Podcast: Oracle's customer-inspired 11g, Larry gets FIOS, Samsung's gadgetfest, VMware's IPO, and more

This week on the Dan & David Show, my colleague Larry Dignan fills in for Dan Farber who is on vacation and the first order of business is a review of Oracle's 11g announcement. Larry was present for the festivities earlier this week in NYC and sees merit in Oracle's description of 11g as a customer-inspired release (what isn't customer inspired though?). That leads us to a discussion of the list that fellow blogger Mary Jo Foley dug up: the list of features that customers most want to see in Windows (which inspired a rant of my own about the disruptions that Vista is personally causing in my household).

It may be Friday the 13th, but Larry is one of the lucky ones to have Verizon's fiber-optic based FIOS service come to his neighborhood. He wasted no time in signing up for the service, especially given his own personal experience with what he considered to be a very unreliable Comcast. Me? No FIOS here yet. So, I'm stuck with Comcast and waiting for that FIOS day when I'll have better uplink speeds for posting video

Larry breaks down the meaning of VMware IPO in the context of Intel's latest round of investment into the company which I guess can no longer be referred to as a wholly-owned subsidiary of EMC. Intel, which knows the Xen-folk well, must not see open source as a threat to VMware's commercial business model. Speaking of stuff in the M&A vain, we also briefly touch on Google's acquisition of Postini. The way I see it: it's one in a string of announcements that Google has made and will be making to overcome some of the major sticking points that must be overcome before larger enterprises will begin to take Google Apps seriously, en masse.

We also discuss the highlights of my visit to Samsung's gadgetfest in NYC.