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  At last, Windows Live Messenger has a Web interface

  Publié: avril 22, 2009, 1:49pm CEST par Angela Gunn

  By Angela Gunn, Betanews

  Better late than, um... what took so long, again? Never mind: Microsoft's release this week of a Web interface to its Windows Live Messenger instant-messaging service is good news for users in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the UK and the US. (The rest of you are going to have to wait.)

  

  The interface can be reached from one's Windows Live Hotmail or People pages -- in other words, from any computer that can get online. (It worked fine from my Mac and Linux boxes, and from within Firefox.) Sign in as usual and there's a Messenger option in the upper-right corner; you can sign in or, if you need your privacy at the moment, you can ignore it.

  If you choose to operate from the People page, you can use your contact list to speed things along; clicking each contact's icon gives a picklist, and on that picklist is a send-IM option that shows that person's status. From Hotmail, you can see the IM status for anyone who's sent you mail, as long as you've already become one of their Messenger contacts.

  Our light testing on Tuesday revealed that it's functional if not yet as slick as that offered by, for instance, AIM or even Gchat. It's not yet a multimedia tool; there's no video and no photo sharing. We'd like to have seen the ability to sort our contacts by availability, too. And we noticed some quirky behavior with displaying which of our pals was and wasn't online. (It's possible that the display inconsistency had more to do with our friends' antics, though.)

  Being a Microsoft offering, it's a good bet that the functionality will indeed be smoothed over time. In any case, it's a tiny welcome nod to increased openness coming from Redmond; if Messenger is your IM of choice, this ought to simplify quick-and-dirty messaging in a pinch.

  Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

  

  
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  Yahoo earnings down, but this time there's a $@)#! plan

  Publié: avril 22, 2009, 12:55am CEST par Angela Gunn

  By Angela Gunn, Betanews

  No surprises in the Yahoo earnings call on Tuesday, but not much joy either: EPS for the search giant for Q1 weighed in at a feather-light 8 cents, down 29 cents (or 78%, if you prefer) year-over-year. Net income was $118 million on revenue of $1.58 billion.

  Also: CEO Carol Bartz dropped the f-bomb near the end of the call. It may not be the most upbeat hour of the earnings-report season these days, but under Bartz's charge Yahoo's calls are, heaven knows, never dull.

  The take-no-prisoners CEO -- she kicked cancer's butt, she can do as much for you, pal -- described her first 99 days at the company as "amazing and busy," stating that she has framed three goals to make Yahoo big and strong again: globalizing the platform, investing in the ads business, and rolling out better products for the users. That does not include random investments in non-core businesses, and Yahoo will continue to slim down its portfolio, as they say.

  The company also said during the call that it plans an additional 5% staff reduction, which works out to around 700 employees. Most of those staffers will get their notice within the next two weeks.

  The quarter ahead doesn't look much better. Blame the seasonal downturns or the economy or what you will, but the company says it expects to bring in between $1.425 billion and $1.625 billion. Income from operations is expected to come in between $80 million and $90 million.

  About about that Anglo-Saxon language excursion there near the end: The subject was engineering, or more specifically how the people who actually do something useful at Yahoo are currently crushed under the weight of multiple layers of product managers -- one manager for every three engineers, she estimates. Bartz agrees that it's excessive: "We have a lot of people running around here telling engineers what to do, but no one is f*****g doing anything."

  Well put and well observed, most Yahoo-watchers would say -- and if the changes she's shepherding through are going to fix those problems and by extension the bottom line, it's hard to imagine shareholders or anyone else begrudging her some frank language.

  Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

  

  
• 

  VMware launches 'cloud OS' for SMBs, hosters and enterprises

  Publié: avril 22, 2009, 12:20am CEST par Jacqueline Emigh

  By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

  At a large-scale rollout today, VMware and blue-chip partners filled in the details on a cloud-oriented "virtualization operating system" that's been hinted more and more about since its initial preview at an EMC customer conference last fall.

  Essentially, vSphere 4 "slides in a new layer of software" for bringing together "islands" of server software running in different operating environments, said VMWare CEO Paul Maritz, speaking at an event that also featured live appearances by top brass from allies Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.

  "It's de rigeur these days when giving a presentation to talk about 'the cloud," Maritz admitted. "I'm going to be no exception," he added, asserting that, to him, "cloud" is simply "shorthand" for "cutting the complexity" out of computing.

  Reiterating a long-term strategy of virtual "private clouds" articulated in Cannes, France during February, Maritz said today that vSphere 4 will be followed by a "steady tempo" of related announcements over the next 18 months. Under the long-term scenario, customers will be able to create clouds that keep the security, manageability, and high availability of the internal computing environment while also accessing applications and services from one or more external clouds.

  Specifically, the product announced today allows up to eight Intel Xeon 5500 processors to function as a single virtual machine (VM), for operating database and other mission critical applications, said VMware CTO Jeff Nick.

  But beyond Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus versions, VMware will also offer an edition for SMBs known as "Essentials Plus," to be "affordably priced" at $166 per processor.

  With Essentials Plus, smaller businesses will be able to build virtualized "mini data centers" on just a few servers, said Nick. The CD for the "virtual OS" went gold today, and shipment is slated for later this quarter.

  In addition to greater scalability than VMware's earlier virtualization software, vSphere brings a new user interface and capabilities across areas that include efficiency, control and choice, said Nick, who also talked about the benefits of virtualization for cutting costs through server virtualization.

  On a Sun Fire 15K server, Nick demo'd new features such as vCenter Host Profiles, for quickly rolling out configuration changes to multiple servers, and vStorage Thin Provisioning.

  In a reference to Oracle's surprise buyout of Sun on Monday, a VMware staffer playfully replaced an "IBM" sign attached to the Fire server with an "Oracle" placard. "I like the 'Oracle Fire.' That's good," Nick quipped.

  Maritz contended that while IBM has sometimes taken credit for "inventing virtualization," VMware was the first to recognize -- soon after its founding in 1998 -- the potential for virtualization across multiple servers.

  But IBM -- a company that was in talks to buy Sun before Oracle entered the picture -- was among a long list of VMWare hardware, software, and hosting partners making video testimonials for vSphere 4 at the event.

  "BlackBerry users tend to think of BlackBerry as a mission critical application," remarked Peter Walker, senior director of software product management at RIM, in one of the testimonials.

  Maritz also mentioned that VMware continues to work on a client-side initiative called VMware View, for installing "software to people" independently of whether they're using a "thin client" or "a thick client like a laptop."

  Speaking live, Dell Inc. Chairman and CEO Michael Dell said that his company plans to expand support beyond the four Dell products now supporting VMware View.

  Taking note of individual efforts of various VMware partners, Joe Tucci -- VMware's chairman of the board, and CEO of EMC -- maintained that Dell is in "excellent position" to take advantage of VMware's client-side virtualization.

  In announcing its own x86-based cloud storage system earlier this month, EMC -- which holds a majority interest in VMware -- said that the will be available for VMware first, and on Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform later.

  Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009