Stories by Galen Gruman

How much work can you do on an iPhone?

It's hard not to look at an iPhone and wonder whether you could chuck your laptop and use it to do all your work instead. After all, it offers e-mail, always-on Web access, and an ever increasing roster of applications, many of which have business us...

Desktop Linux: Ready for the mainstream

It's been a decade since Linux proponents first argued their OS was ready for mainstream adoption. Yet for all intents and purposes, Linux remains nonexistent on "regular" people's desks. Sure, developers and other tech experts use Linux, but that's ...

2008 geek gadget gift guide

10 Christmas gift ideas for the true techie

iPhone OS 2.2 update doesn't fix key business flaws

The iPhone 3G and its iPhone 2 OS propelled Apple's leading-edge mobile device into serious contention as a business smartphone. And the iPhone 3G is one of the best -- if not the best -- mobile 2.0 device out there for overall use. But Apple missed ...

If Windows is a dead end, what's next?

The writing is on the wall. Despite a major push to sell the much-maligned Windows Vista, customers aren't buying. Nearly two years after Vista's release, Windows XP remains the standard desktop OS in business, and Microsoft has extended its availabi...

Adobe Version Cue CS4

Version Cue is now much less visible to users of individual CS4 programs, but better for it.

Is Web 2.0 already on its way out?

At a conference that devoted much of its attention to celebrating the rise of collaborative platforms, media, and technologies, you had to wonder if the "Web 2.0" collaborative future would die before it really began. That was my takeaway from the De...

Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Apple's secret business weapon?

Judging from initial accounts, the next version of the Mac OS X, named Snow Leopard, will be aimed squarely at business and enterprise users, signaling a formal push by Apple to take Windows head on outside the consumer and education markets. "Apple ...

After Bill Gates, five possible futures for Microsoft

For most people, Bill Gates and Microsoft are one and the same. Gates has led Microsoft to global dominance in the 33 years since its founding, combining a strong opportunism -- getting the code for DOS to sell to IBM for the first PC and aping Apple...

Microsoft's future No. 3: The 'streaming' scenario

For investors, the 2011-2015 era was pure hell when it came to Microsoft. Windows 7 and Office 2010 followed Windows Vista and Office 2007 as duds, gaining minimal adoption, mainly as preinstalled software on new computers. For several years, Microso...

Microsoft's future No. 2: The 'slow decline' scenario

Bill Gates retired from Microsoft a decade ago, yet his ghost still loomed large, in the form of a persistent effort to continually extend the reach of Microsoft into every nook and cranny possible. And that ghost inhabited a company increasingly foc...

Microsoft's future No. 1: The 'Borvell' scenario

Microsoft's a dinosaur that didn't know its dead yet. The cloud computing meteor was speeding its way, and when pervasive computing in the cloud became a reality in about 2015, Microsoft was all but dead. Why? Because the Windows and Office revenues ...

How to make the new iPhone work at work

With the release of Apple's iPhone SDK now come and gone, and the enhanced IT-oriented capabilities planned for the next major iPhone device and software update now unveiled, it's clear that iPhones are going to be corporate mainstays. Still, at its ...

100,000 customers tell Microsoft to save XP

Windows Vista was supposed to be a shot in the arm for Microsoft, which had gone five years without a new desktop operating system. It hasn't worked out that way. Instead, Vista sales have been slower than XP's (when adjusted for market size) and the...

Picking the right time to deploy Vista

Windows Vista is known for its much higher resource requirements than Windows XP, such as needing a minimum of 2GB of RAM, a fast processor, and a recent video card. That's why most analysts suggest that a Vista deployment be paired with a hardware r...