Stories by: Randall C. Kennedy

It's here! After months of speculation, Windows 7 was finally unveiled last month at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Through a series of well-orchestrated keynote presentations and supporting breakout sessions, Microsoft walked conference attendees through the highlights of its new desktop OS: better performance, an improved user experience, and some nifty media-sharing features. Overall, Microsoft's pitch was quite compelling, and the PDC crowd was practically salivating at the chance to play with Microsoft's latest and greatest.

It's official: The next version of Windows will be called (drumroll, please) ... "Windows 7!"

Now that I know for certain I'll be receiving a pre-beta build of Windows 7 at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in November, it's time to start thinking about some of the performance-related characteristics I'll be looking for in the new OS.

They're back! Just when you thought the "browser wars" were over, with the two camps -- Microsoft and Mozilla.org -- settling in for a kind of intransigent détente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own in order to ensure a robust base for its myriad hosted applications (e.g. Gmail, Google Docs, etc.)

For the IT worker, the phrase "desktop mobility" has many meanings. It can mean having a laptop computer. It can mean keeping all your data in the cloud so that you can access it at any time and from anywhere. It can even mean downsizing your work environment to fit on a PDA or a smartphone.

It seems like a straightforward question. However, in the aftermath of the Vista debacle, where many systems that were certified as "Vista Capable" proved to be anything but, the process of vetting new Windows-compatible hardware has taken on new complexity.

I love lampooning the FOSS community. These self-righteous cyber-hippies are almost always good for a blog entry or two per month. And because many of them can't resist airing their own community's dirty laundry, I have no shortage of story ideas to choose from.

Last week, I took Microsoft to task for floating yet another batch of unrealistic tidbits about Windows "Midori," the rumored future version that will encompass a complete rewrite of the core OS plus a new, distributed application development model for linking together disparate devices of varying form factors (a.k.a Windows "Mouthful"). I objected to this vision for a couple of reasons:

A wallflower: That's how I used to describe Thinstall when discussing the movers and shakers of the application virtualization party scene. With its chief competitors already paired off and dancing up a storm, Thinstall looked more and more like the lonesome loser, dateless and stag at the junior prom.

Midori. Mojave. Mickey Mouse. They all have one thing in common: They're fictitious constructs assembled by people with vivid imaginations and way too much time on their hands.

Microsoft's next-generation server virtualization solution falls short versus VMware's VI3, but has the right stuff for less demanding, Windows-centric environments