We don't want to give anything away or anything, but let's just say that the November issue of Redmond might just reveal the massive popularity of the Microsoft System Center product line, which the company updated late last week.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20090 comments
Is this the end? Really? Are the bad times over? PC sales were down again in calendar Q2 2009, but there's -- gasp! -- optimism on the horizon. Well, at RCPU, we'll believe it when we see it (we're still pretty pessimistic about the economy as a whole), but we're cheering for that recovery.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20090 comments
And it's goodbye to ISC's flagship product, Star-P, but hello to a bunch of ISC technology finding its way into Redmond's wares. And, in case you were wondering, ISC is (or was) based in Waltham, Mass., your editor's current residence and an all-around fine city.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20091 comments
Oh, this ERP business is complicated, and with Microsoft, it's really, really complicated. Sure, Microsoft Dynamics might be cheaper and easier to use and implement than most -- probably all -- of its competitors, but Redmond's insistence on offering four different ERP suites under the Dynamics name leads to a marketing alphabet soup that even the biggest enterprise software fan might have trouble keeping straight.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 22, 20092 comments
It's just a little exchange of bills among Texans. No big deal, really. With the PC market slumping, Dell has decided to get into the services business, quickly, by forking over nearly $4 billion to buy Perot Systems. So, HP and IBM (and some really large Microsoft partners), there's a new services competitor on the horizon, and it's ridin' straight out of Texas.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 22, 20090 comments
You might want to get this quick fix installed before somebody actually does attack Vista or Windows Server 2008. Then again, how much harm could anybody really do to Vista that Microsoft hasn't done already? Oh, we're just kidding...mostly. (The Vista jokes will cease when Windows 7 makes its grand debut. Maybe.)
Posted by Lee Pender on September 22, 20090 comments
Mary Jo Foley, Redmond magazine columnist and Microsoft follower par excellence, says it could be...along with some sort of Microsoft-branded phone.
So, are we really going to go through this whole tablet thing again? Apple's headed down that road, as well. I guess Microsoft and Apple are just determined to make us like tablet computing. Here at RCPU, we don't really see the appeal. But the whole tablet notion goes well with the touch-computing elements of Windows 7 (also not appealing to us), we suppose. For now, we'll stick with the netbook. It'll take some convincing to get us to do otherwise.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 22, 20091 comments
We're looking for stories of migration to Windows 7 for a story we're putting together for Redmond, our sister magazine. These don't have to be enterprise migrations, since we figure there aren't many of those yet. They can simply be your tales of upgrading your own computer from XP or Vista to the new OS.
Share your triumphs and tragedies at [email protected] or leave a comment below. And remember that we'll never, ever publish your full name without contacting you and getting your permission first. Thanks.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 21, 200912 comments
Those who would sound the death knell for Microsoft got another shot of false hope this week when the U.S. federal government revealed that it would embark on an ambitious cloud computing effort.
Already, the feds have an app store up and running at Apps.gov, and national CIO Vivek Kundra is talking about moving government IT out of the '80s (if we're generous) and into the cloud. Reports the San Francisco Chronicle (from the link in the first paragraph of this entry):
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20092 comments
It's not just XP that Microsoft wants to put to bed. Mary Jo Foley reports that Redmond is also putting out notices that support for Windows Server 2000 and 2003 will change (and end, in the case of 2000) relatively soon, as well. More details straight from Microsoft are here.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20090 comments
This might not seem like big news at first glance, but it's important to your editor. So, indulge us. Dr. James Cash, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, will end his tenure as a Microsoft board member (on friendly terms; no controversy here) on Nov. 19.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20090 comments
Well, who knew? All those Windows Update patches and operating system fixes haven't been all that useful after all. Applications are where the real security risk is. It's apps, I tell ya! Apps are what the hoodlums are lookin' to rub out! Why, I oughta...
Sorry, we slipped into '30s gangster mode for a second there. But speaking of bad guys, apparently they're not attacking the OS (read: Windows) the way they used to. More and more, they're going after desktop apps, which tend to remain largely unprotected in enterprises.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 16, 20091 comments