Microsoft has been drumming up its marketing for Internet Explorer 8 lately, with some interesting results. That marketers can be a bit, shall we say… “creative”… when touting a product is well known, but the question is if Microsoft’s marketing team hasn’t taken it a bit too far with their “Get the Facts” campaign, especially when they start comparing IE8 to other web browsers.

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Many of today’s most popular applications and operating systems have been around for a long time. This is a look back at version 1.0 of some of the most popular and widespread applications of today, many of them ranging all the way back to the 1980s.

To keep this article from becoming the size of a novel we were extremely picky with what we included. We only included applications that are in current use and so widespread and popular that they have more or less become iconic. We also decided to focus solely on Windows and Mac OS this time (sorry, Linux people, we’ll make amends in the future).

Let’s start with the first versions of Windows and Mac OS and move on to the applications from there…

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Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has been getting some serious buzz lately. We thought it would be interesting to see where in the world it’s been the most popular so far.

To get an idea of this, we used Google stats (oh, the irony) to see the popularity of the search term “Bing” in the last 30 days. Since it’s a pretty common word, we restricted our lookup to include only the “computers & electronics” category to get around this (in Google Insights for Search). No Sopranos references should have snuck in…

What we found was, at least to us here at the Pingdom office, a wee bit surprising.

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Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech companies we looked at, including big hitters like Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM.

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Last week we posted an article about how much money the large tech companies are making, but another really interesting thing to look at is how large their workforce is. Just as with revenues and profits, these numbers can be quite surprising (and impressive).

We used the same group of 15 well-known tech companies that we looked at last week: Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.

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Have you ever wondered how much money the really big tech companies are making?

We have, so we looked at the money earned by 15 large, well-known tech companies to find out: Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.

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As you may have noticed, our April Fool’s joke this year was to take irony into overdrive and launch SaveIE6.com. There simply is no other browser that web developers love to complain more about than IE6, so turning the tables on them (no pun intended) and make a whole site dedicated to praising IE6 seemed like a fun idea.

Luckily for us, irony proved to be alive and well on the Internet. The site has been incredibly well received, and was one of the most retweeted links on Twitter yesterday. If you haven’t checked it out already, you might want to take a look!

We have picked out some of the funniest comments people added to the petition page, all explaining why IE6 is a superior browser…

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In November, Google wrote in their official blog that they had done an experiment where they had sorted 1 PB (1,000 TB) of data with MapReduce. The information about the sorting itself was impressive, but one thing that stuck in our minds was the following (emphasis added by us):

An interesting question came up while running experiments at such a scale: Where do you put 1PB of sorted data? We were writing it to 48,000 hard drives (we did not use the full capacity of these disks, though), and every time we ran our sort, at least one of our disks managed to break (this is not surprising at all given the duration of the test, the number of disks involved, and the expected lifetime of hard disks).

Each of these sorting runs that Google did lasted six hours. So that would mean that hard drives would be breaking at least 4 times a day for every 48,000 hard drives that a data center is using.

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The Apple Mac market share has been reported to be around 8-9 percent and growing, but if this search volume graph from Google is any indication, the Mac market share is nothing compared to its mind share.

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All Linux distributions have their own home base: their homepage. How well is this homepage taken care of and how well does it perform? To answer these questions we have monitored the uptime and load time of the homepages for 16 Linux distributions for a month.

And since it is a question we can’t resist asking: how do they compare to the homepages of corporate OS giants like Microsoft and Apple? We included those in this survey so that we could answer that question as well.

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