Microsoft made a major foray into the home entertainment market Sunday with
the announcement of the general availability of Windows Home Server. Partners
swarmed around the announcement with a series of related products or complete
systems -- some available immediately, others coming over the next year.
One of the fastest on the draw is Hewlett-Packard. The HP MediaSmart Server,
based on Windows Home Server, was available immediately for pre-order from Amazon.com,
BestBuy.com, Buy.com, CircuitCity.com and CompUSA.com. HP's offering also set
a benchmark on pricing -- about $600 for a 500GB server and about $750 for a
1TB server.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on November 06, 20070 comments
Dell Inc. announced its intention on Monday to buy EqualLogic Inc. for $1.4
billion in cash. EqualLogic, which makes virtualization-optimized iSCSI storage
area network solutions, will be Dell's sixth acquisition in two years. Like
several of those acquisitions (Silverback Technologies and ASAP Software), this
deal has channel ramifications.
According to a Dell statement, "Dell plans to grow EqualLogic's successful
channel-partner programs with current and future EqualLogic-branded products,
and also plans to incorporate EqualLogic technology into future generations
of its Dell PowerVault storage line available through the channel and direct
from Dell."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on November 06, 20071 comments
Visual Studio 2008 will be ready for release this month, according to S. "Soma"
Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division.
That means the much-anticipated "Orcas" set of developer tools at
least will be on track for Microsoft's big day, Feb. 27, when Microsoft plans
to launch Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. It remains
to be seen if the new versions of Windows Server and SQL Server will be ready
for launch at that time.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on November 06, 20070 comments
It's been a while, but Microsoft has
signed
another deal
with a Linux development/distribution company, promising not
to sue its users for any alleged patent infringement. This time it's Turbolinux,
a maker of Linux desktop and server products that sells most of its wares to
Japan and China.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 23, 20070 comments
OK, here's an important new technology concept to think about. Microsoft Distinguished
Engineer Eric Traut gave a presentation last week at the University of Illinois
where he said Microsoft is working on "MinWin," a much tighter kernel
to provide the foundation for all future Windows OS releases, client and server.
It's currently 25MB and Traut wants to make it smaller. I'm not going to get
my hopes up, especially after all the cool technology plans Microsoft had for
Windows Longhorn/Vista that were eventually dropped or delayed. But this does
sound promising.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 23, 20070 comments
The long international nightmare appears to be over. The European Commission
and Microsoft settled their antitrust case in a phone call on Monday morning.
The agreement came after a round of dinner diplomacy between Microsoft CEO Steve
Ballmer and European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes in the first week
of October, followed up by daily phone calls to hammer out the details.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 23, 20070 comments
Dell, which built its once-dominant PC position on a direct-to-consumer model,
took another step toward the retail channel
with
an agreement with Staples
.
Starting Nov. 11, Dell will sell desktops, notebooks, monitors and printers
at 1,400 Staples locations and through the Staples Web site. The deal was announced
on Monday. It follows a similar arrangement with Wal-Mart to sell PCs in 3,000
stores. Worldwide, Dell says its products will be in more than 10,000 stores.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 23, 20070 comments
You think you've seen good growth, or had your share of growth-related employment
headaches? Well, Microsoft had a stunning example of partner growth to tell
in a press release distributed on Thursday. It described the company's new report,
estimating the
worldwide
economic impact of Microsoft
.
The partner-growth bombshell from the release was this:
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 18, 20070 comments
Eric Ligman, Microsoft's U.S. senior manager of Small Business Community Engagement,
has been busy over on his small business community blog in the last week. For
one thing, there's a new Windows Small Business Server Test Drive feature designed
to help partners show Small Business Server to prospects through a Web-based
tool. There's a similar customer-facing tool on the SBS 2003 R2 product site,
but it doesn't have as many bells and whistles as the version for partners to
show their customers. Find out more
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 18, 20070 comments
Trust a crime writer to get business right. While at a used bookstore on vacation
this summer, I picked up a 1977 novel by Elmore Leonard called
The Hunted
.
In it, Leonard's got one of the pithiest descriptions of how to succeed in business
that I've ever come across.
"In the business world, you don't prepare yourself for a certain job and
that's it, like a bookkeeper, a tax accountant. You hire those people,"
one character, a successful businessman, explains to a marine, who is about
to retire from the service and is looking for direction. "What you do,
you keep your eyes open, you use a little imagination seeing how you can fit
into a situation or how you can bend the situation around so it fits you."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 18, 20070 comments
Microsoft released a huge study on Thursday filled with facts and figures about
how much its software contributes to worldwide GDP, employment and tax revenues.
With the study stored on Microsoft's Web page in a subdirectory titled "Corporate
Citizenship," the primary audience for this document is obviously governments.
It's something Microsoft can point to when lobbying for less protectionist trade
policies and better IP protection.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 18, 20071 comments
Earlier this week, I wrote about how Ingram Micro was
going
"all Facebook"
with a set of social networking sites where solution
providers could connect with each other to partner on business opportunities
or on mergers and acquisitions.
Well, that's the opportunity for partners to do some online networking with
each other. Now Microsoft is moving to make social networking itself a business
opportunity for its partners.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 18, 20070 comments