RCPU's thoughts and prayers are with the Microsoft co-founder and Pacific Northwest sports investor, who got some bad news this week. We've had enough of bad news and don't want to hear any more for a while after this, thank you.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 18, 20090 comments
Already? It's been not quite a month since Microsoft finally let Windows 7 into the wild, and wouldn't you know that hunters are already taking shots at it.
Or, at least, they can see the targets on its back. This week, Microsoft offered advice on how to deal with a zero-day vulnerability that appears to be the new operating system's first post-release flaw.
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 18, 20092 comments
Remember the old Prudential Insurance ads that encouraged customers to "get a piece of the rock"? (Yes, we just spent about 20 minutes watching old '70s commercials. It's all in a day's work.) Well, the cloud is the new rock, and everybody wants a piece of it.
No stranger to the cloud, IBM enhanced its hosted offerings this week with the introduction of Smart Analytics Cloud, a business intelligence-heavy play that features technology acquired by Big Blue from former BI vendor Cognos.
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 16, 20090 comments
Microsoft has paid a fair amount of lip service over the years to opening up to open source, while at the same time making patent threats and generally mixing its messages. Well, evidently, Microsoft is more interested in open source than anybody at the company realized.
Apparently, a Windows 7 download utility contains code protected by the open source General Public License version 2, meaning Microsoft can modify the code -- which Redmond says came from a third-party -- but then has to release the modified code to the open source community. Amazingly, that's what Microsoft plans to do.
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 16, 20090 comments
After the Sidekick fiasco, beleaguered T-Mobile had to deal with another pack of angry users this week, although it does seem to have resolved a service outage that affected about 5 percent of its customers.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 05, 20092 comments
In case you missed the earnings announcement late last week, Ingram Micro reported -- like just about everybody else -- quarterly revenue and profit shortfalls, but the big distributor managed to beat Wall Street expectations. So we'll take that as mostly good news.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 05, 20090 comments
OK, so the news here is that Microsoft has decided to make its discount on the Business Productivity Online Suite, or BPOS (catchy), permanent. Henceforth, the price of BPOS will be $10 per user per month rather than $15 per user per month.
Hey, if it works, it works, although partners might not be thrilled by this cloud pricing strategy if it ultimately causes their referral fees to shrink. The main point here, though, is that the timing of the permanent price cut is likely not incidental.
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 04, 20092 comments
Now, here's a Microsoft cloud play that could produce some thunder. Microsoft is offering Dynamics CRM Online, its hosted customer relationship management suite, free for seven months to customers of Oracle's and Salesforce.com's competing products.
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 04, 20090 comments