February 20, 2011 – 2:50 pm
TweetPlus ça change…et plus. We are at this year’s Mobile World Congress, held last week in Barcelona. One of the usual suspects, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, stands and delivers the new and improved party line: App Stores are bad. Stephenson wants cross-platform apps delivered through the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), whose “commercial launch’’ takes place [...]
November 8, 2010 – 12:34 am
TweetOnce upon a time, Microsoft reigned supreme, they were IBM 2.0, having wrestled control of the PC from Big Blue. According to some critics, Microsoft took over the office application market through a combination of embrace, extend, and extinguish and tied sales. The MS M.O. followed this trajectory: First, Bill Gates and his troops would [...]
January 17, 2010 – 7:46 pm
TweetLegends die hard. In the pre-Web days, they got printed and reprinted, told and retold and so became official, like spinach being good for you because it held the iron your red cells needed. After decades of the disgusting veggie inflicted upon young kids – I remember, a scientist went back to the bench and [...]
TweetWeb Apps are the future: modern, light, run and updated in the Cloud, they will progressively replace the antiquated, bloated, expensive to buy and manage desktop “client” applications. So says Google. And walking the talk, they put their Google Apps against the reigning champion of desktop applications: Microsoft Office. Microsoft never gives up and, as [...]
TweetHere’s what I think its taking place: Microsoft executives and Board members are no dummies: they know Cloud Computing threatens the Windows + Office + Exchange gold mine, the biggest in our industry’s history. They know the future is Office + Exchange running in dual-mode. From the Cloud when a Net connection is available; locally [...]
TweetWe have yet another standards battle on our hands — you might say screens, as it concerns Web video. Or we might watch our wallets, as the fight is about who gets the biggest share of the money spent delivering multimedia on our computers, smartphones and, soon, TVs. My money is on HTML 5, co-opted [...]
TweetOnce upon a time, in 1986, Bill Gates commissioned a book, The New Papyrus, subtitled: The Current and Future State of the Art. I recall an animated conversation with Bill as we were having dinner on top of Seattle’s Space Needle. He was hard at work promoting the CDI, the interactive CD and pushing Japanese [...]
October 19, 2008 – 6:21 pm
TweetThat’s the question Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, is trying to answer every morning when he goes to work. On the server software side, Windows Server is doing well, especially with the Exchange e-mail server and the unheralded but very good collaboration server, SharePoint. These products have matured, they’re relatively easy to set up and manage [...]
September 29, 2008 – 9:55 am
TweetThe Other Steve, Microsoft’s Ballmer, just treated us to another paean to open systems. This was last week at the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley schmoozing institution. There, we meet, gossip, drink, dine and watch a never ending and never boring parade of industry figures submitting themselves to soft-ball interviews by local notables of suitable [...]
TweetSilicon Valley VC-dom is having a grand time watching Microsoft. It always did, in fear some time, with hope the Bill Gates would buy ingenious or annoying startups at other moments, always with respect for the giant’s impact on the high-tech industry. Lately, the respect has turned into puzzlement. Because of, to simplify, Google and [...]
