Back in January, I wrote a column, “I want more from Firefox,” in which I described how my growing affection for Web applications was coming into conflict with my growing impatience with the immaturity of Web browsers as application hosts. Isolation between the Web pages or apps running atop my browser is what I sought from Firefox, for the purposes both of security and of reliability. Shortly after I wrote this column, I managed to achieve a measure of the…

During my recent interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, I was struck by his assertion that if you don’t need–and aren’t getting–bulletproof uptime from your desktop operating system, then it doesn’t make sense to be paying for it. He has a good point. The fundamental job of an operating system is running applications and managing hardware. There are both free and for-a-fee operating system options, which, given requisite hardware and application maker support, perform their core go-between task similarly…

Our own Scott Ferguson is reporting today on the licensing snafu stemming from the ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 that VMware began shipping on Aug. 1: VMware released an alert Aug. 12 to warn customers and partners about problems with an update to the 3.5 version of VMware ESX and ESXi virtualization products. The update is causing disruptions and virtual machines are failing to power on. VMware has posted a temporary fix and is working to fix the update. Three…

Lately there’s been a lot of chatter about an operating system merger made in tech echo chamber heaven: Symbian plus Android. Most recently my colleague over at the Storage Station recounted a conversation between himself and Nokia Forum Director Tom Libretto that called to mind a familiar movie scene. So you’re telling me there’s a chance! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX5jNnDMfxA&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0] Symbian is the popular mobile operating system developed by Nokia and others, the exclusive rights to which Nokia recently purchased from its…

Looking out at yesterday’s Amazon S3 outage through his Microsoft Watch-colored glasses, my colleague Joe Wilcox views the hosted storage slip-up as a selling point 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 pursue a blended strategy, based on traditional on-premises software, complemented by hosted services where appropriate. The software plus services strategy makes a lot of sense,…

Back in March, when Apple unveiled the details of its eventual iPhone 2.0 upgrade, I opined that the firm 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 iPhone will become a popular enterprise device. However, as with all Apple products, embracing the iPhone means relinquishing to The Steve some of the control…

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 of paying customers access their hardware devices and software applications remain smudged and, in some places, cracked. The best example of this misplaced focus relates…

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. While the phrase “small formatting inconsistencies” sums up the situation fairly accurately, organizations and individuals out to bring the open-source suite into their application mix could use a more rigorous means of measuring OpenOffice.org’s handling of MS Office formats. That’s why, when Adobe briefed me…

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 the Windows shell, as the seed from which excitement about the forthcoming Windows Seven is supposed to grow. In the near future, Windows users will…

When Microsoft, some time in the first half of 2009, makes good on its recent pledge to roll full support for the OpenDocument format into a second service pack for Office 2007, my reaction will be, “It’s about time.” Since most Office users would be happy to continue using Microsoft’s old binary formats, and since those for whom open standards are important would probably prefer ODF or PDF formats anyhow, I won’t be surprised if OOXML quietly dies before the…