Bing’s market share hovers around 10%, but according to most sources, is increasing, though at a slow pace, and mostly at expense of Yahoo!. Even Google is advertising its music service on Bing! It continues to pose a viable threat to Google’s dominance, and by looking at just Bing, it would be hard to argue that elephants can’t dance! Would Bing continue to gain market share or would it get relatively stable somewhere in low double digits? Read the full article »

I had quite a bit of backlash on my first part of the series, despite the fact that I gave a high score to Microsoft’s productivity suite. Wait until you read this part!

Mobile:

After Google declared at Mobilebeat conference that app stores are not the future – citing the power of HTML5 as the new platform for web apps, Microsoft also decided to join the HTML5 standard. Soon after, Microsoft announced a native version of Office 2010, the latest version of Microsoft’s ubiquitous productivity software on Nokia smart phones, a big diversion from its traditional approach of creating a lock in with its own operating system. Is Microsoft conceding defeat in mobile operating systems race? Read the full article »

While the iPhone and Android platforms and their ilk have certainly opened up the playing field to a long tail of developers, they are by no means cash machines. In fact, if you had planned on quitting your job to get rich developing apps for these platforms, you might want to reconsider — the chances of your making enough money to build a sustainable business or even survive are slim (see my earlier article on iPhone apps). Read the full article »

Apple’s iPhone has triggered “apps store” wars (with the iPhone as the clear leader so far), with almost every major mobile platform vendor now launching its version of an apps store. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to even remember their names: Google’s “apps store” is called Android Marketplace, RIM’s is called BlackBerry App World, Palm’s is called Palm Pre App Catalog, and so on. For the purpose of this article, we will refer to all of them simply as “apps stores”. Read the full article »