Windows Weekly 91

Earnings, layoffs, the Inauguration, a MobileMe competitor, and more.

• Microsoft earnings and layoffs
  • $5.94 billion on revenues of $16.63 billion - Up just 2 percent year over year
  • Weird: Announced before the start of the business day today, unexpectedly
  • Windows/Office down 8 percent - Server up 15 percent - Xbox up 3 percent
  • Laying off 5,000 in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, legal, HR, and IT over the next 18 months, 1400 immediately
• Apple earnings: Surprisingly healthy
  • $1.61 billion on revenues of $10.17 billion
  • 9 percent jump in its Macintosh business. Mac sales were 2.5 million units, up from 2.3 million
  • Sold 22.7 million iPods in the quarter, representing 3 percent growth (70 percent market share WW, 73 US)
  • 4.4 million iPhones, an 88 percent improvement
  • Watching netbook market
• PC market share figures are in Worldwide:
  1. HP: 14.9 Million Units, 19.1% Market Share, 3.5% growth
  2. Dell: 10.3 Million Units, 13.2% Market Share, -5.9% growth
  3. Acer: 9.6 Million Units, 12.3% Market Share, 31.1% growth = Netbook
  4. Lenovo: 95.5 Million Units, 7.1% Market Share, -4.5% growth
  5. Toshiba: 3.6 Million Units, 4.7% Market Share, 20.7% growth
  6. Apple: 2.5 million units - 3.2 % percent market share
  7. North America: Apple fell from 3rd to 4th place, 5.8 percent market share
• Microsoft tech used to showcase inauguration: Photosynth - Microsoft Live Labs
• Rumor: Microsoft plotting a MobileMe competitor
  • To unveil three new mobile services at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next month. SkyBox is a service for users to sync a phones information with the web. Microsoft will be offering automatic backup and restore services, access and management of phone data and provide easy communication and sharing with others. The service will also allow syncing of contacts, email/SMS, calendar items and pictures into the cloud, similar to Apple's MobileMe. The difference from Apple's offering is Microsoft could be set to offer this out to non Windows Mobile devices. SkyLine will be aimed at small businesses. Offering similar functionality to SkyBox, businesses will be able to setup their phones with Microsoft's Exchange hosting with their own domain names. SkyMarket was originally discovered in September 2008 when Microsoft advertised several external job positions. SkyMarket is the codename for Microsoft's mobile marketplace, a competitor to Apple's AppStore and RIM's Blackberry application center. This service will only be available on Windows Mobile devices and will showcase the 1000s of Windows Mobile applications available today.
• Tip of the week:
  • This weeks tip is about using Windows 7 Styles and Themes. I've put up a Washington D.C. theme -- will soon post themes for London, Paris, Ireland, and Coffee. You can use the desktop backgrounds in XP, Vista, Mac of course themepack files can be opened by ZIP programs
• Software of the week: Unlocker overcomes annoying "cannot delete file" dialogs in Vista/XP. This software is donationware. Thanks to Troy Haskin for the tip via email.

Audible pick of the week: The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, Unabridged, Narrated by Richard Brown. For a free credit toward the audiobook of your choice, visit Audible.com/windows.

Check out Paul's blog at the SuperSite for Windows for more information.

Thanks to CacheFly for the bandwidth for this show. The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Derek K. Miller.