Windows Weekly 221: Take Me To Grumpy Street

Inthe latest episode of the Windows Weekly podcast, Leo, Mary Jo and I discuss Windows Phone "Tango," smart phone market share, FTC's investigation of Google, a class-action lawsuit against Apple, Windows 7 vs. Mac OS X security, the lack of new "Colorado" server hardware, TellMe integration into Microsoft's many products, Hotmail and spam, and the Microsoft Touch Mouse.

Running time: 1:23:40



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Show notes

MJF: Tango! There's a Windows Phone OS coming before Win Phone 8 (Apollo)… Hints about what it looks like are starting to slowly leak.

Related: PT: comScore: Windows Phone in use by ~6 percent of smart phone users in the US. This is down from previous two quarters, but still not horrible when you think about it.

Related: PT: FTC is investigating Google for Android/search service bundling now.

Semi-related: PT: Class-action lawsuit against Apple/publishers for eBook price fixing.

PT: Security expert claims Windows 7 is more secure than Mac OS X. I think they're pretty comparable, actually. And let's face it, regardless of the relative merits, hackers do target Windows more often.

Related: MJF: Gartner: 42 percent of PCs will be running Win 7 by end of 2011... what's this mean for Win 8 uptake (if anything)?

PT: What happened to all the new server hardware? Windows Home Server 2011 and Small Business Server 2011 Essentials have been out for months. Where is all the new hardware?

MJF: Tellme speech stuff is showing up in more and more places -- coming to Win 8 and (in 3-5 more years), will be integrated with Bing for better natural language query using voice

PT: Microsoft cuts spam in Hotmail by 90 percent. And cuts overall Internet spam by 15 percent in the process.

PT: Microsoft Touch Mouse. Two years later, Microsoft copies Apple's Magic Mouse. It should have copied the Tragic Macpad.

Listener Q&A

PT: Tip of the week: Get Microsoft Press books for free in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB formats. Includes Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows Phone 7, Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 by Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines, Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner, Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 by Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker, and Katherine Murray’s Own Your Future, Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft.

PT: Software pick of the week:  Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader. A web app for accessing your purchased Kindle content and, perhaps as important, new eBooks via the Amazon Kindle eBook store. The Kindle Cloud Reader works with Chrome and Safari on the PC and Safari for iPad.

MJF: Enterprise pick of the week:  Juneau tools. These are part of Denali (the next version of SQL Server) and are going to give database devs  an integrated environment for their database design work for any SQL Server platform (both on and off premise) within Visual Studio. Now available to testers as part of the Denali CTP3, which MS released recently

MJF: Codename pick of the week:  The "other" Apollo (not Win Phone 8). This other Apollo is new column-store database technology aiming to provide greater query performance. It is part of the Denali version of SQL Server, which recently hit CTP 3 and may ship later this year or early next.