The VAR Guy

While working from home today, The VAR Guy noticed a package at his front door. It was a generic brown shipping box, about the size of a brick. Hmmm. Had The VAR Guy’s new iPhone arrived a little early? Sort of.

Apparently, many PC buyers prefer Microsoft’s older, poorly secured operating system rather than the shiny new Windows Vista. In fact, Dell has decided to re-introduce Windows XP on some of its consumer PCs, effective immediately. Next up: There’s a high possibility that Dell will introduce PCs with Ubuntu Linux, The VAR Guy hears.

The VAR Guy has a message for Redmond and the PC industry. It’s time to put an end to craplets, those “useless, annoying trial versions of programs” that are packed onto new Windows PCs, as the Wall Street Journal put it today.

You’ve heard the hype about managed services. The VAR Guy wanted a reality check. So he dialed Corporate Network Services Inc., a solutions provider that recently embraced managed services as part of an ambitious business transformation that most VARs have yet to begin. What was the outcome? Far better than The VAR Guy anticipated.

Hold the iPhone. Cisco Systems and Apple may wind up fighting for the remote control in your living room. Here’s why.

The VAR Guy rarely writes about industry research reports. You can never tell who’s really funding them. But in this case — involving a showdown between open source vs. traditional IT management software — he’ll make an exception.

It happens every time a software company pushes into managed services. The media immediately begins to speculate: Will the managed service empower VARs or compete with them? In the case of Symantec’s new managed services platform, VARs are participating in the development and roll-out process. So far, so good, The VAR Guy hears.

One of The VAR Guy’s neighbors just received a Dell notebook at work, which he called a “laptitude or something like that.” Like millions of other consumers, this neighbor had never heard of Dell’s Latitude brand. Apparently, Dell is finally read to change that.

Current CA Inc. management has worked overtime to clean up the accounting mess left behind by former CEO Sanjay Kumar. Now, CA alleges former Chairman and Co-founder Charles Wang also was involved in the fraud. (He denies the allegation.) How did CA and Wang reach this showdown? Here are 15 defining moments that changed CA forever and ultimately turned the company against its co-founder.

The bruising battle between AMD and Intel this week shifts to Wall Street, where both companies are scheduled to announce quarterly results. Sure, we’ll learn just how badly Intel has hammered AMD — and whether AMD thinks it can recover quickly. But we also may receive valuable clues — some spoken, some silent–about Windows Vista’s ability to drive PC upgrades this summer.