Next week marks the first full week of June. Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology. In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday. Apple will hold its annual
Worldwide Developers Conference
(WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its
Tech Ed conference
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Posted on 06/03/20100 comments
Last year, I wrote Steve Ballmer an email, and he was kind enough to write me back. The email contained a scan of a
column I wrote
praising Microsoft's BI strategy. His reply contained three simple words: "Super nice thanks." Well, now I'd like to write to Steve again, in an open letter format, and this time the love may be a bit tougher. But I'm still super earnest.
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Posted on 05/27/20101 comments
The competition between the Web and proprietary rich platforms, including Windows, Mac OS, iPhone/iPad, Adobe Flash/AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, is not new. But with the emergence of HTML 5 and imminent support for it in the next release of the major Web browsers, the battle is heating up. And with the announcements made Wednesday at Google's I/O conference, it's getting kicked up yet another notch.
The impact of this platform battle on companies in the media and advertising world, and the developers who serve them, is significant. The most prominent question is whether video and rich media online will shift towards pure HTML and away from plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. In fact, certain features in HTML 5 make it suitable for development for line of business applications as well, further threatening those plug-in technologies.
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Posted on 05/20/20100 comments
If you're left scratching your head over SAP's intention to acquire Sybase for almost $6 billion, you're not alone. Despite Sybase's 1990s reign as the supreme database standard in certain sectors (including Wall Street), the company's flagship product has certainly fallen from grace. Why would SAP pay a greater than 50 percent premium over the Sybase closing price on the day of the announcement, just to acquire a relational database that is firmly stuck in maintenance mode?
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Posted on 05/18/20101 comments
Yesterday, Microsoft held its flagship launch event for Office 2010 in Manhattan. Today, the Redmond software company is holding a local launch event for Visual Studio (VS) 2010, in Brooklyn. How come information workers get the 212 treatment and developers are relegated to 718? Well, here's the thing: the Brooklyn Marriott is actually a great place for an event, but you need some intimate knowledge of New York City to know that. NBC's Studio 8H, where the Office launch was held yesterday (and from where SNL is broadcast) is a pretty small venue, but you'd need some inside knowledge to recognize that. Likewise, while Office 2010 is a product whose value is apparent, appreciating VS 2010's value takes a bit more savvy.
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Posted on 05/13/20100 comments
On Wednesday, I will have the honor of co-presenting, for both The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) and the New York Technology Council, on the subject of Excel and business intelligence (BI). My co-presenter will be none other than Bill Baker, who was a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and, essentially, the father of BI at that company. Details on the events are
here
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Posted on 05/11/20100 comments
The week of April 26th was a huge one in the world of mobile and tablet devices. There were so many individual developments, announcements and solidifications of strategy, it's almost impossible to believe they occurred in the same month, let alone the same week.
Things started with Apple and Gizmodo having a Law and Order moment over the latter's procurement of what appears to be the former's 4th gen iPhone prototype. We found out on the 26th that Gizmodo blogger Jason Chen's apartment was raided by police and, honestly, that was a bit much.
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Posted on 05/03/20100 comments
The newest version of Office is officially numbered 14, a designation that correlates with the various releases, through the years, of Microsoft Word. There were six major versions of Word for DOS, during whose release cycles came three 16-bit Windows versions. Then, starting with Word 95 and counting through Word 2007, there have been six more versions -- all for the 32-bit Windows platform. Skip version 13 to ward off folksy bad luck (and, perhaps, the bugs that could come with it) and that brings us to version 14, which includes implementations for both 32- and 64-bit Windows platforms. We've come a long way baby. Or have we?
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Posted on 04/29/20101 comments
When the iPad was presented at its San Francisco launch event on January 28th, Steve Jobs spent a significant amount of time explaining how well the device would serve as an eBook reader. He showed the iBook's reader application and iBookstore and laid down the gauntlet before Amazon and its beloved Kindle device. Almost immediately after, criticism came rushing forth that the iPad could never beat the Kindle for book reading. The curious part of that criticism is that virtually no one offering it had actually used the iPad yet.
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Posted on 04/22/201010 comments
This past Monday, April 12th, Visual Studio 2010 was launched. And on that same day, Microsoft also launched a new line of mobile phone handsets, called Kin. The two product launches are actually connected, but only by what they do not have in common, and what they commonly lack.
On the former point: VS 2010 had released to manufacturing a couple weeks prior to its launch. The Kin phones, meanwhile, are not yet available. We don't even know what they will cost. (And I think cost will be a major factor in Kin's success... I told ChannelWeb's Yara Souza so in this article.)
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Posted on 04/19/20100 comments
I have now had my iPad for a little over a week. In that time, Apple introduced the world to its iPhone OS 4 (and the SDK agreement's draconian new section 3.3.1). HP introduced Slate, and Microsoft got ready to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.
And through it all I have used my iPad. I've used it for email, calendar, controlling my Sonos, and writing an essay. I've used it for getting on TripIt and Twitter, and surfing the Web. I've used it for online banking, and online ordering and delivery of food.
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Posted on 04/12/20101 comments
Saturday morning I got up, got dressed and took a seven-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York's Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad. This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day and a rough neighborhood at night. So imagine the sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day.
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Posted on 04/05/20105 comments
I have never purchased an Apple product in my life. That's a "true fact." And, for that matter, the last Apple product I really wanted was an Apple IIe, back in the 1980s. I couldn't afford it though (I was still in high school), so I got a Commodore 64 instead -- it had the same microprocessor, after all. If the iPhone were on Verizon, I probably would have picked one up in December, when I got my Droid. And if the iPod Touch worked with my Napster subscription (which, of course, it does not, but my Sonos does) I might have picked up one of those instead.
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Posted on 03/31/20105 comments
This past Thursday, Microsoft announced that Windows (7) Virtual PC (WVPC) and its XP Mode feature would no longer require hardware-assisted virtualization (HAV). That means any PC running Windows 7 Pro, or higher, can now run this software. And that's a great thing because, as I noted in a post almost five month ago, determining whether a given PC you might be planning to buy actually offers HAV can be extremely difficult. That meant even dedicated, sophisticated PC users, with a budget for new hardware, might be blocked from using this technology. And that was just plain silly.
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Posted on 03/24/20100 comments
The MIX day one keynote was all about Windows Phone 7 (WP7). MIX day two was a reminder that Microsoft has much more going on than a new mobile platform. Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, Doug Purdy and others showed us lots of other good things coming from Microsoft, mostly in the developer stack, that we certainly shouldn't overlook.
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Posted on 03/17/20100 comments