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During the 19th century, P. T. Barnum supposedly said, "There's a sucker born every minute." In the 21st century, those suckers now fall for PC-based scams. In the process, they hurt more than just themselves or their PCs.

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Anyone who's used computers knows that Windows 7 has problems. Not as many problems as Vista, perhaps, but if you are betting that Windows 7 will work perfectly you are making a sucker bet. Microsoft has never made a bug-free operating system in its entire history. That isn't going to change any time soon.

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Last week's announcement that the city of Los Angeles was moving to Google Apps was quite a blow to Microsoft. The $7.2 million contract would have given Microsoft legitimacy in the "cloud computing" arena. Instead, Microsoft will find itself essentially paying L.A. to switch to Google.

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If you have ever seen a survey about when consumers and companies plan to move to Windows 7, there's one choice you can count on being there: "After the first service pack." I suspect that many of the people who make that choice are simply saying they are really busy and just don't want to think about the whole disruptive OS migration thing right now.

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If your company is staying with Windows then it's going to move to Windows 7 eventually. That means you need to be prepared to make the decision about when and how to migrate. Here are a few useful files and utilities on the Microsoft site to make you the Windows 7 expert in your company.

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It does sound like a setup for a joke, doesn't it? What was I, the Open Source Guy, doing at Microsoft's gala Windows 7 launch party in New York City yesterday? A colleague of mine pointed this out, and I joshed back that I felt like the only guy in a corduroy suit at a black-tie ball. Actually, my first jolt of perspective came before I even stood on line for my badge.

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Bye, bye, to the XP supply
And Vista, what a nightmare, it was quite a black eye
Windows 7 now will be the rallying cry
Thinking this will make my new PC fly
This will make my new PC fly

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Microsoft's CEO talks up the collaboration software as a platform for customer-facing Web sites in an interview with InformationWeek.

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Usually the PC press spends a lot of time pitting the number 1 and number 2 browser makers against each other. I think that's just mean, and would prefer to focus on the important issues where they agree. Wouldn't you know, Microsoft and Mozilla have found common ground on the issue of browser plugins: both companies agree they can be dangerous.

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The news today from T-Mobile is that the servers are back and Sidekick users can start picking up the pieces of their mobile lives. The T-Mobile message isn't completely clear, but it seems Microsoft's Danger group has managed to totally destroy most of the data on the servers. The Sidekick product line may be dead.

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Every computer user learns that it's vital to back up important files. They usually learn this lesson the moment after they lose a bunch of important files that they haven't backed up. That's just silly users though. Most large enterprises not only back up files, but have disaster recovery plans that allow them to continue business if their primary data centers are taken out. The key word there is most.

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Microsoft's deal with Yahoo shows that the company isn't ready to roll over and surrender the lucrative Internet advertising arena to Google. Still, the MicroHoo ad network is far behind Google when it comes to the size of its ad network. The result is that Microsoft ad inventory is sparse and ads are not of the best quality, as the Sunbelt Blog discovered.

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Microsoft's share of the browser market is off sharply as new rivals emerge and a bevy of gadgets that provide access to the Web from beyond the PC flourishes. That raises big questions about what's really behind the EU's move to force Redmond to make room for Explorer alternatives on Windows under threat of seven-figure fines.

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You've got a cough and a fever--and haven't had your flu shot yet. Could you possibly have H1N1? Microsoft has launched a new website to help you assess whether you've got swine flu.

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IBM released a $3-a-month, online subscription email service this week, called LotusLive iNotes, and really, it had no choice but to get very aggressive on the SaaS front. I know of at least two big company CIOs that recently left Notes and migrated to Google Gmail or Microsoft Exchange online, after considering upgrades to both on-premises Notes and the existing Notes subscription service that starts at $8 a month.

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IBM is wading into online email service, a space where Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already have big presences. Is IBM staging a kamikaze run, giving itself one more place where Lotus Notes will show it's got difficulty competing? Is there a method to this madness? Why does IBM have its head in the clouds?

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Steve Ballmer seems confident that businesses will adopt Windows 7. Of course, three years ago, Microsoft's CEO was sure that companies would deploy Vista, and look how that played out. Will he be right this time?

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This week's public filings from Microsoft showed that in addition to cutting people, the company has cut executive pay in reaction to their revenue downturn. It's good to see that some companies are still willing to hold their executives responsible for poor performance.

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While all the focus has been on Windows 7 lately, there's another piece of Microsoft software coming out this week that could make an even bigger difference to the Windows world: Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). Athough I think MSE will be a great solution for most people, not everyone will be happy about this software.

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There was a lot of buzz last week about a new folding-tablet-style PC that Microsoft is supposedly developing. All of the reports seem to stem from a single Gizmodo rumor that includes a video demonstrating the interface. Whatever "Courier" is, there must be something to it because nobody makes a slick video like that for no reason.

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Hmmm, this is interesting. Google's had spotty luck trying to push its Chrome browser to users, but now it's come out with Google Chrome Frame to embed Chrome's functionality inside Internet Explorer. What a sweet Peanut Butter Cup of an idea.

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It's time to set Windows 7 free -- at least for Vista users. Anyone who is using Vista should be able to upgrade to the corresponding version of Windows 7. For nothing. No questions asked.

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Last month, security investigators stumbled across a new an innovative variety of malicious software. Named Induc, it's been hiding out there -- undiscovered -- for more than a year. Now that researchers can find Induc, they believe it's one of the top 100 most common viruses.

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In the Sept. 11 story, "Oracle Fights IBM Poaching With Ad," I wrote that Sun used to lead the Unix server market, now IBM does, with HP second. That was once true but the reality is more complicated. HP has slipped to number three, and Sun is number two; therein lies a tale.

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Sam Ramji, Microsoft's credible open source spokesman, is leaving to join a startup and return with his family to the San Francisco Bay area. All Microsoft has to do is find a replacement. Ramji tried to push a mighty boulder up the mountain and got it at least to the first ledge. How will his successor fare?

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Last weekend, some users were unpleasantly surprised to find that the New York Times was serving up malware ads of the type you might expect to find on a sleazy blog site. The ads showed a fake virus scan and tried to force the user to install a fake virus cleaner.

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This year's jQuery conference was held over the weekend, hosted at Microsoft's offices in Cambridge Massachusetts. If the tweets are any indication, the conference was a great sucess.

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The human brain constantly seeks rewards. Sometimes that reward-seeking gets out of hand in the form of addiction. We're all familiar with addiction to cigarettes, alcohol or drugs, but some people now believe there's an new addiction: The Internet. Now there's a rehab for it.

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Yesterday I got an interesting email from Microsoft, inviting me to host a Windows 7 launch party to help Microsoft celebrate in late October. Party hosts get a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate and an opportunity to win a PC.

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It's no secret enterprises are making heavy use of virtualization in the data center. Market research shows their leading provider is VMware. With Microsoft offering virtualization in Windows Server 2008 and other free alternatives available, it's hard to see how VMware's grip will last. But VMworld offered a glimpse of why it may.

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A year ago, Google surprised the industry with its Chrome browser. Even the announcement was innovative, using a comic book to have the Chrome crew describe the design and goals of the new browser. Some recent news seems to indicate that Google is ready to put Chrome to work in an area that's critical to the company's future.

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A friend of mine returned from vacation last week to find that her work PC had been upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Perhaps I should say that the IT department had attempted to upgrade it, because things weren't working right. All it took was a day of wasted time for her to get things limping along again.

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Microsoft has to be encouraged by the modest gains that their new Bing search engine has made over the past couple of months. I would not be surprised to see Bing make gains against Google during the fall. The key to those gains will be the Windows 7 launch and other search deals.

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Politicians learned long ago to release unfavorable information on Friday afternoon. Apple decided to do the same with its response to the FCC regarding the company's policies on the App Store approval process. It's a self-promotional tldr of a document, but it provide an interesting perspective about Apple's treatment of Google Voice.

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This week, a Reddit post pointed out an interesting Sharepoint feature that demonstrates what happens when politics and programming collide: the SPUtility.HideTaiwan method is born.

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Each time a new version of Windows comes out, Microsoft takes an opportunity to change user interface items that seemed to be working fine already. I call it "rearranging the furniture" because it often results in metaphorical stubbed toes. One example of this was renaming a Control Panel item from "Add/Remove Programs" in XP to "Programs and Features" in Vista. Well, they're at it again with Windows 7.

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VMware's acquisition of SpringSource is not a match made in heaven. It's going to take an effort by both parties to make this marriage work. Still, it looks like one of the few responses VMware could make to counter Microsoft's dangerous invasion of its turf.

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For most of this decade, web developers have been suffering the shortcomings of Internet Explorer. That hasn't bothered Microsoft too much, because the company has historically focused on developing "real" applications that run only on Windows and don't use the browser as a platform. With the new Office web apps, Microsoft might actually have to experience the living nightmare that web app development can be. Yet the company has figured out a way to make things easier: cheat.

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Last week, the Wired web site noted Microsoft's "rescue" of Apple back in 1997. At the time, Apple was on life support and barely viable despite the return of Steve Jobs, so Microsoft's $150 million investment was definitely a welcome gift. But what was the story behind that money?

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That's how it seemed to me, anyway, when Microsoft declared in its 10-K filing that it faces "intense competition" from open source. No one should be shocked, but it would be more striking if they saw open source as more of an opportunity and not a danger. And in more than the usual, obvious ways.

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Citing an unfavorable change in tax laws, Microsoft is moving its Windows Azure cloud from a data center in Washington state to one in Texas. It's an interesting new twist in the cloud computing market—moving a cloud across state lines in response to the regulatory climate.

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Boticellis, Da Vincis, Rembrandts, and, uh, Windows 7? Yup, among the works at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art you'll eventually find Microsoft's next operating system. Also on view is Vista—in the dumpster out back.

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This week, the Federal Communications Commission is asking Apple and AT&T to explain the rhyme-or-reason to the Apple Store approval process, and specifically why the Google Voice application was rejected. I wonder if they can afford to give an honest answer.

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Only last year, Microsoft offered to buy the whole of Yahoo for a price of somewhere around $40 billion dollars. This week, Microsoft managed to get the part they really wanted, the search traffic from Yahoo visitors, for almost nothing. What was Yahoo thinking?

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The technology behind Microsoft's Project Natal, a future Xbox technology that employs voice recognition technology and uses a camera to recognize gestures and eliminate the need for a controller, could eventually make its way into the business world.

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Yahoo investors are burning their stock certificates to protest the company's search pact with Microsoft, pummeling YHOO down by 12% at one point Wednesday. No surprise there—this is an arrangement where Redmond gets the milk without buying the cow.

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This week my blogging colleague Serdar Yegulalp has laid out the Windows 7 upgrade options for both XP and Vista. Walt Mossberg laments that Microsoft hasn't provided an "upgrade install" to let users layer a brand new Windows 7 OS over a years-old crusty XP setup. True, but they've provided something better in my opinion.

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The saga of Microsoft's contributions to the kernel just took another curious step. A key engineer with open source network-infrastructure company Vyatta indicated that Microsoft had no choice but to post the drivers as GPL. The implication is that they wouldn't have if no one had pointed it out to them.

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I've already commented on the meaning of Microsoft's contributions to the Linux kernel and releasing extensions for Moodle, but after going over what I wrote I thought some more analysis of the present and future of Microsoft's open source strategies are worth talking about. And no, pigs are still not flying, although they're getting mighty light-footed.

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"That'll never happen." I'm learning not to say those words, because never is a long, long time. How about, for instance, Microsoft contributing GPLed code to the Linux kernel? Well, guess what.

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