Simon Bisson

Simon Bisson is a freelance technology journalist. He specialises in architecture and enterprise IT. He ran one of the UK's first national ISPs and moved to writing around the time of the collapse of the first dotcom boom. He still writes code.

Mary Branscombe

Mary Branscombe is a freelance tech journalist. Mary has been a technology writer for nearly two decades, covering everything from early versions of Windows and Office to the first smartphones, the arrival of the web and most things inbetween.

Latest Posts

Microsoft didn't fail to deliver iPad, Intel did

I'm going to disagree with one key point in Ina Fried's thoughtful piece on why Apple came out with the iPad instead of Microsoft, even though Bill Gates stood up on stage and showed off a thin, light slate PC code-named Haiku years before. It wasn't Microsoft who failed to deliver the form factor - it was Intel.

June 23, 2010 by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

3 Comments Vote

Outlook: Cloudy

It's Wimbledon fortnight, and living in south west London I'm watching out for the inevitable clouds and rain, something that made me think about the other cloud...I'm not really one to use cloud services.

June 23, 2010 by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

1 Comment Vote

The hidden roots of the web: fifty years of PLATO

Imagine a computer network when you can connect with thousands of other users, can play multiplayer games, chat online and share information across the world, explore complex documents that link between pages and between different elements of content – all on terminals with local memory and high resolution touch displays.Sound familiar?

June 18, 2010 by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

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TechEd. It's all about the Ed, not the Tech.

We’re currently in a hot and humid New Orleans with 11,000 IT pros and developers, at Microsoft’s TechEd North America event. It’s one of those events that helps you drill down into the deep and dark places that underpin Microsoft’s growing technology stack with the folk behind the tools and the services.

June 9, 2010 by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

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Is Windows Server competing with Windows 7?

SP1 for Windows 7 is further proof of what Microsoft has been saying - and the sales figures for Windows 7 have been confirming - all along. Windows 7 doesn't need the kind of service pack that XP and Vista needed.

June 7, 2010 by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

3 Comments Vote

A week of Android: grade - B

Exchange email sync is almost right on the HTC Evo I've been trying out since Google IO; almost is actually quite infuriating but still bad news for Windows Phone.I hadn't tried out Android 2.

June 1, 2010 by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

2 Comments Vote

What a flexible display looks like

To get screens to be as ubiquitous as paper, the price is going to have to drop as low as paper - and than means getting away from clean rooms and expensive glass-handling robots. HP, as a printer company, thinks that printing screens is the way to do it.

May 28, 2010 by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

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VP8; some things that I wonder about

At Google IO, the Google team talked repeatedly about having done "a thorough legal analysis" into the VP8 video codec to make sure it doesn't infringe any patents . "We're very confident with the technology," product manager Mike Jazaeri told us; "that's why we're open sourcing it".

May 21, 2010 by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

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