Business Finance

Last month, we saw coverage about Internet Explorer posting a worldwide gain in usage share. That encouraging news continues today with Net Applications’ release of their July usage share numbers. Net Applications reports overall Internet Explorer share grew 0.42% worldwide in July, while Firefox lost 0.90% share and Chrome dipped 0.08% in share.

Today is earnings day and Windows continues to have a strong showing. We announced a new milestone in Windows 7 sales - 175 million copies. This continues our record breaking pace of more than 7 copies sold per second. And as of today – Windows 7 is now running on more than 16% of all PCs worldwide. It's exciting to see this kind of response from customers who have helped make Windows 7 the fastest selling operating system in history.

According to IDC, the global PC market grew 22.4% in the 2nd quarter of 2010 which is in line with their forecast of forecasted growth of 22.9%. I suggest giving the IDC press release a read if you’re interested in the seeing the break out of top (6) PC vendors and worldwide PC shipments. It’s great to see continued growth in the PC market.

I am pleased to announce that Intuit is developing an SDK for Windows Phone 7, making it easier for developers to write Windows Phone 7 applications that interface with the Intuit Partner Platform's cloud services for businesses, including QuickBooks. This enables business professionals to access key data from a variety of Windows Phone 7 devices and easily view their cloud data hosted in Windows Azure.

When customers sit down to browse the web, they have more choice than ever about the browser they’ll use. Here in the Internet Explorer team, we look at usage share as one of several results that come from developers targeting, partners supporting, and customer preferring the latest version of Internet Explorer. Last month we saw some encouraging news about browser preference.

We’ve been talking about the value that Windows 7 Professional brings to small businesses for a while, including productivity benefits that can help businesses save time and money. Today we’d like to share some details from an IDC White Paper sponsored by Microsoft worldwide research study, which explores the business value and return on investment (ROI) of Windows 7 for small and midsize businesses.

What small business wouldn’t want to upgrade their technology and save money on their next business trip? Amazon.com and Southwest Airlines have an offer for all SWABIZ members. (If you’re not a member, you can join at SWABIZ.com.)

I recently talked about the Windows Summit 2010 and today I want to give everyone a quick update on the event and some new content that went live earlier today.  If you have not yet heard, the Windows Summit 2010 is an online event for hardware and software designers, developers, engineers and testers who want to build great products on Windows 7. 

Since the release of the first Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview at MIX back in March and the second in May, we’ve shown a lot of demos of IE9 with other browsers. Today, Apple announced and released Safari 5. We figured we would show IE9 and Safari 5 together running some of the demos from the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive website. Watch the Frames Per Second (FPS) Counter.

Earlier this week, Tami Reller, corporate vice president and chief financial officer for the Windows & Windows Live Division, spoke at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Technology Conference. During her keynote, she talked about the excitement we continue to see for Windows 7 from consumers and businesses alike, as well as customer satisfaction for the OS.