Dell has launched a new wiki, PartnerStorm, that is already fielding reseller complaints about the fledgling Dell channel program.

On PartnerStorm, the channel version of Dell’s popular IdeaStorm forum, users can post their ideas about the channel program, which is called PartnerDirect. They can also comment on each others’ ideas and vote on which are the best.

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We first reported on Symantec Endpoint Management Suite 1.0 last week, when I found that Symantec had prematurely posted product details on its website. But today marks the suite’s official launch, which means I can finally give even more details that Symantec provided last week in an embargoed interview.

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Earlier this week, a partner asked Microsoft the following question: If Software Assurance expires on Small Business Server 2003, will the client lose the right to install SBS 2003 on new hardware?

Seems like a simple enough question, right? Wrong. On the Microsoft SMB Community Blog, it takes Microsoft senior manager Eric Ligman nearly 650 words to answer.

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The Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition saga may not be over. In fact, the real juicy part may be just beginning.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is already trying to take control of Yahoo’s board of directors. Now he’s telling The Wall Street Journal that he’ll get rid of Jerry Yang — who’s not only the Yahoo CEO, he’s also a co-founder — if his proxy bid is successful.

“It’s no longer a mystery to me why Microsoft’s offer isn’t around,” Icahn said. “How can Yahoo keep saying they’re willing to negotiate and sell the company on the one hand, while at the same time they’re completely sabotaging the process without telling anyone?”

Icahn made these latest comments after a Delaware court unsealed a lawsuit that shareholders filed against Yahoo earlier this year. The suit says Yahoo rejected a $40-per-share offer from Microsoft way back in Janaury 2007, then set up a generous severance plan for employees who would lose their jobs in the aftermath of an acquisition — a deterrent for any potential suitor.

Yang has taken most of the blame for Microsoft pulling its offer, but he does have supporters — or at least people who see his point of view. BusinessWeek, for one, gives some “reasonable justifications” for the actions of Yang and his board (namely, holding out for more money).

And Icahn isn’t exactly the most popular guy in the tech world, either. Information Week blogger Eric Zeman asks if Icahn is the “biggest egomaniac ever” and questions his real motivation for sticking his nose in Yahoo’s business.

When Microsoft first made its offer, partners wondered if the potential Yahoo acquisition would become a distraction. There’s been a lull for the past month or so, but it looks like those questions will be on the rise again.

Waiting for Windows 7 to swoop in and save your business from poor Windows Vista sales? Don’t hold your breath, according to Forrester Research.

In a blog post yesterday, analyst Benjamin Gray wrote that Windows 7, Microsoft’s next-generation operating system, is “clearly going to be an evolutionary update, not the revolutionary update that many are hoping for. So the challenges that organizations are experiencing with Windows Vista today will also occur with what’s coming next.”

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VMware’s “cloud computing” strategy set me off on a little rant last week. I wrote that VMware was likely getting into SaaS because it was either inspired by or jealous of Google’s success in the “cloud.”

Now it turns out that VMware is following Google’s footsteps in another area as well. And luckily, someone else has taken care of the criticism this time.

If you haven’t noticed, nearly all of Google’s services — including GMail, Google News and Google Apps — are still in beta, even though they’re years old. Andrew Kutz, who writes on our sister blog Virtualization Pro, points out that several new VMware features — including Storage VMotion and Virtual Machine High Availability — are also in beta or labeled “experimental.” Kutz writes:

Excuse me for being old fashioned, but it isn’t enterprise-ready if it is beta or labeled experimental. And VMware makes no bones about this; they plainly state that these features should not be used in production. However, on the other hand they make a big show about the same set of features, whipping the crowd to a fever pitch of excitement. You can’t have it both ways, guys.

… VMware needs to make sure that features that are experimental should be announced with an asterisk next to their headline.

VMware should be doing a better job separating hype from reality when talking about these products. But it looks like that job will instead fall to VMware partners. When your customers ask about Storage VMotion, for example, tell them it’s promising, but also point out that it doesn’t yet have a GUI option. You’re the last line of defense to keep customers from heading down the dead-end road of hype.

Bad news for people who hate buzzwords: Another big-time IT vendor is getting into “cloud computing.”

This time it’s VMware, whose president and CEO Diane Greene talked up cloud computing during a speech yesterday in Boston. My colleague at SearchServerVirtualization.com, Bridget Botelho, was there, and she reports that VMware will use the “cloud” to differentiate itself among increasing competition in the virtualization market.

“The dream of cloud computing is fast becoming reality,” Greene said during her keynote at the JP Morgan Technology Conference.

VMware becomes the latest traditional IT vendor, inspired by — or jealous of — the success of Google and Salesforce.com, to get into cloud computing.

“Cloud computing” is less annoyingly known as “Software as a Service,” although that term opens up a whole new can of buzzword worms. I’ve heard people refer to “Platform as a Service,” “Hardware as a Service,” and someone I recently talked to actually used the term ”Service as a Service.” Um, excuse me?

Anyway, back to the VMware news. I’m not even sure how “virtualization in the cloud” or “Virtualization as a Service” or whatever you want to call it would work. Virtualization stores information and applications in a data center and recreates an image of that data on a server, endpoint or other appliance. So in that regard it’s similar to cloud computing, which stores information and applications in a data center for users to access through a Web browser on a PC or mobile device.

Other recent examples of vendors getting into SaaS include Microsoft, which is now pushing its Dynamics CRM Online, and Symantec, which released its Online Backup Service. It remains to be seen if the model will work for these vendors who are giants in the on-premise software world — or even what the model is, in VMware’s case. But for now, the buzzwords work, and apparently that’s all that matters.

The much anticipated Dell Channel Blog made its debut today with two posts — one from Dell chief blogger Lionel Menchaca, who introduced the site, and another from channel chief Greg Davis, who wrote about the new Partner Advisory Council.

The council, judging by a picture on the blog, has about two dozen members. They met this week at Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, and Davis said the big topics they discussed were: communication, partner profitability, building trust in the channel and reducing complexity for partners.

Menchaca’s introduction said the primary contributors to the Dell Channel Blog will be channel community manager Amie Paxton and channel community liaison Mike Bukowski. But more importantly, he gave me a shout out for earlier comments I made on the Direct2Dell blog.

Dell execs are clearly making a strong effort to reach out to partners with this blog. They know they have to if they want to erase the channel skepticism that Dell’s two-plus decades in direct sales has created. There will likely still be bumps in the road as Dell puts its channel program together, but this outreach should buy the company some patience and benefit of the doubt from partners.

VMware is going on the attack yet again, slamming Microsoft in a 2,000-word missive on its Virtual Reality blog.

In case you forgot, Virtual Reality is the blog VMware set up specifically to defend itself from criticism by the media, analysts and competitors. The most recent post targets the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool, an online calculator that partners can use to make the business case for Microsoft virtualization.

“Unfortunately we had to give it a failing grade,” writes VMware blogger Tim Stephan.

The post features a pretty in-depth analysis of the assumptions and calculations that Microsoft’s tool makes in “proving” that the upcoming Hyper-V hypervisor is a better value than VMware’s products. (Microsoft’s site doesn’t mention VMware, only a “competitive server virtualization solution.” As Stephan writes, “Gee, I wonder who the competitive solution is?”)

But the best part of the blog are the no-holds-barred shots that Stephan takes at Microsoft throughout. They include:

• “Of course the results were all hypothetical, because Hyper-V is not yet available.”
• “Like most Microsoft version 1.0 products, the initial release of this calculator has numerous errors, contains critical design mistakes, and completely misses its mark. … Maybe we all need to wait for the SP1?”
• “Microsoft’s tool assumes that Hyper-V will run as many VMs as VMware VI3 and deliver the same performance - we can’t wait until Hyper-V ships and prove (sic) this wrong.”

The blog also features this quiz:

Why did MSFT release such a misleading ROI/TCO model?
A) Microsoft did a sloppy and hasty job with the calculator
B) Microsoft is deliberately fudging the facts
C) Both A and B

Microsoft has been promoting its calculator to partners as they prepare to sell Hyper-V and try to chip away at VMware’s server virtualization market lead. I’m in no position to say who’s right and who’s wrong about the tool and its assumptions, but Microsoft partners might want to check out VMware’s stance before they start relying on the calculator too heavily. 

VMware has previously used Virtual Reality to accuse Microsoft of spreading lies, discredit a Yankee Group report and post “corrections” to a blog comparing VMware and Microsoft.

The launch of the Dell Channel Blog is now on for Thursday.

Dell had planned to introduce the blog last Friday but delayed it for unspecified reasons. The bare bones of the site are now up at direct2dell.com/channel, and the RSS feed is ready to go as well.