Vendor performance benchmarks are the IT industry's answer to professional wrestling -- and this week, with Microsoft booking the best-of-25-falls cage match, the winner is...IE 8!

Furloughs are being hyped as a better answer than layoffs for cash-strapped organizations. But the one thing a furlough won't do is protect an employer from the threat of disgruntled employees.

Most useful link of the week may be from the federal courts in northern California -- one that spells out exactly how to keep information that's supposed to be removed from showing up in a Word or PDF file.

Tuesday morning at DEMO included some potentially very useful products and services for corporate IT people. But first came a slew of products devoted to making a smarter Internet.

Monday afternoon at DEMO 09 was about mobile phones and hardware -- including a six-foot-tall phone designed for flirting singles. No, really.

It's springtime in the desert -- specifically, Palm Desert, Cal. -- and it's time for the DEMO 09 conference, where companies large and small get six minutes each to show their new IT products.

Apple could offer a netbook, says an analyst. Microsoft could offer a really secure web browser, say some Microsoft researchers. But those things won't happen.

Vendors hate the Black Hat conferences and love to cast doubt on the security holes hackers turn up. But now and then we get something that proves just how valuable this work is.

Tuesday afternoon at DEMOfall was devoted to Web 2.0 -- or maybe 3.0, or possibly even 4.0.

Tuesday morning at DEMOfall was heavy on consumer products and services, with only a handful of presentations of much interest to at corporate IT.

Tuesday afternoon at DEMOfall was about mobile phones, collaboration and security -- and there were plenty of products and services with appeal for corporate IT.

If it's September in San Diego, this must be the the first of four marathon sessions at DEMOfall '08, where companies large and small get six minutes each to show their new IT products and services.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is not dead. And Bloomberg News needs an obit blog. Really.

Symbian already owns the smartphone market. So why is the company open-sourcing its market-owning product?

Now that Hewlett-Packard and Electronic Data Systems have decided to tie the knot, where does that put them -- and us?