ReadWriteEnterprise

With Microsoft gearing up this year for Windows 8, I thought I would survey the stats on desktop OS share, and to no surprise, XP is still the leader. According to Forrester in March 2011, 60% of the corporate desktops were running XP. The mix is somewhat less on the consumer side: According to NetMarketShare.com, XP has a 46% share as of December 2011. A compilation of other stats on Wikipedia shows between 26-45%, depending on who is counting. Certainly, there is still a lot of XP out in the world, and probably in your home and at your workplace.

So is 2012 going to be the year that we finally tip the balance and have something more recent that a 12 year old OS running on our Windows PCs? Probably not. Even though it has been years since you could actually purchase a copy of XP in any retail store, or buy it pre-installed on a new computer, XP continues to thrive.

A new report by Palo Alto Networks that analyzes data captured by their customers' firewalls last year shows that 70 different social networks used by more than 1500 of their customers still only account for about one percent of total Internet bandwidth. But while the actual bandwidth is miniscule, it does seem that last year was the year that enterprises began using social networks in earnest in a wider variety of ways. We last covered them in June with the results of one of their earlier research reports.

The Internet and politics have a way of magnifying each other's faults. Depending upon which source you read this morning, President Obama either came out forcefully against SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy legislation on Saturday or he staked out a position enabling himself to back away from opposing it outright.

Buried in-between the apparent opposition and the apparent ambivalence is the most important part of Saturday's statement, which would otherwise resound like a clarion call: "Rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don't limit your opinion to what's the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what's right."

PCmover Windows 8 Beta Assistant allows users to move selected programs, files and settings from a Windows 7 or Windows 8 machine into a new machine running Windows 8. Laplink has had an earlier version that was very useful in Windows 7 migrations from XP. You can watch a short video of mine here that describes the process.

Remember last year when questions arose about Microsoft's policies on UEFI secure boot on Windows 8? Microsoft's response, or lack thereof, was that "OEMs are free to choose" how or whether to enable turning off secure boot on systems shipping Windows 8. It appears, however, OEMs may not be as free to choose if they're shipping ARM hardware.

Glyn Moody points out a clause from Microsoft's Hardware Certification Requirements for Windows 8 on page 116, that says "Disabling Secure MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems."

The imminent withdrawal of the court order provision (Section 3) from the Senate version - called PROTECT-IP or PIPA - of this year's round of anti-piracy legislation, will very likely doom any chance of such legislation emerging from Congress this year. Although SOPA, the House version, may yet pass with its version of the court order provision intact, any single bill that passes both houses must be a reconciled version of SOPA and PIPA. With Sen. Patrick Leahy (D - Vt.), one of PIPA's co-authors, now advocating further study in the next congressional term, any move by the House this term will largely be for show.

As we begin to emerge from this round of the anti-piracy fight, none of us are particularly any smarter or wiser or more prepared for the next round than we were before. Not only do we lack a better idea of what a solution may be for the future, all of us have, in one way or another, succeeded in misdiagnosing the problem.

A post by Kevinjohn Gallagher on "no longer recommending WordPress" to his clients has gotten a bit of traction lately. While there's legitimate criticism to be leveled at WordPress, Gallagher's isn't (for the most part) it. If you're approaching WordPress with the expectation that it's the be-all and end-all of content management systems (CMSes) you're going to be sorely disappointed. And frankly, I hope WordPress never tries to fit the ridiculous list of requirements that Gallagher tries to saddle it with.

I use the service Wistia.com to embed videos on my blog pages: I have covered the company before here and mentioned their analytics and video player. Today the company announced another series of improvements to their player on their blog here that are worth considering. The new features go way beyond what most video hosting sites offer.

At the end of every year, AV-Comparatives releases a summary report to comment on the various anti- virus products it has tested over the year, and to review their high-scoring products too. This year, the top overall award goes to Kaspersky Anti-Virus. Anti-virus tools from Avira, Bitdefender, ESET and F-Secure were also highly rated. We last wrote about their 2010 test results here where F-Secure won the top berth.

GetApp.com, an independent marketplace for online business software has released an infographic comparing online project management software solutions to help businesses choose the right product. There are some interesting trends and data on the chart, including their age and size, their emphasis on social media, and whether they offer integration with Google, Intuit and Salesforce products and have their own API as well. There is also information about whether Android or iOS versions of each app are available.