It'll be a short-ish RCPU today, but we'd like to lead off with a topic we'll
come back to later in the week: Microsoft's marketing efforts. By now, you all
know about Redmond's ad campaign shifting from Bill and Jerry to the very PC
Guy Apple parodies so skillfully in its ads. More on that in future editions.
For today, though, we were shocked to see that a branding survey this week
placed Microsoft as the No.
3 brand worldwide, behind only Coca-Cola and rival IBM. Now, there are a
lot of branding surveys out there -- really, a whole lot -- and we understand
that they take a lot more into account than just how clever a particular ad
campaign is or how much a company gets hammered in the blogosphere.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20080 comments
Catch a wave, and you're sitting on top of the world. OK, maybe not, but
this
is still pretty interesting.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 18, 20080 comments
Very often, we use the royal "we" here at RCPU even though the same
person writes the newsletter 90 percent of the time because "we" just
sounds a little more elegant and perhaps less arrogant than "I." (Besides,
we do have an editing and production team -- all your editor does is type.)
But today, when we use the word "we" to describe folks waiting on
Windows 7, we're not just talking one person or even a few people. We're talking
about the masses of people who have rejected Vista (in which RCPU is, to be
fair, presently included) and are more than a little curious to see what its
successor will look like.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 18, 20086 comments
Apparently, Paul Maritz's keynote
did
little
to answer the big questions surrounding VMware. Really, Maritz giving
a keynote and not mentioning Microsoft, executive departures or the company's
over-a-cliff stock price is a little like ESPN doing a review of the year 2008
in sports and not mentioning the Olympics.
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20080 comments
With the DATAllegro acquisition closed, Microsoft is
making
some noise
about SQL Server and data warehousing.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20080 comments
"You wouldn't know a diamond if you held it in your hand."
-- Steely Dan, "Reelin' In the Years"
Have you ever really gotten into a TV show, or maybe even a movie, and just
had a terrible sense of foreshadowing that the whole plot was about to go down
in flames like the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday Night Football? (Sorry, we
really tried to avoid the sports reference there, but your editor really enjoyed
watching his Dallas Cowboys win that game. Look at it this way -- we've officially
jinxed the Cowboys for the rest of the season. You're welcome.)
More
Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20080 comments
Your editor woke up to approximately 346 e-mails about VMware, virtualization
and VMworld this morning. While we understand and appreciate the importance
of virtualization here at RCPU, we're still not experts in the technology. Luckily,
though, RCPmag.com employs some folks who are, and one of them wrote up a pretty
darn good VMworld piece
here
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Posted by Lee Pender on September 16, 20080 comments
Here at RCPU, we realize that most of our readers probably don't share your
editor's passion for European "football," but trust us, this could
end up being a huge amount of fun. Apparently, Bill Gates -- whose net worth
seems to be dramatically underestimated in the linked article (surely we're
talking billions and not millions) -- is
thinking
about buying
More
Posted by Lee Pender on September 16, 20081 comments
One of the Directions on Microsoft guys
thinks
it's possible
, and they're not often wrong about the goings on in Redmond.
So, Vista inches ever closer to the scrap heap of history...with poor (OK, not
that poor, given his contract) Jerry Seinfeld in tow.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 16, 20080 comments