Daily Cuppa: Windows 8, Apple-Samsung and IBM earnings
We're on the downhill run to the weekend, and to get you started for Thursday morning, here's what you missed from Microsoft, IBM, Apple and Samsung.
Microsoft has set a date for releasing Windows 8. From 26 October, new PCs will come pre-loaded with Windows 8, and Microsoft will open up its upgrade program to let people upgrade from Windows 7, Vista and Windows XP. Business customers that have volume-licensing contracts will be able to get Windows 8 in August, when the product is released to manufacturing.
It seems that'll also be the date when people can order the shiny new Surface tablet.
Do you think Windows 8 will be a winner? Or does it risk being another Vista?
Despite currency fluctuations costing the company about US$1 billion, IBM reported strong second quarter earnings of US$3.9 billion. China, UK, Spain and Canada all pulled in strong earnings, while the US, UK and Germany were flat and France and Italy declined.
As we gear up for the start of the hearings for Apple and Samsung's patent dispute between the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the iPad, in Australia next week, a US judge has ruled that only the most sensitive documents in the US case can be kept from the public. Given that a fair portion of the documents in the Australian case have been marked as confidential, I'm wondering whether Apple and Samsung have been over-censoring here, too.
Also in Apple-Samsung news, the UK judge who had earlier declared that Samsung's Galaxy Tab was not a copy of the iPad because it wasn't as "cool", has ordered that Apple must now advertise on its website that the Galaxy Tab is not a copy of the iPad. Although the ruling was a bit of an insult for Samsung, it looks like the Korean tech giant has come out laughing from that case.
And finally, Dropbox has brought in a team of experts to investigate why some Dropbox users are getting spam emails to addresses associated with their Dropbox accounts. It is still too early to say what happened, but it has been speculated that Dropbox may have been hacked or had one of its email servers compromised. Time will tell, but it's good to see that Dropbox is on the case.