When Microsoft released Vista a few years ago, we trumpeted the launch event with a post in RCPU simply titled, "Vista!" It was, we suppose, meant to convey some sense of excitement about the arrival of the long-awaited operating system that would gracefully lift the desktop crown from the head of XP and reign over us with benevolence and majesty.
But instead of reigning over us, Vista rained on us. It poured application incompatibilities, outrageous hardware requirements, draconian user access control and all sorts of other big, wet drops of nastiness on our heads. Well, about three years and many, many jokes at Vista's expense later, we find ourselves writing an edition of RCPU for the coronation of Windows 7, which will try to wrest the OS crown from the arthritic but mighty hands of Good King XP.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 22, 200918 comments
Profit and sales declines will likely be the order of the day again when Microsoft announces earnings later this week. As always, RCPU will be back next week with an analysis of how Microsoft did and probably a wistful goodbye to jokes about Vista.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 22, 20090 comments
The good news is that things should pick up in 2010, but here's the bad news (if you're ready for it) from the Wall Street Journal article linked above:
"While spending growth is expected next year, spending won't return to 2008 levels until 2012."
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 22, 20090 comments
If you're a partner who stands in any way to profit from companies moving to Windows 7, you have to love hearing stuff like this. The analyst honchos at Forrester are telling IT departments that the time to move to Windows 7 is now.
Well, more specifically, the Forrester folks are saying that IT organizations should start planning their migrations now. They give a few not illogical reasons for their recommended urgency, which are, in a nutshell, these:
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20090 comments
To its credit, Microsoft is actually doing a pretty good job of putting an end to its Sidekick data-loss nightmare. If data recovery continues at this pace -- there's now a tool online that T-Mobile users can use to recover much of their data -- Sidekickgate could (and probably should) end up being mostly a non-story.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20090 comments
Google's campaign to dethrone Microsoft Office on the desktop, which began with a few billboards in tech-heavy U.S. cities, is going global. Does this mean war? Oh, the war's been going on for a while -- but Microsoft still has control of most of the map.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20090 comments
Free-software radical Richard Stallman and a group formed by Ralph Nader want the EU to quash the proposed Oracle-Sun merger. Big surprise, right? Well, their beef is with what Oracle would do with MySQL, which is a legitimate concern, and it might make sense all around for Oracle to sell MySQL and get the deal through (unless the whole thing was only about MySQL to begin with, which we don't think it was).
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20094 comments
It's Windows 7 week! On Thursday, Microsoft will roll out its latest operating system at an event in New York. Did you see this? Have you heard about this? Well, be informed -- it's happening!
But if you just can't wait a couple more days to get your hands on the Vista Slayer, there is a place where you can (sort of) get Windows 7 for about $3. As you might have guessed, that place is China, were software pirates have not only beaten Microsoft to the Windows 7 launch, they've also begun offering the new OS at a very competitive price.
Of course, it's not really Windows 7, but for $3, the fake version will likely sell pretty well in China. It might even get a few takers here in the U.S. And that costs Microsoft, partners and customers money. Even if your business doesn't reach Shanghai directly, the piracy taking place there is still lifting money out of your wallet -- and pretty directly, in some cases. (Remember, for one thing, that a lot of pirated Chinese software ends up in North America and Europe.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 20, 20092 comments
It's the 2010 version of each product we're talking about here. For a closer look at what's going to be in both (particularly in SharePoint), take a look at Redmond magazine columnist and friend of RCPU Mary Jo Foley's take on the products.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 20, 20090 comments
Redmond's embarrassing Sidekick data-loss fiasco might still have a non-tragic ending, but the company's ongoing effort to salvage Sidekick users' lost data isn't as easy as Microsoft might have made it seem -- or perhaps even thought it would be.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 20, 20091 comments