Windows 7 finds its way to Beta

and may find its way to shelves as early as the fall according to some reports.  The Beta has only been out since January 9th so I don’t know if there is a consensus yet, but from what I see so far things look good. 

My first impression was that it looks very similar to Vista.  However after working with Windows 7 for the last few days I can honestly say……… it is Vista.  I was fooled at first because of the new task bar and the Windows 7 branding, but I get the joke now, come on where are the cameras?  Am I on TV?  I bet this is that Mojave experiment thing again right?  Is Seinfeld going to walk in the room and proclaim his is a PC? 

Oh! Christmas Eee. Oh! Christmas Eee I want my ASUS Eee PC.

If the ASUS Eee PC isn’t on your holiday wish list this year than you may be left with coal in your stocking. This very special holiday season promises record low profits, increased global and domestic market uncertainty, and CEO’s left to think about how they can cut costs while maintaining productivity and sales. Computer companies like Apple, HP, Dell and Acer are finding a new consumer market with mini-laptops. While Microsoft continues changing fonts in Windows Vista and calling it Windows 7. Computer companies are betting that easier to use systems like Windows XP, OS X, and Linux on ultra portable hardware are going to be just the thing to get consumers excited about computers again. The latest company to make a dent into this new frontier is ASUS with their line of 8.9” mini-laptops. ASUS laptops come pre-installed with everything a business user needs to create documents, presentations, surf the web, and email. There is nothing additional to buy, the Windows XP version comes with Microsoft Works and the Linux version comes with Open Office. These are no toy laptops, they with come with a standard Ethernet port, WiFi, USB 2.0, SD drive, VGA port, and Solid-State Memory and amazingly start at under $300?

Failover can be as easy as TZO

This month’s article will review TZO’s High Availability service. TZO provides Global Load Balancing as a service through DNS delegation, lowering site failover scenarios down to seconds rather than hours or in some cases days.

I remember a time when a person’s business phone and email system was something that was at the office, not in the car or corner cafe. Today in an ever expanding global workplace we expect to be able to communicate anytime, anywhere, from any device, and under any circumstance, suffice to say the rules have changed. Large companies need to consider how they can provide email and a slew of other web services to their employees and customers 24 x 7.

The problem is how does a company load balance or failover critical Enterprise web services across two or more different physical locations?

Jerry Seinfeld debuts in Microsoft commercials…about Nothing!

I wish I were joking, these commercials appear to me to actually be about nothing. I’ve watched both commercials with colleagues, my wife, my kids, complete strangers, and nobody can tell me what these commercials are about. It appears that back in May when I suggested that Microsoft fire their head of advertising they instead hired George Costanza.

Discover the Exchange 2007 Autodiscover Service.

 

This new service allows customers to easily configure their own client-side connections to Exchange related services, including: Outlook Anywhere (formerly RPC/HTTP), Offline Address Book (OAB), Unified Messaging, Exchange Web Services, and the ever popular ActiveSync for a new generation of mobile devices. If you are a large company and still teetering on whether or not to deploy Exchange 2007 this feature alone makes the business justification.

Don’t Scrap It. Feature Pack It!

May 27, 2008–Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer demo Windows 7 during the Wall Street Journal’s annual D6 conference in Carlsbad, California.

What in the world were they thinking? I really applaud the fact they are finally giving the consumer reasons to buy their new OS, showcasing the type of new media features that made Windows XP so popular. Unfortunately, they were not showing Vista, but rather an early version of Windows 7 slated to be released in late 2009. (Link to conference interview and demo below)

 http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080527/gates_ballmer/

I find it so hard to believe that Microsoft is running away from Vista so quickly. Does this mean that the new security features that were introduced in Vista have been abandon,

Making The Argument For Vista

It has been one year and nearly five months since Vista was launched in late January 2007. I hope everyone now agrees that this is the right time to fire the person in charge of marketing at Microsoft. I’m not sure who this person is, but I do know they haven’t given the public one reason to buy Vista. I remember when Windows XP came out we got some great commercials with kids flying all over the place to a Madonna track, while showcasing all of the new cool media upgrades Windows XP had to offer. This was at a time when people were just starting to get into digital media, this was a real reason to upgrade.