If you can believe Microsoft, they frequently put groups of users in little test rooms — or some sort of testing environment — and expose them to the new features in a product. By gauging their reactions, they decide whether those capabilities deserve to go into production. Now if you look at Microsoft’s shipping products, […]

So a client calls me to set up his spanking new MacBook, an operation that I took to be utterly routine, having done that sort of thing for years with different Macs. Arriving at his home, I realized I had forgotten to take my FireWire cable — he had purchased the white MacBook entry-level model, […]

When it comes to Apple, sometimes you don’t know what to think about some of their long-time behavior patterns when it comes to marketing and support. In taping an interview for this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, author and commentator Kirk McElhearn brought to my attention the fact that Apple, after extolling the […]

So I was reading the latest issue of Time magazine, when I spied a flashy, somewhat cartoonish ad telling me that “You Need the Speed of Norton 2009.” Do I? Well, when I went to Symantec’s Web site to see just what this spectacular product was supposed to do, I found a link to the […]