Apple has dropped to fifth place in the US market according to preliminary second quarter estimates from market analysis firm IDC. The manufacturer had reached the fourth place position in 2008, but has failed to keep up that momentum in 2009, retaining a steady market share while its two nearest competitors, Acer and Toshiba, race ahead.

In the first quarter, for example, the company's shipments shrank by 1.2% year over year; and in the second quarter, shipments were down by 12.4%, according to IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker report. This negative growth would not have affected Apple all that much, as it has retained a steady 7.6% market share throughout the year, but Acer jumped up 2.1% in market share during the quarter, and Toshiba went up by 1.1%.

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I tune, you tune, we all tune to iTunes.

Except if you own a Palm Pre.

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Updating applications

Microsoft some years ago combined its two main update services -- Windows Update and Office Update -- into one big Microsoft Update service. (For administrators, there's WSUS, which gives sysadmins greater control over updates.) And then the other programs folks use on Windows often have their own update processes of greater or lesser frequency and persistence.

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Speaking with Industrygamers about the state of the Video Game business, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter said it's "natural" that Apple could convince a large number of iPod and iPhone gamers to buy a game-enabled AppleTV, similar to the way it has drawn users to the Mac platform through the iPod.

Pachter, however, doesn't think it will be a full-blown gaming machine like Microsoft's Xbox 360 or Sony's PlayStation 3, but that it will instead be more Wii-like." We'd get cool stuff like World of Goo or Geometry Wars," Pachter said, "but probably not super cool stuff like Gears of War until they bought a few developers."

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Nokia earnings sequentially up, at least

Morning of Thursday, July 16, 2009 • One of the most wince-inducing earnings calls for reporters in recent months has been Nokia's, but things seem to be a tiny bit brighter at the Finnish phone firm as sales rose 7% in Q2 from the previous three months. They're still down 25% year-over-year, of course, but company officials Thursday said they believe the market for mobile devices to be "bottoming out." (The company still chose to revise its earlier target of raising its market share; now the company says it aims to maintain that share at 2008 levels.) Earnings per share were likewise down year-to-year (65.5%) but up sequentially (233.3%).

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Apple is a company known for good design -- meaning also that appearances matter beyond just the products. Apple's legal department may have done something that appears simply laughable. Even if untrue, it's a helluva good story -- and a Microsoft executive tells it. Well.

Apple has a reputation for issuing legal take-down notices. The practice is a byproduct of the company's penchant for secrecy. Many Websites posting leaked Apple product pics have felt the burning ire of Apple lawyers. Today, at Microsoft's annual partner conference, COO Kevin Turner described receiving what could be characterized as the ultimate take-down notice.

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3. Document properties at a glance. In the old days of Word, the Document Properties dialog box was what editors used to maintain control over versioning -- which version of a document was being edited based on how many editing cycles it had passed through, and when it was last modified and saved. Versioning control in Word has improved dramatically since then, but many publishers' control and validation processes have not.
For editors who have to work with these publishers, it was a pain to discover that the designers of Office 2007 had buried Document Properties in an odd location: in the Office menu (the big round button, which has been replaced in Office 2010), under Prepare, followed by Properties and then Advanced Properties. (Nothing advanced about them, really, it should be "Basic Properties.")

With the BackStage feature in all Office 2010 components, a document's basic properties shows up on the front page -- no excavation necessary, no "advanced" dialogs. You'll also find there the most basic and necessary features that Office 2007 buried under its little-used Prepare menu; in fact, I'm fairly certain that many folks will think the "Check for Issues" feature is new, when it actually premiered in the 2007 version.

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I have a test of nerves for you. I want you to go grab $200 in twenties and some plastic wrap. (Look in the kitchen for the plastic wrap; you're on your own for the cash.) Wrap the cash in the plastic. Now find a kid, preferably one of about elementary-school age. An assortment of kids of various ages is better, if you have multiple instances of plastic-wrapped bills, though the ease of finding extra cash around the house is of course inversely related to the number of kids present.

Each child should come naturally equipped with a backpack, which they use to haul stuff to school, playdates, and the homes of other family members as well as for random covert storage purposes. Now, I want you to reach into each backpack (don't be scared!) and place a plastic-wrapped bundle of money in there. Tell the child that the money is her responsibility from now on; it must be present and accounted for at all times; they will spend much of every day looking at it but will not be allowed to use it as they please; damaged money or plastic will get the child into trouble.

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With the latest version of iTunes (8.2.1), Apple has addressed what it calls "an issue with verification of Apple devices," that is, it now verifies that the Palm Pre is not one.

It was bound to happen. Both Palm and Sprint warned Pre owners of a possible rejection, and Apple last month issued an a report saying, "Newer versions of Apple's iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players."

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Last Month, Betanews' Scott Fulton asked "What will become of MySpace after a 30% headcount reduction?" None other than the highest man in the MySpace architecture, parent company News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, answered that question this week.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Murdoch said the fading social network will need to refocus itself as an entertainment portal.

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"On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées." -- Victor Hugo
Literal translation: "One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas."
Often paraphrased: "Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come."

Web-based operating system/platform is an idea whose time has come, whether or not Google succeeds with Chrome OS. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer can deny it. He can march his Office 2010 and Windows 7 armies into the enterprise. But, elsewhere, the Web platform is turning from idea to practical reality -- in large part because of mobile handsets.

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Yesterday, in a Windows 7 for Developers blog post, Microsoft revealed more details about the special version of Windows 7 for the European Union. The company isn't ripping out Internet Explorer 8 so much as using the "Turn Windows on or off" tool to disable the browser. For all practical purposes, IE8 won't be available to end users or third-party applications. However, Internet Web Applications components will remain.

About 30 days ago, in a brilliant solution to a troubling problem, Microsoft announced plans to release an "E" version of Windows 7 sans the browser. Windows 7 E will be exclusively distributed in the EU, where the European Competition Commission is nearly ready to officially rule that Microsoft's bundling Internet Explorer with Windows is an anticompetitive act. The European Commission is currently entertaining remedies, which are rumored to include a proposal for presenting Windows users with a choice of browsers to set as default during installation.

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In the final scenes of Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), which history may yet restore to its rightful place as one of the dumbest movies ever made, the President of the United States (Charles Durning) learns from a renegade general-turned-prison escapee (Burt Lancaster) that the whole point of the Vietnam War was a geopolitical bluster intended to convince the Soviet Union that the US was crazy enough to engage in World War III if it had to. After the President is told this Earth-shattering information by his kidnapper, his own cabinet conspire to assassinate him to prevent the information from being revealed in a press conference. This despite the fact that the real world was already entitled to The Pentagon Papers in paperback for several years, though readers clearly preferred Jaws and The Exorcist.

It is no "eyes-only" confidential secret that bluster is a very effective political and marketing tool at the disposal of anyone who can afford to use it. So you're safe from any assassination attempts from the likes of Joseph Cotten or Richard Widmark. Meanwhile, anyone reading Betanews on a daily basis over the last few weeks might get the impression that World War III is about to be triggered by the volatile mix of Google and Microsoft, or that at least some of us here who may have stayed up too late to watch Twilight's Last Gleaming on AMC may think so.

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Google today released apps for BlackBerry and Android that allow the still-in-invite-only-beta Google Voice service to be accessed directly through users' smartphones.

The app lets users make outgoing calls or send texts from their Google Voice number through their BlackBerry or Android device. To place a call before the app existed, users had to dial their own Google Voice number from their cell or use the "Quick Call" button from the Web-based component. The app also handles voice mail duties by recording the messages from missed callers and transcribing them into text.

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Developers on the "Shiretoko" track for Mozilla's new open source Firefox 3.5 Web browser now have very good reason to expect a ship date for the first round of bug fixes and vulnerabilities. A very big vulnerability has turned up in just the wrong place: a public site for posting exploits.

The problem is a new permutation of an old exploit technique that, ironically, was first brought to prominence in 2006 by a package called "Internet Exploiter." It's called a heap spray, comprised of shellcode that's set to be distributed into an area in blocks, a bit like spraying bricks into a wall. The resulting pattern may contain executable code that can be triggered through an overflow; and in this case, it's version 3.5's embedded font support, using the <FONT> tag, that's the trigger.

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