Shel Israel posted up a pretty good interview with Michael Dell about Social Media in Dell. Dell seem to do a really good job at this, the various blogs and sites they use to connect to customers work well. They’re certainly far ahead of most hardware vendors I’ve spoken to recently. It’s good to see another big corporate really embracing the new way of doing things.
Mark Andreesen on MS/Yahoo
There’s good post on Marc’s blog about what the potential MS/Yahoo deal might mean for small start ups.
Wifi Digital Photo Frames – what a great idea!
It could be this is old news an I’m a bit behind, but last week my better half had me looking at digital photo frames for her mum. I’ve never really looked that had at these before, they always seemed like a bit of a gimmick and I knew that if I had one I’d soon get bored of transferring pics using SD cards. Having done some research though I find that there are a few companies now offering frames with wifi on board – which is cool by itself – but they’ve also started to appear with built in support for Flickr, Live, Webshots, RSS feeds and even email. What a great idea! Rather than continuously feeding your frame S cards, just point it at your Flickr photostream or at the interestingness RSS feed!
The two frames that I spotted were from estarling (RSS & Photobucket) and Digital Spectrum (Flickr, Live etc). Though I’m sure there are more out there.
I guess that’ll mean less usernames and passwords to remember…
MS makes a bid for Yahoo – $45 billion.
Sounds like good news to me as a consumer… It’s sad to see one of the original web pioneers absorbed (I still remember when the IMDB was still hosted at Cardiff University), but Yahoo has kinda lost it’s way and MS and Yahoo combined would pose pretty strong opposition for Google.
Putting aside the advertising side of things, Yahoo could be a great addition to the ‘Live’ side of MS, for example the prospect of Flickr and Photosynth coming together would be incredibly exciting.
Microsoft, Virtualisation and S+S
There’s a good post over at Vertigo discussing the future of virtualisation in MS. I started my career doing desktop deployment projects, so the idea of virtual desktops is something I’ve kept an eye on over the years. It one of those things that has been promising lots for a long time but never really delivered. I know there are some organisations using virtual desktops successfully, but from what I’ve seen it tends to be for very specific requirements, and as deployment of traditional OS’s has got easier uptake seems to have been quite limited.
The Calista deal is interesting because the technology has the potential to remove one of the big obstacles to wide scale adoption, the user experience. Alongside the other technologies in it’s portfolio MS should now be quite well placed to deliver true virtual and streamed desktops. How about a world where your PC boot’s off the network, a Hyper-V hypervisor is streamed into RAM and then connects to a VM desktop running on a server in an (MS Hosted?) data centre? Sounds kinda cool to me.