Text message this morning from CNN: Unemployment hit 10.2% in October. Microsoft announced earlier this week another 800 employee layoffs to the 5,000 previously announced employee layoffs. If you look at Microsoft's financials you see why, a 14% revenue and 18% net income drop for the last reported...
Can Office Web Apps stave off customer migration to Google Docs? Google wants to take down Microsoft and Google Docs strikes at the very heart of Microsoft's application suite, Microsoft Office. Many users of Google Docs switched because of its sharing and collaboration features or they were looking...
The surprises from Microsoft just keep coming. The most interesting aspect of this week's Microsoft Office 2010 announcements was that the online web version of Office 2010 apps will be free. That's free from three perspectives; free to users with a Windows Live account, free Microsoft hosted Office...
The nation finally has a CIO, Vivek Kundra, former CTO for the District of Columbia. Most of what I’ve learned of his background has been his work as the D.C. CTO, of which one of his major initiatives was to promote D.C. moving to Google Apps. From this interview on the O’Reilly Radar blog, it...
Things are getting bad when Google's adding a Task List feature to Gmail is big news. My in-box is littered with Google Alerts about blogs and articles discussing Google's new task functionality. Is it the economy? Do we need a change of subject from all the layoff news? What is it? Maybe it's...
It's the big news at the Microsoft WPC conference. Microsoft's selling their own hosted versions Exchange and SharePoint, dubbed the "Deskless Worker Suite", and now we know the price. I should say, the bigger news is really about what Microsoft partners will get. $3 a month per...
Everyone was so hyped up about the iPhone 3G and 2.0 software updates this week, Apple's new online SaaS service MobileMe was lost in the fray. MobileMe, Apple's replacement to .MAC, that offers a bundling of data synchronization and online storage SaaS type services. I've been wondering...
This week I'm on the road attending IPSCon in Chicago for my company. And as happens with system crashes, my Vista Business laptop chose this moment to lose its brains and suddenly stop working. It crashed, its broken. Vista boots but doesn't load all the typical start up programs and other than...
Google and Salesforce are announcing support for Google Apps within Salesforce. (See the Google and Salesforce sites.) On the one hand, I'm a bit surprised that Salesforce didn't have support for Google Apps already, given Salesforce's No Software mantra and their drumbeat for SaaS software....
It looks like the iPhone isn't the only "cool" phone AT&T wireless has agreed to carry. After meetings with Google, AT&T said their fears have been allayed that Google Android phones would be too Google app centric, giving Google too much control over AT&T's choice of...
A good friend of mine and security expert Mike Rothman, principal at Security Incite, joins me for this week's podcast . On the podcast, Mike and I talk about the role of patch management and change control in the Microsoft Patch Tuesday process, what the Network Access Protection (NAP) capabilities...
It seems like almost every day that Google makes some seemingly small, incremental move to gradually turn up the heat on Microsoft. The frog, Microsoft in this analogy, though knows Google is sticking it to them, but they're just too big to make the leap out of the pot in one jump. Google just...
Could you move your small business off of your Microsoft Exchange server to an alternative, like Google Apps? Security industry analyst Mike Rothman is attempting just that. An industry analyst formerly with Meta (now Gartner), Mike runs his own small business, Security Incite, providing analyst services...
Mitchell Ashley has a diverse background in software development, network engineering, information security, mobility, collaborative technologies, and IT management and operations. An early adopter of social media in business, he began blogging about security and information technologies in 2006 at theconvergingnetwork.com. Mitchell is VP of Information Technology at CableLabs in Louisville, CO, and previously held positions as CIO, CTO and VP Engineering at prior companies.