Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think its alive, but close up its the walking dead. The first sign that Vista was in real trouble was when major vendors started to offer XP again on new machines. In February, Microsoft insisted it […]

An old, tested method of teaching a puppy to stop making messes in the house is to give him a swat on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when hes made a mistake. When it comes to Microsoft, though, I dont think even if you wiped its nose in its mess and swatted it […]

Listen carefully. Theyre my computers. Theyre not your computers. I choose to put Windows on some of them. I choose what applications go on them. I choose when, and how, to upgrade them. Is that clear? Well, none of that is clear to Microsoft. We now know— we dont suspect— we know that Microsoft automatically […]

Whatever else you can say about multimillionaire technology entrepreneur Michael Robertson—the founder of MP3.com; Linspire, a Linux distributor; and SIPhone, a VOIP company, to name but a few—he has chutzpah. In each of his business ventures, hes taken on giants, such as the music industry, Microsoft and Vonage. Now, with AjaxWindows, hes at it again, […]

Ask any security guru. Whats makes for better security, two-factor authentication or the typical one-step username/password combination? Even Homer “Burns Nuclear IT Assistant” Simpson would know that its two-step. Of course, Homer would probably think you were talking about dancing, but you get the point. So why arent we all carrying authentication cards for our […]

OK, so the biggest market for Apples new iPod Touch, and its newly reduced in price 8GB iPhone, is consumers. But, if you take a closer look at both youll see mobile devices that also make a great deal of business sense as well. When you first look at the iPod Touch, what youre likely […]

Standards expert and attorney Andrew Updegrove has predicted that on Sept. 4 the International Organization for Standards will announce that the draft ISO specification based on Microsofts Office Open XML formats failed to make the standardization grade. The voting to make Open XML an ISO standard closed on Sept. 2. The ISO is expected to […]

Microsoft conceded that it had been unsuccessful in its attempt to make its document formats, Open XML, an ISO standard in an early morning press release on Sept. 4. According to Microsoft, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) released the results of the preliminary ballot to participating National Body members for the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 […]

The IT nations long national nightmare is over. The Department of Justice, under the wise reign of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, has declared that the Microsoft monopoly has been broken by the antitrust settlement. Let the rejoicing begin! “The final judgments have been successful in protecting the development and distribution of middleware products and in […]

Starting in early August, beta versions of Windows Vista SP1 started to appear on BitTorrent sites such as Pirate Bay. Over the Aug. 24 weekend, a new beta has appeared on the BitTorrent sites. The first beta SP1 appeared on hacker sites in early August as a 3.2 GB DVD ISO. This version could only […]

For what I think will prove to be a cheap $500 million, XenSource has been picked up by Citrix Systems. Citrix, for those of you who dont know, has made a living for ages by providing Windows desktops and applications to remote users—first with MetaFrame and now with Presentation Server. So what, you ask? One […]

In 1997, which is when I started following Sun, the business, and not just its hardware and operating systems, it was a hardware company. Oh, Sun would talk about Solaris, and it would promote Java, but Sun really made its money from hardware. Specifically, Sun filled its piggy bank from servers and workstations built around […]