Website Posting About Cisco Flaw Triggers Law Firm Letter

While the Internet is abuzz with bloggers talking about Cicso’s huge PR problem it has created by going after an individual who discovered a flaw in their products, the Company apparently has not decided to ease up at all.

What Might Dr. Lee Do With a Year Off Between Jobs?

King County Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez has granted a temporary restraining order to prohibit Kai-Fu Lee, a former top level executive at Microsoft, from joining rival Google. Full story here.

By now just about everyone knows Microsoft has won the first battle. But will they win the personnel poaching war? Who knows.

HP Says ‘I Can Name That Tune in Zero Notes.’ It’s Bye Bye Apple iPod

What’s up with this? Did someone at Microsoft call someone at HP?

It was with great fanfare that Hewlett-Packard announced in January 2004 that it would begin selling Apple’s digital music player, the iPod, in a deal that was cast as a major step forward for both companies. Earlier this week, however, Hewlett-Packard quietly retreated from that deal when it informed Apple it would stop selling the iPod.

Turns out, if you read the whole piece, HP didn’t sell that many iPods anyway. The story suggests this is HP CEO Hurd ridding the company of everything the former CEO Carleton (Carley) S. Fiorina touched. Maybe. Maybe not. What’s your read?

U.S. Patent & Trademark Office Opens Web Site for SMBs

The Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office…has launched a Web site… dedicated to small businesses and protecting their intellectual property (IP), both in the U.S. and abroad… The Web site provides information to help small businesses, home business owners, inventors and other entrepreneurs decide when, where and how to file for intellectual property protection, covering patents, trademarks and copyrights.

Full story from the press release here.

$17M Later, School System Wishes It Had Never Bought Oracle

If this can happen to a customer who spends $17 million for a big-time software solution, what might that imply for the average SMB thinking of going uptown to one of the big enterprise solution providers?

This is about an Oracle accounting solution installed in the Prince George’s County Public Schools. The horror story comes out of this report in Gazette.net serving southern Maryland.

ZDNet, in Full Review, Gives Raves to Latest WS_FTP 2006 Professional Product

The full review can be found here.

Bottom line is that out of a possible best rating of 10, Ipswitch garnered an 8.9. That’s based on a 9.5 rating for features, a 9 for set-up and ease of use, a 9 for performance and an 8 for support.

WS_FTP Professional 2006 is one of the most secure ways to transfer files. This mature FTP client includes advanced security (SSL, SSH and PGP) and file management — everything you would expect from an FTP client. In addition, security and transfer options now provide up to 256-bit encryption and support for HTTP and HTTPS transfers; there’s also OpenPGP public key/private key encryption, extensive protocol support, email notifications and a new compression utility that allows you to zip and unzip files on the fly.

Know what else? Amoing other things, it’s not a beta; it’s not a sneak preview; it’s not four years late; and, it doesn’t come with ten consultant specialists to install.

IPTV Too Little Too Late from Microsoft?

This from Investor’s Business.

Phone companies want their IPTV, but it’s not certain they want Microsoft’s IPTV… Microsoft, the world’s No. 1 software company, sees IPTV as a potentially lucrative new arena for growth, but a number of smaller companies have beaten it to the punch. And one big company, Siemens (NYSE:SI – News), has jumped into the market by buying one of the small companies. This puts Microsoft in the rare position of not being the front-runner.

Priceless Quote From Tim Wilson about Microsoft’s Managed Security Provider Plans

It’s a bit like buying marriage counseling services from Elizabeth Taylor.

The headline on this Network Computing article: Is Microsoft’s Foray Into MSP Market Folly?

CA Admits It Can’t Find New Customers to Offset Rate of Current Customer Drop Outs

CA realized a 30 percent decline in total bookings for the quarter over the same period a year ago.

Officials attributed that drop to a change in CA’s sales compensation plan, which was redesigned to spur new product sales rather than focus on re-signing existing customers.

Oops!

Full earnings story here.

Group VP at Microsoft In Charge of Windows Doesn’t Know if Vista is On Schedule or Not

For the record, Jim Allchin is a decent guy. It’s not his fault necessarily that he’s a group vice president at the world’s leading software company and in charge of an operating system that is on 90% or more of all desktops all over the world.

It is his fault that he can’t say or doesn’t know whether or not Vista is on schedule.

Here’s the question CNET asked him just the other day:

Microsoft is also releasing a test version of the next server operating system. How far along is that? Is it behind the development of the desktop OS?

Jim’s answer:

…is it behind? I don’t know. We have a lot of features to put in both products still, so I don’t know how to judge that.