Jason Brooks

Looking out at yesterday’s Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) outage through his Microsoft Watch-colored glasses, my colleague Joe Wilcox views the hosted storage slip-up as a selling point for Microsoft’s Software-plus-Services twist on cloud computing. The Software-plus-Services pitch goes something like this: Rather than jump into cloud-based services with both feet, organizations and individuals should […]

Back in March, when Apple unveiled the details of its eventual iPhone 2.0 upgrade, I opined that the company was on its way to seizing a slice of an enterprise smart-phone market in which the BlackBerry and the Treo currently reign. Now that I’ve tested the 2.0 firmware myself, I do still believe that the […]

Microsoft on July 8 unveiled pricing information for its new Online Services initiative, in which the software titan wraps Microsoft-hosted Exchange and SharePoint services into a few aggressively priced subscription-based offerings.While almost every organization relies upon e-mail (and, to a lesser extent, collaboration services), there are very few organizations for which e-mail server management expertise […]

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or S3, has emerged as popular storage option for Web-based businesses. However, S3 lacks a front end that’s suitable for direct use by individuals and organizations looking to tap the service-and its attractive 15 cents per gigabyte per month pricing-for their own online storage and backup needs. Enter Jungle Disk 2.0, […]

Last week in this space, I criticized Microsoft for continuing to burn cycles on superficial add-ons, such as multi-touch support in Windows Seven, while more significant pain points for Windows customers remain under-addressed. As I see it, Microsoft is busying itself tacking up fanciful moldings around its flagship product while the Windows through which millions […]

When considering alternatives to Microsoft’s Office productivity suite, one of the most important issues to evaluate is that of the success with which Office rivals such as OpenOffice.org can handle Microsoft’s ubiquitous binary file formats. Over the past few years, eWEEK Labs has approached the MS Office to OpenOffice.org file format fidelity issue several times. […]

If you asked a thousand people what Microsoft could do to Windows to improve the product, would even one of them describe a yearning to use his or her fingers to move objects around on a Windows desktop? And yet, as demonstrated at the recent D6 conference, Microsoft has chosen this feature, multitouch support for […]

When Microsoft, some time in the first half of 2009, makes good on its recent pledge to roll full support for the Open Document format into a second service pack for Office 2007, my reaction will be, “It’s about time.” In the meantime, we’re left to ponder why Microsoft has changed its mind about embracing […]

A couple of days ago, my colleague Andrew Garcia forwarded me what seems like the 20th plea I’ve seen over the past couple of years to call or write my representatives in Congress to Save Net Radio. This latest plea came from Pandora.com, a fantastic Internet-based radio station that holds more claim on my online […]

It’s been nearly three years since Sun Microsystems kicked off its OpenSolaris project by releasing most of the code that comprises its Solaris operating system under an open-source license. And yet, it’s only just now, with the release of the first official distribution of OpenSolaris, that the project begins in earnest. I, like most people […]

While gathering support contract pricing information for my Ubuntu 8.04 review, I noticed a somewhat surprising item listed among the benefits of paying Canonical for a Linux distribution the company gives away for free: “Protect your business against IP infringement claimsThe Ubuntu Assurance from Canonical covers your business for claims of intellectual property infringements arising […]

Today while trolling around on Slashdot I came across this open-source development flareup tidbit: “Slashdot | Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork “Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 2.4, the ability to manually […]