SMB New Product Flood

It’s nearly spring, and new products for small and medium businesses are busting out all over. Let’s take a look at one new hardware product line and two new software releases.

First, Dell launched two new laptop lines last week aimed at small businesses. Well, they say they’re aimed at small businesses, but they include the Windows Media Center operating system so users can play music without turning on the entire laptop. Just who are these people who carry six pound laptops to listen to music rather than four ounce MP3 players? And why does Dell load the bloated Media Center operating system on all the laptops just for those people?

The good news is that these laptops use the new Intel Core Duo (dual-core) processors. This should give them some horsepower. The laptops also come with 512MBs of RAM, which I consider the minimum today for any computer running Windows XP and more than one application at a time.

Small and medium businesses still don’t backup enough (2 of 5 do it adequately), so new products continue to appear. Symantec just announced an update of their Norton Save & Restore product. If you aren’t backing up because you don’t like or don’t trust your current software, keep trying software until you find something you will actually use. Then use it.

Management fans will be happy to hear that BMC launched SMB versions of some of their management software, including BMC Service Desk. Odd that they use that name, when the product had some name recognition as Magic Service Desk. I guess the BMC ego overruled marketing considerations.