While Microsoft is indeed incredibly profitable, it's not going as well as it seems. The company is still riding high upon its Windows and Office offerings, but when it comes to new markets, Microsoft hasn't been as successful. Jean-Louis Gassee provides some very interesting insights into the company's past ten years.

It's time for Computex! This means loads of gadgets and related stuff to flood the internet, so let's get started by focussing on ASUS. The company showed off two interesting tablets: the Eee Tablet (which is actually a notepad) and the Eee Pad (which is actually a tablet). No, this doesn't make any sense, but product naming hasn't been a strong point at ASUS for a while now. There's also the ExoPC Slate (not from ASUS), which has a pretty interesting user interface.

The journey that started 18 months ago to create a next generation Amiga on commodity hardware has now reached its first major milestone by becoming a completely driver native Aros system powered by the energy efficient Intel Atom processor. This has been achieved with the supply of hardware and in some cases financial rewards to key developers in the Aros world. The plan with the following steps has been to create a base reference platform for Aros and the Amiga community to build on and support.

I've been meaning to write this for some time, and for all the time I delayed the more poignant the point I wanted to make started to become as new news came out further solidifying my angle. When I begun writing this article the iPad had not yet been revealed, iPhone OS 4 was not on the map and Apple had not yet purchased Lala. You've probably just noticed that all of these events in fact point toward Apple embracing the web more and in this article I will point out why this is not the case because I believe Apple's agenda here is similar to something we've already seen in recent history.

"The Free Software Foundation is up in arms over Apple's iTunes Store Terms of Service, suggesting that these terms fundamentally conflict with the terms of the GNU Public License. The foundation has warned Apple that a version of GNU Go distributed by the App Store makes Apple liable to comply with GPL terms that allow free sharing of code, but warned that its 'Usage Rules' violate those terms. The fallout could potentially affect any app that uses GPLed code."

"The developers behind the KDE desktop environment have released the first beta of version 4.5. Although the major focus during this development cycle is stability, the release also brings some nice new features and user interface improvements."

Like Research in Motion, Nokia is playing catch-up, software-wise, to the iPhone OS and Android, which is funny in a cruel way because both Nokia and RIM have a far larger market share than both of them. Nokia has put out a preview video of their upcoming N8 smartphone, which runs the latest Symbian version, Symbian^3. Nokia, like RIM, has got work to do.

One name was conspicuously absent from the list of companies backing Google's WebM project and the VP8 codec. Despite other chip makers and designers being on the list, like AMD, NVIDIA, ARM, and Qualcomm, Intel didn't make an appearance. Yesterday, the company made its first careful commitment to the WebM project.

As most of you probably know, Apple does not allow competing browsers into the App Store. As such, browser makers are forced to come up with inventive solutions to still get their name out there among iPhone users, and after Opera's successful attempt, Mozilla is going to take a stab at it too. Their solution is different, but no less interesting - especially if you're already a Firefox user.

Microsoft Research continues to evolve its Gazelle concept. "In this paper, we present ServiceOS, a platform that tightly integrates a multi-principal browsing architecture with the underlying OS. ServiceOS provides a centralized, fine-grained resource access control model, and uses recursive web-oriented algorithms for sharing system resources. ServiceOS also introduces new abstractions that allow a web service to explicitly allocate and manage resources for any helper services they embed (e.g., via iframes). A key challenge that ServiceOS solves is managing resources in the face of complex web service composition."

Yesterday, the technology world was full of this whole "market capitalisation" thing where Apple overtook Microsoft and became the biggest technology company in the world. Illustrating the futility of this stuff, the situation has already been reversed today, but before the end of the day, Apple may overtake Microsoft again. Or not. Or it may start raining unicorns. No, we're not going to keep track of this stuff. I'm just mentioning it here so nobody can accuse us of being anti-Apple. So, here it goes: for one night, Apple was the biggest technology company in the world by market capitalisation. I hugged my Macs and iPhone.

It's rumour time! Analyst Trip Chowdhry, with Global Equities Research, is claiming that Microsoft has been allotted seven minutes during Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote speech. Supposedly, the Redmond giant will unveil that developers will be able to write native iPhone, iPad, and Mac applications using Visual Studio 2010 on Windows. As crazy as this sounds, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who can move beyond the outdated Apple vs. Microsoft attitude.

Hewlett-Packard knocked IBM from the top spot in worldwide server revenue during the first quarter, as the market for x86 systems picked up but sales of Unix and mainframe systems continued to decline, Gartner said on Tuesday.

Pavel Heimlich has announced the release of an updated version of Korona 4.4.3: "Korona is the live DVD adding KDE4 packages on top of OpenSolaris. It is intended to be the showcase of the current state of the kde-solaris project, definitely not a distribution for any serious use."