You’ve probably read those reports that PC sales are widely expected to contract this year by nearly 12 percent. This should come as no surprise, considering the shaky economic climate. As with autos, owners of personal computers will try to stick with the ones they have, spending money on upgrades rather than on replacement hardware. […]

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, […]

In light of my peculiar line of work, I am one of the first on the block — at least my block — to adopt a new computer-related gadget, and certainly I’m pretty quick to install an upgraded operating system or application. Of course, this sort of behavior entails certain compromises. One, of course, is […]

The other day, I got a letter from a reader suggesting that now that it was so convenient for Mac users to run Windows, developers would quickly decide that it wouldn’t be worth the bother building software for the former. Instead, might as well let you all run the Windows version, and save on all […]