've stopped listening to most of the experts who got so much wrong over the last 10 years or longer and helped get us here in the first place.
Except for these experts. IDC released a study this week saying that IT will create 5.8 million jobs (worldwide) by 2013. Microsoft sponsored the study, which identified IT as a major driver of a global economic recovery. (This, oddly enough, as Steve Ballmer -- and we think quite correctly -- is spreading the messages that IT budgets will be down for a while and that the economy has "reset" and won't return to the levels it reached before the crash of 2008.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 06, 20090 comments
Believe it or not, there are still some Lotus Notes users out there -- lots of them, actually -- and IBM is still an e-mail vendor. Now, it's a vendor with a cloud-based e-mail option for the enterprise, something known as LotusLive iNotes.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 06, 20091 comments
Symantec's got a bit of that mix-and-match thing going in the cloud. The security giant has pure-play cloud storage offerings and has for a while, but now the company is giving customers the option of going full cloud, in-house "cloud" or both.
The longtime Microsoft partner and security market leader this week released FileStore, a platform that, very simply put, allows companies to build private, in-house storage clouds.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 06, 20090 comments
No, really. Red Hat has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw software patents.
Outlaw! Now, we're going to go on another pro-patent rant here, but first we'll say this: No, we don't like patent trolls. Yes, the system needs reform so that some make-nothing patent hog can't tear a legitimately innovative company (that actually makes things) to shreds.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 06, 20090 comments
Champagne all around for the Microsoft legal team. A federal judge this week overturned a great big, $388 million patent-infringement ruling against Microsoft. Apparently, Microsoft didn't infringe on Uniloc's patent, after all. Apparently, the original trial went on for six years before a jury slammed Microsoft with the punitive fine -- which a judge overturned on appeal in a matter of months. Weird how the system works sometimes, isn't it?
Posted by Lee Pender on October 01, 20090 comments
To those of you out there who have taken pay cuts recently (or been laid off by Microsoft), rest assured that the big wigs in Redmond are suffering right along with you. Steve Ballmer's salary cratered from $1.35 million to $1.28 million year-over-fiscal-year, and other Microsoft execs took pay cuts, as well. (Of course, compared to what the real losers on Wall Street have made over the years while helping wreck our economy, Ballmer's base compensation doesn't seem that outrageous.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 01, 20092 comments