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Features

• Your workplace in 2020: Gartner's predictions

  How will people work 10 years from now? Gartner thinks it has a pretty good idea, predicting 10 major changes that will occur during the next 10 years.

• 11 free Linux apps your business needs now

  Despite the wealth of free applications out there, many small business owners continue to spend an inordinate amount of their all-too-scarce resources on software.

• Twitter Tips: 5 Ways to Find Relevant Followers

  Twitter has more than 100 million users, which means you're bound to encounter a lot of noise. You'll find brands hawking their products or services, some users tweeting the mundane details of their everyday lives and spammers insisting you check out their "hottest new pix!" Um, no thanks.

• Lab Notes: The Inside Scoop on Browser Speed Testing

  If you're a regular PCWorld reader, you may have noticed the Browser Blowout story we posted last week. In it, I looked at various aspects of the major Web browsers, including features, interface, security, and performance.

• What Android's impressive growth means for you

  Rather than bore you with an opening line about how Android phones outsold the iPhone last quarter, I'm going to begin with an anecdote:

• Is Linux really harder to use?

  Not surprisingly, the misperception that Linux is harder to use than other operating systems is also one that competing vendors routinely use to scare potential new users away from Linux.

• Microsoft, get back to work!

  Steve Ballmer assured analysts and the world that Microsoft is hard at work developing a Windows 7-based tablet to compete with devices like the Apple iPad.

• Android and Apps

  The more I use the HTC Incredible, the more I like it. And the thing that really makes the Incredible, er, incredible is its operating system, Android<.

• Apocalypse: 52 percent of CIOs plan to blow up IT groups

  The saying goes something like this: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The statement is, of course, embraced as dogma by those fearful of change and by automobile owners praying for a reasonable bill of charge while waiting at the mechanic's garage.

• An IT department's crucial role in a new product launch

  In late 2008, Monsanto licensed a seed coating that helps corn, soybean and other seeds fight insects and disease during the tricky germination stage. By early 2009, company scientists had finished work on that cocktail of fungicides and insecticides, dubbed Acceleron, and the company wanted to get the coating to market in time for the 2010 planting season. "We were going after that opportunity very aggressively. If we don't hit season, that opportunity is another 12 months away," says CIO Shirley Cunningham.

• SAP-Sybase: What to expect in the first 90 days

  Now that SAP's roughly $US6 billion acquisition of Sybase has gained clearance from European regulators, it may not be long before the deal is finalised. With that in mind, users and partners of the companies have much to consider during the next few months, analysts say.

• Windows 7 Migration: Five Real Challenges & Lessons Learned

  Windows 7 momentum is slowly but surely spilling over into the corporate world as long-frozen tech budgets begin to thaw and new PCs are purchased.

• Asus tablet: Hello Android, bye Windows?

  Beyond Apple's iPad, the tablet computer market is a murky place inhabited largely by vaporware.

• 2010's New Software Star: 'Socialytic' Business Apps

  What's next for the ever-evolving and consolidating enterprise applications market in 2010? The rise of next-generation "socialytic" apps that fuse business apps with analytics and social and collaboration software.

• IT Management in 2010: Complex, Costly, Confounding

  No one ever claimed that managing corporate IT systems was easy, or without its fare share of tumult, or for the faint of heart. But during the past decade, as better IT tools emerged in the high-tech industry-such as application integration software, Web-based software delivery methods, project implementation strategies and virtualization techniques-it would be reasonable to think that the overall management of IT might have become less arduous and risky.