Microsoft: Building a Brand Without Really Trying

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.

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Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20080 comments


McAfee Snaps Up Secure Computing

It's a $465 million deal.

Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20080 comments


Windows Live Wave 3 Beta Starts

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


Not a September To Remember for Ingram

Channel titan Ingram Micro is caught up in the economic slowdown with everybody else, apparently, and lowered its third-quarter earnings outlook this week.

Incidentally, we're still looking for comments on how you're handling More

Posted by Lee Pender on September 18, 20081 comments


VMware CTO Looks Ahead

Stephen Herrod apparently filled in some of the blanks that CEO Paul Maritz left open earlier this week.

Posted by Lee Pender on September 18, 20080 comments


We Just Can't Wait for Windows 7

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


VMware CEO Mumbles, Citrix Shouts

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. More

Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20080 comments


Redmond Dives Deeper into Data Warehousing

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


Microsoft Finally Thinks Small(er) with Dynamics

"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.)

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Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20080 comments


VMworld Starts Spinning

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 More

Posted by Lee Pender on September 16, 20080 comments


Gates To Buy Soccer Club?

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


The Global Economic Freak-Out and You

We're trying to stay calm here -- really, we are. We understand that this isn't 1929 or even 1987 -- and maybe not even 2001, for that matter -- and that the bright people who run our economy have the tools and the know-how to deal with what's happening.

We know that the economy is cyclical, that all sort of factors can affect it and that things have been much worse in the past. We're aware that 6 percent unemployment would have only been considered possible on Fantasy Island back in 1981 when jobless rates were closer to (or in) double digits. We get it.

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Posted by Lee Pender on September 16, 20080 comments