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Has Google fixed Java? Sure looks like it.

"The Best of Microsoft Productivity If you're like me when you work, you want to really get things done. We need to be able to seamlessly move between our work and personal needs. Building on our success of more than 200 million devices running Windows 10, the Lumia 650 puts Microsoft's smooth, responsive and most productive OS in your pocket. Our business customers continue to send great feedback on Windows 10 and are compelled by the mobility of the Windows experience across devices. Lumia 650 runs the latest Microsoft Office apps right out of the box, allowing you to create and edit documents on-the-go and sync them to the cloud via OneDrive. It's also perfect for picking up on email and an important presentation during your commute. And with Cortana, your very own personal assistant, you're always organized and prepared for the day ahead."

"We just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data: One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14 percent) than Google Apps (9 percent).  Just 22 percent of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36 percent have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7. Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13 percent of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5 percent. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13 percent of companies. "

"Microsoft today launched Office 2016 for Windows, and simultaneously raised prices of the stand-alone licenses for both it and the Mac edition between 5% and 7%. Office 365 subscription prices -- the "rent-not-own" model that Microsoft's been aggressively pushing since early 2013 -- did not change. resume makeover executive IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to Read Now The cost of a single-license Office Home & Student 2016 edition climbed $10, from $140 to $150, a 7.1% increase. Meanwhile, Office Home & Business 2016 -- which adds Microsoft's Outlook email client to the suite -- also rose $10, from $220 to $230, or 4.5%. Office Professional 2016, available only for Windows, retained its $400 price tag. The single-license, stand-alone editions are sold primarily at retail, and are dubbed "perpetual" licenses because they require a one-time payment, but can then be used as long as the user wants. That's in contrast to Office 365, which requires a monthly or annual fee to continue using the software. On the consumer side, customers can choose between Office 365 Personal ($70 annually, $7 monthly) and Office 365 Home ($100 per year, $10 each month), while businesses have options that range from $99 to $240 per user per year. Office 365 Home is notable because it allows up to five installations of Office 2016 on PCs or Macs in the same household. All Office 365 plans, both consumer- and business-grade, also include rights to run the Office apps designed for Android, iOS and Windows 10 touch-centric mobile devices, including Android smartphones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, and Windows 10 touch-enabled tablets and notebooks. Microsoft's price increase for Office 2016 perpetual licenses was the second since January 2013, when the company revamped its retail line-up and boosted prices by as much as 17%. Microsoft duplicated those price increa

"You used to see it anywhere business workers congregated: the BlackBerry. Some of them are still out there -- secure messaging devices that can be centrally managed; the heart of the business mobile fleet. But the day of the BlackBerry is over and something new is needed -- a mobile operating system that is built for work as well as personal use. Microsoft's latest phone OS is trying to make a play for the enterprise high ground, with a mix of its Windows 10 Mobile platform, a new application development model and a suite of business-focused cloud services. But how well does it fit the needs of today's companies?"

"Today's Windows Mobile is Microsoft second try at an OS with that name. Despite having an early first mover advantage with Windows Mobile in the early 2000's Microsoft's lead folded like a bad hand of cards when the iPhone and Android arrived on the scene in the second half of the decade. We have not heard much about the reasons for this failure from inside the company, until a few weeks ago, when Christian Hernandez, who worked as a developer in the division, spoke out about his experience of this period in a Medium post. He revealed that Microsoft did anticipate the upcoming evolution of mobile phones into internet-connected computing devices and that initially things were looking good, due to Microsoft having the following advantages: A solid and stable embedded OS code base with WinCE and a growing PDA platform in PocketPC which integrated familiar apps and user experience to the desktop A relationship with chip manufacturers and OEMs which should allow it to copy the model of the Wintel era onto smartphones where Microsoft provided the OS, reference designs and marketing dollars and OEMs built the hardware and took it to market A well managed and broad set of application developers who lived and died by Microsoft and would surely support its new shift towards a mobile platform. This also included Microsoft's own apps like Outlook, Word, Excel, MSN Messenger, Internet Explorer and XBox assets. A lot of money in the bank to buy customers and market share"

The key to the Microsoft Empire has always been that of controlling the "interoperability layer". It's something Bill Gates learned in 1980, when he opted to forgo royalty payments from IBM for DOS, in order to control all rights to DOS. "Probably the smartest choice Bill Gates ever made came in 1980, when he decided not to hand over the copyright for Microsoft's first-ever operating system to IBM.  In 1980, IBM contracted a startup called Microsoft to deliver DOS, an operating system for its forthcoming IBM PC, on a tight deadline. The IBM PC came out in 1981, and soon became a smash hit, surpassing the leading Apple II. A horde of competitors rushed to build their own "IBM Compatible" clones that could run all of the same software and use all of the same hardware upgrades. But to build those IBM clones, they needed DOS. And if they wanted DOS, they needed to fork over cash to Microsoft. Microsoft kept the rights in lieu of royalties from IBM. DOS put Microsoft the very center of the PC revolution, even through the era of Windows, and even after IBM left the PC market, eventually selling off that business. 36 years later, it's been a long time since the IBM PC moment. And with the Apple iPhone and Google Android ruling the all-important mobile market, Microsoft missed its shot at the mobile operating system revolution.  That's why Microsoft, which keeps boasting about how much it loves selling cloud services and subscriptions, is suddenly investing so much in hardware like the HoloLens and the Surface. If no new IBM PC will come along like in 1981, Microsoft will just have to build it itself. "

"In recent weeks, email and other collaboration and workflow tools are being re-imagined with new interfaces, social components, integrated video conferencing and easy swipes to dismiss messages. To wit: IBM launched  its Verse effort with a snazzy interface that combines, social, email, analytics and mobile nicely. Google floated Inbox , an app designed to help you manage your email better. For the most part, it's effective. Cisco's Project Squared is an app that runs on its collaboration cloud and integrates video conferencing, messaging and other tools. Facebook is pondering Facebook at Work with a news feed and doc sharing. We could go on, but the list of tech vendors trying to deliver a workflow leapfrog is long. And we're not even counting efforts by Workday, Salesforce and others to include collaboration with core business functions. WHAT'S HOT ON ZDNET Windows 10: You've got questions, I've got answers Windows 10 ​How to use Google's new My Account, the one-stop control center for all of its services Security Apple Watch or Android Wear? Neither. Why smartwatches aren't ready for prime time Mobility The tech of Computex 2015 in pictures Hardware Here's where all these efforts fall flat: These products are all pitched as magic bullets to simplify your work life, but in reality are just another item to sell or keep current customers in the fold. Another reality: These applications are trying to tackle human issues with collaboration and communications. Tech isn't going to fix those communication quirks or cure humans' need to try and keep up. We don't need another tool. We need less of them. We don't need another app to aggregate tech functions. We need to simplify tech functions starting with a bunch of check boxes marked delete. We don't need technology to help us communicate. We need to be taught how to communicate. And we sure don't need more messaging. We need to turn our damn phones off so maybe we can really get some work done or look up a

"From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, the driving factors are collaboration and productivity, as opposed to any ecological or "green" concerns. With this in mind, we take a look at the advantages of going digital, and outline how workers can embrace this new digital-first paradigm to collaborate more, do things faster and work more efficiently than ever."

"Technology leaders are disenchanted with the current state of their IT infrastructure. According to a study released Tuesday by global technology provider Insight Enterprises, tech leaders give their companies' current IT infrastructure a "B minus" grade. For its first Insight Enterprises Intelligent Technology index, Insight Enterprises used Market Intel Group to conduct an online survey of a random sample of 403 IT professionals with decision-making responsibilities between Nov. 30, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015. How to use Windows 10 backup and recovery features Sooner or later, you're going to experience a hard drive failure, usually when you least expect it. READ NOW The study found that 55 percent of respondents felt the current technology in place at their business was a hindrance to incorporating or adopting new technologies, even as 65 percent of respondents were worried about disruption from technology innovation. While 65 percent of tech leaders overall were worried about the prospect of disruption, tech-decision makers at larger companies are especially feeling the pressure: The study found that 74 percent of tech influencers at large companies and 75 percent of tech influencers at medium-sized companies were concerned about disruption. "

"Microsoft quietly updated its Office 2016 Preview apps for early adopters over the past two weeks with a slew of new features the company announced in a round-up Wednesday. The new features let people who have installed the public beta of Microsoft's forthcoming productivity suite update try out real-time collaboration capabilities that will be rolling out more broadly later this year, along with other changes that make it easier to find particular functions and gather contextual information about what they're working on. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Word 2016 now has support for Live Typing, which allows desktop users to see the edits their colleagues are making to a shared document in real time. It builds on a feature unveiled last month that let users see where colleagues were working within a document, but didn't immediately show the words they added. Similar features should be coming to other Office apps with future updates, so that people can work in real time on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Microsoft already offers a real-time, co-authoring feature inside Office Online, but this update brings those capabilities onto the desktop for the first time within Microsoft's productivity suite. It will be possible for people to collaborate in real time across Office Online and Office on the desktop when Office 2016 launches later this year, but until then, users will have to choose between collaborating inside a Web app or inside a desktop app. That feature set puts Office in closer competition with Google's productivity suite, which has grown in popularity and features robust support for real-time collaboration. "

"Office productivity: Has Microsoft blown it? Microsoft has dominated the 'office productivity' tools market for decades and is a de facto way of working in most companies. Having significantly held back innovation in the last 10 years, Office is arguably reaching the end of its useful life as modern digital tools make it look like an old bureaucratic anachronism."