Money, Microsoft, mobiles and mind power

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Money, Microsoft, mobiles and mind power
In the face of growing global economic problems, research firm Gartner has issued the warning that everyone expected: IT spending is set to slow during 2009.

Gartner has lowered its spending forecast from 5.8 percent earlier in the year down to 2.3 percent.

The news is not all bad though, with Gartner’s global head of research, Peter Sondergaard, claiming the downturn will not be as bad as that of the dotcom crash several years ago.

“We learned that in tumultuous times, CEOs want their executives and managers to be advisors and counsellors, not just great implementers of directions given to them,” he said in a media statement.

“What they want now most of all is agile leadership. Leadership that can guide us through simultaneous cost control and expansion.”

Despite the possible trouble ahead, there is good news for readers of CRN Online.

A research team from the University of Califorinia has recently discovered that the Internet can increase your brain power.

Middle-aged people who use the Internet stimulate parts of the brain that would normally degrade through age.

Using CRN’s website can help to improve brain function and complex reasoning ability, while simultaneously keeping you up to date on all the channel’s latest news. It’s
a no brainer!

In other news, the mobile phone celebrated its 25th anniversary this month.

The first mobile was manufactured by Motorola and cost a cool US$4000 to buy.

Users paid US$50 per month for a connection service, with calls costing 40 cents per minute.

The phone featured a red LED screen that was only able to display a phone number – forget typing text messages! Despite its lofty price, more than 12,000 people had subscribed to the service in the first 12 months. More than a billion people use mobile phones today.

Switching topics, for the many Microsoft watchers out there, the past two weeks have offered up two tasty tidbits of information.

The first of these is the news that the software giant has officially decided to run with the ‘Windows 7’ title for the next version of its operating system, due sometime next year.

The announcement was broken by a blog posting by Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows.

“This is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore ‘Windows 7’ just makes sense,” he wrote.

Fair enough.

Later in the month Microsoft will unveil further release information at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

Stay tuned online for our coverage.

The second piece of news was Microsoft’s release of Silverlight 2.0, its new web application tool for designers and developers.

Silverlight is Microsoft’s attempt to steal market share from Adobe’s established Flash technology.

Silverlight allows developers to code in several languages including .Net, C# and Visual Basic and will be supported by the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

In related news, Google’s much-hyped Chrome browser has not lived up to expectations.

Research conducted by analytics firm GetClicky indicates that while Chrome achieved three percent of browser views in the first week of its launch, it has now slipped to 1.5 percent.

Internet Explorer still dominates, with 60 percent of the market, with Firefox creeping up to a respectable 30 percent.
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