A few teams at last weekend's NFL draft needed arms. Microsoft, though, needs a shot in the arm. Hopefully not a flu shot...but we digress. It's no secret that Redmond is struggling in this recession the way many of us are, and if anybody needed any more proof of Microsoft's woes, it came last week with an historic earnings report.
That report was historic for unfortunate reasons, of course. By now, you know that Microsoft experienced its first year-over-year earnings shortfall ever, or at least since it became a public company more than two decades ago. That means, of course, that Microsoft made less money in the first three months of this calendar year than it made in the first three months of 2008. Microsoft's funky fiscal calendar makes the first three months of the year the third quarter, but it's still January-March on the calendar.
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 28, 20092 comments
Have you ever wanted to know how Microsoft Services does things, like how it develops best practices and consults with customers? Well, if you're a Gold Certified Partner, you can buy that knowledge from Microsoft in a
nifty little package
that covers a bunch of different categories. There's more info on the program
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20090 comments
Nobody gives the "shift" key a better workout than VMware. This week, the virtualization market leader drove journalists and bloggers a few strokes closer to carpal tunnel syndrome with the unveiling of vSphere.
To be specific, it's vSphere 4 that VMware is talking about this week. You might remember it as VMware Infrastructure, its former name. It's basically the company's platform for the datacenter, or, as one VMware executive says in Keith Ward's excellent story on vSphere, "We're calling vSphere a cloud operating system."
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20090 comments
In our continuing series on the best complementary partner programs for Microsoft partners, we come to
APC
. Who? It's a power and cooling specialist, apparently, and its partner program is worth checking out.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20090 comments
There's some stir this week about Microsoft's
"starter edition" of Windows 7
, a low-functionality version apparently aimed at the growing netbook sector that helped clobber Windows revenue in Microsoft's last earnings report Windows 7 starter would, for instance, limit users to running three applications at a time and require an upgrade for users who want more juice.
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 21, 20092 comments
Everything considered, this week's
IBM earnings report
isn't too bad. Revenue came in a little below what analysts would have liked, but earnings per share beat the Street. And with this news, we take the opportunity to offer another profile of an
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 21, 20090 comments
For almost as long as they've existed, security applications have been a little like guards at the wall of a medieval city: very important, but just kind of sitting out there all day, not really living with everybody else.
There's been a movement for a while to change that, and two vendors introduced products this week that show progress toward the goal of merging security and systems management. One of those vendors is Microsoft, which bulked up the Forefront security line. The other is Trend Micro, which aims to offer more manageable endpoint security. Both new offerings have cloud components, and both demonstrate the trend toward bringing security into better harmony with the rest of an enterprise's infrastructure in order to improve management and access while not sacrificing protection.
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 16, 20090 comments
One of the more infamous worms in recent memory is
still doing damage
, in part by installing a form of "scareware" on computers -- fake anti-virus malware that promises to clean users' machines if they'll just fork over $50 or so.
Redmond
magazine covered scareware in depth a couple of months ago. Read more about it
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 14, 20090 comments
We continue our series on the best "other" partner programs for Microsoft partners with a look at Microsoft's old buddy and partner in the famous "Wintel" alliance,
Intel
.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 14, 20090 comments
There's a very brief scene in an
old episode of "The Simpsons"
in which a couple of guys, presumably brothers, are fuming at each other over the impending demise of their restaurant, dubbed Two Guys from Kabul. At one point, one brother looks at the other and barks, "Sometimes, I think you want to fail!"
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Posted by Lee Pender on April 14, 20098 comments
We're continuing our series on the best third-party partner programs for Microsoft partners as chosen by
RCP
the magazine readers. Today, it's Microsoft's old friend, and sometimes foe,
Symantec
.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 09, 20090 comments