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Steve Ballmer said last week that his company didn't start earlier in Enterprise Search, but let the record show, both Google and Microsoft entered the consumer search market the same year. Google simply rolled over Microsoft in this game and hasn't looked back.

I've seen a lot of love for Microsoft's newly branded search engine, Bing lately and frankly I just don't get it. Bing landed a couple of weeks ago with a huge ad budget and a big splash, but I've used it and I don't see anything new here, but a pretty interface. Why are some people falling all over themselves to say how great they think it is?

While analysts suggest the number of Microsoft Office users has dropped 15 percent in the last several years, most companies still use it. With so many low-cost and free alternatives, it makes little sense, and in most cases it's just throwing good money after bad.

Idiocy, hubris, chutzpah, arrogance? Regardless of what you call it, Microsoft's attempt to rename the Netbook last week put its arrogance on full display.

For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder.

Big week for Google and Microsoft as Google announced its new unified communications platform dubbed Wave and Microsoft announced the Zune HD and a new search engine they're calling Bing. Wave looks the most interesting as it will be open source and Google is encouraging developers to create extensions.

The US Military is by turns cutting edge and clueless. On one hand, they embrace cloud computing and social media tools, yet think it's worthwhile to upgrade from Windows XP/Office 2003 to Vista/Office 2010 when Windows 7 and Office 2010 release are imminent (and it would make more sense to move large numbers of employees to Linux and OpenOffice and save the tax payers a few bucks). Like any large organization, they make good and bad decisions when it comes to technology.

Microsoft is poised to release its latest search offering Bing to the world and hopes to prop it up with an $80 million ad campaign. I don't see ads substantially changing consumer behavior and it's ultimately throwing good money after bad.

Experimenting, learning, listening, team building; these are the pillars of successful organizations and they are the pillars of the Star Ship Enterprise. Who knew the Star Trek movie was a business case?

The tit for tat going on between Microsoft and Apple feels a bit like a reality TV show, but looks like Apple got the upper hand with its latest Get a Mac ad.

The first annual openSUSE Community Week starts on Monday. I interviewed Community Manager Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier to find out how the event came together and what he hopes to accomplish with the week long event.

When Apple censored an application from the band, Nine Inch Nails, yesterday it subjected itself to a firestorm of criticism. Apple needs to stop being the App Store morality police and let the market decide if an app is appropriate or not.

The Netbook OS really shouldn't matter, but evidence suggests that consumers have rejected Netbooks running Linux and some suggest Android Netbooks could suffer a similar fate.

This week on FierceContentManagement Ric Shreves of water&stone discusses open source content management One on one.

The Android is about to take the leap from the cell phone to the netbook, and much like the first Android-powered cell phone, the first iteration is a bit of head-shaker.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the economy as an excuse for his company's first quarterly loss in 23 years as a public company, but if his big rivals were making money, it begs the question, why was Microsoft doing so poorly?

What happens when a conservative Republican gets sued for using two of Don Henley's hit songs without permission? He gets a quick taste of the DMCA when his videos are removed from YouTube, but fires right back in an interesting test of copyright in the Internet age.

The latest series of ads have left me wondering why Microsoft is targeting Apple at all, and if they are really rivals for the same business. I spoke to Dave Caolo, who is co-lead blogger at TUAW.com to get his view.

Picture a world where your social interactions don't require a conscious effort on your part to open an app, but one where the computing power is ubiquitous and device interaction happens effortlessly. That's a world that Andrew Lippman of the MIT Media Lab described last week at at the Wednesday keynote at AIIM.

It appears that the Android OS has two distinct purposes, one for the mobile phone and one for the netbook. If Google moves Android to a netbook, it begins the move from being a pure cloud vendor to the desktop. And Microsoft and Apple should be worried.