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Summary: There are lots of reasons why I think Windows 8 will having trouble finding acceptance. A major one is that Windows 8 will face more competition than ever before. Here are Windows 8’s biggest rivals. Windows 8 biggest rivals are already hitting it. We’re finding out more and more about Windows 8 as its beta release approaches. And, you know what? The more I find out, the more I feel secure about saying Windows 8 will be a flop.I’ve already explained in general terms I think Windows 8 will follow in Vista’s footprints as a strategic failure. Here’s specifically,...

Microsoft's Windows chief Steven Sinofsky just put up 8,000+ word blog post on Microsoft's plans for Windows 8 on the low-powered ARM processors that today run the iPad and most other tablets. This is the most critical part of Windows 8. Like every version of Windows, Windows 8 will probably dominate the market for traditional notebook PCs and desktop PCs. But it also has to take on the iPad, which is now outselling desktop PCs and had sales last quarter equal to 17 percent of the traditional PC market. For Microsoft's hardware partners to make Windows 8 tablets that are...

As Washington's legislature works diligently to force homosexual marriage on its constituents, one of the more high-profile corporate entities in the Evergreen State has volunteered to help. In a January 24 statement, Starbucks vice president Kalen Holmes announced that the coffee retailing giant was proudly joining “other leading Northwest employers in support of Washington State legislation recognizing marriage equality for same-sex couples.” Holmes emphasized that the measure, which would legalize homosexual partnerships as equal with traditional marriage, “is aligned with Starbucks business practices” and is “core to who we are and what we value as a company.” The Seattle Times...

Nokia is seeing some good initial success from its transition to exclusively supporting Windows Phone for its high-end handsets. Initial sales of the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, Nokia’s first two Windows Phones, are likely hovering around 1.3 million units, according to Bloomberg. This is, of course, unverified data, but for two handsets that only launched in November, that’s not bad. Add in the fact that Windows Phone is not a well known or sought-after OS yet and the fact that Nokia only just launched its first device in the US a week or two ago, and the numbers are...

At the beginning of December, we warned the Copyright Office that operating system vendors would use UEFIsecure boot anticompetitively, by colluding with hardware partners to exclude alternative operating systems. As Glyn Moody points out, Microsoft has wasted no time in revising its Windows Hardware Certification Requirements to effectively ban most alternative operating systems on ARM-based devices that ship with Windows 8. The Certification Requirements define (on page 116) a "custom" secure boot mode, in which a physically present user can add signatures for alternative operating systems to the system's signature database, allowing the system to boot those operating systems. But...

SEATTLE, Wash.– Some 300 Chinese Foxconn employees who manufacture X-box 360 machines said they would throw themselves from their Wuhan, China, plant if demands for lost wages were not met. China Jasmine Revolution, an activist revolutionary organization with a name borrowed from the Tunisian revolt that set off the Middle East unrest, reported that employees made their demands for a wage increase for 100 employees on Jan. 2. Management at Foxconn — the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and a crucial link in the supply chains of Apple, Dell, Nintendo and Song — responded with an ultimatum.

LAS VEGAS -- AT&T held a massive, 2.5-hour keynote presentation today, showing off its plans going into the first half of 2012. Not only did we get a taste of the company's new HTML5 app store, but we also got a sneak peek at several new phones and tablets the carrier will support. There were also a few surprise guests: Steve Ballmer, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, and HTC CEO Peter Chou. We gathered all the important announcements you need to know about. Keep reading to find out what these big tech execs had to say. SNIP SNIP Microsoft CEO Steve...

Microsoft has been granted a patent for its “avoid ghetto” feature for GPS devices. A GPS device is used to find shortcuts and avoid traffic, but Microsoft’s patent states that a route can be plotted for pedestrians to avoid an “unsafe neighborhood or being in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures.” Created for mobile phones, the technology uses the latest crime statistics and weather data and includes them when calculating a route.

Good question. However, if you want an honest opinion, it's usually best to go straight to the source. A former GM who used to work on Windows Phone 7 for Microsoft, Charlie Kindel, took to his personal blog today with some thoughts on why Microsoft's mobile efforts seem so stagnant. It boils down to carriers, manufacturers, and the companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft who make the operating system are all locked in this big three-way pissing contest to see who gets the most say in marketing a device. According to Kindel, Android is crushing iOS and Windows Phone 7...

Looks like there’s no such thing as a Second Amendment in the world of virtual goods. A new policy taking effect Jan. 1 will remove “gun-like” items from Microsoft’s Xbox Live Avatar Marketplace, the online store where gamers can buy items to dress up and accessorize their avatars, according to a forum post by a community manager for Epic Games, the company behind the blockbuster Gears of War franchise for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. Virtual weapons affected by the new policy include the Gears of War Lancer, the combination chainsaw/assault rifle being brandished by my Xbox Live avatar in the...

Windows 8 is on the horizon. Microsoft has designed the next-generation flagship operating system with a split personality that straddles the line between the familiar Windows 7 desktop, and the flashy Metro interface used with Windows Phone 7. Can Microsoft successfully tackle desktop and mobile with one OS? Microsoft is not new to mobile devices. It had a smartphone before the Apple iPhone revolution came along, and it was pushing tablet PCs before the Apple iPad made it cool. But, as long as Microsoft’s history with mobile devices is, so is its stubborn desire to make everything about its Windows...

Microsoft and Starbucks are among 70 corporations, financial institutions, medical centers, and other major organizations that have signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).The organizations are, or represent, major employers who argue that DOMA imposes significant administrative costs, and that it harms their ability to attract and retain talent."Microsoft has joined dozens of corporations, organizations and governments in support of a challenge on constitutionality grounds to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA," the company said in a statement. The amicus brief "points out the significant...

House Democrats today filed a brief in support of a legal challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law that defines marriage as between one man and one woman. The amicus brief filed by 133 Democrats, including the party’s top leaders, maintains that Congress hastily passed legislation during President Bill Clinton’s presidency to limit who can marry and asserts that the law is unconstitutional. The brief was filed in a consolidated court case being considered in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, although a release said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other top Democratic leaders...

Can someone recommend a good pop-up stopper (preferrably free)? I have one installed but pop-ups have nearly stopped my PC from downloading anything. Thanks.

Summary: Microsoft is trying again to con people into thinking that Internet Explorer is the safest browser around. It’s not. At best, it’s tied with Chrome. According to Microsoft, Chrome on Linux only gets a 2.5 for security! Microsoft has always been fond of paying analysts to say that its products are best, or having partners release reports showing how their rivals’ products are second-rate, and, now, Web sites that “show” how Internet Explorer (IE) is better than Chrome and Firefox when it comes to security. Really? Didn’t Microsoft just release yet another major Internet Explorer patch? I quote from...

After a week of confusion, Microsoft's Zune HD is officially no more. Brian Seitz, senior marketing manager for Microsoft, confirmed the news during last Friday's Windows Phone podcast. "Since you I both were Zune brethren," Seitz said to co-host Matt Akers, "there was finally the announcement that we're not going to be making the Zune HD anymore, which was a bummer." On the Microsoft Store Website, the Zune HD is out of stock. Microsoft's reluctance to formally announce a commercial flop is understandable. But during the podcast, Seitz made a point that Microsoft might've done well to publicize: Zune players...

It was only a matter of time: the weakest link in the otherwise awesome idea that is a remote-controlled military, represented by the thousands of Predator and Reaper drones, has always been its biggest strength: the fact that it is remote-controlled. Which means that with no person on location, the system has always been susceptible to infiltration in the form of intermediation between the offsite pilot and the actual equipment. Such as a virus. And as Wired reports, a viral infestation, the biggest nightmare for the the US drone fleet, has just struck. "A computer virus has infected the cockpits...

An unnamed computer virus is compromising the security of U.S. Reaper and Predator drones as they fly missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan. Wired reports the virus was found about two weeks ago and hasn't kept the drone pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from conducting missions. There haven't been any reports of classified data breaches, but the virus has resisted the military's best efforts to remove it.

HTC said Windows Phone devices make up 30 percent of its sales, as Microsoft begins gaining ground in the mobile market. The Taiwanese phone maker is betting Microsoft’s platform will be a big part of its future plans and expect the number of Windows phones sold to go up. “We believe that Windows Phone 7 will eventually be better than other platforms and will give Android a run for its money,” said HTC’s manager in Singapore, Melvin Chua. Microsoft believes its platform has made good progress since its launch last year, and the Mango update builds on that success. Mango...

During Microsoft's annual full staff meeting, employees unmistakably expressed their displeasure about how the company is being run. Every year Redmond assembles the rank and file for a huge presentation about plans for the next 12 months, with senior management laying out current progress and future plans. According to comments made on the unofficial but respected Mini Microsoft blog, staff were less than impressed. “What a sad spectacle. While SteveB was yacking away, people were leaving in droves. Back in the good old days when BillG spoke, EVERYONE listened,” posted an anonymous commentator. Due to prior leaks from these, events...

A senior Red Hat engineer has lashed back at Microsoft's attempt to downplay concerns that upcoming secure boot features will make it impossible to install Linux on Windows 8 certified systems. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specifications are designed to offer faster boot times and improved security over current BIOS ROM systems. The secure boot feature of the specification is designed so that only digitally signed OS loaders will load, a security feature that would prevent the installation of generic copies of Linux or FreeBSD as well as preventing rootkits and other boot-time malware from running. A digitally signed build...

With the announcement that the Windows 8 Metro UI's browser would be plug-in (and therefore Flash) free, a major milestone on the road to HTML5 adoption was reached. But we're still not out of the woods yet. Apple was the first major operating system company to really start the trip down this road, with Steve Job's insistence that iOS, the core OS for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad product lines, would no longer support Abobe's Flash, citing instability and battery life concerns. Instead, Apple went with HTML5-based protocols for video and dynamic content. This week, we saw Microsoft joining...

Microsoft has become locked in a dispute over whether the boot process in Windows 8 will block Linux from running on hardware designed for the next version of its flagship platform. Windows 8 secure boot uses pre-OS boot checks, as well as third-party software checks, to ensure that users PCs remain healthy. Photo credit: Microsoft Matthew Garrett, a power management and mobile Linux developer at Red Hat, raised questions in a blog post on Tuesday about dual-booting of Linux in Windows 8. He argued the use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based secure boot means either Windows 8 will be signed...

Computer scientists warn that proposed changes in firmware specifications may make it impossible to run “unauthorised” operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD on PCs. Proposed changes to the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware specifications would mean PCs would only boot from a digitally signed image derived from a keychain rooted in keys built into the PC. Microsoft is pushing to make this mandatory in a move that could not be overridden by users and would effectively exclude alternative operating systems, according to Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University and other observers. UEFI is a successor to the BIOS...

Microsoft's obituary has been written plenty of times. There was no place for the software mammoth in a tech world designed -- and dominated -- by Apple. CEO Steve Ballmer was unable to steer the company to a position of growth, leaving Microsoft selling PC software in a post-PC world. So often has Microsoft been written off as irrelevant that investors have largely stopped believing in the stock, which has spent the bulk of the past ten years in a tight range between $25 a share and $30 a share. On Monday, the stock closed around $27, which is where...

Yesterday, I had an experience that shows why Microsoft should kill the Windows Phone brand and name its new phones something fun like Mango. I went to Radio Shack to buy a cheap audio cable. The clerk was excited because it had just become an official Verizon outlet as well -- the front of the store had a special Verizon awning, and there was Verizon advertising all over the place. As I paid, the clerk and I began talking about phones. He said he used to work at the Apple Store, and was well-informed about the upcoming iPhone 5 and...

As big shareholders flee AOL and Yahoo's board flounders, consolidation is "definitely" in the air, a source close to Microsoft's portal, MSN, tells us. "Definitely, people are talking about it." This source – who asked to remain anonymous because getting fired sucks – says Yahoo is more attractive to Microsoft than AOL. "People generally expect AOL to come apart one way or another. I don't think that's an interesting asset. It's just been so beaten down." Regarding AOL's prized acquisition, Huffington Post, this source says: "I love Huffingotn Post as a user. As a business I don't." He says its...

Microsoft seems optimistic about Windows Phone's future chances. Is that optimism justified? According to a statement released be Microsoft, the Windows Phone mobile platform has the potential to increase its share of the smartphone market up to as much as 20% during the next two or three years through active support from its hardware manufacturers and its own increasing efforts in marketing. The head of Windows Phone marketing, Achim Berg, has said that the forecasts released by the research firms IDC and Gartner are conservative in expecting the company to have a 20% share of the market by the year...

Microsoft allegedly tracks the location of its mobile customers even after users request that tracking software be turned off, according to a new lawsuit. The proposed class action, filed in a Seattle federal court on Wednesday, says Microsoft intentionally designed camera software on the Windows Phone 7 operating system to ignore customer requests that they not be tracked. A Microsoft representative could not immediately be reached for comment The lawsuit comes after concerns surfaced earlier this year that Apple's iPhones collected location data and stored it for up to a year, even when location software was supposedly turned off. Apple...

Details about Windows 8, Microsoft's newest operating system expected in 2012, have been leaking out thanks largely to Microsoft previews and a stream of blog posts on the company's Building Windows 8 blog. The new OS is said to be Microsoft's biggest Windows refresh since Windows 95, when desktop PCs reigned supreme and most laptops cost nearly $3000. Now, Microsoft wants to update Windows for a consumer technology world that is obsessed with online services and touch-centric devices such as the iPad and Android smartphones. Windows 8: TL;DR* (*Too Long; Didn't Read) So far, Microsoft has detailed a brand new...

Microsoft's "decision engine" more likely to lead users to a Web page than searches through rival Google, study finds. While Google may control the lion's share of the search market, queries made through Microsoft's Bing search engine lead users to click on a Web page at a significantly higher rate than queries made through Google, according to data released Thursday. The success rate for Bing searches in the U.S. in July was 80.04%, compared to 67.56% for Google, according to Experian Hitwise. The market watcher defines "success rate" as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to...

It seems Matt Rosoff is having a little bit of snark over Microsoft apparently disregarding Linux as a threat to its desktop business. The schadenfreude stems from a tweet from Wes Miller, Research VP at Directions on Microsoft, which points out that Microsoft's boilerplate from its last two annual SEC filings has some interesting revisions, as seen here.  Predictably, Rosoff pours salt on the wound by off-handedly cackling about Jim Zemlin's comments earlier this year that taking on Microsoft would be like "kicking a puppy."To be fair, Rosoff did a little digging in the same SEC filings and discovered that Linux...

"Apple has much to learn about securing an operating system, and it could learn how from Microsoft, Roger Grimes writes in the wake of further evidence that Macs are more vulnerable to attack than Windows machines. 'It's taken Microsoft 10 years to turn security from a weakness into a strength. Apple can use the lessons learned by Microsoft to manage a quick turnaround. Apple has already hired one of Microsoft's former security leaders, Window Snyder, and it has adopted a modified form of Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle programming practices. Apple has the benefit of seeing how Microsoft fixed its past...

PCs are going the way of typewriters, vinyl records and vacuum tubes, one of the engineers who worked on the original machine has said. The claim was made in a blog post commemorating 30 years since the launch of the first IBM personal computer. No longer, said Dr Mark Dean, are PCs the leading edge of computing. No single device has taken the PC's place, he said, instead it has been replaced by the socially-mediated innovation it has fostered. While IBM was not the first to produce a personal computer, the launch of the 5150 on 12 August 1981 established...

Windows Phone is getting a giant update coming this fall called "Mango." We can't wait. Mango has some truly inspired features that integrate social networks into every aspect of the phone, as well as many others. We got our hands on the beta version of Mango a bit early, and we're going to prove that Windows Phone isn't dead. Windows Phone Mango is a stellar platform that integrates social features far better than Android or iPhone (even in iOS 5), but can't really succeed until developers get on board and build apps for it. Most importantly, Mango looks fresh and...

Microsoft’s security used to be a joke. Its operating systems were riddled with bugs that were exploited by hackers and mocked at conferences such as Black Hat, the Las Vegas confab for security technology. But yesterday, one of the independent security researchers at the conference praised Microsoft’s progress on improving security. Chris Paget, chief hacker at security consulting firm Recursion Ventures, is a well-known figure at the twin Black Hat and Defcon conferences in Las Vegas, having demonstrated a live interception of a cell phone call last year. In her talk this year, she said she hated the limitations of...

Researchers at Microsoft have built a virtual vault that could work on medical data without ever decrypting it. Imagine getting a friend's advice on a personal problem and being safe in the knowledge that it would be impossible for your friend to divulge the question, or even his own reply. Researchers at Microsoft have taken a step toward making something similar possible for cloud computing, so that data sent to an Internet server can be used without ever being revealed. Their prototype can perform statistical analyses on encrypted data despite never decrypting it. The results worked out by the software...

On the one hand, the tech industry is awash in patent trolls, companies that own generally spurious patents for technologies they didn't really invent, which exist solely to sue other companies into licensing said technologies. On the other, we have tech companies that have patents for technologies that they did, in fact, invent (or at least purchase legitimately) and, as important, use in actual products. These companies, too, must sue others to protect their patents, but for far more legitimate reasons. Google is upset about the latter kind of company, and it's citing two heavy-hitters, Apple and Microsoft, as example...

Microsoft today launched a $250,000 contest for researchers who develop defensive security technologies that deal with entire classes of exploits. The total cash awards for Microsoft's "BlueHat Prize" contest easily dwarfs any bug bounty that's been given by rivals. Google, for instance, which pays for Chrome vulnerability reports, has spent just over $110,000 so far this year, putting it on a pace to hand out about $190,000 in 2011. Microsoft said the competition is an effort to tap researchers' brains for something bigger than a vulnerability here, a bug there. "We want to make it more costly and difficult for...

Earlier today, Google came out swinging. Seemingly sick of being continuously slapped in the face by the patent issue, Google’s SVP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, wrote a blog post calling out several of Google’s rivals for attempting to use “bogus patents” to destroy Android. Chief among the rivals called out was Microsoft. Drummond noted that the software giant had been getting in bed with other rivals to hurt Google. Among the accusations was that Microsoft teamed up with Apple to buy Novell’s old patents, implying that they did so in order to keep them away from Google. Microsoft...

After a healthy 10-year run, Windows XP may finally be losing its overwhelming grip on computer users. Though it's still the most heavily used version of the Windows operating system, XP's market share among all operating systems finally dipped just below the 50 percent mark last month, according to stats out today from Net Applications. The aging OS has gradually been shedding market share a bit each month over the past few years, touching 62 percent a year ago and 51 percent in June before its latest dip in July, according to Net Applications. At the same time, Windows 7--the...

Profits at the world's biggest software maker climbed to $5.87bn (£3.6bn) for the past three months, a 30pc increase on the same period last year. Revenues rose 8pc to $17.4bn, topping Wall Street's expectations. It was Microsoft's business division, which includes the Office set of software, that again delivered the growth. Microsoft had business spending to thank for a rise in profits in a quarter that saw consumers abandon personal computers in greater numbers. Sales of the Windows operating system, which comes pre-installed on most of the PCs sold in the world, edged slightly lower in the quarter.

Look down a list of Windows Phone 7 smartphones being offered without a contract and you’ll notice the price hovers around the $300-$400. There are some $200 models, but they are few and far between and make a few feature compromises to achieve the lower price point. The price of buying a smartphone outright is clearly high, but Microsoft has stated that is about to change, and come 2012 you will be able to pick up a Windows Phone 7 smartphone for around $100. That revelation was announced to a crowd of people attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011...

LONDON — At the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that cloud data — regardless of where it is in the world — is not protected against the USA PATRIOT Act.It was honestly music to my ears. After a year of researching the Patriot Act’s breadth and ability to access data held within protected EU boundaries, Microsoft finally and openly admitted it.The question put forward: “Can Microsoft guarantee that EU-stored data, held in EU based datacenters, will not leave the European Economic Area under any circumstances — even under a request by...

Just three months after Mozilla pushed out what was its final big beast of a browser release in the form of the long-awaited Firefox 4, the next iteration of its popular surfing tool is now available online. Firefox 5, as it has been sensibly named, can be downloaded for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android platforms. Few major tweaks have been slotted into this release, which is hardly surprising given the fast, splatter-gun style of updating Mozilla code. The iterate-big-or-die cultural shift inside the open source browser outfit's Towers comes in clear acknowledgement of Google's Chrome schedule. It may be mirroring...

Microsoft stopped giving forward guidance a couple years ago when the company hit a rough patch, but yesterday at a Rotary event in Seattle, CEO Steve Ballmer spilled some rough figures about the company's 2011 fiscal year, which ends today. As reported by GeekWire's John Cook, who was at the event, Ballmer said: There’s a reason why we’ll do almost $70 billion in revenue this year, and we will make over $20, whatever, $26, $27 billion in profits. That $70 billion would be a 12% increase from last year's revenue of $62.5 billion, and would mean a quarterly revenue figure...

A recently surfaced Microsoft patent focuses on technology that could be used to spy on VoIP users' conversations without the detection of participants. Redmond originally applied for the patent in 2009, well before its move to buy up VoIP provider Skype. This technology may have been developed with an eye to selling it to government agencies. Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has applied for a patent on technology that may let its user secretly intercept Voice over IP (VoIP) communications, amend the content and store it. The application was filed in December 2009 and was recently made public. The technology could allow...

Microsoft's past operating system woes might have some people living in the past While many computer lovers eagerly await the arrival of Windows 8 and Mac OS X Lion, a massive segment of users takes a decidedly slower approach when it comes to embracing new operating systems. According to an uber-detailed infographic by blog Manolution, 40.7% of users still run Windows XP on their computers. XP, which was released way back in October 2001, has since been succeeded by both the not-so-well-received Windows Vista, as well as Windows 7. In that same time frame, a half-dozen new versions of Apple's...

The World’s Most Ethical Companies designation recognizes companies that truly go beyond making statements about doing business “ethically” and translate those words into action. WME honorees demonstrate real and sustained ethical leadership within their industries, putting into real business practice the Institute’s credo of “Good. Smart. Business. Profit.” There is no set number of companies that make the list each year. Rather, the World’s Most Ethical Company designation is awarded to those companies that have leading ethics and compliance programs, particularly as compared to their industry peers. This year, there are 110 World’s Most Ethical Companies. Of these companies, 36...

Microsoft’s words, not mine. Hidden within a whitepaper, detailing the security features in the upcoming Office 365 suite, it reveals links to the Trust Center; a treasure trove of data protection policies and legalities of how Microsoft will handle your data in its cloud datacenters.