PC Market
Giga, 12/2/02: Quarterly PC Vendor and Market Update: Fourth Quarter 2002
Rob Enderle
World economic conditions continue to be dire and the quarter continues to be overshadowed by the threat of war in the Middle East, increasing security threats (both related and unrelated) and aggressive market moves by many of the major and minor vendors. There has been no major event that will drive money back into the PC segment and Giga continues to track efforts to extend the service life of PC equipment. On the positive side, however, recent financial results from Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell are better than expected, indicating there may be some improvement in the segment (at least on the corporate side).
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Infoworld, 12/5/02: Slower PC replacement weighs on growth, Gartner says
By Michael Kramer
TAIPEI (REUTERS) -- Global sales growth of personal computers will be much slower in 2003 than previously thought as improving technology and shrinking budgets convince corporations to hang on to their old computers, a technology research firm says.
Gartner Dataquest slashed its forecast for 2003 worldwide growth in personal computer (PC) sales to about nine percent from a 14-percent forecast made at the beginning of 2002, researcher Charles Smulders told Reuters on Thursday.
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IT Services
Giga, 12/2/02: Managing IT as a Service: A Federated Model
Jean-Pierre Garbani
Managing IT as a service seems to be the goal for many organizations. However, despite abundant literature and many claims from product vendors, implementation faces multiple hurdles. Most IT operations are organized along technical domains, such as network, server and database, and this determines the skills and consequently the processes used. Compounding the problem, infrastructure management vendors provide products that fundamentally address these competency silos, because they are by far the largest and easiest market to reach.
To be efficient, an IT service management model requires cross-domain coordination in order to understand and minimize the business impact of infrastructure problems. Giga believes that only a federated approach provides the necessary transformation of roles and responsibilities as well as a model for sharing infrastructure management data and improving the service to end users.
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Giga, 12/4/02: Best Practices for Investing in Service Availability
Jean-Pierre Garbani
There are two major approaches to measuring service availability and they determine the type of investment. The first is the most traditional, which measures availability of devices and fundamentally uses the formula: Availability = Mean Time Between Failures / (Mean Time Between Failures + Mean Time To Repair).
The other view of availability is “the probability for an infrastructure to perform a desired function.” This is a far broader view, which includes all components and especially applications, servers, storage, etc. This is increasingly considered as the basis for service availability.
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Giga, 12/3/02: Criteria for Selection: Server Performance Management Suites
There is a confusing array of server performance monitoring products available — from those collecting information at the operating system level to the application or subsystem monitoring products. It is difficult to distinguish the grain from the chaff between agentless techniques that claim efficiency to sophisticated suites claiming effectiveness. The technology alone should not be the main selection criterion. Rather, a number of fundamentals should be considered.
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Microsoft
Giga, 12/2/02: GigaWeb Survey Shows Office XP Dominates, but Migration Patterns Will Erode Microsoft’s Share
Ken Smiley
Giga surveyed its client base this past fall to determine market shares, trends and intentions with regard to office productivity suites. The survey results represented nearly 1.2 million desktops. The first portion of the survey gauged the existing status of the market (see IdeaByte, GigaWeb Survey Shows Microsoft Office Has Largest Share, but Upgrades Slowing, Ken Smiley), while the next portion attempted to gauge the state of flux in the market and its future direction. Participants were asked whether or not they were currently evaluating an alternative suite or an upgrade to their existing suite. The results shown in the following table have some interesting implications.
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Giga, 12/2/02: GigaWeb Survey Shows Microsoft Office Has Largest Share, but Upgrades Slowing
Ken Smiley
Organizations want to be certain that they are not about to make a mistake with their next office suite deployment and require reassurance that they are in most instances similarly situated to their partners and competitors. Microsoft does not publish figures for individual sales of its Office product by version, although an examination of Microsoft’s annual financial reports indicates that sales from all versions of Office combined add up to Microsoft’s second largest source of revenue. With recent Microsoft licensing changes there has been a significant amount of press coverage surrounding pricing and Microsoft competitors. As is often the case with such coverage, it isn’t possible to determine whether or not any particular installation or migration represents a trend in the industry. Therefore, this past fall Giga embarked on a survey of its client base with respect to office productivity suites deployed and future plans for suite upgrades. The survey results encompassed almost 1.2 million desktops and produced some interesting results, as shown in the following figure.
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Internetnews.Com, 12/5/02: Microsoft Introduces New IE, Outlook Fixes
By Clint Boulton
Microsoft late Wednesday introduced two new security patches which seal moderate flaws in versions 5.5. and 6.0 of its Internet Explorer browser and Outlook 2002.
The IE flaw exists in the software's cross-domain security model because the security checks that IE carries out when particular object caching techniques are used in Web pages are incomplete. This could allow a Web site in one domain access to information in another, including the user's PC.
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PC World, 1/03: Microsoft's Next Office: More Than Meets the Eye
Outlook redo, enhanced XML support are key improvements.
Yardena Arar
Microsoft's latest biennial remodel of Office is now in beta testing. We took it out for a spin. Result? Except for a major overhaul of Outlook, the upgrade looks much like today's model--on the surface.
But under the hood, the new version of the market-leading productivity suite--which is due to ship in mid-2003 and requires Windows XP or Win 2000--introduces changes that could eventually be significant for individuals and businesses alike.
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Mobile
The New York Times, 12/6/02: High-Speed Wireless Internet Network Is Planned
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 5 — The wireless technology known as WiFi, which allows users of personal and hand-held computers to connect to the Internet at high speed without cables, got a significant stamp of approval today when AT&T, I.B.M. and Intel announced a new company to create a nationwide network.
The unruly technology, which has largely been a playground for hackers, hobbyists and high-technology start-ups, is already sprouting mushroomlike in coffee shops, bookstores, airports, hotels, homes, businesses and even a few parks.
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ZDNet, 12/6/02: 3G networks deliver at a snail's pace
By Ben Charny
Several years back, when wireless carriers broke ground on third-generation cell phone networks, some businesses bragged of systems fast enough to blow by the 56kbps experience of Web providers like America Online.
But with those 3G wireless networks now up and running, one thing's clear: The same landline dial-up services the carriers hoped to challenge aren't having any trouble keeping up--in fact, they're faster.
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Security
TechWeb, 12/5/02: Sophos Names Top 10 Viruses Of The Year
By Mitch Wagner, TechWeb News
The biggest virus of 2002 was also the one with the most staying power. The Klez virus infected users for seven months, said antivirus vendor Sophos, which released on Thursday a top 10 list of the nagging, costly and seemingly endless security problems.
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