Microsoft said on Tuesday that there is a test version of updated Facebook software for Windows Phone 8. The beta software adds support for high-res photos, post sharing and the Facebook Timeline.

However, the companies apparently mean it when they say beta.

“Don’t like it when apps crash?” Microsoft said in a blog post. “This probably isn’t the program for you.”

The app isn’t available in the Windows Phone marketplace, but is available via this direct link.

Separately, an app geared toward to making it easier for folks to switch from Android to a Windows Phone has made its way onto the Google Play and Windows Phone stores. Developed by Quixey, Switch to Windows Phone helps ease the move and allows one to see which of their apps are available for Microsoft’s operating system.

Microsoft said CFO Peter Klein “will leave the company at the end of the current fiscal year, after nearly four years in role and 11 years at the company,” adding that the software giant will be naming a new leader from its internal finance team in the next several weeks.

In addition, reporting its third-quarter results, the software giant said its revenue was just under $20.5 billion on earnings of 72 cents. Wall Street analysts were expecting Microsoft to earn 68 cents on just over $20.5 billion in revenue, compared to 60 cents on $17.4 billion in the same period a year ago.

Strong results in its Business, Entertainment and its Servers & Tools units, and even its Online Services division, were bright spots, even as its flagship Windows business was flat when adjusted for upgrade offers.

But flat is not down. Many investors have been worried about the results, focusing especially on the negative impact of declines in PC sales on its flagship Windows software and the slower uptake of Windows Phone and Surface tablet devices that the company has introduced.

It seems as if Microsoft has calmed those critics, at least for now. Shares were up about two percent in after-hours trading to $29.36.

“The bold bets we made on cloud services are paying off as people increasingly choose Microsoft services including Office 365, Windows Azure, Xbox LIVE, and Skype,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a statement. “While there is still work to do, we are optimistic that the bets we’ve made on Windows devices position us well for the long-term.”

Here are Microsoft’s financial docs on Q3 — Klein will be part of its conference call with analysts on the results at 2:30 pm PT (which I cannot cover today, but I wish the CFO a fond farewell):

PressReleaseFY13Q3

FinancialStatementFY13Q3

Here’s a quick rundown: Hewlett-Packard fell more than 6 percent to $20.88. Dell fell more than 1 percent to $14.04. Apple fell slightly to $434.33. Intel fell 2 percent to $21.83. Advanced Micro Devices fell 3.5 percent to $2.52. Microsoft fell almost 4.5 percent to $28.93. Hard drive manufacturer Seagate fell 3 percent to $36.53. Western Digital fell 2.5 percent to $17.53. All told, they fell by an average of about 2.85 percent.

It was that kind of day, and the financial analysts who track the stocks of the PC makers had to jump in with their own assessments.

“We ultimately don’t believe that tablets are ‘replacing’ PCs (very few people we have met have actually retired their PC because of a tablet),” analyst Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein wrote in a note to clients today, “but they are contributing to PCs being used less — which, in turn, is pushing out the replacement cycle for PCs. This is a big deal.”

He also said that HP in particular, which according to IDC’s reckoning saw a decline in PC sales of more than 23 percent year on year in the first quarter, may miss sales estimates by more than $700 million as a result. “A key question is whether the contraction in volume (potentially $1 billion in revenue) will have a material impact on PC margins,” he wrote. “We suspect that some of HP’s share loss was the result of increased pricing discipline and a focus on margins in the quarter.”

Shaw Wu, analyst with Sterne Agee, placed at least some of the blame for the market’s poor performance at Microsoft’s door. “We frankly believe Microsoft’s strategy of forcing user interface changes that nobody wants has proven to be a disaster,” he wrote in a note issued today. “Not to mention the customer confusion with too many choices with multiple form factors.” He now expects the PC market to contract in 2013 by 5 percent, down further from his earlier 2 percent guidance.

Yesterday’s reports from the market research firms IDC and Gartner showed conclusively what pretty much anyone paying attention had already suspected — that the bottom has finally fallen out of the PC business. During the first quarter of 2013, the combined shipments showed their worst year-on-year decline ever.

Reversing that trend is probably not an option, which means that a fundamentally new chapter in the history of the personal computer industry is unequivocally here. Shareholders in those companies will start making value judgments accordingly. That was in evidence in the premarket trading this morning.

With a few minutes to go before the opening of markets in New York, shares of market leader Hewlett-Packard were down by nearly 6 percent. Dell, still the subject of an ongoing fight over its proposed $24.4 billion plan to go private in a leveraged buyout transaction, was down only slightly.

Chipmaker Intel was down nearly 3 percent. Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s one remaining rival, was down 2.7 percent. Microsoft, the primary supplier of operating system software to the world’s PCs, was down 3.5 percent.

Apple, the maker of the iPad, which arguably has disrupted the PC industry, but is also North America’s third-largest supplier of PCs, was down by $2, or less than half of a percentage point.

The software giant is developing a new lineup of its Surface tablets, including a seven-inch version expected to go into mass production later this year, said people familiar with the company’s plans.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

For our readers who are not inclined to constantly hit the refresh button, here’s a quick look back at the Top 10 stories that drove AllThingsD this week:

1. Disney Shuts Down LucasArts
2. Here’s Why You Hate Your Cable Company
3. AT&T: Oh, Wait … About That Samsung Galaxy S4 Pricing
4. Samsung Says Apple’s Patent Damages Could Still Exceed $1 Billion
5. HD Voice Will Start Coming to AT&T Later This Year
6. You Still Can’t Resell Your iTunes Songs, Court Rules
7. Elissa Murphy, One of Yahoo’s High-Profile Tech Execs, Heads to Go Daddy as CTO
8. Henry Blodget Is Quietly Planning a Stunning Return to Wall Street
9. What’s Dell’s Bidding Process Really About? (Clue: It’s Not About Fixing Dell)
10. Windows Phone Gaining a Toehold in Some Markets

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

“I’ve been evangelizing that BlackBerry is not a business device,” global gaming head Anders Jeppsson said. “It used to be, maybe, many years ago. But over 80 percent of our users are active consumers today, and they’re very, very social.”

In order to get to those users, though, developers must first be persuaded that porting games over to BlackBerry is simple and cheap. Naturally, Jeppsson said it is, thanks in part to the company’s open-source efforts on Github and the cross-platform social gaming tools provided by BlackBerry-owned Scoreloop.

Microsoft is also touting how easy it is for mobile developers to transition into its ecosystem, but — this is both a positive and a negative for Redmond — the discoverability gap versus BlackBerry 10 is huge. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are the newest members of a big family, including the proven powerhouse Xbox 360 and its accompanying Xbox Live Marketplace, not to mention Windows 8’s backward compatibility with innumerable PC games. Meanwhile, BlackBerry 10 is a nascent OS currently available on just one device, the Z10.

Efforts to bridge that device gap include some monetary incentives for BB10 developers, like the (now ended) “10K Commitment” that promised early-adopter devs up to $9,000 in free money if they couldn’t reach $10,000 in revenue in their first year on BB10. There’s also a first-mover advantage, Jeppsson added, because the OS is barely two months old. In other words, it’s easier for a game to break out on a non-Google and non-Apple platform because, at least for now, the pickings are slimmer.

Jeppsson said he’s been working on developer outreach since he came to Research In Motion in 2012, when RIM acquired Jeppsson’s user interface design company, The Astonishing Tribe. He claimed “many” developers are making more money with BB10 than they are on iOS.

But the devil’s in the details, and one of the biggest questions is, what proportion of BlackBerry 10 users are frequently playing games on their new Z10s? A company representative said she would try to find out last week, but did not respond to a follow-up request for numbers. (“Frequently” is important, because players who download games, open them once and never come back are near worthless for the free-to-play mobile developers that dominate the charts on other operating systems.)

Lack of specific numbers isn’t stopping Jeppsson from some good old-fashioned competition bashing when it comes to attracting developers from outside BlackBerry’s ecosystem.

“I think BlackBerry users are actually users that are willing to pay for quality content,” he said. “They expect a quality experience. They’re not going to sideload stuff and pirate it like Android [users], stealing software.”

However, he added that his newest goals are less about developer outreach and more about making the case that the consumer’s gaming experience is better on his side of the fence.

His hope is that, as phone hardware continually improves (“This is easily an Xbox One in terms of what it can do,” he said, holding up a Z10), users will be able to play the same games as consoles, so that a game started on the bus can be finished on the couch.

Again, Microsoft is preaching a similar message. But although it already has the console side of the equation worked out, its cross-platform games are more casual than the more complex hardware-constrained games Jeppsson aspires to pair with BlackBerry — or, indeed, run entirely on his phone.

“Why would you want to buy a big PC to play Counter-Strike, where you remove all the details anyway because you want 60 frames per second?” he said. “That’s how I play Counter-Strike.”

As you might expect, there’s good news for any company in the business of building tablets and mobile phones, and lousy news for those building PCs. Worldwide sales of “devices,” a category that combines PCs, tablets, mobile phones and ultramobiles (tiny notebooks, presumably), will approach a combined three billion units by 2017, representing growth of 34 percent from 2012.

Growth will be led by tablets, which are expected to grow by 70 percent, to 467 million units. Phones will break the two-billion-unit mark in 2017, Gartner says. Traditional PCs, on the other hand, will decline by fewer than 300 million units by that year. Obviously, this is bad news for the PC players, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell, who are both struggling to get their PC divisions back on track, while at the same time trying to kick-start mobile device plays. (Click the chart below to make it bigger.)

Another nugget in the Gartner report: Google’s Android devices will dominate, accounting for nearly a billion and a half unit sales by 2017. Its nearest competition will be Microsoft’s Windows, and Apple’s combined portfolio of Mac and iOS devices, which will split about a billion devices between them.

Over the past couple of weeks, I explored a variety of options for extracting files from my old floppy disks and getting them onto my current computing system. I shipped disks out across the country, and called around to public libraries with the fervor of a college student looking for a textbook. I even found an 11-year-old in San Francisco who does disk transfers for family and friends for a small fee.

I spent about $100 to get hundreds of files off of more than a dozen disks, and another $25 on an external drive that would let me transfer the files myself. It was worth it to me to recover these files, but there are also cheaper ways to do it.

The first step is to make sure you know what kind of floppy disks you have — whether Mac or Windows PC disks, 5.25-inch floppies or 3.5-inch. I found that 3.5-inch disk drives, while not exactly common, are still more prevalent than older 5.25-inch disk drives or equipment for reading eight-inch floppies.

It’s also important to understand that not all of your floppy disks may be readable. They may have degraded over time, and even if the files can be read, you may no longer have compatible software with which to read them. For example, most of my files were old Microsoft Word documents, but there were also Final Draft screenplays that I couldn’t open without that software.

Using File Transfer Services

As I do when I’m looking up a new restaurant or researching every possible cause for a headache, I turned first to the Internet. Throughout my research, references to the same two websites kept coming up: RetroFloppy.com and FloppyDisk.com (which also operates as DiskDuper).

RetroFloppy, run by a man named David Schmidt, has been online and operating since 2006. It works mostly with 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch disks, though the company does work with older 800k Mac discs (Since the company started, Schmidt has received only three requests for eight-inch disk transfers.)

RetroFloppy charges $6.95 per standard floppy disk file extraction and conversion — which means he takes the time to locate compatible software and put old files in a format that’s readable on your current system. Specialty disks or ones that require a little surgery may cost more.

Usually, customers will put in an online or phone request, and then Schmidt himself will get in touch to find out more about the disks and see if RetroFloppy can extract the files. If the job can be done, you mail the disks to North Carolina in a protective cardboard box.

The company promises a turnaround time of two business days at most. In my experience, Schmidt was professional and a fast responder to my email inquiries, and a few days after I shipped my eight disks, I had received an email that included a downloadable zip drive with my files. By the next day, my floppy disks had arrived back home. Then I received an email invoice, powered by PayPal.

Unfortunately, RetroFloppy was expensive. The total for my eight disk extractions and file conversions, plus a CD transcription and return shipping, was $70.50.

California-based FloppyDisk.com, on the other hand, offered a more reasonable price for my disks, which were old Windows disks: $1.95 per 3.5-inch disk transfer. Mac-formatted 3.5-inch disks are $4.95 a transfer, as are 5.25-inch Windows or DOS disks.

Again, I filled out an online form, and then spoke with Tom Persky, who runs FloppyDisk, to explain my needs (no automated tellers at these one-man shops). This time I had to pay upfront, through PayPal. Then I headed to the local shipping center to mail seven more floppies.

Less than 48 hours later, I received a downloadable YouSendIt file, through email, that included almost all of my old files. Unfortunately, one of the disks couldn’t be read. But my total for the disk extractions, plus sending the disks back and a USB flash drive (included in the return shipment), was $23.60.

Overall, my experiences with these two services were positive. Afterward, I spent a good chunk of time poring through photos, cringing at old journal entries (in which I devoted entirely too much digital ink to unworthy love interests) and shaking my head at what passed as a college paper.

Buying an External Drive

If you have dozens of disks you want to tap into, it might be more economical to purchase an old external diskfloppy drive that connects to your computer via USB, and try to transfer the files yourself. These range in price from around $10 to $25, and can be found on online retailers like Amazon and eBay.

This might sound daunting, but in my research I was referred to an 11-year-old in San Francisco who, using his software-engineer-father’s equipment, transfers files off 3.5-inch floppies for a dollar a disk. So I figured if he can do it, many other people probably can, too.

I actually purchased an old Dell drive from FloppyDisk for $24.95, but I unwisely didn’t think about the fact that I now use Macs. When I plugged the external drive into my MacBook Pro, my laptop recognized the drive but couldn’t read the disks. I would have to plug into a Windows-based PC to see and move the files.

Calling Your Local Library

If you really want to transfer your floppy files for no cost, you might want to call your local library. While budget cuts have hit libraries pretty hard in recent years, one tiny silver lining is that some haven’t upgraded to brand-new computers.

The Boston Public Library, for example, has more than 60 computers available to the public, and the majority of them still have 3.5-inch floppy disk drives. The San Francisco Public Library has a limited supply of external drives that people can check out and use in the building.

The New York Public Library and the Washington, D.C., public library, however, no longer have computers with disk drives, so will require some research. But if you want to save a few bucks, the library might help you get the job done.

Shutterstock/Fussypony

The offer promises developers $100 for each app they bring to the PC or phone, up to a total of $2,000.

But paying for apps is a risky game. Such a move can boost the total number of apps, but seems unlikely to convince big-name developers to bring their apps to Windows.

Microsoft, for its part, seems to agree. In a statement to AllThingsD, a representative said that paying developers is not its primary strategy, noting that the promotion is a limited-time offer that runs only through the end of June.

“We believe the best apps come from those partners who are invested in the platform and own their experience now and in the future,” Microsoft said. “Of course, we are always working to spark creativity with new developer audiences and sometimes try limited incentives or contests, like Keep The Cash. However, it is not representative of an ongoing program.”

Microsoft added that it is encouraged by both the quality and number of apps out there, noting it now has four times as many apps as it did when Windows 8 launched.