Kavmerica.com

Kavmerica.com usually doesn’t review technology but we are going to make an exception here because of the vast economic implications that the new version of Microsoft Windows carries with it. Recently we were able to get a hold of a beta version of the new operating system, Windows 7. It should be noted that some of the problems mentioned below will be fixed before the final version comes out. However, no doubt about it, Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) severely disappointed us.

Our test machine was setup to run NVRAID. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s when the computer uses software to make two or more hard drives appear as they are one disk. That’s where the trouble started, both Windows XP and Vista were able to detect this configuration without any problems, Windows 7 could not. Finally we opted to just do away with NVRAID and install it to a single hard disk. The Installation was rather straight forward after that and seemed to move along quickly.

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Apple announced today a 30 day free trial of iWork ’09.  Available Here

The computer “office” market is currently dominated Microsoft’s Office 2007.  Available Here as a 60 day free trial.  It is doubtful that iWork ’09 will make any serious inroads into what has become a very lucrative corporate market.  However, it should appease the Mac faithful and dampen any movement towards open source products like Open Office which is available freely.

The signs have been clear for some time now, Blockbuster is on its way out. It might be able to struggle on for a few more years but its business model is broken. Competitors such as RedBox and Netflix are eating up it’s market share left and right. Even worse the management at Blockbuster seems to have it’s head stuck in the sand. Their current strategy seems content to develop their business to maximize short term profit while paying no attention to long term needs.

Every time you turn around it seems like Netflix, Blockbuster’s online rival, is unveiling a new service.  Most recently they partnered with television giant, LG, to embed their service directly into LG’s HDTVs. That means for a fee you can stream movies directly to your new LG HDTV from Netflix. This announcement comes on the heels of Netflix and LG announcing that they would provide a similar service embedded into their new Blue-Ray players. On top of all that Netflix has also moved to embed their services in devices offered by Tivo, Microsoft Xbox 360, Roku and Samsung.  To their credit Blockbuster has also moved to embed their service onto different devices but they haven’t wrapped up as many big names as Netflix.

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In case you missed it a company called Citrix announced it is working on bringing a “Citrix Receiver” to the iPhone. What does that mean to you and me? Well with the Citrix Receiver you would be able to host almost any windows application on your server and have it pop right up on your iPhone. All the horsepower to run the application is provided by your server and the iPhone serves up the visual end of it. This will certainly help Apple penetrate further into the business sector which has been dominated by the RIM Blackberry line up until now.  It also means that the software library for the iPhone could be expanding enourmously through this method.

While remote desktop and VNC implementations have been available for both the iPhone and Blackberry for some time now this new software could be a game changer. Citrix will allow enterprises to put their desktop applications into the palm of their workforces hand… literally. Imagine being able to use the full version of Microsoft Office or your companies proprietary software anytime you need to just by reaching into your pocket.  The possibilities for increasing work force productivity are astounding.

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