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.
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.
Microsoft, HTC, Nokia and Sony Ericsson have teamed up in Europe to send Apple a message: no one can own the term “App Store,” and they’re willing to join forces to prove it in court.
It looks like Microsoft’s plan to beat Apple in the retail space by building their own Microsoft Stores right across from mall-based Apple Stores is paying off: Microsoft’s successfully chased Apple out of its space in the Bellevue, Washington shopping mall.
It’s something of a pyrrhic victory, though. Apple’s just moving to the second floor of the mall to a larger retail space. Directly overhead, overlooking Microsoft’s store, where it will literally be living in Apple’s shadow. If there was ever a time to LOL, this is it.
Microsoft’s latest attempt at persuading customers to buy a Windows PC rather than a Mac is an advertising campaign that compares the price of Apple machines with computers from Asus, Dell, HP, Sony, and others; and then asks buyers to “do the math” and look at the money they could save – which they could then spend on a trip to Hawaii.
For example, compare Apple’s MacBook Air with a selection of Windows netbooks and straight away you’ll notice the difference in price – with the MacBook Air listed at $1,049 compared to netbooks for as little as $299. We’ll ignore the fact that Microsoft has classed the MacBook Air as a netbook and move on to specifications.
Microsoft is trying to lure iOS developers into creating applications for the Windows Phone 7 operating system by offering an API mapping tool which helps them port their applications over from the iPhone. Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Microsoft’s Senior Technical Evangelist for Interoperability, unveiled the tool on the Windows Team blog:
With this tool, iPhone developers can grab their apps, pick out the iOS API calls, and quickly look up the equivalent classes, methods and notification events in WP7. A developer can search a given iOS API call and find the equivalent WP7 along with C# sample codes and API documentations for both platforms.
Included in the package along with the API mapping tool is a 90+ page guide entitled “Windows Phone 7 Guide for iPhone Application Developers;” a series of “developer stories” from devs who have already ported their iPhone apps over to Windows Phone 7; and a compilation of the key resources needed to get started.
Apple has surpassed Microsoft in quarterly profits for the first time ever, bagging $760 million dollars more during the first calendar quarter of 2011. Microsoft announced today that its net profit for the past quarter – the company’s third fiscal quarter – is $5.23 billion. Last week, Apple reported profits of $5.99 billion over the same period, which is its second fiscal quarter of 2011.
Six months ago, Apple’s excellent performance in recent years was highlighted when the Cupertino company surpassed Microsoft in quarterly revenue for the first time in nearly 15 years. Despite this, Microsoft continued to hold Apple off when it came to profits, largely due to the high profit margins it achieves with its software business.
Apple’s latest accomplishment is now the third time the company has trumped Microsoft over the past year. In May of 2010, Apple first surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization, then went on to surpass Microsoft in quarterly revenue in October, and has now surpassed Microsoft in quarterly profits.
Apple’s market cap is now nearly $100 billion higher than Microsoft’s. It’s no wonder Apple has enough cash reserves to keep the company going until 2018, without selling another single product.
[via MacRumors]
Microsoft’s latest iOS offering hit the App Store today in the form of Photosynth; a fantastic photography application for taking 360º panoramic photos on your iPhone. It’s a free download, and one of the most impressive panorama applications I’ve tried.
The first thing I noticed about Photosynth is how easy it is to create your panorama. You simply tap the screen to start and then move your device around – up, down, left, right – and the application captures the images automatically, so there’s no need to move your device bit by bit while tapping a button to capture each tile.
Have you ever needed to move Microsoft Word documents between your Mac at home and your PC at work, but you just didn’t know how, or if it was even possible? Once you know what to do, it is a relatively simple and straightforward process that requires nearly no effort. Find out what to do in this video.
