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Microsoft

Shocker Of The Day

by Jason Wilk on August 12, 2009

  • A Texas judge ruled this morning that Microsoft cannot sell one of its flagship products, Word, in the United States because of patent infringement. Yes, you heard correct: Microsoft cannot sell Word, the judge ruled.
  • Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered a permanent injunction that “prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML”.
  • Seattle PI quotes “XML essentially is a programming language that allows users to customize the underlying format of their word-processing documents, for example, and makes them readable across different word-processing programs. The ability to read and write XML documents is an integral feature of Microsoft Word. In its complaint (PDF), i4i alleges Microsoft willingly violated its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) on a method for reading XML. The company, whose Web site advertises that users can ‘Create and edit XML content in Microsoft Word,’ helps clients work with XML”
  • Along with Microsoft losing Word, Judge Davis also ordered Microsoft to pay i4i more than $290 million in damages. Microsoft said “We are disappointed by the court’s ruling,” Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said in a statement. “We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We will appeal the verdict.” It is unknown in Microsoft will be able to get this ruling turned around.

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Google Goes At Microsoft’s Throat With Unnecessary Billboard Campaign

by Jason Wilk on August 3, 2009

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  • Microsoft and Google are at eachother’s throats more than ever these days. First, Google announced Chrome OS, the company’s first operating system. Then Microsoft announced the new version of Office with major cloud app support. Then Microsoft announced its deal to take over Yahoo’s search business. Today, Google begins a major promotional campaign to get the word out about organizations switching to Google apps.

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  • The campaign, called “Going Google,” will predominately be made up of billboards on four major U.S. highways that will give a new message about Google apps everyday for a month. The billboards will be placed on the 101 in San Francisco, the West Side Hwy in New York, the Ike in Chicago, and Mass Pike in Boston. They will also use #gonegoogle as a potential trending hash tag on Twitter to get the word out. Does Google really need to do this?

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*Google says that the vinyl being used to create these new messages each day will be recycled or reused into either computer bags or shopping bags.

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Apple Controls 91% Of Premium Computer Market

by Jason Wilk on July 23, 2009

  • According to NPD, in June, nine out of 10 dollars spent on computers costing $1,000 or more went to Apple. So, to say Mac revenue market share in the “premium” price segment is 91 percent is shockingly accurate. Their numbers in May were 88%, up over 20% since last year when Mac revenue share was 66 percent. 
  • According to NPD, in June, average selling prices for all PCs sold at US retail was $701, or $690 for desktops and $703 for notebooks. When comparing Average selling price (ASP) to Mac and Windows, it gets interesting. For all Windows PCs, ASP was $515 in June. For Macs: $1,400. Desktop Windows PC ASP: $489. Mac desktops: $1,398. Windows notebook ASP was $520, or $569 when removing all those nasty, margin-sucking netbooks. Mac laptops: $1,400. In tough times, it’s apparent people will only spend money on quality. [Beta News]

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Not Good…

by Jason Wilk on July 13, 2009

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  • SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Six in 10 companies in a survey plan to skip the purchase of Microsoft Corp’s Windows 7 computer operating system, many of them to pinch pennies and others over concern about compatibility with their existing applications. Many of the more than 1,000 companies that responded to a survey by ScriptLogic Corp say they have economized by cutting back on software updates and lack the resources to deploy Microsoft’s latest offering.

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Did Google Announce Its Microsoft Killer?

by Jason Wilk on July 8, 2009

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  • This morning, Google posted the following on their blog, explaining their next step in the battle to take over Microsoft. Yes, it’s coming. The Google OS. Don’t get too excited yet as Microsoft plans to announce their counter attack on Monday with a similar product called Gazelle. (coming next post…)

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“It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer”.

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