At the moment no one knows the answers to these questions but I personally think this is quite a good purchase, as long as they can integrate this into the rest of the product range.

So let’s look at why they’ve done it:
Now they have access to 700 million users; obtained a great technology; and are now the market leader in VoIP.

In one foul swoop they have jumped ahead of Apple and Google in consumer internet telephony and video conferencing, plus kept it out of the hands of Facebook. The interesting thing is that Skype is the only truly platform agnostic offering, in that it runs all major desktop systems as well as nearly all mobile phones, which is something Apple and Google can’t claim yet.

Have they paid too much?
It is hard to say if they have paid too much or not, my feeling is yes but if it helps them gain ground in the consumer market, which is something they are striving for (this is why Apple has done so well), then it could be money well spent. The issue Microsoft had was that they were bidding against other companies with pretty deep pockets and they probably needed/wanted Skype more than the others.

Will Microsoft ruin Skype??
I don’t think they will ruin Skype, they’ve paid too much to allow it to wither and die. I think they will wait for a while, take stock of their acquisition and look for ways to integrate it into their other products. XBOX live is ripe for integration as is the Microsoft Office platform, there is also the possibility of aligning it with - or replacing - Live Messenger. (That said I wouldn’t want to be responsible for integrating those platforms together.)

Overall I think this is a good move for Microsoft and quite a brave one, time will tell to see if it is a wise one.

It’s pretty self explanatory what happened at the event and it is exactly what it says on the tin – Dell unveiled a hell of a lot of products…39 to be precise and every one of them to target the business market.

Dell called this launch event- “the biggest product launch in the history of the company”.

Dell unveiled to the press their 10-inch Windows 7 tablet which is obviously aimed for the business tablet market rather than consumers which is great as the only real competition Dell will have is going to be Blackberry’s PlayBook with QNX.

The downside of when Dell unveiled the tablet was that they only had a mock up unit just to demonstrate what the tablet will look like and it looks like the bigger brother of the Streak.

Dell confirmed that the tablet would be released later this year so possibly around the same time of the Playbook, Honeycomb and iPad2. Who goes on the top seller we would have to wait and see – who do you think?

I personally believe that Windows 7 will dominate the tablet market but it will take a while for Microsoft to gain their well earnt market share due to the fact of Apple’s iPad being released virtually two years before Windows 7 is put on a reliable hardware tablet.

Honeycomb is going to be out in Q2/Q3 –ish time and hopefully by then Microsoft will have a decent tablet and it will become a top seller.

What are your views on the whole tablet market? Pop a comment below or give us a tweet.

-Via CNet

Want to know how “WET” can help you?

Put in very simple terms, ‘WET’ is an abreviation for ‘Windows Easy Transfer’ and this very useful application can save time for a lot of people transfering from Windows XP to Windows 7 but is often overlooked – until now.

WET comes pre-installed on most newer releases of Microsofts Operating Systems (OS) and designed specifically for helping users transfering saved information, data, images and settings stored currently running on Windows XP or a more recent PC running Windows 7.

WET will even transfer your wallpaper.

Often a lot of people use third party applications like Norton Ghost to backup a PC to another but often for applications like this, users have to pay quite a bit of money for the privilidge of this. I know myself that I have always found an alternative way around this until recently having to re-build a PC and upgrading the Operating System (OS) together.

With everything having to be organised when transfering information from one PC to another and trying not to miss the important information, Norton’s Ghost will create its own custom image probably to complicate things a little more.

The main benefit WET has over Norton Ghost and competitors is that it is FREE and it comes pre-installed with your PC. As it is currently installed in Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP, it makes it pretty easy for any user to migrate from one Operating System to another.

Here is a useful link if you want more information on getting started with Windows Easy Transfer – read more

WET is quite a flexible application as it gives users the option to transfer information either onto a hard drive, through a network or alternatively through an ‘easy transfer cable’ which is more formally known as a USB-A to USB-A cable.

Note : Not all programs and settings are going to transfer to your new OS but this definitely makes it easier to transfer compatible program settings, your files, folders and important documents.

With Windows 8, who knows what Microsoft have in-store for their users – could it be the ability to store all of their documents, music and other information in the cloud nice and secure? Hosting applications such as Photoshop and providing it on subscriptions?

This wouldn’t be a first Microsoft having a cloud based system encorporated with an Operating System. We’ve seen in the ASUS netbooks an app store where users can download applications straight from the Cloud to their laptops – pretty cool huh?

At the moment, with Windows 8 not being due until 2012, it’s a little hard to try and depict what will be on the Cloud service but I would probably go with something like Games and programs like FileHippo.

-For more information go to the original article source here at Zath

Additional information available here: BBC

We have been trialing Windows 7 Beta and more recently Windows 7 RC (Release candidate) and are happy to report we are very impressed with the updates and changes from the previous version (Vista). We are looking forward to this being the stadard on all new PC’s.

I’m pretty sure Microsoft would empty their last Post Office savings account to ensure Windows 7 is a hit – and if they fulfil the promise shown by the beta version I have been testing for the past few days, then 7 could be their greatest operating system yet.

XP, Vista, 7

There are still people out there who slate Vista however my experience has been I found it a welcome upgrade from XP and whilst it does have its flaws it is a much more stable OS than even XP with SP2. (People conveniently forget the nightmare that XP was on 1^st release)

With my Vista experience in mind,  I have been pleased to discover over the past few days that Microsoft appears to have built on Vista’s strengths and addressed most of its weaknesses with the beta release of Windows 7.

Installing

The Windows 7 install was totally painless. The built in driver support covered all the hardware aspects of my test machine (self-build Intel P4 Dual with 2Gb RAM). 30 minutes of installing, a few reboots and I was up and running.

Performance

I had heard that 7 was significantly faster than Vista and sure enough it seemed to be the case. I installed Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Office 2007 and Call Of Duty. All installed perfectly and I found I could easily launch PhotoShop and Dreamweaver – whilst surfing the web.

So whats new?

Vista’s most visible annoyance, User Account Control (those annoying pop-ups that warn you every time you do anything), is set by default at a much less ferocious level, and I encountered it only a couple of times throughout a whole morning of installing applications. It can of course easily be changed back via Windows 7′s new Action Center, which acts as a central place for security updates and warning alerts.

Post-install Windows 7 recommended that I installed a 3^rd party Anti-Virus package. The suggested options were AVG and Kaspersky however the operating system itself comes preinstalled with Windows Defender.

One cool thing I found was the new photo-realistic device icons. They look much classier and will no-doubt raise comments from Mac fan-boys. Microsoft appears to have wiped out a lot of the Windows XP-era interface quirks of Vista; the result is a much more simplistic, unified experience for common tasks.

To wrap up…

Overall so far I’ve found 7 to be a stable and useable OS. Critics will complain that in essence it’s a tarted up Vista but why is that so bad? It is important to note that I haven’t tested the beta version of 7 extensively, merely started to play around with it, but so far – so good.

Oh yes sorry – I did have a problem. Apple’s iTunes refused to install….. J