The growth could have been smaller, at 13 percent, but the company had to delay reporting revenue form pre-orders for Windows 7 last year as the operating system did not ship until October 22nd. The operating system was a proof that the PC industry was still healthy, according to Microsoft. About 240 million copies of Windows 7 have been sold in a year of availability and this was the fastest-selling release Windows ever had.

However, results were not positive uniformly for Microsoft. Bing gained market share and officially replaced Yahoo’s search engine, but the Online Services group of Microsoft lost $560 million, which was more than 17.4 percent, worse than it lost a year earlier. Traditionally, the company has had significantly smaller search share than the rival Google and has also had trouble in persuading companies to accept its cloud services over platforms like Google Apps.

These results would not reflect any immediate result of the launch of the Windows Phone 7, which began only on October 21st and would not reach the United States until November 8th. Microsoft has admitted that Windows Phone 7 was a reset of the platform and has been intended to allow Windows Mobile slip in favor of the newer operating system.

Despite the record, Microsoft’s performance was not enough to claim a revenue lead over its rival Apple. The maker of the Mac earned $20.34 billion over the same timeframe. Apple has been supported by dependence on its hardware, which is more expensive than Microsoft’s licenses for its software. It also defeated Microsoft in areas outside of the core Office and Windows fields. Currently, the iPhone has larger market share than Windows Mobile. The iPod has constantly outsold the Zune line.

Microsoft has lately been defeated in the tablet space too. The sales of the iPad have exceeded the total Windows tablet market by many times. The situation is not likely to change as far as new significant designs are not shipping until next year.

The one-year anniversary of Windows 7 was on the same day Microsoft stopped allowing Windows XP to be preloaded on new PCs. The simplest version is Windows 7 Starter and it is largely preloaded on netbooks and notebooks instead of XP, while Vista is no more an option.

Windows XP was the cheapest operating system for the platform and this helped it to maintain its position in the netbook market. Its price is $15 per netbook, while Vista and Windows 7 Starter cost at least $30. Microsoft is supposed to have dumped the price of XP in order to force Linux to leave the netbook market, which was earlier dominated by platforms independent from Microsoft.

The Green edition spins at a slower speed of 5,400RPM and addresses those users who appreciate the power saving or who need lower heat because of tight enclosures. The drive still has 64MB of cache as have the best drives from Western Digital and plugs into SATA and SATA II interfaces.

Drives are already available and the cost of the flagship 3TB is $239. A smaller version with 2.5TB is available for $189. The company did not mention when will arrive the mainstream Caviar Blue or the performance-oriented Caviar Black.

Although the current interface offers basic multi-touch features, it still sports many menus and other graphical elements like buttons conceived for mouse input. This way, it is necessary to use a pen or to take the time to modify the settings of the operating system in order to make them usable. The iPad of Apple is from the beginning designed for touch and, even if more limited, has sold as many devices in two months as is estimated for Windows tablet PCs during the whole year 2010.

Ballmer did not miss the opportunity to attack the iPad by saying that it was not as a tablet due to lacking a keyboard, although Microsoft’s slates promoted for holiday launches also lack physical keys. He evoked the case of a person in the audience who was having trouble to use a competitor’s tablet because there was no keyboard available and using that device was a real torture.

Mark Wilson, the person in the audience, noted that the seeming torture was not due to the user interface of the iPad and emphasized the issues with Windows 7 tablets and the whole platform. He mentioned that both his netbook and 15-inch notebook had battery lives not allowing the use through a day, required a too long time to boot up and were not easy at all to type with in small spaces. On the contrary, the iPad could last over 16 hours and was booting instantly, not to mention the comfort when using it in landscape mode.

Wilson said that the reason he took his iPad at the event was that his Windows devices were too bad for hardware portability. He added that if Microsoft had produced a tablet able to do what the iPad was doing, he certainly had used it. Unfortunately, according to Wilson, there would be a long time to wait before that happened.

The initiative comes as a consequence of Microsoft trying to get more users away form the old Windows XP operating system. NetApplications’ recent study of market share showed that 66 percent of Windows use online, or about 60 percent of web traffic is still provided by Windows XP systems. Although not representing a direct reflection of the user base and being potentially influenced by corporate traffic, these large figures suggest that a significant part of the Windows base still hangs on the 2001-era release.

There are several reasons for this to happen. An important factor is that corporate buyers are reluctant to upgrade to an operating system incompatible with some applications and frequently more demanding than supportable by older PCs. Members of the developing world also replace PCs less often or have chosen cheaper netbooks and nettops that were still running XP. It is a fact that few major applications really need any Windows version newer than XP.

There was no official launch date given but leaks point to the Windows Phone 7 event on October 11th to be used by Ballmer for Windows 7 tablet plans. While the hardware seems to be only a minor focus, devices could be named, says Neowin. Microsoft is supposed to have worked with unnamed PC makers, but it is not known if special deals are in place or if these are merely known projects.

The most probable candidate to be seen at the New York City event is the Slate 500 of Hewlett Packard, which will probably ship by the end of October. The Slate 500 has become a symbol of the frustrated tablet efforts made by Microsoft, as Ballmer himself has shown in January. The device is still unreleased after ten months and was eventually shifted to the enterprise role. However, a mainstream model may come in the near future. There are also other candidates, like the soon-shipping ExpoPC. An accelerated launch for the ASUS Eee Pad EP121 and others are also possible.

Microsoft is believed to have been strongly hit when the iPad launched. For nine years, it tried to impose Windows tablet PCs as mainstream devices but has been eclipsed by the launch of Apple’s iPad. The sales of the latter have more than doubled the predicted 1.25 million units estimated for the Windows tablet in 2010 in less than three months. The iPad’s sales could lap the lifetime numbers of the Windows tablet in only a fraction of its time span. Criticism to Windows-based tablets referred to a complete finger touch input missing as well as a low battery life when compared to mobile tablets like the Galaxy Tab or iPad, more software-limited but also cheaper, more intuitive and longer-lasting.

The comments Helm has made are probably intended to give developers some references for the experience of the tablets. They are also indicating that the company is conscious about the effect Apple has on developers. Hewlett Packard has been aware of Apple’s plans related to the tablet even before the iPad has been unveiled, as it had a prototype of the Windows 7 Slate ready. Since that moment, HP acquired Palm in order to help making tablets and launched a printer with an Android-based tablet as a hybrid control interface and media device.

It is already known that the webOS tablet should run on an ARM processor and would also support multi-touch, but other features are completely unknown by now.

This confirmation follows the formal announcement made by Microsoft in 2008 about the future phasing of Windows XP. The Windows customer support blog of Microsoft has itself advised its customers with respect to the end of official support for Windows XP SP2. Support for Windows XP SP3, however, will continue until April 2014. Licensing permission for downgrading through the normal product cycle of Windows 7 will continue to be available for corporate enterprises. This is a guarantee that Microsoft was forced to use for a longer time than expected and was due to the reluctance manifested by the consumers with respect to the adoption of Vista and later even for Windows 7.

The longest-lived operating system of Microsoft, XP has been used for a so long time because of the hesitation induced by Vista. As Dell was one of the first companies to offer Vista systems early, in January 2007, it had to backtrack soon and offered almost immediately an XP downgrade due to problems with Vista. After many home and professional buyers began to avoid Vista due to more or less real problems with performance and compatibility, Dell had to resume shipping systems with the XP version by default.

The new package will be available for purchase at select retailers, but also at the Microsoft Store online. The same deal will be available for Canadian, UK, German, French, Australian and clients in other markets starting October 22, which is the actual anniversary of Microsoft’s OS.

There is an upgraded JavaScript engine for every platform, which helps processing a large amount of numeric code. This includes animation and images besides math. The beta version can now be used natively by not less than 34 languages.

Like the previous versions of Firefox 4, the beta 3 enjoys an improved web renderer with the largest jump in JavaScript. Other additions are represented by the App Tabs, improved HTML5 support and WebM video, a streamlined user interface putting tabs on top, and protection to crash against plugins such as Flash. The beta version released by Mozilla is available at the same time for Mac, Linux and Windows systems.