Stories by Jon Brodkin

"The PC is dead!" We've heard that message a lot since the birth of Apple's iPad, but when one of the creators of IBM's first PC added his voice to the chorus, people took notice.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Developers who make apps for Android have a lot more to worry about than just building great software.

The mythical "year of the Linux desktop" still hasn't come, and may never, but on the 20th anniversary of Linux the free operating system's proponents threw a party to celebrate its success and scoff at past attacks launched by Microsoft, its biggest rival.

Google's $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility is far and away Google's biggest-ever purchase -- in fact, it's greater than Google's next 10 biggest acquisitions combined and only its third above a billion dollars.

Pop quiz: Can you name every smartphone platform that's more popular than Windows Phone 7? Go on. We dare you.

Thirty years ago, IBM created the first personal computer running Microsoft's MS-DOS. Today, IBM and Microsoft seem to have very different views on the future of the PC.

After criticism over new restrictions on the amount of virtual memory customers can deploy before having to buy new licenses, VMware has boosted the limits on virtual RAM so high that most customers should not be negatively affected.

Google's chief legal officer today accused rivals Microsoft, Oracle and Apple of "a hostile, organized campaign against Android ... waged through bogus patents."

With Microsoft trumpeting the idea that PCs and tablets should run the same operating system and have all the same capabilities, will Apple go down the same road?

Microsoft's long and steady decline in browser market share continued in July, but there is one bright spot for Redmond: Among Windows 7 PC owners, Internet Explorer is gaining, albeit only slightly.

A new Android Trojan is capable of recording phone conversations, according to a CA security researcher.

In Google's early days, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin argued that answering email complaints would be a waste of time, and that Googlers should fix problems behind the scenes without interacting directly with users, according to a former Google employee who wrote a book about his time at the company.

Microsoft isn't exactly dumping Windows for Linux, but it has become one of the busiest contributors to the Linux kernel. Microsoft's attempt to get Hyper-V drivers into the Linux kernel has taken longer than expected, having begun in July 2009, so Microsoft is apparently trying to speed up the process.

Cloud computing is widely perceived as a threat to Microsoft, because the maker of Windows and Microsoft Office earns the lion's share of its money selling licenses for packaged software.

Data center managers are well versed in distributing power efficiently to physical servers. But the proliferation of virtualization, with multiple virtual machines and applications running on a single piece of hardware, has made this task a lot more complicated.