As you know, Microsoft makes huge profits from the sale of software and services. While you can get a generic PC real cheap with a flavor of Windows preloaded, actually buying a copy at your favorite consumer electronics outlet can be extremely costly. Best Buy, for example, offers Windows 7 Ultimate, the edition with all […]

When Microsoft announced that you had to do a “clean install” to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, even so-called Microsoft fans complained, and loudly. This meant they’d have to basically backup, erase, and restore their hard drives. Only Windows Vista offered a direct upgrade path, and it wasn’t a pretty picture, although I […]

Now that the key details about Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5, not to mention iCloud, are available, you have to start wondering about Apple’s competitors, and how they’ll react. Certainly the presence of Steve Jobs, at least for part of the keynote, seemed a plus, although some analysts couldn’t avoid reminding you that he […]

All right, Steve Jobs did show up at this year’s WWDC keynote, but VP Phil Schiller and the rest of the crew did the heavy lifting — at least for the first two parts of the presentation. But let’s get this little nugget out of the way first: Just last week, the Tech Night Owl […]