Windows Blog

FTA> "As form factors shrink power efficiency and battery life will increasingly drive market success."

I hope it does work out like that, because cheap Linux-only hardware will only help Linux adoption! However I still think this is incorrect. You can already get a netbook with more than one useful day's battery life, which means you can always plug it in overnight. There are people who need more but that's a fairly small niche.

x86 compatibility is a much bigger deal. The percentage of netbooks sold with Linux has dropped from 100% to somewhere between 33% and 4% (sources: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsexperience/archive/2009/04/03/windows-on-netbook-pcs-a-year-in-review.aspx and http://www.osnews.com/story/22587 ).

That's still not a bad number, especially if it's closer to 33%, but it does put ARM in the position of at best trying to win a market within a market.

On top of that there's a question of how much further form factors are really going to shrink. Keyboards can only get so small, and we are already seeing a trend towards _bigger_ net books - not smaller.

Finally, they are comparing against the old single processor atoms, not the new dual core atoms that are already available.

That still leaves ARM with a potential advantage in the tablet market, where there is a lot less space for batteries and the software stack is better concealed. But the fate of the tablet market is still in doubt.

From http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2012/02/07/connect-your-android-device-to-skydrive-with-onenote-and-other-apps.aspx

>If you have an Android device, we also encourage you to try other apps from partners built using SkyDrive APIs. For example with Browser for SkyDrive or Cloud Explorer for SkyDrive, you can view, access and upload documents or photos on your Android phone. Portfolio for SkyDrive lets you organize and upload photos from your Android phone in batches to SkyDrive. If you want to add SkyDrive support to your app, site or device, please visit our developer center.

Looks like there's OneNote and third party apps, but official support would be nice.

In its first 18 months windows 7 sold about 650.000 licenses a day. According to Andy Rubin there are currently around 500.000 android activations a day. Since not all windows licenses that are sold are actually used, and the number of licenses sold is probably declining, while the number of android activations is increasing, I'd say it's fair to say that they're roughly as popular, and android will probably overtake windows some time this year.

Sources:
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2011/04/22/windows-7-at-18-months.aspx
https://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/85660213478309888

"In short - there is no new functionality as we have mentioned previously beyond client-side support for RemoteFX and Dymanic Memory which are 2 new virtualization features enabled in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1."

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2011/02/22/windows-7-sp1-now-available-for-everyone.aspx

Summary: SP1 is just a collection of hotfixes:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17855015/Hotfixes%20and%20Security%20Updates%20included%20in%20Windows%207%20and%20Windows%20Server%202008%20R2%20Service%20Pack%201%20%281%29.xls

Did you see the SkyDrive features at the MS event? No. Actually neither did I. In fact it wasn't in the recent MS events. In fact it was announced with with a blog entry:

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2011/06/07/don-t-wait-for-your-cloud-use-hotmail-and-skydrive-today-on-your-pc-mac-or-phone.aspx

Why didn't MS talk about this at their special Mango VIP event? No idea. MS seems to think that getting too much attention for features is a bad thing.