Bill Snyder

Ever wonder why Apple is gaining market share at the expense of Windows-based PCs?

One big clue comes when you boot a brand new PC for the first time. Not only do you see the familiar Windows logo, but there are also icons leading to applications and services that you may or may not want. Typically, those applications are for trial, or are stripped-down versions of the software, that some company hopes you will eventually buy.

If you've ever struggled through a skiing lesson, you know exactly what the expression "too far over your skis" means: You're headed in the right direction, but you're leaning so far forward you're going to take a tumble. And that's what's going to happen to my colleague Galen Gruman, who along with other pundits is falling all over himself to bury Intel under the oncoming ARM tsunami.

Yes, as many of us have written, the old PC-centric computing model is running out of gas as tablets and smartphone become more powerful and more central to how we live, work, and play. That's the right direction. But timing is everything -- there's lots of evidence that Wintel (the Microsoft-Intel partnership) still has many years left in it -- which is why Gruman and others are seriously ahead of themselves.

Apple continues to clobber its competition in the tablet market, and the new iPad is only going to make matters worse for rivals like Samsung. But it's not just other tablet makers that are taking significant hits delivered by the iPad. A new survey of business users by ChangeWave Research found that nearly one-third of the companies expecting to buy tablets in the next few months are using them as replacements for PCs for at least some users.

What's more, the penetration of tablets into the enterprise, a major piece of what's being called the consumerization of IT, is speeding up. Twenty-two percent of the businesses surveyed expect to buy a tablet soon, and the only reason that number isn't three or four points higher is that Apple didn't announce the third-generation iPad until a month after the survey was conducted, says Paul Carton, ChangeWave's director of research.

Want to hack someone's bank account? You might think it takes a sophisticated knowledge of computer security or maybe a tie with the Russian computer mafia. It doesn't.

All you need is a perfectly legal check writing application that costs $14.95, a laser printer and a fake I.D. How do I know? I was hacked recently, and it isn't fun. I've learned how shockingly easy, and surprisingly low-tech, forgery has become. And I've also learned that an alert bank employee paying attention to her job could be the best defense money can buy.

Suppose you knocked a cool $32 billion off the value of your company, trashed its long-term strategy, and thoroughly confused your customers, employees, and shareholders. Most of us would be taken out and shot, but ex-HP CEO Léo Apotheker, who practically destroyed one of Silicon Valley's oldest companies (after doing the same to SAP), walked away with more than $7.2 million in severance and benefits. What a bozo!

But Apotheker was hardly the only tech bozo to (dis)grace 2011. Indeed, the past year was the Year of the Bozo, with CEOs, pundits, and bloggers sharing the honors.

Don't tell my daughter I was talking about her behind her back, OK? A couple of weeks ago, she spilled a drink on her MacBook Pro's keyboard. We've all done that. It happens. But as we discussed the damage, I assured her that, worst case, she could move her backed-up files to her new machine. Back up? Uh oh. Not only does she not back up, but the Wi-Fi network in her apartment is not secured and she uses the same weak passwords over and over.

You might wonder why I'm telling you this. It's because a survey of young professionals and college-age students conducted by Cisco Systems confirms that my daughter's behavior is all too common. As the Baby Boomers retire, their jobs in business will be taken by the millennial generation, who are going to be a handful for IT. And all too often, IT responds with the equivalent of "Get off my lawn!"

If you've noticed that you're smartphone is getting faster, you're not imagining it.

All four of the major wireless carriers have been improving their networks across the U.S. But only one –Verizon – is consistently delivering download speeds of 3Mbps, the threshold of 4G, or better. That's according to a new report by RootMetrics, an independent company that tested wireless networks in 27 markets between March and October of this year.

We all knew that the end of the dot-com bubble resulted in widespread failure of companies and the loss of many IT-related jobs. But until recently, there were few hard statistics to flesh out that assumption. Now there are -- at least for Silicon Valley, the heart of the bubble. They indicate that high tech is not necessarily the source of long-term jobs and suggest that the brewing mobile apps bubble could bust fairly quickly if startup funding continues to decline.

Ten years after the peak of the bubble, only one in six of the high-tech companies founded in 2000 still survive, and only one in three of the jobs created then still exist, according to a new study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Internet-related startups, the darlings of Wall Street, fared even worse: Only 8 percent, or about one in twelve, survived.

Figures don't lie, the old aphorism goes, but liars can figure. And after nearly 20 years covering technology, I've realized that you could update that saying to: Benchmarks don't lie, but liars can benchmark.

What brings this to mind is a nasty war of words between Microsoft and Mozilla, the publishers of Firefox, over whose browser is more secure. Both are pointing fingers at the other, claiming that their benchmarks really tell the tale.

When Eric Schmidt stepped down as Google's CEO, the conventional wisdom was that founder Larry Page was ready to run the search giant without training wheels. "Page spent 10 years at the knee of the master, Eric Schmidt, and he was not only willing but able," said Intuit chairman Bill Campbell during a talk this week at the Demo Fall 2011 startup fest.

Maybe you'd better rethink that one, Bill. Google's cavalier treatment of small business, its unwillingness to move on privacy concerns until it's forced to, and its panic-driven handling of the $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility acquisition prove otherwise. Google still lacks adult supervision.

If you read much about tech, you've undoubtedly been told by some snarky writer that if you're not headed for the cloud, you're hopelessly unhip, behind the times, and probably overweight. You know -- the cloud, that repository of all things digital contained on giant servers owned by someone else out there in cyberspace.

Well, wait a minute. I'm not saying everything about the cloud is hype and bunk. It's not, particularly for businesses that don't need to own and operate infrastructure. But for us regular consumers, the cloud should be seen as a choice for some functions not an absolute must have, much less a measure of your IQ and sex appeal.

Take a deep breath. There's a new report out highlighting a huge spike in threats against Google's Android platform. Yes, it's something to be concerned about. But don't freak out or return your cool new Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Mobile threats are rising, but actual attacks against smartphones and tablets are still a tiny fraction of the number of new threats that target your PC, and to a lesser extent, your Mac. And remember the law of big and little numbers. When a number is small, it doesn't take a huge addition to pack a big percentage change.