Lenovo is the fastest growing PC maker in the world. The Chinese computer company outgrew every other PC maker for the past seven quarters and is now the third largest PC maker by volume. There’s no questioning Lenovo is a major player in the desktop and notebook fields — and soon tablets, or so says the CEO, Yang Yuanquing.

Lenovo recently announced three tablets, the Honeycomb ThinkTab and IdeaPad K1 along with the Windows-powered IdeaPad P1. The first two just hit the market with the Windows tab coming this fall. With these three tablets, each with a distinct target demographic, Lenovo hopes to surge to the front of the tablet race. Of course that means going head-to-head with the iPad, a product Lenovo’s CEO sees as a top-tier item and whose $500 price puts it out of reach of those in “the small cities, townships, low salary class, low-income class.” Someone should probably tell Yuanquing that his craptastic IdeaPad is only $50 less.

Let’s look at the full quote, courtesy of the Financial Times:

“Apple only covers the top tier. With a $500 price you cannot go to the small cities, townships, low salary class, low-income class. I don’t want to say we want to significantly lower the price, rather our strategy is to provide more categories, to cover different market segments.”

It’s hard to argue against that strategy. Different consumers want their tablets to do different things and one product cannot cover all the bases. The Lenovo IdeaPad K1 targets consumers with a curvy exterior and Netflix app. The prosumer ThinkPad packs a strong security suite, active digitizer stylus, and enough straight lines to look right in any corner office. The IdeaPad P1 is there for consumers and companies that still need/want Windows on a tablet for some reason.

This multi-demographic approach is widely different from what other companies are doing. But it’s not off to a good start.

IdeaPad P1 reviews started popping up. I turned down a review sample; all Honeycomb tablets are essentially the same right now. Engadget gave it a 6/10 while Joanna Stern over at ThisIsMyNext awarded it a more honest 4.5/10. The only notable feature on the consumer-oriented Honeycomb tablet is the Netflix app but is effectively countered by Honeycomb itself and a cheap build. The IdeaPad P1 will likely make a few owners happy but it’s a hard sell at $449 when the iPad is only $50 more. It’s hard to see how Lenovo views their tablet hitting the lower-income demographic when there’s only a $50 price difference.

Lenovo is hitting the tablet market running but it’s still unclear if it will pay off. The IdeaPad K1 is just another stale Honeycomb tab while the remaining two-thirds of Lenovo’s tablet offering targets businesses with tablets that replicate notebook functionality. If Lenovo wants to set their tablets apart from the iPad – and they should – the Android tablets should first prove how they increase productivity and fit in business world – that’s a trick even the iPad hasn’t pulled off.

The news comes hand-in-hand with HP’s latest quarterly financial results, in which it posted revenue of $31.2 billion, up slightly from its year-ago number of $30.7 billion. The company also slightly dropped estimates for its fiscal year 2011 numbers, revising its expected revenue to $127.2 billion from $127.6 billion and targeting diluted earnings per share in the range of $3.59 to $3.70, down from a minimum of $4.27.

HP’s Personal Systems Group, which sells PCs, tablets and smartphones, has the company’s lowest profit margin although it accounted for nearly a third of HP’s overall revenues in 2010. PC sales—particularly consumer products—tend to fluctuate more than business solutions and services as they are more sensitive to seasonal buying trends and economic trends, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

“By spinning off PCs, HP could effectively isolate potentially volatile financial numbers and their effect on its more stable, higher-margin businesses,” King said.

The company said that it was considering a variety of options for the Personal Systems Group, including “a full or partial separation” from the company.

In doing so, HP is following in the footsteps of IBM, which spun off its PC business to Lenovo in 2005 to focus on the higher-margin software and services business. HP may also feel pressure from Apple, which has released highly profitable consumer products such as smartphones and tablets. Apple’s tablets have hurt PC shipments, a market that HP dominates as the world’s largest PC vendor.

HP’s PC business has been marginally profitable, but the margins have shrunk over the years, said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.

“It certainly goes against Carly Fiorina’s theory of ‘all’s well together,’” Kay said. HP bought PC maker Compaq for $25 billion in 2002 when Fiorina was CEO.

Meanwhile, the purchase of Autonomy would be “completely in keeping with the increased focus on software and business solutions that HP’s board had in mind when they hired [CEO] Leo Apotheker,” said King.

Based in both San Francisco and Cambridge, Autonomy provides a variety of portal, enterprise search, content management and analysis tools to organizations.

“Autonomy focuses mostly on search and analytics of unstructured data and databases, which includes information that typically can’t be captured within traditional relational databases,” King said. It has grown a healthy business in the enterprise content space: Autonomy reported revenue of $870 million for 2010.

Traditionally, HP’s enterprise services and hardware sales have dwarfed its software sales. For fiscal 2010, services generated almost $35 billion in net revenue and enterprise hardware generated $18.5 million, while software brought in $3.5 billion. Autonomy’s sales could push that figure past the $4 billion mark

While starting in the enterprise search space with in-house technology, the company expanded its software portfolio through its acquisitions of Verity in 2005 and Interwoven in 2009. It also acquired informational governance software from CA Technologies in 2010.

Such a software portfolio would be “a natural complement to HP’s efforts and technologies” in the enterprise content space, King said. It would dovetail particularly well with HP’s Vertica database and 3PAR data storage products.

The software would also give HP a foothold in the emerging big data space, where it could build systems to compete with EMC’s Greenplum and IBM’s Netezza. “Both [of those] companies consider Big Data a market with a potentially huge future,” King said.

In March, then-newly appointed HP CEO Apotheker announced that HP would concentrate more efforts on the data analytics and big data markets.

The PC business is the first obvious domino to fall as Apotheker tries to bring profitability to the company, said Ezra Gottheil, senior analyst at Technology Business Research.

“It’s a much more exaggerated consequence of the [direction] the company decided to go with Leo Apotheker. Clearly the board wanted higher margins,” Gottheil said. However, “HP will be challenged to drive software to be the kind of generator of profit that it is at IBM,” Gottheil added.

But HP does potentially have something to lose if its PC business goes away—such as some of the leverage it has in buying high-end server parts, Gottheil said.

Elizabeth Heichler of IDG News Service contributed to this report.

Is Silverlight really dead, or is it the future of Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone? This is a question weighing on the minds of legions of Microsoft developers right now – developers who were once promised that Silverlight was the answer to their cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility woes, only to be later informed that JavaScript and HTML5 will be the tools used to build Windows 8 applications. HTML5 is also supported in the IE9 browser, coming soon to Windows Phone “Mango,” due out this fall.

Does that mean HTML5, then, is the future of the Microsoft platform? Maybe not. A new, unannounced platform called “Jupiter” may soon have Microsoft developers leveraging their existing skills to write applications for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Which means, of course, apps that run on all platforms – not just PCs, but tablets and phones, too…and even the TV (via Xbox).

That “Jupiter” exists is not new information. There have been a number of leaks about the forthcoming platform in blogs, forum posts and some folks have even reversed-engineered leaked code to learn more.

Above: C# being used to invoke a Jupiter-based app. Looks like Silverlight animation!

For those not closely tracking Microsoft’s news, here’s what (we think) we know about Jupiter, based on the information out there:

• It is a new user interface library for Windows. (source)
• It is an XAML-based framework. (source)
• It is not Silverlight or WPF, but will be compatible with that code. (source)
• Developers will write immersive applications in XAML/C#/VB/C++ (source, source, source, source)
• It will use IE 10′s rendering engine. (source)
• DirectUI (which draws the visual elements on the screen, arrived in Windows Vista) is being overhauled to support the XAML applications. (source, source)
• It will provide access to Windows 8 elements (sensors, networking, etc.) via a managed XAML library. (source)
• Jupiter apps will be packaged as AppX application types that could be common to both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. (source, source, source, source)
• The AppX format is universal, and can used to deploy native Win32 apps, framework-based apps (Silverlight, WPF), Web apps, and games (source)
• Jupiter is supposed to make all the developers happy, whether .NET (i.e., re-use XAML skills), VB, old-school C++ or Silverlight/WPF. (Source? See all the above!)

That last item is especially important, since to date, Microsoft’s only public comment about Window’s 8′s development platform is that it’s “based on HTML5 and JavaScript.” As Peter Bright of Ars Technica pointed out, Microsoft developers were “horrified” by this news.

Before you throw Microsoft developers under the bus for failing to jump on the HTML5 bandwagon, you have to understand that they’ve invested a lot of time and money over the course of many years to learn all the technologies Microsoft has pushed, including Win32, COM, MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6, .NET, WinForms, Silverlight and WPF, explained Bright. It sounded like Microsoft was asking them to throw away decades of experience and switch to HTML5.

While obviously, HTML5 has come a long way in recent months, it’s arguably not quite ready to drive the entire Microsoft platform just yet. It’s an option, of course, as it is on iOS, Android and other modern operating systems with modern Web browsers.

But it’s not going to be Microsoft developers’ only option, it seems.

At the BUILD conference next month, it’s expected that Microsoft will reveal Jupiter to its developer community and the public, at long last.

Why does Jupiter matter so much? If it’s not clear from the technical details above, it’s because Jupiter may end up being the “one framework” to rule them all. That means it might be possible to port the thousands of Windows Phone apps already written with Silverlight to Windows 8 simply by reusing existing code and making small tweaks. Or maybe even no tweaks. (That part is still unclear). If so, this would be a technical advantage for developers building for Windows Phone 8 (code-named “Apollo” by the way, the son of “Jupiter”) or Windows 8.

Post-PC World: Microsoft vs. Apple vs. Google

Imagine if Apple was to announce something similar – an easy way to port iOS applications to the Mac, for example. Right now, there’s no simple method for this. While there are third-party tools that help, Apple developers still have to do quite a lot of work to get a mobile iOS app running on the Mac OS X desktop. That said, we imagine Apple is secretly hard at work on solving this dilemma as we speak. After all, you can clearly see iOS’s influence on Mac OS X with the latest release, Lion: there’s a iOS-like “LaunchPad” with rows of apps, support for apps that work in “full screen” mode, disappearing scroll bars, and more.

Meanwhile, at Google, there’s currently a lack of vision about how to merge desktop and mobile. Chairman Eric Schmidt has made vague statements about how, at some point in the future, Chrome OS and Android will merge. But it seems like Google has no clear idea as to how it will go about doing so.

That Microsoft is thinking about the merging of desktop and mobile is no small matter. It’s a post-PC world, as they say, and for now, Apple is the only company that seems to be able to compete here. Android is struggling in the tablet market. HP just killed its barely-launched webOS. With Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Jupiter, Microsoft, at least, seems to have a vision.

Developer Discontent Grows, Microsoft Stays Mum

But with Apple so far ahead at this point, the timing of that vision’s reveal may be key to Microsoft’s future. The fact that Microsoft has allowed discontent to grow in its developer community for the entirety of the year, just so it could have a splashy announcement at BUILD may be looked back on as a strategic mistake that contributed to Microsoft’s eventual downfall. Microsoft wants to be Apple, full of secrets and surprises, but it doesn’t have the culture to support it. With Jupiter, the news should have been officially announced months ago, as a tease, with a full reveal at BUILD.

But instead, Microsoft set aside developers and their concerns, in order to win the hearts of consumers, technologists and the media with promises of “big announcements” at BUILD regarding the future of Windows. Oh, Microsoft. Whatever happened to “developers, developers, developers”? Make them happy and the rest of us will come.

Image credits: Microsoft, David Burela

Rackspace is offering a hosted desktop virtualization service with Citrix that provides a way to virtualize all those tablets and smartphones that people are bringing to work.

It also takes the burden off the enterprise, which is having considerable difficulty figuring out how to bring together the multiple parties that are needed to offer a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution. As we noted in a recent post on the topic of virtual desktop infrastructure, it requires the desktop, storage, network, virtualization and data center teams to work together.

The mobile question is the big one here. The service allows the user to keep apps and data in a separate container. If lost, the apps can be disconnected by the administrator. That’s important but there is another aspect to this beyond security. And that’s the issue with storage and how a VDI infrastructure keeps performance optimized.

The Rackspace Hosted Virtual Desktop service includes integration with NetApp storage, which helps alleviate the issues that come when a number of people are on the network or go on all at once in a “boot storm.”

VMware, MokaFive and Quest are just a few of the companies that compete with Citrix in the VDI space. It’s a crowded market and one that analysts question. The difference here is the connection with Rackspace, a hosted service known for its focus on customer support. That means an organization can benefit from the Rackspace infrastructure and Citrix value as a desktop virtualization provider. That may be enough for companies as they adapt to the new mobile desktop environment.

There is also the question about how integration will be accomplished on a hosted service. How do you put all all the pieces together? If Rackspace and Citrix can tie their worlds together, it will help a lot.

The question I have is about the overall market. Gartner predicts that the growth in the market will take place in the next two years with 70 million people using VDI by 2014. According to a ComputerWorld story, IDC expects that by 2014, 34 million seats or 7% of all PC desktop shipments.

But it’s not clear that desktop virtualization has had much pick-up in the market. Maybe it’s the hosted aspect of the equation that will make the difference. Organizations may want the benefits that come with VDI but the infrastructure requirements are considerable. A hosted service may be more what customers are looking for as mobile devices continue to proliferate in the enterprise.

Microsoft is planning to show off a version of its Windows 8 designed for tablet PCs next week, according to a report.

Bloomberg says that Windows President Steven Sinofsky will present a version of the software with a touchscreen interface at the All Things D conference next week. The software will be running on a tablet based on Nvidia’s Tegra chip. The new operating system isn’t expected to be out until next year.

Rumors about a new Microsoft tablet have been floating around for some time. In February, Business Insider reported that Microsoft planned to showcase a version of Windows 8 for tablets in June. According to the report, Microsoft is taking a more Apple-like approach to interface design by using the Metro interface developed for Windows Phone 7.

The effort comes after two Microsoft misfires in the tablet market. There was the 2010 debut of the “slate PC,” a model running Windows 7 and Amazon’s Kindle software, which has been compared to a stripped-down PC lacking a keyboard. And long before that came the Tablet PC, first unveiled by Bill Gates at Comdex in 2000. The Tablet PC was a laptop with a rotating screen and stylus functionality.

Meanwhile, Microsoft recently reported weak consumer PC sales partially because of the surge in sales for Apple’s iPad and iPad 2. To spur PC sales among students, Microsoft is now offering a free Xbox for those who buy a PC costing $699 and up from participating retailers. Despite Microsoft’s relatively late entry to the tablet market, at least one analyst, Citigroup, predicts Microsoft can corner a large share of the market in 2013 and beyond.

Microsoft is acquiring Skype for a reported $8.5 billion in cash. There has been a lot of speculation about what this might mean for Skype, the leading Internet telephone and chat service with around 663 million registered users. For consumers, there are two key aspects to this deal which will potentially take Skype to the next level: Microsoft’s mobile expertise (in collaboration with its mobile partner Nokia) and its enormously popular gestural interface system Kinect.

Microsoft has a competitive mobile offering now in Windows Phone 7. In addition, as Todd Bishop from GeekWire noted, there are over 10 million "Microsoft cameras connected to television screens in homes around the world" – thanks to Xbox 360 Kinect sensors. This is the future of Skype, now that it's been acquired by Microsoft: Skype will be much more widely used on your mobile and in your home.

Skype has 145 million average monthly connected users, most of whom use the service through their PC. However, in case it’s not obvious by now, the future of Internet services lies in mobile devices and real world objects (such as televisions).

Skype must make that jump to non-PC devices. And Microsoft is actually a great partner for that, despite deserved skepticism about its track record with pricey acquisitions and leaving aside the cynicism about Microsoft buying Skype as a defensive strategy against Google. It has Windows Phone 7, an impressive new smartphone platform. Plus it has Kinect, perhaps the key to the next version of Windows OS.

Skype has made some in-roads into the mobile market, with an iPhone and Android app – among other mobile services. It’s also released Skype enabled TVs and TV compatible webcams. But those services for mobile and the home are not yet widely used. Microsoft offers a way for Skype to extend beyond the PC and into mainstream mobile devices and millions of family televisions.

This isn’t merely audio, of course. Kinect had its origin in the Xbox 360 gaming device. Video is where the future of Skype lies, which again plays right into Microsoft’s hands with Kinect. Take a look at this Microsoft promotional video (found via Gigaom) about video chat. It shows a demo of two people not just chatting by video, but doing social things like watching a movie together. Also Kinect can track you as you move around, which would be very handy for a video Skype call – you’d be able to walk around the room and the camera would follow you.

It remains to be seen how well Microsoft implements Skype into its mobile and Kinect offerings, but this is undeniably a huge opportunity in the consumer communications market for Microsoft. It can take Skype to the next level, but will it? Let us know in the comments whether you think Microsoft will pull it off.

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Lots of companies benefit from having a blog. For some, it’s a friendly, accessible way to say hi to devoted fans, curious onlookers and likely a few haters and skeptics. For others, it’s simply the way they communicate important messages. The role of public relations professionals in this chatty puzzle is to help companies build, shape and fine-tune their public voice. In fact, many PR campaigns aren’t complete without a blog strategy. But building a client blog from the ground up can be daunting. So where do you begin?

Start, With Help

When it comes to picking out a blog platform, there are certainly plenty to choose from, but Jeff Davis, who runs the content services team at San Francisco-based PR firm LaunchSquad, generally points clients towards WordPress, a mostly-free, open-source platform. Davis also makes another point: When you’re just starting out, don’t go DIY. “If you’re building something strategic for a client, even if it’s small scale, hire a WordPress developer to handle set up, find the right plugins and design a nice UI. It can be fairly inexpensive and is critical to building a blog that will work the way you need it to quickly and effectively.”

With a bit of help, WordPress’ initial set up process is simple and fast, and yet it offers a huge range of customization and configuration options. And with thousands of plugins, there is one that will satisfy any need that you can think of, often for free. For those who are coordinating blogs for multiple clients, WordPress also offers admin features for easy management across the board.

Optimize, But Not Too Much

According to Rich Brooks, President and “Chief Blogging Officer” at Flyte New Media, your SEO practices should have a very simple goal: rank high in search results for the things that your client’s customers are looking for. He recommends starting with a keyword analysis service like Raventools, WordTracker or Google Adwords’ keyword tool.

You want to pick one keyword topic per post, mentioning it once in the post title and once in the body of the post. Be sure to link important words to past posts as well, but keep it to one or two internal links at most. Beyond that, make sure you’ve got the WordPress SEO plugin installed and place the rest of your focus on working with your client to create engaging content.

Make It Worth Sharing

The company and product news that grace the vast majority of corporate blogs can certainly be both useful and good, but it’s just a tiny snippet of what is possible and inspiring. Arik Hanson, principal at ACH Communications, recommends considering content that is less about your client’s product, and more about the “culture that surrounds” your client’s product.

Hubspot, a company that offers inbound Internet marketing software, is a prime example. Its blog offers up creatively packaged, practical information that appeals to its very own target audience. Readers will find witty, educational posts, videos, guest contributions and even cartoons that cover everything from SEO and lead generation to Charles Darwin and cupcakes.

As you work together with your client to determine the content and focus of the blog, you should ask two key questions:

• Who is going to read it?
• What kinds of topics and issues do they care the most about?

There are tons of ways to develop an ongoing flow of engaging blog content, especially if your client is willing to talk about something other than the company. Don’t be afraid to pull in experts for Q&As, give spots to guest authors, respond to news and timely topics, share the spotlight with partners and customers and provide educational how-tos. And of course, we all love lists.

Think Like a Media Property

Davis says that there are times when a company blog can fill a pretty significant informational void. In 2009, Boston-based PR agency March Communications launched a blog for client TuneUp, which makes PC utilities for consumers. After conducting some market research, the company learned that when faced with PC problems, many people turned to forums and blogs to end up finding unverified and even potentially harmful solutions. The goal of the TuneUp blog was to become a reliable source of information for PC users who want to improve performance. The team brought on an external, experienced editor-in-chief to ensure editorial quality, and it placed the majority of the blog’s focus on helping users solve real problems. Since launch, more than 170,000 people have visited the TuneUp company blog to find answers to their PC questions and concerns.

Build Your Own Newswire

Traditionally, when a company has news to share, the official statement comes in the form of a press release. However, a carefully-written, information-rich blog post can play a similar role. Andrew Sinkov, VP of marketing at Evernote, explains that “your blog can be your own newswire.” A pre-published draft of a blog post, shared with reporters under embargo, is a legitimate source for news. Last month, Evernote used a blog post as the “news announcement” for the launch of its redesigned web app, with an embargo set for the time the post was to be published. Instead of having the information live on a wire somewhere, the Evernote blog is the ultimate source for Evernote news. The announcement post has since been viewed over 17,000 times.

The benefit of incorporating blog posts into your news announcement strategy is that it’s an opportunity to share the news in the client’s voice. “You write a blog post like it’s coming from you. You’re telling a story, you’re talking to someone. If you’re excited about something, that personal excitement comes through,” says Sinkov. This doesn’t mean that blog posts should replace press releases, it simply means that they should not be overlooked. So if you’ve got a press announcement and a blog post all drafted up and set for a big launch, make sure the reporters who cover your news get to see them both.

Turn Your Readers Into Viewers

Some of us and/or our clients might have the luxury of a video-savvy person on staff — but many do not yet. Not having a dedicated video pro doesn’t mean you can’t post videos, which are a great way to engage an audience. Whether it’s a user offering her own how-to, a customer waxing poetic about how great your client’s product is, an employee explaining why people should want to work there, or the CEO talking about his favorite kind of ice cream (or his company vision, for that matter), video tells a story in a way that text often cannot match.

Steve Garfield, author of Get Seen: Online Video Secrets and the first-ever video blogger, explains that video is easier than ever to capture. Any smartphone will do as a start. For example, capture a video on an iPhone, pull it into the iMovie app to trim the clips and layer in photos and sound, upload it to YouTube directly from the app and embed it in a blog post. Keep it short and sweet — 30 to 60 seconds at most. Garfield also recommends the Kodak Playfull, a simple camera with built-in editing and sharing features.

The best advice here is to be ready to experiment. Blogs can be casual, and captured video can be real, authentic and less-than-perfect. Companies are made of people, after all, and all of these same characteristics apply. Pick your device and take it with you when your client is speaking, out at an event, or excited about a new product, and encourage your client to capture video around the office, too.

Some Parting Advice

• Create an editorial calendar that outlines both the types of posts that you would like to see on your client’s blog (video, text, photo), and the post topics. Make sure you’ve got at least two months of blogging covered at any given time, and that there is clear delineation of responsibilities, including someone who is actively maintaining the calendar. And don’t be surprised when the topic pipeline changes, because it inevitably does.
• Come up with a realistic posting schedule. One post per week is a good starting point, and it can go up from there based on time and resources. It is good to be consistent, and it is okay to for some posts to be relatively brief in order to keep things going.
• Determine who your writers are and what amount of time and resources you’ll have at your disposal. Get them to commit to a certain number of posts per month or quarter — and start conservatively.
• Make it as easy as possible for readers to spread your content around and be sure your blog is decked out with all the key sharing plugins.
• Make a list of the top 10 or 15 most influential bloggers in your client’s space. Then, make a habit of sending them a friendly note when a great, relevant post goes up. And be sure to give back to your blogger community by setting up a blogroll and offering “link love” and retweets of great posts that you come across.
• Think like a reporter. Whether you are the main writer of your client’s blog or are working with a handful of people on the client side who do the posting, pay attention to timely topics that come through and share your ideas.

What do you think of blogging for PR? Let us know in the comments below. Share your blogs, as well as your advice for PR professionals who use blogs.

Disclosure: The author works for Launchsquad, and Evernote is one of her clients. Hubspot is a Mashable sponsor.

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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tioloco, LdF, narawon.