A NEW information technology discipline is emerging around application delivery to control desktop management costs and security over a widening array of devices.

Streaming is the next-generation delivery vehicle

Under the broad banner of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), images of operating systems or application code are being dynamically streamed to devices, accessed remotely or served up as Web 2.0 pages.

Wrapped around these are service-level guarantees for specific applications encompassing network performance and application response times for different locations.

Gartner research director Martin Gilliland says Citrix is leading the charge but faces competition from Softricity, which has been acquired by Microsoft, and from AppStream.

“The next generation of delivery is application streaming,” Gilliland says.

“The key reason why they developed different models is because remote display protocols, such as with Citrix or Windows Terminal Services, don’t suit every purpose.”

Application streaming serves program code to terminal or desktop machines, often with its own cut-down virtual operating system.

Citrix Access Gateway product manager Sandler Rubin says this means his company’s Presentation Server can run a Windows Vista application on an XP machine, or conflicting versions of software.

“Four years ago Citrix was about server-based computing,” Rubin says. “Now we’ve become much more sophisticated and nuanced.”

Michael Kleef, a technology adviser at Microsoft, says his company supports choice, such as application streaming into isolated environments, or even remote desktops each running on their own server blade.

Another variation on the theme is to run multiple virtual machines on the same desktop.

Kleef points to the usefulness of application streaming as providing a centrally managed isolation chamber for troublesome applications.

“With streaming, in terms of performance, you get it on the local machine,” Kleef says.

Of course, simply dragging operating systems or applications from a file server was popular in the early 1990s, even to diskless workstations.

This fell out of fashion because of growing download sizes over limited bandwidth.

Gigabit ethernet overcomes this problem, but Rubin says application delivery is different from file serving.

For example, VDI can maintain a security context between users and devices and pick the right delivery mechanism. It also encompasses service-level guarantees for wide area network response times.

This need has propelled Citrix into the hardware acceleration business, where it now powers sites such as Google and Yahoo.

All these pieces are subject to centralised policy management, which is what Access Gateway provides.

“When you speak to a CIO, they take for granted that the network will work,” Rubin says.

“What worries them is how they will bring their applications out to branch offices.

“You need to focus how you deliver the applications.”

Citrix says it has “joined hands” with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle to raise the awareness of application delivery as a strategic technology approach.

Oracle Australia-New Zealand technology sales vice-president Robert Gosling says this is necessary to take advantage of his company’s grid computing capabilities, so applications can spread across the grid on-demand and extra servers can be plugged in as needed. All this application support could be wasted without guaranteed delivery to users.

“There’s a demand from the business to have service-level arrangements for the delivery of applications,” Gosling says.

“The idea that you can take a system down for two hours overnight to give it a patch is disappearing. They want consistent response times under different workloads and to deliver new applications at a reasonable cost and timeframe.”

Rubin likens these early days of application delivery to the time when departmental LANs were joined up to create one centralised network.

Likewise, using multiple systems run by different people over different business units to deliver applications is inefficient, he argues.

Kleef says the new techniques are “no silver bullet”.

He and Gilliland point to sales people still needing traditional PC support for their notebooks.

Title: Virtual desktops trim admin costs
Author: Eric Wilson
Date: 29 May 2007
Source: Australian IT

StarForce Technologies, which specialises in copy protection has released StarForce FrontLine version 5.0, which it describes as an evolution in copy protection.  This version features which it claims to give unquestionable advantages for publishers, developers and extra convenience for the end user, including a new graphical interface.

Improvements for end users include the ability to easily install or remove the copy protection driver for disc based protection and activate or deactivate the StarForce FrontLine ProActive shema protected application.  Users will also be able to retrieve serial number and activation information via the StarForce activation website.  StarForce has also recently been certified for Microsoft Windows Vista.

In the past, StarForce 3.0 has been criticised for installing a driver, which was difficult to uninstall, since it did not provide any uninstaller tool and some protected applications did not remove the driver when uninstalled.  However, at least now this version provides the ability to uninstall the driver.  It is unclear if any of the past claimed issues of IDE performance degradation or optical drive malfunctioning still exist while the copy protection driver is installed.

Title: Starforce releases StarForce FrontLine 5.0
Author: Seán Byrne
Date: 28 May 2007
Source: cdfreaks.com

BEIJING (XFN-ASIA) - China’s Vimicro Corp (NASDAQ: VIMC) said its tieup with Microsoft China has been expanded to include research and development (R&D) in the mobile multimedia sector.

Vimicro, a fabless semiconductor company designing advanced mixed-signal multimedia products and solutions, made the announcement as it reaffirmed its strategic partnership with Microsoft during a ceremony in Beijing.

The two are also finalizing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to increase their joint efforts in enabling Vimicro’s multimedia processors to be compliant with Windows Vista drivers and be ready to receive Windows Vista logo certification.

The companies have joint operations in the Microsoft-Vimicro Multimedia Technology Center, originally established in 2003 within Vimicro’s Beijing headquarters.

Title: Microsoft, Vimicro expand China multimedia tieup - report
Author: Andrew Pasek
Date: 28 May 2007
Source: Forbes.com

Microsoft Games Studios today announced the eagerly awaited Halo 2 for Windows Vista, will be available across the UAE on 8 th June, coinciding with its launch in Europe. The sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved brings Master Chief to Windows Vista TM allowing PC gamers to play the critically acclaimed Halo phenomenon against others for the first time.

Halo 2 for Windows Vista is a first person action shooter that takes place in the same science fiction universe as Halo, where humans have occupied numerous worlds due to the development of superluminal travel. More than 32 years before the beginning of Halo 2, the outer colony world of Harvest was destroyed by a collection of alien races, called the Covenant. Since then, the humans and covenant have been locked into a bloody war. Shortly before the events of Halo 2, the Master Chief heads to Earth after destroying a covenant fleet to warn of an impending covenant attack on humanity’s home planet.

The game features an expanded range of vehicles as well as other gameplay changes to its predecessor. For example, in Halo 2 for Windows Vista the health bar is no longer visible on-screen. Instead, health regenerates slowly, if the player is not taking a beating!

Halo 2 for Windows Vista also features more than fourteen human and alien weapons with players allowed to carry two weapons at a time, each weapon having advantages and disadvantages in different combat situations.

Master Chief is calling out for your help! So shoot on down to your nearest store and buy a copy of Halo 2 for Windows Vista with an Estimated Retail Price of 159 dhs and show your peers what you are made of!

Title: Microsoft Games Studios proudly presents… HALO 2 for Windows Vista starring Master Chief
Author: ArabianBusiness.com
Date: 28 May 2007
Source: ArabianBusiness.com

In 1989, FASA Corporation, a Chicago-based game company, rolled out Shadowrun . It was a pen-and-paper role-playing-game (RPG) set in a dark future after magic and mystical races had returned to the world.

In this bold new world, magic existed with cyber-technology. Players could create and adventure with cyberware-augmented human or troll heroes (who had their skeletons enhanced with nano-bots or weapons built right into their bodies) or with magic-wielders elven, human, or other race capable of laying waste to people and building.

RPG gamers snapped up the new product and ran with it. Since that time, Shadowrun has constantly been a property sought out by gamers. They adventure through a dark world of treachery and betrayal, working for Mr. Johnsons (the name applied to anyone willing to pay them to run through the city to get information, things, or people. Players could sign up as bodyguards, transport specialists, or outright assassins.

Megacorps run the world, and the players can choose to affiliate with one of them or live off the grid and risk life and limb just to live to see another day.

The RPG was so popular that it spawned a video game for the SNES console as well as the Sega Mega Drive. There was also a CCG, collectible card games.

On May 29, 2007, Xbox 360 and Windows Vista release the latest Shadowrun game. Although initially conceived as being based on the Halo gaming platform, the game designers soon had to write their own engine to drive the game. Shadowrun features 16-multiplayer capability in a first-person shooter scenario.

As a first-person shooter, the player will be able to choose between two different megacorps to play. In addition to the individual gamer’s experience against the game, the designs aren’t his.

Not only that, but Shadowrun will be the first video game to allow crossover gameplaying of the PC and Xbox 360 over Xbox Live. Alterations were made in the PC controls (which some game players have already protested even before the game has been released) to put the console players on equal footing with the PC players. The PC functionality has been lessened to provide harder target acquisition and limited movement to imitate the console player’s handheld controller. The console player also has access to auto-aiming to compensate for the pinpoint accuracy the PC player enjoys.

Screenshots released from the game are beautiful and show the amount of work the designers and the artists have gone to in order to make a good game. Players will have fully rendered 3-D environments to combat each other.

The original Shadowrun game rose to an overnight cult following in 1989. FASA Corporation published the game from that period to 2001 when they closed their doors and sold the rights to WizKids, another company created by FASA’s owners/product designers Jordan Weisman.

The RPG was set in 2050 and the major conceits were that the world had changed from nations and being politically-driven to megacorporations and being profit-driven. Magic and magical creatures and races had also returned to the world. The players usually rolled up characters who became “shadowrunners.” They were called that because they ran between the shadows of the megacorps and off the grid. They were usually hired by “Mr. Johnsons” to steal data, corrupt computer systems, and kidnap employees.

Shadowrun the PC Vista and Xbox 360 game is set in Brazil in 2021 and is a prequel to the events that changed the world. In the RPG game, the VITAS plagues (Virally Induced Toxic Allergy Syndrome) and the Computer Crash of 2029 set those events in motion. The new game is going to backfill some of the history of the RPG and sharpen the definitions of the races involved in the Shadowrun world.

Title: Xbox 360/Windows Vista News: Shadowrun
Author: Mel Odom
Date: 28 May 2007
Source: BlogCritics Magazine

Following in the wake of last week’s blog update by Paul Loefler, Palm has added a short blurb to the Windows Vista support section of their site.

Palm has added the following text to their Palm Desktop 4.1.4e and 4.2 recommendations:

“Coming soon: Look for a beta release of the new Windows Vista-compatible Palm Desktop and HotSync Manager software this summer.”

Palm is also including a note in the box of the new Sprint Treo 755p urging users not to install the bundled Palm Desktop 4.2 version but instead to check the above URL.

This blog post, the recent support site update, and the note in the 755p packaging are hopefully clear signs that a beta Vista-compliant Palm Desktop download will be available sooner rather than later. With the 755p already on the market, the 680 ROM recently updated, and the 700p ROM update hopefully just around the corner, addressing Windows Vista compliance should be near the top of Palm’s immediate priority list.

Title: Palm Updates Windows Vista Support Page
Author: Kris Keilhack
Date: 28 May 2007
Source: Palm Infocenter

The mass upgrade to Windows Vista hasn’t started but Windows licenses are still big business. In the first hundred days Microsoft sold 40 million copies of Windows Vista, which Microsoft chairman Bill Gates claimed at last week’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) is twice as many copies as Windows XP had sold by the same point. And selling 11 per cent of the notebooks bought in retail stores haven’t given Apple enough market share to threaten Windows. “In our first five weeks we matched the entire installed base of any other provider of similar software” Gates said, referring to the 20 million copies sold in that time. According to Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint who has looked at the Vista ecosystem for Microsoft, “Windows is 94 per cent of the personal computer installed base”.

Microsoft hasn’t officially broken out sales between new PCs and upgrades or between consumer and business sales, but Kay reports Steve Ballmer claiming “there was an order of magnitude difference; it’s mostly OEM sales, mostly preloaded machines and the amount of boxed copies sold is tiny”. Those figures cover PCs shipped rather than purchased, but IDC is predicting a Vista installed base of over 90 million copies of Vista by the end of 2007 and over 150 million by the end of 2008.

Enterprises aren’t migrating to Vista in large numbers yet; Intel has stated it’s going to wait until Vista SP1 to upgrade its internal IT and that’s a common view. Negative coverage of Vista in the press and in blogs may suggest that’s based on issues of stability and compatibility, but that doesn’t indicate long term problems any more than similarly negative coverage at the launch of Windows XP did. Some enterprises were still running Windows 1995 in 2002, so the migration to Vista may prove to be faster than to XP.

For customers who do switch to Vista, there are fewer issues than with XP; fewer users are calling Microsoft or the OEMs for Vista support compared to the first 90 days of XP and the call volume is decreasing four times faster than it did with Windows XP.

Getting healthier every day

Michael Keigley, a product manager at Microsoft’s Windows Client Division claims Vista’s reliability is good and getting better. “If you look at crashes as a result of video drivers, today they’re already down after 100 days with Vista, compared to XP after five years in the market. A lot of the problems users are experiencing can be related to hardware and there’s new telemetry in Vista so that we’re able to identify those and with Windows Update we can drive updates into the product almost daily.” Microsoft uses the driver quality rating system to show hardware partners which of their devices are causing the most crashes, and the figures are now normalised across the installed base for each hardware manufacturer to make it clearer. Certified drivers that crash a certain percentage more than the average have to be fixed within 90 days and Keigley claims that as fewer and fewer drivers crash, problem drivers that wouldn’t have hit the threshold with Windows XP will have to be fixed for Vista.

Beyond simply working under Vista and not crashing, Microsoft is encouraging hardware and software manufacturers to achieve logo certification. There are four times as many certified software applications as for XP at this stage and 70 new applications achieving the Vista logo a month, with 1,400 applications that ‘work with’ Vista and another 250 that are ‘certified for’ it. As of April, 600 hardware partners have 9,000 certified devices, compared with just over 5,000 devices certified for XP at the same stage; that includes 800 printers, 80 scanners, 300 monitors but not the 1,600 PC systems that have also been submitted.

Devices are also starting to take advantage of the new hardware support in Vista, although it’s still a small proportion of hardware. Only a handful of notebooks, remote controls and digital picture frames sport secondary Sideshow screens to remote Sidebar gadgets so far, for example. Jim Barber, a senior program manager, claims plenty of interest in Windows Rally “There’s a lot of momentum: many people are starting to evaluate and some people are starting to ship web services for devices. These are the protocols we believe are going to make network connected devices to easy to use in the future, easy to configure and easy to maintain.”

Rallying to consumers

The first Windows Rally devices shown in the WinHEC keynotes were consumer devices; a wireless digital camera and a digital picture frame. The wireless access point and Seagate’s prototype Maxtor Shared Storage II NAS shown in the keynote are more suitable for home than enterprise use, but Barber expects the Rally technologies - Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD), Windows Connect Now, the Devices Profile for Web Services and Plug and Play Extensions (PnPX) - to find a home in the office. As well as simpler setup and maintenance, Rally offers security, he explained; “you can build devices that have strong cryptographically secure communications channels between that device and the PC”. That could be secure printing, or scanning; he demonstrated initiating a scan from an MFP device rather than from the PC, so you can go to the scanner and push the scanned documents to the PC remotely, so you don’t have to walk back and forth across the office to load the documents and start the scan, making it easy to leave confidential documents in the scanner when you’re done.

Security strategy director Jeff Jones claims that Vista is ahead of the curve on security too. “Vista shows an improved situation over its predecessor as well as modern enterprise Linux distributions and the most recent major Mac OS X release. Windows Vista fixes in April had some effect in pushing total vulnerabilities up to seven, with five of them being High severity. Mac OS X, on the other hand, had the worst three-month count for both total and High Severity vulnerabilities.

If Vista is doing better than people expected, have the hardware and software companies been caught flat-footed? Roger Kay thinks in some cases, yes. “You could see stockpiling of memory going on a couple or three months in advance, you could see the vendors betting on memory, thinking Vista was going to take off. But they were hedging their bets, betting on it not being quite as big as it could have been. My sense is that people are playing catchup more now. I think that the ecosystem missed an opportunity and if a lot of partners had been able to step up simultaneously there would have been an impact that wasn’t there, because Vista support rather dribbled out.”

Title: Windows Vista: 100 days later
Author: Mary Branscombe
Date: 21 May 2007
Source: ITPRO

DisplayLink Corp. has announced support for the Windows Aero 3-D interface in Windows Vista for its family of network display semiconductors, making it one of the first companies to enable USB 2.0 and WiMedia wireless display connections for Windows Vista.

The company will demonstrated this technology at WinHEC 2007 on DisplayLink-enabled products, including USB displays, notebook docking stations and display adapters from Samsung, Toshiba, Kensington, IODATA and Sunix.

DisplayLink’s solution is built for “plug-and-play” simplicity enabling notebook docking stations and multimonitor computing for all PC users. The technology enables the 3-D capabilities of the Windows Aero interface on multiple screens for an unparalleled user experience on USB-connected displays. Up to six displays can be added to a computer over a single USB connector when using the Windows Vista Basic color scheme interface.

The DisplayLink solution for Windows Vista delivers high-quality images, including 32-bit color images and smooth DVD video playback. Interactivity with mouse and keyboard is quick and responsive, and the solution supports monitor resolutions as high as 1600 x 1200 (ultra extended graphics aArray - UXGA) and 1680 x 1050 (widescreen super extended graphics array - WSXGA+).

DisplayLink’s solutions combine a virtual graphics card (VGC) software driver for Windows XP and Windows Vista on the host computer and DisplayLink’s DL-120 and DL-160 hardware rendering engine (HRE) chips that are embedded in displays, projectors, notebook docks, adapters and other display systems to convert the compressed video information into pixels for the display. The solution uses a lossless compression algorithm to transmit graphics across a wide range of standard wired and wireless network interfaces.

VGC software version 4.1 and the DL-120 and DL-160 chips are available for quantity shipments from DisplayLink and its worldwide representatives.

Title: USB and wireless network display technology for Windows Vista
Author: RF Design
Date: 22 May 2007
Source: RF Design

Speaking to a crowd of hardware engineers last week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates trumpeted the fact that the company has sold 40 million copies of Vista since the operating system hit the market.

But does that milestone mean the operating system is causing more PCs to be sold?

It’s a natural question to ask, but a difficult one to answer. One reason it’s hard to suss out Vista’s impact on PC sales is that consumers don’t really decide whether they prefer a new operating system. When Microsoft releases a new operating system, it becomes the default on nearly all machines sold at retail stores. So if consumers want a new PC, they basically get Vista .

That makes it tough to gauge whether Microsoft’s latest creation is actually spurring people to buy new PCs. Market researcher In-Stat issued a report on Wednesday saying Vista is not having a major impact on the PC market. The firm said some people delayed purchases last year to wait for the new operating system, a move that added some sales to this year, but that the software is not leading others to speed up their new PC purchases.

“My view is that, as a motivating factor to go buy a PC, Vista is not enough,” said Ian Lao, the In-Stat analyst who wrote the new report.

But there hasn’t been a groundswell of grumbling over the new operating system either. “It’s not the scenario like (new) Coke and Coke Classic,” Lao said. “There isn’t a big revolt going on.”

“There are certainly things you can do with Vista. The computer makers certainly have not pushed the envelope on any of those things quite yet.”

– Stephen Baker, analyst, NPD

Dell did see enough demand for XP that it has brought back the older operating system as an option on some consumer machines. Dell, HP and others still offer XP for small- and medium-business customers as well.

As for the PC market as a whole, Lao said it’s shaping up largely as expected, something he said he foresees continuing.

“I see the rest of the year panning out, for the most part as it would have originally,” he said. Consumers “will purchase a PC if they were already planning to.”

NPD analyst Stephen Baker said that the market has shifted somewhat during the early part of this year. While the trend toward notebook computers has continued, desktop sales and pricing have finally stabilised some, although Baker said he doesn’t attribute either those changes or overall consumer sales patterns to Vista’s release.

“That would require you to believe that on the consumer side, people actually buy their PC based on what operating system is inside, and I really don’t believe that is the case,” Baker said.

Microsoft, for its part, says Vista has helped the overall PC market as well as the company’s own business, noting that the operating system was a key part of its strong quarterly earnings report and contributed to a PC market that grew 10.9 percent worldwide in the first quarter, according to IDC.

“Though it’s very early in the product lifecycle, we’re pleased with the market response to date for Windows Vista,” Microsoft said in an e-mailed statement. “We’re looking forward to continued growth and broad adoption of Windows Vista around the world.”

The corporate factor

An influential factor in the PC market is businesses upgrading their machines, and there has been little indication that corporations are buying large numbers of PCs as part of a rush to Vista. Microsoft has maintained that the corporate move to Vista will outpace prior transitions, most notably when it claimed in September that business adoption of Vista in its first 12 months would be twice that of Windows XP
An HP representative said on Wednesday that the company is starting to see increased interest from some corporate customers in Vista, perhaps a sign that some businesses have completed the testing needed to qualify the new operating system. “There is now growing evidence that transitions are under way in large corporate accounts,” the HP representative said.

But others are predicting a far slower pace of Vista adoption, looking to next year as the time when most businesses will start to consider buying Vista. Even in the PC business, some of Microsoft’s closest partners, notably chipmaker Intel, have yet to push Vista out to their own employees.

Lao said many businesses upgraded large numbers of PCs in 2005 and 2006, making them unlikely to move to Vista this year or even next year.

“I’m seeing this more like a 2009, 2010 thing, where corporations will start to make wholesale conversions,” Lao said.

Another reason Vista may not be having much of an impact on PC sales is a lack of software and hardware targeted specifically for the new system.

While Microsoft has put a lot of effort into ensuring compatibility with existing software, it will take time before there are any killer apps specific to Vista. While some of Vista’s benefits, such as built-in desktop search, are available out of the box, many of its advances, such its new presentation engine or its peer-to-peer sharing technology really only come alive once developers write programs that take advantage of those features.

On the hardware side, there have been a few showcase Vista-optimised PCs, most notably HP’s TouchSmart all-in-one and a sleek white Toshiba Portege with a secondary “SideShow” display. But many of the computers on the market largely resemble their XP predecessors both inside and out.

“There are certainly things you can do with Vista,” Baker said. “The computer makers certainly have not pushed the envelope on any of those things quite yet.”

Some additional PCs that harness Vista features are expected in the second half of this year, as computer makers gear up for the back-to-school and holiday buying seasons.

“We’re going to see new industrial designs from almost all the major computer makers,” said Samir Bhavnani, research director at Current Analysis West. “I think you are going to see Vista spur growth in the back half of this year.”

Title: Is Vista helping boost PC sales?
Author: Ina Fried
Date: 24 May 2007
Source: ZDNet Australia

Microsoft tends to tout the release of a new operating system as an earth-shattering event, certain to change computing as we know it. Take the Jan. 29, 2007 launch of Windows Vista: “The launch marks the achievement of an unprecedented collaboration between Microsoft and its customers and partners, and ushers in an era in which personal computing is easier, safer and more enjoyable than ever before,” trumpeted a press release. “Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 will transform the way people work and play,” Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates gushed. “Windows Vista squarely address[es] the needs and aspirations of people around the globe.”

The consumer and corporate world, however, has taken a less exalted view of Vista. That’s according to a new report by market research firm In-Stat, which said that PC sales haven’t been significantly impacted by Vista’s release. Sales have remained steady and have followed the same trends they have for years, said Ian Lao, a senior In-Stat analyst and author of the report.

“If I were to look at Vista as a demand creation agent for PCs, it’s not there. It’s great for advancing the state-of-the-art and advancing the needs [of the consumer],” Lao says, but it hasn’t been a “game-changer”, to use a phrase Microsoft likes to employ.

“With the recent release of Vista, a short-term rise in PC demand is anticipated,” Lao states in a press release. “System sales that had been muted waiting for systems pre-loaded with Vista rather than XP are expected to work through sales channels in the next two quarters. However, these sales represent an offset from last year rather than actual new demand creation.”

The future looks equally, well, normal. In-Stat predicts that the industry is set to sell 300 million units in 2009, and the Vista release won’t affect that prediction.

Lao says there were short-term effects on the market, but that even those were due to normal factors, not an overwhelming desire to upgrade from Microsoft’s last OS, Windows XP. “Some things we anticipated would happen, happened. As the channel geared up for Vista, we had a delay in sales, because they had to flush the queue of XP boxes, and people waited to buy until Vista was released.” Vista, too was delayed several months, until after the Christmas buying season.

That’s not to say it’s been selling badly. Microsoft made a show at its recent WinHEC conference about the 40 million Vista licenses that had been sold as proof of its popularity. But although those figures are impressive, Lao chalks them up more to regular buying patterns than the kind of frenzy that surrounds genuine events like the publication of a new Harry Potter book or release of the Sony PlayStation 3. For the average consumer or corporation, he says, “The OS doesn’t play into the decision-making factors of whether or not I buy another PC.”

Corporations, especially, buy almost strictly based on upgrade cycles, Lao says. He thinks the next very strong year for PC (and therefore Vista) sales could be 2009, when businesses are ready to buy new PCs.

That doesn’t mean Lao doesn’t like Vista as a technology. He does — very much. He just doesn’t think it’s the dawn of a new computing day. “Are we looking at a new era, like the birth of the PDA, or the birth of the iPod?” he asks.

Not according to the numbers.

Title: Vista Not a Magic Bullet for PC Market
Author: Keith Ward
Date: 28 May 2007
Source: ENT News