There'll be more features and a couple of new high-end versions of the database, but prices are going up. Redmond magazine columnist Mary Jo Foley has details.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 04, 20090 comments
OK, so EMC and VMware are mostly the same entity, but now Cisco is on board, not as an acquirer but as a partner. The two-and-a-half companies have come together to combat the IBM-HP datacenter powerhouse. The new alliance will focus on virtualization and storage technology as well as networking for datacenters, which seems entirely reasonable given what each company does. The first product is already here: Vblock, a private-cloud offering.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 04, 20090 comments
In 1995, when Major League Baseball returned from a labor dispute that killed the end of the 1994 season, baseball players were suddenly everybody's best friend. Ballplayers signed autographs, posed for pictures and high-fived kids as they never had before. They had a reputation to restore. And eventually, they did restore it...before the steroid scandal hit, of course.
But forget about the steroids for now. Microsoft is emerging from a bit of a "baseball strike" of its own with Windows 7 replacing Vista. One of Vista's big problems was that not many applications worked with it; another was that migration to it, especially from machines that lacked the requisite memory, was difficult. Those and other factors frustrated users (to say the least), so not many people migrated to Vista. That was especially true in the enterprise.
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 03, 20092 comments
We're not sure what noted irony expert Alanis Morissette would say about this, but it turns out that Microsoft is kind of, sort of paying for part of the city of Los Angeles' switch to Google's e-mail platform. Apparently, Microsoft paid the state of California $70 million back in 2006 after the state alleged that Redmond -- get this -- overcharged for its software. L.A., evidently, has $1.5 million of that money left over and will give it to Google for the city's Google Apps deployment.
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Posted by Lee Pender on November 03, 20090 comments
When we read the news that Tony Scott would be entering the CIO Hall of Fame, we immediately thought, "Wait, there's a CIO Hall of Fame?" Well, there isn't, really. Iit's just an honor bestowed on certain technology executives by one of your editor's former employers, CIO magazine.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 03, 20090 comments
Economic recovery? Not in Walldorf, Germany, mein freund, where SAP reported disappointing third-quarter earnings and saw its stock price tumble this week.
We hate to always be nattering nabobs of negativity, but we here at RCPU feel as though SAP's earnings will be the rule and not the exception for a while to come. This "recovery," if it's even happening, isn't going to be a quick one. So, get used to this kind of stuff.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20090 comments
Come on back, Randy Newman. Google is singing your tune this week. There's little doubt that the nerds from Northern California love the city to the south of them now that they've won a big contract to provide e-mail for the city of Los Angeles.
That's right. Sgt. Joe Friday will soon be filing his police reports via the cloud -- if, in fact, Google's cloud stuff actually works -- instead of using Outlook and Exchange.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20095 comments
They're PCs that don't have the normal boatload of trial software and other stuff loaded on them. You can get them at a physical Microsoft store or at the company's online shop. But, as far as we can tell, you won't find them anywhere else, at least for now.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20090 comments
Well, he sort of approves. Mark Shuttleworth thinks that Windows 7 is a "credible release." We can hear folks in Redmond now: "Well, thank you very much, Mr. Single-Digit Market Share. We'll just get back to developing our utterly dominant operating system, if it's OK with you."
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20090 comments
Everybody wants to douse the Windows 7 fire with cold water. Last week, it was a couple of Gartner know-it-alls, who grilled Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division, on whether Microsoft's products still had any value and whether the company was in for a bleak future.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 28, 20093 comments
One of our least-favorite leftover phrases from the go-go '90s is "open the kimono," which marketing types used to use when talking about a proprietary vendor revealing the inner workings of its software. It just seemed...well, a little disturbing. So, we're not going to use it here when talking about Microsoft opening the .PST data format it uses in Outlook. If we have to use a hackneyed '90s expression (and, let's face it, we do), we're going to go with Microsoft "peeling the onion." So, there you go, developers and third-party vendors. Microsoft's Outlook onion is -- or soon will be -- open for your dining pleasure.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 28, 20090 comments
So, had Microsoft's advertising executives just never seen an episode of "Family Guy," or what? We were shocked by the news that Microsoft had bought a whole episode of "Family Guy" -- and that the show's producers had sold it. This week, though, we were relieved to learn that Microsoft has backed off the whole "Family Guy" idea given that some of the show's jokes are, uh, a tad unconventional.
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Posted by Lee Pender on October 28, 20092 comments