(This is part 4 of 6 of “Microsoft: Can Elephants Really Dance?” series. For earlier parts, please follow the links below the post)

It’s been a while since Microsoft’s heyday as the monopolistic king of technology.  Called “too big to innovate”, “inefficient”, and “crippled [by redundancy]”, the bearish outlook on Microsoft’s once glorious future seems pervasive.  But with the highly anticipated Project Natal arriving this year, a healthy 32.5 million Xbox 360 consoles sold, and a blossoming Xbox LIVE community of over 20 million users, Microsoft’s console gaming division has shown everyone that Microsoft can still come up with some cool new tricks. Let’s take a look at how the Xbox 360 is faring against its two fiercest competitors (*cue battle music*). (more…)

With Google Buzz, Google has launched yet another product to compete in the social networking arena. It’s just one week new, and already Buzz has a significant user base and poses a viable threat to several existing players.

Google, like Microsoft, keeps trying. In the social networking space, it has made several attempts to become more relevant: Orkut, though fairly popular in Brazil and India, never really took off in the US and became more irrelevant with rise of Facebook. (…more)

Internet video has the media industry worried. DVD sales, which are projected at $17 billion today, are expected to slow down substantially in the next few years, as online streaming picks up momentum. In the meanwhile, Avatar, with its record breaking sales of $2.2 billion, has injected new hopes in the industry. Would movies like Avatar be enough to save the sinking ship? (more…)

Every week VentureBeat publishes top stories of the week in a column called “Week in review: …”, based on number of hits each story gets. I have written a total of eleven columns on VentureBeat so far, and three of them have been featured (each in a different week) in top stories of the week. I am listing the stories here, and each is linked to the “Week in review” post it was featured in. (more…)