Just what's going on at Cisco? And is this a sign of things to come? Brad Reese has a stunning post today with his observation that Cisco may be over pushing product into their channels to help pump up the short term numbers. Brad's got some interesting data that shows it could be as much as $20 million dollars in channel stuffing?

Are other vendors doing this too, in order to minimize the impact of the economic downturn in the economy? Or is this limited to Cisco? I've not seen any evidence of it elsewhere but if you have, speak up here or contact me directly.

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At the JavaOne 2008 conference this week, Sun "sort of" announced something called Project Hydrazine, Sun's hinted at answer to Microsoft Live Mesh. I have to wonder how much of Sun's Project Caroline makes up Project Hydrazine. Not much detail squeaked out about Project Hydrazine other than to say it "includes common federated services for discovery, personalization, deployment, location, and development". Most of the emphasis was put on JavaFX, Sun's competitor to Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR visually interactive technologies.

You have to give Sun a lot of credit.

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Things are heating up in the hypervisor and virtualization software space with Microsoft's release of the Hyper-V within Windows Server 2008 and adding VMware support to Microsoft System Center products. (The standalone Hyper-V release is a few months out.) My son Phill is working with Windows Server 2008 and has a lot of good things to report about it. Embedding Hyper-V technology into the Server 2008 operating systems is clearly Microsoft's Trojan horse strategy to seed its virtualization technology into Microsoft shops and help displace VMware. Microsoft isn't making it any easier on VMware by adding support for 3rd party virtualization products in System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

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Apple is AWOL from the world of software-as-a-service, on demand software, cloud computing and storage, and virtualization. So just what are Apple's plans to thrive, or maybe just survive, in the quickly emerging ecosystems of SaaS and utility services? Does Apple have a plan, or are iPods and movie sales supposed to sustain Apple's future? Apple's been suspiciously quiet with the exception of announcing new Mac models, selling tons of iPhones, and bringing out their iPhone SDK.

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Microsoft had three big themes during their appearance at last week's Interop 2008 conference in Las Vegas; interoperability, Network Access Protection (NAP) and Unified Communications. Yes, I said interoperability. Over and over again I heard mention that so many were surprised by Microsoft's open stance (pun intended) towards interoperability between Microsoft, partner and other third-party products. What was surprising is that I heard it from network equipment, security and software companies alike. Are Microsoft's actions matching up to their words?

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Let's face it. Yahoo! is at best a very far distant second (12.8%) to Google (62.4) in the search engine world, and it would be disingenuous to call Yahoo's future anything but the equivalent of the Internet's "long goodbye". Google's grabbing more and more of their share of ad revenues too. That's why Microsoft's now withdrawn offer to buy Yahoo seemed such a good deal for both. Yahoo would no longer have to face competing with fierce Google on its own and Microsoft would greatly accelerate their standing in the search and online marketplace.

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So just who is in charge of branding for Live over at Microsoft these days?

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Interop 2008 Update: So is it still unified communications if it takes a combination of Microsoft, Foundry, Sun and Mitel to create a complete unified communications offering to battle Cisco's UC equivalent?

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Interop 2008 Update: Network World's John Fontana is reporting we may see Microsoft's Hyper-V ship to customers in June or July 08, busting out ahead of the 180 day timeframe Microsoft originally gave itself. Microsoft needs a successful Hyper-V launch out in the marketplace to begin to stave off VMware's dominance. But Hyper-V can't do it alone, that's only part of the picture. Just having Hyper-V is like having a NASCAR race car but no pit crew. Hyper-V's got to have the management tools to be successfully utilized by IT.

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Who would have thought?

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So who is the Edison of today? Or should I say, who will be the Edison this next era of the utility network?

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I had a chance to check out the new Live Mesh "tech preview" announced at Web 2.0 Expo this week. Two first impressions. First, the Live Mesh tech preview is a good start. It's obviously early in the life of Live Mesh so it's hard to judge something which you are viewing by just peering into one tiny porthole. Second, Live Mesh is a move away from the old freeze the market, bait-n-switch tactics of Microsoft old. Lets jump into the Live Mesh tech preview experience and then I'll expand on my latter point in a separate blog post.

Live Mesh Installation

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I'm liking this new under promise, over deliver era brought on by Ray Ozzie and Live Mesh. Lets hope it's a permanent fixture at Microsoft. Instead of filling us with sunshine about Live Mesh's five year vision (meaning it'll be five years before we see anything), Microsoft has given us hints and very basic demos, followed by rolling out some interesting functionality fairly soon afterward. We've seen this with Live Mesh, Live Search, and Office Workspace to name a few examples.

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I hate to say I told you so, but, I told you so. It was so gratifying reading John Fontanta's guest blog post about the editors meeting with Shanen Boettcher, GM of Windows product management. Shanen gave the nod to what I've been say for months about where Live Mesh was heading. (I called it Microsoft Mesh until it was named by Microsoft). I've been speculating about what Windows 7 might be, and debunking the myth that its about saving face for Vista. While I may or may not be right about if it comes in Windows 7 or not, the key to Microsoft's move into SaaS and cloud services is virtualizing applications at the desktop OS.

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Tuesday evening Vista SP1 started its trek onto Vista computers through the Windows Update automatic updates. SP1 is being phased in over time so you might have gotten the update today, or will get it in the coming days or weeks.

My experience was the install took 45 minutes or to fully complete, and include update steps before and after a system reboot. But surprisingly, everything went very smoothly. Everything install just fine, with no crashes, compatibility problems, lost setting or data. It just took a while to complete but so far, so good.

At this point I'd give Microsoft an A+ for the upgrade to Vista SP1.

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What is it with successfully execs name "Bill" these days? Bill Gates is out drumming up rumors about Windows 7, and according to my sources, Redmond's playing mum by not answering any Windows 7 questions. Did Gates speak out of turn, or is he just as hard to shut up as Bill Clinton is out on the Hillary campaign trail?

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HP had a major faux paux when they rushed their shiny new Upline online data storage service to market. They ended up pulling back and shutting the service down for several reasons. The problems were described as "technical issues" and I'd say the were certainly more than just your ordinary new software kinks. There's some good lessons here for all of us as we use, build applications and create products in the world of Live Mesh and Live Office Workspace.

What kinds of problems happened?

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I often hear reactions like, virtualization is really going to commoditize companies like Dell, and what's Intel going to do about virtualization? It looks like virtualization certainly hasn't hurt Dell's latest revenues, at least yet. I actually believe data center space, power, cooling, capital costs along with US economic pressures have been just as big an issue for many, limiting their computing server expansion needs. Virtualization isn't all bad for hardware manufactures, and in many cases it's good.

Virtualization Sells Premium Servers - The good margins in hardware aren't in the $1,200 servers Dell, HP, IBM and others can sell you.

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Are mobile devices to become the bastion of phishing identity theft attacks?

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TechCrunch is reporting that Outlook email plug-in company Xobni and Microsoft have a letter of intent to acquire Xobni. That would make sense why Xobni hasn't exited beta status, offering a release version of the plug-in. If you aren't familiar with Xobni, I blogged about Xobni when I first came across it.

Xobni is a social networking plugin for Outlook that digs into your Outlook PST file, exposing connections and conversations you've had through email directly and indirectly with others.

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