With the aftermath of the U.S. election in full bloom (by the time you read
this), NFL playoff races heating up and much of the country basking in unusually
warm fall weather, we're going to head back a few months and make...an Olympics
reference! Or, at least, a track and field reference, which might as well be
an Olympic reference. (Seriously, though, doesn't it seem as though the 2008
Olympics happened about 17 years ago? The shelf life for an event is short in
our YouTube culture.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 05, 20080 comments
Andrew McLennan finally got tired of being ripped off, so he started a security
company.
Well, it didn't happen exactly like that, but McLennan's experience as a video
game developer did eventually lead to his founding of Metaforic,
a maker of anti-tamper software. During his time at Steel Monkeys, a Belarus-based
game developer, McLennan saw the company's products hacked, cracked and available
for illicit sale literally before Steel Monkeys had released them in some markets.
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 04, 20080 comments
Identity and security might sound like topics to discuss with a therapist,
but at Microsoft they're key components in a burgeoning product line. Redmond
this week announced that it's adding some capabilities to a couple of identity
and security applications.
First off, there's Identity Lifecycle Manager, which combines identification
management and certificate management -- sort of the chocolate and peanut butter
of security, as we once
called them, much to the amusement, apparently, of some folks in Redmond.
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 04, 20080 comments
Partners, take note: As if you didn't know this already, a new CDW survey has
found that confidence in IT spending is
on
the decline
. It looks as though that nasty old economic downturn is hitting
IT...but the numbers really aren't that bad. Look at it this way: You could
be an investment banker.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 30, 20080 comments
There sure have been a lot of announcements at Microsoft's Professional Developers
Conference this week. We say that with a touch of incredulity because the PDC
always struck us as being a tad esoteric and not having the broad-based appeal
of, say, Tech-Ed.
OK, granted, Azure
is more of a development platform than anything else, so it makes sense to announce
it to developers. But it's also a critical part of an overall SaaS -- sorry,
S+S -- strategy, so we might have expected an unveiling at a different, somewhat
more inclusive conference. (And that goes double for Windows
7, even though developers will take some interest in it, as well.) Oh, well...it
all ends up on the Internet, anyway, right?
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 30, 20080 comments
It's getting serious now, this cloud computing stuff. It's not just the up-and-coming
vendors or the Web-era giants (think Google and Amazon) that are offering some
sort of Software-as-a-Service model. Oh, no.
As
of this week
, there's an old-school player in this game in a serious way:
Microsoft.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20081 comments
Microsoft seems ready to stop pretending that Vista will ever gain wide acceptance.
Just take a gander at
this
story's headline
: "Microsoft vows Windows 7 will fix Vista mistakes."
Mistakes? Vista? Anyway, Microsoft did demo
Windows 7 at PDC this week, and it does seem kind of cool.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20081 comments
Finally! Microsoft Office is going Live...for real this time. Microsoft announced
this week at the PDC in L.A. that there will be
browser-based
versions
of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, with a beta probably available sometime
in 2009.
But let's read the fine print from the CNET article linked above:
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20081 comments
Well, they're
sort
of talking about it
...mostly in press releases and earnings conference calls.
Still interesting, though.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 28, 20080 comments
So that's what Ray Ozzie was working on all this time. At its Professional
Developer Conference in L.A. this week, Ozzie and Microsoft took the wraps off
of Azure, which Redmond calls an
operating
system for the cloud
.
A what? Yeah, we weren't too sure what that meant, either...and we
weren't alone. But the basic idea is that this cloud OS -- of which Steve
Ballmer has spoken a few times recently -- will provide a platform for developers
who want to create hosted applications. (Really, it seems more like a development
platform than an OS...but we digress.) Microsoft will then conveniently host
for customers those very applications in its datacenters.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 28, 20080 comments