Late October brought the much anticipated market arrival of Windows 7. Microsoft is hoping to move past the poor market acceptance of Windows Vista and improve the Windows revenue stream.
You see, most large organizations never moved from Windows XP to Vista. In fact, Microsoft actually found itself making it easy for customers to stay on XP.
Unfortunately, even though Microsoft has dropped support for XP, they may have made it easier once more for customers to stay on XP, as upgrading from XP to Windows 7 requires a complicated "custom install" procedure that is not for the faint of heart. The labor time required for this "custom install," plus the cost of the operating system "upgrade" makes it such that you are probably money ahead just buying a new computer.
Computer hardware manufacturers are thrilled - they expect hardware sales to boom.
Meanwhile, on the same day as the Windows 7 roll out, Apple's earnings announcement showed a quarterly revenue increase year-over-year of almost $2 billion. Macintosh computer sales were up 17 percent. A whooping 7.4 million iPhones and 10.2 million iPods were sold during the quarter.
Apple's latest operating system, Snow Leopard, hit the market during the quarter with an upgrade price tag of $29, which was $100 less than the price of a Windows 7 upgrade kit.
On the smart phone front, Google is now running commercials for their open source Android operating system. These cleverly list, in Apple's font, all of the functions an iPhone can't do that are available on a "Droid" phone. All major cell phone carriers will soon have Android driven phones in the market.
On the smart phone application front, Apple's "App Store" is being joined by similar offerings from RIM, maker of BlackBerry devices, Palm and Google.
Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is growing publicly angry with the number of iPhones being used by Microsoft employees. There is no announced date for the long awaited upgrade to the Windows mobile operating system. Microsoft employee blogger, Mini-Microsoft, has chastised the company about their poor performance in the mobile arena and announced that he is buying an iPhone.
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