And I ask, in all seriousness, why?

Yes, there are legitimate concerns about the changes in the Windows 8 user interface. The learning curve is steep, some of its most basic new functions are difficult to discover, and parts of the UI are, frankly, unfinished and in transition. Windows 8.1 needs to fix those problems.

But simply plopping a Start menu on the screen isn't the solution. The problems with Windows 8 weren’t caused by the removal of the Start menu. All of the things you can do with the Start menu in Windows 7 can be accomplished using the new interface.

Don’t believe me? Here, look at the Windows 7 Start menu, where I’ve highlighted its core functions.

Let’s go through each of those five parts.

1 - Search

In both Windows 7 and Windows 8, you start a search by tapping the Start button or moving the mouse pointer to the lower left corner of the screen and clicking. (The fact that there’s no Start button in Windows 8 doesn’t matter; that gesture still works.)

In Windows 7, you can begin typing as soon as you see the Start menu. Your input appears in the box at the bottom of the Start menu, and as you type, the Start menu’s contents adjust to show programs, settings, and files that match your input.

That unified list might be a good thing if you find exactly what you’re looking for. But it’s limited to the top three results in each category, which means your search term has to be very specific or you have to click the heading to open another window. At that point it’s not really a shortcut anymore.

In Windows 8, you can just start typing at the Start screen to begin a search. Results appear immediately as tiles on the left, and you’re not limited to three items in the list.

Click (or tap) Settings to find matching results in Control Panel options, as shown below.

And then there’s Files search, the weakest of the three options. I get more complaints about this than any other aspect of Windows 8, so here’s a tip. Ignore the Files option on the Start screen and use the search box in File Explorer (on the desktop) instead. If you remember the keyboard shortcut Windows + E, it’s easy.

2 – Pin

In Windows 95, it was a big deal that you could pin program shortcuts to the Start menu. But Windows 7 added the ability to pin programs to the taskbar, which meant that you didn’t have to visit the Start menu at all.

The taskbar is still there on the Windows 8 desktop, which means you can still pin your most frequently used programs to it, which means once you get to the desktop and pin those program shortcuts you can mostly ignore the Start screen.

And you can pin programs (including some system shortcuts) to the Start screen too.

So, those desktop programs you use occasionally but not often enough to warrant cluttering the taskbar with? Pin them to the Start screen in a custom group. Call it Utilities or Extras or, really, whatever you want, and those pinned shortcuts are never more than a tap of the Windows key away.

There's an All Programs shortcut at the bottom of the Start menu that leads to a cascading menu. It takes at least three clicks to find a program there (Start, All Programs, folder name). In Windows 8, you can see the same program shortcuts on the All Apps menu, which is three clicks away: Start, right-click, All Apps.

3 – User Account

Did you even know that clicking the icon at the top of the right column opens the User Accounts section in Control Panel? Very few people know about that little trick, and even fewer have the need to use it more than once or twice a year. In Windows 8, you can find it by opening Control Panel, typing user in the search box, and clicking the User Accounts tile in the search results.

But if this little icon’s a dealbreaker for you, well, I guess you need the Start menu.

4 – Files

The right side of the Start menu holds shortcuts that open top-level folders in Windows Explorer: your user profile, your Documents/Pictures/Music folders, and (of course) Computer, where you can browse your entire file system starting with drive letters.

Does anyone still use these shortcuts in 2013?

File Explorer (the new Windows 8 name for what used to be called Windows Explorer) has a shortcut on the taskbar. It has a Favorites section in the sidebar on the left, where you can put shortcuts to the folders you use most often. You can pin folders, drives, and libraries to the Start screen. Here's what a suitably customized Start screen looks like.

This custom screen has a bunch of useful administrative tools under the Desktop tile, and a separate group of shortcuts to folders and system locations just to its right.

You don’t need a Start menu to browse files, honest.

5 - Settings

The Windows 7 Start menu has a shortcut for Control Panel and Default Programs. You can pin either or both of those shortcuts to the Start screen, the taskbar, or both in Windows 8. The thing is, though, you’ll be much more productive if you search for the specific setting you’re trying to find. Enter a search term on the Start screen, click or tap Settings, and go.

That Devices and Printers shortcut on the Windows 7 Start menu can’t be pinned to the Start screen or the taskbar. But really, when was the last time you visited that page? Did you even know it existed?

Yeah, I thought so.

So tell me again why taking the Start menu away made you less productive and why bringing it back will restore that lost productivity?

Seriously, I want to know.

Update: Several people have asked, what about the power buttons? Ha. I remember the jokes in 1995 when everyone thought it was hilarious to point out that you clicked "Start" to shut down. On modern hardware, the operating system and the hardware work together.You want your notebook to sleep? Close the lid. You want to shut dpown your PC? Press the power button. You want to lock your PC? Learn the keyboard shortcut Windows key + L.

You can even customize these settings:

Back in the dark ages, Windows couldn't respond to these requests from hardware, and if you tried shutting down by pressing the power button you would lose your work. But that hasn't been an issue in years. Every modern PC design supports these features.

But how many people are actually trying out the signature feature of Windows 8, its new apps? And how many are continuing to use those apps on a daily basis?

Microsoft collects usage data through its opt-in Customer Experience Improvement Program. So far, however, it’s only disclosed the number of apps available in the Windows Store.

That leaves the data collection and analysis to third parties. A new report from Soluto. “Windows 8 Metro Apps Usage,” suggests that the new apps are gaining traction, albeit slowly. And the most engaging apps, the ones that people download, install, and use regularly, are coming from some surprising sources. The number-one app on the list? Yahoo Mail.

Soluto collects details from users of its PC management software, which is primarily aimed at IT pros who support small businesses and consumers. The data is collected from a management agent that runs on client computers. (If you manage PCs for family members, you should try the free version.)

For this report, the company analyzed roughly one month’s worth of data from 10,848 Windows 8 machines, including desktop PCs, laptops (with and without touchscreens), and tablets. The sample population included 200 separate models from (in alphabetical order) Acer, Apple, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Toshiba.

A few highlights from the report:

• The survey recorded 9,634 unique Metro style Windows 8 apps that had been launched at least once.
• Owners of touchscreen-enabled laptops are 47% more likely to use Windows 8 apps than those with a standard laptop/notebook.
• Not surprisingly, tablet owners launch nearly twice as many Windows 8 apps as do their counterparts on desktop PCs. More surprising is the finding that nearly 40 percent of desktop users launch at least one Windows 8 app every day
• Among the built-in Windows 8 apps, the Windows Communications Apps (a single package that includes Mail, People, Messaging, and Calendar) was launched at least once by more than 85 percent of all Windows 8 PC owners. The Photos, Reader, and Camera apps were launched at least once by 44 percent, 27 percent, and 13 percent  of Windows 8 users, respectively. The remaining Microsoft-written apps were largely ignored by the owners of Windows 8 PCs.
• Among third-party apps, only Netflix made the top 10. Its app was downloaded and installed from the Windows Store and used at least once by roughly 8 percent of the sample population. Google Search was the second most popular non-Microsoft app, with slightly less than 4 percent of the sample trying it at least once.

The most interesting data in the report measures the level of engagement on the part of app users. For this statistic, Soluto starts by counting the number of Windows 8 users in its sample who have launched an app at least once, and then calculates the average number of times that app is used per week. That methodology tends to punish Microsoft’s built-in apps, which are preinstalled on every Windows 8 PC and in some cases are set as the default app for common file types: Photos for JPEGs and Reader for PDFs, for example. A PC owner is more likely to stick with an app that he or she deliberately downloaded and installed from the Windows Store.

With that caveat in mind, it’s still startling to see which Windows 8 apps are used most often.

Yahoo Mail? Yes, indeed. Hardcore techies might scoff, but Yahoo has hundreds of millions of loyal mail users worldwide, and its Windows 8 app, released in December, was built with those mainstream users in mind.

Yahoo’s app snubs Microsoft’s user experience guidelines for Metro style apps, with a large logo and a command bar along the top of the screen. When you’re reading a message, there are prominent buttons to reply to a message, delete it, or search your mailbox. Microsoft’s built-in apps, by contrast, force the user to find the hidden search charm, and most other options are hidden on a command bar that only appears when you swipe from the bottom of the screen or right-click.

You won’t find the second and third items on the list in the Windows Store unless you own a PC built by Acer or its Gateway subsidiary. These apps are preinstalled on Acer PCs, but weren’t on my machine. I downloaded and installed the Social Jogger app on an Acer touchscreen PC. Here’s a shot of the app in action.

One secret of this app’s success is that some of the Gateway PCs on which it’s installed include a dedicated key for accessing the app directly. But it’s also worth noting that the app contains prominent branding and four action buttons that are always visible in the upper right portion of the app. Again, making the app’s commands discoverable and not hiding them appears to have paid off for Acer.

Number four on the list is Lync MX, the Windows 8 version of Microsoft’s unified communication suite. Although there’s a more powerful desktop version of Lync, the Windows 8 release is easier to set up and much easier to use. And not coincidentally, it’s also incredibly touch-friendly, with an always-visible search button and easy commands for placing calls to other Lync users.

In fact, if there’s a single takeaway from this report, it should be a call to action to Windows 8 app developers: Don’t be afraid to break the Metro rules and put common commands right on the app screen. Your customers will thank you. More importantly, they’ll come back.

But it’s worth taking a look back at the company’s history. Five years ago this month, Yahoo turned down an unsolicited acquisition offer by Microsoft that would have netted YHOO stockholders $33 per share. If you owned Yahoo shares five years ago and decided to stay the course, it’s been a pretty miserable five years, as this chart attests:

Chart: Marketwatch.com

That might have been the biggest bullet Microsoft ever dodged. And it’s not just the $47.5 billion in cash that would have disappeared from the company’s bank accounts that would have been at risk.

The goal of a combined Microsoft-Yahoo was to compete directly with Google on advertising and search. It would have been the culmination of an acquisition spree in which Microsoft bought at least eight search and advertising related companies. And in an interview at the D6 conference five years ago this week, CEO Steve Ballmer still spoke bravely about advertising. But it was clear that drastic changes were afoot.

Given Google’s effective monopoly on search, it’s unlikely that adding Yahoo’s resources would have made a difference in total share. And that’s not just speculation. Three years ago, Microsoft and Yahoo signed a 10-year revenue-per-search deal that was supposed to create an effective Google competitor. It’s been a dud.

Instead, the failure to complete the Yahoo acquisition seems to have ended Microsoft’s dreams of being a giant in online advertising. There were no further acquisitions in that space, and last year Microsoft took a $6.2 billion writeoff of its biggest acquisition in that space, aQuantive.

What else would have happened if that acquisition had succeeded?

• Microsoft management would have been distracted during one of the most crucial times in the company’s history, as it recovered from Vista’s real and perceived problems and prepared to launch Windows 7 and Office 2010 (those two products were still nearly 18 months away from public release).
• Engineering resources would have been strained, at a time when much of the engineering work on multi-touch support for the next release of Windows was just beginning. Microsoft introduced multi-touch support in Windows 7 but it wasn’t fully integrated into the OS until Windows 8.
• On a global scale, efforts to protect online privacy would have spiraled downward. One of the unintended consequences of Microsoft’s failed acquisition was that it de-emphasized the ad business and eventually turned online privacy into a potential competitive advantage. In early 2008, Microsoft’s advertising division had enough clout to veto a genuinely innovative privacy feature in Internet Explorer. Today, Do Not Track is enabled by default in IE 10 and Microsoft is attacking Google publicly and privately on its privacy flaws.
• The efforts to make an ad-supported Office might have accelerated. Office 2010 included a Starter Edition (Word and Excel only) that was free with new PCs and ad-supported. Thankfully, Microsoft dropped Starter Edition completely in Office 2013, instead focusing on free Web apps as the right way to reach consumers.

After dropping its ambitions to become an online advertising giant, Microsoft chose to pursue a “devices and services” strategy instead. There’s no guarantee that this business model will succeed, but there’s also no question that Microsoft is better prepared to fight this battle than it would have been if it had been dragging around the weight of Yahoo for the past five years.

With the rise of free webmail services, the personal email landscape changed, but business mailboxes have remained pricey.

Now, thanks to aggressive competition between Microsoft and Google, that situation has changed. You can get business-class email for a relative pittance. And if you don’t want to pay for a modern mail server but still want to use a custom address with your business domain, you can now get that for free.

I’ve just converted several domains that had been running on ancient POP servers to a modern, cloud-based infrastructure. And it didn’t cost a dime. You can do the same.

First, a little background.

Back at the dawn of the commercial Internet, I registered a custom domain for my personal and business use.  One of the first things I did with that new domain was to attach it to a POP mail server and create a default email address.

I now own and use more than a dozen domains, but that first domain is still going strong. I’ve used that original email address for nearly two decades now. During that time I’ve lived in four states, changed Internet service providers a half-dozen times, and transferred the domain to different hosting providers without ever losing contact with my friends, co-workers, and family. I switched to a different default address for business e-mail a few years ago, but I have never stopped using that original address.

I could have chosen Google Apps for Business or Office 365, but either of those options would have meant a hefty annual bill.

As you can imagine, a 20-year-old email address, especially one with a common name to the left of the @ sign, attracts a lot of spam. Over the years, I’ve tried a bunch of spam-filtering options. None of them were close to perfect, but SpamAssassin passed the “good enough” test for a long time. A good decade, probably.

The trouble with SpamAssassin is that its technology hasn’t kept up with the bad guys, and over the past year or two the amount of junk mail that was bypassing the filters and landing in my inbox was steadily increasing.

And I’m not the only one with a mailbox on that domain. My mom has her primary account there, and my wife still receives some personal and business messages through an account there.

When the two most important women in my life both complained that the spam had gotten out of hand, I knew it was time to act.

So I decided to shut off the POP server and move that domain to a cloud-based service with its own spam filtering.

I could have chosen Google Apps for Business or Office 365, but either of those options would have meant a hefty annual bill: $50 per user for Google’s solution, $48 per user (and up) for Microsoft’s plans. (Those Google Apps accounts used to be free for up to 10 users, but Google dropped that option last year. If you set up an account before the cutoff date, you're grandfathered in, but there is no longer a free Google version for custom domains, only for Gmail.com addresses.)

But these are primarily personal accounts, so why should I pay a minimum of $150 a year? I decided instead to go with Microsoft’s best-kept secret: the free online tool that allows you to connect any domain to Outlook.com and keep email, contacts, and calendars in sync on just about any device.

Boy, am I glad I did that.

For the past three weeks, all three of those accounts, complete with custom domains, are now going through Microsoft’s mail servers. I’ve created some new accounts as well, using up 10 of the 50 addresses (and if I need more I can just put in a support ticket).

Here’s what I’ve gained:

• Amazingly good spam filtering. My main account gets between 300 and 500 spam messages per day, for a total of more than 10,000 per month. I’ve been monitoring that folder obsessively for the past three weeks. Only five messages of more than 7000 that I considered spam actually made it to my inbox. Fewer than 10 legitimate messages were caught by the spam filters. All of them were bulk messages that I ended up deleting anyway.
• Cloud backup. The trouble with those ancient POP servers is that they use a store-and-forward method that requires me to manage those archives somehow. Yes, I can use IMAP, but that’s still a crude technology compared to Exchange ActiveSync, which powers Outlook.com. And the same sync technology allows me to keep contacts and calendar items in the cloud as well.
• Easy connections to Microsoft Outlook. I use Outlook 2013 for my work email, which is handled by an Exchange server. I can connect any Outlook.com account (including my old Hotmail addresses) to Outlook as well. This support is built in to Outlook 2013; for Outlook 2010 and 2007, you need to install the free Hotmail Connector.
• Server-side rules. Microsoft calls this feature “sweep,” and it’s a very clever implementation that allows me to define flexible ways of handling different types of messages. “Just keep the most recent newsletter from Woot. Clean out daily news alerts from The New York Times after 10 days. Always move messages from the IPG mailing list to their own folder.” And so on.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, of course. The web version of Outlook.com includes unobtrusive ads that appear to the right of the main email window. Those ads are not context-sensitive: the advertising engine does not use the contents of the current message or other messages in your mailbox to determine which ads to display, as Gmail does. Incoming and outgoing messages do not include ads. (If you use a dedicated email client program such as Outlook, you’ll see no ads at all.)

Best of all, I get to keep my custom email address. If an alternative service comes along at some point in the future and I decide to switch, I can move my custom address. I own it. You can’t do that with an address in someone else’s domain, including Outlook.com and Gmail.com.

Oddly, the back-end service that makes this feature possible still uses the old Windows Live branding. It feels very … 2007. It’s scheduled for a visual refresh and a usability makeover to fit in with the look and feel of the new Outlook.com services, although Microsoft hasn’t said when that’s going to happen. But you can use it today, without waiting for those changes.

If you’re interested in connecting your custom domain to Outlook.com, I’ve put together a tutorial illustrating how to do exactly that.

To attach your custom domain to the Outlook.com servers, you need three things:

• Your own domain, which you can purchase from any registrar.
• The ability to create custom DNS (Domain Name System) records. In particular, you’ll need to create an MX (mail exchanger) record.
• A Microsoft account (formerly known as a Windows Live ID), which you’ll use to sign in to the domain administration center. This account should use an address that is not on the same custom domain as the one you're about to attach to Outlook.com. (If you already have a Microsoft account you use for other purposes, use it here.

If you're a stickler for legal details, you can read the terms of service, which are a supplement to the Microsoft Services Agreement.

Let's get started.

Step 1: Go to the Microsoft Custom Domains Admin Center and sign in using your Microsoft account.

Step 2: Click the Get Started link. (If you’ve previously used the Admin Center to attach a domain, click Add Domain.) That opens a new page where you can begin the custom domain setup process.

Step 3: Enter the domain name you want to attach to Microsoft’s Outlook.com service. Be sure you select the option to set up mail service for your domain.

Step 4: Accept the terms of service, fill in the captcha, and click I Accept.

You’ve now finished all of the initial setup steps. The next screen shows you the settings for the DNS record you need to create for your custom domain.

You now need to go to the settings interface for the DNS records associated with your domain. Each domain registrar is slightly different, but you'll need to find the place where you create an MX record and enter your domain name and the MX server address provided in the Mail Setup box, as shown above. If you're not experienced with managing DNS records, just copy and paste the entire box and send the details to a support professional at the registrar or a networking-savvy friend or colleague.

And then you wait, as the new DNS records propagate over the Internet. On one domain that I set up, the change was instantaneous. Most of the time, you should be able to continue within an hour. Click the Refresh button, and if the settings took, you'll see a screen like this one:

Click the Add button to begin creating accounts. For each new account, you add an account name (that's the part that goes to the left of the @ sign). You also assign a default password. If you're creating the account for yourself, you can clear the "Require password change at first login box."

If you're creating the account for someone else, leave that box checked, and send them the new email address and the password you just created. They'll be prompted to create their own password when they sign in for the first time.

To complete the account creation, go to Outlook.com and sign in using the credentials you just created. Your new mailbox is now available. You can attach the account to any mobile device and sync mail, contacts, and calendar using Exchange ActiveSync. You can also attach the account to Microsoft Outlook. This setup is automatic with Outlook 2013; for Outlook 2010 or 2007, you'll need to install the Outlook Hotmail Connector.

You can create up to 50 addresses in your new domain.

Any questions?

That’s the inflammatory allegation that a UK-based security blog made in a post earlier today:

Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H's associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. Shortly after sending HTTPS URLs over the instant messaging service, those URLs receive an unannounced visit from Microsoft HQ in Redmond.

That's a pretty dramatic conclusion, based on very thin evidence.

Heise Security, the German branch of the same publishing company, received a tip from a reader alleging that he had “observed some unusual traffic” following an IM session over Skype. So they performed a single experiment:

Heise Security then reproduced the events by sending two test HTTPS URLs, one containing login information and one pointing to a private cloud-based file-sharing service. A few hours after their Skype messages, they observed the following in the server log:

65.52.100.214 - - [30/Apr/2013:19:28:32 +0200]
"HEAD /.../login.html?user=tbtest&password=geheim HTTP/1.1"

As an aside, if you're sending URLs that contain login credentials in plain text, you already have big security problems. The same is true if your session ID allows anyone to masquerade as you simply by clicking a link.

That IP address, 65.52.100.214, is indeed controlled by Microsoft, as a cursory inspection of DNS records confirms. But after doing some investigating of my own, I’ve concluded that the reason for the mysterious visit is almost certainly innocent.

Microsoft doesn't normally discuss the details of its security infrastructure. However, I’m reasonably certain that address is part of Microsoft’s SmartScreen infrastructure, which the company uses to identify suspicious and dangerous URLs so that it can block malware, phishing sites, and spam in Internet Explorer, Outlook.com, and other Microsoft services. Presumably, Skype picked up SmartScreen filtering when it took over the functions previously handled by Windows Live Messenger. (Microsoft has not publicly confirmed that change and declined a request to comment on this story.)

First, let’s dismiss the implication that someone at Skype is following links from its customers and “reading everything they write.” That HTTP request uses the HEAD method rather than a GET. As the relevant portion of the HTTP standard explains, this method specifically doesn’t retrieve content:

This method can be used for obtaining metainformation about the entity implied by the request without transferring the entity-body itself. This method is often used for testing hypertext links for validity, accessibility, and recent modification.

Testing hyperlinks to see if they’re safe, perhaps? That’s the official explanation Microsoft gave to the original authors of the article when they asked:

In response to an enquiry from heise Security, Skype referred them to a passage from its data protection policy:

"Skype may use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links."

Heise Security was skeptical of that explanation. Wouldn’t Microsoft/Skype have to look at the contents of a given page to determine whether it’s a phishing site or spam? No. Microsoft’s SmartScreen technology works by examining the reputation of a host, and it uses a wide range of markers to assess that reputation. This 2010 post from the team responsible for the SmartScreen technology explains how it looks at URLs:

Obviously SmartScreen's reputation systems learn that particular URLs are bad—that is the first step—but we go much further. Every URL is hosted on a domain. … Abusers will often host hundreds or thousands of individually abusive URLs on a single domain. With the right evidence, SmartScreen's reputation system will flag whole domains as abusive.

URLs and domains are concepts that let humans refer to computers. But every computer that's directly on the Internet also has a numeric code, called its IP address, that lets other computers refer to it. For example, 109.22.33.142 might be the IP address of the computer that's running the web server that's hosting the canada-pharmacy.us domain. SmartScreen's reputation system tracks these as well and will mark specific web server IP addresses as abusive. SmartScreen will also generalize to other computers "in the neighborhood" of known bad ones. For example, IP addresses are often allocated in blocks, and it's likely that the person who owns 109.22.33.142 also owns 109.22.33.143 and .144 and .145. We use knowledge about the way infrastructure blocks are allocated–into subnets, ASN (Autonomous System Number) blocks, the way message routing works, and more–to figure out what other computers the abusers own, and prevent those abusers from attacking Microsoft customers.

Let's be clear: SmartScreen doesn't scan every link in every IM or email. It doesn't need to. An algorithm determines that a message contains a link (identified by a text string like http:// or ftp://). Most links are from known safe domains. Those test links are unfamiliar and possibly suspicious, so the SmartScreen servers asked for more information from the server, using a HEAD (not GET) request, with the exact URL that was included in the original Skype message.

I spent 30 minutes or so poking around some particularly dark corners of the Internet, where the webmasters had inadvertently left their server logs and other incriminating documents open to the public. I found evidence that this particular Microsoft IP address had queried servers containing pages filled with PayPal usernames and passwords entered by phishing victims. That address was in logs from warez sites hosting downloads of pirated games and movies; it was in records kept by several spammy-looking sites offering "pharmaceuticals" for sale; and I even found it on one BBS where the site’s owners were alarmed by a possible Microsoft intrusion until they determined that the credentials of one of their administrators had been compromised and used to send spam to their members.

I couldn’t find any examples of legitimate sites complaining about unauthorized access from this IP address. Update: And contrary to heise Security's assertion, I found many examples of plain HTTP links that had been scanned by SmartScreen.

In short, Microsoft’s explanation checks out. If you share a URL in a Skype instant message, there’s a possibility (not a guarantee, just a chance) that a SmartScreen server will ask for more information about the server from which that URL originated. It will then use that information to help determine whether that link is legit. If someone on Skype sends you a link to a phishing site or one containing malware, you should know, right? That's the point of the SmartScreen feature.

There’s no evidence that anyone, human or machine, is reading your confidential messages. There's no evidence that the content of the messages is being examined at all. Automated scanning of some URLs within instant messages isn't the same as "reading everything you write." This is roughly equivalent to what mail servers do when they check the header information on an incoming message to determine whether it's spam. That's a legitimate security function, not an invasion of privacy.

You can put that tinfoil hat away, at least for now.

Why would anyone run their own server if they didn’t have to?

Servers are big boxes of stuff just waiting to break and make their administrators' lives miserable. If I can pay a fair price to have someone else set up, maintain, secure, and support an online service for me that eliminates the need for me to own my own hardware and manage my own server software, I will take that offer every time.

Consumers figured that out long ago, which is why the big three of free web-based mail services, Hotmail and Gmail and Yahoo, collectively have more than a billion mailboxes in use. Many of those mailboxes are provided through ISPs, who were happy to get out of the POP and SMTP business.

But businesses still run on email. One recent report from the Radicati Group estimates there are 929 million business mailboxes in use, and most of them are still running on in-house servers.

The world’s most widely used solution for business email is Microsoft Exchange, with 51 percent of the market and roughly 473 million mailboxes in use, according to that report. Microsoft and its partners have been offering hosted Exchange for years, but more than 400 million of those Exchange mailboxes are still connected to on-premises Exchange servers.

I have no desire to run my own Exchange server, which is why I was thrilled to let someone else do it for me. I’ve been running my work-related email on a hosted Exchange account at Intermedia for the past three years, and I’m about to upgrade that account to Exchange 2013. I’ll be comparing Intermedia’s offering to Office 365, which I’ve been using for the past six months or so, as well as Google Apps for Business. Moving email to the cloud is a huge growth opportunity for both Microsoft (and its partners) and Google. (Is there anyone in third place?) Other essential business services, like your PBX, are also ripe for replacement.

Last month I shut down my last POP mail account. Every mailbox I manage, personal and professional, is running in the cloud, using either Microsoft or Google software. I no longer have to manage or troubleshoot POP, IMAP, and SMTP servers of my own.

And after this past weekend I’m about ready to hand over responsibility for some other servers as well.

A lot of the reasons I need a powerful dedicated server have vanished over the past decade.

I have a dedicated, Linux-based server at a hosting company that I’ve worked with for years. They’re in the process of transitioning my server to a new range of IP addresses this week. As a result, I’ve spent the past few days working in server consoles, editing DNS records, and manually tweaking obscure Linux configuration files so that everything works the way it’s supposed to. It hasn’t been painless. Nothing that involves the words DNS propagation ever is.

I only have to play network engineer a few times a year, and it’s usually for something simple. This level of mucking about with servers only comes along every few years, thankfully. But it’s painful enough that I’ve been looking at the alternatives. Can I hand the whole thing over to someone else?

A lot of the reasons I need a powerful dedicated server have vanished over the past decade.

• As I mentioned earlier, I’ve already eliminated the need to run email servers on those boxes. I still have to set up accounts and occasionally reset a password, but that’s all done through a dashboard on a service managed by Google, Microsoft, or Intermedia.
• My co-authors and I used to use FTP regularly to share files. These days we use online services. In 2009 and 2010, for two editions of Windows 7 Inside Out, we used Dropbox, which was convenient and reliable enough. For Office 2013 Inside Out, which just went to the printer, we used SkyDrive, which worked exceptionally well. The range of business-class storage services is impressive
• Back when I started blogging, I used Movable Type and then switched to WordPress. These days most of what I publish online is here on ZDNet, where the servers are maintained by an engineering staff, thank goodness. So my moderately expensive, occasionally high-maintenance dedicated server runs a handful of personal blogs. WordPress now runs its own hosted service, which looks mighty tempting.
• For our books, we created a custom URL-shortening service that allows us to provide short links to long URLs. So we can use the link http://w7io.com/10285 instead of http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178982.aspx. And if a website owner moves a page without redirecting it, we can change the target of our short link on the fly. (Services like bit.ly won’t let you do that.) That allows us to avoid the problem of link rot, but it also means maintaining a legacy app.

I’d love to move my personal blogs to a hosted service. In the middle of the last decade I managed a couple blogs on Google’s Blogger service, but these days it feels like one of those neglected products that’s on the verge of being discontinued. (Take Google’s announcement of its decision to kill Google Reader, search and replace with “Blogger,” and you’ve pretty much got a preview of the press release.) Tumblr and other free platforms are fine if you just want a place to dump ideas and pictures

For $99 a year I could get every bell and whistle that WordPress.com offers in its Premium plan. Unfortunately, the terms of service prohibit most forms of advertising and e-commerce, which is a potential roadblock for me as a professional publisher. I could probably work within those restrictions, though.

In fact, it looks like I could easily move just about everything that requires a dedicated server over to a hosted service. I’d love to find a way to permanently hang up my network manager’s hat. Now all I have to do is find the time to research the options and actually make the move.

• See also: New Windows 8 hardware specs hint at 7-inch tablets and a Microsoft Reader

Now, thanks to a leak from Amazon, we’ve seen more details of what might be the first of a new wave of small Windows 8 tablets.

The first pictures of Acer’s Iconia W3-810 appeared at TabletGuide.nl a couple weeks ago.

Yesterday, PC World’s Brad Chacos spotted the listing for Acer’s W3-810 and snapped this screenshot:

Image: PC World

If the specs in the Amazon listing are accurate, this device will have a 1280x800 touchscreen at 8.1 inches. That horizontal resolution is below the minimum 1366 pixels previously required for a Windows 8 device. It’s the same resolution and roughly the same size as Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The aspect ratio is less elongated than the current crop of 16:9 Windows 8 tablets and is noticeably more appropriate for applications such as reader programs, which work best in portrait mode.

According to the Amazon Product Information sheet, the device will weigh 1.1 pounds (significantly less than the 1.5-pound weight of the current iPad but more than the 0.68 pounds of the iPad Mini). The claimed average battery life is 8 hours.

Those earlier photos show optional covers and a keyboard dock for the device.

Image: TabletGuide.nl 

At least one spec in the listing that Chacos snagged is wrong. This device won’t have a 1.5 GHz Apple A4 processor (that’s an error that appears in some other Windows 8 device listings at Amazon as well, probably the result of someone entering data into a template snagged from an iPad listing). Instead, a handful of GeekBench results saved at Primate Labs’ website show that the device contains an Intel Atom Z2760. That’s the same CPU found in several currently available 10-inch Windows 8 tablets, including HP’s Envy X2, Dell’s Latitude 10, and Acer’s 10-inch W510.

The earliest benchmark scores are from nearly a month ago, suggesting that the device could enter the market sooner than the expected unveiling of Windows Blue at Microsoft's BUILD Conference in late June.

The specs show this device running a 32-bit version of Windows 8 Pro, which means in theory it’s capable of running almost any Windows desktop app, including Microsoft Office. If the performance of existing devices using this CPU is a guide, though, that will be a secondary task for this device, which is much more suited for reading books and playing music and movies and games.

Unfortunately, his entire argument relies on a handful of significant factual errors.

In the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "You’re entitled to your own opinion. You’re not entitled to your own facts."

So allow me to set the record straight.

First, there’s simple arithmetic.

How bad are Windows 8 sales? In April 2013's Net Applications numbers, Windows 8 barely crept up to 3.82-percent. That still leaves Windows 8 behind Microsoft's last operating system flop, Vista, after seven months in the market.

No, Windows 8 has not been on the market seven months. Windows 8 was released to the public on October 26, 2012. The latest NetMarketShare numbers cover the period ending April 30, 2013. That’s six months and four days.

That kind of detail matters. If someone can’t get a simple fact like that right, should you really trust the rest of their analysis?

Second, my colleague and erstwhile debate opponent continues to compare the launch of Windows 8 with the launch of Windows Vista. He wrote an entire column on the subject in March of this year, creating a graph that purported to compare the two launches using Net Applications data. Unfortunately, the company that actually gathered those statistics has specifically said those comparisons are not valid.

Windows Vista was released to corporate customers in November 2006 and to the public in January 2007. So its first six months on the market would have ended in either May 2007 or July 2007, depending on which starting date you use.

Net Applications changed its data collection methodology in November 2007. The data it collects today is not comparable to the data it collected in 2007.

I asked Vincent Vizzaccaro, Executive Vice President of Marketing for NetApplications, to explain. Here’s what he told me:

Our methodology change occurred starting with data from November 2007. We started doing country-level weighting, which means we compare our traffic to the CIA Internet Traffic by Country table, and weight our data accordingly. For example, if our global data shows that Brazil represents 2% of our traffic, and the CIA table shows Brazil to represent 4% of global Internet traffic, we will count each unique visitor from Brazil twice. This is done to balance out our global data. All regions have differing markets, and if our traffic were concentrated in one or more regions, our global data would be inappropriately affected by those regions. Country level weighting removes any bias by region.

Comparisons of data before and after the change in methodology are invalid because of the massive shift caused by the weighting. It’s apples and oranges now.

We can’t go back before 11/2007 because the weighting required a completely new data collection structure. The two data sets are now incompatible with each other.

For the record, one year after its launch, Windows XP was in use by about 10 percent of the installed base of PCs. I checked the oldest Net Applications figures I have for Windows Vista, which date back to April 2008. Those numbers, which were collected using the same methodology the company uses today, show that Vista was in use by 9.41 percent of the installed base at that time, roughly 15 months after its launch.

And finally, Mr. Vaughan-Nichols takes a shot at Windows RT on his way out:

Windows on tablets fared even worse with touch-screen-based Windows 8 devices and Windows RT devices coming in at 0.02-percent and 0.00-percent each. The last was not a typo. The Surface RT is now in the running for worst Microsoft launch ever.

Oh dear. That does sound awful. In fact, those numbers are so dreadful I asked Net Applications if they’re accurate. The short answer: No. Mr. Vizziccaro explains that Windows RT devices are included with the figures for Windows 8 and are not broken out separately. The entry in the NetMarketShare reports for Windows RT shouldn’t be there.

So, reality check: Windows 8 is following roughly the same adoption pattern as previous Windows versions. The big difference is that its arrival in the marketplace comes as the market for traditional PCs is shrinking. In fact, its most important changes are specifically designed to enable operation on tablets and touchscreen devices, with a special emphasis on mobility.

Six months after the launch of Windows 8, we're just beginning to see the first signs of that shift. According to Strategy Analytics, Windows-based devices accounted for 7.4 percent of the tablet market, or about 3 million devices, in the first quarter of this year. IDC estimates that Microsoft and its partners accounted for 1.8 million devices, or 3.7 percent of the tablet market, in the first quarter. I expect that percentage will increase over the next year. So does IDC, which says if Microsoft can address consumer messaging and cost issues, "we could see Microsoft make even further headway in 2013 and beyond."

When Microsoft launched Windows 8 last year, it also committed to a more rapid update cadence. In the past decade, Windows has been updated every three years or so. The new plan is to release updates on an annual basis. If Windows 8.1 (code-named Blue) arrives this summer as expected, it will be right on schedule.

As for the comparison between Windows 8 and a sugary soft drink, we’re back in opinion territory now. Let’s just say we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. I do wish that the Coca-Cola Company would release its secret formula so we could see, once and for all, what's really in those classic curved bottles.

Maybe we could even get an open-source alternative to Coke. I'm sure it would take the world by storm.

It might seem like only yesterday, but that Mac version was released more than five years ago. And under Microsoft’s Support Lifecycle, that’s the end of the line. Office 2008 for Mac reached its Mainstream Support End Date on April 9, 2013. No more bug fixes, no more security updates, no more service packs.

That’s a significant difference in support policy between the Mac and Windows versions. On Windows, Microsoft provides an additional five years of extended support for all Office versions, even the Home/Student/Teacher editions. Office 2007 is supported until October 10, 2017. Even Office 2003 is still supported, with an end date that matches Windows XP: April 8, 2014.

But Microsoft’s Mac software is covered under the rules for Consumer and Multimedia products, not Business and Developer products. If you look under the Extended Support End Date heading, you see “Not Applicable.”

What are your Mac alternatives?

Well, sticking with Office 2008 is an option. It won’t stop working just because the support deadline has passed. Potentially, that leaves you vulnerable to attacks like the Uyghur trojan, which was discovered earlier this year on machines running Office 2008 for Mac on OS X. The vulnerability was patched in 2009, but some Mac 2008 users never got the update. Human rights activists working in Tibet and Eastern and Central Asia were targeted with spear-phishing emails containing booby-trapped Word documents that installed a backdoor on unpatched machines.

There’s no evidence that similar undiscovered vulnerabilities exist in Office 2008. Yet. as long as you’re comfortable with the idea that newly discovered vulnerabilities in that version won’t be patched, proceed with caution.

Maybe iWork is good enough, or maybe you can make do with Google Apps or the Office Web Apps that are free with a SkyDrive account. The free OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are also options.

If you plan to stick with Microsoft Office, you can upgrade to Office for Mac 2011, which is supported until January 12, 2016. If your Mac is one of multiple devices in your home or office, consider an Office 365 subscription, which allows you to install the latest version of Office on up to five devices (PCs running Windows 7 or Windows 8 or a Mac running OS X). That option gives you a license to use Office for Mac 2011 today and the right to upgrade to the latest version at any time.

Historically, a new Office for Mac has come out a year after its Windows counterpart. The 2008 and 2011 Mac Office versions followed Office 2007 and Office 2010, respectively. That suggests that a new version of Office for Mac will come out late this year or early next.

During that time, the PC industry has contracted sharply and Windows 8 buyers have been less than fully enthusiastic.

The conventional wisdom is that Microsoft is flailing and Apple is a productivity machine. Apple’s products are uniformly loved and Microsoft’s are unable to get any traction. Apple's cool, Microsoft's not.

And yet the company’s stock prices have gone in completely opposite directions since the launch of Windows 8. This chart begins on the day Windows 8 was released to the public.

Now, the market has been known to be dead wrong before. But it’s odd to see this big a divergence between public perception and market performance.

Last week Microsoft released its quarterly results. This week Apple weighed in with its numbers. That gave me a chance to look at both companies in a little more detail. And when I did, I saw far more similarities than differences, including two CEOs who have drawn their share of fire from critics who think they need to be replaced.

At Microsoft, Steve Ballmer gets dinged for the company’s inability to make any serious inroads into the mobile category. After six months on the market, neither Windows Phone 8 nor Windows 8 have managed to get out of the single digits in terms of usage.

And yet the company managed to increase its profit 19 percent over the corresponding quarter last year. How? By concentrating on the boring, yet highly profitable units that most tech bloggers yawn at. Microsoft Business Division (responsible for Office 365, which is about to become a billion-dollar business) and Server and Tools (with multiple billion-dollar businesses under its umbrella) are both bigger than Windows.

Meanwhile, the Windows Division reported flat revenues even though PC shipments dropped by 14 percent during the same period. I’ve read several critiques from armchair financial analysts implying that Ballmer and Co. are somehow cheating by including its new Surface hardware line in the Windows Division’s results.

But that’s Microsoft’s strategy for Windows, part of its initiative to become a “devices and services” company. You can argue about the execution of that strategy, and you can place bets on whether it will succeed. But there’s nothing timid or tentative about it.

And then there’s Apple. Superficially, its business looks as diversified as Microsoft’s, with revenue and profits coming from a variety of products.

But in the same quarter where Microsoft's profits were up 19 percent, Apple's were down almost 18 percent.

There’s no question that Apple will sell lots more iPhones and iPads. But as CEO Tim Cook acknowledged on the earnings call, “We acknowledge that our growth rate has slowed and our margins have decreased from the exceptionally high level we experienced in 2012.”

In developed markets, Apple has masterfully executed against its plan to sell high-priced, high-margin products to the wealthier segments of the buying public. But there’s evidence that that market is saturated, and the first-mover advantage is gone. On the same earnings call, Cook conceded as much: “We can't control items such as exchange rates and world economies and even certain cost pressures.” Growth for Apple in its existing product lines means appealing to more price-conscious buyers and moving into markets where the $618 average selling price of an iPhone isn’t an option.

Is there another breakthrough hardware product in Apple’s back pocket? It’s hard to believe that a smart watch or a TV has the potential to define a category as the iPhone and iPad did.

Maybe services? Revenue on the iTunes/Software/Services line in Apple’s just-completed quarter was up 30 percent. But as the latest 10-Q report makes clear, that’s a by-product of the larger installed base of iOS devices:

This increase was due primarily to growth of iTunes [which] reflects continued growth in the installed base of iOS devices and expanded iTunes digital content and applications offerings around the world, resulting in higher net sales on the App Store and higher net sales of digital content.

Outside of iTunes, Apple hasn’t exactly excelled at delivering services to its own customer base, let alone expanding those services to a larger market. So it’s hard to see that as a real growth opportunity.

Indeed, that’s the real difference between Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft and Tim Cook’s Apple. Ballmer has a significant challenge in one division that represents about a quarter of his company’s revenue, while other divisions are growing steadily outside the gaze of the gadget-obsessed tech press.

Meanwhile, Apple has become downright boring and predictable. As Felix Salmon wrote after seeing Apple’s latest numbers:

Today’s earnings report marks the point at which Apple is officially no longer a high-growth tech stock, valued on its monster potential. Instead, it has become a cash cow, valued on its ability to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into its shareholders’ pockets.

That's actually a fairly accurate description of Microsoft's performance in the Ballmer era. And given the challenges of the economy and a fickle technology market, it's a significant accomplishment for both men.

In short, regardless of the stock market's vicissitudes, neither company is doomed. And I suspect neither CEO is going anywhere soon.

That’s the conclusion of a new report released today by Soluto, which crunched the data from its cloud-based PC monitoring and management software to come up with a list of the 10 most reliable portable PCs you can buy today.

The most reliable Windows PC you can buy today, according to Soluto’s report, doesn’t come from one of the leading hardware OEMs. Instead, it’s built by Microsoft’s archrival Apple. (You'll have to use Apple's Boot Camp utility and buy your own Windows license to transform the Mac into a Windows PC.)

The report also provides a partial answer to the age-old question of whether you should use a vendor’s OEM image of Windows or wipe it and perform a clean installation.

Soluto’s database includes data gathered from millions of machines running Windows. For this study, the company chose a sample of data gathered in the first three months of 2013 from 150,000 portable PCs. They filtered the dataset so it includes only models available for purchase today, running Windows 7 or Windows 8.

That left a total of 49 models from a who’s who of hardware makers. The world’s leading PC OEM, HP, had the most entries on the list, followed in order by Lenovo, Dell, Samsung, ASUS, Acer, Toshiba, and Apple.

At the top of the Soluto list is the 13-inch MacBook Pro (mid-2012 model), which earned the best reliability score of the bunch. The score takes into account program crashes and hangs (events in which an application becomes nonresponsive for at least five seconds), average boot time, the number of background processes, and the number of BSODs (STOP errors, aka the “Blue Screen of Death”) per week.

What’s most startling about this top-10 list is who’s not on it. HP isn’t represented at all, and giant Lenovo squeaked in to take the last spot on the list with its pricey ThinkPad X1 Carbon. ASUS and Samsung are nowhere to be found.

By contrast, Dell makes half the models on the list, and Acer earned two spots, including a close second.

The secret of their success isn’t all that surprising. Both companies deliver relatively clean installations of Windows, with close attention paid to drivers. Dell includes minimal amounts of third-party software in its PCs, a practice that adds to the reliability of its products. By contrast, when I last looked at consumer PCs from HP and Samsung I found that crapware was a performance-sapping nightmare.

Acer’s Aspire E1, a bargain-priced 15-inch notebook, earned rock-solid reliability scores, nearly equal to those of a clean install of Windows on a MacBook Pro that costs nearly three times as much. That’s a significant data point in favor of the argument that PC OEMs can indeed ship reliable hardware with a factory installation of Windows. Wipe-and-reinstall should be an option, not a necessity.

Soluto shared one data point with me that you won’t find in the report. In their sample, 35 percent of Lenovos had non-OEM Windows installations, meaning they had been wiped and reimaged by the owner. For Dell and HP, the percentages were 28 percent and 22 percent, respectively. By contrast, only 15 percent of Acer machines were reimaged. I suspect the higher percentages are an indication of a greater share of Lenovos and Dells among IT pros and corporate buyers, with Acer being much more focused on a consumer market that is unlikely to do the radical surgery of a clean Windows install.

A closer look at the raw data suggests that BSODs, in which Windows stops working because of a fatal memory error or driver flaw, are relatively infrequent. On a 13-inch MacBook Pro (non Retina) with a clean install of Windows, Soluto’s data suggests you’ll see a BSOD once every two years. On a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, a BSOD raised its ugly head at a rate equal to one every nine months or so. By contrast, the sample data from 15-inch MacBook Pros with Retina displays suffered BSODs at a rate of one every five weeks.

Without looking more closely at the data, it’s impossible to tell whether those crashes on the more expensive expensive MacBook Pro Retina are the result of bad drivers from Apple or third-party drivers and system software that don’t play well with Apple’s expensive hardware. They might also have included Windows 8 installations using the Windows 7 version of Boot Camp.

As the report notes, Apple’s two entries in the list should include a giant asterisk. Running Windows directly on a Mac (without the use of virtualization software) requires using Apple’s Boot Camp utility and purchasing a separate Windows license at a typical cost of between $130 and $200. You then have to partition the hard disk and install Windows yourself.

Despite those extra hurdles, there were enough Mac owners willing to endure the hassle of running Windows on a Mac to put those models on Soluto's radar.

Because of the timing of this study, most of the machines (roughly 89 percent) were running Windows 7, with just over 10 percent running Windows 8. Neither Microsoft’s Surface Pro, which went on sale in the middle of the data-collection period, nor any touchscreen-equipped Windows 8 PCs are represented in the report. That situation should change over the course of the next few months, and those models will be reflected in future editions of Soluto’s reports.

There’s more to purchasing a PC than just reliability, of course. Price is an important consideration for both consumers and businesses. The average price of the eight Windows PCs in the Soluto list is $682. That’s $1500 less than you’ll pay for a MacBook Pro with Retina display.

And there are other considerations as well. Some, like build quality, size, and weight, can be quantified. Others, like the feel of a keyboard or the operation of a trackpad, are intangible. And running Windows on a Mac adds other headaches, including compatibility issues with imaging and backup software.

If you’re attracted to any of these PCs, I urge you to read the entire Soluto report so you can catch some of the subtleties in their analysis.

When I wrote that news earlier this week, I heard two reactions, for the most part. The first was, "This surprises you?" The second was: "But that can’t be. The Samsung Chromebook has been at the top of Amazon’s bestselling laptops list for months!"

Indeed it has. That apparent contradiction surprised me, too, so I decided to take a much closer look at that Amazon list. I came away with a plausible explanation for Samsung’s success and some insights into the PC market as we head into midyear.

First, a little background. As a book author, I know a thing or two about Amazon’s bestseller lists. They’re based on complex (and highly secretive) algorithms that blend long-term sales with short-term momentum. So a product that sees a spike in sales in a single day can move impressively up the charts for a day or two, and then drop quickly back to its normal slot. But the products that stay atop the charts are those that sell steadily over time.

By that measure, there’s reason to congratulate Samsung for the Chromebook’s performance. Its tenure at the top means it has been selling consistently over time. So what’s the secret of its success?

Let’s start with the most obvious attribute: its price. At $249, the Samsung Chromebook is the second-cheapest device on the Amazon list. In fact, when I copied the list into a spreadsheet and sorted by price, lowest prices first, Chromebooks magically rose to the top.

Two of the top five notebooks are dirt-cheap Chromebooks. When you sort the 100 laptops on the list by price, only one Windows-based machine, the Acer Aspire One, managed to sneak into the bargain basement. With the Samsung getting excellent reviews for its build quality, at a price of $249, it passed the “What the hell?” threshold for many gadget buyers.

But I found the rest of the list much more enlightening. Here’s the short version:

• Apple’s MacBooks are very popular indeed.
• Touchscreens are making inroads into the mainstream.
• Cheap PCs are still the no-profit lifeblood of the industry.

Let’s dig in.

For starters, there really aren’t 100 discrete devices in the Amazon top 100 list. I threw out 10 of the entries on the list that were available only from third-party sellers, not fulfilled by Amazon. This group included three ancient Apple iBooks powered by G4 CPUs. It also included listings for five equally antique refurbished Dell machines. After excluding those listings, we end up with a total of 90 entries in the Formerly Top 100 list.

And there are a lot of duplicates on that list. The Samsung Chromebook comes in a single configuration, but many of the other entries on the list represent the same device with a different CPU or memory, in a different color, or with a slightly different model number.

One could, in fact, make a plausible case that ASUS deserves the top spot on the list with its amazingly inexpensive low-end touchscreen notebook powered by an Intel i3. The ASUS X202E appears in the #10 spot on the list, but its siblings, the silver and pink units with the same model number and the identical device sold as the Q200E, appear on the list as well. All told, this machine appears five times. If those sales were consolidated, it would certainly move up the charts - perhaps all the way to the top.

I found a total of six Apple MacBooks in the top 100. They paint a picture of Apple’s amazingly successful sales strategy. Create a manageable number of models, build them very well, slap a premium price on each one, and collect the greenbacks.

If you sort the list by price in reverse order, MacBooks float to the top of the list. All of the 12 Mac models on the bestseller list were among the 20 most expensive laptops you can buy at Amazon. Only one had an actual selling price of (barely) under $1000. Collectively, they represent only six models: the 11- and 13-inch MacBook Airs, and the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros, with and without Retina displays.

And then there’s the incredibly diverse Windows laptop lineup.

When I combined all the duplicate entries, I found a total of 46 Windows-powered devices on the bestseller list. Here’s the breakdown:

• Only 2 were running Windows 7
• 32 were running Windows 8 on conventional notebook form factors
• 12 were running Windows 8 with touchscreens

That middle group is basically the strip mall of PCs: ho-hum, mostly heavy lookalike devices at price points that make you wonder how the OEMs can make a dime of profit. Of that group, 56 percent were priced at $500 or less and 88 percent were $700 or less.

But if you’re looking for signs of life, look at the list of touchscreen devices, most of them fairly recent additions to the bestseller list.

• Acer: Aspire V5
• ASUS: Taichi Convertible Ultrabook; VivoBook S400CA and VivoBook S500CA; Q200E/VivoBook X202E
• HP: Envy X2 convertible
• Lenovo: IdeaPad Yoga 13; Thinkpad Twist; ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch
• Samsung: ATIV Smart PC 500T; ATIV Smart PC Pro XE700T
• Sony: VAIO T Series

On average, the touchscreen devices sold for $802 each. By contrast, the non-touchscreen devices sold for $515. Part of that is the current premium price for touch-enabled displays. But as volumes go up, that component price should go down, making touchscreens more popular.

What I found most fascinating about this list were the Lenovo entries. In the recent dismal Q1, Lenovo nearly hit the top of the worldwide PC sales charts. And it’s not doing it with just cheap PCs. The Yoga 13, ThinkPad Twist, and X1 Carbon Touch are genuinely innovative designs, sold at premium prices.

We are in a time of transition in the PC industry. By the end of the year, I predict this list will look very different indeed.

In its first week of monitoring worldwide usage of Google's Chrome OS, NetMarketShare reported that the percentage of web traffic from Chromebooks was roughly 2/100 of 1 percent, a figure too small to earn a place on its reports.

The first Chromebooks went on sale in June 2011, nearly two years ago. In the run-up to the launch, ZDNet’s own Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols called the Chromebook a “Windows killer,” predicting that “Microsoft is facing real trouble” in the market for desktop PCs.

Those first Chromebooks didn’t make an immediate dent in the market, with Acer reportedly selling fewer than 5000 units in the first six months and Samsung selling even fewer. But the new OS and its ultra-low-cost hardware have attracted their fair share of coverage from enthusiasts who like Google’s all-cloud-all-the-time vision of computing.

The two biggest names in the list of PC OEMs, Lenovo and HP, have jumped into the market as well, adding low-cost Chromebooks to their lineup. Last fall Samsung introduced a $249 ARM-powered Chromebook in a form factor reminiscent of the MacBook Air. And Google raised a few eyebrows when it introduced its own model, the spectacularly pricey Chromebook Pixel, with a high-resolution touchscreen.

With all those choices, you’d think the category would be successful. Indeed, that Samsung model topped Amazon’s list of best-selling laptops this winter.

But so far, Chromebooks haven’t appeared at all on the list of operating systems monitored by Net Applications, which publishes its figures at NetMarketShare.com. And that’s an important metric, according to my opponent in last week's ZDNet Great Debate on the future of Windows 8, who cited disappointing usage reports as evidence that Windows 8 has flopped:

Windows 8's market numbers are even lower than Vista's pathetic ranking at a similar point in their sales cycle. Even if you buy the most optimistic reading of NetMarketShare's numbers, Windows 8, after being in the market for six months, has just 3.31 percent of the desktop marketplace—that's just over what Vista had with 3.02 percent in three months.

Well, it was only five months, not six, and NetMarketShare also changed the way it calculated usage in 2008, rendering those comparisons invalid. But let's not quibble over details. When I looked at the same numbers last month, I found a slightly different story. I also noticed a curious omission:

One widely discussed operating system isn’t visible in the NetMarketShare numbers. There’s no entry for Chrome OS at all. A spokesperson for the company tells me those numbers will be included in an update to their tracking stats, coming soon.

The first numbers were due to show up in the subscriber-only reports for the week ending April 14. This morning I asked a company spokesperson for a sneak peek and got this report:

For the week of 4/8 - 4/14, ChromeBook has 0.023 percent weighted worldwide usage. Because it rounds to less than 0.1 percent it’s not showing up in our reports.

To put things in perspective, as of April 2013 all Chromebooks combined have managed to achieve 7/10 of 1 percent of the usage of Windows 8 PCs worldwide.

Put another way, that figure suggests that in nearly two years on the market, all of those Chromebooks have achieved a smaller percentage of usage than Windows RT earned as of January 2013, after only three months on the market. Windows RT has been widely considered a disappointment, with OEMs cutting prices for RT-powered devices.

In both categories, those tiny results suggest a fair amount of pain for the OEMs that jumped in early. Google’s gone all-in for its cloud-based OS, and Microsoft is similarly gung-ho about the future of its Windows RT operating system. But it might be another couple of years before the general buying public is really ready for either one.

I believe Microsoft’s motives were sincere, but their decision was mistaken.

So, how would you characterize the Microsoft Windows Division under the leadership of Steven Sinofsky? Bold and decisive, or arrogant and stubborn? Maybe both? Your answer to that question colors how you feel about Windows 8. And the fact that I even have to ask the question explains the passionate reaction to this polarizing product.

The naysayers are probably overrepresented in the final tally from this week's Great Debate between me and my ZDNet colleague, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Can Windows 8 be saved? But there’s no question that a lot of smart people have serious problems with the initial release of Windows 8.

Great Debate: Can Windows 8 be saved?

Microsoft has indeed done many bold things in Windows 8. No one in their right mind would accuse this release of Windows of being timid or overly cautious. It represents a big technological bet that one OS family can scale across an extraordinarily wide range of device form factors and sizes.

On the other hand, plenty of perfectly sane critics have attacked Microsoft for being arrogant, stubborn, and dismissive of legitimate complaints about the user experience with Windows 8 on systems that lack touchscreens and are primarily running desktop programs.

Read this

Just how much do people hate Windows 8?

• Read more

I believe Microsoft’s motives were sincere, but their decision was mistaken. In the desire to take a bold and determined step into the future, Windows 8 eliminates some of the touchstones of the Windows 7 desktop interface, while still leaving most of that desktop intact.

That decision alienated many desktop users and created a wedge issue that has distracted from the many impressive accomplishments in Windows 8. I know some people (myself included) who have adapted to the new ways and even prefer them. Those who would rather stick with the old paradigms can't catch a break from Microsoft, though. They need to tweak the system extensively and use third-party utilities to achieve the desired result.

Microsoft had the ability to include at least some options in Windows 8 so that upgraders could get the many benefits of the new Windows while still keeping those familiar touchstones. They chose not to. That decision is widely perceived as arrogant. As a result, people who should be happily using an upgrade that’s filled with genuine goodness are clinging bitterly to the previous version. And they're telling their friends.

What’s right about Windows 8

Microsoft got a lot of things right with Windows 8.

I’m very impressed by the internals. On new UEFI-based hardware, performance (both in operation and especially in terms of startup and shutdown times) is excellent. There are small but meaningful improvements in Task Manager, File Explorer, and other little stuff that Windows power users will love.

The ability to sync settings and files (with SkyDrive integration) is downright magical. If your only experience with Windows 8 is poking around at a copy running in a virtual machine on a Linux box with a local user account, you can’t appreciate this sea change in how Windows works.

But when you switch from a Windows 8 desktop PC to a tablet to an Ultrabook or a Surface Pro and your files and settings just roam with you, that’s very cool.

The inclusion of Hyper-V virtualization in the Pro edition is awesome. Big improvements in the BitLocker experience make it easy to encrypt a whole drive so your data stays safe if your device is stolen. Connecting to wireless networks is easier and faster.

And just about all of your Windows 7 software works on the Windows 8 desktop.

Everyone I know who has used Windows 8 on a touch-enabled device likes it a lot. (Even dyed-in-the-wool iPad fanatics admire it and quickly learn how to use it, in my experience.)

The problems appear when you run Windows 8 on a PC that doesn’t have a touchscreen.

The Metro problem

My debate opponent might have gone slightly overboard with his hammering on what’s wrong with the modern/Metro UI, but he speaks for a lot of people.

If most of the things you do with a PC involve Windows desktop programs driven by a keyboard and a mouse, many of the new mouse gestures are unfamiliar and awkward to execute.

If most of the things you do with a PC involve Windows desktop programs driven by a keyboard and a mouse, many of the new mouse gestures are unfamiliar and awkward to execute. People learn them eventually, some even do so quickly. But if your first hour or day or week with a product involves frustration as you try to figure out how to switch to a program or why your browser is using the full screen and you can’t find the tabs…? Well, first impressions last.

Partly this is people just grumbling about change. People complained about Windows XP’s “Fisher-Price” interface when it was first released. People complained about Windows 95. (How many times did you hear critics joke about having to click the Start button to shut down?) Hey, the guy who designed Apple’s first human interface and wrote eight editions of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines complained bitterly for years about OS X and why its signature interface change, the Dock, sucked.

Microsoft has very sophisticated, very wide reaching tools to monitor sentiment among their customers, including on social media, so they should have known this. They should have expected that people would complain when they took away the Start menu and reworked several small but important parts of the UI while leaving other parts unchanged.

Switching between two Control Panels, for example, can be jarring, with one group of settings in a modern/Metro app and a bunch more settings still in the desktop Control Panel. They should have anticipated confusion when people have desktop and immersive versions of Internet Explorer that behave in different ways. I can share a web page easily on Twitter from the immersive one, but the Share charm just laughs at me from the desktop browser.

From the leaked previews of Windows 8.1, we know that Microsoft is moving more stuff from the desktop Control Panel to the modern/Metro PC Settings app. In other words, the Windows road map assumed that this transition was going to take multiple releases over an unknown period and require some patience on our part as we worked in the construction zone. So why couldn’t they allow users some opportunities to avoid the transitional parts?

One UI change that would help tremendously, in my opinion, is the ability to pin the Charms bar to the Start screen so that you can always see those five charms: the Windows flag icon that takes you to the Start screen; the gear icon that takes you to the PC Settings page and the Shut Down command; and the Search icon. If you set a beginning user in front of that screen and those five charms are visible, they will figure things out quickly just by clicking. I suggested that option shortly after Windows 8 was made public, and my feedback was dismissed completely.

We already know that the Start screen will get some fine-tuning in Windows 8.1. You can already see some slight rethinking of the way apps work with the latest refreshes of the Mail and Music apps. But there’s definitely room for improvement in the way that Windows 8 introduces itself to new users, especially those without a touchscreen.

The accelerating decline of the PC

Any observer who’s been paying attention knows that the PC market was poised to decline and that mobile devices represent the future. Almost exactly two years ago, I noted the stunning rise in mobile web traffic and wrote “As Microsoft's monopoly crumbles, its mobile future is crucial”:

For the first time since I’ve been recording this data, Microsoft’s share of web usage has dropped below the 90 percent mark—to 88.88 percent in April 2011.

That’s a reflection of the decline of the traditional PC and the increasing importance of mobile devices. People aren’t abandoning Windows for other traditional operating systems—OS X usage is flat, too, and desktop Linux still can’t crack the 1 percent level.

No, people are turning to mobile devices to do tasks that used to require a PC, and the iPad has been the biggest success in that role. In just over a year, it has grown from a microscopic market share to nearly 1% of all web traffic.

Obviously, Microsoft had seen this inflection point coming. That’s why Windows 8 makes such investments in touch, power management, and connectivity.

With Windows 8, Microsoft is unifying its user experience across an entire range of devices, including traditional PCs, ARM-based tablets, smartphones, and the Xbox 360. The stakes are incredibly high, and there’s really only one chance to get it right. if Windows 8 flops on phones and tablets, Microsoft’s future is very dim indeed.

So, here it is two years later. The economy sucks worldwide, PCs are better built and therefore lasting longer, and what people really want are light, portable, personal devices that they can use for work (to handle a variety of communication and creative and collaborative tasks) and for play (as consumption devices for reading, listening to music, watching videos, and looking stuff up online).

The dismal recent numbers for worldwide PC shipments are evidence that we in the early stages of a fundamental transformation in PC form factors. Consumers and businesses are buying fewer “heavy” PCs and holding on to them longer. I might quibble with the projections from IDC and Gartner, but I think Gartner is basically right to see huge growth potential in “ultramobile” devices (which can act like a tablet or a full-strength PC) as well as lower-powered tablets designed primarily for media consumption and light computing tasks.

If you look at Windows 8, you can see that it’s aimed at both of those segments, which are primed to grow at very high rates over the next few years. One big change that would help make Windows 8 more popular is the appearance of small tablets at low price tags. For holiday season this year, Microsoft and its hardware partners (who should have gotten the point by now that those tired old designs won’t sell anymore) need to have lots and lots of touchscreen devices on the shelves, at a broad range of price points and form factors.

Windows 8 is more like a living organism, made partly from familiar bits that have evolved over the last two decades, with several new strands of DNA tossed in.

But let’s not overestimate the importance of the holiday season. The fourth quarter is important for consumer devices, but businesses will continue to have a big say in Windows’ growth, and they tend to buy on a schedule that is not seasonal.

The good news is that enterprises always resist new Windows versions. (See history lessons here.) So most of them will be able to watch from the sidelines for the next few years and see how early adopters fare with the first wave of updates to Windows 8. Microsoft can capture the revenue from those Windows 7 licenses for several years to come.

It’s the ecosystem, stupid

It’s tempting to compare Windows 8 to its predecessors. But I really see it as the first Windows release in a new generation.

I believe Windows 7 was the last big, monolithic release from Microsoft, the end of the line for static code on a shiny disc in a shrink-wrapped box, like Windows XP or Vista.

Windows 8 is more like a living organism, made partly from familiar bits that have evolved over the last two decades, with several new strands of DNA tossed in. It’s due to be updated for more often, and it’s part of a much larger hardware-apps-services ecosystem that is also changing quickly.

It’s terribly short-sighted to focus only on the flaws with the interface, which can be easily tweaked. Windows 8 lays the groundwork for some other huge long-term changes as part of Microsoft’s transformation to a “devices and services” company. An impressive collection of cloud services are evolving along with Windows 8, including SkyDrive and Office 365. Windows 8 has deep connections to those services, which work across devices, and even across platforms. The end-to-end experience, the collective impact of all those devices and services, is the really big bet.

Those services have evolved significantly since Windows 8 launched six months ago. Windows itself will make another big set of changes this summer with Windows 8.1 (Blue), which is much more than a service pack. New Office apps designed specifically for the modern/Metro side of Windows 8 will arrive this year as well.

Those are big changes. But the Windows 8 system you use today will include all of them by the end of the year.

Microsoft’s biggest failure was falling behind in the middle of the last decade, first fighting a successful but costly battle to secure the underpinnings of Windows and then cleaning up the mess of Longhorn and Vista.

The scope of change in Windows 8 (and its successors) is so great that it was inevitable it would be released in phases, with the early phases that we’re in now causing some confusion. But Windows 8 isn’t broken, like Windows Vista was. It doesn’t need a service pack to fix fundamental performance and compatibility problems, like Vista did. It just needs to grow up and for the ecosystem around it to evolve.

The good news is that Microsoft can afford a year (maybe two) of transition in the Windows Client division, which is only one of a dozen billion-dollar businesses in the company’s portfolio right now. The Windows desktop market is not small, but it’s a small percentage of Microsoft’s overall business.

Meanwhile, there’s a list of things Microsoft needs to do quickly and confidently, and there’s not a lot of margin for screwing up. The built-in apps desperately need improvement, especially the Mail and Music apps, which are still a mess despite recent improvements.

And Microsoft also needs to acknowledge more fully that the new user experience is confusing and frustrating for some people. Oddly, this is a case where I think Microsoft gave too much credit to its user base in terms of their willingness to adapt to change. Adding some tools and options to create a Windows 7 Legacy Desktop mode will inspire plenty of “Microsoft admits it screwed up” blog posts, but users will appreciate it.

Unike Vista, Windows 8 is solid at its core, and Microsoft today is far more disciplined than in the Vista era.

Six years ago, my opponent in the just-concluded debate called Windows Vista “the walking dead.” This time around, he called Windows 8 “a dead OS walking.” But in his eagerness to pronounce things dead, he’s inadvertently called attention to a perfect example of how Microsoft responded in a similar previous crisis. The Aero interface he loves so much debuted in Vista. Windows 7 was "Vista, fixed" and much more.

Unike Vista, Windows 8 is solid at its core, and Microsoft today is far more disciplined than in the Vista era. It’s also capable of working much more quickly, which means that improvements to the OS and its apps can and should arrive in a cadence that’s measured in months, not years. The real wild card is the OEM community, which  needs to step up and build products that people want to buy, not just produce incremental updates to the same tired old designs.

Microsoft’s role as the kingpin of computing is long gone and some already consider it irrelevant or obsolete. Windows 8 and its ecosystem have all the ingredients to change that perception and make the next generation of computing devices very interesting. But even with flawless execution there’s no guarantee of success.

See also:

• The real reason for the PC sales plunge: The era of "good enough" computing
• Windows APIs: Microsoft's hidden guide to architecture
• Five operating system alternatives to Windows 8 and XP
• Windows 8 doesn't need saving
• What Microsoft's Blue is and isn't
• Where can you find a PC running Windows 7?

Last week Gartner released yet another report containing long-term predictions. This one laid out what the analyst firm believes the market for computing devices will look like in 2017.

And tech pundits have run with it, churning out one sensational headline after another: Microsoft will be obsolete, its influence is fading fast, it is sliding into irrelevance. And my favorite, “Gartner May Be Too Scared To Say It, But the PC Is Dead.” One could write a pretty good parody of the Monty Python “dead parrot” sketch just using the headlines.

There are two problems with what happened last week.

First, it’s Gartner, which has a track record of being spectacularly wrong with its predictions. Like the time in 2006 (and no, that is not a typo) when Gartner asserted that Apple’s only path to success was to quit the hardware business completely and license the Mac to Dell. Or the rolling forecasts in 2009 that started with Gartner projecting the “sharpest unit decline in history” and ended up with a report of “the strongest growth rate [in PC shipments] in seven years.”

Now, in fairness to the analysts who wrote this report, I think they have identified some likely trends. Sadly, those genuine insights are getting lost because they’re surrounded by tables full of numbers that are so specific as to be ludicrous.

But even if you take their numbers at face value, you need to actually understand them. With a few exceptions, most of the quick-and-dirty rewrites of Gartner’s press release got the story exactly wrong.

And that’s the second problem. All those reports focused on one shiny thing and ignored everything else in the report. Here, I’ve used my virtual yellow magic marker so you can see Gartner’s data as superficially as all those bloggers did:

Right. The market for conventional desktop and notebook PCs is declining, because people increasingly value mobility in the devices they use to perform basic computing tasks. So, Gartner predicts a 20 percent decline in demand for big, desk-bound PCs and conventional notebooks, most of which are heavy devices that remain on a desktop full time.

But what’s that line right below the highlighted one? What’s an Ultramobile?

The good folks at Gartner helpfully defined the term for CNET last summer:

Gartner describes the combination of ultrabooks and the MacBook Air as "ultramobile notebooks." Typically, ultramobile laptops are under 3.5 pounds and less than 0.8-inches thick.

Via email, a Gartner spokesperson confirmed that devices in this category "retain full PC capabilities." These are lightweight PCs, typically with keyboards and trackpads, powered by the same operating systems used on those heavier desktop and conventional notebook models. Microsoft’s two-pound Surface Pro is a perfect example of this type of lightweight PC/tablet. So are hybrid Windows 8 devices like HP’s Envy X2, Samsung’s 500T and 700T, and even Dell’s 3.3-pound convertible XPS 12. Ultrabooks and MacBook Airs, which are the equivalent of PCs and MacBook Pros in every dimension except weight and thickness, are counted in that line too. In other words, some PCs are getting considerably lighter, but they’re still PCs.

So let’s redo Gartner’s numbers, this time combining the PC and Ultramobile lines.

Wow, that’s a completely different story. Large, heavy, general-purpose PCs are becoming less popular, but demand for lightweight devices that can still function as general-purpose PCs is soaring. If you do the math, you’ll see that the increase is projected to be about 881 percent from 2012 to 2017. That phenomenal growth rate in the Ultramobile category means that overall, the number of shipments of devices running desktop operating systems (like Windows and OS X and even Chrome OS) will probably increase by 5 percent between 2012 and 2017.

At an average of about 340 million devices per year, that means roughly 1.7 billion new PCs (including 250 million or so in the Ultramobile category) will reach the market between 2013 and 2017, also known as the Windows 8 era. Not exactly a dead category.

If you trust the numbers, that is, which is a pretty big if.

(A side note from that CNET story: Last July Gartner said it expected about 10.7 million ultramobile units to ship in 2012. Gartner’s final tally for the year was 9.8 million, more than 8 percent lower than its projection just six months earlier. Likewise, last July they projected that the number of ultramobiles shipped in 2013 would be “about 17 million.” Nine months later, they’ve revised that projection upwards to 23.6 million, a change of about 39 percent in just nine months. Think about that before you get too transfixed by the detailed projections for 2014 and 2017.)

And what about that "obsolete,” “irrelevant,” “fading fast” Microsoft?

Well, again, if you trust in Gartner’s numbers enough to write a “Microsoft is doomed” blog post, you really need to look at all the numbers. Here, let me help.

[Data from Table 2 in this report, with RIM's tiny numbers added to the much larger "Other" category. I added percentages and trendlines.]

Wait, what? That same Gartner report says that Microsoft will struggle in 2013 and 2014 but then will dramatically increase its share of the overall market by 2017?

Exactly. Here’s what Gartner said in their summary press release:

In the shares of operating systems (OSs) in device sales, the shift to mobile and the fight for the third ecosystem becomes more evident. Android continues to be the dominant OS in the device market, buoyed by strong growth in the smartphone market (see Table 2). Competition for the second spot will be between Apple's iOS/Mac OS and Microsoft Windows.

I think that sounds about right.

Apple isn’t interested in winning market share at any costs. They want the high-margin customers. Microsoft is doing its best to build new-format devices that can work well in corporate environments where management is important. Android and Windows are both fighting aggressively to win share in emerging markets. The real loser is “Other.”

And before you start high-fiving Google over their complete dominance, it’s worth noting that Google’s direct share of the Android ecosystem might be a lot smaller than either of its two rivals. As my colleague Jason Perlow pointed out last week, the open nature of Android is a great blessing and an even greater curse for Google. Samsung, the largest maker of Android devices in the world, “will diverge from Google's OS and become a legitimate fork.” So will Amazon.

ZTE, Lenovo, and Huawei service primarily a domentic market in China, and will run their own weird domestic builds of Android with state-approved social networking software to keep the Chinese government happy...

This leaves us with no less than four, five, or six distinct forks of Android. Google as represented on Nexuses or Google Experience devices; Amazon; Samsung; HTC/Facebook; and whatever weird beast ends up running for domestic Chinese use. And BlackBerry 10's Dalvik implementation.

If you strip away the sensational headlines, the real story is pretty prosaic. The worldwide market for computing devices is changing rapidly, and three ecosystems (one of which is highly fragmented) have excellent prospects of becoming large enough to be taken seriously over the next five years.

Unless things change, which they always do.

Now go ahead and spin a clickbait headline out of that story. I dare you.

Windows XP, the oldest of the bunch, celebrates its 12th birthday this fall. It kicks off a year-long farewell tour next week, counting down to April 8, 2014, when Microsoft officially ends its support. XP lived longer than any version of Windows ever, getting multiple extensions on its retirement date to placate customers who said no to Vista. But April 2014 is the end of the road.

XP will not get a last-minute reprieve.

Let me say that again, in boldface this time: Microsoft will not extend the support deadline for XP. If you're still relying on XP, you should have a plan to switch to a supported platform, whether it's from Microsoft or someone else.

April 8, 2014 is a deadline, not a death sentence. PCs running XP will not stop working when the clock runs out. In fact, XP diehards won’t notice anything different except an eerie quiet on Patch Tuesday. Newer Windows versions, including Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8, will continue to get security patches and bug fixes via Windows Update, but not XP. When the extended support period ends, so do those updates. (Large enterprise customers who have custom support agreements with Microsoft and who are willing to pay dearly for the privilege might be able to get custom updates after the official end of support. But consumers and small businesses will not have that option.)

None of this should be a surprise. As I’ve noted before, Microsoft has a well-established support lifecycle for its software products. It’s basically an agreement that the company makes with everyone who commits to Windows. The terms of that agreement don’t change often, which is an important assurance for business customers who tend to be conservative in their approach to upgrades.

Six months after the launch of Windows 8, it’s become obvious that Windows 7 is the new Long Term Support version. And I'm starting to get more questions from readers who are concerned that Microsoft is going to try to kill off Windows 7.

In a word: Relax. It’s not time to start a “Save Windows 7” movement yet. I've put together a chart listing the end-of-support dates for all supported versions of Windows and Office. Here’s the full list, which is accurate as of April 4, 2013.

* Chart updated since original publication with dates for Office 2013, as published here.

For all of those products, Microsoft provides at least five years of mainstream support, followed by another five years of extended support. These lifecycles FAQ if you want to dig deeper into this stuff.)

Generally, “supported” means you have access to at least one type of assisted support option (possibly paid) and no-charge security updates through channels like Windows Update and the Download Center.

The calculations start with the general availability (GA) date for each product. The official date of retirement for support is the second Tuesday in the first month of the quarter following that anniversary (which also happens to be Patch Tuesday). That grace period typically means a few weeks or months of extra support tacked on at the end of the five- and ten-year support cycles for each product.

For Windows 7, you can do the math yourself. The GA date for all Windows 7 editions was October 22, 2009. Five years after that date is October 22, 2014. The next calendar quarter begins in January, 2015, and the second Tuesday of that month is January 13. So, that's when mainstream support is scheduled to end. Extended support for business all editions goes an extra five years, until January 14, 2020, which happens to be the second Tuesday of that month. (Those calculations don't work for Windows XP, whose end-of-life date was extended artificially.)

To find the end-of-support date for any Microsoft product, use the  Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search page, the product family index, or the full A-Z product index to get the official answer. When you find the entry for a specific product, you can see the general availability date, the retirement dates for mainstream and extended support, and retirement dates for service packs.

Microsoft today released version 3.0 of its SkyDrive app for iOS. It’s a significant update to an app that was last refreshed in June 2012, when support for Retina devices was added.

The most significant change in this update, announced in a post on the Inside SkyDrive blog, is compatibility with newer iOS devices, specifically the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. A scan of recent reviews for version 2.1 suggests that this was the number-one item on users’ wish lists.

The new version also addresses issues that had caused iOS users to ding the previous version in reviews. One of the biggest is the ability to download full resolution photos to an iOS device. In the previous version, it was possible to upload full resolution photos, but downloads were automatically resized to a lower resolution. With the new app, you can control the size of uploads and downloads. In addition, the sync process now reportedly includes full metadata for photo files.

Version 3.0 also reportedly improves the process of opening and uploading SkyDrive files using other iOS apps.

And, of course, there are the usual “bug fixes and performance improvements.”

Notably absent are any links, direct or indirect, to Microsoft's paid upgrade options for SkyDrive. That's in keeping with Apple's guidelines for the App Store, which require that it get a 30 percent cut of any revenues for purchases made within the app. That's the same approach that other "freemium" apps, such as Dropbox, Amazon's Kindle, and Spotify, use to avoid running afoul of App Store rules.

Some reports in recent months suggested that Apple had refused to approve the updated app over the issue of in-app payments. In a statement today, a Microsoft spokesperson didn't directly confirm those reports, but did note that this app isn't like its others: "We worked with Apple to create a solution that benefited our mutual customers. The SkyDrive app for iOS is slightly different than other SkyDrive apps in that people interested in buying additional storage will do so via the web versus in the app."

For Microsoft, SkyDrive is a strategic service, a core part of the company’s transformation into a “devices and services” company. With its 7 GB of free online storage, SkyDrive is tightly integrated into Windows 8 and Office 2013. It’s a crowded field, with Dropbox and Google Drive as key competitors who are well represented on iOS.

But this release is really just a tease for the iOS app everyone is expecting from Microsoft. The company won't discuss its plans to release a version of Office for iPhone and iPad, but rumors continue to swirl. Having a robust SkyDrive app that works with all iOS devices is a prerequisite for a subscription-based Office app for iOS.

This comment, from the Talkback section of a recent post, is typical: "After Windows 8 came out, a Windows 7 desktop became nearly as hard as a Lost Dutchman Mine to find."

Uh, no.

In fact, one of the biggest reasons Windows 8 was slow out of the starting gate last October was that so few PCs designed for Windows 8 were shipping. Some of the most interesting designs, including models built around the newer Intel Atom chips, like the HP Envy X2, were months late in arriving. Microsoft’s own Surface with Windows 8 Pro wasn’t available until more than 100 days after Windows 8 went on sale.

The number of choices for Windows 8 PCs has increased steadily since then, but you can still find a Windows 7 PC if you want one. In fact, you have plenty of choices, and you will continue to have choices for a long time — at least until October 2014, more than 18 months from today. You just need to look in the right places. (Spoiler alert: Stores that cater to businesses will be your best bet.)

First, let’s put to rest the conspiracy theories that Microsoft is forcing PC makers to stop selling Windows 7.

That’s not true. Microsoft has a clearly delineated sales lifecycle for Windows, which I first wrote about back in 2010 (see “XP in 2020? Not even close. Read the fine print...”). Under those rules, OEMs can continue to sell Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs alongside one another.

This came up last summer after Windows 8 was released to manufacturing. What I wrote in “How to skip Windows 8 and continue using Windows 7” last summer still applies. Here’s the relevant part from that post:

Furthermore, you’ll still be able to buy Windows 7 PCs for at least two more years. Microsoft’s sales lifecycle for Windows (which is different from its support lifecycle) specifies that retailers will be able to sell the boxed version of Windows 7 until at least October 25, 2013, and OEMs can sell PCs with Windows 7 pre-loaded until October 25, 2014.

If Windows 8 gets any pushback from consumers and small businesses, we could see big OEMs continuing to offer Windows 7 as an option on its non-touch-enabled PCs for two more years, with Windows 8 as the default option for tablets and touch-enabled PCs. [emphasis added]

Now, please note that this is not unusual. It is not evidence of the failure of Windows 8. It is, rather, a reflection that at any given time, Microsoft is supporting three or four versions of Windows. The new operating system goes on the flashy new hardware aimed at consumers. Business buyers typically get to buy hardware that’s a bit more staid and solid, running an older, more established version. Windows XP played the role of Long Term Support version for a long time. Windows 7 is now taking over that spot, mostly for businesses.

And there’s the number-one rule to follow when searching for a Windows 7 PC: Start your search in places that sell to businesses.

New PCs at your favorite retail outlets are mostly aimed at consumers and have been designed for use with Windows 8. That’s especially true for new models with touchscreens.

But if you go to business-focused stores, especially online, you’ll find that the majority of models are still available with Windows 7. For some current designs, Windows 8 isn’t even an option.

To prove the point, I looked at four leading online PC sellers. Here’s what you’ll find if you follow in my footsteps.

Dell

Dell.com is neatly divided into Dell for Home and Dell for Work sides.

On the home side, combining laptops and desktops, I found a total of 104 different options available with Windows 8 and only 39 with Windows 7.

But visit Dell for Work and it’s a completely different story.

After you choose Desktops and Workstations or Laptops and Tablets, you’ll find a sidebar on the left side of the page where you can refine your search. One of the criteria is Operating System, where you can specify that you want to see only systems running Windows 7 or Windows 8 (or only a 64-bit OS, if that's your pleasure).

Here’s how many listings* I found when I searched those those two Dell sites earlier today:

Laptops and Tablets

Windows 7: 201

Windows 8: 99

Desktops and Workstations

Windows 7: 247

Windows 8: 141

On the business side of Dell’s operation, your Windows 7 choices outnumber Windows 8 by nearly a 2:1 ratio. You can even find a smattering of machines running FreeDOS and Linux, none of them available on the consumer side.

HP

For as long as I can remember, HP has been in the top three PC makers, along with Dell and (recently) Lenovo.

Like Dell, HP divides its website into a Home and Home Office Store and an HP for Business shop. On both sides, you have the capability to refine your search by choosing an operating system.

On the Home and Home Office side, Windows 8 machines outnumber Windows 7 models by roughly 10 to 1, with 131 Windows 8 listings and only 12 with Windows 7.

So if you want a Windows 7 PC, go to the business shop instead and choose laptops or desktops. There, you’ll find that Windows 7 is still the champ. Here’s the count of listings* I found:

Laptops, Tablets, and Notebooks

Windows 7: 60

Windows 8: 26

Desktops and All-in-ones

Windows 7: 60

Windows 8: 17

On that side of the house, you’ll find roughly three Windows 7 options for every one running Windows 8 — just as you’d expect.

Lenovo

This Chinese PC giant has grown tremendously in recent years and is now battling to take over the top spot in PC shipments from HP.

The company’s web site isn’t as easy to navigate as HP and Dell’s, at least not in terms of clearly demarcating between PCs for work and those for home. And although there’s a filter for operating systems, the option for Windows 7 is grayed out and unavailable. So does that mean you can’t get a Windows 7 PC from Lenovo?

Nope. I went to the Help me choose tool, where I was able to narrow choices from Lenovo’s enormous selection. After I had winnowed down the list, I found an option to filter by operating system.

Applying that filter using the Home Office and Small Business options gave me a selection of 40 PCs running Windows 7 and 58 machines with Windows 8 preinstalled. Here's one example: a good-looking all-in-one, built around a current Intel Ivy Bridge CPU:

Lenovo appears to have embraced Windows 8 more aggressively than any of its rivals, but there are still plenty of Windows 7 options available, especially in the legendary ThinkPad line.

Toshiba

These guys aren’t in the top five PC vendors worldwide, but they still have a cult following.

Toshiba is almost all about laptops, notebooks, and tablets. (Their Business desktops page contains a grand total of four all-in-one models, all running Windows 8.)

But give the company credit for making it easy to find Windows 7 machines. Their website has a dedicated “Looking for Windows 7?” page with no fewer than 32 choices.

That’s a decent number, although it’s only about a third of the number of Windows 8 choices available (94).

You can repeat this exercise for your favorite brands, and you can try the same thing at retail shops. If the brand or shop targets businesses, I predict it will have plenty of Windows 7 options. And, of course, you can get any local system builder to put together a custom desktop PC with your choice of parts, running your favorite operating system, even Windows XP. Many local shops even offer custom notebook builds.

So please don’t tell me you can’t find a Windows 7 PC. They’re out there.

* A note about “listings.” The actual number of different models from any of these merchants is smaller than the number of listings returned by a search. Many listings are variations of the same basic PC design, including preconfigured “fast ship” models that don’t require customization. But my spot check showed that the number of discrete models available was proportionate to the count of listings.

I prefer to dig a little deeper. Minor changes in monthly usage shares are mostly noise. It’s the trends that matter more. And because I’ve been collating these monthly figures at regular intervals for the past six years, I have that trend data close at hand, in handy graphical format.

The number that every other tech reporter will focus on today is the share for Windows 8. If you read that Windows 8’s share of usage is up to 3.17 percent, give that reporter a failing grade. The actual number is slightly higher, because you have to add in 0.12 percent for Windows 8 Touch and another 0.02 percent for Windows RT Touch (which NetMarketShare lumps into the Windows 8 bucket). At the current trajectory, Windows 8 is likely to pass 10 percent share by its first birthday this fall.

[Update: A note on those percentages. That 0.12 percent figure is presumably when NetMarketShare detected that a touch browser (Internet Explorer 10) was being used on Windows 8. That number shoiuld be compared to the total Windows 8 number of 3.17 percent. That means that roughly 4 percent of Windows 8 traffic is coming via touch, with an indeterminate amount of traffic coming via conventional desktop browsers on a touch-enabled Windows 8 PC. The actual percentage of touch-enabled PCs is therefore at least 4 percent and probably higher.]

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Just how much do people hate Windows 8?

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How accurate is that 3.3 percent figure? Who knows? It could be off significantly in either direction, and any math one tries to do with these numbers is fuzzy at best. But taken at face value, with appropriately large error bars, that percent would be equal to about 50 million Windows 8 PCs in use in a world with an installed base of 1.5 billion PCs and Macs running Windows, desktop Linux, or OS X.

Here are my takeaways from the new data:

• Windows XP (38.73 percent) continues its steady decline, but its share of web usage is still remarkably high for a product that will reach its official end of life in just over a year.
• Windows Vista (4.99 percent) is nearly invisible, with a share that has finally (if barely) dropped below 5 percent. Despite its decline, Vista is still used more than any individual version of OS X.
• Windows 7 (44.73 percent) appears to have taken on the unofficial role as the Long-Term Support version of Windows, replacing XP. Note the green and blue lines that dominate this chart. Every other operating system, from Microsoft or its rivals, is in the sub-10 percent range, making them experimental, transitional, or part of a market niche. Of the entries on that chart, Windows 8 is the only one that I expect to break through the 10 percent barrier, and even at that Windows 8 might turn out to be transitional.
• Windows 8 (3.31 percent) is slowly (very slowly) gaining traction. It’s worth noting that Windows 7’s steady increase in usage flatlined as soon as Windows 8 was released.

On traditional PCs and Macs, Microsoft still owns an overwhelming market share, with 91.8 percent of all traffic coming from Windows-based machines. Among non-Microsoft operating systems, both OS X and Linux have stalled since October 2011, hovering around 6.9 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively.

With the general decline of the PC market, that could just mean that Apple has focused more of its energy on mobile devices (which are not included in these numbers). In my personal stats, I've noticed that nearly 20 percent of all traffic over the past few months has been from mobile devices, and that percentage continues to grow. 

In looking at the numbers, I noticed one trend you probably won’t see discussed elsewhere. Pundits obsess over upgrade rates for Microsoft Windows versions, but they almost never mention OS X. So here are a few Mac facts to chew on:

• Despite its $19.99 price tag, only 38.3 percent of all Mac users are running the most recent OS X release, Mountain Lion, which was released eight months ago. Most of those were included with new Macs.
• More Mac users are running the 2009 Snow Leopard (27 percent of Mac users) than the 2011 Lion (26.2 percent).
• Surprisingly, 35.5 percent of all Mac users are running versions of OS X that are officially unsupported by Apple. That places them at a higher risk of contracting malware delivered through flaws in the Java browser plugin, which was shipped with every version of OS X until Snow Leopard.

Oh, and one more interesting fact worth passing along. One widely discussed operating system isn’t visible in the NetMarketShare numbers. There’s no entry for Chrome OS at all. A spokesperson for the company tells me those numbers will be included in an update to their tracking stats, coming soon.

Net Market Share publishes snapshots of PC usage based on data from 160 million visits per month to its large collection of sites (the exact methodology is here). Its monthly reports on operating system versions contain a wealth of detailed information about even the most obscure OSes. Their stats for mobile platforms are tracked separately.

In fact, it might be one of the most polarizing tech products to ever see the light of day.

There’s no question that Windows 8 has a large number of outright haters. It’s even inspired comparisons with the much-loathed Windows Vista.

But it’s hard to tell whether that outpouring of anger is simply the echo chamber amplifying a vocal minority or whether it truly represents a widespread negative opinion.

So instead of guessing, I went looking for data. And I found it in a familiar place: the product pages of Amazon.com, where thousands of Windows upgraders in the past six years have left ratings (on the familiar scale of 1 to 5 stars) and detailed feedback about their purchase.

I went through more than 3000 ratings for upgrade versions of the three most recent versions of Windows and tallied those ratings to measure the love/hate rating for each one. (For details on methodology, see the end of this post.)

The verdict?

Windows 8 is indeed less popular than Windows 7, which has very high approval ratings. But it’s far more popular than Windows Vista, which was well and truly hated.

Here’s the story, in one easy chart that uses the same format as Amazon’s ratings:

A few conclusions leap off that chart.

In my experience, a 4- or 5-star rating is a solid thumbs-up. A rating of 2 or 3 stars means “Meh.” And a 1-star rating is the equivalent of a raised middle finger. If you read the reviews that accompany 1-star ratings, you’ll find equal parts rage and buyer’s remorse.

By that standard, Windows Vista is a world-class villain, an object of scorn and ridicule, with 42 percent of all reviewers giving it the lowest possible rating.

By contrast, a mere 17 percent of Windows 7 reviewers hated it enough to award it a one-finger salute. And Windows 8 was right smack in the middle of those two, with 29 percent of reviewers giving it just 1 star.

Slightly more than 50 percent all Windows 8 buyers like it. That’s less than the whopping 67 percent approval rating for Windows 7, but far beyond the puny 38 percent of Vista buyers who gave it a thumbs-up vote.

In fact, as a measure of how deeply despised Vista was, note that the number of 1-star ratings was higher than the total of 4- and 5-star ratings. That’s not the case at all with the more recent versions.

The average rating for Windows 7 on Amazon’s 1-5 scale is 3.7. Compare that with the very poor 2.7 rating for Windows Vista. Once again, Windows 8 is right smack in the middle of those two, earning an average rating of 3.2.

For the sake of comparison, I looked at the most recent version of OS X that Amazon sold. Apple sells the newer Lion and Mountain Lion online only, but Snow Leopard, which was released around the same time as Windows 7, is only marginally more popular than its Windows rival. Snow Leopard earns an average rating of 3.9, compared to Windows 7’s 3.7. And, you know, "haters gonna hate.” For the proof, note that 14 percent of Snow Leopard buyers gave the Apple OS a 1-star rating. That's only 3 points lower than the "I hate Windows 7" score.

I suspect that none of these conclusions are surprising to the Microsoft managers and product planners who released Windows 8. They had to know that some of their design decisions were going to be unpopular. People don’t like it when you move their cheese. Time will tell if those customers move elsewhere or slowly come around.

There's certainly precedent for a version of Windows to improve its approval rating over time. I've argued before that Windows 8 and Windows XP share some striking similarities in their initial hostile response (see "Windows 8 is the new Windows XP"). Windows XP might be remembered fondly now, but it took a while for Microsoft customers to feel that love. Here are the ratings from Amazon for the original release of Windows XP and for Windows XP Service Pack 2, which was a major update:

In its initial release, Windows XP wasn't exactly loved, and its overall approval rating at Amazon remained below 3.5 throughout its life. Windows XP's 57 percent total of 4- and 5-star ratings isn't much higher than what Windows 8 is earning today. And the number of haters actually increased slightly with the SP2 update. Like I said, haters gonna hate. 

One other encouraging note, from Redmond’s perspective, is that there have been more ratings for Windows on Amazon in the first five months of its existence than Windows 7 has garnered in 3-1/2 years. That suggests a phenomenal level of interest.

If this were a political race, a 50 percent overall approval rating would be a solid base from which to start. In this product category, it indicates a product that needs some attention. Microsoft’s announced plan to release more frequent updates like Windows Blue, due later this year, gives it an opportunity to deal with some of the criticisms. But it’s uncertain whether Windows 8 can ever achieve the popularity of its predecessor, which suggests that Windows 7 will be around for a long, long time.

Notes on methodology: I gathered ratings from Amazon.com on March 31, 2013, for the following products, all in retail boxed upgrade packaging: Windows 8 Pro; Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate; Windows Vista Home Premium (original and SP1), Business, and Ultimate; and Windows XP Home and Professional (both original and SP2).