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[caption id="attachment_107" align="alignleft" width="240"] Steve Balmer in 2012. (Official Microsoft Press Photo)[/caption] The announcement that Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer is to retire is another pointer to the end of an era in the growth of personal computing. Bill Gates and Steve Balmer were at the heart of the Microsoft dream of having a PC in every home. More than a billion people on earth run the Windows operating system today, a huge number run Microsoft Office and vast numbers of businesses depend on Microsoft. I have been reading a lot of journalistic comment on Steve Balmer's career at Microsoft. At lot of Wall Street seems to be pleased he is retiring. The tech community seems to hold him responsible for all the decisions Microsoft got wrong over the last 13 years but don't seem to credit him with making lots of money for Microsoft. Some people seem to hold Microsoft to a higher level of loathing than any other tech company. Apple, Goo

The question of the week for all Windowsphone users is perhaps is Google being 'evil'. The Google mantra is 'Don't be evil' but this week they banned the Youtube app for Windowsphone for the second time. The whole story is a bit strange and Paul Thurott's Supersite for Windows is one of the best authorities for this. The shorthand for the situation is that Google have not created a Youtube app for Windowsphone. In the USA Windowsphone has just a 3% market share (elsewhere somewhat higher) so there are no commercial pressures on Google to do this. Although you might argue since Blackberry is now disappearing fast Windowsphone is the third ecosystem. So to get over this little difficulty Microsoft created their own Youtube app for Windowsphone. Google blocked it because it violated their terms of service. By this they seemed to mean it didn't serve Google ads and didn't use the Google API. Microsoft said they were happy to modify the app but Google had n