software

Note: For readers of this blog, below is the response I posted to a gripe from Adobe Systems' John Dowdell about an earlier blog posting of mine.

As the author of both the headline and the blog, I'm glad you took the time to write down your thoughts, not just curse me inwardly, because it affords me the opportunity to offer the following response. It is, as the blogosphere cliche goes, a conversation.

The headline is perhaps a bit snarky, but I don't think it's wholly inaccurate. John Loiacono took pains to point out the flaws of … Read more

In advance of Labor Day weekend and its inevitable coast-to-coast traffic jams, Microsoft is releasing Streets & Trips 2008 software. Among the new features in the deluxe edition are live traffic updates, information on nearby gas prices, and estimates of what filling up along the journey will cost for that Hummer, Prius, or whatever else you're driving. It also hooks up to Live Search maps that you can mark up, and which chart businesses including hotels, snack spots and camping areas.

Despite such helpful features, this product seems like an odd fit in the market when you can get … Read more

Adobe Systems has embraced open-source software for some products, but its core Creative Suite line looks like it'll remain proprietary.

In a blog posting Sunday, Adobe's top creative products executive, John Loiacono, made unflattering remarks about open-source alternatives whose free cost is offset by the time that creative pros have to spend fiddling. "Time is money," he opines, not without merit, and links to a blog posting by Eric Vreeland, who observed, "Debugging recent installs of certain open-source software has wasted immense amounts of my spare time; charged at my hourly rate these hours represent … Read more

I've always liked Jive Software. My company, Alfresco, is used in conjunction with Jive's products in a range of accounts, and so I've had the chance to talk directly with Jive's customers. They all say the same thing: Jive's "lightweight" collaboration provides heavy-duty benefits at a significant cost advantage.

Now Jive is getting $15 million from Sequoia to expand and grow its business. It couldn't have come at a better time.… Read more

Like so much else on the Internet, you have to be skeptical about the star ratings of software. Perhaps you suspected this, but now there is proof.

A software developer in the U.K., Andy Brice, was suspicious about the ratings assigned to his software, so he did a test--a lab experiment if you will. He started with a plain text file that said "this program does nothing at all" a few times. Then he renamed the file so that it ended with ".exe" and submitted it to 1,033 download sites. The "program," … Read more

Fueled by a round of venture capital, Jive Software is pushing into the corporate technology market with lightweight Web collaboration software.

The company is expected to announce next week that Sequoia Capital has invested $15 million into Jive Software which has been self-funded and profitable until now.

Jive, perhaps best known for its online forum software, is focusing the company on Clearspace, a product first written about here and commercially introduced earlier this year.

The software is meant to be a lightweight alternative to more structured document management applications like Microsoft's SharePoint. With Clearspace, end users can start wikis, … Read more

It's been nearly a year since Dave Duffield unveiled his on-demand enterprise applications company Workday, with the launch of his Workday Human Capital Management software.

And since that time, Duffield and Co. have been toiling away to build out the rest of his on-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) vision. The PeopleSoft founder has added another piece to his project.

A beta version of Workday Financials was released Monday. The software includes core accounting features such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and financial accounting and reporting.

In the to-be-added category, the company plans to add such features as support for … Read more

In my last posting about DropMyRights, I used the Trend Micro Transaction Guard utility as an example of a Java applet installing software while running inside a restricted instance of Firefox.

Transaction Guard was only used to illustrate a point, the reference was not an endorsement of the product, which I have hardly any experience with. Since writing the last posting, I have tried to use Transaction Guard many times from three different Windows XP machines over the space of two days. Not once have I been able to install it. It consistently fails with the "network connection not … Read more

LogMeIn. GoToMyPC. Radmin. CrossLoop. MyIVO. Envision, if you will, a fierce battle waged by these multiple armies, a mad melee of digital pikes, longbows, broadswords, dotanuki and, oh, an anachronistic Sherman tank for fun, and you've got a very vivid imagination.

It's also not a bad metaphor for the remote access wars, which are currently roiling in a frothy boil. LogMeIn Ignition is upping their ante. It's a nifty little self-contained program that you install on your desktop, then copy the EXE onto a portable device such as an iPod, flash drive or a BlackBerry. Connect that device to any PC, double-click on Ignition and you've got instant access to any of the machines saved in your LogMeIn account.

… Read more