Microsoft « The Life of a Silicon Valley Rockstar

Hyper-V launches, let the battle begin

Microsoft announced this morning that their new virtualization platform, Hyper-V, has launched. NetworkWorld leaked the story last night (don’t they have an NDA??) and published a full story this morning. This dovetails with the buzz I started at NetworkWorld yesterday afternoon by claiming Hyper-V will kill VMWare. That started a religious war in the blogosphere overnight and there’s a great discussion going on over at BroadDev.

John Furrier called VMWare out while John Casaretto did a deep dive on his experience with VMWare and wondered if Hyper-V was all hype. Taken from my NWW article, “Hyper-V is a LOT more friendly for Windows admins and it doesn’t require any of the core Linux skills that installing and tuning an ESX server does. The combination of easy to use and free has been Google’s trademark strategy. Microsoft may have taken a page from their book on this one and I think it’s very likely to succeed.”

June 26, 2008 Posted by Alex | Technology | Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMWare | 2 Comments

The saga of MicroHooBook goes on

It’s sounds like a bastard apple product, but MicroHooBook won’t be announced at the Apple developers conference. John Furrier was the first to put 2 and 2 together and get Microsoft’s new strategy; buy only what they need of Yahoo and acquire Facebook.

No one has mentioned what I thought would be the key buzz. Buying Facebook makes Microsoft “cool” again. Arguably not since NT4 has Microsoft really been seen as cool or hip. Vista was supposed to be the trendy infusion Microsoft needed but fell flat. Facebook has so much market momentum Microsoft is hoping the platform can carry the whole company into the hearts of the internets. Buying only a portion of Yahoo gives Microsoft infinitely more value per dollar without the liability on Yahoo’s other properties that wouldn’t really synergize with Microsoft any way. So, the Yahooligans are happy.

This seems like a win all around, even for our buddy Carl Icahn who is likely to see a pretty good short term return on his Yahoo investment. It may not be the whale he expected if Microsoft purchased all of Yahoo but if he chooses to hold his shares he can use that leverage to help drive Yahoo in Asia where it is doing very well.

In the same vein, Kara Swisher published the full communication regarding Yahoo’s view of Microsoft’s view of Yahoo. Doesn’t this seem a little bit like a mouse asking a cat it’s thoughts right before it gets eaten. Yahoo being the mouse, Microsoft is batting at it like a toy prolonging the fun before it moves in for the kill.

Update: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook won’t be sold. However doth he protest too much? “You can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term.” He’s already talking about Facebook being independent in the past tense. Thankfully John Furrier has more time than me today and is following the story realtime like CNN in Iraq during the “anyone named Bush” era.
Update 2: Facebook has ceased its search for a new CTO to replace Adam D’Angelo. Hmm, under what situation would they not need a CTO?

May 19, 2008 Posted by Alex | Technology | Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo | 1 Comment

Jerry Yang / Yahoo smokescreens latest Carl Icahn / Microsoft move

…And that move is Checkmate. On top of of the official Yahoo response to Carl Icahn’s letter, Jerry Yang felt the need to add his 2 cents. His advice? Ignore it and it’ll go away! Taken from his email to all employees:

What can employees do?
We ask you to continue to put aside all rumors and speculation you may be hearing.

Kara Swisher has been on this since the beginning and has a great analysis of CARL ICAHN’s intial letter of intent to Yahoo with the best part being:

Nonetheless, I must ask: What are you smoking over there on the Left Coast?

When someone dangles more than $40 billion to anyone on Wall Street, we’d throw our mother under the wheels of the bus if we needed to to get it. Frankly, we would do it for $12.43.

In any case, your break with reality is my golden opportunity.

Regardless of Yahoo’s Roy Bostock’s posturing it seems Roy, Jerry and the rest of the board are soon to be in the unemployment line. Michael Arrington put it most bluntly in his post “Dear Yahoo: You’re Fired“. The key is, he’s dead on. Valleywag’s analysis of who own how much of Yahoo shows Bert and Ernie, I mean Roy and jerry, are virtually powerless to stop Carl from doing whatever he wants; including bending them over a table while Steve Ballmer comes in for the kill. (In the picture on the left, Steve and jerry do their best impression of playground “mercy“. photo credit to Kara Swisher and Boomtown)

Is Ballmer playing the role of Icahn’s puppeteer or is it just a convenient alliance in light of a win-win situation involving billions of dollars? I’d vote the latter, but they do make a formidable team!

May 16, 2008 Posted by Alex | Technology | Ballmer, Icahn, Microsoft, Yahoo | 1 Comment

Headed to AZ till Thursday

In about 2 hours I’m headed to the airport and jumping on a plane to Arizona. Even though I printed my boarding pass last night I’m stuck in the 6th boarding group! Grrr, that sucks.

I’m headed out to the UCStrategies conference:
I’ll be talking about the power of unified communications, UC strategy, roadmaps and deployment, and probably a bit on vendor selection. Somehow that always comes up no matter how much I try to avoid it. If you’re in the area, feel free to come by. I’ll send a complementary autographed copy of my book, Windows 2003 Unleashed R2 Edition, to the first person that mentions they read my blog.

May 12, 2008 Posted by Alex | Technology | Microsoft, Unified Communications | 2 Comments

Twitterbot: A cool toy

I saw that a colleague, Carlo Longino had his blog auto-update his twitter stream with new posts. He uses twit tools and they aren’t available for those of us on wordpress.com so I found twitterbot. Another option is twitterfeed but I couldn’t get it to work. I’m also a little leary of using a service for this sort of thing, no offense Mario.

It doesn’t run as a service technically, but I’m considering setting it up that way using the Microsoft SC tool.

May 1, 2008 Posted by Alex | Life, Technology | blog, Microsoft, rss | No Comments Yet

Tech Blogs I Write and more about me

This is my first stab at a personal blog, but I’m not new to blogging. I’ve written a few for various sources over the years. Here’s a list of ones I’m writing currently and some other general info.

My NetworkWorld Microsoft Subnet Blog: Mainly Unified Communications focused, but I cover the general Microsoft landscape as well.
My Twitter stream: Regularly updated with what I’m doing and random thoughts.
HYPERCONNECTIVITY.COM: I write for this site on global unified communications and telepresence strategy and news.
I work as a principal consultant for Convergent Computing. CCO specializes in design and implementation of Microsoft technologies. I lead CCO’s Unified Communications practice.
Windows Server 2003 R2 Unleashed: My first book as a named (front cover) author. I’m currently working on an OCS Unleashed title, also from SAMS publishing.