Everyone who's anyone -- at least, anyone who watches Jim Cramer on CNBC --
knows Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for an amount that would have Detroit execs
doing cartwheels (and maybe even restructuring their operations). Microsoft
gave up that quest (and actually, buying Quest would've been a much smarter
idea) and
refuses
to be pulled back in
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/09/20080 comments
I hear a lot of complaints about various forms of Microsoft software. But I
can't remember any complaints about Windows Server 2008 (if I'm wrong, e-mail
your grievances to
[email protected]
).
Windows Server 2008 Release 2 is
now
in limited beta
, the company announced to some 6,000 developers at PDC last
week. The new server is 64-bit only, and will include live migration of VMs,
an advantage VMware brags about at every opportunity.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/03/20080 comments
I'm not sure if this is self-serving, real or both, but Slavik Markovich, the
CTO of Sentrigo, claims that in tough economic times, your computer defenses
need to
be extra-strong
.
That's because layoffs mean more angry ex-workers (or angry new hackers), and
that folks that have jobs might be looking for ways to make a buck or two by
stealing company data, says Markovich. IT workers may even sabotage the network
to show how necessary IT jobs are. Interesting theory.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 10/29/20080 comments
We all know that we need to meticulously decompose projects into tasks. We need to lay them out in a plan, and have a dictatorial project manager wielding a heavy cudgel direct and track their progress. This is simply how it’s done – plan or perish.
Or maybe not: Liquid Planner says that project management is more about probabilities and social interaction. According to founder Charles Seybold, traditional project management has its origins in the command-and-control culture of the 1950s. It is long overdue for an update.
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Posted by Peter Varhol on 03/05/20080 comments
We've had a lot of fun with Vista -- not using it, but writing snide, occasionally
witty comments about it. (For so many of us commentators, snideness is meant
to be funny and imply authority, but admittedly it's often just cutting.)
In the case of Vista, our criticisms are warranted, as they come directly from
you, the loyal Redmond Report reader. With nearly all Microsoft tools, as badly
as they begin, they almost always end up smelling like roses. And Vista -- as
folks get used to it and Microsoft adds some fixes -- will start to smell better
soon.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/15/20070 comments
If you were in IT in 1994, you probably remember Intel's huge Pentium recall
because of floating point math errors. The errors seemed tiny on the surface
(
Byte
magazine estimated an error every 9 billion calculations), but
a small error carried across a massive set of spreadsheets and other apps equals
big, big problems.
Today's Excel has
a similar problem but since this is software, not processors, fixing this
bug shouldn't cost the $200 million or so that Intel shelled out.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 10/01/20070 comments
I'm sure we've all heard that line before.
Redmond
magazine Editor Ed Scannell and I got a briefing from a company called OpenScan (
www.openspan.com
) last week that touted just such a claim. The announcement accompanying the briefing was under embargo until today (yes, sometimes we still get pre-briefings), so I decided to wait until today to even post a description of what the company is doing. When I worked at Compuware's NuMega Lab, one of our most successful products (BoundsChecker) injected debugging code into the memory space of a running process (and yes, that is also what a virus does). This code identified traced code execution and determined the values contained in variables, among other things. The important thing was that it could see many things that weren't being exposed by the application.
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Posted by Peter Varhol on 04/23/20075 comments
I spoke to Infragistics today about their upcoming release (Monday, but I got approval to blog something ahead of time) on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) controls. Many of you probably know that Infragistics has somehow been able to make a thriving business out of selling controls for Win32, .NET, Java, and Web. What makes their controls so popular is two things. First of all, they provide significantly more functionality than those out of the box in Visual Studio, especially in the areas of data binding and performance. Second, developers pay a per developer license fee, and no runtime fees. It turns out to be a great deal for developers. These new WPF controls are no exception. They provide ways to abstract the control from its implementation, providing developers with ways to customize controls, and insert controls inside one another. For example, you may want to put a push button in a data grid.
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Posted by Peter Varhol on 04/20/20070 comments
The world has changed. But I don't think I need to tell any of you that. Most of us work in job categories that didn't exist three decades ago, and that are continually evolving as technology obsoletes some of our skills while other doors open to new opportunities. This cycle is exciting, because of the opportunities for learning and growth. It is also stressful, because it's often not possible to step off of the roller coaster of technology change, even for a short time.
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Posted by Peter Varhol on 04/14/20070 comments
The
announcement by Google
on CNN, also in Wall Street Journal and other general media outlets that it was going to enable Google Maps users to create their own mashups without programming was a real disappointment to me. I was hoping for a real leap in usability and flexibility, given the great strides the company has made in the past. However, the capability announced by Google did no more than bring it up to approximate parity with what Microsoft had with Live! Local for around a year. After playing with it for a while, I came away wanting much more. If I wanted to do a feature by feature comparison, there are areas where Google Maps is a little better, and visa versa, but I've been doing much of what Google says on Live! Local for our conferences since early last fall.
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Posted by Peter Varhol on 04/06/20070 comments
I woke up this morning to six inches of new snow in New Hampshire, a tree down in my driveway, and the news in my inbox that German firm Software AG was acquiring webMethods for somewhere north of half a billion dollars. I don't often comment on mergers, acquisitions, or other corporate financial gymnastics; I don't have a background in business, and often have nothing worthwhile to say. But there are a couple of points of interest here. First, few of us have likely heard of Software AG, or if we have, don't know quite what it does. That's not unusual, for a couple of reasons. First, except for a few international brands (Nokia and Siemens come to mind), we don't necessarily think of European high tech companies as technology leaders.
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Posted by Peter Varhol on 04/05/20070 comments
I had a talk with the modeling people at Telelogic at the end of last week, and one of their announcements timed for this week revolves around modeling using its Rhapsody product in conjunction with an agile development process.That sounds dubious on the face of it, because modeling tends to be far more heavyweight, with a lot of up-front work writing specifications and building models.Agile processes, on the other hand, tend to work incrementally, with minimal design work, constant user feedback, extensive unit testing, and rapid turnaround. Still, there seems to be a role for modeling in agile development.Telelogic VP George LeBlanc explained that many projects still had a need for project and design documentation, and modeling incrementally back and forth with code generation can serve that purpose well.As long as the model doesn't have to be complete in order to generate code or otherwise begin development, it's possible for modeling and agile development to reside at the same address.
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Posted by Peter Varhol on 04/03/20070 comments