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During the Microsoft antitrust trial, one of the company's PR execs named Mark Murray would dutifully approach the press microphone on the courthouse steps in Washington, D.C., each afternoon to declare: "It was another good day for Microsoft."

That was called playing the part of loyal soldier in the face of debatable circumstances. But if Murray were called upon to sum up this week's events, I think he would describe it as a very good week for Microsoft.

And he'd be right.

In fact, it was a helluva week--one of the best the company … Read more

NEW YORK--At about 1 p.m. EDT in midtown Manhattan, I overheard a group of suit-clad thirtysomething men talking as they waited to cross Madison Avenue.

"You know, leopards are solitary animals," one of them said. The other three or four continued musing on the characteristics of the large exotic felines, and I figured that it was actually part of a conversation about Apple's latest operating system, which launches Friday at 6 p.m. I thought, wow, if fratty midtown office types are talking about Mac OS X 10.5, there must be a huge line of … Read more

Progress is measured in steps both big and small. The smaller ones may get less attention, but they are much easier to take.

It's been a year of big steps for Apple. The company dropped the "Computer" from its name in January as a way of showing Apple was no longer just about the Mac, and the clear priority for 2007 in Cupertino was to get the iPhone out the door and selling briskly. Then, perhaps for kicks, it decided to overhaul its entire lineup of iPods.

Later today, Apple will take a smaller step, with the … Read more

Tomorrow may be the day OS X Leopard makes its way out to the unwashed masses, but we were lucky enough to get our hands on a (legal) copy of the operating system earlier this morning directly from the mother ship in Cupertino. Besides the snazzy new look and feel, the big things we wanted to get our hands on were all the Web features we've been drooling over. We picked four that we think people are actually going to use, including Web Clips, RSS feed reading in the new Mail app, Web search history in Spotlight, and Wikipedia … Read more

An excellent item last month comparing the desktop designs of Apple and Sony by our colleague Matthew Elliott drew some of the most reader comments seen on Crave in months. We won't wade into that territory again but wanted to pass along this item from Engadget Japanese to show that we're hardly the only ones to draw parallels between the two companies.

Engadget says the photos are "official, un-doctored press shots from both Apple and Sony" of an older iPod Nano and the new Sony Cyber-shot released yesterday, respectively. Even the colors and position of the … Read more

The exact details of AT&T's revenue-sharing agreement with Apple have not been disclosed, but one analyst thinks that over the two-year life of a user contract, the amount exceeds the actual price of the iPhone.

Silicon Alley Insider spotted a research note from Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster estimating that Apple is receiving $18 per month for each iPhone subscriber, under the revenue-sharing agreement between the two companies. Apple has confirmed that such an agreement exists, but has not shared the details about exactly how much cash it's getting from the revenue AT&T makes … Read more

In advance of Friday's general release of Apple Mac OS X Leopard, Apple has posted a variety of preview pages, one of which details new security features. In Apple's preview, the Cupertino vendor cites 11 specific enhancements that should make Leopard more secure than Tiger.

Library randomization: This is huge. The technology behind this, address space layout randomization (ASLR), randomly arranges the positions of key data areas. This prevents malware authors from predicting the targeted memory addresses for buffer overflows and malware exploitation. Windows Vista includes ASLR.

Sandboxing: Sandboxing allows applets to run without interfering with the overall … Read more

Correction: This blog initially misstated the day NBC announced it was pulling its content off YouTube. It was Monday.

Am I the only person who has lost every ounce of respect for NBC? First, it tells the world that it will not renew its contract with Apple citing disputes over content pricing, and then it tells us all Monday that it has pulled all of its content off YouTube and will reserve it for Hulu when it finally goes live.

Nice one, NBC. Not only have you pulled your programming off the most popular video-sharing site on the Internet, you've decided to add it to a video site of your (and News Corp.'s) own that has no promise. Am I missing something here?

There is no chance Hulu will ever become a success. And the reason is quite simple: It is being produced by two companies that have no idea what consumers want and are utterly unaware of how the Internet works. Even worse, neither of those companies knows what Web 2.0 is all about.

I give Hulu one year.… Read more