The Insider News

All Things D[^]:

One of the more intriguing concepts in the recent speculation about who will be the next CEO of Microsoft was raised recently: The difficulty of selecting between an exec who has business chops and one who is a tech product visionary.

ReadWrite[^]:

Nirvanix customers learned first hand what happens when cloud services go out of business. Here's how you can be prepared.

Infoworld[^]:

The toolkit can be used to keep IE11 off Windows machines without disabling Automatic Updates for all other Microsoft software

Forbes[^]:

It is safe to say that most people reading this probably don’t respect Microsoft very much. Asked to name the most innovative tech company, they’ll say Apple or Google. And they’ll do it with a straight face, while sitting in a chair made by Microsoft.

BetaNews[^]:

Steve Ballmer's departure from Microsoft will be a series of epitaphs written over the coming months. Many arm-chair pundits and analysts will scrutinize his 13-year tenure as chief executive, and you can expect him to be the scapegoat for all things wrong with Microsoft. Most assuredly, Ballmer could have done many things better, but he also contended with forces out of his control: government oversight for anti-competitive practices conducted under predecessor Bill Gates' leadership; maturing PC software market; and rise of the Internet as the new computing hub, among others.

Cliff Simpkins[^]:

Following today’s announcement of Windows Phone 8 Update 3 (8.0.10512), I’m pleased to introduce Windows Phone Preview for Developers, which will kick off later today. Windows Phone Preview for Developers gives you, our developer community, access to prerelease builds of Windows Phone updates on your dev phone before operating system updates generally are available to consumers. With the update in hand early, we hope that you can use the time to exercise your code on the update and verify that your app works as you expect. If you find issues, you can fix your app and get an update into the Store before your customers get the OS update.

TNW[^]:

It has only been three years since Apple introduced the iPad, and it has been a tremendous success ever since. That makes it all the more interesting to hear Steve Jobs convincingly dismiss tablets, at the first All Things Digital conference in 2003, ten years ago, to Walt Mossberg.

Charles Stross[^]:

I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar ...

The Motley Fool[^]:

Hewlett-Packard now sees Microsoft as a competitor. For years, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft had a strong partnership -- but evidently, those days are over. The widespread backlash to Windows 8, combined with Microsoft's decision to release its own, competing hardware, has alienated Hewlett-Packard.

Medium[^]:

I wanted to do everything right. I had ideas on how to make this place better than my earlier workplaces. I had studied the literature. Well tested and documented code, continuous integration, service oriented architectures, lean methodology—you name it.

Tech Radar[^]:

Of all the criticisms leveled at Microsoft, the "you're no innovator!" one must hurt the most: Microsoft has the Forrest Gump-esque ability to be present at every major technological development, and in many cases it was shipping innovative hardware, software and services years or even decades before the rest of the world caught up.

VentureBeat[^]:

Yet literally billions of dollars are wasted due to excess project failures, bug fixes, and maintenance nightmares. Surveys and studies have consistently shown that 50 to 75 percent of software projects are consumed by bug fixes and maintenance. One underlying root cause of this significant problem is the use of traditional imperative languages (Java, C family, Python, Ruby etc.), whose manual, low-level approach is very error-prone and generates spaghetti code that eats up the backend costs.

Reuters[^]:

State-controlled telecoms group Rostelecom plans an internet search engine named after the Sputnik satellite, Vedomosti newspaper said on Friday, though analysts said the aim to muscle into the highly competitive Russian market was doomed.