Shane O'Neill

Try as it will to break through in the mobile space, Microsoft is still struggling to gain any ground with Windows Phone almost a year and a half after its launch.

Things have gotten so bad that that in a recent market share report by research firm Nielsen, Windows Phone market share was so small in the U.S. that Nielsen didn't even bother to break out its usage. It was relegated to the dreaded "other" category.

This Saturday, Jan. 28, is Data Privacy Day. DPD, as it's known, is a day to "increase awareness of privacy and data protection issues among consumers, organizations and government officials and help industry, academia, and advocates to highlight consumer privacy efforts."

Hear, hear. Data privacy, we can all agree, is important. Nobody, from the teenager posting party photos on Facebook to the Fortune 500 CIO in charge of terabytes of data, wants their information compromised.

In a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Google CIO Ben Fried penned an ode to letting go.

That may sound a bit "Zen Buddhist," but it's becoming a critical message for the modern CIO. With the workplace being invaded by workers armed with personal tablets, laptops and smartphones demanding to rule their own tech destiny, what is a CIO to do to prevent chaos?

Chances are Microsoft will not retaliate against Google's 12.5 billion purchase of Motorola by acquiring a phone maker of its own, say industry analysts, mainly because of the company's rich history developing and licensing software and building an ecosystem of hardware partners.

Their thinking is that this approach worked with PCs, and that the overarching software license/hardware partner strategy will not change for smartphones.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wasted no time in his keynote at the Office 365 launch in mentioning that Office 365 is an ideal solution for SMBs.

"Small and midsize businesses represent two-thirds of global job growth. But they need an edge that doesn't require big investment and complex IT infrastructure."

A new study of corporate operating system and browser trends by Forrester Research reveals both good news and bad news for Microsoft.

The good news is that Windows is still the powerhouse OS in the enterprise, running on almost 88 percent of corporate PCs. In addition, Windows 7 is slowly becoming the new standard, running on 21 percent of corporate PCs, according to Forrester.

At a time when cloud computing services for productivity tools are gaining steam, you would think that desktop software like Office 2010 would be on a downslide.

But Office 2010 is doing just fine thank you very much, despite the onset of the cloud. Microsoft reported this week in a company blog post commemorating Office 2010's one-year anniversary that corporate customers have adopted Office 2010 software five times faster in its first year than Office 2007 did in its first year.

This week, Microsoft presented the Windows 8 user interface and displayed various devices on which the next version of Windows will run.

The tile-based Start screen of Windows 8, which is strikingly similar to the Metro UI used in Windows Phones, is a complete revamp of the traditional Windows desktop design. It is arguably Microsoft's biggest Windows risk to date as it prepares for the shift to the post-PC era.