What got me fuming was that this range of computers was for the ‘over 50s’, those people whose brains are just too old and addled to understand new technology, like me and a lot of my friends. I find the term ’silver surfer’ particularly annoying; my hair went grey in my mid-30s so presumably dementia set in then as well. Heck, even our own youthful Jon Honeyball has a few threads of grey, so perhaps he’ll need some help with his computer soon!

By all means market a computer for ‘those who find existing computers confusing,’ but this assumption that the over-50s and silver surfers have special needs is just plain ageist.

As for this computer launch, the operating system is Linux, so you are not going to find as much local help for that as you would with a Windows machine. By all means build an easy-to-use interface on top of Windows, make a simple email client, and remove all the unnecessary buttons from the browser (or use Chrome). But keep an operating system underneath that your kids can help you with, and that has support for all those devices that you might want to plug into it.

I’ll get off me soapbox now.

There are a few signs here at TechEd that Microsoft wasn’t quite as sure about the runaway success of Windows 7 as its fanboys (me included).

In planning the layout of the show stalls in the exhibition halls, Microsoft has ensured plenty of space to gently introduce skeptics to its new hot product. You can wander up and furtle about with example machines, and if you stand there too long a Nice Person will come up and ask if you’ve seen this or that cool feature. I thought I was being even ruder than usual by brushing them off – then some Russian delegates popped up beside me and showed me how to do that brush-off thing properly.

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The core Sky Mobile TV News and Sports app is available for free, and offers full listings for the core sports and news channels. But for the paltry sum of £6 a month, you can stream live coverage from those channels over a Wi-Fi connection. Read more

Microsoft is in Berlin around the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, just after U2 has smeared the town with its dubious neo-political imprimatur, and just before Thanksgiving in the US – it’s one of those periods that might well be marked by suggestions in emails as “a good time to bury some bad news”. But: there’s some good stuff here. Calm stuff; stuff which shows MS is getting down to business, and not distracting the world with dancing paperclips.

The basic raw headlines are that Exchange 2010 goes to public availability as from today, worldwide: and Microsoft is very pleased with some rational improvements. Read more

With its place at the heart of the Microsoft Office suite, PowerPoint is the overwhelmingly dominant presentation software for business. However it has a fundamental flaw – it still doesn’t offer an in-built route for efficient, cross-platform, screen-based web delivery. For a program whose whole purpose is to help users get their message over, this is quite astonishing and unforgivable as we approach 2010.

Microsoft might not provide its own solution but there are plenty of third-party applications which fill the gap such as Adobe’s Captivate and Presenter, the bargain Flair from WildFX and my personal favourite Articulate Presenter. The major embarrassment for Microsoft is that these all rely on the Adobe Flash format.

It’s an embarrassment that is made considerably worse by the fact that Microsoft is currently busily touting its own cross-platform web format, Silverlight, as a direct alternative to Flash. It’s clear that PowerPoint and Silverlight should make a perfect match and native Silverlight export would certainly go a long way to explaining (if not excusing) PowerPoint’s lack of support for Flash.

So where is the ability to convert PowerPoint to Silverlight?

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