Microsoft

It's a widely accepted fact that Apple is a master of marketing, while Microsoft is a walking disaster when it comes to the business of branding and getting people to buy its products.

Just look at the different approaches the two companies take when it comes to naming their operating systems: Apple markets versions of OS X with punchy, red blooded names like "Leopard," "Panther" and "Tiger," while Microsoft gives Windows rather effete monikers like ME, XP and Vista.

More than two years after the Windows Vista launch, XP is still the dominant business PC operating system in North America and Europe.

Windows Vista “finally appears ready to dethrone XP” as the operating-system choice for enterprise PCs, trumpeted a new Forrester Research report released on January 30. But the report, based on a survey of 962 IT decision makers, didn’t do much to bolster Vista’s image in the market. From the report by Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray:

OK, so everywhere I turn I am hearing people ridicule the changes in how UAC behaves in Windows 7. There is even proof of concept code that can turn off UAC without even being prompted.

For those with their heads in the sand, the story goes that in Windows 7 the default behaviour for UAC is to “Notify me only when programs try to make changes to my computer” and “Don’t notify me when I make changes to Windows settings”. Because UAC is a "Windows setting", it means you can disable UAC without being prompted. And people believe that due to this behaviour, UAC is broken.

How ready is Windows 7? Ready enough so there will be no Beta 2. Microsoft plans to go directly from Beta 1 to release candidate.

Can you say Windows is shipping sooner than later? Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, broke the news in a blog post time-stamped Midnight EST that popped up in my RSS feeds at noon. He writes:

Yesterday we reported on a major UAC security flaw where malicious hackers could potentially execute a script on a users machine by tricking into them into opening a disguised exe. This script would disable UAC without user interaction and without the users knowledge.

A Microsoft spokesperson has provided Neowin with a response to the issue:

A Windows enthusiast is calling for Microsoft to release Windows 7 now, only a few weeks after the company made available the software's first public test version.

Nashville, Tennessee, resident Kelly Poe has started the "Release Windows 7 Now" campaign to urge the company to "let the beautiful little birdy (with the odd name) fly" instead of continuing to test the software.

Microsoft has made available to a select group of testers an updated test build of Service Pack (SP) 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft made the so-called “escrow” Release Candidate build available site on January 28.

Microsoft warned those testing the forthcoming service pack on Windows Small Business server against downloading the new SP2 bits, citing a “known issue that effects branding.”

Privacy activists are crying foul over the "Suggested Sites" feature in IE8, but Microsoft insists concerns about the feature, such that it might be used to serve up targeted advertising or that it poses a security risk, are misplaced.

Whenever Microsoft does something involving open source, look at the fine print.

Sometimes it’s under a bogus unapproved license written by Microsoft lawyers. Sometimes it’s under a Microsoft license its lawyers got through the OSI, after much wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth.

But this is the real deal. This is Apache 2.0 licensing. And this is pretty cool code, too. Specifically we’re talking about Web Sandbox, which aims at securing Web content through virtualization. OK, that’s not a cool thing, but wait.

Now that Internet Explorer 8 RC1 is available for download from Microsoft's servers, it is time to have a closer look at the security improvements that the company's programmers have integrated.