Thurrott Daily: October 16, 2015

Here’s what’s happening today.

10/16/2015 2:32:25 PM

Of Lenovo and Microsoft Surface

Dell, as you may recall, has agreed to resell Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Surface Book PCs. So, too, has HP. But the world’s biggest PC maker, Lenovo? Not so much.

As first reported by The Register, Lenovo president and COO Gianfranco Lanci told attendees at the recent Canalys Channels Forum that his firm had refused to resell Surface.

“I said no to resell their product,” he said. “Microsoft asked me more than one year ago, and I said no. I don’t see any reason why I should sell a product from within brackets, competition.”

HP Inc. CEO Dion Weisler estimates that Microsoft invested over $2 billion creating the “Surface category” of product, something that his firm—or Dell—would never have done. But HP is reselling the devices because of “customer pull.”

Maybe Lenovo just isn’t listening to its customers. 🙂

Google’s book scanning project is found to be legal

I’m not sure why this bothers me, but “a United States appeals court ruled on Friday that Google’s effort to build a digital library of millions of books was ‘fair use’ and did not infringe on the copyrights of authors,” The New York Times reports.

“The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals,” Judge Pierre N. Leval of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote in the court’s decision.

The Author’s Guild, which has been fighting Google for over a decade for this activity, says it now plans to take its case to the Supreme Court.

10/16/2015 9:08:33 AM

Games with Gold reminder

It’s October 16th, and you know what that means: More “Games with Gold” free games are now available to Xbox Live Gold subscribers. As I noted previously inGames with Gold: October 2015, that means The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season for Xbox One and for Xbox 360 as well. This an absolutely fantasticgame, so be sure to check it out.