“The new Windows phone software is a big improvement on its predecessor but may not be enough to reverse market share losses, and Microsoft Corp may have to eventually buy a Nokia or BlackBerry maker RIM to get back into the game,” Bill Rigby reports for Reuters.

“Microsoft, used to a near monopoly in the PC market even though it doesn’t make any hardware, has found the same rules do not apply in phones. Its Windows software has not been able to deliver the same consistency of performance across a range of different phones,” Rigby reports. “‘It’s something I know they’ve talked about — buying Research in Motion or even Nokia,’ Toan Tran, an analyst at Morningstar, said of Microsoft. ‘To really compete in this business, Microsoft needs to get into the hardware business, where they are able to control the entire user experience. Apple has shown that’s the model that works. In a consumer device, people just want something that works, they don’t want something as complicated as a PC.’”

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“Some analysts believe the Apple-Google battle is likely to get much rougher in the months ahead,” Peter Burrows reports for BusinessWeek. “Jonathan Yarmis, research fellow with the consulting firm Ovum, thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple’s engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, says Yarmis. ‘I fully expect [Apple] to do something in search,’ he adds. ‘If there’s all these advertising dollars to be won, why would it want Google on its iPhones?’”

Burrows reports, “‘This rivalry is going to accelerate innovation,’ says Andreas Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an early investor in Google. ‘Apple goes pretty fast, but having someone chasing you always makes you go faster. This is going to be good for consumers.’”

“Still, in a battle over the future of computing, friendship will almost surely be a casualty of progress,” Burrows reports. “‘You can just feel the tension rising,’ says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. ‘Until the Nexus One, the competition was at arm’s length. But the iPhone is Apple’s darling. Now it’s personal.’”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

My cousin sent me a party invitation as an email attachment, but my Mac won’t open it. The file is named invite.pub. I already called her and got the relevant details, but in case this happens again, do you know any Mac apps that can read a PUB file? I already tried Word 2008 and Preview.

Microsoft Publisher is included with high-end versions of Office for Windows, but there’s no equivalent app on the Mac side. If your cousin plans a lot of parties, she might want to export her Publisher-created invites as PDF files or HTML instead. Either of those formats can be emailed to PC and Mac users without problems.

But if you’re too sweet to trouble her, you can do the PDF conversion yourself. Fire up your Web browser and head to pdfonline.com/convert-pdf. Follow the instructions to browse your Mac for the PUB file (up to 2MB in size), choose a name for your converted PDF file, and supply your email address. Then click the Convert To PDF button, and the site will make your new PDF file and email it to you when it’s ready, for free. Ours came quickly, about 1 minute later.

PDFOnline.com can convert several file types to PDF, including PUB, PPT, PPS, and more.

Bishop reports, “When Ballmer was making his big entrance — slapping hands, running around, and generally whooping things up, as is his tradition at these events. That was when he spotted someone at field level, allegedly a member of the Windows group, using an iPhone to take his picture.”

“Ballmer grabbed the Apple device from the employee and made some funny remarks as everyone booed. Then he put it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it, before walking away,” Bishop reports. “The scene was visible on the big screen, so even people in the upper deck could see what was happening.”

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Microsoft has been developing a software wrapper to better enable iPhone application developers to add Bing search results to their applications, a Microsoft official said, Paul Krill reports for InfoWorld.

The wrapper, based on Objective C, is being tested now and is due out in a few weeks, said Alessandro Catorcini, senior program manager for the Bing search engine at Microsoft, in an interview at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., Krill reports.

For Complete Article click here.

With iPhone having a lot of application developers without paying them, this is one way for microsoft to tap not “all” but “some” developers to earn more…

“In my brief comments yesterday on the new touchscreen Zune HD that is set to debut September 15, I noted: Clearly, the Zune HD is going to be compared to the iPod Touch. Its biggest shortcoming is that it’s just a media player and web browser; no apps, no games,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball.