Information Technology World

Windows 7's Built-in Backup Microsoft has a history of bundling really bad backup programs with their operating systems. The company has been accused of a lot of monopolistic behavior, but their backup programs often seemed designed to not threaten the market for third-party competitors. So I wasn't prepared to like Windows 7's Backup and Restore. But much to my amazement, I kind of do. does image backups for system protection and file backups for regular data protection--and does both for the Home Premium as well as the Business and Ultimate editions. For file backups, it defaults to backing up exactly what you should be backing up (libraries, appdata, and a few other important folders), and lets you tell it to back up any other folders you want to protect.   Backup and Restore can backup files incrementally, saving only those created and changed since the last backup. And it does versioning--if several versions of a file have been backed up, you can pic...

Ballmer: Microsoft Will Stay in China   Microsoft does not plan to follow Google's lead in pulling out of China, the software giant's CEO told news outlets on Thursday. "We've been quite clear that we're going to operate in China," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in an interview on CNBC. However, his hopes for China to produce growing revenue for the company seem to hinge on a thorny issue: a reduction of piracy and intellectual-property theft. "China ought to be a source of growth," Ballmer said. "Intellectual-property protection in China is very, very bad. Abysmal. ... We're buying a lot of goods from China but the things that U.S. companies can sell -- pharmaceutical products, media, software -- it's all intellectual property and design, and that stuff's not getting paid for in China. It's got to change." His reference to the problem of IP theft points to bigger challenges Microsoft could face if it decide...

Microsoft's Bing Still Creeping up the Search Rankings   Microsoft continues to gain share in the search market, growing slightly faster in December than any of its competitors, according to a report by comScore. Its share of searches in the U.S. reached 10.7 percent last month, up 0.4 percentage points from November, comScore said. Google is still attracting the majority of searches, with a 65.7 percent market share in December, up 0.1 percentage points from November, comScore said. Microsoft's growth came at the expense of its partner Yahoo, as well as Ask and Aol. Yahoo's share slipped slightly from 17.5 percent in November to 17.3 percent in December. Aol also lost share, slipping from 2.8 percent in November to 2.6 percent in December. Since it launched Bing in June, Microsoft has steadily if slowly been gaining ground. The company has added new features over that time, perhaps contributing to the growth. In mid-November, Bing resu...

China's Google Hack Shouldn't Surprise Anyone What surprises me about the latest hack of Google , supposedly by the Chinese government, is that it was surprising to anyone. Stories about the incident are flooding Computerworld.com and other sites throughout the Internet. Google is threatening to pull out of China in response to the hacking , which is giving people the impression that Google is protecting its Web mail subscribers and itself. In reality, I doubt that it will do either. The whole affair reminds me of a scene in the movie There Will Be Blood , when Daniel Day Lewis' corrupt oil baron tries to buy drilling rights from several landowners, and only one holds out. Years later, the farmer, in need of money, reconsidered. The oil baron, in a drunken rage, laughs at the landowner's representative and tells him that all of the oil was in one common pool, and that when he pumped the oil out of the ground from one piece of land, he got the oil under everybody els...

Google's China Moves May Hurt Android, Help Windows Mobile Google's decision to postpone the launch of two new Android phones in Chinasearch giant's potential exit from the market. this week points to the wider implications of the market. A decision to leave China could deliver a blow to Android, which has just recently gained notable momentum, and could bring opportunity to Google's struggling rival Microsoft. Google had planned to help launch two Android phones from Motorola and Samsung on Wednesday with China Unicom, said Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman. She would not say why the launch is now delayed. After Google publicly revealed a cyberattack on its systems that originated in China, the company followed up with a shocking announcement last week: It would stop censoring search results in China and thus face banishment from the country for failing to comply with local laws. The decision to delay the Android phone launches is likely related t...