Michael Dell said today he expects sales of Microsoft's Surface to be "relatively small."

The Dell founder and chief executive commented on Microsoft's upcoming tablet during the PC maker's second-quarter earnings conference call this afternoon.

"I think there's an understanding of the number of units that they're likely to sell is a relatively small percentage. Maybe in the 1 [percent] to 2 percent range of total PC units during next year," Michael Dell said in response to analyst's question.

CFO Brian Gladden also had something to say. "[About] Microsoft … Read more

Slow network speeds got you down? On Monday, computing experts will announce they're tackling the next speed bump for the venerable Ethernet standard.

But don't expect to find the new speed option on your next computer's feature list. The standard, to be produced by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), will likely reach data-transfer speeds between 400 gigabits per second and 1 terabit per second. For comparison, that latter speed would be enough to copy two-and-a-half full-length Blu-ray movies in a second.

In contrast, your laptop today probably maxes out at a mere 100 megabits … Read more

Hewlett-Packard lost ground to Acer, Asus, Apple, and others in key markets in Europe, according to market researcher Gartner.

The Western Europe PC market recorded weak overall PC shipments across all countries, according to Meike Escherich, principal analyst at Gartner.

But some are doing better than others. Acer is gaining on HP in Europe and increased its market share by 2.7 percentage points. Asus was the top performer among the top five vendors and moved up to the No. 3 slot, according to Gartner.

In the U.K., which is one of the worst markets, "the real worry...… Read more

Hewlett-Packard is losing its battle with Apple and Samsung because of a lack of focus and strong products in key segments, an analyst said in a research note today.

After Meg Whitman took over the CEO spot, HP's pitch to financial analysts has been that it can succeed as both a corporate and consumer computing company, UBS analyst Steven Milunovich wrote in research note cited by MarketWatch.

But it's not turning out that way, with the stock now hovering below $20. "HP is...being attacked in enterprise computing by focused goliaths like IBM and EMC and in … Read more

Printers are suffering the same fate as hardcover books -- which is not only good for the environment but maybe for your state of mind.

In a research note titled "Dead-tree format is dying," Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore illustrated the decline of paper-spewing printers with plenty of stats (see graph below).

June quarter results for printer suppliers were "particularly weak as Canon, Epson, Lexmark and Xerox all missed expectations," according to Whitmore.

Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Lexmark over the past 10 quarters show combined supplies and hardware revenues declining about 6 percent year-over-year in the … Read more

CareZone, a startup for organizing and sharing personal information, announced a promotion that grants free access to those with a family member with epilepsy.

Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, who previously led Sun Microsystems, said a partnership with the Epilepsy Foundation will match what CareZone has done with groups dealing with autism and Parkinson's disease.

(For a look at the executive and his views on Oracle, Apple, Amazon, and Intel, check CNET's accompanying Q&A with Schwartz.)

Schwartz hopes CareZone will catch on as a way to let people privately share information such as instructions for babysitters, emergency … Read more

Instead of leading 30,000 employees at a beleaguered Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz is now leading just a dozen at his new startup, CareZone

But Schwartz remains the same. True to the provocateur culture that helped keep Sun in the headlines despite a relatively small advertising budget, Schwartz clearly relishes holding forth about the trends that will separate the computing industry's winners and losers.

Among some opinions Schwartz shared in a recent interview: that Macs will once again seriously compete with Windows for PC market share, that Oracle lost a chance to innovate rather than just litigate in the … Read more

Dell will sell its sleekest ultrabook with a version of Ubuntu Linux this fall.

The Dell XPS 13 ultrabook will be offered with Ubuntu 12.04LTS preloaded in select geographies, the company said in a statement.

The initiative is an extension of Project Sputnik, a pilot project aimed at creating an Ubuntu-based developer laptop.

Dell is taking the project "from pilot to product this fall" and allowing developers "to create 'microclouds' on their laptops...and then deploy that environment seamlessly to the cloud." … Read more

In an effort to attract app developers to its cloud storage, Amazon has introduced SSD-backed rentable servers through Amazon Web Services.

Launched Wednesday, the High I/O Quadruple Extra Large EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) includes 2TB of local SSD-backed storage running on eight virtual cores, 60.5GB of RAM, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. The new rentable EC2 instances will be an "exceptionally good" host for NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB, Amazon Web services said in a blog post.

"Modern web and mobile applications are often highly I/O dependent," Jeff Barr, a senior … Read more