Robert Pogson

Some bosses just don’t know their limits and like to micro-manage and intrude at every level. Sometimes it works but often the boss stumbles in, breaks something, and resumes his busy day leaving employees to pick up the pieces.

I have had some incidents. One day a boss came in to tweak something on a cyclotron and jammed a highly radioactive target. I had to go in an manually free some Zn⁶⁵ that was fresh from the machine. Another time I had a boss who would come in and demand a report, some statistics, about how the programme was going. He would invent a different reward programme for students every other week with new criteria. As this was not pre-planned, our paperwork was not yielding the information promptly so I finally automated. Whatever he demanded, I could work out an SQL query to dash out an answer within a few minutes. I was pretty sure that boss broke things as a form of harassment.

Well, Apple has such a boss. He is suing folks for using “app store” in terms of Android but the argument has been raised that Jobs himself has used the term “app store” generically… There goes the case, trademark and all.

see “Steve Jobs’ Android jabs may cost him App Store trademark”

I have done this maths before: “7″ is not shipping on a large number of PCs these days. This is a dramatic change over the last ten years. Normally the current release from M$ gets a free ride.

I am not alone in this observation:

see Microsoft’s own numbers suggest declining Windows market share

This is a good thing for IT. That other OS should not be the default for any computer.

A number of manufacturers and OEMs have scaled back their estimates of notebook production in 2011. This is not about shrinkage by a few companies. It is an industry-wide phenomenon where tablets are taking a bite out of the market. Tomorrow, M$ will reveal its situation. If the manufacturers feel the pain we should see that pain reflected in a kink in the growth of M$’s revenues.

• Compal dropped estimates for 2011 12% with quarterly revenue down 48% from a year ago…
• Samsung was the only one to achieve a paltry 1% growth in notebooks for the quarter

Since notebooks are the largest share of the IT landscape and desktops are only showing life in the corporate sector, M$ should have a change from the usual news. We shall see. They do have some presence in tablets but little on ARM and nothing on Apple’s stuff. I don’t expect their situation to change for the better until their product is released on ARM sometime late in 2012. I expect it will be a disaster like Vista judging by defections and low morale leaking into the news.

Worse than defections from within, customers are also defecting. Even the share of PCs installed with that other OS continue to decline.