Microsoft is feeling the pinch and reverting to their nasty days will Bill Gates was alive. Check out the Microsoft PC versus Mac web site:

There are some things you simply can’t do out of the box with a Mac like watch, pause, rewind, and record TV like a DVR.

It’s funny how many PCs running Windows 7 can’t do that, either.

Most Macs can’t hook up to your TV unless you buy a converter dongle. Many PCs running Windows 7 are designed to connect directly to TVs, so you can watch movies and see photos on the big screen.

Most versus many?

Unlike Macs, many PCs running Windows 7 support Touch, so you can browse online newspapers, flick through photo albums, and shuffle files and folders—using nothing but your fingers.

Yes, and those touch screen PCs have been such hot sellers. So have the tablets running Windows.

Apple’s productivity suite file formats won’t open in Microsoft Office on PCs. This can be a real hassle for Mac users sharing work documents with PC users.

No mention of Microsoft Office for Mac. I wonder why?

Google and Verizon propose a Net neutrality framework. From Marguerite Reardon in CNET News:

The major breakthrough in the proposal is an agreement that the nondiscrimination clause that the Federal Communications Commission has proposed as part of its regulatory efforts would be enforceable.

If it’s so good then why are other carriers and major players not lining up to help push the proposal into law? Maybe it’s only good for Google and Verizon.

From AP:

The name “Liquidmetal” brings to mind the silvery, shapeshifting villain of the “Terminator 2” movie, but the company’s products are somewhat less dramatic. It mixes molten metal alloys in such a way that, when they cool, the structure of the material is more similar to glass than metal.

Maybe Apple has found a way to use Liquidmetal in cases for future devices. Incredibly hard, durable, very light, and very expensive to make (it needs large amounts of platinum and beryllium).

From Reuters:

Hewlett-Packard Co CEO Mark Hurd resigned on Friday after an investigation found that he had falsified expense reports to conceal “a close personal relationship” with a female contractor.

Word on the streets is that HP’s board was looking for a way to dump Hurd. He was a Wall Street darling and doubled HP’s stock after the Carly Fiorino fiasco, but HP’s rank and file hated the guy something fierce.

Phillip Elmer-DeWitt describes Apple’s new store, #300, in London’s Covent Garden:

This is an Apple Store for the record books. Largest and most expensive. Longest Genius Bar. Biggest staff (300 employees). And most elegant interior, restored from its original Welsh stone and English oak, with exposed brick walls and two glass interior staircases.

I stood in line for two hours to get inside before my flight back to NY. It’s so big the Apple Store on NY’s 5th Avenue would fit inside. It’s high tech done warm and cozy.

Dan Frommer in Business Insider:

After 100 days, the iPad is my favorite computer.

That’s not to say it’s my most powerful computer. Or the one I get the most work done with. Or the most portable or convenient.

But it’s the one I enjoy using the most. And I wouldn’t want to be without it.

I think he likes it.

From MG Siegler in TechCrunch:

Remember back in the day when Google was only activating 100,000 Android units a day? You should — it was May. By June, that number had jumped to 160,000 units a day. And today it now stands at 200,000 Android units activated a day.

I’ve said it before. Apple will not win a market share battle with Android OS smart phones. It has already lost that battle. Apple is fighting a different battle and a different war.

Media mogul Rupert Murdock in the Aussie version of Computerworld:

It’s a real game changer in the presentation of news. We will have young people reading newspapers. We will have different looking types of newspapers.

On charging for news content:

We have had a very encouraging number of people subscribing at a good price, But we think we are on the right strategy there and we think it’s going well.

On the crumbling MySpace:

It will look very, very different in a few months to what it’s looked for the last few years.

Will it be too little, too late?

Wilson Rothman on MSNBC quoting researcher Michael Gartenberg the new BlackBerry Torch:

The questions is, will the Torch be bright enough to lure users away from the latest and greatest Android devices, iPhone 4 and a newly re-invigorated Microsoft Windows Phone 7? At the moment, if you’re a die-hard BlackBerry user, there’s a lot to love but in terms of the state of the art, RIM hasn’t quite caught up to the leaders of the pack.

The Torch is a comfort phone for BlackBerry users. It’s not there to sway iPhone or Android users to BlackBerry. It’s to carry the torch for BlackBerry users who want a reason not to switch.

Brad Feld tried a Mac for 30 days:

I’m typing this on my brand new spiffy MacBook Pro 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 with 8GB RAM, with a 500GB solid state hard drive.  I can’t figure out why I’ve been so stubborn about really switching to the Mac.  This is a beautiful computer.

Life is good.

Jay Yarrow in Business Insider seems to think Microsoft’s Bing is out innovating Google’s search engine.

Bing is a surprisingly fast-moving, innovative product—and it’s forcing Google to play catch-up time and time again.

The innovation? Bing has colorful photographs in the home page background. Google only has a colorful logo. Bing had Twitter integration hours before Google. Bing’s search results are categorized. Google followed suit a year later.

That’s innovation?

What has all this so-called innovation wrought?

For all of Bing’s new ideas, it hasn’t translated into big gains in users. The latest numbers from comScore show that 63 percent of searches in the U.S. are performed on Google, but just 13 percent are done on Bing.

Apple’s Mac has a similar market share compared to Microsoft’s Windows, yet the Mac is highly profitable. What does Bing’s innovation do for Microsoft’s bottom line?

Thanks to that huge share of search, Google has built a wildly profitable business. Meanwhile, Microsoft is losing billions online, dumping money into Bing and other properties.

So, while Microsoft gets credit for innovating and forcing Google’s hand, it’s not paying off.

How about innovating search results which are relevant? That would be different and useful and might pay off in more usage which would mean more revenue for Microsoft and less for Google.

I’m just saying…

Michael Calderone reports on Fox News moving up the ladder in the White House:

The board of the White House Correspondents Association has agreed, by consensus, to move the Associated Press to the front row, center seat in the James S. Brady Briefing Room.

The board further agreed to move Fox News to the front row seat previously occupied by AP, and relocate NPR into the second row seat previously held by Fox, next to Bloomberg News.

They’re closer to the front, but will they be able to see the truth?

More news on Android-based smart phones outselling iPhones. Kevin C. Tofel says Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the U.S. in GigaOm. Yes, it’s not news and not a very important metric since Google derives no revenue from Android sales and Apple brings in a minimum of $600 per iPhone sold. As Windows PC makers have shown time and again, market share does not equate to revenue and profits.

In response to the news comes a comment from some guy:

To (sic) bad apple wont be making money for much longer then. When the developers abandon ship for androids easier, more streamlined and better development-environment iOS will die a quite fast death.

And we will see the beginning of this when? Note that iPhone customer satisfaction is substantially higher than Android smart phone customers.

Also, iPad isnt selling nearly as good as projected and can only be described as a horrible failure. Soon cheap, superior and faster android tablets will fill the market.

Some guy knows what iPad projections are? Not likely. So far, by all accounts except some guy, iPad is selling like hotcakes everywhere. Does anyone know anyone with an Android tablet? Are they for sale?

Since apple hasnt really kept up their pace at hardware on the PC-side of things the only thing they will really be selling in the future is OSX.

Yet Apple’s Mac sales continue to sell at record numbers in the lucrative and profitable high end of the market. Please note that all Macs are equipped with higher end Intel CPUs, vs. Dell, HP, Lenovo which ship more low end, low profit machines.

I doubt that will be a big margin-item since they are directly competing with Microsoft and Linux there.

Sure, Apple will stop making hardware and start selling OS X. Yep. That’ll happen. Probably by late fall. Uh huh.

People like some guy help to explain why Sarah Palin is popular.

Tim Bray on Apple vs. Google, iOS vs. Android:

Is it VHS vs Betamax, Mac vs PC, or Coke vs Pepsi? The current multibillion-dollar mobile-market war is a confusing tangle of software makers, hardware makers, and network operators. This isn’t what a theorists would call a perfect or even very clean competitive market, but it does seem to be delivering a regular flow of better, faster, more usable products to the people of Earth. It’s a privilege to be in it.

It is a classic war with many battles raging; not just those between Apple and Google. Also included are RIM, Nokia, Microsoft, perhaps HP and webOS, and not just for smart phones. Tablets and pads have yet to become mainstream.

Whether you call it a Smartphone or an App phone or an Internet phone, you’re typically talking about an expensive high-end device. Which, despite all the impressive numbers, is a small corner of the global phone market; the volume and the head count is in the phones owned by the people whose income tends towards the world’s average. So far, none of those are very Internet-enabled. iOS will never address this market unless Apple makes a conscious decision to shift its strategy away from profit maximization to market-share growth. I sure wouldn’t if I were them.

That’s not how Apple rolls.

I predict continued fragmentation of the rapidly growing smart phone space. Within a year, Android will lead in sheer units, followed by a rapidly dying Symbian, Apple’s iOS, RIM, and a long line of also-rans, including Microsoft, webOS and friends.