For the month, Windows XP grabbed 47.19 percent of all OS users, inching up from 46.5 percent in December. At the same time, Windows 7 saw its market share dip to 36.4 percent from almost 37 percent the previous month.

Obviously, a fraction of a percentage point is nothing for XP to crow about, especially since its overall share has dropped from almost 58 percent a year ago. But it does point to the continued popularity of an OS that Microsoft would like to see kick the bucket.

The folks in Redmond have been pushing both consumers and companies to jump ship from XP to Windows 7.

As part of that push, Microsoft has been constantly reminding people that support for XP runs out in April 2014, at which time security patches and other updates will no longer be available. Though that gives individuals plenty of time to upgrade, enterprises face a longer path to migration, putting more pressure on them to switch to Windows 7 before too long.

Microsoft has even advised companies still on XP not to wait for Windows 8 and instead plan their moves to Windows 7 now.

Despite the minor drop in Windows 7′s market share last month, more people may be following Microsoft’s message.

The current flavor of Windows has seen its cut of customers rise from 23 percent a year ago to its present 36 percent.

Of course, as more people buy new computers outfitted with Windows 7, the percentage naturally grows, but probably not fast enough for Microsoft’s taste.

Windows 8, which has been available as a Developer Preview since last September, saw its share of users actually dip to 0.2 percent from half a percentage point last month. Fewer people may be checking out the Developer Preview in anticipation of the beta version, which is due to launch sometime this month.

Among operating systems in general, Windows remains in top place by a long shot with an overall share of 92 percent. Apple’s Mac OS X grabbed 6.39 percent of users last month, a minor increase from December and around a one percentage point bump from a year ago.

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Today, many of Android’s perceived security weaknesses stem from the openness of Android Market, and the availability of rogue applications.

McAfee has taken that to heart and added a feature called App Alert, which provides information about what applications are doing with users’ personal information. Although Android Market already informs users of the phone functions accessed by the apps they download, the list can be long. App Alert specifically checks whether a downloaded app requests access to personal information including contacts, and warns the user.

A future version will also be able to check the reputation of the app developer, according to McAfee.

The company has added call and SMS filtering, so users can block unwanted calls and senders of spam texts, according to McAfee.

At its core, Mobile Security 2.0 scans and cleans malicious code from files, memory cards, applications, downloads, text messages, and attachments, according to McAfee.

But there are also a number of features to help people that lose their smartphones. Absent-minded users can remotely lock access to all data, including that stored on the SIM card, and display a message with contact details on the phone.

They can also remotely wipe data on their phone and the removable memory card. To ensure that nothing is lost, a backup can be made before everything is deleted, according to McAfee. To find the phone, users can view the device’s location on a map, send an SMS to prompt its return, and use a remote alarm to help find it, McAfee said.

Users’ biggest security concerns are not viruses, but related to where private content is sent, and the protection of passwords that can be used to access many different services, according to analyst Geoff Blaber of CCS Insight.

To address users concerns, security vendors seem to be taking a more holistic approach to smartphone protection, rather that a PC-oriented approach, which is very much focused on viruses and malware, Blaber said.

“We have been talking about viruses on mobiles for years, but we are yet to get to the point were there has been a piece of malware that has really hit phones,” he said.

Besides Android, McAfee Mobile Security 2.0 is available for devices running BlackBerry OS and Symbian, but users of those platforms will have to manage without App Alert, which isn’t included.

The software costs US$29.99 for new users and existing subscribers can download the updated software for free.

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Just imagine if your multibillion-dollar business depended on it, as Google’s does. Then imagine the glee in Google’s corridors at a significant new victory in the company’s attempt to build a Web-accelerating technology it calls SPDY into the Internet.

Earlier today, Mark Nottingham, chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group, announced support for SPDY in an overhaul of one of the networking foundations of the World Wide Web. That foundation is HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and Google hopes SPDY will open up some of its bottlenecks.

The HTTPbis group, part of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), has been been sprucing up the 1999-era HTTP 1.1 for several years. But Nottingham said it’s now time to look to the future.

“There seems to be broad agreement that the time is ripe to start work on a new version of HTTP in the IETF, and that it should happen in this Working Group,” Nottingham said. When work refurbishing HTTP 1.1 began, there wasn’t interest in a new version of HTTP, but SPDY and its adoption shows there’s interest now, he said, proposing completion of a draft of HTTP 2.0 by May and finish the work by July 2013.

Speed boost
In Google’s research, SPDY accelerates page-load times by 28 percent to 43 percent over a 2Mbps DSL line and 44 percent to 55 percent over a 4Mbps cable broadband connection.

Standardization is often a drawn-out, painstaking affair, but it can pay off by making a particular technology easier to incorporate in a wide range of products. A neutral industry standard can be technically, politically, and legally easier to embrace.

Tinkering with the basic workings of the Web is a tricky business given the immense variety of browsers, servers, and network gear in between. Google has made progress with SPDY, though, since unveiling SPDY in 2009 and then building it into its Chrome browser.

SPDY is a high-profile element of Google’s “make the Web faster” effort. Yesterday, the company also detailed proposed improvements to TCP an even more fundamental Internet technology. The Transmission Control Protocol governs how a huge amount of data is sent over the Net despite problems such as network congestion or lost packets of data.

Google is in many ways perfectly positioned to rebuild the Net. It’s got the world’s most-trafficked Web sites and measurements that show that speed means profits. It’s got the No. 3 browser, Chrome, so it can experiment with technology that works hand-in-hand with its Web sites. And it’s got an army of research-minded engineers encouraged to think big.

Those assets don’t always equate to success, though, when it comes to rewiring the Web–in particular given that Google’s self-interest means that its ideas can raise competitors’ hackles. Microsoft and Mozilla, for example, while sharing Google’s interest in making the Web a better foundation for programming, are leery of Google’s Dart programming language that competes with the incumbent JavaScript.

SPDY milestones
One earlier milestone was SPDY’s inclusion in Amazon’s Silk, the browser on its Kindle Fire tablets. A more recent one is that Firefox 11 introduces SPDY support, too.

“I think with Firfox on board with SPDY, it’s got legs,” said Mike Belshe, who along with Roberto Peon invented SPDY at Google. (Belshe since has moved to a start-up, Twist. “We’ll get it (or its derivative) standardized in 2012 for sure.”

Technical details and a SPDY white paper show how it works and what it offers. It employs a number of tricks to speed up Web page transfers, including compression, prioritization of important Web page elements, and a way to sidestep today’s limits on opening multiple network connections.

One technical detail that historians might be interested in is what exactly SPDY stands for. The answer: nothing. “It doesn’t stand for anything,” Belshe said, “but it sounds like ‘speedy.’”

Adding SPDY isn’t the only possible way to improve HTTP, and Nottingham acknowledged that it will be a “tightrope walk” to admit some HTTP improvements without getting bogged down in massive rework of the technology.

FreeBSD programmer Poul-Henning Kamp was unenthusiastic about Nottingham’s proposal, though, because he sees it as too narrow in scope. He also asked where in Nottingham’s proposal there is room for evaluating other suggestions

“In my mind, the effort [Nottingham] sketched out would be correctly titled ‘Beatify the SPDY protocol as a carrier of HTTP/1.1 traffic,’” Kamp said in his “devil’s advocate” response. “HTTP/2.0 would in my mind be an attempt to actually improve the protocol.”

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Seven people have been named in an indictment and four suspects have been taken into custody, according to the statement today. They have been charged in Virginia with crimes related to online piracy, including racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, and conspiring to commit money laundering.

The suspects face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, the government said.

According to the statement, the indictment alleges that Megaupload is led by Kim DotCom, aka Kim Schmitz, a German with a colorful history who was once convicted of a felony but who has repeatedly denied engaging in piracy.

DotCom and three others were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand police, “who executed provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States,” the Justice Department said. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the arrest.

Along with DotCom, Kim Tim Jim Vestor, 37, a resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand was also arrested. Authorities say that DotCom founded Megaupload and is the director and sole shareholder of Vestor Limited, which has been used to hold his ownership interests in the Mega-affiliated sites.

“This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States,” the statement said. The action “directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.”

In August, CNET profiled DotCom, a free-wheeling former street racer and computer hacker, after he was sued by a porn studio for copyright violations. At about the same time, film industry sources told me that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had complained to law enforcement officials numerous times that Megaupload was getting rich by helping millions of people store and distribute pirated films and TV shows.

DotCom allegedly rents cyberlockers to the masses, and nobody disputes that many millions of people from across the globe use them to store and access unauthorized copies of TV shows, feature films, songs, porn, and software. The question is whether DotCom and the other suspects can be held responsible for the piracy.

Some of the services DotCom is said to operate are MegaPorn, MegaVideo, MegaLive, and MegaPix.

If you’re wondering if the Obama administration didn’t go after Megaupload as a way to placate the film industry in the wake of White House criticism of the Stop Online Piracy Act, I can only tell you that my sources said the feds began looking at the service months ago.

Nonetheless, the timing of the arrests is kind of curious, considering the indictment had been around for two weeks.

The arrests occurred with many in the entertainment and media sectors feeling betrayed by Obama. According to a story in Deadline.com, some studio chiefs are planning to cut off donations to Obama’s re-election campaign after he failed to support antipiracy legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and Senate (the Protect IP Act).

That’s bound to hurt as Hollywood has long been a rich area for Democrats seeking campaign contributions.

Obama has said for years he supports stronger antipiracy laws but on Saturday issued statements that were critical of the bills, which are heavily supported by a large number of copyright owners.

The laws would make it easier for authorities to cut off access in the United States to foreign-based sites accused of piracy, which essentially describes Megaupload’s situation.

That leads us to the big question I’m trying to get answered: if the feds can have an accused pirate arrested and brought to this country for trial, why do we need SOPA and PIPA? I’ll update as soon as I get that answered.

Update 2:05 p.m. PT No sooner than I posed that question than Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) and the man who drafted PIPA, release a statement:

“Today’s action by the Department of Justice against the leaders of MegaUpload.com shows what law enforcement can do to protect American intellectual property that is stolen through domestic websites.”

Domestic?

DotCom was arrested in New Zealand and is a German national. His servers have long been rumored to be in Hong Kong. According to Leahy’s office, Megaupload’s servers are located in Virginia. Apparently that gives U.S. officials jurisdiction.

This thing is just starting and DotCom is known for his publicity stunts and tweaking the noses of law enforcement all over the world. We’re sure to being hearing more about this.

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The Department of Justice (DoJ), FBI and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) among others have been bombarded with internet traffic.

Web links have been been distributed which, when clicked, make the user’s computer part of the attack.

A statement attributed to Anonymous claimed responsibility. >>more

Information Technology Services | IT Services

Wikipedia’s English-language pages went completely black at 9 p.m. PT, with a splash page saying “the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” The online encyclopedia’s blackout, intended to precede next week’s Senate floor vote on the legislation, is scheduled to last 24 hours.

Craigslist and Google have taken a more modest approach. Unlike Wikipedia, the sites will remain online during Wednesday’s virtual protest, but the home pages now feature exhortations to contact members of Congress and urge them to vote against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate version called Protect IP. Craiglist’s snarky note: “Corporate paymasters, KEEP THOSE CLAMMY HANDS OFF THE INTERNET!”

It’s a novel experiment in grassroots-outreach-by-the-millions that could, if successful, derail SOPA and Protect IP, which have come under increasing criticism since last fall. Their authors — Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) — responded in the last week by offering some changes. But Smith said in a statement today that, one way or another, a House committee vote will be held in February.

CNET predicted the protest in a December 29 article that said opponents of the bills may “simultaneously turn” their home pages “black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress.”

This is “classic Hollywood trying to do heavy handed legislation to protect its business interests,” Casey Rae-Hunter, deputy director of the Future of Music Coalition, told reporters this morning.

Among the other Web sites that, in one way or another, have joined the blackout: Metafilter, the Consumer Electronics Association, BoingBoing, OpenDNS, WordPress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and what is almost certainly the Internet’s most popular dinosaur comic strip. Some physical protests are also planned tomorrow.

Because Web companies are typically reluctant to involve their users in political spats, nothing exactly like today’s protest has ever been tried before, and it’s difficult to predict how it will affect Congress’ willingness to proceed. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated on Sunday that he expected the floor vote on Protect IP to happen as scheduled.

But Google.com is the most popular Web site in the world, according to Alexa, with about half of global Internet users visiting it per day — meaning that if only a small percent sign the company’s petition against SOPA and Protect IP, the total number of voters lodging protests could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. (Google pointedly refrained from asking its users to call the U.S. Capitol’s switchboard at (202) 224-3121, which likely would have overwhelmed the system within minutes.)

In a blog post late Tuesday night, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, predicted that Protect IP and SOPA “will censor the Web,” “risk our industry’s track record of innovation and job creation,” and ultimately be unsuccessful in curbing piracy.

And then Wednesday morning, Google’s home page featured a big, black block over the colorful “Google” logo that dominates the page, and a stark message under the search window urged: “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” Both the blacked-out logo and the “Tell Congress” line linked out to a page entitled “End Piracy, Not Liberty” with an option for users to sign a petition to Congress.

SOPA, of course, represents the latest effort from the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore Web sites. It would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet service providers, and other companies, forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish. It’s opposed (PDF) by many Internet companies, users, and civil liberties groups.

Some Internet companies including Facebook, Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo have expressed concerns about the bill but have not said they would join the blackout. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote that “closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”

In one early sign that the blackouts and protests are having an effect, the MPAA today characterized them as “stunts.” The group’s chairman, Chris Dodd, took a thinly veiled swipe at Wikipedia by denouncing the protests as “an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services.” News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter to offer similar thoughts.

Tomorrow’s protest was originally designed to coincide with a hearing that SOPA foe Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had scheduled on the measure’s technical aspects, especially the portions relating to Domain Name System, or DNS, blocking. Issa said over the weekend that the Republican leadership had promised him that a floor vote would not happen “unless there is consensus on the bill,” a rather implausible scenario. As a result, Issa postponed the hearing.

“There’s a lot of sort of technologically ignorant language in” SOPA and Protect IP, said Erik Martin, general manager of Reddit, which has become a focal point of anti-SOPA activism and can probably claim credit for convincing GoDaddy to flip-flop on the legislation. Both bills, he said, were “done without a lot of thought about the impact and the execution and without a lot of knowledge technically about how the Internet operates.”

Mozilla will join the protest at 5 a.m. PT (8 a.m. ET) tomorrow in what it’s calling a “virtual strike” against SOPA and Protect IP. It will black out the default start page for Firefox users and ask them to take action.

“SOPA makes all of us potential criminals if we don’t become the enforcement arm of a new government regulatory and policing structure,” Mozilla chairwoman Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post today.

The protest had a few hiccups. For the first 20 minutes or so, Google’s initial sign-this-petition Web page delivered this message: “Error: Server Error / The server encountered an error and could not complete your request.”

Not all of Wikipedia’s pages are blacked out. Entries for the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are still visible. More than a few users of the encyclopedia seemed confused.

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Next year is one of those years that can’t come soon enough for Microsoft.

It’s not that 2011 was a particularly difficult year. The company posted record revenue for the fiscal year that ended June 30. And its 2-year-old PC operating system, Windows 7, hit 500 million copies sold, further embedding it as the most widely used operating system in the world. But 2011 had few big product launches at the company, Office 365 and Internet Explorer 9 notwithstanding.

Next year will be altogether different. Microsoft is prepping the big kahuna of its product arsenal, Windows 8. The company hasn’t set a date, though most analysts expect the flagship operating system to debut before the end of the year, and perhaps in time for back-to-school shopping. From that product, much else from Redmond flows.

So here are five things to look for from Microsoft in 2012:

1. Windows 8 tablets

Windows 8 is one of the boldest bets Microsoft will make, radically changing the interface on the operating system to the company’s tile-based Metro look, first used by Windows Phone 7 last year. The familiar desktop photo covered with application and file icons will be available to PC users who want it. But Microsoft is pushing the new touch-friendly interface to convince consumers to buy tablet computers that will run it.

It won’t be an easy sell. Microsoft will be coming to the tablet market more than two years after Apple iPad launched and quickly became a commercial success. And this holiday season, Amazon debuted its Kindle Fire, which became the first non-Apple tablet to gain a meaningful foothold. Market analyst Forrester recently reported that consumer interest in Windows tablets is waning.

As the core of computing moves beyond the PC, Microsoft needs Windows 8 tablets to succeed. It’s all the more pressing as PC growth sputters and the tablet computer market soars.

The market muscle of Microsoft and its partners will help propel Windows tablets at their debut. But unless Microsoft can convince developers to create tablet-specific apps that users can’t live without, the devices will have a hard time making a dent in iPad’s massive lead.

2. Xbox moves farther into live TV

Even in its earliest days, Microsoft’s video game console business was pegged as a Trojan Horse to bring the company’s technology from the office to the living room. But the brains behind Xbox knew they had to make a great gaming experience job No. 1. Now, leading the United States in console sales in 2011, Xbox is pushing in earnest beyond gaming.

Microsoft just brought the first hint of live TV to Xbox consoles with an updated look to its Xbox Live service earlier this month. In addition to introducing the Metro-style look to Xbox, it also let customers of Verizon’s Fios cable television service choose from 26 different live TV channels–Comedy Central, HBO, and Nickelodeon. A handful of other partners are offering live programming through Xbox as well.

That’s clearly just the start for Microsoft. The company is moving toward the goal of getting consumers to fire up their Xbox whenever they flip on their TVs, not just when they want to play a game. Next year will see more live television content come to Xbox Live. It’s a foundation that Microsoft will build out as it readies the next version of the Xbox console, something a source on the Xbox team says will happen in 2013.

3. Windows Phone: We’re No. 3

It may be a measure of the decade-long struggle to succeed in mobile telephony that, for Microsoft, a victory would be grabbing the third place spot in terms of smartphone market share for its Windows Phone software. While the company has wrestled to arrive at a winning formula, rivals Apple and Google have introduced mobile-phone operating systems that have seized business that Microsoft had hoped to grab.

Microsoft rebooted its phone effort at the end of last year, introducing a passel of new phones from partners running its brand new operating system, Windows Phone 7. The slick-looking software, refreshed in September with an update dubbed Mango, has won plaudits from reviewers for its animation and app integration.

While the technology is catching up with rivals, Windows Phone’s market share hasn’t. According to market research firm Gartner, just 1.5 percent of the smartphones worldwide run Microsoft’s operating system. And rivals aren’t standing still. Apple’s new iPhone 4S has outsold every other mobile phone since its debut in October. And despite the market fragmentation of Google’s Android, with different handset manufacturers running different versions of the mobile operating system, it continues to pull ahead in the marketplace.

There’s little doubt that Windows Phone share will grow, if only because of the marketing push Microsoft and partners, particularly Nokia, will make, coupled with the tiny toehold it currently has. But it’s most likely to grab customers from Research In Motion’s foundering Blackberry business rather than established Apple and Google customers.

4. Patent litigation aggressor

The ground Microsoft hasn’t been able to take away from Android in the marketplace may well be covered by the revenue it’s able to generate through the threat of litigation. The software giant has persuaded several handset makers–including HTC, Wistron, and Compal– to pay it a vig for each Android device they sell to settle allegations that the mobile operating system violates Microsoft’s patents.

The Android device makers that don’t pay? Microsoft’s taking them to court. Two high profile cases will move toward resolution next year– Microsoft’s suit against Barnes & Noble, whose Nook e-reader runs Android, and a separate suit against Motorola. (Google is in the process of acquiring Motorola Mobility.)

The tactic has proven so successful that in 2011, Microsoft started collecting fees from companies that make devices running Google’s Chrome operating system as well, including Acer and ViewSonic. Expect Microsoft to continue to press device makers that use its rival’s technology. Likewise, count on those manufacturers, particularly the smaller ones, to pay up rather than face Microsoft in the courthouse.

5. Growing search through social

Like the mobile-phone business, Microsoft has bounced from one strategy to the next in a bid to be more relevant in Internet search. It’s re-branded its search engine a few times, added key partners, and cycled through senior executives, and still significantly trails market leader Google.

There’s one Microsoft partnership that could start to pay off in 2012, and it’s not the deal to handle search queries from Yahoo. It’s Microsoft’s deal with Facebook. In May, Microsoft began including recommendations from Facebook friends into its Bing search engine, creating customized results by elevating the ones that receive a “like” from someone in the searcher’s Facebook network. So when someone is looking for a Thai restaurant in Seattle, for example, a spot that earned a like from a Facebook friend will rise in that person’s particular search rankings.

Google is on to the same formula too, creating its Google+ social network to infuse its search results with customized answers to Web surfer queries. But in social networking, Facebook remains king. Using Facebook “likes” are just the first step. Microsoft clearly plans to add more social signals to Bing in 2012. And while that won’t topple Google, it does offer the opportunity to grab a large slice of the search business by providing more relevant results.

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Percento Technologies

Easier said than done, right? Wrong. There’s actually a ridiculously simple, but little known, way to save money on most online purchases: start them at a cash-rebate site.

It works like this: Suppose you’re planning to order one of HP’s spiffy Pavilion dm1z laptops. The base configuration starts at $399.99, and because it’s a brand new model (well, newly refreshed, anyway), there are no deals to be found online.

All you have to do is head to a site like BigCrumbs. Or Ebates. Or FatWallet Cash Back. Search for HP, click “Shop Now,” and then make your purchase like you normally would.

In about 90 days, you’ll get back a percentage of your purchase. It might be 8 percent, or 5 percent, or even just 2.5 percent (the amount varies from store to store and rebate site to rebate site), but it’s still money back.

And think about it: if you save 5 percent on a $400 purchase, that’s $20. If you’re buying 10 new laptops, that’s $200. All for just a few extra clicks when you start your online shopping trip. Kind of a no-brainer, right?

Of course, I haven’t told you the catch yet. That’s because I haven’t really found one. I recently used Ebates to order the aforementioned Pavilion dm1z, and everything worked like a charm. I was even able to use a promo code to get a discount on the laptop (which, granted, lowered my rebate a bit, but I still came out way ahead).

Indeed, I’ve become something of a cash-back convert. Although it takes a few months to get your rebates (which, depending on the site, can come in the form of PayPal or an honest-to-goodness check in the mail), the percentage points do add up. My take: why not use one?

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Shaw’s explanation appeared to make sense. Microsoft’s major consumer product launches tend to fall in the second half of the year, and next year’s big release—Windows 8—isn’t going to buck that trend. There’s an outside chance that Microsoft might talk Xbox 720 at CES 2012, but that too won’t be launching any time soon. The company’s presence at CES has traditionally been big and expensive, and the company no longer feels it yields a valuable return on that investment.

After the 2011 keynote earlier this year, this was hardly surprising. The 2011 keynote was dominated by a mix of products already on the market—Kinect, Windows Phone—and the Windows-on-ARM processor announcement. Though significant, this announcement had no relevance to consumers or indeed 2011. Windows-on-ARM products will only ship in 2012, and most consumers have little interest in the vagaries of instruction set architectures or system-on-chip designs.

But intrigue was added to this apparently straightforward announcement when GigaOM reported that according to people “inside Microsoft,” the withdrawal was due to CEA refusing to allow Redmond to make the keynote presentation beyond next year. In other words, it wasn’t the software giant’s decision at all. In retaliation, Microsoft pulled its future booth plans.

The story took another twist when The Verge reported said that its sources backed Shaw’s original explanation. CEA tried to get Microsoft to sign on for another three years of keynoting after 2011, but Microsoft refused, signing on for only a single additional year (2012)—showing that the company’s plans to leave the event are long-standing. CEA did want more money for future keynotes, which helped push Microsoft away, but ultimately the decision to leave was Microsoft’s.

Microsoft will still be at future CES events in some capacity to connect to partners, press, and the general public. But big reveals and launches of major products will in the future be made at Microsoft-organized, Microsoft-specific events. Events that happen when Redmond says they should happen, and that make Microsoft products the star of the show.

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