Robert Mullins

Those focused on the two 10-inch tablets Dell previewed at a launch event in San Francisco on Tuesday were missing the point. At the event, Dell released a massive number of new products to help the enterprise better cope with the onslaught of consumer technologies entering the workplace.

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The vultures are already circling around Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, little more than a month after the first handsets went on sale in the U.S. Phone pundits cite the tepid 40,000 unit first-day sales as a bad sign. And Microsoft is inviting the negative publicity by withholding specific sales figures.

While some of the commentary can be characterized as coming from cynics expecting a Microsoft fail, an analysis of the smartphone market by Troy Wolverton in the San Jose Mercury News drew my attention. Reporting on the D: Dive Into Mobile conference last week in San Francisco, Wolverton has concluded that it's going to be Google Android and Apple iPhone/iPad and everyone else languishing in the back of the pack. In an interview at the conference with the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Microsoft senior vice president Joe Belfiore again evaded the questions about sales figures. But when asked for an example of a feature Phone 7 has that others don't, Belfiore offered that you can take a picture without unlocking the device. Nice, but not a game changer, Wolverton noted, and I agree. Wolverton was similarly unimpressed with the prospects of RIM/BlackBerry and HP with Palm making any headway against Apple and Android.

I reported earlier on the operating system share gains for Microsoft Windows 7 as reported by Janco Associates. But the other half of the Janco report measured Web browser share, which I want to address in this post not just for what it says about Internet Explorer, but how it also handicaps rival browsers.(See also "As Internet Explorer Turns 15, We Take a Look Back.")

Janco pegged IE's market share at 66.07 percent in August, down 4.54 percentage points from 70.61 percent in August 2009. That's actually more generous than share numbers from the often-cited Netmarketshare, which put IE's share at 60.74 percent in July, its most recent report. IE recovered in June from a dip below the 60 percent percent mark in April and May, according to Netmartketshare.

The annual Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting today in Redmond featured the usual numbers crunching about its financials, a promised beta of IE 9 by September and CEO Steve Ballmer’s bombast and optimism, tempered by annoying vagueness, about when Microsoft will introduce a tablet-style computer -- “As soon as we can,” he said. But one interesting part of the daylong program was a point-by-point challenge to five of Microsoft’s top competitors from Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner.

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