Making good business

It seems Microsoft won't be making good on Vista delays after all. On Tuesday, eWeek reported that Redmond was cooking up a plan for "reparations" for customers who would have gotten Vista under their Software Assurance maintenance plans except that the new OS was delayed -- and delayed, and delayed, and delayed.Not so, says a Microsoft product manager. There's no reparations plan, and the reporter "took a lot of liberties" with the story. And an IDC analyst, who likely would have heard about a plan like that, says he hasn't.Let's ignore for the moment whether this is a case of a reporter who stretched a story too far on a slow news week (always possible) or a Microsoft trial balloon that didn't take off (also possible). Tap-dancing and trial balloons aside, this is a good idea.

Making good business

It seems Microsoft won't be making good on Vista delays after all. On Tuesday, eWeek reported that Redmond was cooking up a plan for "reparations" for customers who would have gotten Vista under their Software Assurance maintenance plans except that the new OS was delayed -- and delayed, and delayed, and delayed.Not so, says a Microsoft product manager. There's no reparations plan, and the reporter "took a lot of liberties" with the story. And an IDC analyst, who likely would have heard about a plan like that, says he hasn't.Let's ignore for the moment whether this is a case of a reporter who stretched a story too far on a slow news week (always possible) or a Microsoft trial balloon that didn't take off (also possible). Tap-dancing and trial balloons aside, this is a good idea.

It won't be long now ...

Since Google announced its Spreadsheets program, I've been looking at online office applications.  Who knew there were so many to choose from?  And all of them seem to be pretty useful.  But I've had my doubts about whether or not these services would ever make it out of the home-users' arena.But then this morning, I saw this little note on CW.  If Forrester Research is taking note of online office applications, then there must be something to them, right?  Probably.  They are useful.  I travel a LOT.  And in my travels it never fails that once in a while I leave a file behind that I need.  Now, if it's a truly desperate situation, I can call home, have someone upload the file for me, and access it that way.  But that's a pain, both for me and the unlucky soul who happens to answer my phone call.  I tend not to have the easiest to understand electronic filing system.  It makes perfect sense to me, but other people don't get it.

DTrace on OS X

In case you missed it, WWDC was this week. Fortunately, the Internet troubles I had earlier in the week (when a cable was replaced due to a very bad line, probably damaged in a recent storm) didn't prevent me from keeping up to date with what was going on. While it is ever so tempting to talk about the disappointments at WWDC and how, once again, the hype expectation didn't quite equal the reality, there was still quite a lot of good stuff if you knew what you were looking for. Of interest, particularly to developers, is the introduction of support for the DTrace debugging tool, which was first introduced as part of Solaris 10. I'm working on some detailed pieces on Solaris 10 features over the next week where DTrace will be one of the pieces I cover.

DTrace on OS X

In case you missed it, WWDC was this week. Fortunately, the Internet troubles I had earlier in the week (when a cable was replaced due to a very bad line, probably damaged in a recent storm) didn't prevent me from keeping up to date with what was going on. While it is ever so tempting to talk about the disappointments at WWDC and how, once again, the hype expectation didn't quite equal the reality, there was still quite a lot of good stuff if you knew what you were looking for. Of interest, particularly to developers, is the introduction of support for the DTrace debugging tool, which was first introduced as part of Solaris 10. I'm working on some detailed pieces on Solaris 10 features over the next week where DTrace will be one of the pieces I cover.