April 26, 2008
The news came out this week that the FAST acquisition is complete and that we will continue to support the FAST technologies on Linux and UNIX, as a separate product from SharePoint, for the forseeable future. This also means that for the near term If you’re a customer using SharePoint and you’re interested in FAST you should talk to your Microsoft team or any Microsoft partners you work with regularly to get the FAST team engaged. I expect to see more guidance on integration and SharePoint/FAST deployments in the near future.
April 26, 2008
Jonathan Schwartz has pioneered executive blogging and has done a great job of keeping Sun visible and relevant during a radical transition in many of their businesses. Credit should be given where credit is due. If McNealy were still at the helm no one would be talking about Sun anymore.
April 12, 2008
Treehugger: “Proponents of modern prefab are always lamenting 1) the strop that manufacturers throw when you ask for a house without old-school traditional charm, and 2) the problem of getting the house from factory to site. Converting standard 20- or 40-foot shipping containers into housing gets round both snags: the containers are already fabricated, and the infrastructure for transporting them (duh—stick ’em on the back of a truck or on a boat, or even a train) already exists.”
April 12, 2008
Mike Gunderloy: “One of the persistent complaints about Twitter is that it doesn’t offer any sort of “group” functionality: messages from everyone you follow come in as a big heap, and anything you say goes to all of your followers. GroupTweet provides a solution for the second half of this complaint, by layering distribution groups on top of Twitter.”
As Mike points out, Twitter is challenging to deal with for group messaging. Most people have opted to set their profiles to private and to keep their followers to a select few in order to make Twitter a more private group chat tool. GroupTweet takes a novel approach to make group functionality work without changing how most users approach Twitter- with open profiles and a desire to tie their Twitter activity (personal, business, etc.) to a single identity.
March 29, 2008
IBM Internet Security Systems: “Apple is trailing Microsoft in security patch responsiveness – in fact, after inspecting their graphs, Apple appears to be trending entirely in the wrong direction; more vulnerabilities, longer patching times, more 0-days, etc. – not the sort of thing we expect from a well known software vendor.While I think that there are quite a few reasons why this is probably so, I’d be inclined to say that Apple’s biggest problem appears to be that they treat every new vulnerability as a potential PR disaster rather than an opportunity to visibly reinforce their work in securing their customers.”
The only way to improve your security posture is to acknowledge that you’re vulnerable and to continue to work on identifying and remediating security vulnerabilities. Apple doesn’t understand this yet- hopefully they’ll get it soon.
March 29, 2008
Jeff Jarvis: “[N]ewspapers will not — not — recover what they have lost. They lose doubly in a downturn: advertisers spend less because they have less and then they realize they can keep spending less. It’s a reverse plateau.”
The article that Jeff references is interesting. The newspaper industry still claims that there is a rising tide as newspapers develop stronger web properties. That would be nice if it were true, but the problem that most of them face is that they don’t have the original news, editorial content and other elements of value that will sustain them online. As newspapers go out of business, of course the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are safe (at least for now). Their original content has value and their online properties are strong. They’ll continue to live on in some form. And maybe the smalltown newspaper like the one I grew up with will somehow find a way as local interests drive the aggregation of their content under larger umbrellas. Maybe. But most newspapers are dead in the water.
March 16, 2008
According to Tom Krazit over at CNet, Windows Mobile phones may soon include Flash Lite. This is partly a headline since Microsoft is investing in a competing technology with Silverlight, but I think it is also major news since Apple continues to disparage Flash as a platform for the iPhone. Given the ubiquitous nature of Flash on the internet, it seems a little funny that Windows Mobile phones may support it but Apple phones won’t.
Related to the Apple/Adobe issues, a recent article from Electronista claims that Flash is already running on iPhones but isn’t being officially released/supported due to political issues between Apple and Adobe. Ah, the joys of technology company partnerships and business strategy conflicts. As a end user of mobile technologies, I would definitely like Flash support on any device that supports web browsing to make sure the greatest compatibility with existing web sites. I would guess that Microsoft, Apple and Adobe all understand that desire and are trying to find ways to make it work best for consumers.
March 16, 2008
Michael Scherotter interviewed Ice Cube at SXSW for Channel 9. Check it out.
