Microsoft has released some beautiful new themes for your Windows devices. These backgrounds are perfect for the holidays. Some even support multi display’s. Download them and enjoy the Winter feel at your desktop, hopefully staying warm!

Microsoft’s controversial ranking system, which pitted employees against each other in a somewhat unfair ranking system, is being tossed as Ballmer is cleaning out his office. One of the major complaints I’ve heard from several Microsoft employees has been the ranking system that was in use.

I believe that after the initial shock and people get used to not having it, things will improve greatly, and as consumers we will see better products.

Stack ranking is a process where each business unit’s management team has to review employees’ performance and rank a certain percentage of them as top performers, or as average or poorly performing. Former Microsoft employees have claimed it leads to colleagues competing with each other, especially when some employees in a group of individuals need to be given poor reviews to match the method. It’s a system that’s similar to Yahoo’s new alleged internal process of ranking employees.

Windows 1.01 was released November 20th, 1985, but that was after years of delays. It was formally announced November 10th, 1983 – 30 years ago (yesterday). I was excited, but didn’t officially jump on the Windows wagon until Windows 2.0, which I used a little. Windows 3.0/3.1 was where I really got into Windows. Before Windows, we used MS-DOS (or PC-DOS…). I didn’t have any issues with DOS, but using a mouse was great.

So, Happy Birthday, Windows. Here’s to another 30  great years!

Our earlier report on Elop’s future for Microsoft has been deemed fiction according to Microsoft to Bloomberg.

Good thing this is all pure speculation. When asked by Bloomberg to comment, Microsoft replied, "We appreciate Bloomberg’s foray into fiction and look forward to future episodes."

Steven Elop, one of the few potential CEO candidates for Microsoft, has some ideas to improve Microsoft’s bottom line. First, he would spin off or kill the Bing search engine and the Xbox product line. This is combination with increasing the footprint of their popular Office application, bringing it to iOS and Android in a more full featured package.

Killing off the Xbox and Bing lines would allow Microsoft to focus back on it’s core software packages – Office and Windows, both consumer and enterprise variants.

Agree? Disagree? I can see his point, and it’s very valid. I just think that the Xbox platform is a major part of Microsoft now. Bing, although I love it and prefer it to Google, isn’t as strong as a brand as the Xbox is. Spinning it off to a different company would probably give some benefit.

Elop would probably move away from Microsoft’s strategy of using these programs to drive demand for its flagship Windows operating system on personal computers and mobile devices, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the 49-year-old executive hasn’t finalized or publicly discussed his analysis of the business. Most of Microsoft’s software has been tied to running on Windows.

For those that remember the old days with monochrome displays and low resolution programs, there is a Windows 1.01 simulator available that runs in a web page. I didn’t care much for Windows 1.01 back then, but I started to get the Windows bug with version 2. I wasn’t able to buy Windows until Windows 3.0, though. This is great to see how things were nearly 30 years ago. We’ve come a long way.

For those that have been using Windows for a long time, the awesome game Hover is back. Of course, now it’s done in HTML5 to help promote the HTML5 standard within Internet Explorer, but it works just fine. Another great time waster.

Three of the top 20 investors in Microsoft are pushing for Bill Gates to step down from the company. After a lot of pressure on Ballmer to resign, and after his retirement announcement, this comes as a shock.

I can see why they are interested in having him step down, with this quote from the article –

They are also worried that Gates – who spends most of his time on his philanthropic foundation – wields power out of proportion to his declining shareholding.

Gates, who owned 49 percent of Microsoft before it went public in 1986, sells about 80 million Microsoft shares a year under a pre-set plan, which if continued would leave him with no financial stake in the company by 2018.

Gates has done an excellent job at the helm of Microsoft, and as a board member and as head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is one guy I’ve gone from hating to loving throughout the years. Great guy that I hope to one day meet. But, with a declining role in the day to day operations, as well as a smaller and smaller financial stake in the company, is he the right person to have on board? More power than those that do have more of a financial stake and with more input on the operations? The ups and downs of having an investor owned corporation.

I hope this has a good outcome for Mr. Gates and the investors can come up with a solution to keep him around in some capacity.

Outlook.com now supports IMAP, as reported by the Outlook.com team in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). Just a heads up if you do visit Reddit –

In a recent AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit, and grabbing some nice karma in the process, the Outlook.com team has made the announcement that they now support IMAPand OAuth. While it already supported EAS (Exchange Activesync), it now allows more devices and applications to access the service, giving you more options to use your email