Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has since got in contact to clarify that Ballmer was actually repeating a figure of 500 million Windows 7 license sales that was announced in December - explaining this means there is an installed base of 500 million potential users that could be upgraded to Windows 8.

While that changes the context of his comments in the article below slightly, it still shows that Microsoft has high hopes that its new operating system will be adopted by the majority of its vast user base.

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Shy, retiring and wallflower are not a phrases you'd ever hear in connection with Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer.

He's one of life's characters, you might say, although we say this with respect, as Ballmer's enthusiasm is a refreshing change from many dry and dusty chief executives that can waffle on for hours without saying anything remotely interesting.

In that spirit, Ballmer once again has hogged the spotlight with comments in Seoul, South Korea, in which he estimated Microsoft will have 500 million users of its forthcoming Windows 8 system in the next year, according to a report by the AFP.

Such a figure, when considered in detail, is hard to place - would that be good or bad for Microsoft?

Well, firstly, there must be far more than 500 million Windows machines in operation at present, running everything from Windows Vista to Windows 7. So 500 million could seem low in that context.

However, these platforms have had years to establish themselves in the market, and during periods of little competition, unlike now as Apple starts to make inroads into the desktop market and consumers eschew laptops and home PCs for iPhones and iPads.

Perhaps, then, 500 million would be a success for Microsoft, especially when set against data it announced in 2010 that it had shifted 175 million copies of Windows 7 within the first nine months in which it was released.

However, estimates from analyst firms don't even place total PC sales for the entire market at above 500 million in 2012. Gartner estimates around 440 million units will be sold this year, suggesting Ballmer's boasts may be a tad speculative.

Then again, Microsoft is pushing Windows 8 as a product not just for the desktop, but also the smartphone and tablet markets.

This could well mean that, if manufacturers such as Samsung, Dell, Acer, Nokia and Fujitsu all push new tablets to the market, 500 million may even be a modest estimate, especially as consumers and businesses in developing nations start to embrace these devices for the first time.

Ultimately, only time, and sales figures, will prove how popular the new platform from Microsoft proves to be - even the head of Windows has admitted it's a ‘bet' on the future of computing - but you can be sure Ballmer will be the first to let the world know if his prediction comes true.

Just days before its highly-anticipated initial public offering, social networking giant Facebook has received a very public slap in the face from car giant General Motors: it has told Facebook that it will no longer advertise with it because the ads just don't work.

The loss of $10m in ad revenue is not likely to dent Facebook's market value, which is on course to sale past the $100bn mark when it floats. Last year Facebook made $3.7bn in revenue.

But the public rebuke over the effectiveness of advertising on the social network will undoubtedly sting.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported GM's shift in advertising strategy, the car giant spends around $40m each year on Facebook – three-quarters going on social content and $10m on advertising.

The implication is clear: Facebook's a great avenue for businesses to connect with their customers, but spending money on adverts is simply over-egging it.

And GM is not alone in questioning the value of Facebook advertising.

According to research by online ad analysts WordStream, Facebook ads generate far fewer click-throughs than those placed with arch-rival Google. WordStream claimed the average click-through rate on Google display ads is 0.4 per cent; with Facebook it's just 0.05 per cent.

Such measures matter little when Facebook can generate rampant demand for its stock ahead of its IPO. But as a public company, it will be beholden to shareholders that demand revenues grow – so expect to see Facebook double down on its ad offerings in the very near future.

Dell has taken to the echo-filled Google+ social networking stage to apologise to all women for comments made by a speaker at one of its events.

Elektronista blogger Christiane Vejlø was unfortunate to be in the audience at the event, where she was stunned by the hiring of Mads Christensen, an outspoken Dutch celebrity.

"I am in a state of shock realising that a large professional company as Dell will consciously hire someone with the well-known agenda Mads Christensen has," she noted.

"I have a really hard time seeing how the communication team in such a big organisation can justify booking a speaker/moderator that always talks with the agenda that women should shut up and men should learn to tell them that."

Christensen outdid himself at the event by recommending that the men in attendance say "shut up, bitch" to their partner on returning home.

"The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy," he is also quoted as saying.

Someone at Dell had hired him for the job, we don't know who. And someone at Dell has penned an apology.

"Mads Christensen made a number of inappropriate and insensitive remarks about women. Dell sincerely apologises for these comments. Going forward, we will be more careful selecting speakers at Dell events," said Dell in its Google+ post.

"As members of our Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network (DWEN) know, Dell is an enthusiastic and committed advocate of women in business and IT. These comments do not reflect Dell's company values and undermine much of the work we've done in support of women in the workplace overall."

Forbes has named Microsoft's Steve Ballmer the worst chief executive to still have a job.

Ballmer was listed number one on Forbes' list of chief executives who should be fired. Microsoft's chief was ranked ahead of horrible bosses such as Cisco's Jeff Chambers and General Electrics Jeffery Inmelt.

"Without a doubt, Mr Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today," wrote Forbes contributor Adam Hartung.

Ballmer took over Microsoft in 2000, during Windows' heyday, with company stock swapping hands at $60 a share. During his tenure he's driven a company once accused of holding a monopoly on its industry into a $30 a share stock option.

Who could forget some of the lowlights of Ballmer's rein? The Zune, Windows Vista, Windows ME, and Internet Explorer 6 were all award-worthy failures from Microsoft's chief executive.

But maybe Forbes is being a bit harsh on Ballmer. Sure, he is a billionaire who's bad at his job. How many people can be voted worst chief executive and still have employment? He survived the Zune era with a job still intact. He must be doing something right.

When SAP announced its decision to buy SuccessFactors in December last year, commentators and analysts said the purchase was a big deal, and not just because the acquisition cost SAP $3.4bn - a 52 per cent premium on the closing price of SuccessFactors at the time.

The purchase was hailed as significant because it could change SAP's delivery of cloud computing applications.

For the last five years SAP's cloud strategy revolved around Business ByDesign, a set of on-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications for the mid-market that includes software for financials, human resources, supply chain management, business analytics and compliance management.

The SuccessFactors technology gave SAP the capability to put core business applications into the cloud as standalone offerings. And this is exactly what SAP has done now, revealing its new strategy at the Sapphire customer event in Orlando.

SuccessFactors clearly stole the limelight at the event - even from SAP's baby of the moment, in-memory database Hana.

Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP co-chief executive, said a new SAP cloud business unit had been created to save the firm from integrating SuccessFactors technology with its own, and to ensure SAP did not risk hurting its newly acquired powerful portfolio of cloud technology.

Perhaps even more interesting is that SAP is quickly dumping its Business ByDesign set of applications for the newer model of SuccessFactors.

It was the SuccessFactors founder and chief executive Lars Dalgaard who broke the news.

"Business ByDesign was a beautiful vision but it was too big. Everyone does not want to put all their apps out in the cloud in one go. It was intimidating," he said.

SAP will now break up Business ByDesign into a number of different applications that customers can buy as they like.

"The pricing of these applications is attractive and their availability is immediate," added Dalgaard.

Snabe also admitted during a press conference that trying to create cloud versions of on-premise applications, like SAP did with Business ByDesign, was not the right approach to the cloud. He said that Microsoft with its Dynamics offering, and Oracle with its Fusion alternative, would soon find this out.

"It is a fundamental mistake to take an app that is designed for on-premise and put it in the cloud," said Snabe.

"We know this because we worked on Business ByDesign. The fact that they [Oracle and Microsoft] started to create them [Fusion and Dynamics] six years ago, tells you they cannot have been creating them with the cloud in mind."

The gossip around Facebook's impending initial public offering (IPO) that's expected to take place in the coming weeks, or even days, received another juicy bit of intrigue when one of the firm's founders, Eduardo Saverin, renounced his US citizenship.

The move was immediately cited as a tax dodge by critics, as by taking citizenship of Singapore he is reported to save some $600m in tax on the cool $4bn he is expected to make when the firm's stock hits the markets.

According to the BBC, a spokesperson for Saverin explained the decision by saying he, "found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time".

While it makes good fiscal sense for Saverin, there is something slightly unwholesome about the situation, as Facebook is cited as one of the shining lights in Silicon Valley's ability to conjure up new, world-changing businesses that make the US as a world-leading tech hub.

For one of its co-creators to give up his relationship with this country for the purposes of saving a chunk of change (admittedly a rather large chunk), seems a touch rash, but as Saverin was actually born in Brazil, perhaps he doesn't have such strong ties to the nation.

It comes just a few days after founder-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg was slated for wearing a hoodie and sandals to a meeting with investors.

However, with both Zuckerberg and Saverin now expected to rake in billions, neither probably care much what the critics have to say about their living locations or sartorial style.

Twitter has asked a New York state judge to throw out a subpoena that would require the social networking company to hand over messages posted by an Occupy Wall Street protestor accused of disorderly conduct.

The social networking site is looking to quash a New York state court order which required it to hand over the deleted message history of a New York-based activist.

Twitters' urging comes following a failed subpoena attempt by activist Malcolm Harris to block the court from viewing his Twitter feed.

"The order surprisingly holds that Mr Harris has no right to challenge the District Attorney’s subpoena for his own communications and account information on Twitter," said Twitters lawyers in a motion submitted to the New York state courts.

"The analysis, based on the assertion that Mr Harris has no proprietary interest in the content that he submits to Twitter, contradicts Twitter’s Terms of Service and the express language of the SCA."

Harris stands accused of purposefully disobeying a police order which called for New York protestors not to march across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The court believes that Harris's Twitter feed would prove that he knew of the police decree before he took part in the 700-strong protestor march last October.

Harris, @destructuremal, originally tried to block the subpoena himself, but was denied on a technicality that stated Twitter owned his tweets.

Twitter believes that assumption is incorrect and points to its terms of service as proof. 

A company spokesperson told V3: "Twitter's Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users own their content. Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users."

As smartphone users wake up to the dangers of apps snaffling data they would rather not share, researchers at Microsoft have come up with a neat solution to the problem that could be used to bake a balance of content personalisation and privacy into its Windows Phone operating system.

Many of today's most popular smartphone apps reliant on harvesting information about users to deliver a personalised service, according to Ben Livshits of Microsoft Research. 

But unless users are aware of the extent of this information, they risk handing over more data than they bargained for, as app makers harvest user data and transmit it to their own datacentres.

A case in point is photo-sharing service Path, which caused a furore earlier this year after users realised the app had sent the contents of their address book back to the firm while Apple and Google where also caught up in the issue.

So Livshits and his colleague Drew Davidson of the University of Wisconsin developed MoRePriv.

It designed to be used with the Windows Phone system to build up a picture of the user, and defines the level of data sharing allowed on the phone according to a set of pre-established roles, such as technophile or business user.

“MoRePriv advocates leaving user data on the mobile device, under the control of the user,” they said.

This change in perspective means users retain control of their data and cloud providers will not fall foul of data protection or privacy laws.

MoRePriv analyses the use applications such as email, SMS and Facebook to establish a persona for the user – this persona is not intended to exactly match the user, but provides a means to establish rules for data sharing based on their profile.

“The use of personas limits the potential for user tracking: while persona information can be shared by apps to perform server-based personalisation, for instance, it is not enough to link the user across multiple interactions,” the researchers said.

The researchers then used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to establish how these different categories of user would have to sharing data in various circumstances before testing the system using a Windows Phone running the Mango version of the operating system.

They found that the system was able to reduce the permissions given to 73 per cent of apps that wanted some access to data, providing the user with greater privacy without crippling the apps that they want to use.

It remains to be seen if the tool could be extended to other systems, but it could be a key step on the road to providing device owners with more control over how their data is stored and secured, and kept away from organisations with unknown motives.