It's a CRM and unified communications -- whatever that is -- combo with an eye on the cloud. If you want to read more about it, you'll just have to click here for Stephen Swoyer's excellent story on RCPmag.com. (Yes, we're trying to drive traffic to the Web site. It's part of why we're here. And while you're on RCPmag.com, have a look around. Stay for a while.)
Posted by Lee Pender on October 08, 20090 comments
So, social networking is critical for business, huh? Well, it might be, but it isn't likely to be so important during work hours with more than half of companies in a recent survey saying that they block social networking sites in the office.
And good for them, we say. Not because of productivity and all that but because just about anything that hastens the demise of the completely ridiculous notion that is Twitter is something we like. By the way, we'd like to remind you that you can follow RCPU on Twitter at http://twitter.com/leepender. Just probably not from work. And hopefully not for long.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 08, 20091 comments
If anything Microsoft does deserves the description "underwhelming," it has to be Windows Mobile. Lagging in market share, innovation and general relevance behind several other competitors (not just the iPhone), Windows Mobile is the ne'er-do-well relative of the Windows operating system, the gin-soaked brother-in-law who sleeps on the couch when he gets kicked out of his apartment and just needs a place to crash for a few days, man.
Windows Mobile is, for now, a money drain on Microsoft, a product so forlorn that even Steve Ballmer can't manage to be upbeat about it. So, this week's appearance of some smartphones based on WinMo 6.5, despite Microsoft's officially sunny take on the whole thing, didn't exactly cause a massive, iPhone-style stir. In fact, it mainly seemed to draw attention to how far behind Windows is on the small screen.
But, as always, Microsoft has something cooking. The long-rumored project "Pink" appears to be Microsoft's attempt to get into mobile hardware and doesn't seem to have anything to do with Windows Mobile at all (probably not a bad thing). Exactly what Pink is, we're not sure. And, apparently, as Mary Jo Foley tells us in the link just above, Microsoft won't talk about it at all or even acknowledge the codename.
As usual, however, there have already been leaks of what Pink phones might look like -- if they're ever going to look like anything. And now (get this), there's word coming from stealth sources in Seattle that Pink might be dying, if, of course, it even exists. Or maybe it'll never be born. Or something. As best we can tell, there's massive confusion at Microsoft around Pink, WinMo 7 and the whole mobile strategy at Microsoft in general.
And so Windows Mobile remains the Roger Clinton or Billy Carter of operating systems, except without the ironic charm of the aforementioned brothers or former presidents. What WinMo remains, really, is an embarrassment for a company that worries immensely about its image and -- a few dorky ad campaigns aside -- does a pretty good job of preserving it. Worse, WinMo is a money loser in Redmond and, we're guessing, not exactly a pot of gold for partners.
If this slothful houseguest of the Microsoft family is going to get himself cleaned up and make himself useful, he's going to need some help from the family in Redmond. But Microsoft seems to be executing at about Vista level with WinMo, which means that the drunken brother-in-law will probably go on embarrassing his relatives and crashing on couches for a while to come.
What could Microsoft do to make Windows Mobile better? What should Microsoft's mobile strategy be? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on October 07, 20094 comments
The news earlier this week that Hotmail had been caught in a phishing net brought out the Microsoft haters in full voice. But the naysayers seem a bit quieter now that other Web-based e-mail services -- including the sainted Gmail, which, by the way, your editor uses for personal purposes -- have fallen victim to the attack.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 07, 20090 comments
Talk about epic fail: Vista was such a disaster that even Steve Ballmer has stopped pretending that it was any kind of success. Ballmer told a U.K. newspaper this week that the company's reputation still hasn't recovered following the Vista debacle. Surely Vista has to have achieved something along the lines of New Coke-level failure now. Or maybe Ryan Leaf drinking New Coke while driving a Yugo. In any case, it's bad.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 07, 20093 comments
Hey, you Mac zealots, we know your secrets. We see those PCs hidden in your home offices and those Dell laptops on your living room sofas. We know now that 85 percent of you -- that's a lot -- not only have a Mac but also a PC. So, stop the smug act, OK? (Linux users, you may still be smug...for now.)
And speaking of the smug act, we loved this hilarious bit of commentary on the PC-Mac dichotomy from a grouchy U.K. writer and PC user who hates both the PC and Mac fans -- a position we can understand to a great extent (beware, this is a tad nasty and has a hint of a dirty word or two...but it's also funny).
Posted by Lee Pender on October 07, 20090 comments
It's getting better out there, right? Well, with financial markets seemingly recovering and, at the same time, the unemployment rate bumping up on 10 percent here in the U.S., the messages are mixed at best. And we've stopped listening to most of the experts who got so much wrong over the last 10 years or longer and helped get us here in the first place.
Except for these experts. IDC released a study this week saying that IT will create 5.8 million jobs (worldwide) by 2013. Microsoft sponsored the study, which identified IT as a major driver of a global economic recovery. (This, oddly enough, as Steve Ballmer -- and we think quite correctly -- is spreading the messages that IT budgets will be down for a while and that the economy has "reset" and won't return to the levels it reached before the crash of 2008.)
Of course, Ballmer has to walk a fine line here, as part of Microsoft's current pitch to the enterprise is that companies should save money by spending it. In other words, buy a bunch of Microsoft applications, increase efficiency, eliminate costs and end up having a positive effect on the always-trembling bottom line. In that sense, it makes sense for Ballmer to talk about the economy resetting and IT budgets staying relatively low. Plus, that kind of talk will make for a nice built-in excuse if Microsoft reports disappointing quarterly earnings again.
Then again, nobody likes too much negativity, and Ballmer talking too much about an economy that won't fully recover (although, again, we think he's right there -- and he does work the word "reset" into his quote in the AFP story linked above) might scare CEOs, CIOs and other executives into not buying anything from Microsoft at all. So, fortunately for Microsoft (ahem), the Microsoft-sponsored IDC study can spread some good news without directly conflicting Ballmer's message of caution. Well-played all around there.
So, given RCPU's skeptical take on "experts" and their talk about the economy and jobs, do we believe IDC's projections? Well, not really...but we want to, and given that we're not experts ourselves, we'll give the numbers people (IDC does do numbers very well) the benefit of the doubt. But if we had to choose between Ballmer's prevailing worldview and IDC's gaudy projections, we'd probably lean Ballmer's way.
What's your take on the economic recovery? Are you feeling it, and if so, how? Send your thoughts to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on October 06, 20090 comments
Believe it or not, there are still some Lotus Notes users out there -- lots of them, actually -- and IBM is still an e-mail vendor. Now, it's a vendor with a cloud-based e-mail option for the enterprise, something known as LotusLive iNotes.
The name has it all -- the word "Live," a la Microsoft, two words PutTogether, as has been popular in the industry for a while, and the lower-case "i" before the word "Notes" in what we can only guess is a loving tribute to the iPhone (and a bunch of other Apple stuff). Way to make that new service really stand out, IBM. In other news, we're changing the name of RCPU to the "InformatonWorld ComputerWeek iNewsletter." Not really.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 06, 20091 comments
Symantec's got a bit of that mix-and-match thing going in the cloud. The security giant has pure-play cloud storage offerings and has for a while, but now the company is giving customers the option of going full cloud, in-house "cloud" or both.
The longtime Microsoft partner and security market leader this week released FileStore, a platform that, very simply put, allows companies to build private, in-house storage clouds.
"We want to give enterprise customers the ability to act like a Web company," Sean Derrington, director of storage management and high availability at Symantec, told RCPU last week. "Some customers want a little bit of both -- some aspects of application services they want to serve via the public cloud, and [other] things they want to deliver through their own architecture."
FileStore is about more than storage, though. There are significant management components, and it has the flexibility to connect "any storage environment to any other storage environment," Derrington said. He added that FileStore is aimed at letting businesses start small and grow with in-house cloud storage.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 06, 20090 comments
No, really. Red Hat has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw software patents.
Outlaw! Now, we're going to go on another pro-patent rant here, but first we'll say this: No, we don't like patent trolls. Yes, the system needs reform so that some make-nothing patent hog can't tear a legitimately innovative company (that actually makes things) to shreds.
But outlawing software patents? Baby, bathwater, throwing one out with the other -- those are the words that come to mind. It's too much. Red Hat's argument is that patents stifle innovation. We would argue that patent trolls do that, but that patents themselves encourage innovation because (in an ideal world) they let the people who invent things make money off of them, which provides pretty good incentive to invent. We won't hold our breath waiting on the Supreme Court to respond to this.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 06, 20090 comments
Champagne all around for the Microsoft legal team. A federal judge this week overturned a great big, $388 million patent-infringement ruling against Microsoft. Apparently, Microsoft didn't infringe on Uniloc's patent, after all. Apparently, the original trial went on for six years before a jury slammed Microsoft with the punitive fine -- which a judge overturned on appeal in a matter of months. Weird how the system works sometimes, isn't it?
Posted by Lee Pender on October 01, 20090 comments
To those of you out there who have taken pay cuts recently (or been laid off by Microsoft), rest assured that the big wigs in Redmond are suffering right along with you. Steve Ballmer's salary cratered from $1.35 million to $1.28 million year-over-fiscal-year, and other Microsoft execs took pay cuts, as well. (Of course, compared to what the real losers on Wall Street have made over the years while helping wreck our economy, Ballmer's base compensation doesn't seem that outrageous.)
We've been wondering something lately, though. Remember a couple of years ago, when the economy was still swimming along, how there were calls for Ballmer to step down as Microsoft CEO? Where have those calls gone? Where are those skeptics now? We're not saying that Ballmer should step down (and we never have). In fact, with Windows 7, Azure and a major virtualization push, he's got Microsoft moving in a lot of good directions.
But did a bad economy absolve Ballmer of what some perceived to be his sins? Did it serve as a scapegoat and an out clause for a once-embattled CEO? It sure might have. Discuss or send your thoughts on this to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on October 01, 20092 comments