Betanews

The fallacy of Facebook privacy

Carmi Levy — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:03:39 -0500

Natalie Blanchard is either the most naïve Facebook user in the history of the social networking service, or an incredibly unlucky woman who just can't seem to get back on her feet. Whatever title she ends up wearing, she's quickly becoming the poster child for caution in the social media age. Unless you belong to a mysterious sect that specifically bans any form of online activity, either learn her difficult lesson or risk suffering a similar fate.

The resident of Bromont, Quebec, Canada suffers from severe depression and has been on long-term disability leave from her job at IBM for over a year-and-a-half. She had been receiving benefits from her company's insurer, Manulife, until earlier this fall when the checks suddenly stopped coming. When she called her insurance agent to find out why, she was told the company had looked up her supposedly private Facebook account, and found pictures of her posing with Chippendale dancers at a bar, attending a birthday party, and enjoying a beach vacation.

For its part, Manulife won't comment specifically about the Blanchard case. While the company has said it "would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on Web sites such as Facebook," it did confirm that it does check into the Facebook accounts of its clients. And given Facebook's architecture, even a private account will leak information like photos and status updates to anyone with even a basic ability to navigate the service. Despite Facebook's recent efforts to shore up its privacy policies and procedures, its online definition and application of the term still differs greatly from how we learned it as kids.

Privacy? What privacy?

This comes too late to help Blanchard, of course, who couldn't understand how her insurance overlords got a hold of her supposedly locked down postings. This was her first, last, and only mistake. Because nothing is ever private on the Internet. And at the risk of kicking an unfortunate soul when she's already down, if you really wanted to keep something to yourself, you wouldn't put it online -- in any form -- in the first place.

We participate in social media specifically because we want to share slices of our respective life stories with those around us. Some of us also want to grow that audience, hence the relentless pressure to amass more online "friends" and followers. These tools have turned many of us into prolific broadcasters. And like any broadcast, where what's sent out is often consumed by a different audience than the originally intended one, there's always a risk, however small, of the message landing wrong. In Blanchard's case, not only did the photographic message spread further than intended, but it also prompted her insurer to believe she was no longer suffering from depression and could head back to work.

Whether she returns to her office or stays home will now likely be decided in court. Blanchard has filed a $275,000 civil suit against the insurer, and the first hearing is scheduled for Quebec Superior Court on December 8. However this particular case plays out, Facebookers, Twitterers, MySpacers, and bloggers everywhere now have another high-profile example of someone who, for whatever reason, failed to appreciate the impact her online activities would have on her real life.

In many respects, it's easy to feel sorry for Ms. Blanchard in her rejection of the insurer's rejection of her. She feels wronged by the company. She feels the company mistakenly assumes the pictures its investigators saw were clear evidence of her recovery. She claims the clubhopping, the partying, and the prancing around on the beach were all recommended by her doctor -- tonics for a depressed soul. She claimed that "in the moment" she felt fine, but leading up to and following the moments when those pictures were taken, she remained her depressed self.

The futility of picking a winner

It's hard to tell who's right and who's wrong in a case like this. And in virtually all respects, it simply doesn't matter. Manulife drew its own conclusions based on the evidence available to it through social media. Whether it's justified or not is almost irrelevant. Merely the whiff of impropriety in a social media posting is often enough to prompt an employer, an insurer, or some other class of protagonist to pull the plug.

As we lead more of our lives online, the number of incidents like this will only skyrocket. Things like due process and presumption of innocence will all be tossed out the window as large organizations become more comfortable with their newfound power over employees and other small-potatoes stakeholders. HR departments now routinely Google job applicants and dig into their activities on popular social media sites to get a better picture of them than any resume or cover letter could ever provide. You can say what you want in your application package, the thinking goes, but what you do on your own time speaks volumes about the kind of person you really are...and whether you'll even get to that coveted first interview. The scrutiny doesn't end when you get the job, either, as our desire to hang it all out for all to see has tilted the playing field in favor of those who employ us.

I'd like to assume the rules for staying under the radar in this increasingly open, privacy-free environment are straightforward and easily understood. I'd also like to assume that there's an all-encompassing list of do's and don'ts out there that we can use as a guide for this Byzantine new order. But we all know where assumptions ultimately lead us, and in any event, the environment is changing too quickly for any one solution to ever stick long enough to be useful.

The sad truth is this: There's no way to ensure every person who reads every one of our online activities will absorb the tone of the message exactly as we originally intended. We could, of course, unplug completely. But that's an alternative that carries risks of its own, most of which are significantly worse than running afoul of some pencil-pushing insurance industry investigator.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.

Microsoft 'worked with Apple' for Silverlight on iPhone, says Goldfarb

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:37:59 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It was an impressive demonstration, once they got it working: H.264 video streaming wirelessly (and slowly, at least during the caching sequence) using Microsoft's Silverlight video streaming, to an Apple iPhone. It's all the more impressive when you realize that Flash video still has not made its way (permanently) to the iPhone, not for any technical reasons we know of...simply because Apple wants to control the video channel for streaming media to its devices.

And yet here it is, a Microsoft stream. You'd think Apple would have stood firm against Microsoft at least as aggressively as it has against Adobe, if not more so. How did this happen? We asked Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb last week at PDC 2009, and the answer was a huge surprise...followed by some caveats. But it contained these four amazing words: "We worked with Apple."

"The promise of Silverlight is that it's a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows," Goldfarb responded. "The iPhone is a unique scenario. We talked to our customers...and they said, 'Look, we just need to get our content there, and it's mainly in the media space like broadcasting, and we want to put it on the iPhone.' They have a great solution for that; if you're surfing the Web, and hit YouTube and hit 'Play,' it'll play your video because they've created an environment where they can safely play media, and they're comfortable with that.

"So we've worked with Apple to create a server-side based solution with IIS Media Services," Goldfarb continued, "and what we're doing is taking content that's encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, 'I want to enable the iPhone.' The server will dynamically make the content work -- same content, same point of origin -- on the iPhone. We do this with the HTML 5 <VIDEO> tag, in many ways."

Goldfarb showed a standard HTML page where the <VIDEO> tag is embedded, linking to a familiar "Big Buck Bunny" animation that Microsoft has used before in demos. That video is located on an IIS server that now knows how to respond to a request from a QuickTime playback system. "We're translating the content to support the MPEG2 v8 [decoder] format [of] the iPhone; we're moving it to their adaptive streaming format. So it's the same IIS smooth streaming content, the same server, the same point of origin, but now I can get that content to play without any code changes, without any real work, on the iPhone. That's the critical thing for our customers."

What did it mean to "work with Apple," I asked Goldfarb. As it turns out, it's a little lopsided: "We did all the work," he responded. "We just made sure Apple was comfortable with it. We have to have a strong partnership with our partners, we have to have trust, and that's key."

From there, Goldfarb could not go into much further detail, but the extent of the achievement could present interesting lessons for others who have been endeavoring to "work with Apple" over the years: Apparently Microsoft didn't spend most of its energy talking about it, negotiating, and making its point. It simply made the technology work first, and Apple said OK.

When Silverlight first started out, it was intended to be a programming platform that extended .NET into the cross-platform realm of Web apps, by way of the browser. To give Silverlight a bigger push, Microsoft incorporated more video capabilities into it last year, with the result being a strong contender against Flash. Now the marketing effort is coming full circle, with the company now re-emphasizing its programmability, to maintain a par against AIR and keep active on both fronts in the battle against Adobe.

In its guise as a media platform over the past few years, Goldfarb admitted to us that Silverlight "has gotten pigeon-holed in many ways, because of just the way the features came together. It was a sequencing and a timing thing. I don't look at that as a bad thing; I look at is as, what are the requirements for a software platform? It needs to be ubiquitous. That's a great way to reach into the consumer space; what we've done in media is absolutely a critical part of our strategy. And we've executed on it flawlessly. Now with the business features coming in printing, bi-di, all the language support, the accessibility, the rich data access, the networking...you really do get that level of rich business applications that's required."

Goldfarb here was referring to Silverlight 4's upcoming support for functionality that extends beyond the traditional security sandbox -- another dangerous pigeon-hole for plug-in developers. For a real, business-class Web app to be considered legitimate, it needs to print. That means it needs access to the printer beyond what the browser can provide.

This gets into the whole area of where the security boundary lies, and who gets to marshal it -- Silverlight or the browser. Earlier in the week, Microsoft President Bob Muglia told Betanews he believed the browser would always provide some sort of basic, standardized security context. But Muglia left open the possibility that Silverlight, or something like it, would push the boundaries of that context.

As long as the browser provides the basic sandbox, the level of vulnerability for any future Silverlight 4 Web app will be determined by the weakest browser. I asked Brian Goldfarb, does this present an argument in favor of Silverlight providing its own security context, over and above the browser? "You're welcome to make any argument you'd like," Goldfarb responded at first, his face showing some signs of sweat. After he collected his thoughts, he proceeded with a more thorough response: "We've been through rounds and rounds of this, and we've tightened it up, and we think the sandbox that's generated by the browser is the most secure place to run software. It's not perfect, but it's the best...The majority of applications today are all inside the sandbox, even the out-of-browser applications. What we've done with [Silverlight] 4 is extend the sandbox space by giving more features in that secure zone -- drag-and-drop, all the things our customers have demanded -- and now we're creating a Trusted Application model, which is more like regular software, where you need to have a trust relationship with who you're installing it from. You wouldn't go to www.hackmysite.com and install some .EXE, but you'd feel pretty comfortable going to the NBA or to Betanews, or whomever you have a trust relationship with."

What about Google Chrome, then? Can Microsoft trust Chrome the way it would trust Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox to establish the trust framework? "It's a browser, like any other browser," Goldfarb responded.

Clicker.com cuts through the Web video chaos

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:21:02 -0500

By Chris Maxcer, TechNewsWorld

Let's put this simply: If you want to stream free, professional videos online, Clicker makes finding the video easier than most other solutions I've seen. In fact, it's one of the few online television and video search guides that I've felt compelled to create an account with. Why?

Easy. It targets the content I want -- full episodes of network television shows, and what's not a network television show is professional-grade content. It might be full-length movies or Web originals, but there's also some free music videos, though there seems to be plenty of holes, and some old videos are bafflingly popular.

But let's focus on Clicker's core strength strength -- online network television.

Clicker says its mission is to make it simple for you to find the show you're looking for online, and that it does. The search function isn't trying to scan the entire Web, so its results are usually right on target -- search for a show name, say "FlashForward," and you're going to get "FlashForward" at the top of the list. Same goes for titles like "Castle," which brings up the comedic murder mystery show's available full episodes -- rather than old buildings and such. ("Castle?" you might be thinking ... yup. Remember Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog? That's the star of "Castle.")

But Clicker isn't just a search engine with a clean database. It's also an online directory that gives you multiple, intuitive ways to drill into the content -- it's got a handy square alphabet grid for browsing by show name, categories for finding action & adventure, drama and whatnot, plus shows by media type, which are TV, movies, Web originals, and music.

Right now, Clicker contains more than 450,000 episodes from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.

If you've got a show in mind that's actually available online in full episodes, you can find it easily enough with Clicker.

After you find your show, you can click on it to view specific episodes and where they are available to watch. While Clicker embeds some shows, most of the bigger network shows click through to network sites for streaming, for example, on ABC.com or CBS.com. Of course, Clicker also clicks through to sites like Hulu.com and TV.com. So if a show like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" is available from CBS, Clicker will give you options to stream it from CBS, including what appears to be an alternate CBS streaming site, which I didn't realize existed. But that's just "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." What about "CSI: Miami"? That particular crime drama sibling is available on both CBS and TV.com ... and clicker gives you links to both.

What gives? In this case, "CSI" has two full current episodes available online on CBS.com but only one on TV.com. Why? There's either a lag in the different services or there's some esoteric online video rights clauses and licenses that restrict what episodes of which televisions shows can be made available from various online outlets at any given moment. Current episodes of "The Mentalist," for example, aren't available anywhere online that I can ascertain at the moment, except for Apple's iTunes, which is, of course, a pay-to-buy download option only.

Because Clicker is about finding and pointing you toward available shows, you usually end up streaming the show directly from the host site. This means your browser may need to be compatible with the host site's stream. In the case of "FlashForward," you get two choices -- ABC.com and Hulu. Since I already use Hulu, I'm more likely to choose that. But I also tried ABC and realized that no, I don't want to download the ABC.COM Video Player Software plug-in and agree to ABC.com's end user license agreement. So, a few back button hits on my browser and boom, Hulu it is.

The best feature of Clicker is its Playlist. If you create a free account, you can easily add shows to your playlist. You can add a single episode, all available episodes, or just all new episodes. It's pretty simple to manage. In about 10 minutes, I suddenly found myself with hours and hours of great content on my playlist. There's a reason I'm not recording every new episode of "The Simpsons" on my DVR, but hey, maybe I'll find time to watch the latest "Treehouse of Horror" episode at my desk. It's just a click to add "The Simpsons" to your playlist.

So now you know that I receive network television and I have a DVR. I've also got a decent HDTV and an old couch. Pair the two together, and most of the video I want to watch is on a big screen, in network television high definition -- much better than streamed TV content. Clicker and other online television guide sites -- like TVGuide.com, Channels.com, OVGuide.com, and SideReel.com, et al. -- have years before they'll compete with the average consumer's living room and more traditional HD television delivery methods.

Still, sometimes I run into episodes or shows that I haven't been following or haven't recorded or heard about and want to watch them, like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." I can't take the time to enjoy Jon Stewart on a daily basis, but once a week or so, I can check out the guests and recent action via my Clicker playlist. Nice.

The playlist, though, isn't a perfect system. For example, many shows have online publication rights that let only a certain number of the most recent shows be made available online. Take "Castle," for instance. I just recently ran into "Castle," and it's a decent show. I'm not sure how long it'll be able to sustain my interest, but I'm willing to give it a try. I started watching one of the episodes late at night and got sidetracked. The next day, the episode was off my playlist. Obviously, Clicker only tracks that it sent me to the online video and didn't realize that I didn't actually watch it. When I managed to find a link, I learned that the episode had expired on both Hulu and ABC.

Bummer. And the limited time frames of availability is a fundamental problem with online streaming video in the world today. Byzantine broadcast rights are hard for regular consumers to follow, if not tolerate. So the episode that I had watched a portion of? The only way to finish it would be to wait for a rerun ... or buy it from iTunes.

Clicker is new, easy-to-use, and clutter-free. Similar guides offer similar functionality, as do video search engines like Blinkx and Truveo, and perhaps because they've been around longer, they tend to be crammed full of information, if not a lot more advertising.

Hopefully, Clicker will be able to retain its clean ease-of-use as it balances its need to generate revenue off the service. Meanwhile, I'll be using it for those moments when the couch and HDTV aren't readily available.

Originally published on TechNewsWorld

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: 'Nobody's going to be 100% open'

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:52:22 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Over the last five years, Microsoft has undergone a gradual, but significant, shift in its public image, a shift toward interoperability and a willingness to play more fairly in competitive markets. At the same time, it remains a commercial software producer committed to the protection of its proprietary intellectual property.

Openness, as CEO Steve Ballmer explained to his company's Worldwide Partner Conference in July 2008, should not imply free. "Open source also implies free -- free is inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference," he told attendees at the time.

The picture Ballmer painted then was more black-and-white, where Microsoft will selectively venture into the black world of openness where necessary, but stay rooted within the white world of business that pays salaries and funds conferences. Last week during a press luncheon at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles, where Betanews and others were invited, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (the company's leading executive spokesperson now, after Ballmer) painted a more scalable picture of "openness" from Microsoft's vantage point, one which is more attainable by degrees.

What's 'open?'

"Well, we're all open and we're all not open," said Ozzie, in response to a statement repeated (at least) four times by TechCrunch reporter Steve Gillmor: "Android's open." Gillmor was pressing Ozzie and colleague Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools, to be more "open" about when and whether Silverlight will become interoperable among multiple smartphone platforms (the Silverlight video on iPhone announcement had not yet been made). Someone in the company giggled in response to Ozzie's remark like an extra on "Hee Haw"...it was probably me.

"I mean, nobody is going to be a hundred percent open," Ozzie continued. "Android's not 100% open, we won't be. There are things that are illegal that, if you have the ability to shut off, we're going to have to shut off. There are things that get in the way of your partner's business model. I may be wrong on this...but the way Google Voice hooks into the Droid, I think Verizon's still gets billed for calls...So Windows has a brand value of openness, meaning, we don't control what desktop apps people write. It's got a history of data openness; we don't look at the data that's sitting on your desktop. So I think as we move forward, the nature of what we do on phones that carry the Windows brand, will probably be more open than not. It's not like the Xbox, where Xbox, like the iPhone, is more of a managed ecosystem [that] is part of the business model."

Seated next to Ozzie was Moonlight developer Miguel de Icaza, who related his recent problems with Apple in working to port code from Moonlight (a Silverlight-compatible runtime for non-Windows platforms) from Mac OS X to the iPhone. Technically, there were few problems at all; but Apple made the decision (after the fact) that two of the APIs that de Icaza's team ported over, should not have been.

Are apps important on phone platforms?

LiveSide.net blogger Kip Kniskern followed up by asking Ozzie and Muglia why consumers should wrestle with the confusion over phone platforms at all -- specifically, why can't there be an App Store that's a single location that applies to every user? Ozzie interrupted by saying, "This isn't going to be a big deal for consumers anyway. It's not going to be at all.

"Let's just step back: There's a lot of confusion, I think, right now, about what's going on on the phones," he continued, "and I'll just give you a high-level perspective -- this is my perspective, I'm not 'right,' I may be wrong, it's a perspective: These are app phones -- what distinguishes them from everything else. We're now in an era where apps are the higher [element of importance], not just calls. And the apps that are on them, most of them -- I know there are exceptions, but most of them -- aren't deeply complex. A lot of them are apps that somebody paid a reasonable amount of money for some group to go port or implement. A lot of them are front-end companions to a Web service on the back end. I think, my assumption -- and I don't have any reason to believe that this is wrong -- is that once things settle out, and we all have app phones (Apple has an app phone, Google has an app phone, Microsoft has an app phone, BlackBerry/RIM has an app phone)...If there's a market there, all the apps that count will be ported. Every app that matters will be ported to every one of them, because if there's a set of users and it costs $50,000 of consulting time to have somebody port a little app, it's going to get ported. So I just don't think there's going to be significant differentiation at the app level.

"This is a big difference from the PC, Mac ecosystem in the past" Ozzie continued. "You cannot take the lessons that we learned in that era and apply them to the phone. It's a totally different world. If all you saw on the phone was Office -- something of that substance that took that many man-years to implement, and it was very nuanced -- then it would be different." Kniskern reminded Ozzie of the remaining problem with apps not being approved by the proprietors of app stores, especially Apple's. "But once the other app phones have a more lenient approval environment, then they change."

Next: Is Microsoft's cloud bigger than the law?

Is Microsoft's cloud bigger than the law?

As Microsoft and its competitors expand their cloud computing services, for the first time, entire computing platforms will commonly cross country's boundaries. There are laws governing interstate transport, even among members of the EU; and now, those laws will apply to computing systems just as though sovereign boundaries separated the CPU from RAM.

In recent dealings with issues of privacy, interoperability, and fairness as they pertain to certain governments around the world, it often seems -- at least to this reporter -- that it's difficult to know what the new ground rules are until the referee takes the field to declare the first out-of-bounds penalty. This is an observation I raised with Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia: How does Microsoft plan, going forward, to communicate with governments what its plans are, without tightening the boundaries for itself?

"There's no single answer to that question," Muglia responded. "What we have is, we are engaged in conversations with governments all around the world, and when I talk about the cloud being nascent and emerging, this is an example of emerging characteristics of the cloud: understanding how it will exist in the regulatory environment, in all of the different countries and geographies that it has to work in. So as we begin to bring services out to businesses and users within a given geography, we have to, we have to operate in the legal context that's established by the government agency. There's complexities in some parts of the world where you get into issues about privacy and government control over access to information, and things like that. Those are just things you have to understand how to operate in, and what sort of steps you need to take.

"So we're engaging with them," he continued. "And I think we're all learning a bit together. I don't think the laws will exist the same way today -- ten years from now, I think they'll have changed, they'll have evolved. You had the concern that they will get tighter; that probably will happen, in some cases, and in other cases they will probably get looser. As people see that government restrictions prevent prosperity within their country as organizations and individuals aren't able to do some of the things they might want to do, if some of those restrictions weren't there."

Ray Ozzie picked it up from there: "The best analogy I've been able to come up with is, late '80s, early '90s, there were a lot of crypto export issues. There was a real disconnect between what we were trying to do as a technology industry, and what customers wanted to do, and the regulations. And right now, there are some things that don't make sense to technologists. Like the fact that you cannot have a copy of this kind of data -- whether it's health data, or whatever -- on the other side of a border, for a citizen of a given country. Almost as though encryption doesn't exist, in terms of, where should the keys be versus where should the data be? And there was a big lag in terms of getting the regulations changed over time, and we really don't regard it as much of a problem as an industry any more, for the most part.

"The big difference between cloud computing and crypto -- and the reason I'm optimistic that things will change sooner -- is that governments themselves want to use cloud computing. There are some really significant economic issues related to people within governments building massive data centers where they maybe shouldn't, maybe they don't need to, and so I'm optimistic that some of these things will have a lot more [progress]...The pragmatic need to embrace cloud computing themselves will put them in a situation where they might go, 'Okay, there is this economic benefit; now I understand what these people are talking about.'"

Nearly half the money spent at US retail on desktop PCs goes to Apple

Joe Wilcox — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:24:06 -0500

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

In October, Mac US retail desktop computer revenue share was 47.71, percent up from 33.44 percent a year earlier, according to NPD. It's a stunning number, given just how many Windows PC companies combined command so much more market share, while competing for the same revenue share.

NPD measures in-store and online sales to compile the numbers. Contrary to blogs or news sites that will link to this post, NPD did not issue a report with this data. I asked for it. That's what reporters do -- ask questions.

The larger questions: Can Apple sustain such high desktop dollar share? Does Apple benefit long-term from the trend? "No" is likely answer to both questions.

Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, attributes some of Apple's October gains to the release of fast, new iMacs during the same month that Windows PC sales declined ahead of Windows 7's October 22nd launch. "You only really had 10 days to catch up some 20 days of lost [Windows PC] sales," Baker said.

Additionally there is the recession, which force hit following the late-September 2008 stock market crash. "You're comparing the [iMac] launch month this year to the month last year when people stopped going into stores to buy things," Baker said. "To some extent it's a little bit apples and oranges."

He emphasized: "While those are great numbers, that's probably not sustainable." Perhaps, but even a decline to 40 percent revenue share would put Apple head and torso above every single competitor selling Windows PCs. It's worth noting that Mac desktop revenue share had already risen to 44.91 percent in April 2009, although Baker attributed some of that "pop" to the "residual effects" of new iMac upgrades a month earlier.

One factor helping Apple is average selling price. The Mac maker has largely chosen not to compete with Windows PC manufacturers below $1,000. While price wars continue at the low end among Windows PC manufacturers, Apple's entry-level iMac starts at $1,199. True, Apple offers the Mac mini for $599 or $799, but the ASP is considerably higher than comparably priced Windows PCs. Low-cost Windows PCs typically come with monitor, keyboard and mouse, which are all extra-cost items for Mac mini unless the buyer uses existing gear.

In October, the Mac desktop ASP was $1,338, down from $1,390 in April and $1,581 in October 2008, according to NPD. By comparison, Windows desktop PC ASP was $491, or nearly $900 less than the Mac desktop. Generally, Apple also captures more revenue share on much smaller sales. For example, according to Apple SEC filings, worldwide, the company shipped 3.05 million Macs -- only 787,000 of them desktops -- in third calendar quarter. By comparison, HP shipped 16.1 million PCs and Acer 12.5 million, according to Gartner.

Where Apple's sales are stronger, in notebooks, it's revenue share is by no means as high -- yet still an enviable percentage for any single computer manufacturer. Mac notebook US retail revenue share was 33.66 percent in October, up from 30.07 percent in April but down from 38.13 percent in October 2008. In the year-ago month, Apple released its first unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros, which lifted revenue share. The change in revenue share from October to April to October bookends the new Mac laptop launches and corroborates Baker's assertion that Apple revenue share will recede in coming months.

"Apple gets a huge bump out of new products that no one else gets," he said. "Those [share increases] haven't tended to be sustainable in the long term."

Maybe, but one third of sales going to one company is an amazing feat -- and it's where the market is growing fastest: Portable computers. The Mac laptop ASP also is much higher than Windows notebooks: respectively, $1,410 to $519 in October, according to NPD. Apple sells fewer units, but commands higher margins on every one than Windows PC manufacturers.

The question ahead: What about Windows 7 and the holidays? On Monday, Gartner predicted that Windows 7 wouldn't lift PC sales in 2009. That's a question to answer in January when the sales figures are final. But based on Apple's ability to defy the recession's downward pull on computer sales and just how consistently busy are the company's retail stores, I'll predict that Mac overall US retail revenue share will stay well above one-third and more than 40 percent for desktops. Surely any Windows PC competitor would want make so much on so few computers sold, comparatively.

A case study in improving software: What Office 2010 can learn from Notion 3

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:08:59 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download a 14-day trial of Notion 3 music composer, plus 10-day trials of IK Multimedia plug-ins, from Fileforum now.

On the surface, this is a review of a music composition product entitled Notion 3, from Notion Software, priced at $249 suggested retail, born out of the original VirtuosoWorks product produced in 2005 by music professor Dr. Jack Jarrett, and which produces realistic orchestral sound from precisely notated sheet music on a standard Windows-based PC or Mac. But if you've never composed music before, and even if you don't plan on doing so in the future, I urge you to read on anyway, because this is about the business that we are all engaged in.

This is a story about a software company managing the process of starting all over again, putting its past behind it and crafting a completely new product. Notion 3 is billed as an upgrade (Notion 2 owners can purchase it for $8), but it is entirely new.

When Microsoft first announced the tremendous changes it had planned for Office 2007, including the premiere of the innovative ribbon, it was turning its back on over a decade of adherence to the spirit -- though typically not the letter -- of the Common User Access guidelines. This meant retraining millions of users on a completely new way of working -- a process that is still going on in many enterprises, even now. Microsoft knew that to embrace the future, it needed to change. But managing the transition, to this day, has been difficult.

Hear an MP3 clip from the funk-symphonic score that Scott created with Notion 3.

Notion is not the dominant music composition product -- though market studies have yet to be made official, it's probably the #3 product in its category. The top two are bona fide professional music composition market leaders -- Sibelius and Finale -- trading off with one another like Coke and Pepsi. By contrast, the original Notion had been positioned as a beginner's product, a step up from something called "Music Printer Plus" that seemed about as likely to dethrone one or the other market leader as Print Shop Deluxe was to knocking off QuarkXPress.

What Notion had going for it was two things: a surprisingly agile sound reproduction system that reproduced a respectable sounding studio orchestra, and a front end that was not only easy to learn, but educational for those who wouldn't know a fermata from a marcato. But against these two giants -- the proton and neutron of the composer's world -- Notion 2's market penetration had pretty much run its course by the middle of this year.

Thus the bold decision to redo everything. Notion Music would replace the sound system and the user interface, and both would have to be worlds better. "It was a hard decision, to tell you the truth, that we didn't take lightly," said Lubo Astinov, Notion Music's product manager, in an interview with Betanews. "We pondered on it for a few months before we finally decided to go ahead and switch. But basically, we decided in one swift move to go to a new code base...and take everything that we could from Notion 2 in features, rebuild them onto the new code base, and on top of them, build an abundance of new features. We tell people that Notion 3 is indeed a new product; it's not an update, it's a new piece of software."

With Notion 3 only having been released late in September, the jury is still out as to whether the product has even begun to achieve the market penetration it needed. So it's premature to talk about the Notion 3 "success story." But just as the recent evolution of Microsoft Office has been about pulling off a successful remodeling job while keeping all its users comfortable -- a process which isn't over yet -- the Notion 3 story is about rethinking everything, and challenging old "notions" about how a very complex piece of software should work.

The people leading the discussion for Notion were musicians first who became developers later. Astinov is a studio guitarist skilled in many styles, including jazz and flamenco, though he's also composed production music for PBS programs. He was a graduate of the Berklee College of Music where Dr. Jarrett taught.

"Mostly the discussion was driven by, 'Where do we need to be?'" Astinov told us. "We had to lay out a plan of not only, 'How do we get there?' but, 'In what time can we get there?' We realized that those were the goals that we set two years ago...that we needed to embrace a code base that is more flexible, easily updatable, and easily manageable."

Lesson 1: Rebuild the code base to be taken apart

Years ago, a point release for software suggested a completely replaced code base. But as the "engines" of applications became precious intellectual property for their publishers, point releases eventually became new life support systems for old code. Sure, there were new feature sets, and sometimes a revised and updated look and feel. But under the hood, you'd often find a living, breathing, single-threaded creature of the pre-OO era, not so much a component as a mashup.

"We needed to have a more general way of controlling elements, a more...well, [Notion 2] was object-oriented before, but [we needed to] really utilize the power of generalized object-oriented languages to their extreme, making sure everything is nicely structured, utilizing best software development practices, to create an architecture that is easily updatable, easily changeable."

Sometimes, the problem with the "engine" mentality in a development shop is that it creates an artificial barrier between what can be changed and what cannot be touched, lest the ghost of past developers haunt their sleep. In the new reality of software, even past the RTM date, problems and bugs crop up that deserve to be addressed immediately. If those problems exist within an untouchable zone of software sanctity, customers come to view them as defects endemic to the code base rather than as unforeseen circumstances curable with minor surgery.

"Although we had a brilliant team working on Notion 2, and it achieved what it set out to achieve, developing a software product is always a learning in progress," remarked Astinov. "You learn as you do it, and a couple of months later, you come back and you say, 'You know, I wish we coded that differently.' Then little by little, we came to the realization that, it would be harder to update the Notion 2 code base, fix all the problems -- whether they're design problems or coding problems in the software -- and get to where we want to be at the same time with allowing us to quickly enhance the software for future features."

Next: Building the user experience down...

[FULL SEC DISCLOSURE:] Notion Music supplied Betanews with a not-for-resale copy of Notion 3 for our review, without pre-condition. Betanews also received an earlier copy of Notion 2 for comparison purposes. Scott M. Fulton, III is the author of this article, and as always, is solely responsible for his content. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Betanews or any of its other editors or contributors.

Download a 14-day trial of Notion 3 music composer, plus 10-day trials of IK Multimedia plug-ins, from Fileforum now.

Lesson 2: Build the user experience down

A more complex piece of software tends to become used in a more complex fashion. Years ago, CorelDraw was a miracle of software design, incorporating as many functions as possible into mouse gestures and shortcuts, enabling illustrators to develop streamlined methodologies for complex operations into natural, everyday practices. But in recent years, the need to tack features onto the side of the box or the Web site resulted in that product suffering from the "feature bloat" that has afflicted so much of installed software prior to the advent of Web apps. Dialog boxes have never been conducive to creativity.

Part of the inspiration for Microsoft's ribbon feature, which premiered in Office 2007 (and which nobody really calls the "Fluent UI" anymore), was the need to get complicated menus out of the user's way, and bring choices forward. That having been done, Office 2010 Beta 1 has a revised ribbon that contains palettes of choices occupying just as much space, if not more, than the old drop-down menus. And while the 2007 edition was focused around keeping you focused on your page, the new File menu (the new name for the BackStage button, which replaced the Office button, which replaced the File menu) completely encompasses the entire open window.

Maybe these features truly are improvements in some senses, but they are not exactly true to the original spirit of the Office 2007 redesign, and in some respects are actually backsliding towards Office 2003.

The original Notion UX was based on a well-received graphical feature called the Sidebar, which was positioned like sidebars in Office apps and Web browsers today. Here, the original Jack Jarrett design was clever for its time, gathering together only the tools necessary to change and develop the score (the active document) into categories, while keeping functions related to managing the program relegated to the menu bar and classic toolbars. Sidebar categories were not intuitive (Tools, Entries, Expressions, Properties), but their clusters were operated independently of one another so that you found yourself able to combine these functions like open pots of paint. "Tools" usually referred to things you do to or with notes, while "Entries" referred to things you do to the staff or to a measure. "Expressions" contained the articulations and accents you place on existing notes, especially with regard to particular sections of the orchestra; while "Properties" let you make adjustments to existing elements (and it was here that you converted notes in time with the current signature, into tuplets that were timed in thirds rather than halves or quarters).

The tried and tested user front-end of Notion 2, which was completely replaced in September 2009.

On paper, it was simple, direct, and effective. By no means did the Notion 2 sidebar feel outdated or outmoded, and in many ways, it actually achieved one of Office 2007's original objectives: getting clutter out of the way of the open document. But it wasn't always consistent -- for example, I never quite got the hang of time and key signatures being "Entries" but tempo markings being "Expressions." And when a score became complex, the steps one took to get things under control took way too long.

"In Notion 2, if the user wanted to insert an element into the score, he would go and navigate this tree structure, choose his element, and put it in. But what we realized was that, while that's certainly easy to do, it's also time consuming," explained Notion 3 product manager Lubo Astinov. "You basically have to take your eye away from the spot on the score that you were working on, move your eye towards the sidebar, choose the element there, then go back and find that place. It may not seem like a lot, but it really is a time-consuming, frustrating thing to do."

Hear an MP3 clip from the funk-symphonic score shown in this screenshot from Notion 3.

In Notion 3, the sidebar is completely gone. In its place is a unique, symbolic palette along the bottom, where categories of score elements are represented by the symbols themselves. Now, you have to know pretty much what these symbols mean, especially in the context of the other symbols around them. For example, that dot in the fourth category from the left doesn't mean "extend the duration of a note by one-half," but rather "apply a staccato to a note" to make it play more briskly; and that sweeping arc is a slur, not a tie -- although it looks exactly like a tie. But the division of palette categories is indeed more consistent: Notes and rests (including alternate notations) appear together, tremolos and arpeggios and glissandos are all together, and the accents you give an electric guitar (more on that later) are gathered together.

All of this does not immediately spell "easy." What it does is spill onto the table all of the elements of scoring in a one-level menu rather than a nested tree structure, like tokens in an old board game. The learning curve, as a result, is higher for a novice user, especially one who will find himself hovering over all the symbols and learning what they're called through their tooltips.

For most applications in the last decade, getting over the learning difficulties of configuring documents has been accomplished through wizards (series of dialogs which lead users by the hand through choices) and templates (blank documents whose styles are pre-set). Notion 2 was conventional in that regard. But the plethora of templates shipped with Notion 2 were replaced with just seven in Notion 3.

Removing this truckload of templates, Astinov told us, was a carefully reasoned design decision -- a counter-intuitive one reached after the team studied how composers of various levels of acumen used the product.

"We went through several notation applications, and we had user tests with people setting up a score," he said, "and what we realized was that while it certainly is aggressive to have 300 templates in your score wizard, it actually adds to the clutter and makes things far more difficult to navigate, search for, and create...than if you simply create a score from scratch the way we have it, the graphical way, in Notion 3."

Notion's designers tested two groups of users: professional musicians with notation software experience, and folks with no prior experience in any music application. Both groups were observed using Finale, Sibelius, and a beta of Notion 3. They were asked to set up a score for a small chamber orchestra, and both groups were twice as fast in accomplishing their goal in Notion 3 without any templates or wizards at all, than they were with Finale and Sibelius. Their discovery was this: In the interest of making the program seem easier, wizards and templates and other hand-holding tools have the side-effect of making users slower. They also fail to teach the user anything about the typical use of the product, by bypassing it the long way around. So even though the Notion 3 palette seemed steeper, climbing to that level and staying there was actually much faster and more productive.

Lesson 3: PC games are UX prototypes

If only applications were more like games. Seriously, the most innovative user input experiences have always come from games -- as time goes on, games only grow more and more ahead of the curve.

"Game interfaces were on the forefront of our discussion here, when we were designing things like the palette, for example," said Astinov. "We really liked some of the novel menu systems that some of the game designers were implementing in their games, and certainly that feel of one element controlling their menu inspired us to think about the main entry palette."

One of the design iterations considered by the team was circular, where the mouse movement zipped through a Rolodex-like presentation of options. "We didn't go with that because it turned out not to work very well on corners. Game design was one of the things that we considered...because oftentimes in games, people are trying to concentrate a lot of usage into one small area."

The designers eventually settled upon a simpler, perhaps less cool, but certainly functional palette design. It does achieve its objective of keeping your eyes focused on the score, the way a dashboard of a car keeps your attention fixed upon the road ahead. In practice, I've noticed some small difficulties, especially the palette's ability to obstruct the bottom-most staff of an open composition. I've also noticed a bit of a "dead zone" that exists just around the perimeter of the palette -- something that might not be so noticeable in a game where you're controlling troop movements, but certainly a hassle if you're programming those bass instruments that typically fall in the bottom of a grouping.

But while Notion 2's design was based around looking like a conventional application in the interest of not confusing users, Notion 3 went completely off the board, noting that games intentionally advance new designs in the interest of fun all the time, and players embrace them for doing so.

Next: Users' expectations change the nature of an application...

Download a 14-day trial of Notion 3 music composer, plus 10-day trials of IK Multimedia plug-ins, from Fileforum now.

Lesson 4: Completely separate text commands from visual inputs

Most applications, in the name of "accessibility," invoke keyboard "shortcuts" as an alternate means of maneuvering through the menu or control system. But perhaps you've noticed this but never fully appreciated it: Each keystroke is a token for where your mouse pointer would go, if you were using the mouse. So in many ways, commands are not truly alternatives or even really shortcuts -- you can visually follow the same menu and dialog box locations you would have clicked on anyway.

While Notion 3's designers were gleaning ideas from PC games, one member of the team ended up..."borrowing" a method from a dark corner of game design, literally by accident: the cheat code.

The result was a facility called Express Entry, which Lubo Astinov told us "was not actually done intentionally. There was never really a design discussion about it, or anything. [Our senior programmer, Ben Singer] just made that as a shortcut for quickly accessing elements while the code was being written, and more or less, this was kind of an accident. As we started using it, I said, 'You know what, let's keep that!'"

Although Notion 3 does carry over a number of single-keystroke shortcuts from version 2 -- such as the 3 key during note entry to bring up a sharp, or q for quarter notes and e for eighth notes and the like -- these shortcuts are independent of the palette. There are a few conventional Ctrl + menu bar commands for managing elements of the program, though you'll rarely use them.

In addition to these, Express Entry pretends that there's a little invisible command prompt open someplace. So rather than imagine the spot on the palette where something is located and try to recall the key that brings up that area, you type a whole command, which can often be all or part of a word. For example, to bring up notation on the cursor that lets you place a pizzicato marking on a string instrument staff (plucking the string rather than bowing it), you would type 'pi -- the apostrophe key, followed by the command. Nothing visual happens at all while you're doing this, but once the command is accepted, the pizz. marker appears over your cursor, so you can stamp it where you want it. The 'norm command lets you stamp the location where the pizzicato section ends.

By acting like a cheat code mode, Express Entry violates all the rules that typical users would expect. Personally, I don't use it much...not yet, at least. But I see where a professional composer may be more interested in getting his "pen" to work right, than perusing the palette in search for something he knows he needs now.

Lesson 5: Seize initiatives now -- don't wait for a Service Pack

Since Notion 3's release in late September, there have been four major fixes distributed through the application itself over the Net. It has needed these fixes -- Notion 3 was not perfect coming out of the gate. It's had obvious glitches, which I reported to Lubo and the team; and other users have asked for minor enhancements, especially to the user interface.

The team has responded to these glitches and requests not by gathering incident tickets until they accumulate to a big enough pile deserving of a Service Pack, but by issuing patches and additions immediately.

"What I wanted to do from the beginning was a very dynamic and very close QA cycle that is tightly related to development," Notion 3's Astinov told us. "This is something that Ben and Evan [Ruiz] wanted to do in their development process internally here...Almost every week, we will have a new build. But in testing that build, I will check out the revisions and start testing the new editions, new features, keep up with any possible regressions that might have occurred from the code."

Astinov calls this process parallel QA -- essentially, a much tighter cycle between committing a change to the code repository and deploying it in the field. In one sense, it's a workflow innovation; in another, it's an unfortunate necessity of modern business: "We used to have a really large QA department back in the Notion 2 days; we don't have that luxury right now. There's really not that many people who do testing, but that kind of forced us into that parallel QA process even more, so we are always on top of what is being changed and what is happening, and we have direct communication lines to the developers when something goes wrong."

Lesson 6: Trust the user

One of the major problems that marred the release of Notion 2 was when users discovered a rather aggressive third-party copy protection system for securing the instrument samples. Indeed, it was the power of those samples that made Notion 2 sound...pretty good. Better than "passable." But the persistence of this little scheme in memory proved to be a performance drain on the entire operating system.

It's gone for Notion 3, replaced with a modern key-driven software activation system. But the problems haven't exactly been eliminated, especially for folks like me who think they're being cautious and "modern" by installing their applications "As Administrator." While Notion itself is fine with that, it comes shipped with two outstanding add-ons from IK Multimedia -- one that provides a beautiful programmable reverb, and another called AmpliTube XGear (please forgive the naming) whose job is to accurately simulate a bastion of interconnected amplifiers for rock, jazz, and hip-hop musicians.

Since both IK Multimedia plug-ins are installed during the single setup process, they inherit the "As Administrator" permissions from Notion. But since their software activation is keyed to those permissions, it creates a situation where you if you installed Notion 3 as admin, you have to run it as admin also. If you don't, the AmpliTube plug-in will insert white noise into the soundtrack automatically every 10 seconds.

That pretty much negates the whole purpose of restricted user access -- keeping a potentially vulnerable application from becoming exploitable. I'm not the only user who encountered this little problem, which I'm told Notion and IK are currently working to eradicate.

As with Notion 2, the close-mic instrument samples in Notion 3 are particularly precious intellectual property. Without them, all of the hard work expended in making the user front-end workable, would go down in smoke. But the real key to protecting those samples is presenting them in a format that only Notion 3 can use, not by encasing them in a paranoid protection scheme that polices everything the user does. Unfortunately, the music software industry has historically been prone to piracy; so putting producers like IK Multimedia in a position where they can trust the user more, as we're suggesting, will require some more work on the users' end as well.

Next: The joy of composing...

Download a 14-day trial of Notion 3 music composer, plus 10-day trials of IK Multimedia plug-ins, from Fileforum now.

The joy of composing

I am not a professional musician, but I've always considered music a part of the artist side of my life. My most productive work in that arena was a wedding suite I composed in 1989, first for my friends and then revised for my own ceremony, using a composition program for the old Atari ST. It must actually have been somewhat good because my wife still thinks so -- and she was my editor before she was my wife.

There is a special place in my heart for symphonic music. An orchestra is, in itself, a unique and nuanced instrument, whose tonality and rhythm and timbre all exist over and above each of its individual instruments. So even though I've composed music for real and electronic instruments before -- small arrangements, jazzy ensembles, string quartets -- I never really had the personal opportunity until the advent of Notion to attempt a composition for anything that truly sounded, or even approximated, a full orchestra.

The beauty of Notion 3, therefore, is the ability to pick up an orchestra the way one picks up a guitar or a saxophone, or sits down to a piano. It's a way of handing an orchestra to someone and saying, "Hey, try this!" with the same carefree and eager gesture as my mother -- an art teacher who loved music -- would have handed someone an autoharp or an harmonica. Since so much of the music that has lived in my head for years has started out symphonic, Notion gives me the freedom to avoid boiling the melody and the rhythm down to something that will fit on four or six instruments, or however many the band or sound card can faithfully reproduce.

And yes, Notion contains parts for instruments you wouldn't normally find in a symphony orchestra, like a screaming electric guitar (screaming courtesy of AmpliTube XGear, which once you figure it out, is a scream in itself). But there have been any number of movies recently whose entire presentation to the audience, I feel, could have been enhanced with a complete rethink of the orchestration, courtesy of Carlos Santana.

A new type of cursor: Here in the composition screen, I'm about to replace a fortississimo (fff) with a fortissimo (ff). Everything in a symphonic score is synchronized vertically, so the shaded bars represent points in time. The olive-shaded bar is the area I'm about to change, and the yellow brick points to the specific instrument (Trumpet 1). The grey bar is my mouse pointer now, and the "ff" is the symbol that replaces my pointer arrow. When I click on the score, I move the olive bar to that point; if I click Play, that's the part I hear. And if I press the A key, I hear the note under the yellow brick. The grey bar shows me where I can move the olive bar, and where I'm about to insert my new ff dynamic.

Hear an MP3 clip from the funk-symphonic score that Scott created with Notion 3.

The sound snippet I've included here for download is about 30 seconds of a demo reel I produced using a score using pieces of a composition from Notion 2, that I spruced up using Notion 3. The first theme you hear is something I believe I started humming to myself one day while watching a piece of the PBS documentary "Carrier" with the sound turned down, on account of my wife talking on the phone. Months later, the theme crept up in my mind again as something I wished could have been used in a particular movie, the identity of which I'll keep secret for now, but which folks who know me well will be able to guess right away -- I was disappointed by the score, and used Notion to challenge myself to see whether I could replace it.

Since my work started in Notion 2, I was able to learn something valuable about not only musical scores, but any type of electronic document that has been tailored to suit the quirks and nuances of its native application. Because Notion 2 was also a sound system, managing the nuances of that sound system required "massaging" the score, if you will, to balance the instruments. That included over-weighting the dynamics of entire instrument sections just to make Notion 2 sound better than just "good," though if you were to print the resulting score, it would confuse a real-world conductor.

Notion 3's score format has also changed, so bringing over a Notion 2 project requires a file import. That import leaves the over-weighted balances exactly where they were -- so with respect to the printed output, it's a mostly accurate import (the new format was confused by the old fermatas, but such small adjustments are easy to fix). But the result sounded...perfectly horrible, as though the horn section were collectively suffering an asthma attack, and buzzsaws were tearing through the violas.

"That was one of the inherent problems in Notion 2," Lubo Astinov admitted, "the balance of the sounds was completely ridiculous. It hurt many scores and many users, because they were basically -- and we were doing it here -- over-exaggerating dynamics to get the desired sound, which should have never happened. You don't do that for a real orchestra; you shouldn't have to do that for a Notion score as well."

The first part of the solution involved going back through the project and toning down the dynamics to something more realistic, which in some cases literally meant bringing fortissississimo (ffff) back down to as low as forte (f). The entire piano range (soft) was suddenly opened up, because now it was actually audible.

The second part involved utilizing the new sound mixer panel, which replaces Notion 2's "mute/unmute" dialog with a completely graphical representation of a real studio channel mixer. Add-on effects such as AmpliTube, and VST effects plug-ins from the outside world, "attach" to this panel as though they were filter components. You can then route the sound from one instrument through one of these plug-ins, or group several instruments (for instance, the whole horn section) into a bus that leads through a filter.

This very tactile approach to sound mixing runs almost completely opposite of the wholly symbolic approach to composition presented by the Notion 3 palette, almost as though you're using a different program altogether. Nevertheless, the mixer provides very granular, explicit functionality, replacing Notion 2's generalized functionality, and matching N3's level of detail in scoring. If I were applying a more holistic approach to the application's design, I might have imagined an other-worldly "mixer palette" that works similar to the scoring palette. But a studio musician might have found such a device foreign.

To this day, Notion is not a "perfect" program, if there is such a thing. Lubo Astinov audibly winced when I told him I was using standard Realtek integrated audio on my test system; relying on ordinary components such as this has been the cause of many troubles. The most pressing problem I've encountered thus far has been the sound system tripping over the score and losing synchronization of measures, a problem we've traced back to AmpliTube set to "oversampling" by default -- a setting that's not obvious to a novice. Every so often, N3 still trips over the score even with this setting turned off, especially if it has to share memory with other applications (for example, this word processor I'm using now, or anything that relies heavily on the .NET Framework).

But the program itself amazes me so much that not even these problems have become headaches -- it still feels miraculous, at least to me, that Notion 3 is capable of doing as much as it does. If I were a professional musician, making a living from my score, I might need an aspirin or two. (I might also invest in a real sound card.) For now, I manage to find enough inspiration from the quality of what's possible that the act of using this program continues to be a joy.

One wonders how many people throughout the history of written music would have been able to bring themselves to an artistic par with Ludwig van Beethoven, or Jean Sibelius (the real one), or Dmitri Shostakovich, or Jerry Goldsmith, had they the same access to an orchestra that minds their commands the way Beethoven's orchestra-in-his-head minded him. How many untried artists with un-nurtured talents were left waiting, and how many such artists may become inspired today with such power at their control now?

Imagine what brilliance is possible when we hand the world an orchestra.

Kindle 2 update adds battery life, native PDF reader

Tim Conneally — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:42:02 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Today, Amazon announced that an automatic update to its popular Kindle 2 e-reader will extend the device's battery life by 85% and add a native PDF reader to its repertoire of functions.

The Kindle 2 could previously stay on for four days with wireless connectivity activated, following the firmware update, Amazon says the device will be able to stay turned on for a whole week.

Formerly, PDF documents had to be converted to Kindle format to be viewable on the family of e-readers. Now, users can e-mail PDF documents or upload them to their Kindle through a USB connection and be able to read them without conversion.

It's a small, but significant upgrade as e-readers are looking like some of the most desirable gadgets this holiday season and the competition to Amazon's Kindle 2 is stronger than it's ever been.

Safari on iPhone gets competition from a $1 browser app

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:59:08 -0500

By Paul Hartsock, MacNewsWorld

If you search for "browser" in the App Store, you'll get dozens of applications, each purporting to be an alternative to the iPhone and iPod touch's built-in Safari browser. In a sense, they are alternatives, since they look different and might have a few unique features. But they're really all Safari underneath -- Apple will only approve browsers that are basically built with Safari guts using a reworked user interface.

On the down side, this means we won't be seeing alternative browsers from the likes of Mozilla or Opera any time soon, and there's no official challenger to Safari in terms of speed or compatibility with various Web standards.

On the plus side, since they're all Safari at heart, all these browsers should be just as able to navigate the Web at large as Safari itself, and considering how poorly some other mobile browsers do that, that's not a very painful limitation. Safari tackles most non-Flash pages just fine, and any site specifically optimized to work on mobile Safari should work on these alternate browsers in terms of audio, video, interaction, etc.

So what's in an interface? Some Safari alternatives can be pretty gimmicky, but one called "Full Browser" makes a few simple and sensible improvements that bring more of a desktop feel to the iPhone.

More space, more functions

Full Browser earns its name not just by giving you a few more features common to full desktop browsers, but also by sweeping all its control panels off the screen and giving you a full-framed image of the page you're looking at. With just 3.5 inches of screen to work with, every last bit of surface area counts. If you don't really need to know things like time, network availability and battery life, and you don't need a set of navigation controls at the bottom, FullBrowser will take those away and let you see slightly more of the Web page you're on. Tapping a very small shaded region at the bottom of the screen pulls up the control.

Along the top of the control panel, you get the familiar URL bar, a Google search bar (it stays Google even if your Safari search default is Yahoo), and a menu button. The drop-down menu gives you options like clearing cookies, mailing a link, editing your bookmarks and opening a link in Safari proper. The second row of top control panel buttons contains your tabs. These are arranged much in the same way desktop tabs are laid out -- hit "+" to open a new one, press "x" to get rid of the one you're on, and swipe left and right to move through them if you have a lot open.

Along the bottom, you have controls for searching the page for a word, calling up a grid layout for all the tabs you have open, adding the site you're on as a bookmark, forward/back/reload, and hiding the control panel for a full-screen page view.

Text search found

For me, Full Browser's biggest benefit is its text search capability. This is something I use all the time on a desktop browser, and I miss it when using mobile Safari. The way it works here is similar to the way it works in Firefox.

It's pretty subjective, but I also like the tabbing system in Full Browser better than Safari's sort-of playing-card system of keeping several pages open. FB's just reminds me more of a regular browser, and I seem to be able to navigate it faster.

Another nice feature Full Browser has is Hot Spots. You can assign the corners of the screen to perform a specific function (like scroll to top, show all tabs, text search, etc.) when you tap them as you view a page in full-screen mode. If that sounds like it'd get in the way, you can turn it off.

Finally, there's Speed Dial, a function that will show you a grid of your bookmarked pages when you open the browser. Like Hot Spots, this can be deactivated.

Odd quirks

Despite FB's virtues, some weird behaviors popped up.

When I held the phone in landscape mode and hit the bottom bar to see the control panel, it comes up displayed horizontally across the screen, as expected. But when I touched the URL bar to input an address, the virtual keypad sometimes comes up sideways, in portrait mode. Not exactly hard to fix that yourself, though -- just try again, or, I dunno, turn the thing sideways.

In addition, it seemed as though the bottom bar wouldn't work on a few occasions. It wasn't often, but no bottom bar means no controls, so you're pretty much stuck. The bar's also sort of small, so if you have sausage fingers it's easy to miss it and instead click a link lying near it.

I also get a strange error whenever I accessed online media like video or audio: "Operation could not be completed (WebkitErrorDomain error 204)." After I hit "OK," the media played just fine. This message does not come up when I access the same media through Safari.

Bottom line

When it first arrived in 2007, Safari on iPhone made every other smartphone browser in the world look hideous by comparison, and though it's changed only a little since then, it still easily holds its own.

Safari's features are still very basic compared to a desktop browser's, and that's probably always going to be the case, considering that a phone is just too small to do everything a desktop does. Although Full Browser hits a hiccup now and then, and although it certainly doesn't have all the functions of a real full desktop browser, things like text search and a familiar tab layout make it well worth a buck.

Originally published on MacNewsWorld

Will Firefox beat IE9 to Direct2D rendering?

Scott M. Fulton, III — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:47:14 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It was a principal element of the Day 2 keynote at Microsoft's PDC 2009 conference last week in Los Angeles: an early demonstration of code being worked into Internet Explorer 9 that replaces the browser's outdated reliance upon the (very) old GDI rendering library, with new code utilizing Direct2D -- a library that borrows processing power from the GPU. But with the project only having begun last October, it could still be several months before Microsoft creates still more features to make IE9 worthy of a point-release.

By that time, Mozilla could very well have absorbed Direct2D capability into Firefox, if it accepts the contribution of engineer Bas Schouten. By modifying a recent daily build of the organization's "Minefield" track for Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 for Windows, Shouten was able to graft Direct2D support onto the browser, which also usually relies on the old GDI library. The results were Web pages that were as instantaneous to the eyes as the demos we saw of Direct2D rendering on IE9 test code last week.

In a personal blog post Sunday, Schouten discussed some of the difficulties he faced in working Direct2D rendering capabilities onto Mozilla's "Cairo" graphics engine -- difficulties peculiar to Firefox that IE9's developers may not be troubled with: "Direct2D has been implemented as a Cairo backend, meaning our work can eventually be used to facilitate Direct2D usage by all Cairo based software. We use Direct3D textures as backing store for all surfaces. This allows us to implement operations not supported by Direct2D using Direct3D, this will prevent software fallbacks being needed, which will require readbacks. Since a readback forces the GPU to transfer memory to the CPU before the CPU can read it, readbacks have significant performance penalties because of GPU-CPU synchronization being required. On Direct3D10+ hardware this should not negatively impact performance, it does mean it is harder to implement effective D2D software fallback. Although in that scenario we could continue using Cairo with GDI as our vector graphics rendering system."

Although the improvements in on-screen rendering are not something our Betanews CRPI JavaScript performance suite would be able to track, those performance hits Schouten mentioned are indeed something we could see. In tests this morning on Windows 7 RTM using last night's private build of Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1, versus Schouten's remodeled build, the Mozilla build posted a CRPI 2.2 score in Windows 7 of 13.88 -- the best score turned in by a Mozilla browser to date -- versus 12.31 for Schouten's version. At least for now, the rendering improvements come at a cost.

But can those improvements more than make up for the implementation cost, which at the moment Betanews estimates to be about 12.8%?

Betanews tests this morning revealed the answer, quite surprisingly, to be no. Compared to the current daily Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 build, timing the page loads for 28 major Web sites on Windows 7 RTM, the Schouten build with Direct2D installed only rendered pages about 5.2% faster than the Mozilla build, according to a geometric mean of the differences in render times. The Schouten build only renders 7.3% faster overall than Internet Explorer 8 by that same formula, which is not even close to the speed gains we saw on Microsoft's own in-house tests of Direct2D on IE9 code last week.

Where the Schouten build did see gains was on very content-rich sites such as the Chinese Web portals, such as qq.com and xunlei.com. But that build also crashed for one of those sites -- sina.com.cn -- and it also crashed for plain old, American aol.com, for reasons we couldn't ascertain. (Perhaps it doesn't like the new branding campaign either.) For content-light pages such as Google and Ask.com, the Schouten build was measurably slower than both the Mozilla build and IE8. It's worth noting here that IE8 is very competitive against Firefox in render times for sites with moderate content, and even on a few sites with heavy content (the Chinese portals, for instance). However, when the content load gets great or when content may be composited from multiple sources (as appears to be the case with Blogger.com), IE8 becomes exponentially slower, with some load times exceeding one minute.

Your eyes may tell you the Schouten build renders faster -- as ours did right at first -- but that conclusion may derive from the feeling of speed you see from a page appearing all at one time. The test build may actually be much faster at snappy rendering, but that's not the entire job; in fact, the page loading portions of our CRPI tests indicate that the test build may actually be slower at that part than the Mozilla build.

Integration is the key to making Direct2D work in place of GDI in the browser; and if this early test build is any indication, Microsoft could be further along in this process than Mozilla after all.

Action Replay maker sues Microsoft for Xbox 360 'predatory technological barriers'

Tim Conneally — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:45:20 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Microsoft's Xbox 360 is no longer compatible with the first -- and only -- third party memory card, Datel's Max Memory, after the distribution of a Dashboard software update. In response, Datel has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.

"Microsoft has taken steps to render inoperable the competing Datel memory card for no visible purpose other than to have that market entirely to themselves," said Marty Glick, the senior attorney representing Datel. "They accomplished their recent update by making a system change that will not recognize or allow operation of a memory card with greater capacity than their own. We believe that with the power Microsoft enjoys in the market for Xbox accessories this conduct is unlawful."

Datel has made a name for itself by selling "over the counter" device hacks for most of the major video game consoles of the last 20 years, most notably the popular Action Replay system which lets users manipulate game software to enable cheats.

Datel has landed in court over its products many times over the years, both for the Action Replay brand, and for the Game Shark brand which was originally based on Datel's Action Replay licenses. In 1992 Datel went to court with Sega, and in 1999 with Sony. This year, Sony sued Datel again for the PSP Lite Blue battery which enabled "service mode" in the PlayStation Portable.

Few of Datel's products have ever been officially endorsed by gaming companies.

Datel alleges that Microsoft's recent dashboard update was intended to "prevent consumers from choosing a Datel product that offers far better value for the price," and also to "foreclose competition from Datel in the sale of other aftermarket Xbox accessories and in add-ons, including gamepad controllers, through the implementation of predatory technological barriers. These technological barriers do not constitute improvements of the product in any respect, but are rather arbitrary contrivances intended to perpetuate Microsoft's market power."

Where there's smoke: Apple warranty stance raises troubling questions

Carmi Levy — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:18:04 -0500

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

I'm the last person who would ever come out in support of smoking. It's a noxious, nasty habit that according to the US Centers for Disease Control kills 443,000 Americans every year. The CDC says smoking is the root cause of over 30% of all cancer-related deaths, 80% of all lung cancer-related deaths, and 80% of deaths due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

These are big, ugly numbers, for sure. But I'll be selfish and focus only on one: My father was a secret smoker for years -- a secret that ultimately landed him in hospital with a compromised heart, and a secret that ultimately killed him.

So far be it for me to defend smokers. And I won't. But after Apple's recent moves to tighten its warranty coverage and deny repair claims on machines that had been exposed to smoke, I find myself wondering whether the company has gone too far, and whether fair-minded consumers are being taken for a ride when they either buy an Apple-branded product or purchase an extended warranty.

The Non-Warranteed Warranty

First, the basics: The Consumerist reported last week on a couple of cases where Applecare Warranty claims were denied by Apple after technicians discovered the machines had been exposed to cigarette smoke. The company said it would not require its technicians to work on anything that could harm their health. And since nicotine is on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's list of hazardous substances, Apple made it official by letting its techs refuse to provide service and, in the process, essentially void the warranties of smokers.

But here's the challenge: Not everyone whose machine is damaged by smoke is necessarily a smoker. While we can easily wag our fingers at folks who carelessly dangle a burning butt mere inches from their keyboard -- and laugh at them when the ragged remains muck up their keyboards and clog their fan intakes -- what about those poor saps who've never smoked in their lives, but happen to live or work in an area where their machines may suck up whatever's already in the air?

We don't often control where we both take and use our mobile devices. Some of us are occasionally forced to take our laptops into smoke-choked public places (they may be disappearing, but they still exist) or have the dumb luck to work in offices where the chain-smoking bosses still don't care about workplace health standards. Any machine that spends a few hours, days, or weeks in places like these will likely emerge with its insides coated with nicotine. Whether it's first-hand or second-hand smoke will hardly matter.

But wait, there's more

All of this means that Apple's newly tightened rules could potentially void coverage for perfectly well-meaning non-smokers who had the misfortune of using their machines in less-than-optimal environments. More ominously, Apple's move opens the door for other vendors to not only follow its lead, but to also pick and choose the kind of environmental conditions they'd like to void next. And even if they bother to update their fine print after you bring your spanking new piece of hardware home, chances are the first you'll hear of it is when something breaks and you bring it in for service, only to be told you're rather out of luck.

Apple has already managed to tick off some iPhone users by refusing to replace units whose moisture sensors had gone off. Immersion is another no-no for electronic devices, and Apple's been just as diligent ensuring it isn't on the hook for sweaty exercisers, rain-soaked commuters or folks who like to keep the humidifier on high. When I first wrote about this for Betanews last August, I got panicked phone calls from friends suddenly afraid to bring their iPhones into the kitchen while cooking or into the car on a damp, foggy morning. One father of a toddler freaked when the little munchkin appeared in his home office with a water pistol. It was empty, but he's now so worried about Apple's anti-moisture stance that the iPhone usually stays at home.

Say goodbye to mobility

Now that the smokey Pandora's Box has been opened, it's only a matter of time before we can't take our devices outside (UV, windborne pollen, excessive carbon dioxide due to global warming) or inside (fireplace emissions, paint fumes, foot odor) and are instead relegated to sticking them in protective bubbles that allow absolutely no interaction with the environment around them.

Yes, I'm being ridiculous. But so is Apple. Can the company's technicians truly tell the difference between smoke deposits left by a smoker, those obtained from second-hand smoke and those received during a business trip to smog-choked Shanghai, China? If Apple is so intent on shielding its techs from hazards, can it reasonably assure us that every piece of hardware it has ever made is completely devoid of noxious substances that can cause permanent damage to someone unlucky enough to pry open the case? In fairness to Apple, its latest generation of hardware leads the industry in eco-friendliness, but still, it's more than a little arbitrary to single out smoke deposits and nothing else.

Legally inclined folks refer to it as "reasonable use," which means, simply, that they'll cover claims arising from regular usage scenarios, and will deny those resulting from anomalous use. So accidentally bumping your machine against the door jamb as you rush out of the house is considered reasonable use. Pile-driving it into that same door jamb to test its structural integrity or otherwise entertain the small-minded? Not so much.

I get that vendors have to establish basic ground rules to prevent those small-minded folks from taking advantage of the system, and driving higher costs for the rest of us. I also get that the corporate ethics of a company led by a man who's been to the medical equivalent of hell and back twice, may be somewhat predisposed toward encouraging healthier, greener life choices. If that's what it takes to reduce the CDC's figures and save families needless heartache, then so be it. Vendors still shouldn't use it as an easy way to wiggle out of warranty obligations.

Can you come up with a better brand for AOL than 'Aol.'?

Joe Wilcox — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:11:01 -0500

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

The new, much maligned "Aol." logo has upped its failworthiness. Newest buzz: A 27-year-old with no marketing expertise was the driving force behind AOL becoming Aol.; that has many people wondering what the company was thinking.

Age isn't so much concern as lack of marketing expertise. What was AOL thinking, particularly with the rebranding being so important to a company spinoff planned for early December?

I think Betanews readers could do at least as well, and probably a lot better. So I ask: What would you have done with the AOL brand? Please respond in comments. Be graphic. Be creative. Be critical, if like me you think Aol. spoken aloud sounds like "A-hole."

[Update: Betanews reader Jason Syth submitted the logo above. I'll add others as they come in from other readers.]

AOL's decision to rebrand as Aol. takes a bad brand and makes it worse

Joe Wilcox — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:06:25 -0500

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Not since AT&T gobbled up Cingular and rebranded as at&t with that ugly Death Star-like logo has a company erred so far from sensibility. The new AOL brand, Aol., is coming soon to frighten you. AOL's attempt to be hip is anything but. Not that AOL, distributor of a billion CD coasters, was ever cool. The service may have been the biggest online community of the 1990s, but it was never hip. Nor will the lame rebranding make it so.

AOL previewed the new brand identity overnight ahead of its unveiling on December 10th, for the company's spin-off from Time Warner. By measure of big tech sites and Twitter, the rebranding is a total fail before even being officially launched.

Giga OM's Om Malik opined: "The new logo fails to capture what is going to be a smaller, nimbler AOL, one that is represented by a collection of smaller, iconic brands such as Engadget and Joystiq. AOL should ask for its money back!"

NBC Washington's Jim Iovino blogged: "Give those image consultants a year's worth of dial-up and a few thousand AOL CDs packed away in the Dulles campus boiler room. And yes, they're officially calling the logo 'aol-dot'. Dot-what you ask? Good question. We'd suggest 'dot-lame,' but whatever."

Designer Daily blogger Mirko Humbert likes the basic lower-case logo and period, but still gives it a fail: "Unfortunately, there are many chances that you won't even notice the nice changes to the logo since it also features some horrible background images."

The logo was a big topic on Twitter today, too. Some random tweets:

Web designer Will Ayers: "AOL's new branding + identity is nothing short of a complete disaster. Wow. Speechless."

FASTforward blogger Paula Thornton: "And in lower case it is now subjected to pronunciation. How would YOU pronounce aol? : )"

Business Insider writer Alaska Miller: "Iterate, get trolled, re-iterate. Ad nauseum. Maybe now AOL can finally compete. Good on them. TS on the shareholders, though."

Web developer Bruce Clark: "AOL, the world is crying for you. How in the world did you ever seriously consider this...much less make it real?"

Marketer Doug Chavez: "Does anyone else think the new Aol logo looks like it was designed by a 5th grader?"

The branding announcement comes at a strange juxtaposition. AOL execs are on the road trying to woo investors to next month's public offering, while also looking to lop 2,500 heads from the 6,000 payroll. You've got to wonder who would want to leave a company right before a spinoff. I lived in Washington, D.C., when an earlier incarnation of AOL went public and turned even the lowliest of employees into instant millionaires. Surely this past isn't lost on the AOLers looking at the big exit sign.

AOL is giving employees some untoward exit options. Last week, All Things Digital's Kara Swisher blogged:

AOL is offering those who 'volunteer' to leave the company now a departure package that ranges from three to nine months of pay, compared to one to four months for employees laid off in the first quarter of next year. It's a depressing rock-and-a-hard-place choice. An AOL spokesperson confirmed the offer.

Say, AOLers, if the new brand is any indication of things to come, maybe you should take the money now and run. But use that rebranding as bargaining chip for 12 months pay with benefits and a bunch of cheap AOL shares. You can look for reemployment at leisure instead of going down with the good ship Aol., which can't be all that good for you. How cruel is it to take voluntary departures until December 4th, only to trot out the big public offering days later? The point: AOL's execution problem is much bigger than just the rebranding.

Wait. Now when is that public offering again? Officially, it's December 9th. But according to Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson, AOL stock could start trading as early as tomorrow under "when issued" trading rules. Sure enough, there's an 8-K filing dated November 20th explaining AOL's plans.

Can you come up with a better brand for AOL than Aol.?

Microsoft's Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie on Silverlight vs. standards

Scott M. Fulton, III — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:43:58 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Last week at Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference, Betanews had the honor of being invited to join a small cadre of reporters -- including noted blogger Long Zheng; TechCrunch's Steve Gillmor; and our good friend from SD Times and Technologizer, David Worthington -- for a luncheon with Microsoft's President of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia; and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. There, we discussed a handful of topics -- some of their comments were candid and off the record, and some were for the record.

The first issue on our plate Tuesday afternoon concerned Silverlight, and Microsoft's continuing efforts to entice developers to build Web sites around a platform that is not considered a "standard," and perhaps never will be. Some developers discount Adobe Flash as a "standard" for the same reason; while others suggest that Flash's ubiquity renders it a de facto standard. The questions for Web developers have centered around whether they can afford to evolve any portion of their forward-facing online assets around a proprietary standard (around Silverlight) and still have it be on "the Web," whose values are based around platform neutrality. Those questions do seem a bit more pronounced for Microsoft than for other platform developers. But how should Microsoft handle the delicate issue of developing for a platform that's "ours" versus one that is "yours?" (And what's the difference really?)

Bob Muglia took the lead on this question: "The thing we want to be careful of is, we're not trying to say Silverlight is an alternative standardization to HTML 5, and that part of the Web," he told us. "We're not saying, 'Hey, you should use this instead of that.' We're trying to provide people with an environment that has capabilities that you just simply can't do today in the standards-based world."

Ray Ozzie picked it up from there: "The way I view it, I know there's not a bright line. But when I'm thinking of Silverlight, I'm thinking a lot in terms of skills leverage for the people who have learned how to program, how to build things in C#, who have built-up assets...and it is the most seamless transition for people like that to build to things in the browser and build things that are hybrid, between the browser and the service. It's not intended to be disconnected from the Web; there's more and more integration between the things that you do in Silverlight [where] you don't have the browser. But we will build in both, and it just depends on where you come from, those skills."

This has been a major problem for Ozzie with respect to Web developers at large, and he made it very clear in his candid comments: Just who gets to say what the Web is, and where it ends? Technically, I've made it a point to explain the Web as the subset of Internet functions that utilize HTTP, which is how standards bodies might also explain it; but there are a growing number of protocols and technologies that are completely off the HTTP protocol and that rely, nonetheless, on the Web browser. Flash has been one of them; shouldn't Silverlight be another, posits Ozzie and Microsoft?

“We're trying to provide people with an environment that has capabilities that you just simply can't do today in the standards-based world.”

Bob Muglia, President, Server & Tools Division, Microsoft

Steve Gillmor noted that in a previous talk, Ozzie promised to "do the right thing" with regard to integrating Silverlight technologies down the road into the whole discussion of HTML 5 standards. He asked Ozzie what he meant by that; and Ozzie responded by saying that he's not always in the same position as those who are working directly on the problem itself, to say how much is being done and when it'll get done.

"We love the Web; we're not anti-Web, we're not going in a different direction," Ozzie continued. "And what I meant was, when we look at the various pieces of what we call HTML 5, as consensus emerges around different aspects of it, that we will do what people expect us to do in the spirit of the Web."

Bob Muglia then added this: "I think it's helpful to actually have a clear line that says, 'This is Silverlight, and then this is HTML,' and have both of them in existence, where we can step back and say, 'Okay, the standards process is evolving around HTML, and we very much want to participate in that and help drive it forward and build the world's best Web browser that does that.' [By that same token], it's nice to have something that's separate from that, it interact very seamlessly with that, it runs cross-platform, it does all these other things, but we can run like hell with it. And to be non-apologetic about running like hell with it."

Muglia drew a mental picture for us of a realm of clearly decided upon concepts called standards, a growing body of protocols that everyone agrees to follow. But customer demands run faster than standards organizations -- he cited Netflix as a critical example -- and companies like Microsoft and Adobe (here he wasn't ashamed to mention the Flash maker) have to run ahead of the pack, and in competition with one another, to meet that demand.

“As far as we can see, there will be a difference between the security context of running in a browser, and having a user make a decision to install (I use that word loosely) an application on their machine.”

Bob Muglia, President, Server & Tools Division, Microsoft

"The issue of rights management, for example...is interesting, and it matters. It matters to Netflix, it matters to a whole bunch of our customers," Muglia continued. "At some point, I suspect there will be standards-based implementations. Your guess is as good as mine as to when all those features will get into HTML, whether it's HTML 6 or whatever the heck it gets called. We know there's still all sorts of areas -- 3D as a whole example -- that we haven't touched with Silverlight; and there's a whole broad set of things that we know are areas where we'll want to invest.

"Our perspective on this is very simple: The standards-based world will advance, and continue to do more and more, and applications will be delivered in that way, and that's a critical thing. There will always be opportunities for people to build applications that take advantage of characteristics that go beyond what the standards do, and that's what we're trying to do with Silverlight. And we actually want to make it easy for developers to choose: You want to deliver something with JavaScript and HTML, great, we'll offer a world-class browser that does that, we'll enable that across our operating system and systems in different environments. If there's other things that you want to do in terms of delivering applications, we'll also have a world-class runtime to do that, and you can mix and match."

Next: Google Chrome Frame makes Ozzie very angry indeed...

With regard to the borderline between "proprietary" and "standard," there's something that has been sticking in Ray Ozzie's craw. He was well-behaved, for most of the afternoon, avoiding too much use of the "G" word. (Not "Gillmor.") But Google's recent behavior (the Chrome OS announcement event was still two days away at this point) clearly has Ozzie upset, especially with regard to how he perceives it tries to define "the Web" in its own image, moving the boundary between standards and proprietary protocols as it chooses.

"The thing that's tough is the thing in-between, and this is what really did surprise me about what Google did. The Chrome Frame thing is basically saying, 'Well, we believe in standards, but we're going to put our implementation that's beyond standards into someone else's frame.'"

Chrome Frame is the company's unsanctioned add-on to Internet Explorer that enables it to deliver designated Web pages through Chrome's browser engine rather than IE's. I asked Ozzie whether he believed Chrome Frame was just bluster on Google's part, a tactic to make folks like Ozzie upset. His answer indicated he did not believe so; he takes Chrome Frame quite seriously, as something designed to blur the line for Web developers who are legitimately trying to determine what their clients are running, and publish Web pages to that platform -- a kind of smokescreen.

The reason it's important for that dividing line to be clear, both Microsoft executives argued, is because applications need clear security boundaries, and Web applications must be more constrained about their security and permissions than "installed" apps on the user's system. "The two big differences between .NET Framework writ large and Silverlight are the execution model within which they operate, and the level of function," Ozzie explained.

Muglia took it from there: "As far as we can see, there will be a difference between the security context of running in a browser, and having a user make a decision to install (I use that word loosely) an application on their machine and provide access to physical resources...You can start to do that with Silverlight 3; you'll continue to see us do more there. For example, when we built Visual Studio 2010, almost all the new code and a very large part of the application is written in WPF. We're not to that point with Silverlight; there's no question about it, we can't build that application today with Silverlight. The day may come when we may continue to build more services and capabilities into Silverlight where you can build an application of that level of complexity, and that's true because all these environments continue to evolve."

“We love the Web; we're not anti-Web, we're not going in a different direction.”

Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, Microsoft

Surprisingly, Ozzie's later comment bordered on contradicting Muglia: He sees an evolution of the development model where, in his words, "over time, both Silverlight and the browser get closer and closer to the OS.

"Whether it's the accelerometer or compass or whatever I/O devices, over time, all of these things are going to end up having to be permissioned...by the user to do extended things, and those will be used for installed apps probably first, but maybe even for Web-based apps, I have no idea. And I think therein lies some of the biggest challenge that we have moving forward. In AIR and Silverlight, you're going to see us pushing at the edge on what Web apps are just now doing with OAuth, where the user has permissioned a site to do something. Well, we're also going to have to have the application permissioning the client to do something, to have access to my local data, to my microphone or speaker; and that permissioning on the Web is done at the Web site level. I'm not sure yet what the right granularity is for the client. Is the client just a signed piece of the Web site that you're permissioning; once you permission the Web site, [does] the client have the permission to do these things? We're in new territory here."

More of our Lunch with Bob & Ray later this week in Betanews.

Uh-oh, netbooks -- not Windows 7 -- will lift 2009 PC sales

Joe Wilcox — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:01:47 -0500

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Gartner is just full of bad news that will suck Windows PC manufacturers' thanks out of American Thanksgiving -- and Christmas along with it. Ho Ho Ho Ba Humbug. Today, the analyst firm predicted that based on fourth-quarter PC shipment estimates, for 2009, the market would grow -- but not because of Windows 7 -- and with deep declines in average selling prices. Combined, the latter two predictions spell lower profits for Windows PC OEMs and potentially overshipment of PCs for holiday 2009.

"We just don't see consumers buying new PCs solely because of Windows 7," Gartner research director George Shiffler said in a statement. "We are expecting a modest bump in fourth-quarter consumer demand as vendors promote new Windows 7-based PCs, but the attraction will be the new PCs, not Windows 7."

Microsoft and many of its PC partners were looking for Windows 7 to bring a big sales uplift during the holidays. Microsoft already got its big bang, recording in third quarter the highest quarterly sales ever for any Windows version. Strong OEM Windows sales make sense as PC manufacturers stocked store shelves for holiday sales.

Gartner predicts that globally 298.9 million PCs will ship this year, for a year-over-year increase of 2.8 percent. For 2010, Gartner predicts PC shipments will grow 12.6 percent year over year to 336.6 million units. But Gartner warned that 2.8 percent growth is by no means sign of a recovery, because of the weak year-over-year comparison. Holiday 2008 PC shipments stalled, as manufacturers pulled back inventory following the late-September stock market crash.

More disturbing, in what looks to be a long-term trend, rapidly falling average selling prices are pulling down the total value of the PC market. Gartner predicts a 10.7 percent year-over-year decline in 2009 to $217 billion.

"We don't see PC ASPs rising any time soon," Shiffler said in the statement. "As a result, growth in the market value of shipments will significantly lag shipment growth next year and beyond."

As I've complained all year, netbooks are a menace. Netbooks, what Gartner calls mini-noteboks, pull down ASPs and cannibalize notebook and desktop margins. According to NPD, US retail Windows portable PC ASPs fell to $519 in October from $558 in April and $659 in October 2008. Without netbooks, declines were less severe. By comparison, the Mac portable ASP was $1,410 in October.

Gartner predicts that of the 162 million portable PCs shipping in 2009, 29 million will be netbooks. For 2010: 41 million netbooks out of 196.4 million portable PCs shipped. Next year's netbook shipment gains will come with slower growth, but not enough to lift already sunken ASPs.

"Mobile PC shipments continued to get a significant boost from mini-notebooks," Shiffler explained, adding that "Mini-notebooks are facing increased competition from other low-cost mobile PCs, as well as alternative mobile devices. They are rapidly finding their level in the market, and we expect their growth to noticeably slow as early as next year."

But for holiday 2009, Windows PC manufacturers are looking at netbooks' continued ASP downward pull, even while Windows 7 looks to give only marginal lift to PC sales, if any at all. Meanwhile, Mac US retail laptop ASP was nearly $900 higher than Windows portables in October. Apple will be selling at top dollar and capturing higher margins, following another record quarter of Mac shipments. In third calendar quarter, Mac shipments increased 17 percent year over year to 3.05 million units.

Netbooks are only a part of the problem facing manufacturers and sellers of Windows PCs. The question: Did OEMs and retailers overstock? If the answer is yes -- as Asian component orders and high third quarter Windows 7 license shipments suggest -- retailers will have to heavily discount PCs to clear store shelves during the holidays. All while Mac pricing is expected to remain much higher.

The good news for consumers and retailers, according to Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis: "We anticipate very strong unit volume growth in the core tech categories like flat panels and notebook PCs." The bad news for retailers and PC manufacturers but potentially good for holiday bargain shoppers: "PC Pricing will be very difficult to maintain, and we expect to see aggressive pricing all through the holiday."

No thanks to Windows 7.

Microsoft's .NET Micro Framework is now free and open source

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:38:33 -0500

By Jack M. Germain, LinuxInsider

Microsoft announced at its Professional Developer Conference on Tuesday the release of version 4.0 under the Apache 2.0 license. The license transfer makes good on a longstanding promise from Redmond that it would make the popular .NET code base available as open source.

The gift to the open source community, however, does come with some strings attached -- or, rather, removed from the gift wrapping. Microsoft reduced some of the framework's functionality in making the Software Developer's Kit open source, according to Peter Galli, the Open Source Community Manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group. In his blog post last Tuesday, Galli revealed details about the code release.

Microsoft pulled the framework's cryptography libraries and also stripped out its TCP/IP stack because it contains third-party software licensed from EBSnet, wrote Galli.

"While the Micro Framework constitutes only a small part of the total .Net corpus, it is a significant step forward in making Redmond's ubiquitous framework more available and interoperable with other FOSS code," Bill Weinberg, principal analyst at LinuxPundit.com, told LinuxInsider.

The .NET Micro Framework is a development and execution environment for resource-constrained devices, according to Galli. It is well-used in embedded devices with low-powered processors that have a limited amount of RAM.

The framework was initially developed inside the Microsoft Startup Business Accelerator but was recently moved to the Developer Division to be more closely aligned with the overall direction of Microsoft development efforts, he noted.

"The result of this is that the .NET Micro Framework has become a seamless development experience, bringing a single programming model and tool chain for the breadth of developer solutions, all the way from small intelligent devices to servers and the cloud. There are also no more time-limited versions," wrote Galli.

Microsoft's decision to include the source code for almost all of the product ensures that developers now get access to the Base Class Libraries that were implemented for .NET Micro Framework and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) code itself, he added. CLR is a core component of Microsoft's .NET initiative.

The TCP/IP stack is third party software that Microsoft licenses from EBSNet. Thus, Microsoft did not have the rights to distribute that source code.

Microsoft did not include the cryptography libraries in the source code because they are used outside of the scope of the .Net Micro Framework. Customers who need access to the code in the cryptography functions can get that functionality in other sources.

Microsoft plans to remain active as a community partner to continue developing the framework. While the license allows customers to develop their own specialized versions of the framework, Microsoft intends to stay involved to avoid any possible fragmentation of the platform, Galli explained.

"As such, we are planning on establishing a core technology team that is made up of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft contributors that continues the goals of producing a high-quality product for very small devices. This group will act as the gateway to community contributions while, at the same time, Microsoft Developers will continue [to] add functionality and coordinate with the overall .NET team," Galli said.

Microsoft also plans to form a community of involved members to help shape the future direction of the framework product. This will include a core technology team composed of Microsoft and external partners. People will be encouraged to propose projects, which will be vetted before they are accepted, he noted.

"The site will also support people building extensions that exist alongside the platform rather than being integrated into it," Program Manager Colin Miller told Galli, according to the blog.

In the short term, the Micro Framework will only aid developers and integrators of resource-constrained embedded systems and not the larger communities building more robust intelligent devices, desktop and enterprise applications, according to Weinberg. More crucial is the potential for pressure from other other source projects to spur .NET uses.

"I find the release more interesting for its use of the permissive Apache license. By licensing the Micro Framework under Apache, the release throws down a gauntlet to open source .Net work-alike Mono, which is licensed under GNU GPL and LGPL. What used to be a stark choice between highly proprietary and closed source .NET vs. open and free Mono is now more clouded," Weinberg said.

Embedded developers and others could find Redmond's code and terms more attractive for the flexibility conferred by Apache licensing. The key is that Apache 2.0 demands minimal reciprocity for code licensed under it. The license requires only preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer, he explained.

"Unlike GNU, GPL and LGPL employed by Mono, Apache is not a copyleft license and allows use of source code for both proprietary and FOSS derivation and deployment. While OEMs, integrators and others are today mostly comfortable with the disclosure requirements imposed by GNU licenses, their legal departments still cleave to closely held IPR, potentially giving .NET Micro Framework advantage over its traditional FOSS rival, Mono," concluded Weinberg.

Originally published on LinuxInsider

Google's value proposition for Chrome OS: Should we feel insulted?

Scott M. Fulton, III — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:19:32 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Let's be absolutely honest and straightforward about this right up front: Google Chrome OS is not an operating system. It's a device, like the iPhone, only that Google wants to license its specifications to OEMs. Any OEM that builds it is making a Chrome device, whose profile will be so low that it could probably never be switched out to run Windows, even XP. Probably great connectivity, but not enough solid-state storage to manage local documents or store many media files.

More than an Android device, less than a Windows device.

Any amount of SSD storage does not come cheap, though, so a Chrome device will not be a cheap netbook. But it will not be a PC, and that fact alone should tell the market that it will not compete against Windows -- not really. Instead, Google's play appears to be in the narrow field of subsidized connectivity devices that aren't meant to be used as highly portable PCs.

And who exactly is that? Not anyone who makes ample use of her digital camera, not anyone who collects music or videos (even legally), not anyone who makes DVDs of his home movies, not anyone who uses a printer for anything besides a screen dump, and not anyone who plays a game whose depth of graphics exceeds Frogger circa 1979 or whose interactivity with other players goes beyond Club Penguin. At the same time, this ideal customer must be willing to keep her documents online, her personal profiles online, each and every transported photograph online.

The difference between private and public in this world is that "private" starts out with "public" as its base, with layers of protection to obscure it. Security through obscurity -- a method that has never worked yet, not once.

There comes a point in the evolution of almost every computer company of respectable size when it toys with the idea of being able to channel the entirety of computer users through a device or mechanism or program of its own design. And for a while, their ideas actually show some progress and bear some fruit -- e.g., MS-DOS, Windows, and to some extent the iPhone.

But even then, history has shown that customers have only been willing to invest in devices or software that refrains from limiting their choices, whose clear and unequivocal benefits can be demonstrated, and where gains from making the choice and taking the leap are quantifiable and guaranteed. In every instance in history, that guarantee has come from a solid, underlying, pre-established platform.

Consumers do not take well to being cattle-prodded into pre-established purchasing channels on the promise of future value. Invest now, reap later, is a value proposition that has never worked for any type of technology, at any time in history.

Here's what Google thinks about you, the potential Chrome OS user, from the company's launch video last Thursday:

If you're like me, you spend something like, I don't know, 90% of your time on the Internet in a browser -- there's e-mails, chatting, you're reading news, you're watching videos, you're playing games, you're buying things, just to name a few. Which kinda makes the Web browser the most important program on your computer...If everything's stored on the Internet, then your phone, your computer, all of these devices, are what people call stateless. Which is kind of a big word.

Maybe you caught the hidden message behind all that: Google thinks you're unemployed. You're illiterate, you don't know the difference between a Web browser and a spreadsheet, and you spend 90% of your online time doing nothing that earns you a living -- Google either implied all that or said it explicitly. And as if to drum home the point, in the little cartoon, a speaking bubble next to a productivity icon on the desktop reads, "Nobody clicks me anymore."

I know when I've been insulted, and I know when you've been insulted. If you're indeed unfortunate enough to be among the 10% of our brethren who are unemployed, then I would imagine you are spending 90% or more of your online time working hard to rectify that situation. If I were to make the same presumptions about you that Google just did, you would stop reading me right now, click on a new bookmark, and never come back to Betanews again. I wouldn't dare make that presumption. So why should Google?

When Apple came to market with the iPhone, it was not like Great Britain's attack on the Falkland Islands. It had the well-respected platform of the iPod and iTunes already established, it had plenty of decent applications already built, and most importantly, it had one very attractive device.

The Chrome device, at this point, does not appear to have any attractive benefits to it, besides the possibility of those that OEMs may add to it through their own volition. One could foresee multitouch as an option. But with only enough solid-state memory to get it running and, I guess, store cookies and bookmarks, it would be difficult for the Chrome device to have enough local media on-hand to be stretched or shrunken or manipulated, even with a link to Picasa. And with the principal application being the Chrome Web browser, there really isn't much use for touch for most instances besides scrolling and tapping.

One has to wonder what manner of sociologist or market consultant or psychoanalyst or supermarket tabloid psychic led Google to this conclusion: that you, the poor, illiterate, unemployed socialite, have the intrinsic desire to become a bandwidth consumer. The Chrome device appears geared around the idea that you want to consume bandwidth, so much so that you're eager to transfer the interface between CPU and local storage entirely to the Internet, and delegate the job of protection and privacy to "the cloud." Because without a "killer app," without a truly revolutionary device design with orders of magnitude more functionality than you've ever had before, and without clear and obvious gains from making the switch, people typically don't make the investment.

The Mattel Aquarius computer, circa 1983. [Photo credit: OldComputers.net]

Technology has never inspired leaps of faith from consumers. They will make leaps, but only with guarantees. Without them, the manufacturer's value proposition doesn't look any more solid than, say, Mattel's in 1983. Mattel put together a handful of applications (one of them Microsoft BASIC), made a deal with its manufacturer in Hong Kong for a cheap device, and essentially said this: Since you're only using your television to play games anyway, why not stick a keyboard on it, and maybe you can pretend you're doing something productive or educational? At least you'll feel better while you're wasting your time.

The consumer knows when he's been insulted. A new device's value proposition only works when its manufacturer demonstrates that it has at least as much faith in its consumer as it would ask that consumer to invest in it. That's why the iPhone works, that's why the first BlackBerrys worked, that's why the Macintosh worked, it's why the first Android devices are working, and that's why the Google Chrome device has already failed. Chrome is Google's "Bob."

10 things about Microsoft's PDC 2009: The good, the bad and the ugly

Joe Wilcox — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0500

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Microsoft's 2009 developer conference wrapped up yesterday in Los Angeles. Not since PDC 2003 has Microsoft talked so much and said so little. As I listened to the keynotes and have reviewed the sessions, words "series finale" repeatedly popped into my head -- like a TV show coming to its end after a long run. Good or bad for Microsoft, a computing era is ending. Perhaps PDC 2009 demarcates the transition.

PDC 2003 was memorable for demos that wooed but seemed insubstantial. Within weeks after that developer conference, I began telling my clients (I was a senior analyst for JupiterResearch then) to expect Microsoft to delay Windows Longhorn sometime in early 2004. The delay came, followed by several others, as Microsoft dumped features to get Windows Vista out the door -- late -- missing holiday 2006.

PDC 2009 had a quality that reminds me of the event six years earlier. Much of the big new stuff came off a bit airy, and there are gapping pot holes in the product strategy -- mobile being the biggest -- that Microsoft executives tried to walk around or jump over. Ignoring these holes doesn't make them go away, unless perhaps sticking one's head in them like an ostrich might.

Windows is no longer the satellite around which trendy development projects revolve. Windows gravity remains strong in the enterprise, for which switching costs to competing platforms hold tight the orbit. Increasingly, Web development and the mobile device capture pull developers away from Windows. Microsoft didn't increase enough the gravity to pull them back. For example, Internet Explorer 9 demos were laughable in context of continued and aggressive Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox development. Meanwhile, Microsoft had virtually nothing to say about Windows Mobile/Phone.

With that introduction, I've compiled my thoughts about PDC 2009 -- and related announcements this week, such as the Office 2010 public beta -- into a list of 10 things. The things are in no particular order of importance.

1. Two screens aren't enough for a three-screen strategy. The most baffling Microsoft messaging coming out of PDC 2009 was the continued talk about three screens -- mobile device/phone, PC and TV. But Microsoft only really has one of those screens down, the PC. The TV screen is more about Xbox gaming and entertainment, without enough synchronicity yet with the PC.

The mobile phone strategy is a disaster. Microsoft has got no software or service that can effectively compete with Apple, Google, Nokia or Research in Motion mobile operating systems. Windows Mobile is losing licensees to Google's Android, and Apple's App Store/iPhone/iPod touch platform is a black hole sucking in developers.

Actually, it's embarrassing for Microsoft to pitch three screens when the software and strategy around one of those screens stinks so badly. I actually felt sorry for Microsoft executives trying to make the three-screen pitch. I was embarrassed for them.

2. A laptop isn't a bribe, it's an investment. During the PDC Day 2 keynote, Steven Sinofsky, Windows & Windows Live divisional president, told paying attendees they would each receive a free laptop. Microsoft and Acer designed the thin-and-light laptop, with 11.6-inch touchscreen. The other features seemed quite underwhelming,

But underwhelming really was an overwhelming achievement. Microsoft accomplished two important objectives by giving away the laptops:

Every developer attending the conference now has Windows 7 for creating new applications.
The laptop establishes a baseline for which developers should create their new applications.

The latter is important. Many Windows XP and Vista systems can be upgraded to Windows 7, and they won't have the fastest processors, best graphics capabilities or highest screen resolutions of computers shipping now. Then there are all those underpowered netbooks that businesses and consumers are buying. Microsoft set an appropriate baseline for where the market is and where Microsoft wants the market to go -- touchscreens.

3. A big conference should justify attendees' investment of time and money. PDC 2009 didn't offer any big surprises, aside from the the free laptop. Perhaps that's OK, as Betanews' Scott Fulton expressed yesterday:

The big stories here in Los Angeles this week were more evolutionary than revolutionary. That was actually quite all right with attendees I spoke with this week, most of whom are just fine with one less thing to turn their worlds upside down. It's tough enough for many of these good people to hold onto their jobs every week.

Perhaps some other attendees would like to keep their jobs by justifying the time and expense of attending Microsoft's developer conference. Microsoft should have skipped doing a developer conference this year. It's better to saying nothing if you really have nothing to say.

4. A shipping operating system is better than none. Windows 7 is here. It's real, and it's really much better than either Windows XP or Vista. Windows 7 is fun and productivity boosting. During PDC, Microsoft made a pretty good pitch for why Windows 7. Yesterday, during a Webcast, Google made an operating pitch, too -- for Chrome OS. After months of rumors, Google finally explained what to expect from Chrome OS. The news was everywhere yesterday. But for all the buzz, Chrome OS is, at least for today, vaporware. The software release is a year, maybe even more, away.

But the timing of the announcement felt deliberate, like Google had looked into the Microsoft playbook and copied a few strategies. During the 1990s, Microsoft was notorious for announcing big new -- coming someday in the future -- things about the same time competitors released new products. Some of these forthcoming Microsoft products were real vaporware; they never shipped. But whether real products or not, the announcements gave businesses and consumers reason to wait on the competing thing available in the present for the one that sounded so good in the future. Chrome OS is Google's reason to wait on Windows 7. I say that nothing is no reason to wait on something.

5. Being Amazon is no way to launch Azure. During PDC 2008, Microsoft's Web services pitchman, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, gave a rousing pitch for Azure. He convinced that Azure would be a cloud-based operating system developers would write their applications to. The strategy beamed with innovation. A year later, the pitch came across as something much different. Ozzie still talked about a cloud OS, but the deliverables and new services were about databases.

It seemed as if Microsoft had pulled a Windows Longhorn, dumping features and shifting strategies before reaching the destination. Azure, which won't launch until Jan. 1, 2010, now looks less like a cloud OS and more like an up-and-coming Amazon Web Services. Chasing Amazon is not a winning strategy, even with all the leverage Microsoft commands from existing PC desktop and server software.

Like PDC 2003, where Microsoft employees showed lots of Longhorn facade but not much structure behind it, Azure seemed not only less substantial than PDC 2008 but missing pieces even ahead of the launch. What about Windows Live and important services like Windows Mesh for which there was supposed to be synchronicity with Azure?

6. Silverlight can light Microsoft's way to the Web. Scott Guthrie made a compelling pitch for the new features coming in Silverlight 4.0, which is now in beta. The Microsoft corporate vice president showed that at least with this one product, Microsoft is innovating -- and remarkably fast. New features include Adobe AIR-like capabilities, support for microphones and Webcams, standalone Silverlight containers and better HTML support, including HTTP streaming. There is much for developers to like in Silverlight 4.0.

But Microsoft also is acting like the old Microsoft and not the more open one presented during PDC 2008. Some new features are specific to Windows, which potentially fragments Silverlight functionality across different platforms.

7. People don't want to work more, they want to live more. The most baffling Microsoft marketing messaging of the week had to be for Office Mobile. Tagline: "Take work with you?" Exactly what is aspirational about that? Microsoft expects so-called knowledge workers, whose computing habits already mix professional and personal lives, will want to take even more work with them? The tagline is reason not to use Office Mobile. That is unless the marketing goal is to generate fear: It's better to take more work home than to not work at all, given the increasing chances of otherwise being laid off in this economy. Such approach is perhaps motivational, but certainly not aspirational.

8. Real open-source supporters improve Azure's allure. Ozzie has consistently and persistently pitched Microsoft's Web services strategy as being more open. He made his case during PDC 2009 in a surprising -- and I'd say shocking -- way. He brought out two surprising Azure supporters It was a simply brilliant marketing maneuver. The first: WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg came out on the PDC stage to announce that Automattic would begin using Azure in production ahead of the official service launch. From a marketing perspective, it was a stunning announcement, since Automattic uses open-source tools like Apache and MySQL. The message: Azure isn't just about Microsoft products or development tools.

Additionally, Vivek Kundra, the US government's chief information officer, appeared via satellite link. Many news reports have painted Kundra as a Google hosted apps lover. That buzz has raised questions about how much the Obama Administration might embrace Microsoft software or services. Kundra is on record supporting the use of open development tools for government online services. While the Federal CIO mostly spoke about the government's open-development efforts, his appearance at PDC was good for Microsoft by association. Kundra concluded by saying that he looked forward to the "thousands of applications that are going to be created." But he didn't specifically say with Microsoft development tools or services.

9. SharePoint and Windows Live are not social networks. On Monday, Microsoft released Office 2010 beta, ahead of PDC 2009's official opening. Among the announcements with potential developer appeal: Office Social Connector. Microsoft is attempting to make Outlook 2010 the hub for users' social connections. But right now, the major supported product/service is SharePoint 2010. While Microsoft acts like SharePoint is a social network, it most certainly is not. Meanwhile, Microsoft promises Windows Live support for Office Social Connector sometime next year. Third-party services must support a Microsoft proprietary XML schema to appear in Office Social Connector.

10. Digital natives are looking elsewhere. The biggest tech news of the week was about competitors' vaporware -- the aforementioned Chrome OS and Apple's rumored tablet. How outrageously laughable. Apple's rumored tablet is rumored to be delayed. It was all over the InterWebs during PDC! A product that doesn't exist will ship late. Later than what?

The point: Apple and Google are having much more success appealing to geeks and digital natives than is Microsoft. While Microsoft executives talk big iron -- the kind of blathering heard from IBM a generation ago -- Apple and Google offer products or services meaningful to everyday users, such tools for creating or managing content that matters, like photos and videos, rather than static text documents. Just look at the bazillion of iPhone/iPod touch new App Store application stories that post to the Web in any week.

Apple and Google have got the buzz. By comparative perception, Microsoft makes software for aged computing users and IT stiffshirts. Microsoft did little to change perceptions through PDC 2009.

E-book readers will be in short supply this holiday season

Tim Conneally — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:02:14 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Black Friday is just a week away and the demand for ebook readers looks to already be too great.

Earlier this week, Sony said its 3G-connected Daily Edition Reader may not arrive in time for the holidays. Preorders for the device began on Wednesday, but it will not ship until some time between December 18th and January 7th, and it is not expected to land in stores until after the holidays.

Today, Barnes and Noble said that it has already sold out of its new Nook e-reader, and that the next shipment of devices will not be available until January 4th.

In November 2007 when the Kindle first launched, the device reportedly sold out in six hours and wasn't available again until mid-2008. Then the Kindle DX debuted, and it too was in short supply.

The link between these devices (and nearly every e-reader on the market) is their electrophoretic display, which comes from Massachusetts company E Ink Corporation. Betanews reached out to E Ink Co. today, to find out how its production is holding up in light of the high demand for e-readers, and a reply is pending.

We'll update as soon as the company gets back to us.

Sony looks to finally open a single storefront for downloads

Tim Conneally — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:12:20 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Sony yesterday discussed its plans to open a download shop similar to iTunes or Amazon Digital Downloads.

Reportedly given the tentative name "Sony Online Service," the online store would make the many different types of Sony digital content available in a single place. The company has a number of content portals already, but each is geared toward a related piece of hardware and run by a different business unit of the giant Sony conglomerate.

For example, PlayStation 3 and PSP users can download new games, movies, and TV episodes from the PlayStation Network, but users of the Bravia Internet Link on Sony's HDTVs get content directly from Sony Pictures services such as Crackle. Users of Sony's e-Reader family can get content in The sBook Store from Sony, but users of Sony's Walkman family of portable media players are encouraged to get their music from Sony MusicPass, which was launched to replace the defunct Connect music download shop that closed in 2008. There is also a substantial overlap in content with Sony's mobile phone joint venture Sony Ericsson and itsPlayNow arena..

Kazuo Hirai, Sony's executive vice president for networked products and services, says the service will be modeled after the popular PlayStation Network, which now has more than 33 million registered users. Hirai however, expressed doubt to Businessweek that users of PlayStation Network would actually migrate over to a new service.