If you’ve ever wondered why it’s the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt who are the successful ones who end up creating and running a hugely successful technology company and not you then I have excellent news – it’s not your fault. In fact, it’s an accident of birth.

I was reminded of this while browsing through Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink and generally considered to be a very clever bloke) as part of my research, such that it was, for next month’s Prolog – that is, the editor’s column in PC Pro. (more…)

While Barry Collins was researching his free upgrades to Windows 7 news story, he stumbled across possibly the most ridiculous offer I’ve ever seen: you, my lucky, lucky friends, can download Windows Vista Home Basic from the Microsoft UK store for £137.01. Excluding VAT.

Now before everyone rushes off to bag this bargain, I should point out that you can also buy Home Premium for £166.37! Obviously excluding VAT again, Microsoft has to make a living you know.

A quick trawl online reveals the going rate for the full version of Vista Home Premium is around £130 inc VAT - and you can buy it for less than £90 inc VAT if you’re willing to opt for the more restricted OEM version, which is tied to the motherboard you first install it on (so if you build a new PC, you’ll have to buy a new copy of Windows).

So, taking away VAT, Microsoft is charging a premium of over £50 if you buy direct from its store. It would be amazing to discover just how many sales it’s made for these two excellent picks, but sadly I don’t think I’m going to get much joy out of Microsoft on that one. My guess? A princely zero.

Once upon a time, when Google could declare “We’re not evil” without hundreds of thousands of shareholders to worry about, search engines were just search engines. Now, it appears, they’re not. Microsoft is calling Bing a decision engine, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, and Yahoo is… well, let’s not go there.

You could argue Microsoft’s position is born out of desperation. On whatever metric you chose to use, MSN Search (or Windows Live, I lost track of its names in the end) fell behind Google. Number of users, amount of money it made, brand awareness, effectiveness of the raw search - Google kept on winning. (more…)

Microsoft’s pricing and upgrading plans for Windows 7 in Europe are bordering on a farce. You can’t upgrade from a previous version of Windows, but you can elsewhere in the world. You can buy the upgrade product but you will get full retail box instead.

And it won’t come with Internet Explorer 8, in a strangely “the sky is falling down” reaction to the antitrust spat with the EU. Microsoft hopes that this is enough, the EU doesn’t appear to be convinced.

But this could be a marvellous thing indeed. By forcing you to wipe the machine and start afresh, it is possible to ensure that all that accumulated crap is wiped from the machine. A clean OS is a happy OS. (more…)

And so the EU’s pointless vendetta against Microsoft reaches its ridiculous conclusion: Microsoft will now ship Windows 7 in Europe without any web browser whatsoever.  The pathetic gripes of a vastly inferior competitor - yes, I’m talking about you Opera - have concluded with the EU making life harder for consumers, PC manufacturers and, ironically, Opera itself.

PC manufacturers will of course bundle a browser with any new Windows 7 PC, and I wouldn’t mind betting that the only browser the vast majority will choose to bundle is Internet Explorer.

And what about people who buy Windows 7 off the shelf? A spokesperson for Microsoft Europe said the company will provide a free IE8 CD-ROM with every retail copy of Windows 7. So the company’s still effectively bundling IE8 - it’s just making consumers jump through a few more hoops to install the browser. Utterly, utterly pointless.

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At first glance, the “demonstrated, ready to ship but really just not yet” Microsoft Project Natal looks fascinating. Finally a push forward on the otherwise tired Xbox 360 platform which, despite being a strong games console, has yet to really integrate into the house.

I know it can do media streaming and all those other goodness things. But in terms of actually delivering notable benefits, this has been a second-class citizen compared to a Media Center computer once you move outside of the games market.

But perhaps this is changing. Certainly, the announcement that Sky will be streaming video to it is interesting, albeit only for those on large bandwidth connections and with the approval of their ISPs. (more…)

Just a quick warning for anybody thinking of updating to Vista SP2. Our very own Paul Ockenden subjected himself to this supposedly painless process only recently and discovered that when it’s done installing, SP2 automatically reboots the machine without any warning.

Now, as Paul notes “at the start of the install it does warn you that this will happen, and suggests that you don’t use the machine while the update is taking place. But it’s on one of those screens that no-one ever reads!”

Needless to say, we highly recommend that you don’t begin patching in the background if you’re halfway through writing your War and Peace rivalling masterwork.

Given the fuss Microsoft’s been making in its Windows 7 promotion about listening to the customer and making life easier for them, there’s something particularly fitting about the gnashing of teeth likely to be caused by Vista SP2. On the bright side, it looks like Vista’s going to go out in much the same way it came in, against a chorus of complaints.

It appears Microsoft has come to its senses and decided to remove the completely arbitrary three app limit from Windows 7 Starter edition. Word of the U-turn comes via the normally reliable Paul Thurrott, who makes the claim in the briefiest of blog posts on his SuperSite for Windows, although there’s no official word from Microsoft yet.

Why the about face? Perhaps Microsoft has recognised what we’ve been telling them publicly and privately since this ridiculous announcement was made: limiting netbook owners to three concurrent apps is hugely frustrating. Open your email, web browser and IM client, and you’ve got to shut down one of them before you can fire up Media Player to watch the video clip you’ve just clicked on.

With competitors such as the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the Intel-backed Moblin and Google’s Android all looming large, Microsoft probably decided it couldn’t afford to give PC manufacturers any excuse to look elsewhere.

So well done Microsoft. Now if you can see your way clear to putting BitLocker To Go into the Professional edition, we can all rest easy…

You may have read my not-terribly-polite post about the astonishing restrictions found inside Microsoft’s terms and conditions for its hosted services. Well here’s the follow-up.

Because yesterday, I (and a couple of colleagues) had an hour-long “full and frank exchange of views” with four senior Microsoft Redmond people responsible for the hosted services offering: Eron Kelly, Senior Director, Microsoft Online Services; Kore Kourbourlis, Senior Director, Compliance and Privacy; Brendon Lynch, Director, Trustworthy Computing; and Mike Ziock, Senior Director of Operations, Business Online Services.

We went through our concerns regarding data movement, implications for data protection issues under EU law, SLA, the sign-up process, terms & conditions and so forth. (more…)

A few months before the launch of Vista, a very senior person at Acer spilled the beans to me in a one-on-one press briefing held in Taipei, that Acer was going public with its criticism of the Vista pricing model, and that it felt it had no choice but to swallow the cost for putting Vista Home Premium onto its products rather than Vista Home Basic. Apparantly, Home Basic was the same cost as XP Home, and Vista Home Premium was some $20 more. (more…)