Sprint's BlackBerry Curve to get GPS and Wi

Sprint’s BlackBerry Curve to get GPS and WiFi — linkWow, that’s like so cool! It is said that Sprint’s Blackberry Curve will get GPS and WiFi all into one. It’s kind of a special offer which they will simply name the 8350i. Probably RIM will name it and Sprint will sell it. Well I guess at first it was really a mind boggling problem to fit the GPS and the WiFi antenna inside the precious Curve. And now it’s all fixed. I am guessing that’s going to happen sometime soon with Sprint and other carriers will follow. After all why buy a Curve with only one of the must have features when you can get them both now? [Link to story]

Iran and the Bomb

T he brinksmanship between the West and Iran over that country’s nuclear ambitions appeared to enter a new and dangerous phase earlier this month, when the Iranians did not accept the West’s latest offer to set aside further economic sanctions if the Iranians immediately stopped enriching uranium. Representatives of six Western nations had given Iran until Aug. 2 to reply to their offer. Iran allowed the deadline to pass, then responded 48 hours later with little that was new. In the interim it deployed a new long-range weapon it said was capable of striking U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf. In return, the United States and its allies have said that they will pursue additional economic sanctions. Meanwhile, Israel, which fears that a nuclear Iran would wipe Israel off the map, continues to prepare its Defense Forces for a strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities.

Such an attack would be a catastrophe. Among other things, it is impractical, as an attack would likely only delay the Iranians, not stop them. The principal elements of Iran’s nuclear program are spread out among numerous locations and population centers, decreasing the likelihood that an Israeli strike would eliminate the nuclear threat and increasing the likelihood of Iranian civilian casualties. Also, an Israeli attack would invigorate Iranian nationalism, silence the moderate voices in Iranian politics and rally support for the Tehran regime. Lastly, Iran would almost certainly retaliate by striking targets in Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and possibly by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, choking off the world’s oil supply. The Bush administration should make it clear to Israel that a military strike would be a perilous and unacceptable escalation.

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Microsoft Calls Firefox Competitor To Windows

Microsoft always paints a picture of the competitive landscape in when it files its annual 10-K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. In a sign of the times, there are a few new clouds when this year’s report was filed Thursday, including a Web browser’s first appearance as a threat to Windows, Microsoft’s biggest cash cow.

“The Windows operating system faces competition from alternative platforms and new devices that may reduce consumer demand for traditional personal computers,” the report warns, noting the possibility that software as a service and mobile devices could decrease the relevance of traditional PC operating systems. “Competitors such as Mozilla offer software that competes with the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of Windows products. User and usage volumes on mobile devices are increasing around the world relative to the PC.”

Firefox has been a success story against Internet Explorer, continually increasing its share against Microsoft’s market browser for the last few years. But the fact that it’s now seen as a threat to Windows is more evidence than ever that Firefox has made it. More importantly, it shows that Microsoft is aware of its own important balancing act as the company strives to maintain its relevance and dominance in the services era.Microsoft has been spending billions on huge new data centers around the world, as recently as last month announcing a new one in Iowa. It’s making major investments in search and advertising, has expanded consumer services, and has begun rolling out business services and will likely announce plans later this fall to compete with companies like Amazon.com in utility computing services.

“The ability to combine the power of desktop and server software with the reach of the Internet represents an opportunity across every one of our businesses,” the company said. “As we continue to build out our services platform, we will bring a broad range of new products and service offerings to market that target the needs of large enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses, and consumers.”

Still, Microsoft makes it clear in its report that much of the increase in revenue the company has seen in the last two years has continued to come from Windows. Preinstalled Windows copies account for more than 80% of Microsoft’s client division’s revenues, and more PCs sold around the world means more Windows copies sold as well. Microsoft characterized Windows Vista adoption in the last year as “widespread.”

Whether that means Microsoft’s operating systems are continuing to be well accepted is another matter entirely. Microsoft has begun embarking on a new marketing strategy for Vista 18 months after it was released, trying to convince people that they should buy it despite early criticism. It also recently lashed out at Forrester Research for what it said were “schizophrenic” reports on Vista’s adoption rate.

In other competitive notes, Microsoft leaves Citrix off a long list of competitors to its server and tools business, which includes both Windows Server and Microsoft’s Visual Studio development tools. Citrix increasingly competes with the group’s virtualization products and isn’t listed despite VMware’s presence. Microsoft and Citrix have had a long partnership around Citrix Presentation Server, which is now known as XenApp.

Microsoft continues to up the ante in research and development, spending $8.2 billion in fiscal 2008. That’s a 14% increase over the previous year’s $7.1 billion investment, which itself represented 14% more than 2006. Still, all that spending doesn’t represent all of Microsoft’s investment in new technology, as the company spent $8.8 billion in 21 acquisitions last year, including $5.9 billion on advertising giant aQuantive and $1.3 billion on enterprise search company Fast Search & Transfer.

Is Windows Vista Really That Bad?

As the release of Windows Vista approached, the reports about how neat it was quickly turned to reports about how messed up it was, or still is: dropped features, poor performance, compatibility problems, crashes, you name it. Most of that was overblown. Certainly the computers that ran the five-year-old Windows XP couldn’t all be expected to run Vista well (even the much-heralded Mac OS bumps-up system requirements significantly over that span of time).

But some of the noise was deserved, and Vista certainly had its share of growing pains. But it’s been a year and a half. The first service pack has been released, along with an absolute flood of other automatic updates and drivers and software patches and so on. Is Vista really all that bad? More to the point, is it even worth upgrading anymore?

The short answer, I think, is yes. If you buy a PC today and it has Vista installed on it, or build a new PC (even a low cost, sub-$1,000 box), you should be in fine shape.

The driver situation has really come along to the point where Vista is perhaps better supported on new-ish hardware than XP is, and the work Microsoft did in changing lots of driver models to stabilize the system is finally paying off—more drivers, and parts of drivers, run in User Space instead of Kernel Space now, so one messed up driver doesn’t hose your whole system the way XP would, and many driver problems are recoverable without a reboot. Performance is finally there, even on what you would consider a pretty cheap PC with integrated graphics. Vista sure appears to use more resources than XP, but appearances can be deceiving. Take RAM for instance. Empty RAM does nothing for you. You don’t want empty RAM, you want RAM filledup with pre-cached data so your applications and data files snap open without hammering the hard drive, with enough intelligence to free up that RAM if an app needs it. Vista does this pretty well. Hard drive space is a non-issue.

It really doesn’t matter if your OS takes up 3GB, or 8GB, or 12GB of your hard disk. It’s a small fraction of even most laptop hard drives these days. In fact, the percentage of the average hard drive used up by the Windows installation has declined with each major release, as the size of hard drives have increased faster than the size of the Windows installation. The truth is (as much as a person’s opinion can be “truth”), Vista “feels” as fast or faster than XP on any computer a year old or less, and even on some of the better machines that are older than that. And it’s got lots of nice features, if you can get yourself out of the “do everything exactly as in XP” mindset long enough to try them.

The “trail of breadcrumbs” at the top of an Explorer window is a great improvement. Popping open the Start menu and simply typing a few characters of what you’re looking for, then seeing the program and file list update in real time, is a very fast an easy way to get to that app, file, control panel, or utility you’re looking for.

There are actually Sidebar applets worth having now. Individual volume controls for all applications can be very useful. Vista-only features like DirectX 10 are finally starting to become meaningful.

You may have heard of Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment marketing campaign. The company took a whole mess of PC users who haven’t tried Vista yet, but hate it based on all the bad stuff they hear. You almost certainly know someone like this (or maybe you are one yourself). Then they showed these people what they said was the next version of Windows, named “Mojave.” Which everyone loved. Then the Microsoft group told everyone—surprise!— Mojave is actually Windows Vista. Sure, it’s just a goofy marketing trick and you could pull the Folgers Switch with a lot of things and get a similar reaction. But I think there’s some truth to it.

Vista got a bad rap, and perhaps not undeservedly so. The Vista experience today, however, doesn’t live up to that extraordinarily negative reputation. If you’re dead-set against it, maybe it’s time for another look.

The View Beyond Vista

Why use an operating system other organizations have rejected? That’s a question many enterprises will be asking themselves when considering moving some or all of their Windows desktops to Microsoft Vista. A small minority of organizations run Linux or Mac OS X on the desktop and have no interest in Vista for that reason. But most others will at least consider migrating. And these businesses are overwhelmingly rejecting Vista, according to a report called “Enterprise Trends: Vista Is Rejected; Mozilla and Apple Make Small Gains,” which Forrester Research published in late July.

“Eighteen months after the release of Windows Vista, enterprise adoption is still in the single digits, and the majority of that seems to have come from upgrades of legacy Windows versions, not XP,” the report says.

It’s not surprising that enterprises running Windows 98 or the despised Windows ME (surely they can’t have been running anything older) are upgrading to Vista. That’s because migrating to a new OS is a major change, so it makes no sense to move to anything but the most current one. The real revelation is that significant numbers of organizations are still running these legacy operating systems.

But of the vast numbers of enterprises using XP as their standard desktop OS, comparatively few see any need to move to Vista. Microsoft claims a total of 180 million licenses have been sold for the OS and that its adoption is in line with XP after 18 months. However, according to Forrester, fewer than 10 percent of businesses are using it. Even the release of Service Pack 1 — traditionally a signal for enterprises to start adopting an OS in earnest — hasn’t put the percentage of businesses using Vista into double figures.

This may be because even though the security features of Vista are an improvement over XP — UAC (define) excepted — application and hardware compatibility issues, as well as the general feeling that Vista is bloated, slow and just a bit too pretty to be taken seriously as an enterprise OS, seems to be a barrier to adoption.

So what is the best solution for the corporate desktop in an organization reluctant to move away from Windows? Ideally something that combines the security and other advanced features of Vista with the speed and leanness of XP. Perhaps the answer is Windows Workstation 2008, the enterprise desktop OS counterpart to Server 2008. It’s a lean, mean, fast and stable desktop OS without the DRM (define), eye-candy and other unnecessary cruft that makes Vista less than ideal in the enterprise. It’s also the OS of choice for many Microsoft employees.

If you’ve never heard of Workstation 2008 that’s because it’s not an official Microsoft product — it’s just Server 2008 with the unnecessary bits taken out and a few features you’d expect in a desktop OS added. Since Vista and Server 2008 now share the same codebase, it is straightforward to add the Aero interface and other Vista features, although it somewhat defeats the purpose of the exercise.

If you fancy giving it a try you can roll your own Workstation 2008, or take the easy option and head to http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/ and use the automated Server 2008 to Workstation 2008 converter utility (which, admittedly, I have not yet tested). Deploying converted copies of Server 2008 on every desktop in an enterprise could be expensive, of course, but the license for the Data Center Edition allows for unlimited instances of Server 2008 running in virtual machines (define). These could be accessed using some thin clients and a VDI system.

Microsoft appears to have a much deeper long-term problem, though. It has a huge desktop OS business — both consumer and enterprise — but the likes of Google are intent on moving computing to the “cloud.” Microsoft has demonstrated that it understands this (with limited success) in the application space with initiatives such as its Live services. But what’s the future of the desktop OS beyond Windows 7 (and probably 8 and maybe even 9)?

At this stage it’s not clear, but Microsoft is certainly thinking about the problem, according to information about Windows’ successor that has been leaking out of Redmond in recent weeks. Apparently codenamed Midori (better known as a brand of melon flavored liquor), this new OS is designed to be “Internet-centric” and “predicated on the prevalence of connected systems,” according to a report by David Worthington in the Software Development Times. Worthington claims the report is based on internal Microsoft documents.

It’s pointless to speculate in too much detail what Midori might be like should it ever see the light of day, but one thing is for sure: Something will eventually emerge from Redmond to replace Windows. It will almost certainly be very different from the stand-alone Windows OSes that have made the company rich, and it will probably be designed to dovetail with Microsoft’s “software and services” plans.

There’s one other near certainty as well: The company will be hoping that when it is finally released, whatever Midori turns into will wow enterprises (and consumers) more than Vista has managed to do.