Microsoft’s bad news has a silver lining

Microsoft took a beating recently, like every other company in the free world, and has announced job cuts and missed earnings expectations.  As a Microsoft developer and someone who built a career by riding the coat tails of the software giant, this is very relevant to me and something I will be watching closely.  The news was a bit of a surprise.

Coming Soon…

I’ve been building a new tool at Ockham Research we call RazorWire.  It watches TV for you.  When stocks are mentioned on financial commentary media, we post what was talked about, what was said, and attach our research and information on that company to the event.  In addition, you’ll see the news history on each of our stock report pages.  I expect to release this next week. 

Bad News from Redmond

While working on some final touches to UI, I noticed a rash of news about MSFT.  I quietly considered what this might mean to the company and its future.  I, like the rest of the media and its audience, wondered if this might be the beginning of the end for a lot of things we’ve become accustomed to in our world. 

When Mega Giants Grow Up

Fortunately, Ned blogged about Microsoft yesterday, unbeknownst to me, and helped me understand why this is not really such a problem.  It sucks that they had to let some people go, yes.  However, Microsoft has grown up and they are no longer a growth investment like Google or Apple, they are a value investment like GE and Coke have been.  I don’t claim to be anything close to an expert in this regard, so read Ned’s awesome write up on why Microsoft is a good long term play right now.  For the techies reading this, this means you can keep relying on Microsoft to be strong despite the recent bad news.

http://blog.ockhamresearch.com/index.php/2009/01/microsoft-a-ben-graham-stock/

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VMWare is corrupt and their support sucks

Recently, I reiterated a problem I have been having with file corruption from TortoiseSVN while running on Windows Server 2003 under VMWare Fusion.   I am writing now because I have nothing better to do other than wait for chkdsk to finish on my Windows VM.  Yep, happened again.  I updated VMWare to the most recent version, as requested by the support person.  He then had the audacity to mark my issue resolved!  He closed the ticket.I use tortoiseSVN regularly on bare hardware Windows Server 2003 with no issues, ever.  I also have absolutely no issues with this computer running any other programs.  If there truly was a hard disk issue, I would see it elsewhere.  If this was a tortoise problem (entirely), I would see if on other servers.  It seems as though it occurs when I copy files from my mac to the vm.  When I do that, I have to change permissions on the copied files.  Today I copied an entire directory.  I usually copy one file at a time.Assuming I can recover once again, I may try a controlled experiment.  If I can reproduce this, perhaps I can get some resolution… Or maybe it really is time to consider Citrix.Â

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