The Coming Microsoft Cultural Revolution

Screen Shot 2014-07-15 at 12.34.41 AMLast week Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took another step in redefining his company for the post-Gates/Ballmer era, sending a 3100-word positioning memo to every Microsoft employee and to the world in general. I found it a fascinating document for many reasons, some of them even intended by Nadella, who still has quite a ways to go to legitimately turn Microsoft in the right direction.

We’re seeing a lot of this — companies trying to talk their way into continued technology leadership. Well talk is cheap, and sometimes that’s the major point: it can be far easier to temporarily move customers and markets through the art of […]

Some thoughts on the passing of Windows XP

winXPIt may be hard to believe but there was a time when people looked forward to new versions of operating systems. Before Windows XP many PC operating systems were not very good. The developers of applications had to code around problems.  Companies wanted their business applications to be more reliable.  Over the years operating systems improved.

Before Windows XP Microsoft had two PC operating systems.  One was the descendant of Windows 95 the other of Window NT.  In the years that preceded Windows XP Microsoft incrementally improved the user interface on the Windows 95 side and the reliability and performance on the NT side.   Windows XP was the convergence of the best of both.   Before XP […]

Google Earth is now on Mainframe2

Screen Shot 2014-03-26 at 11.01.23 AMCisco Systems this week announced their $1 billion Intercloud that will link nine partner companies to offer an OpenStack-based, app-centric cloud system supposedly aimed at the Internet of Things. That’s a lot of buzzwords for one press release and what it means is Cisco doesn’t mean to be left behind or to be left out of the IT services business. But Cisco’s isn’t the big cloud announcement this week: the really big announcement comes today from little Mainframe2.

This morning at the big nVIDIA GPU Technical Conference in Silicon Valley Mainframe2 demonstrated two new PC applications — Google Earth and Microsoft Word — running on its graphical […]

As Seen on TV: ThreeDrive, from CringeCo

skydrive-onedriveMy e-mail inbox this morning contains 118,306 messages totaling about seven gigabytes. I really should so something about that but who has the time? So I keep a lot of crap around longer than I should. I have, for example, every message I have sent or received since 1992 when I registered cringely.com. Those obviously occupy a lot more than seven gigabytes, though interestingly enough the total is less than 20 gigs. My storage strategy has been a mixed bag of disks and cloud services and probably stuff I’ve forgotten along the way. So I’ve decided to clean it up by standardizing on Microsoft’s OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) cloud storage service, just relaunched with its new […]

Nadella’s success at Microsoft probably depends on Gates

Ballmer_Gates_NadellaMicrosoft has a new CEO in former cloud and server chief Satya Nadella and readers have been asking me what this means? Certainly Nadella was the least bad of the internal candidates but an external selection would have been better. Whether it works out well or not probably comes down to Bill Gates, who leaves his job as chairman to become Nadella’s top technical advisor.

You might ask why Nadella, whose technical chops are easily the equal of BillG’s (and a lot more recent, too) would even need Gates in that advisory role? I believe the answer lies in my recent column where I argued that the best new Microsoft CEO would be Gates, […]