The World of Windows

Despite valiant efforts to push its Windows licensees to adopt Vista and the forthcoming Windows 7, Microsoft has one again agreed to extend the option of selling Windows XP for use on new PCs for another year, through April 30, 2010. The announcement hasn't been made publicly, but AppleInsider can exclusively report that according to a source within Hewlett Packard, Microsoft has granted the PC giant an extension to its existing rights to continue selling the nearly eight year old Windows XP on the company's business desktops, workstations, and notebooks in place of Windows 7 for another year. Microsoft isn't excited about the XP extension, as the internal communique provided by the source stated, "It’s important to remind customers that Microsoft are still planning to retire XP Pro Mainstream support on April 14th 2009 and will only provide OS security updates beyond that date unless the customer has an Extended Hotfix Support contract. MS Extended Support for XP Pr...

Microsoft is getting ready to unveil a long-anticipated free anti-virus service for personal computers that will compete with products sold by Symantec and McAfee. A Microsoft spokesman said on Wednesday that the world’s biggest software maker is testing an early version of the product with its own employees. Microsoft would “soon” make a trial version, or product beta, available via its website, he added, but declined to provide a specific date. Investors are closely monitoring the free service, code-named Morro after Brazil’s Morro de Sao Paolo beach, amid concern it could hurt sales of products from Symantec and McAfee, which generate billions of dollars of revenue a year protecting Windows PCs from attacks by hackers. “It’s a long-term competitive threat,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst with FBR Capital Markets, though he added that the near-term impact was minimal. Microsoft has said that Morro will offer basic features for fighting a wide range of viruses, which would likely make i...

Windows 7 (formerly codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna) is an upcoming version of Microsoft Windows, a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, netbooks and media center PCs. Microsoft has stated that it plans to release Windows 7 on October 22, 2009,less than three years after the general availability of its predecessor, Windows Vista. Its server counterpart, Windows Server 2008 R2, is slated for release at the same time. Unlike its predecessor, Windows 7 is intended to be an incremental upgrade to the Windows line, with the goal of being compatible with applications and hardware with which Windows Vista is already compatible. Presentations given by the company in 2008 have focused on multi-touch support, a redesigned Windows Shell with a new taskbar, a home networking system called HomeGroup, and performance improvements. Some applications that have been included with prior releases of Micr...

One of the more interesting aspects of Web 2.0 are the parts that encourage the development of effective online social communities. It's true though, that even from the beginning of the Web we had these, whether they were folks in IRC, obsessive product reviews on Amazon, or one of the original bloggers before it was cool. But a read-write Web makes social communities form more quickly and easily, stay vibrant longer, and retain members better. This is because it's so much easier to be social in a Web which allows even very non-technical folks to interact together effortlessly and leave permanent changes to the community behind them. Yes, I'm referring to the social software that enables conversations in and between blogs, social product recommendations, wikis, and MMOGs, and much, much more. I've written recently about how to create good social software. At the time I wanted to get a handle on the basic design patterns for fostering communities and comfortable socia...

“Looking for greater flexibility and support for more ad hoc processes, employees have responded with a more bottom-up approach, in some cases circumventing official information systems,” say CMS Watch Founder Tony Byrne and contributing analyst Jarod Gingras, the principal authors of The Enterprise Social Software Report 2008 . CMS Watch's social media vendors matrix. In other words, if your organization hasn’t embraced and standardized social software, your employees will begin installing it and using it without your permission. I know of what client that only found out recently that 15% of their employee base had voluntarily joined a dedicated company Facebook site. At BT, 4,000 employees formed their own “BT Facebook” site. BT took note and in response built their own social networking site called MyBT (see The power of Intranet 2.0 ). If your organization hasn’t already developed an Intranet 2.0 plan (social media plan), you would do well to develop one before emp...