Select Plus Licensing Begins this Week

Posted by Lee Pender on October 01, 20080 comments

It's the End of the World as We Know It...Maybe

Before we even get into this (again), here's our obligatory caveat: By the time you read this, the Dow Jones Industrial Average might be back up 500 points, or 700, or 1500, or whatever, and Congress might have passed a package that will save our very mortal souls -- or at least drag the country out of a mess the likes of which we haven't seen in decades. So there you go.

Still, we're writing this about an hour and a half after the Dow lost 777 points in another day that had people freaking out all over the globe. Closer to home for partners and Microsoft, the NASDAQ chopped off almost 200 points, or almost 10 percent of its overall value. Wow, that sounds bad.

And, of course, it is. And the worst part is that nobody seems to know what to do about it. It's way beyond our purpose here to get into why we're in the mess we're in, and there's plenty of blame to go around. We blame the Cowboys' secondary...wait, that's something else altogether. No, really, there's plenty of blame for this financial mess but not much consensus on a solution, which pretty much sums up everything that's happened in Washington for as long as we'd care to remember.

We thought -- and, apparently, investors thought -- that Congress would have passed a bailout plan by now (see caveat -- there's a time lag here) that would have, if nothing else, stabilized the financial markets at least for a little while. Microsoft, which is trying to patch the leaks in its financial battleship, was on board with it. And so were a lot of people who are now worried about the end of the world as we know it -- more specifically, the end of credit, the end of any semblance of a housing market, the end of a pretty long era of relative prosperity and the beginning of another Great Depression. The end of the investment bank is already upon us -- in fact, it's old news.

Many have the times been that we've advocated the free market here at RCPU. We've used -- in our own limited way, as nobody here claims to be an economist (although your editor does read The Economist) -- the free-market argument to defend Microsoft in European antitrust matters and to rail against some of the more Communist elements in the open source movement.

But, in our defense, we said all that stuff in the specific context of Microsoft and the technology industry -- and we stand by it. The crisis we're facing now is bigger than that, brought on by years of bad decisions and, well, unchecked greed from pretty much all corners. It's bigger than all of us -- although it's going to affect all of us in a serious way if it hasn't already. So, we're not here to preach free-market economics and oppose a bailout plan, nor are we here to support a bailout plan -- because, frankly, we don't fully understand what's going on here, and we have no idea what to do.

Unfortunately, that seems to put us in a category with pretty much everybody else in the country, including lawmakers and quite possibly the Treasury secretary and Fed chairman. And that's the scary part. Normally in times like these we turn to people smarter and more experienced than we are, but those folks mostly seem to be either throwing Hail Mary passes or staring at their hands about right now.

It's kind of like going to the emergency room in extreme pain and having a doctor say, "Well, we can't figure out what's wrong with him, so let's just give him some aspirin and hope he gets better," right as another physician darts in to say that there's nothing wrong with the patient that won't heal over time. Meanwhile, we're hurting over here.

We'll grant that most of the colossal freak-outs -- the dire predictions of a depression and the prophecies that nobody will ever be able to buy a house again if somebody doesn't do something -- have mostly taken place in the freak-out-fertile fields of Internet message boards and blog commentaries. But, then again, even supposedly level-headed experts don't seem to have any idea of what's going to happen from here.

We don't like that type of insecurity -- and markets hate it (again, see caveat). We're all subject to the market's moves now, to the state of credit, to the action or inaction of Congress. And the road ahead is foggy at best. It turns out that Michael Stipe might not have written such a prophetic chorus after all. If this is the end of the world as we know it, we certainly do not feel fine.

How would you fix the current economic crisis? All ideas, from the ridiculous to the chin-scratchingly interesting, will be considered. Send them to [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on September 30, 20082 comments

Microsoft Adds jQuery to Visual Studio

Posted by Lee Pender on September 30, 20081 comments

More Details on VS 2010 and .NET 4.0

Posted by Lee Pender on September 30, 20080 comments

Communication Breakdown: Cisco Storms Into UC, Sort Of

Or, at least, we think it is. After all, messaging, calendaring (we still love the fact that "calendar" is a verb now) and "collaboration" all seem pretty UC-ish to us, even if Oracle's new suite doesn't currently appear to delve quite as much into voice, Web conferencing and other nifty Web-whatever-point-oh functions as offerings from Microsoft and Cisco do.

It's all about people getting in touch with each other, right? And different ways of doing that, all rolled into one easy-to-manage bundle that's more or less supposed to tell us how to get a hold of any person at any time? The difference between simple collaboration software and swanky "unified communications" seems to be the size of and number of options available in the bundle -- or maybe it's all just marketing speak. And to think that we all once survived with just e-mail, cell phones and instant messaging (actually, most of us still do).

But if Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Oracle (sort of -- it's harder to tell with Oracle) and others have their way, we'll all be tethered to the almighty system all the time, reachable in any location, situation or state of being and ready to share documents or hop on a Web conference at the drop of a hat. And you thought the cell phone was an intrusive concept.

Anyway, this week's UC news -- and we're pretty sure that this is UC, not just collaboration, news -- is that Cisco is all jacked up about its UC suite, which is coming together nicely after a series of acquisitions. We note, though, that at least a few of the press outlets covering this story have tended to refer to Cisco's suite as collaboration software, which we thought was the simpler, Notes-Exchange type stuff, not the more heady UC.

See, this is why this stuff is so confusing. One day, we read that Oracle is set to take on IBM and Microsoft in the Notes-Exchange battle, which seems pretty old-school and established. The next day (literally), Cisco is going after Microsoft in UC -- or maybe collaboration software, which in any case, sounds more whiz-bang and sophisticated than just Notes and Exchange. Oh, and the analysts don't seem to be talking about Oracle or IBM in the same breath as Cisco at all. Although they are talking about Google, without even mentioning what Google really offers or how much market penetration (in any of these markets) it has. Everybody talks about Google. Very few people seem to understand it.

Surely if we're this confused as to what all this stuff is and what category it's supposed to fall into, at least a few partners must be, too. And customers -- for heaven's sake, what are they buying? An e-mail server or an integrated unified communications platform? Or both, or one thing that's part of another? And what does it all do? And how much will it cost? And they need it...why, exactly, if everything's pretty much working OK as-is? And if they buy one thing from IBM, will the other thing from Cisco work with it? And what is Google doing here again?

It's up to partners to answer those questions...if they can. We're pretty sure that we can't right now, but we're just hacks. We do find it funny, though -- ironic, maybe -- that markets with names like "collaboration" and "unified communications" are the most muddled in terms of who's offering what and which product or service or platform performs which absolutely necessary, can't-live-without-it function. Crank up Led Zeppelin's early stuff and call it a communication breakdown. At least Zep will drown out the noise coming from these vendors.

Have you got UC figured out? If so, enlighten us at [email protected]. Oh, and we'll get back to running your e-mails next week. We promise.

Posted by Lee Pender on September 25, 20080 comments

I'm Not a PC, But the Ads Aren't Bad

It's with that sense of amusement that we watch Microsoft's "I'm a PC" ads, which strike back at Apple's brilliant and exhaustively documented Mac Guy-PC Guy campaign. The ads are pretty good, really, even if we don't recognize most (any?) of the celebrities in them. In fact, although this isn't saying much, these might be the best Microsoft ads ever.

Really! They're not wincingly un-cool or painfully nerdy (and we don't mean "cool nerdy," either -- just nerdy). They're pretty clever, well-paced and mildly intriguing -- we wanted to know who would step up and be a PC next -- and they almost manage to pass Microsoft off as a populist and grass-roots organization and not the massive corpomonster that it really is. (To be fair, Apple's a corpomonster, too -- just one with smaller market share in the operating system business.) They're not cool, but they don't need to be -- because Microsoft isn't cool and never has been. Finally somebody got that and went in another direction, successfully.

Of course, the ads don't make us want to buy Vista, which, we thought, was the point of the campaign. (Or maybe even Redmond has given up the Vista ghost and is priming us for Windows 7.) But if Microsoft just wanted to improve its image and get out from Apple's pop-culture thumb, this new campaign does the trick.

Of course, we at RCPU are among the only people on the world who are on the fence in the PC-Mac debate (and, yes, your editor is speaking for himself here). We've had both, and both have their drawbacks and advantages. So, you won't be hearing us declare that we're a Mac or a PC any time soon -- which we wouldn't do, anyway, given that we're supposed to be impartial and all that. (We are West Ham, though.)

One more thought about Microsoft's ad strategy: We're not buying the line that the company scrapped the Bill Gates-Jerry Seinfeld spots as a snap decision. We're pretty sure that those ads weren't supposed to run for long and that there weren't supposed to be many of them. In fact, we think that Bill and Jerry's obtuse efforts were just meant to get people talking -- which they did -- and maybe even to provide a lame, confusing setup to the much better "I'm a PC" campaign. After all, the lousy band is always the opening act, right? We're on to you, Redmond. But we're still not a PC.

Posted by Lee Pender on September 25, 20080 comments

Oracle Stirs Hornet's Nest with Beehive

Or, at least, it could be significant. The database titan has just stormed into the Notes-Exchange war with what seems at first glance (although we haven't actually seen it) like a nifty new suite of collaboration software.

That's right -- it's not all about Microsoft and IBM slugging it out for IT departments' e-mail and calendaring applications anymore, with Google offering its Web-based stuff just on the edge of the battle and Cisco making noise about unified communications. Oracle has arrived, seriously this time, with its own collaboration suite aimed at -- but ready to work with -- Outlook and Exchange, as well as Notes.

As the Ovum commentary linked above indicates, there's something of a move toward heterogeneity taking place in IT departments' collaboration strategies -- or, at least, there might be soon. We know that many Microsoft partners have been slugging it out with IBM to try -- successfully, in many cases -- to knock Lotus Notes out of customers' environments. Well, Oracle would love to knock out both Notes and Exchange/Outlook...but it also claims to collaborate with Microsoft's wares as well as those of IBM.

And that's a big deal. After all, the biggest challenge any enterprise deployment faces is user acceptance, and as anybody who has gone through the Notes-Outlook transition in either direction can attest, it's not easy getting used to a whole new interface for the most important business application we have today -- e-mail. Never mind all the apps built on top of the collaboration platform and all the back-end mess of keeping the thing running. We don't know exactly how Beehive will work with its rivals' wares, but there's talk of back- and front-end integration, and IT managers and users alike would welcome both.

Of course, the real question is whether -- and, by extension, why -- customers would look at Beehive in the first place. Notes and Exchange/Outlook are very mature products with huge market penetration. They've been hammering each other for years, so Oracle had better step in with something pretty darn appealing (easier to use, to administrate, to manage?) with Beehive.

Will it produce the sticky honey that keeps collaboration systems together and makes users' and IT managers' live sweeter? Or will it simply be a bit player in the ongoing IBM-Microsoft drama? We don't know, but we'll say this -- Larry Ellison rarely does anything halfway, so we have a feeling Beehive will buzz its way into at least a few IT shops. Microsoft partners, take note: You're fighting on (at least) two fronts now.

What's your take on Oracle getting serious about collaboration applications? Will Oracle stake a claim in the IBM-Microsoft war? Tell us at [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on September 24, 20081 comments

Microsoft Buys Itself, Sort Of

Posted by Lee Pender on September 24, 20081 comments

ByteShield Launches Anti-Piracy App for .NET

Posted by Lee Pender on September 24, 20080 comments

MessageGate Rolls Out Risk-Management Apps

Posted by Lee Pender on September 24, 20080 comments

Demand for IT Workers To Grow

Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20080 comments

HPC Server Live

Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20080 comments