Microsoft - page 33

When Apple announced that it was going to sell OS X Lion exclusively as a digital download, many were skeptical. By not selling physical copies of the operating system, wouldn’t Apple be crippling Lion’s consumer reach?

As it turns out, Lion has already sold more than 6 millions copies in the Mac App Store, making it 80% more popular than Apple’s previous desktop OS, Snow Leopard. The folks in Redmond have taken notice, and Microsoft has announced that its upcoming operating system, Windows 8, will also be offered as a digital download.

Microsoft recently unveiled its first retail store on the East coast at the Tysons Corner mall in McLean, Virginia. Like other Microsoft stores, the new location is strategically placed near the local Apple Store.

In an attempt to appeal to the hip and cool computer geeks out there, Microsoft hired a DJ to play music during the store’s opening. Can you guess what kind of laptop the DJ used?

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a nasty, totally broken little power grab of a bill that would effectively end the concept of ‘safe harbor’ that has allowed the internet to grow and thrive over the last ten years by allowing the government to add websites to a DNS blacklist for posting any kind of copyrighted material, fair use or not.

The bill’s so stupid and the outrage over it so deafening that it’s doubtless it will be never make it into law. Too many people are openly angry about it, including Mozilla, 4Chan, Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, AOL, Wikimedia, the ACLU, Twitter and Yahoo!

You know who supports SOPA, though? Apple. In fact, they are writing a check to support it, albeit indirectly. It’s a check iTunes Match might have to cash.

Could it get any sadder? Ten years late, Microsoft is finally set to open its sad sack retail store later today at Tysons Corner, pretty much directly across from the original Apple Store that started it all way back in 2001. Needless to say, the world’s pretty much yawning at the news, and so Microsoft is trying anything to get people to attend the grand opening. I’m not sure what’s sadder, though: the fact that they hired a Jonas Brother to draw in crowds, or the fact that the Jonas Brother they hired, Joe Jonas, is both a Mac user and a former entertainment act for Apple, famously drawing scores of screaming teens to the SoHo Apple Store in 2008.

Multitouch is so 2011. The future of computer interaction is gestures. Instead of swiping a finger, say analysts, we’ll be waving our hand. And in one of those ‘back to the future moments,’ Microsoft, which Apple passed in a blur, could be leading the ‘gestures’ movement thanks to its gaming interface Kinect.

Microsoft allegedly aborted a deal with a Swedish mobile blogger because he uses an iPhone.

Toni Johansson, at the helm of site winMobile.se, said that responding to an email with the “sent from my iPhone” signature cost him a funding deal from Microsoft. As a result, he’s closing the site.

The iPad has been a staggering success for Apple since its inception in 2009, but if it wasn’t for one loud-mouthed Microsoft employee, the tablet may have never been born. Steve Jobs decided that he would create the device after listening to a Microsoft employee boast about a Windows tablet over dinner. When he got home that night, Steve said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet really can be.”

Have the salad days of Microsoft passed? Insiders say CEO Steve Ballmer was greeted with yawns at a recent annual meeting replete with reportedly “painfully flat demos and lifeless speakers.” Ballmer, who once derided the Apple iPhone market share as a ’rounding error,’ is now on the defensive, adopting the mantra “Windows Cannot Lose.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has revealed that both Apple and Dropbox have joined the Digital Due Process coalition — a group whose mission is to pressure Congress into updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

For a number of reasons, mainly its long list of stability issues and its unquenchable thirst for any power your system may have, Apple will ensure we never see Adobe Flash on the iPad. And while the company has been criticized by competition for this decision in the past, it’s not the only one turning its back on the aging technology: Microsoft has also announced that Flash player will not feature in Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 8 tablets.

Here’s the new Blue Screen of Death in Windows 8, which Microsoft is previewing this week at its Build conference.

It’s been transformed into a sad face emoticon.

Reminds me of the old Happy Mac but, well, sadder.

Bigger version after the jump.

Via Arnold Kim’s Twitter stream.

The Microsoft Explorer Touch mouse invites you to “explore” its unique, touch-sensitive scroll wheel. While the Explorer Touch doesn’t offer multitouch gestures like Apple’s Magic Mouse or Microsoft’s own, flagship Touch Mouse, the Explorer does sport an attractive form factor and quality build.

The Explorer Touch Mouse ($50) gives you a scrolling experience that’s unusual to say the least. It’s pretty cheap, and it’s portable.

Microsoft is in the process of developing Windows 8, and the Redmond giant has posted an analysis of what it’s calling “Improvements in Windows Explorer.” We’ll leave you to be the judge of the “improvements” made in Windows 8, but we couldn’t resist showing you Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined” interface in the new Explorer.

If you’re a regular visitor to Cult of Mac, you’ll already have some appreciation of how terrific Steve Jobs is. But do his employees share the same opinion of him as us fans?  Well, according to the employment reviews and rating site Glassdoor, 97% of them approved of him as CEO — making Steve one of the most successful CEOs among those rated on the site.

With more and more Mac apps gaining compatibility with OS X Lion, Microsoft’s widely popular Office suite for the Mac is the next in line. MacNN is reporting that Microsoft is hard at work implementing Lion features like Auto Save, Versions, and full-screen mode in Office 2011.

Apple’s own iWork productivity suite has already been updated with these Lion-specific features, and Microsoft aims at adding these features to Office in the coming months.

Apple’s abundance of available cash is certainly no secret. With $76.2 billion in the bank at the end of the June quarter, the company has more money then the gross domestic product of almost two-thirds of the world’s countries. But what will it do with all that cash? Just sit on it in case of an (incredibly) rainy day?

Of course not. To begin with, it may just be about to buy Hulu.

Vitamin Water may be the 2011 equivalent of snake oil, but now those bus shelter ads have got some actual juice: you can hook up your iPhone or iPod to charge on the go.

The ads featuring USB ports will be rolled out in Boston, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. They are the brainchild of Crispin Porter + Bogusky — the same Mac-happy guys behind Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunters”  campaign.

Poor Microsoft. While Apple’s sales and profits have been on the upward trend for the past several years, Microsoft hasn’t nearly as much growth in the computer or mobile business.

In an effort to expand the “Microsoft story,” the Redmond based company has launched the initiative to build 75 new US retail stores in the next 2-3 years. 75 stores hardly competes with Apple’s 300+ worldwide retail locations, but at least it’s something to start with for Microsoft.

Apple famously solved the copy-and-paste touchscreen challenge with their innovative hold-and-drag-corners approach first introduced in iOS 3.0, but is there a better way? Microsoft thinks so. They think they’ve got an even better way to copy text in the latest version of their Bing for iPad app. It’s called the lasso.

The iTunes Festival 2011 is now well under way in London, boasting 31 nights of music from 62 artists including Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Linkin Park, Bruno Mars, My Chemical Romance, and many more. If you weren’t lucky enough to bag yourself some tickets, you can still enjoy every show live and on demand with the iTunes Festival London 2011 app for your iOS device — the first of this week’s must-have iOS applications!

We’ve also included the brand new Starbucks app, which boasts Mobile Pay, reward card management and eGifts; and the Photosynth app from Microsoft, which just got an awesome update!

There’s a lot of truth in these Organizational Charts for various tech companies from Bonkers World.

Via Laughing Squid

It’s a total embarrassment, but less than a year after Microsoft finally “caught up” with Apple’s three year lead and released a modern, multitouch smartphone operating system in Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is having to do it again, this time having been caught with their pants down by the iPad.

Their solution? Windows 8, the next version of their desktop operating system, carefully optimized to support power-sipping ARM processors and skinned with a special, tablet-specific operating system. Now a report suggests that Microsoft will rush Windows 8 to market to make sure that the iPad 3 doesn’t eat Microsoft’s tablet lunch before they’ve even sat down to the table.

Earlier this week Microsoft released updates for the Mac versions of Office 2004, 2008, and 2011 that address some issues with security, stability, and reliability. Users of these versions of Microsoft Office are encouraged to update their software.

In a bout of self-congratulation as laughably misguided as that of the toothless hobo hanging outside of Albert Einstein’s office claiming that whole Theory of Relativity thing was his idea, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows Phone is now “feeling flattered” that Apple copied so many great iOS 5 ideas from Windows Phone 7. As if.

When it comes to mobile, Microsoft has been caught with its pants down twice in the last four years.

The first time was when the original iPhone completely turned the smartphone industry upside down overnight back in 2007. Microsoft was so slow to respond that by the time they released their first true touch-based operating system, Windows Phone 7, in November of last year, they had gone from a dominant player in the smartphone market to losing almost all of their market share.

Before Microsoft could even get Windows Phone 7 out the door, though, it happened again. Apple released the iPad in 2010, and this time, iOS didn’t just revolutionize smartphones… it attacked the very foundations of Microsoft’s Windows empire itself, cannibalizing laptop sales and utterly destroying the netbook market.