If you don't follow Microsoft closely, you may be surprised to discover that its annual one-day meeting with financial analysts, called the Microsoft... »
All About Microsoft
Microsoft FAM 2010, Part 1: Microsoft’s Consumer Initiatives
If you don't follow Microsoft closely, you may be surprised to discover that its annual one-day meeting with financial analysts, called the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting, or FAM, has traditionally been a day of interesting revelations. This year's event happened yesterday, and while you could pour over all the speech transcripts and videos... »
PC Market Share, Q2 2010
Both IDC and Gartner have reported their PC market share estimates for Q2 2010. As usual, I average these figures to present a clearer picture of what's going on in the market »
Dell Water Cooler Chat: Windows 7 Deployment Q&A
I'll be taking part in a live Water Cooler chat session with Dell's End User Computing Solutions Architect, Phil Dakas. This follows a series of Dell Windows 7 deployment web casts that I previously participated in as well »
Microsoft Security Essentials vNext Now in Beta
Microsoft sends word that it is now offering a public beta version of the next Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) product. »
Outlook Social Connector Gets More Social, More Connected
Microsoft today is delivering the previously announced Facebook and Windows Live Messenger support for its Outlook Social Connector. Additionally, it is making the Outlook Social Connector available to Outlook 2003 and 2007 users as well (it was previously made available only on Outlook 2010). »
Service Pack 1 Beta for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2: Direct Download Links
If you go through Microsoft's Download page for the Service Pack 1 Beta for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, you're going to have to jump through some hoops to get it. In fact, you might even have to lie: If you inform Microsoft that you're not a developer, the site will... »
Smart Phones vs. PCs
Many (myself included) have assumed that smart phones are poised to take over the computing market and surpass PCs as the primary way in which people around the world consume computing resources, whether they're local applications or web-based/cloud services. It turns out that it's more accurate to say that "phones" (i.e. not just... »
App Inventor for Android
Google has just released a beta version of a tool called App Inventor for Android that lets you "build just about any app you can imagine." Similar in function to early versions of Visual Basic, this is a serious competitive threat to iPhone, Windows Phone, and other smart phone platforms, while harkening... »
Windows 7 64-Bit Momentum
Microsoft posts some interesting information about the uptick in 64-bit versions of Windows 7 . As of June 2010, we see that 46 percent of all PCs worldwide running Windows 7 are running a 64-bit edition of Windows 7 . That is, nearly half of all PCs running Windows 7 are running 64-bit »
Xbox Live: Over $1.2 Billion in Revenues This Year, Half of Subscribers Now Pay
So this is arguably big news. In the past, Microsoft was pretty cagey about the percentage of Xbox Live subscribers that were paying, "Gold"-level members. (The free version is called Xbox Live Silver.) The consensus was that the vast majority were, in fact, not paying »