Good morning from Las Vegas. I'm here for some meetings, interviews, and of course Windows Connections. I'm not speaking, but I'll be around the show all day Tuesday, I believe.
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Microsoft dropped the new Xbox Live Dashboard update (what I think of as NXE v2) this morning, as expected. (It includes bits for Kinect, which debuts this week as well.) I previously wrote an article about the update, Xbox Live Update (Late 2010), which covers the basics. I'm on the road, so I can't really do more at this point, but I'll have to say about the Xbox 360--and of course Kinect--later in the week.
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Apple has countersued Motorola for patent infringement, this time around the multi-touch interfaces in its DROID and other smart phones.
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And speaking of Apple, ex-Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassée has written an interesting article examining Steve Jobs' plan to rethink the desktop OS. I've always been a huge Gassée fan, and while it's pretty obvious now that Apple made the right choice in rehiring Jobs and buying NeXT, I did think at the time that Gassée's BeOS would have been a better choice. This is why I don't run one of the world's most respected and powerful tech companies.
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Microsoft sends word about Internet Explorer usage share from October. IE 8 remains the world’s most popular browser with 32.6 percent worldwide share. Overall IE usage share is 57 percent worldwide. And there's some IE 9 momentum: IE 9 usage share has grown 0.21 percent this month to 0.32 percent worldwide. And Microsoft has seen over 10 million downloads of the IE 9 Beta.
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Stephen King has a Kindle, God bless him. And while many of you won't be able to read this (the WSJ is behind a pay wall, right?) here's an interesting interview with the prolific author regarding eBooks and the future of publishing.
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This obviously isn't my area of expertise, but there are rumors (again) that Facebook is going to launch a so-called Facebook phone at this week's mysterious mobile event. I'm pretty sure what they're really doing is just launching new mobile apps and a new mobile version of the Facebook web site. I guess we'll find out: The event occurs November 3.
