Preston Gralla's Most Recent Posts

More bad news for Microsoft: Gartner research shows that its smartphone sales have tumbled by 27% compared to a year ago, and Microsoft now only has 1.9% market share. At this rate, it's not clear if Windows Phone will ever gain traction.

Facebook gets all the publicity, but when it comes down to what company people really like, Microsoft leads Facebook by a wide margin, as do Apple and Google. That's according to a just-released AP-CNBC poll.

Steve Ballmer has probably faced more long-time criticism than any CEO in America. And now there's this: A Forbes writer rates him as the CEO who most deserves to be fired.

Politicans are prone to hypocrisy, but now they're carrying it to new heights -- a Senate committee may look in Microsoft's blocking browsers from accessing certain features of Windows RT, but not investigate Apple for even greater browser restrictions.

How's this for hypocrisy: Mozilla says that Apple banning Firefox from iPads and iPhones is no problem, but Microsoft restricting the browser from using some features on some Windows 8 tablets may be illegal.

When ARM tablets running Windows 8 ship, Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers will be at a disadvantage, because Internet Explorer will be the only browser allowed to take advantage of certain features of the operating system. Mozilla and Google are crying "foul." Do the restrictions really matter?

There's been plenty of talk that Microsoft's purchase of Skype is hurting Windows Phone's acceptance with carriers because they view Skype as a threat to their business. Recently, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop was quoted as saying that. But that's only part of the story -- Elop went on to say that Microsoft's ownership of Skype will help Windows Phone, not hurt it.

A security researcher has found a potentially massive security hole in Windows 8 that would expose someone's contacts and other information from social networking services and email including Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail, LinkedIn, and Twitter, among others. It sounds serious, but there may be less to the security hole than meets the eye.

Windows Phone continues to struggle to make inroads into the smartphone market, with two well-known research firms finding that it had 2% or less U.S. market share in the first quarter of the year.

Even though Microsoft has promised that Windows Media Center will be included in Windows 8, and was included it in the Consumer Preview, the company now says the multimedia app won't ship with Windows 8. Instead, if you want it, you'll have to pay extra for it.

Microsoft has finally admitted what the rest of the world has known for years: The Windows Live brand is a kludge and deserves to be put to death. Microsoft has announced that it's finally doing that, in preparation for cloud-based services that will work in concert with Windows 8.

There's no way to know whether the next NOOK Tablet will be based on Windows 8, although there's certainly a chance it will be. If it is based on Windows 8 rather than Android, here's how it might work.

The engineer who wrote the code that scooped up people's private Wi-Fi data for Google's Street View has finally been named -- and before his time at Google he wrote the groundbreaking NetStumbler Wi-Fi sniffing app.

An offshoot of the investment by Microsoft into the new NOOK subsidiary of Barnes & Noble may be having Windows 8 instead of Android powering the next NOOK Tablet. That would boost Windows 8 and Windows Phone, and help Barnes & Noble with sorely needed development assets.

Co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak believes that Windows Phone 7 sports a more beautiful interface than the iPhone and Android phones, so much so that he jokingly said that Microsoft may have managed to reincarnate Steve Jobs to help with its design.