Business Software Week in Review: Week of July 9-13, 2012
Business Software Week in Review gathers the most interesting news items from the past week in one convenient post. Go into the weekend knowing you didn’t miss anything important this week.
Microsoft Announces Windows 8, Acquires Perceptive Pixel, Launches Angel Fund
On Monday, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Perceptive Pixel, a manufacturer of large touchscreens (we wrote about it here). With this acquisition, Microsoft is trying to stay competitive in the mobile computing space. According to research group Nielsen, the top two smartphone providers are, unsurprisingly, Android and iPhone, leaving Microsoft to battle the likes of RIM for the third place. The company also set the official Windows 8 release date for October ’12, but will this new release mirror the success of Windows 7 or be a disaster like Vista? And in what turned out to be a busy week for the software giant, they also announced their new angel fund and incubator program, Bing Fund, which at first will be focused on startups that are active in the mobile and web experiences space.
Rackspace Adds Windows Server 2012, New Cloud Computing Statistics Revealed
Cloud hosting provider Rackspace announced support for the upcoming Windows Server 2012. Rackspace acquired a consulting company, SharePoint911, to be able to deliver the same high-quality (they call it “fanatical”) support as they do for their other services.
Speaking of cloud computing, VC firm North Bridge recently released a study on the continued popularity of the cloud, citing scalability as a key reason for cloud adoption, while security remains most people’s #1 concern.
Yahoo Security Breach
For those of you needing a good reason to switch away from Yahoo, 450.000 Yahoo passwords were hacked this week by an organization that calls itself D33DS Company. How did they do this? By way of “SQL injection vulnerability, where databases are accessed through inadequately filtered parameters passing through the web front end.” As of this writing, Yahoo has not commented on the security breach or provided a phone number for D33Ds, in case you wanted to buy your ex’s email password from them.
Google Chrome 20 vs. Firefox 3.5 Beta
Yahoo’s big competitor, Google, had better news this week. Chrome 20 is on its way, together with updates to Google Drive and offline mode for Google Docs. Not to be outdone by its bigger brother, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 beta, promising better performance and private browsing mode.
This Week on Business-Software.com
And on Business-Software.com? We talked to Piston Cloud and OpsCode about the challenges and opportunities of the cloud. We reviewed Google Drive and found it to be an unnecessary app. We took a closer look at Atlassian and Jive, two newer companies trying to be the next big thing, as well as a current big thing, Yammer. We listed the top 5 free CRM solutions, because who can look a gift horse in the mouth? And finally, we revealed the darker side of cloud computing.
- Top Expert
N. Rowan
Program Research, Editor, Expert in ERP, Cloud, Financial Automation
