David M Smith

Consumerization has long been a good thing and a not so good thing for Microsoft. As one of very few companies with a significant presence in both consumer and enterprise markets, it is positioned to take advantage of that crossover.  However, as it has gained the trust of IT, it is reluctant to be seen [...]

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Controversial issues tend to attract the lunatic fringe to the poles of those issues. We see it all the time in politics. We also see it in cloud computing.    In the cloud case, the poles are public cloud and private cloud.  And the extremes bring out the lunatic fringes on both sides.
First the public [...]

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Yesterday I blogged about this and I had a couple of further thoughts.
First, my colleague Nick Gall brought to my attention that I may have implied accidentally about the capabilities of GCF (Google Chrome Frame).
GCF does not replace the IE renderer as the default renderer, it merely adds GCF as an optional renderer that [...]

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Well, it really depends on what you think the “IE problem” is. If you haven’t heard about Google’s Chrome Frame, it’s a plugin for IE (6, 7, and that basically replaces the IE rendering engine with Google’s Chrome.  It has gotten a lot of attention as an “IE killer”. It allows IE users (especially [...]

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Not that there isn’t already too much in this world, but hey its a cool headline…
Recently there was another short gmail outage. and it sparked the usual outrage over how unreliable cloud computing is and how OMG nobody should use it etc., etc. Of course people wasted more time complaining about the outage that [...]

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According to one of my favorite philosophers, Yogi Berra, Its hard to predict, especially the future”. He’s right but it doesn’t stop many people from trying. In fact predicting the future is essential to many aspects of our lives – in business, and beyond. Many professionals have the need to accurately predict outcomes [...]

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I’ve come to view “software upgrade” as a term that meant, yes, “a software upgrade, but you will really need a hardware upgrade if you hope to actually use it even for what you used to use it for”. Especially with new OS versions. It has been a given that new versions of OSes [...]

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A relatively obscure acquisition (Torch Mobile, a Toronto browser specialist, by RIM, makers of BlackBerry) highlighted and reinforced something I’d been thinking about for a while: that virtually all major companies have now or are moving towards webkit and HTML5.  RIM has made a lot of progress with its own browser in recent years, but [...]

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As leader of Gartner’s cloud computing agenda, I don’t normally respond to random blog posts, but this  from James Watters in Siliconangle requires some response. I will limit it to the facts and leave readers to draw their own conclusions. (This includes references to Gartner published research which requires a subscription to see the entire [...]

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My daughter (who is now 11), as most kids today, are very familiar with technology and they still say the darn-est things.   When she was 3, she came into my office and commented that I had a lot of “polluters”.  How right she was!
The latest example occurred when I was on a recent business trip [...]

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