What's on Microsoft's Windows holiday gift list?

A year ago, shortly after the launch of Windows 7, Windows 7 PCs were a hot holiday gift item. But what about this year?

HP’s Slate 500 Windows 7 business tablets may be on back-order (less surprising given their reportedly limited supply), but they’re nowhere near as likely to be on wish lists as iPads and color Nooks. And even the soon-to-be-unveiled Dell netbook-tablet convertible, the Dell Inspiron Duo, is not likely to be a runaway holiday hit — at least not on the magnitude of other consumer tech goodies.

Microsoft is holding a press event on November 23 — the same day the Dell Inspiron Duo is rumored to be launching — in New York City, where the company is expected to show off more Windows 7 PCs.

Update: It looks like Microsoft is having two Windows holiday events. There’s also another slated for December 6 in New York City. I’ve asked for more info as to what will be different. No word back yet.

Make no mistake: The emphasis on the Windows front this holiday from the Softies is PCs, not slates.  CEO Steve Ballmer said as much during Microsoft’s annual shareholders meeting today. Ballmer noted that Windows is now on 1.2 billion PCs. He said in the next month, expect from Microsoft a number of “new form factors based on Windows.” These will start off with “new form factors of PCs, rather than something trying to be something else,” Ballmer told shareholders.

He restated his previous guidance: In the next year to 18 months, once Intel rolls out its Oak Trail processors, which have the kind of battery-life and processing power needed by Windows slates, expect other form factors to arrive. Ballmer said it will be during that 2011+ period that there will be “new advances and changes in our software” to support these kinds of devices. (He didn’t elaborate on “changes in our software,” but the Softies have said not to expect an interim version of Windows with more touch-centric capabilities. They have hinted that the kind of “big button” interface pioneered in Windows Media Center may come into play.)

In addition to highlighting new PCs from Microsoft partners at the November 23 event, Microsoft also will likely play up Windows Live Essentials 2011. That bundle of software plus services is key to Microsoft’s new “To the Cloud” ads.



I’m not so sure most consumers are going to understand “the cloud” after viewing these ads. Things are a little less cloudy if you know to go to Microsoft’s Windows 7 plus Windows Live site, which explains that a PC user who wants to extend Windows 7 needs to download Windows Live Essentials 2011 to get additional creation and collaboration capabilities. I haven’t heard Microsoft using its “Personal Cloud” terminology lately (maybe company marketers decided against it after floating some trial balloons this summer), but this is essentially the same campaign.

Obviously, Windows 7 PCs aren’t the only holiday gift items the Softies are pushing this year. Kinect/Xbox 360 and related game titles, of course, are at the top of the company’s list, as are the newly released Windows Phone 7 phones.

Stay tuned next week to hear more about what else, if anything, Microsoft unveils during its Windows holiday announcement….

IE9 takes top benchmark prize, no cheating involved

I was going to write a short post this morning passing along the news that Microsoft was releasing a new Platform Preview for Internet Explorer 9 (that’s number 7 for those keeping score). I had a quick briefing on it yesterday (with an embargo that was to lift when the build was released to the web).

I was probably going to mention that Microsoft was claiming it had made extensive overall performance improvements with this build, including a great deal of work on its Chakra JavaScript engine, and that they had managed to unlock the Top Scorer achievement on the widely followed SunSpider benchmark, ahead of even nightly and experimental builds of the latest and greatest rival browsers.

And I was planning to speculate a little about when Microsoft would deliver a release candidate, which is the next milestone. I was going to guess, given the quick turnaround for this preview release, that an RC will probably be ready before the end of the year.

And then a funny thing happened. Via Twitter, I saw a link to a disturbing headline: Microsoft caught cheating on IE9 SunSpider JavaScript tests? Oddly, it led to a post from my colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. But when I started following the original sources, I learned that Adrian had been taken in by a Slashdotted flamebait troll story.

I do not mean those words as an insult or as hyperbole. That is, in fact, the label that the Slashdot editor who posted that story attached to it. Here’s the screen capture, complete with mandatory image of Gates-as-Borg.

It’s the sort of stuff that Slashdot does well, catapulting an inflammatory story from a tiny website into something its community of ubergeeks can argue about. At Slashdot, the comments are usually more entertaining and informative than the main article.

If you follow the sources back just a few links, you see where this is coming from. Way back in early September, some 10 weeks ago, a Mozilla engineer named Rob Sayre wrote a fairly non-inflammatory blog post giving an update on Firefox JavaScript performance. Given that his blog’s tagline is “JS engineering and Kanye West updates,” this is not a surprising choice of subject matter. At the end of the post, he noted an odd result for IE9 on one score and speculated that there might be “a problem of some sort” with that result. There is no insinuation of cheating or misbehavior. In fact, it is the last example in a series designed to illustrate some of the small problems that crop up in software engineering.

Nearly 10 weeks later, a tiny blog called Digitizor (based in India, apparently) noticed that post and added its own inflammatory spin. That’s the post Slashdot highlighted.

Normally, here’s what happens: Slashdot’s readers get a big chuckle over the whole thing, the tiny web site goes back to obscurity after its servers take a Slashdot beating, and everyone moves on to the next topic. One positive outcome of the ruckus is that the Mozilla engineer who wrote the original blog post finally got around to filing a bug at Microsoft’s Connect site, which is the formal means of raising issues like this so that engineers can look at them in detail. I am authoritatively informed this particular bug is being looked at very carefully.

And there it should have ended. Except that this morning a blogger at ZDNet comes out and repeats the exaggerated allegation, even including the word “cheating” in its headline. ZDNet reaches a big audience. Bigger than Slashdot and orders of magnitude bigger than the little tiny outfit that stirred up this hornet’s test. So for ZDNet’s millions of readers, an inaccurate story turns into an inflammatory headline.

The original headline on Adrian’s post has been slightly updated, with an unconvincing disclaimer tacked onto the end. [By the end of the day the headline had been completely changed, with the word "cheating" removed.] An update at the end of the post itself now contains a response from Microsoft. Unfortunately, anyone who just sees the headline and skims the opener as they scan through their favorite websites will come away with an inaccurate conclusion. [The IE Blog post has now been updated in great detail to address this allegation, complete with an explanation of dead-code elimination as an optimization technique and some actual code samples. If you're a developer, pay attention. If you're not a code jockey, well, your eyes may glaze over.]

The thing that’s absurd about this entire incident is that it’s obviously untrue. If you try to game a benchmark, you’ll get caught as soon as you try to perform the same tasks doing real work. That’s especially true when millions of end users have been beating on your beta release for months and developers have been pounding on six previous platform previews stretching back for nearly a full year. Whether you’re a user or a developer, you can see the clear improvement in JavaScript performance when you run any of Microsoft’s Test Drive examples or visit script-intensive sites.

In fact, I’m about to install that new Platform Preview myself and look at its performance. I was really looking forward to that. It’s something I would have started hours ago if I hadn’t been distracted by a Slashdotted flamebait troll story. Sorry for the delay. I’ll be back with a more detailed look after I’ve done my homework.

Jury slams SAP $1.3 billion in TomorrowNow lawsuit

In making a record award, either the jury in the Oracle v TomorrowNow case wanted to get home early for Thanksgiving or Oracle’s lawyers and witnesses dazzled them into believing that Oracle is entitled to close on the full value of the license that Oracle claims it would have wanted to be paid.

The figure of $1.3 billion the jury awarded is an order of magnitude higher than any previous award.

The jury were given the choice of making an award based upon a fair market value license or lost profits. If the jury had looked at lost profits then it is difficult to conceive how they could have awarded anything approaching this amount. Even looking at fair market value, one wonders how they managed to compute such a figure given the number of customers TomorrowNow actually secured and the value of those contracts.

You can be sure that Oracle will milk this for all its worth but in the meantime SAP will almost certainly appeal the verdict. SAP has already expressed ‘disappointment’ according to the Wall Street Journal.

While SAP would not have difficulty in settling this amount, it will crimp the company’s ability to expand through any planned acquisitions, despite it has recently refinanced its core ג‚¬1.5 billion revolving credit facility.

In the meantime, the verdict by the Twitterati was simple: ‘#ouch.’

ZDNet Government roundup: more Wikileaks, sites seized, and Dubya does Facebook

This week on the ZDNet Government blog, I’ve been pretty focused on Wikileaks (and a little 5-minute TV appearance by yours truly).

In addition to my posts here on ZDNet Government, a bunch of my fellow ZDNet bloggers have written some fascinating posts on government-related topics, ranging from the government seizing some not-so-well-behaved Web sites to former President Bush taking his book tour online at Facebook.

Please read and enjoy the talent and knowledge that my colleagues here on ZDNet bring to their individual columns — and to you, every day.

Government shuts down Web sites

The Rise of Web Censorship

Last week saw the closing down of numerous Web sites by the U.S. Government and that may have only been the tip of the iceberg.

UK police want domain seizing powers: Right or wrong?

UK law enforcement want similar abilities to the United States to be allowed to shut down domain names for sites which break the law. Is this acceptable, or an infrigement of further civil liberties?

Wikileaks and more Wikileaks

Wikileaks: How our Government IT Failed Us

Jason Perlow shows that it wasn’t an insecure network that created the “perfect stormâ€‌ that allowed Private Bradley Manning to dump the State Department cables to Wikileaks. It was the failure of our government to apply standard IT practices in a theater of war.

What do we tell our students about WikiLeaks?

WikiLeaks’ impact on foreign policy is considerable, even as we struggle to fully understand the magnitude of their latest disclosures. However, for our students, Chris Dawson questions of ethics and digital citizenship will need to be addressed right now.

Amazon Web Services takes down Wikileaks; It’s in the terms of service

Amazon Web Services has stopped hosting Wikileaks, according to various reports. The hosting company retains the rights to terminate accounts.

Preventing your own WikiLeaks

Security is only as strong as your weakest link, and that â€کlink’ is probably already is in your pocket or laptop bag.

Wikileaks: Collaboration vs Silos & Stovepipes

Oliver Marks says he expects more than a few CIO’s have reached for the Pepto Bismol after hearing the news about WikiLeaks releasing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables on the public Internet, given how similar the situation is to their responsibilities for protecting data and information.

Agency actions online

FCC sets open Internet vote: Framework just enough to annoy everyone

The FCC is planning to vote on draft rules for an open Internet on Dec. 21. Next up: A wide range of reaction and a framework that won’t completely satisfy anyone.

new policies to protect online privacy

The Federal Trade Commission is proposing new policies around online privacy, including the creation of a “Do Not Trackâ€‌ mechanism as a means of easing the burden on consumers trying to keep tabs on who’s keeping tabs on them.

Google and the government cloud

Google wins email, apps contract with U.S. GSA

The U.S. General Services Administration is going Google. The agency today announced a $6.7 million, five-year award for Google’s cloud-based email and collaboration tools, a move that will help the agency reduce costs by 50 percent over the next five years. In all, the savings is expected to be around $15 million.

EU launches probe against Google. Now what?

The European Commission said today that it has launched an in-depth investigation against Google over allegations that the search engine has abused it position as a search leader, specifically that it has tampered with the ranking of Web sites for competitive reasons.

Washington 2011: The year of the cloud

The U.S. government is adopting a “cloud-firstâ€‌ approach to tech and looking to reduce the number of data centers it operates.

Other interesting reads

Live on Facebook: George W. Bush is an “iPad person,” uses “the Facebook”

Former President George W. Bush made the granddaddy of book-tour stops today - swinging through the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto for a live Q&A broadcast on Facebook.

Iran: Yes, Stuxnet hurt our nuclear program

The Stuxnet worm got some big play from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who acknowledged that the malware dinged his nuclear program.

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