If you can believe Microsoft, they frequently put groups of users in little test rooms — or some sort of testing environment — and expose them to the new features in a product. By gauging their reactions, they decide whether those capabilities deserve to go into production. Now if you look at Microsoft’s shipping products, […]

It appears that no company is immune from economic woes. Toyota, now the world’s largest automaker, was once thought to be bulletproof, yet the company is about about to suffer from the first financial loss in its history. Apple appears to be cutting back on production for this quarter, although it seems certain they’ll still […]

You’ve heard it time and time again. Apple won’t enter the low-cost PC market because they don’t want to produce “junk.” Steve Jobs said that himself as recently as the last phone conference with financial analysts in October, when asked whether Apple planned to release a netbook. Since then things have changed in the marketplace, […]

So a client calls me to set up his spanking new MacBook, an operation that I took to be utterly routine, having done that sort of thing for years with different Macs. Arriving at his home, I realized I had forgotten to take my FireWire cable — he had purchased the white MacBook entry-level model, […]