PHONES (featurephones or smartphones) are a growth area which is further complemented by mobile devices like tablets. This comes at the expense of the so-called 'desktop' to a certain extent. Microsoft knows this and even admits this sometimes. Vista 7 is not suitable for such devices and Microsoft is unable to make Vista Phony 7 [sic] stick (the company needs it for form factors like tablets). In such a situation Microsoft can just give up, acquire a winning team, or try again to leapfrog the competition with a new product. But instead, Microsoft is extorting for products it does not make to pay up, in order to serve as a sort of corporate welfare. A mobile technology news site says in the headline that "Microsoft sees revenue potential in smartphone-related patents" and this claim sometimes comes from Microsoft's own mouth. Rupert Murdoch's AllThingsD has another opinion: "Microsoft's top lawyer, Brad Smith, said the company's road to success in mobile isn't based solely on its Windows Phone 7 operating system. According to AllThingsD, Smith said the company also believes it can make money from its vast pool of smartphone-related patents. However, he conceded that the money Microsoft could make per phone from patents isn't as much as it could get via sales of phones running Microsoft software."

• Gartner finds the reasons it was wrong

  TABLET AND SMARTPHONE sales are thought to be behind lower than expected growth in PC shipments, according to Gartner.
  
  The IT market research firm is now expecting a 14.3 per cent increase in PC shipments in 2010 over 2009, down from a prediction it made in September that the year would see 17.9 per cent growth. Gartner views tablet and smartphone sales as reasons for that and the company expects tablets to grab 10 per cent of the PC market by 2014.

• The bad guys are worried - did we win?

  I’ve said this before but if you feel the best way to promote your product is to attack the opposition you have already lost. Fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) is a well known tactic and exists not only in the software world. Free software supporters have been quoting Ghandi’s “ignore, ridicule, fight, win” quote for a long time. By launching these attacks both Microsoft and Jobs appear to have belied their fear of the rival product and aligned themselves with step 3 of that process. Despite the rhetoric that came from Redmond and Apple supporters following these stories, the truth is that both OpenOffice.org and Android have made big enough dents in their markets to wake up the sleeping giant monopolists.

The software giant filed a patent yesterday, in which it proposes to deploy a layer of shape-memory plastic that would change the surface of the screen when hit with different wavelengths of ultraviolet light.

For the better part of 20 years, Mac lovers fumed in frustration as Apple languished in sub-5% PC market share territory. Wintel dominated. Big, ugly, buggy, clunky, and everywhere. It seemed as if graphic designers were the only people stubbornly refusing to admit defeat and join the rest of the planet in using Windows.

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