Five companies courting controversy this week

Dell this week apologised for controversial comments made by a Danish motivational speaker last month at a Dell-hosted customer and partner summit in Copenhagen. Dell acknowledged that Mads Christensen, a well-known agitator in Denmark, made "a number of inappropriate and insensitive remarks about women" at the event, which was attended by Michael Dell himself. According to Danish blogger Christiane Vejlø, Christensen said that all great technological inventions have come from men, with the exception of the rolling pin.

"The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy," Christensen said at the event, as reported by Vejlø.

PC buyers have long fumed over the annoyance of "bloatware"; the variety of software trial offers and other promotional materials that come loaded on PCs from major vendors. Bloatware is also known to negatively impact the performance of PCs, but Microsoft is now taking a stand by offering Signature PCs, which come without all the unnecessary extra stuff.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is giving customers with Windows 7 PCs the option of paying $US99 to have their machines scrubbed of bloatware, just like the Signature PCs. This sounds like a great service, but not for $US99. If Microsoft is concerned over the negative user experience that bloatware creates, reigning in the OEMs that make money from it would be a good first step.

At HP's Global Influencer event in Shanghai last week, HP started talking about a new class of PC called a "sleekbook", which describes thin, lightweight notebooks that come with AMD processors, traditional hard drives and plastic casings. In essence, they are cheaper versions of ultrabooks that look, from a distance anyway, like the genuine article. HP's sleekbooks could confuse customers that are still trying to get their heads around what differentiates an ultrabook from a regular notebook, one longtime HP partner told CRN.

"What HP continues to fail to understand and recognise is that people embrace simplicity with great functionality," said the partner. "People don't want another name -- they want a product that works well, and Apple has proven that they'll pay a premium for that."

More bad news for Nokia this week as the Finnish vendor lost its top spot in mobile device sales to Samsung. According to Gartner, Samsung's mobile device market share stood at 20.7 per cent at the end of March, compared to Nokia's 19.8 percent. And while Samsung's device sales surged some 26 percent year over year during the period, Nokia's dropped nearly 23 percent.

"It just hasn't been marketed right, it hasn't been positioned right, it hasn't been explained right, people haven't been trained right on it, people haven't been given [needed] tools. There isn't much about it that I can explain that's gone right in terms of go-to-market. And that's what I know how to do," he said.