It’s December, and you know what that means: egg nog, Christmas trees, and Internet top ten lists from both the year past and the year to come. One early attempt at divination amounts to a lump of coal in Microsoft’s stocking: IDC doesn’t exactly expect the desktop version of Windows 8 to leap off the shelves. In fact, the analysis firm bluntly says that Windows 7 users probably won't even care about the new OS when it launches.
Whenever someone in recent months questioned Microsoft’s intention to make Windows 8 its tablet OS, the company would emphatically point to surveys showing that users actually wanted Windows-based tablets. A new Forester Research report however, claims that consumer interest in Windows tablets has declined sharply in the last six months. According to the report, Microsoft may have missed the boat on the tablet market.
Yesterday was no ordinary Tuesday. It was Microsoft’s eleventh Patch Tuesday of 2011. In keeping with Microsoft’s practice of releasing a lower volume of patches during odd-numbered months as compared to even ones, this month’s Patch Tuesday only contains four security bulletins, which is half of what the company shipped in October.
Are you concerned that Windows 8 with its radically redesigned UI and Metro style Start menu will be too much to swallow on the desktop? It's a valid concern, though it doesn't appear to be scaring off businesses and IT departments, both of which are already showing strong interest in Microsoft's upcoming OS well ahead of its 2012 launch.
Even though Kinect does not celebrate the first anniversary of its launch until November 4, Microsoft is already in a celebratory mood. The Redmond-based software giant on Monday seemed cock-a-hoop as it fondly recalled what’s been “an amazing 12 months” for Kinect, the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history. Besides going gaga over the “Kinect Effect,” Microsoft talked about the release of the commercial version of the Kinect for Windows SDK.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, and so does competition in PC platforms, This helps explain why Acer chairman JT Wang is in full support of Hewlett Packard keeping its PC business rather than spinning it off or selling it to a third party. Wondering what that has to do with Acer? It's simple, really -- HP is the world's largest PC manufacturer, and both have a common enemy in Apple.
In what has to be arguably one of its most interesting revelations, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs has revealed that the late Apple CEO wanted the iPad to be powered by an Intel chip. If Jobs had had his way, Intel would have found itself in the driver’s seat in the burgeoning tablet market, something the chip maker is unlikely to achieve in the coming years according to a new report by DisplaySearch.
All things eventually come to an end, and for Windows XP and its legion of holdouts, the end is nigh. It's a dead OS walking and the governors at Microsoft aren't going to pick up the phone at the last moment and give it yet another stay of execution. Microsoft general manager for Windows Commercial marketing, Rich Reynolds, confirmed as much in an interview with InformationWeek.
Linus Torvalds on Monday announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.1 at the ongoing Kernel summit in Prague. The latest stable version of the Linux Kernel was preceded by as many as ten release candidates. With Kernel.org still trying to recover from the security breach it suffered in August, Linux Kernel 3.1 is the first release to be hosted on code hosting service GitHub.
It's been somewhat of a banner year so far for Microsoft, at least in terms of revenue. Driven by solid business and consumer demand, Microsoft announced record first quarter revenue of $17.37 billion for its first fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2011, representing a 7 percent increase from one year prior. It's also higher than what Wall Street was expecting.
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