Development

A trio of new products get released

There's been a lot of speculation about how a U.S. recession may impact the IT jobs market.

Paul Kim, U.S. head of marketing at Everex, must be a very busy guy right now. But he found time to send me an update on CloudBook availability on Friday night. Here's the list:

SaaS providers should do well in the coming economic downturn, predicts one SaaS executive

A digital Day of Reckoning is approaching, especially in government. Its arrival may be facilitated by a hurricane, or maybe a terrorist attack, a flu pandemic or even a series of simple retirements. We ain't the Krell

You can't download IT Blogwatch: in which Microsoft relents (slightly) on its decision to give Widows Vista SP1 to IT people at the same time as everyone else. Not to mention the weirdest big-screen error message ever...

Gregg Keizer reports:

Microsoft Corp. confirmed today that beta testers of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) can now download the final bits of the update, [but] it will not make the code available to IT pros and developers who subscribe to TechNet or the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) until later this month ...

Citrix hopes its Platinum edition of XenServer will yield gold for the company

There's bad IT. And there's dumb IT. One major hotel chain has a pretty dumb system for its guests.

After months of development and testing, this pilot fish and his co-worker roll out their Web-based application to users -- and it turns out to be almost unusable.

A virtual testing world can save IT operations from making mistakes in production systems

One vendor wants to eliminate "crap" from business correspondence

Whenever Microsoft Corp. eschews an open standard (think the OpenDocument Format, aka ODF), it gets pilloried. Whenever it embraces one, as it confirmed Thursday it will do with DataPortability.org, fears rise that Redmond will twist it to its own advantage, (think Java) or, failing that, sabotage it. (ActiveX)

A South American outsourcer makes his case for choosing the right development team

Interested in getting a non-Microsoft/IBM reaction to the news that Big Blue was supporting Office Open XML in a handful of its products, I talked to Sam Hiser, one of the heads of the OpenDocument Foundation Inc., a pro ODF group which Hiser dissolved late last year after becoming disillusioned with the document format. His views were surprising and thought-provoking.

You'd think Target.com must dislike blind people by the way it's fighting to keep its Web site inaccessible to the visually impaired