My Microsoft Watch colleague Joe Wilcox is reporting today on some rather eye-catching Apple/Microsoft numbers: “Here’s a big number: 20 percent of Microsoft Office’s U.S retail sales are the Mac version, according to NPD. Here’s another: Mac users account for 10 percent of retail Windows Vista Business and Ultimate sales.” If OS X, with its estimated 5 percent market share, can account for 20 percent of Office’s retail sales, and if a significant share of Vista purchases are going to…

Today I attended a Sun Microsystems Chalk Talk on the company’s virtualization plans. The talk centered on two upcoming products from Sun, which ride together under the anagrammatic label xVM. The Xen-based xVM will allow companies to choose Solaris without rejecting their existing x86 operating systems. If Sun can team xVM Server with an effective management layer (and xVM Ops Center does look promising), then it can earn the opportunity to win back those who’ve forgotten about Solaris in favor…

Symantec has been turning heads with its suggestion that whitelisting might be a better way forward for ensuring the security of PCs than the blacklisting approach that current A/V products, such as those from Symantec, adopt. Is application whitelisting a total solution? I don’t think such a thing is possible. However, I contend that traditional A/V can not, never could, and never will clean up after app install promiscuity the way that people wish it would, better app vetting and…

When word came out that SF’s deal with Earthlink and Google to roll out free wireless Internet to every corner the city had fallen apart, I was feeling pretty disappointed. However, a better way forward would be for those of us in San Francisco who would benefit from a citywide wireless network to build one of our own. As luck would have it, the city has the opportunity to just that…

Are you waiting for Service Pack 1 before deploying Windows Vista? Based on Microsoft’s raft of Windows announcements this morning, it looks as though companies sold on a “better SP1 than sorry” deployment strategy will be hanging tight until Q1 of 2008.

Last week I came across a video presentation of Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan’s “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing,” a method for resizing images by slicing out or padding uninteresting strips of pixels. If you’ve seen this video already, you may be a bit bummed-out that you can’t access an application right now that’ll work this magic. However, at least one enterprising developer has already implemented this and released his initial code, and I can report that his app…

As the slipping ship dates for Microsoft’s home-baked hypervisor, Viridian, demonstrate, rolling a new hypervisor is no small task. Enter Citrix, which followed in a long tradition of making technology bets on Microsoft’s behalf by announcing an acquisition of XenSource, the company started by the founders of the Xen project to commercialize the technology. XenSource President and CEO Peter Levine, summed that focus up well, “Our product focus is to provide the best Microsoft Windows virtualization experience on the market.”

As I surmised back in 2003, the reason that SCO refused to lay its cards on the table was that SCO was bluffing all along. However, as long as Microsoft keeps crowing about the 234 Microsoft software patents on which Linux allegedly infringes, I won’t be ready to hoist a mission accomplished banner in the battle to clear Linux’s name.

HP has announced plans to acquire thin-client vendor Neoware–a smart move, since endpoint security problems remain a major problem for enterprises, and thin clients offer one of the best solutions for limiting this exposure.

Does OOXML really “deserve” to join the ranks of 16,000-plus existing ISO standards? Probably not. But, to paraphrase a favorite movie quote of mine, I suspect that in matters like these, deserving sometimes has nothing to do with it. In this situation, I don’t think it matters much, anyhow.