Sunday Sampler: Windows price war, Sandglaz adds attachments, Fusebox integrates Google Calendar, BlackBerry’s Chen pissed, Huddle for Office
Windows is dropping the price of Windows 8.1 by 70% for tablet and PC makers, under renewed pressure from Google’s Chromebooks, Bloomberg reports. I wrote about Google’s new deal with VMware to get Windows apps running on Chromebooks, last week (see The Office Wars intensify as Google brings Windows apps to Chromebook), and the pressure is high.
The real concern is that companies will simply change their plans about Windows, and start to migrate in a wholesale fashion to iOS, Mac OS, Android, and Chrome OS.
This discount is for low-cost machines — where Windows is fighting it out with Chrome OS, Android, and iOS. OEMs will be charged only $15 for 81. licenses for machines that retail for less than $250, instead of $50, as is still the case for more expensive machines.
Computer shipments fell 10% last year, a record, and the forecast is for more droppage as tablets and smartphones increase in capabilities.
Sandglaz has (finally) added the ability to attach documents to tasks, one of the must haves I wrote about last year (see Setting the bar for team task management apps).
The implementation is limited to Dropbox at the present time, which is unusual: typically tool vendors start with a native ability to upload files as attachments, and later on introduce integrations with Dropbox and other sync-and-sahe companies. Odd, but at least there is a way to do it.
FuzeBox announced the ability to schedule Fuze meetings directly in Google Calendar via a Chrome extension. If you invite people that don’t have a Fuze account, no problem. The meeting invitation link will add them via browser, or they can dial in by phone.

John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry, engaged in a very public spat with T-Mobile about a new promotion the company is running offering incentives to customer to drop their BlackBerries. In a company blog post he wrote, after praising users that complained about the marketing campaign,
Finally, to T-Mobile, I would like to remind you that our long-standing partnership was once productive and profitable for both BlackBerry and T-Mobile. I hope we can find a way forward that allows us to serve our shared customers once again. Notwithstanding the current challenge, we remain very excited about BlackBerry’s future.
John Legere, the CEO of T-Mobile, wrote a number of tweets about the hiccup, saying he wanted to connect with Chen to discuss it, but that Chen didn’t have a twitter account. Hey, John: use the phone.
Huddle released Huddle for Microsoft Office, a free add-on for Windows that allows users to lift content directly to the Huddle cloud, rather than save a file on the hard drive and upload it manually. As the company said in a press release,
Teams can provide feedback on content, make changes and reply in-context to co-workers using @ mentions and can use Huddle’s cloud collaboration features without having to leave the applications and open a web browser.