If the netbook market is a race to the bottom, then Sony is bringing up the rear. Not a year after Sony execs disparaged netbooks as undeserving of its premium brand attention, the company announced its token entry into the market: the Vaio W.
Windows XP is almost nine years old. And it will be almost 11 before it is finally retired for good now that Microsoft has once again extended XP downgrade rights, this time for 18 months following the general availability of Windows 7.
Now that the marketplace has abandoned Vista, is Microsoft making preparations to abandon it as well? Earlier today, a Microsoft executive suggested that might be the case, hinting that the company could be planning to ditch Vista soon after Windows 7 ships.
Microsoft had planned to cut off sales of its Windows XP operating system through the retail and original equipment manufacturer channels on Jan. 30, 2008–one year after the Windows Vista debut. But the poor reception given Vista and the unwavering loyalty of XP users have forced the company to extend that deadline again and again and again.
Microsoft’s renewed antipiracy push isn’t currying much favor among PC users running pirated software. In China, a nation where 82 percent of all software is unlicensed, many are lambasting the company over its Windows Genuine Advantage program, which blackens the desktop backgrounds of PCs running unlicensed copies of Windows and pesters their owners with constant warning messages.
Windows Vista may end up being the least-desired best-selling OS in the history of operating systems. New research suggests that more than one in three new Vista PCs is downgraded to Windows XP. Performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software reports that its survey of over 3,000 Vista PCs revealed nearly 35 percent to be running XP
I’m not sure which is more humiliating, the fact that the opening ceremony for this year’s Olympics in China culminated with the unwitting projection of the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) onto the roof of the National Stadium, presumably in full view of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who was in the audience. Or that the organizers of the event decided to run Windows XP and not Vista.
Add Lenovo to the ever-lengthening list of PC makers turning their attention to the ultra-mobile PC market, that new category of extraneous mobile computing devices the electronics industry seems so determined to create.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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