IBM is, not unreasonably, ditching Microsoft Office for hundreds of thousands of its employees and sticking them with IBM's open source Lotus Symphony. It's perfectly reasonable, of course, for IBM to want its employees to use its own products (or, at least, not to use competitive products), but we hope for IBM's sake that these folks don't have problems communicating with the rest of the world, which uses Office. (The Open Document Format should solve any of those problems, though...right?)
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 16, 20090 comments
Microsoft Office poobah Stephen Elop sat down recently for a video interview with Redm...actually, with The Wall Street Journal -- but we'll get Elop again one of these days. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, the WSJ video is here.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 16, 20090 comments
Momentum is one of those intangibles that can end up being massively important. In business, in sports, in daily life in general, people who can create or capitalize on momentum can accomplish a lot. It's hard to say -- in a non-scientific way, since we do know that there are actual scientific formulas for momentum -- what the feeling of momentum really is or how it develops and flows, but we know it's there.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 15, 20095 comments
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are (or, we suppose, "is") back, and both personalities apparently work on open source messaging at Microsoft.
First, Microsoft slams Linux for breaking patents and shakes down Novell and lots of other Linux vendors for protection money; then, Microsoft gets all fuzzy with open source, issuing a sappy white paper about open source software (OSS) and now sponsoring a whole open source foundation aimed at bringing OSS folks and proprietary vendors together. (By the way, if you don't click on any other link in this edition of the newsletter, click on that last one. It's a fantastic story about the whole foundation thing.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 15, 20091 comments
Finally, jurisprudence swings Microsoft's way, mostly. A court said last week that $358 million was just way too much money for Alcatel-Lucent to win in a patent-infringement case against Microsoft...and struck down the penalty. The case isn't over, though, as there will be a new trial now to determine just how much Microsoft should pay for having broken Alcatel-Lucent patents, something everybody outside of Redmond seems to agree that Microsoft did.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 15, 20090 comments
Scandal! Microsoft is sending out marketing materials to retailers that -- gasp! -- make Windows look better than its competitors. Will this bully's reign of terror ever end?
Seriously, this week, the trade press and the conblogeration (it's sort of a combination of conglomeration and blog -- we like it better than blogosphere) went nuts over materials Microsoft sent to Best Buy employees. These propaganda pieces touted Windows 7's advantages over Linux and the Mac.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 10, 20095 comments
It's rare -- very rare -- that we do this sort of thing, but we're going to run a couple of atypical e-mails this week. First of all, there's one from David (more on him in a minute), whose thoughts we ran in a post about browsers not long ago. We had to cut David's post for length (no, we don't have completely unlimited space), and David took the time to complete his thoughts on the blog post itself. Thank you for that, David.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 10, 20090 comments
OK, so it's much more likely that the economy is to blame than VMware is, but server revenues were down pretty sharply year-over-year in the second quarter of 2009.
While most of the 30 percent overall drop in revenues is likely down to companies having smaller IT budgets or putting off spending, some of it -- according to an analyst at IDC, the firm that prepared the revenue report -- is the result of server and software virtualization.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 09, 20092 comments
We're talking the feds here, who will be hiring a quarter-million people over the next three years, including more than 10,000 IT pros. Partners, beware: The gummint isn't just going after unemployed folks; it's also (allegedly) poaching from contractors.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 09, 20090 comments
In one of the more hilarious cases of government intervention in the software market, Russia has dropped an antitrust probe that was looking into Microsoft XP.
Really now, Russia. Is this the biggest problem you have on your plate? Is it even a problem compared to everything else going on there? And how can a government that is, shall we say, not the least corrupt in the world seriously carry out this type of "investigation"?
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 09, 20091 comments
Don't mess with Redmond, Texas. (OK, it was a federal court, but we couldn't help but play on the old slogan.) Microsoft managed to get a stay of execution for Word sales to, we believe, no one's surprise.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 08, 20090 comments