All Things Digital

John Locke (played by Terry O’Quinn) and his Apple II in ABC’s “Lost”

“Because they’re the super-small-market share guy, they get all these statements about them.” Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates said that about Apple back in 2005. And while it’s essentially still true, it’s less so than it has been in years past. In separate reports today, research houses Gartner (IT) and IDC (IDC) both note that Apple has climbed to third place in the desktop market in the U.S. Gartner figures Apple’s share of state-side PC shipments for the second quarter of 2008 to be 8.5 percent, up from 6.4 percent in the quarter a year earlier. IDC pegs it at 7.8 percent for the second quarter this year, up from 6.2 percent in last year’s second quarter. And that puts the company in third place in the domestic PC market–ahead of Acer, if you believe Gartner. And in fourth place behind Acer if you believe IDC.

Not that it matters all that much. Because regardless of whose metrics you prefer, Apple (AAPL) still lags far behind the two PC sales leaders. Dell (DELL) is still the No. 1 seller of PCs in the U.S., with 32 percent of the market according to IDC. HP is No. 2, with 25 percent. And in terms of worldwide sales, Apple hasn’t even cracked the Top 5. Yet.

It’s definitely No. 1 in Hollywood though, as critic Roger Ebert noted a few years back. “Macs turn up in the movies all the time–not so much because of product placement, but because so many movie people use them and like them,” Ebert wrote. “A historian of the future, counting all the on-screen computers between 1983 and today, would likely conclude that Macs represented 90 percent of the computer market.”

QOTD

I am sure there will [be] some day next month where I start thinking about software and I will start driving here to Microsoft, go up to the fifth floor and walk down to my office and they will be remodeling it. In fact, they were wondering if I was leaving at four or five today, so they could get started on that.”

– Microsoft chairman Bill Gates bids farewell to Microsoft

“Microsoft’s philosophy is to ‘do things better’,” Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said at the D6 conference last month. “And Vista has given us lots of opportunity to do that.”

Yes, Microsoft (MSFT) certainly has done just that. Actually, even more than you’d think, because as it turns out, the Chronic Vista Aversion Disorder that swept through the consumer population following Vista’s launch has also afflicted the developer community.

According to recent research from Evans Data, fewer than one in 10 software developers are writing applications specifically for Windows Vista this year (almost half are still writing applications for XP and presumably the .Net framework). And that means applications that leverage Vista features that would prevent them from running on XP without modification.

Evans expects that percentage to improve a bit next year, but not by much. The research firm found that about 24% of developers plan to tailor their apps to use Vista-specific features in 2009. Course, by that time, they may not even have to bother. Windows 7 will arrive at market by late 2009, early 2010.

[Illustration: LolCatGenerator.com]

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates delivered his last scheduled speech as the full-time chairman of Microsoft (MSFT) this morning. He spoke at length about Microsoft’s application development plan, the August debut of Internet Explorer 8 and the company’s efforts to compete with Google (GOOG). But all paled in comparison to his discussion of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio and the egg-throwing Ballmer-bot created with it. Transcript and video below …

Robot: Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers; developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

Bill Gates: Good; we’ve got the Ballmer-bot pretty excited here. It’s an amazing-looking robot. It’s just balancing itself, and fantastic.

Patrick Deegan: Yeah, what you see here is the latest in robotics technology. The Ballmer-bot features a dynamically stable mobile base, a rotating torso and two dexterous arms. This makes it so that it’s even able to throw eggs.

This year’s D conference had its share of great lines–tired ones, too (we’re all clear on the subject of Facebook and information sharing, right?). Here’s a selection of the former…

Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.”

–Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates

AOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Web. We don’t get no respect.”

–Jeff Bewkes, president and CEO, Time Warner (TWX)

I will probably never be a CEO again.”

–Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang states the obvious

It’s a company that creates technology.”

–Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answers the question, “What is a technology company?”

Read more »

A tough act to follow, last year’s D: All Things Digital 5. How do you best, or even match, a 75-minute joint interview with Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs–a history-making history lesson taught by two principal protagonists of tech’s narrative? Summon Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse from the dead to reminisce about the “War of Currents”?

No. Better to let history make itself, as it always has, and focus on making news. And it’s likely there will be quite a bit of it coming out of D: All Things Digital 6. With this year’s lineup, how could there not? Microsoft’s Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer onstage together just a month before Gates steps back from his day-to-day duties as company chairman. Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes talking strategy as the media giant prepares to spin off Time Warner Cable and tries to figure out just what the hell to do with AOL. Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless (VZ) and FCC Chaiman Kevin Martin appearing separately, but together offering an insider view of the telecom industry as it grapples with issues of Net neutrality, open access and early termination fees. And then there’s Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, who’ve been struggling to right a foundering Internet pioneer as it battles Google (GOOG), Microsoft, investor-agitator Carl Icahn and itself.

And that’s just a sampling. Clearly, there’s much to talk about. Much news to be made.

Sure, we may not have managed to arrange another tete-a-tete as historic as last year’s Gates/Jobs interview.

But we did manage to get Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang on the same stage–albeit at different times. Still, no easy feat, that.

And who knows, perhaps we’ll get them onstage together as well.

So join us at d6.allthingsd.com tomorrow for as-it-happens, all-access coverage of the conference. Liveblogs of the sessions and demos. Videos of the speakers. Photos of attendees. You’ll find it all here.

(Photo illustration by Beth Callaghan)

Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition bid for Yahoo is apparently looking more attractive to the now-minor Internet major, especially since Carl Icahn has mounted a full-fledged fight for the nine seats now on Yahoo’s board.

Sources close to Yahoo (YHOO) say the company would likely agree to an acquisition if the price is right. Trouble is, Microsoft (MSFT) doesn’t seem to be interested in one anymore.

Or at least that’s the way it would like to be perceived. Speaking at an event in Moscow, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once again feigned disinterest in an outright acquisition. “Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing, it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business,” he said. “We will spend money on some acquisitions. You can do a whole lot of things with $50 billion.”

You sure can. Like spend $47.5 billion of it on Yahoo, just as you planned to last month–even though, as BoomTown’s Kara Swisher reports, Chairman Bill Gates harbored little enthusiasm for buying Yahoo.

But that may happen yet. Some inside Microsoft say the software company would still like to acquire Yahoo, it just doesn’t want to pay the $37-a-share or so Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Co. are reportedly demanding. And it may not have to, if Icahn and other ornery Yahoo investors like Legg Mason Capital Management (LM) force Yahoo’s hand.

Dear Friends; Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates sharing his fortune. If you ignore this, You will repent later. … When you forward this email to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (If you are a Microsoft Windows user) For a two weeks time period.

For every person that you forward this email to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00. For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.”

–Excerpt from the Microsoft giveaway hoax

My God … Bill Gates really is sharing his fortune. But not with folks who help out with that infamous Microsoft email “beta test.” He’s sharing it with consumers who use Microsoft’s Live Search engine to find and purchase products online.

Today, Microsoft (MSFT) will announce “Live Search Cashback,” a sort of search-engine loyalty program that rewards users with rebates on certain purchases of products found through Microsoft’s live.com Web search. “We want to earn your loyalty and reward it with cashback savings for your everyday online shopping,” Microsoft enthuses on the Cashback site. “We are ‘The Search That Pays You Back!’”

Cringe.

Like Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo (YHOO), this new service is yet another effort to bolster its laggard search service, which has long been a very distant third in the search market. Question is, will it work? Gartner (IT) analyst Van Baker says maybe. “Assuming that the rebate amounts are enough to be appealing to people, which it sounds like they are, that definitely could attract a fair number of consumers,” Baker told the Seattle Post Intelligencer. “But what they may do is just go to that site when they’re thinking about buying something, and use Google the rest of the time.”

Microsoft (MSFT) started with a vision of a computer on every desk, and soon it hopes to put one on every wall as well.

During Microsoft’s 12th annual CEO Summit today, Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated TouchWall, a 4-by-6-foot multitouch computer that can transform home and office walls into computers. Gates calls TouchWall “the whiteboard of the future,” and it may turn out to be just that–if Microsoft can get it to market at a reasonable price. The company’s other multitouch computer, Surface, is currently shipping for about $10,000.

You wouldn’t know it from the protests over Microsoft’s decision to retire Windows XP at the end of June or the PC users exercising their Windows Vista downgrade rights, but Vista is actually selling quite well. Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates said today that sales of Windows Vista have reached 140 million copies worldwide. “That’s a very rapid sales rate,” Gates explained.

Sure is. Especially for an operating system that’s met with such a middling reception. That said, you’ve got to wonder if the 140 million copies to which Gates refers are deployed copies or licenses sold. Because if it’s the latter, the number would be decidedly less impressive. It wouldn’t really account for volume licenses sold to corporate customers, copies pre-installed on OEM computers, and copies downgraded to Windows XP. And Gates has made exactly this type of oblique statement before, the last time Microsoft announced Vista sales figures.