Google must get a grip on the Android orphans

Friday, October 28th, 2011

We may have griped about the problems we had upgrading our iPhones to iOS 5, but at least those old handsets are being upgraded to Apple’s latest OS. A new piece of research published in the US suggests the majority of Android handset owners are being left behind by the ever-evolving Google operating system.

The research, by Michael DeGusta from TheUnderstatement.com, tracked every Android handset released in the US before July 2010, and then recorded how many of them had been updated to the latest version of the OS. The results were startling.

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Has Ballmer lost the dressing room?

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

There are six words a football manager never wants to read about himself in a newspaper: “he has lost the dressing room”. Reports of mutiny in the ranks are almost inevitably followed days later with another six-word epitaph: “spending more time with his family”.

Will Steve Ballmer’s three kids soon have more quality time to spend with their dad? Judging by the reaction to last week’s annual employees’ meeting at Microsoft, it’s looking increasingly likely.

The influential Mini-Microsoft blog posts a largely upbeat account of last week’s gathering. Yes, people were reported to be “streaming out” of the hall before the event had finished, although only in “small numbers”, and as the blog points out, it was “nowhere near as bad as BillG’s last company meeting where Ballmer started screaming at people to sit down”.

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Windows 8, Flash and Silverlight: some very bad news

Monday, September 19th, 2011

In amongst the flood of details emerging about Windows 8 is the news that the IE 10 browser in the lightweight Metro front-end won’t support plugins. In the scheme of things this might sound pretty small beer, but it’s hugely significant for the long term future of Rich Internet Application (RIA) development and for the web in general.

Most immediately it’s another kick in the teeth for Flash, still reeling from Apple’s iOS ban. It’s not exactly a death blow, as the Windows 8 desktop version of IE will still support the player, but it’s clearly another major disincentive for developers who believed Flash was as universal as HTML.

Understandably all the focus has been on Flash, but even more telling and extraordinary is the realisation that the new no-plugin policy means that the Metro browser won’t even support Microsoft’s own cross-platform RIA technology, Silverlight!

So just what is going on?

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Windows 8 on a laptop: first look

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

All the talk so far has centred around the wonderful new Metro UI, and how it could well be the nicest touch interface yet – but what of the vast majority of PCs and laptops that don’t have a touchscreen? Does Windows 8 relegate them to an afterthought, or can you carry on with mouse and keyboard as if touch never existed? To find out, I installed the developer preview on a 15in Core i5 laptop and plugged in a mouse.

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Windows 8: apps and the Store

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

As we discussed in the new interface section, Windows 8 now supports two different kind of applications: the new Metro Style apps and conventional desktop software. What’s more, Microsoft is launching its own Store to sell them both from.

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Windows 8: performance

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

With Microsoft deciding to push “full fat” Windows onto tablets, the operating system’s performance is going to be critical.

The company had already stated that the system requirements for Windows 8 would be no greater than those of Windows 7. Now it claims to have improved on the performance of its predecessor.

“We’re using considerably less memory in Windows 8,” claimed Gabriel Aul, director of project management for Windows fundamentals, who showed the Task Manager for Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines running side-by-side, with the latter using between 10-20% less RAM with the operating system sat idle.

Aul also claims CPU optimisations allow the processor to stay in “a lower power state for much longer”. So what does this mean for Windows 8 battery life?

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Microsoft wakes up to cold-caller scam – what took it so long?

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

A Microsoft press release that landed in my inbox this morning has left me fuming. “Microsoft Survey Warns of Emerging Internet Phone Scam” reads the headline.

The “emerging” phone scam it’s referring to? The swindle that sees conmen cold-calling computer owners, telling them they’ve got a virus on their PC, fleecing them for hundreds of pounds to remotely “repair” non-existent problems and installing God knows what on their PC in the process. The very same phone scam that PC Pro was the first publication to uncover in March 2010.

Why it has taken Microsoft 16 months to wake up to this problem is bewildering. Especially as we alerted Microsoft’s press office to the fact that these con artists were often pretending to be Microsoft and splashing Windows-style logos all over their websites when we broke the story last March.

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Why on Earth is Microsoft buying Skype?

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

So Microsoft is buying skype for $8bn. Whether that figure includes the $686m of debt that Skype has isn’t clear. What is clear is that this is a huge amount of money for a company that has a turnover of $859m and an operating loss of $7m.

What is staggering is that Microsoft has bought it. Skype would have been a great fit for Apple. A great fit for Facebook. But Microsoft? Hello?

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The nightmare of Patch Tuesday for small businesses

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

More and more businesses are dreading that Tuesday every month when Microsoft release a bunch of security patches and updates.

Patch Tuesday should be a thing to look forward to, of course, seeing as it’s when the latest round of application and operating system vulnerabilities get a nice big sticking plaster to protect your systems and data from exploit. The trouble is that when, as with the latest Patch Tuesday, there are no fewer than 17 security bulletins (nine rated as critical) covering a whopping 64 vulnerabilities –  many of the patches requiring a full system restart – it all starts to become something of an IT management nightmare. Especially for the smaller business where there isn’t an IT manager or even an IT department to handle such things.

The vast majority of smaller businesses that I talk to are not IT savvy, they get by and rely upon the systems and software they are supplied to do their job. They don’t switch browser to Firefox or Chrome, they run Internet Explorer because that’s what everyone else uses and it came with the box. What’s more, they often run an older version of Internet Explorer as they apply the “if it ain’t broke” rule. Wrongly in the case of older versions of IE, of course, which are broken from a security perspective.

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Street View rival takes Microsoft down blind alley

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

You’d assume that the high-fliers at the top IT companies are a smart bunch, given the importance of their roles to the industry, but every so often you have to sit back and wonder what they’re thinking of.

Take Microsoft’s decision to mimic Google’s Street View photographic mapping of the world, the service that landed Google in hot water with authorities around the world for breaching privacy codes.

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