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, […]