The Gartner Group reported last week that the almost meteoric rise of the iPhone and the longer steady rise of the RIM Blackberry have been largely at the expense of Microsoft and their Windows Mobile platform.

Nvidia has joined Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in complaining loudly about the tactics Intel uses to sell its products, especially the strong-arm bundling of video chips with CPUs.

The City of Los Angeles has decided that its 30,000 employees will “Go Google,” as the city has selected Gmail as its new email system. This decision might spell a troubling trend for Microsoft in the Enterprise Software market.

Carl Icahn, who led a stockholder revolt at Yahoo aimed at taking over the board of directors, changing the management team, and selling to Microsoft, has resigned from the Yahoo board.

In a surprise move that no one saw coming, Microsoft has begun selling computers in its online store.

Intel and AMD are forming battle lines for another round of processor warfare, each warming up to win the battle of the new, slimmer laptops to be managed by Windows 7.

Microsoft’s cleverly named “software plus services” strategy would probably work better with users if their cloud computing centers would stop turning into smoke and mirrors.

Unsatisfied with their corporate involvement in social networking, Microsoft has created a brand new research group intended to take the company to social places that they have never gone before.

Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Edition will begin shipping on new PCs with an ad-supported revenue model until a user buys a key to the full version. This new strategy offers the limited functionality of Works with the annoyance of ad interruptions.

There’s a rumor afoot that Twitter is talking to both Microsoft and Google about licensing the full Twitter feed for real-time search. If so, it could mean that the company starts making money without having to sacrifice the user experience.

Analysis of the list of Hotmail passwords recently published online suggests they may have been gathered by phishing attacks aimed at the Latino community. It also suggests many people are either unimaginative or lazy when it comes to choosing a password.

Scammers who put together a list of 10,000 stolen Hotmail passwords may also be responsible for collecting 20,000 passwords from other e-mail providers. AOL, Comcast, Earthlink, Gmail and Yahoo are all said to be affected.

The trend toward less expensive laptops continues, driven by the even lower prices of netbook computers, as evidenced by prices released in advance by both Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba.

Nvidia’s new graphics processor, code-named Fermi, was designed to be the video guts of a new supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but the company is also positioning it for use in personal computers.

After wrapping up the worst fiscal year in the company’s history, Microsoft is slashing the compensation of its named executive officers. The company is also set to freeze salaries of all employees for the next year.

As the Kindle becomes more popular, it would seem to be a natural target for third party developers, much like the iPhone, to extend it from just a portable re-book reader into a multi-purpose device.

While everyone and their brother has been obsessing over the rumors of an upcoming Apple tablet, that may not even exist, it seems that Microsoft has gone one further and actually has a new tablet computer in the late stages of prototyping.