Back a long, long time ago, I had my first encounters with instant messaging, in the form of AOL’s Instant Messenger. An outgrowth of the way things worked with those original bulletin board systems, it sure was convenient, being able to have an online text-based conversation with someone without having to actually talk to them, […]

When Microsoft announced that they would build a Mac version of Outlook — their professional Windows email client — for Office 2011, I had some guarded hopes. After all, Encourage had proven to be a buggy mess. Not only would it crash frequently regardless of the Mac I was using, or the OS version, but […]

Certainly the skies must seem cloudy to the executives at Microsoft these days. PC sales are flat, so Windows 7 sales are still growing, but not as fast as before. Microsoft’s efforts to turn Bing into a true Google competitor appear to have faltered; most of the share gains come at the expense of Yahoo!, […]

When the iPhone 4s first shipped, it wasn’t long before an inconvenient problem was discovered. Some owners reported that battery life wasn’t near what Apple promised, making it necessary to recharge far more often than they expected. Consider what might happen if you were on the road, accustomed to your iPhone lasting an entire day, […]