by alec on March 14, 2011
Later this week, Browsium Inc will officially launch UniBrows. I feel tempted to make a joke about cosmetic eyebrow products, but I’ll refrain. In fact, UniBrows is the IT department’s answer to Microsoft’s refusal to support the millions of enterprise line of business applications that were built for IE6, and won’t run on IE8. This is likely the biggest blocking issue for any IT department facing an upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. Microsoft’s stance is to ask their customers to “remediate” their applications to IE8. Remediate is a big word that means rewrite. Frankly, it’s surprising that Microsoft has chosen to abandon its customers in this fashion.
Nevertheless, Browsium solves this problem effectively and cleanly for the IT manager. It gives the IT manager the ability to define profiles specifying settings and configurations including browser engines, java versions and so on for individual sites in the organization. When the site is loaded into IE 8, the correct browser engine (IE 6, for example) is loaded transparently to the end user.
The IT manager simply creates a profile:
Specifies the rules for the profile:
and pushes it to user.
When a user hits a site that requires the profile, that profile is loaded. It even allows individual browser tabs to load their own profiles separately from other browser engines.
UniBrows is as close to seamless as anything I’ve ever seen. It solves a huge problem for Microsoft and their customers. Priced at what can only be described as a “no-brainer” for the corporation, I predict millions of seats will be sold.
by alec on October 22, 2009
Today is Windows 7 launch day, the day that Microsoft hopes to erase the ghosts of Windows Vista, and move forward. After many months of using the beta versions of Windows 7, I feel confident declaring it the best Windows yet. Windows 7 is solid, it performs well, and the rough edges of the new user experience pioneered in Windows Vista have been shaved off.
I run Windows 7 on a variety of hardware – a couple of Core2 Quad PC’s equipped with 6 and 8 gigabytes of RAM respectively, an Athlon 3800 single core with 2 gigabytes of RAM, a core2 Duo with 2 gigabytes of RAM, and an HP Mini 1000 with an Atom N270 single core processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM. Windows 7 performs well on them all. The single biggest performance factor is having sufficient RAM. Microsoft’s system requirements page says that 1 gigabyte of RAM is sufficient for Windows 7. In my experience with the beta, that’s not enough. 2 gigabytes is a requirement for acceptable performance. A gigabyte of RAM is a $30 to $50 investment – spend the money!
And what of Apple? Coming off outstanding financial results at the beginning of the week, Apple sought to trump Microsoft’s launch by announcing new products of their own. Nicely played!
In the short term, we shouldn’t expect Apple’s marketing tactics to take a new tack, even though Windows 7 is launched. Yes, it will be more difficult to attack Windows 7 than Windows Vista. However, the prize money in this battle is in shifting the upgraders – those who have held off on Windows Vista and are still on XP. Their computers are old, and many are not likely candidates for Windows 7 because of hardware constraints. Even if those computers are capable of running Windows 7, Windows XP is not a supported upgrade to Windows 7. Can those consumers be persuaded to move to Macintosh instead of buying a new PC?
DISCLOSURE: Until 2000 I was a Microsoft employee, and a member of the Windows team. I’m not a Microsoft shareholder (it has been a terrible investment, and I sold Microsoft out of my retirement savings portfolio years ago), nor do I hope to work for the company at any point in the future, which is to say I’ve no vested interest in seeing them succeed.
