Top 5 non-obvious feature enhancements to Office 2010

The question has been asked, who really needs to use Microsoft Office these days? The answer is, anyone who is in the business of professionally generating content for a paying customer. Word 2010 may not be the optimum tool for the everyday blogger, and Excel 2010 maybe not the best summer trip planner, just as a John Deere is not the optimum vehicle for a trip to the grocery store. But in recent years, Microsoft is the only software producer that has come close to understanding what professional content creators require in their daily toolset.

So far, the improvements we’ve found from actually using the Office 2010 Technical Preview released Monday (as opposed to the ones Microsoft told us about) can mainly be described as usability enhancements — tools that appear to be responses to how people actually use the products. Compared to Office 2007, which threw out the old instruction manual with regard to how applications should work, Office 2010’s changes are subtler, slicker, and less ostentatious. Of those we’ve noticed in our initial tests, here are five which we feel will make compelling arguments for at least some users to upgrade:

5. Embedding Web videos in PowerPoint presentations. Technically, it’s possible to embed a YouTube video into a PowerPoint 2007 presentation, but you need a third-party plug-in to pull it off. Otherwise, PowerPoint is only geared to play locally accessible files, essentially using a Media Player component.

One of the very few functional changes to PowerPoint 2010 is the addition of a mechanism that enables you to embed YouTube and other videos into a presentation the same way you’d embed them into a Web page: by copying the HTML <EMBED> code directly in. PowerPoint 2010 (gauging from the Technical Preview) will allow you to preview the video in-place without having to view the presentation as a slideshow first, which demonstrates the depth of functionality Microsoft truly intends for this component — apparently an in-place Adobe Flash object. It will be even nicer when this feature works; in our tests, the new component often did not locate the video online and looked for it in the “My Documents” directory instead.

4. Restrict Editing command in Word 2010. Many publishing organizations use Word as their principal tool for editing textual content, which means collaborators shuttle multiple documents between authors, editors, and proofreaders. Microsoft’s collaboration tools are supposed to enable only certain parties to make changes. But in the publishing business, formatting codes are the keys to the final formatting of a production document, and if someone who has access rights can change those paragraph formats, even accidentally (which is easier to accomplish than you might imagine, thanks to customizable document templates belonging to each user), the entire production process can be held up, sometimes for days, while formatters work out the kinks.

This simple tool may go a long way toward preventing these kinks from popping up. On a per-user basis, Restrict Editing (located in the Developer panel, which is not displayed by default) can prevent named individuals from making certain types of changes to a document, even if he’s generally permitted to make changes. Among the available restrictions are changes to styles, which creates the possibility for a safeguard that publishers can use to prevent authors from changing manuscripts willy-nilly to suit their tastes. (Can you tell I’ve been in the editing business?)

3. Document properties at a glance. In the old days of Word, the Document Properties dialog box was what editors used to maintain control over versioning — which version of a document was being edited based on how many editing cycles it had passed through, and when it was last modified and saved. Versioning control in Word has improved dramatically since then, but many publishers’ control and validation processes have not. For editors who have to work with these publishers, it was a pain to discover that the designers of Office 2007 had buried Document Properties in an odd location: in the Office menu (the big round button, which has been replaced in Office 2010), under Prepare, followed by Properties and then Advanced Properties. (Nothing advanced about them, really, it should be “Basic Properties.”)

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With the BackStage feature in all Office 2010 components, a document’s basic properties shows up on the front page — no excavation necessary, no “advanced” dialogs. You’ll also find there the most basic and necessary features that Office 2007 buried under its little-used Prepare menu; in fact, I’m fairly certain that many folks will think the “Check for Issues” feature is new, when it actually premiered in the 2007 version.

2. The Share menu takes center stage ‘BackStage.’ Office 2007 introduced something Microsoft was fairly excited about at the time, called the Publish menu (under the big Office button). Its projected purpose was to enable any number of possible options for preparing a document to be received by multiple people, whether through SharePoint or Microsoft’s Document Management Server, or to a blog post someplace. But Microsoft’s “Johnny Appleseed” approach to the notion of publishing (a blog post and DMS are pretty different things) meant this menu became another of the 2007 version’s buried treasures.

In Office 2010, BackStage’s new Share menu replaces Publish with a full and richly self-documented selection of functions you can perform to enable the active document to be consumed by someone else, typically without using Office. This is Microsoft’s acknowledgment, at long last, that Office is not the universe which binds together all intellectual property.

The Change File Type menu is particularly interesting and useful here, as it presents well-explained options for doing the kind of thing we used to call “exporting.” Here is where you’ll find one of the multiple places where Office now supports OpenDocument format, both as an alternate default file save format and as a vehicle for sharing files with others. The concept of “share” makes more immediate sense to new users than “export,” and it has a more open and positive connotation: It doesn’t mean to move data out of one universe to warp it into another.

While I’m on the subject of BackStage: When Office’s designers first premiered the ribbon for the 2007 version, they claimed one of its principal benefits was to get options and commands out of the way of the document being edited. Nothing in the ribbon drops down, and the document is obstructed by dialog boxes only when vitally necessary. But BackStage runs completely contrary to that design ethic. When you’re about to save a document or print it or see what it will look like on your printer or in SharePoint, the BackStage screen totally occludes the document you’re working on, although in some cases it leaves a thumbnail open in the upper right corner as a reminder.

And yet it works surprisingly well. Because it uses all that space, there’s all that space for it to use, and it gets used for explaining the user’s options in clear and concise language. Here is where Microsoft finally learns a lesson from Web page design. Notice also the construction of the menus, in a three-tier fashion with the categories running top to bottom, and subcategories expanding to the right. Little left-pointing arrows align the commands to their respective categories like notations in an open book. It’s very legible, very attractive, and yet in runs in stark contrast to the very design decisions that gave rise to it.

1. Fully customizable ribbons. The ability to customize Office completely, to make it into the application you need it to be, is something I’ve not only treasured but cashed in on. Two of the 17 books I’ve published under one of my two names, including this one, were exclusively about the subject of Office customization.

So when I learned that you needed Visual Studio to customize Office 2007’s ribbons, I was a taken aback. I heard a number of various excuses, one of which being that the everyday end user was not familiar enough with the principles of ribbon design to be making a ribbon for himself (it’s too dangerous, boys and girls!). And the bone that Microsoft threw for us customizers in the meantime, the “Quick Access toolbar,” is not only too trifling to be fully functional or adaptable, but also (as its name clearly suggests) contrary to the ribbon design ethic — it’s a toolbar!

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This glaring omission in Office’s long-established functionality — perhaps the most prominent regular Office feature ever to be omitted from a successor version for lack of readiness — will be fixed in Office 2010. I would like to say it’s fixed now, but in early Betanews tests, adjustments I’ve made to the ribbons in Word and Excel did not stick — for some reason, components revert to their default layouts. (We’re legitimately testing Office 2010, so when I discover the reasons, Microsoft will most certainly hear from me.) Nonetheless, you can see where in the new Options panel, there are separate tiers for the Quick Access toolbar and the complete ribbon.

Everything here can be changed, including the order and names of the menus themselves, and you can create completely new menu categories on your own — you don’t need Visual Studio or a lesson in “line-of-business applications.” The background programming language for Office remains Visual Basic for Applications, which isn’t altogether bad — it means older macros remain compatible — but it does forsake the enormously powerful possibilities of opening up access to the .NET CLI, and letting the user choose her language (VB, C#, F#, IronPython, IronRuby). While VBA is, on the whole, slower and based on an older Windows component model, it still has access to the complete Office type library, and that’s the most important feature for developers. Now it’s possible once again to re-engineer Office into a sophisticated information management system exclusively for global publishers. And yes, you’re sensing a huge smile on my face.

We can debate the monolithic nature of Office applications until Steve Ballmer stops repeating the word “tenacity.” It’s almost a moot argument until anything the Web can deliver enables the degree of productivity, and the level of flexibility, as Microsoft Office. There remains no equal in the applications field, and that’s actually a shame because there appears to be ample opportunity and talent out there quite capable of engineering a better and more efficient way of working. Until then, we Office users may have even less reason to complain for at least the next three years.

AMD claims six-core Opteron performance lead over Intel Xeon

Just last month, AMD began shipping its first 6-core, 45 nm Opteron server CPUs with “Istanbul” architecture, with the top-of-the-line 2.6 GHz, 4- and 8-way 8435 SE selling for $2,649 in 1,000-unit quantities (“trays”). Perhaps ahead of schedule, yesterday AMD cut the tape for a 2.8 GHz 4- and 8-way model 8439 SE model that one-ups its own June release. Its tray price: $2,649.

And while a new entry on the high end usually triggers a price drop for existing models, it may yet be too soon for AMD to drop the price of the 2.6 GHz model below its June price. In an interview with Betanews, AMD’s Opteron product manager Steve Demski said that won’t be much of a problem, since in this economy and with the current state of data center architecture, high wattage and higher performance are less of a factor than ever before.

“In general, I won’t say that the SE is a dying breed, but it’s a small percentage of our overall business. We still do have some of these high-profile customers that do want that extra performance, and they’re willing to pay more for it. But as a percentage of our business, I want to say it’s less than five percent,” admitted Demski. “Not to say that it doesn’t matter to the people who want that performance; it does.”

AMD’s strategy, revealed last May, is to address what it believes to be four market segments: a mainstream and three offshoots. The high-performance and low-power divisions are obvious, but then AMD is gambling on a lower power market segment, for server farms that are truly dedicated to “going green.” Yesterday’s releases address the “very high performance” and the “generally lower power” shades of these two more obvious market sub-segments, with the 2.1 GHz six-core, 4- and 8-way, low-power 8425 HE priced at $1,514. Using AMD’s Average CPU power metric (ACP), the 8425 HE is AMD’s 55W part, while the 8439 SE runs at 105W ACP.

In the two-socket bracket, AMD introduced a high-performance 2439 SE, which has the same power and performance profile as the 8439 SE, only priced at $1,019. The 8425’s counterpart on the 2-socket side is the 2425 HE priced at $523, followed even lower down by a 2.0 GHz 2423 HE priced at $455. Meanwhile, the “older” 2.2 GHz 2427 HE remains at $455.

There might not be much cause for complaint here, however. Competitor Intel’s most recent price list (PDF available here) continues to show not one six-core processor in its Xeon 7400 series lower in tray price than $2,301.

In SPECpower_ssj_2008 benchmark tests AMD conducted on the standard six-core 2.6 GHz 75W Opteron 2435 introduced last month and the 2425 HE 55W at 2.1 GHz introduced yesterday (again using AMD’s metric, which doesn’t align with Intel’s Thermal Design Point or TDP), both processors yielded the same score of 1228 at 100% load point. “But the power consumption of the HE system is 49 watts lower [221W versus 270W] than the power consumption in the standard system,” remarked Demski. “This is the exact same platform; we swapped CPUs and took the measurement again.

“So you’re saving 49W per 2P system. Let’s do some math here: If you’ve got 49W of system [savings] and you have a rack of servers, you’ve got 42 1U servers in that rack, that’s over 2,000 watts of power you’re saving by going to the HE model. If your cost per watt is $5 — which I would argue is conservative — you’re saving $10,000 a year on that one rack. And you can imagine the cloud guys — they don’t build by rack, they build by container, which has 5,000 or more servers per container.”

On the other side of the equation, server admins and IT professionals will be watching the benchmark charts to see if AMD’s latest claim is proven and officially filed. Though the SPEC organization does not show an official claim this afternoon, AMD is claiming that a four-way Tyan Transport TX46 server with 64 GB of RAM, loaded with four 2.8 GHz Opteron 8439 SE CPUs, posted a peak performance SPEC_int_rate2006 score of 417.

Compare this against the 274 score that AMD’s quad-core “Shanghai” series 3.1 GHz quad-core Opteron 8393 SE posted, and you might file these results under “D” for “Duh.” Here, 150% the processor provides 150% the performance — what’s new with that? The first bullet point this 417 score (if it holds up) should provide is the fact that the 8439 uses the 8393’s same power envelope; you can swap out the quad-core with a six-core and not suffer a power cost.

But bullet point #2 has a lethal tip to it, and again if the score holds up, it will be extremely impressive news, and the first time in years that AMD can submit a performance score to SPEC without accompanying it with lower-power explanations and best-case-scenario apologies. According to SPEC’s latest list of official scores, a four-way IBM System x 3850 M2 loaded with four 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon X7460 processors — Intel’s highest performer in its six-core line, selling for $2,729 — posted a 294 peak score on the same test. That’s the highest-performing X7460 in the list; a Dell PowerEdge R900, a Fujitsu Siemens Primergy RX600 S4, and an HP ProLiant DL580 G5 with a quartet of X7460s all posted peak scores of 291.

Maybe the Opteron SE series only sells to less than 5% of AMD’s customer base, according to Steve Demski. But whenever AMD boasts a performance lead (and it’s backed up by independent tests, which have yet to be revealed), it always manages to make a dent in 100% of Intel’s customers’ minds.

First TraceMonkey vulnerability poses new priorities for Firefox 3.5.1

Developers on the “Shiretoko” track for Mozilla’s new open source Firefox 3.5 Web browser now have very good reason to expect a ship date for the first round of bug fixes and vulnerabilities. A very big vulnerability has turned up in just the wrong place: a public site for posting exploits.

The problem is a new permutation of an old exploit technique that, ironically, was first brought to prominence in 2006 by a package called “Internet Exploiter.” It’s called a heap spray, comprised of shellcode that’s set to be distributed into an area in blocks, a bit like spraying bricks into a wall. The resulting pattern may contain executable code that can be triggered through an overflow; and in this case, it’s version 3.5’s embedded font support, using the <FONT> tag, that’s the trigger.

A check of the Bugzilla database this morning does not indicate the issue as an active security bug among Mozilla testers. However, security firm Secunia rates the vuln “Extremely Critical,” as the published exploit is believed to be in use in the wild.

In its proof-of-concept distribution, the exploit triggers CALC.EXE in Windows, though it’s an academic matter for someone to make that trigger run other code, perhaps an arbitrary payload. Though this exploit is not a “virus” per se, despite how some local TV newscasts may portray it, certainly the arbitrary payload this trigger may enable could be infectious.

Though a general planning meeting for next-stage Firefox development was scheduled for yesterday morning, and security problems were scheduled to be on the agenda, apparently this latest exploit had not yet cropped up at the time developers met. Meeting notes published yesterday concerning the bug fix schedule for 3.5.1 read, “Contrary to some reports on the Internet, this is the usual process for Firefox and software releases; the 3.5 release was strong, stable and solid, and feedback has been extremely positive. Near the end of the release we become extremely conservative about patches to accept; the 3.5.1 release is a quick update to fold in some patches that came up late in the 3.5 release cycle.”

Candidate builds of 3.5.1 were scheduled for next week, though today’s discovery may accelerate the release process.

Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 3: Finding a place for more tabs

Neither Chrome nor Firefox pioneered the art of tabbed browsing, though Firefox made it popular first. Can Google seize upon this feature and make it its own?

With Web pages having evolved into Web sites and moving on to become Web applications, we find ourselves frequently revisiting the question of what a Web browser tab should represent. In researching a topic for multiple stories during the course of a day, I often find myself with as many as a hundred tabs open at one time. And yes, I try to keep them in some kind of order, which is never easy; and when the browser crashes (as it still often does), recovering all those open tabs is becoming more difficult, it seems, as time goes on.

Improving the way one organizes tabs is part of the entire value proposition for Google Chrome; besides its impressive architecture under the hood, tab management is one of the few front-end features Google sought to perfect from the very beginning. The idea behind Google’s approach to tabs is this: Perhaps in this evolving Web landscape, a tab should be whatever the user designates or needs it to be at the time. So if the user should decide it should go in a window or outside of a window or floating around on its own, for whatever reason, Chrome should enable those options. And it should enable as many options as possible.

Does that mean those options are self-evident or self-explanatory? Not at all. In typical Google fashion, unless you’re reading some sort of comic-book-styled sales brochure — or this particular article — you have to either stumble upon these options for yourself, or read an article like this one. It’s strange to note that of the major Windows Web browsers produced today, only Mozilla Firefox and Opera render their pages in typical window devices — even Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 uses a non-standard window. For Google Chrome, this means that each tab must serve double-duty as a Web page’s title bar. That actually may be a problem in cases where titles run long — e.g., news sites whose names fall first, followed by the headline. You can still point to each tab, and in a moment see a tooltip with the full title — a slight inconvenience, if any at all, but also an indication of one of the problems all browser architects must face. Whereas an application is easily identifiable by its icon, a Web page’s icon may denote its publisher but not its purpose.

So if you don’t mind your desktop looking like…well, like mine at times, then Chrome 3 presents you with a way to work out where Web pages or applications should be arranged and how they should work. While you can still drag and drop a Chrome window anywhere on the desktop and create any number of windows for collecting more tabs, you can drag a tab away from one window and into another or onto the desktop by itself (thus creating a new window). And the beta of Chrome is experimenting with a system perhaps inspired by, or inspiring (depending upon whom you ask), the Aero Snap feature of Windows 7. Though Beta 3.0.190.1 had some trouble with this feature, Beta 3.0.191.3 released this morning appeared, in Betanews tests, to have fixed its troubles:
• When you drag a Chrome tab (as opposed to a window) toward the center of the edge of the desktop, an animated symbol pops up representing the projected placement of the tab’s new window on the desktop if you were to release the mouse button. If you leave this symbol alone and release the button, then the new window will be created at the mouse pointer location. But if you continue dragging on top of this symbol and release there, then the new window will be opened as indicated by the symbol. For example, if you drag to the bottom (just above the taskbar), you’ll see a symbol showing a window that hugs the bottom and that’s half-height, leaving the top open. If you drag to the left, you’ll see a symbol for a window that hugs the left edge, that’s full-height and half-width. It’s a little different than Microsoft’s method, introduced in Windows 7, of “bumping” the edge of the desktop, and it takes an extra step, but it’s certainly sensible. I’ve said before that I really like this feature in Windows 7, and I must admit to really liking Google Chrome’s interpretation of it.

• When you drag a Chrome tab toward the center of the outside edge of another Chrome window that has room alongside for a new neighbor, another animated symbol pops up depicting the relative location of the new window if you were to release the mouse button. This way, you can create a new window beside an existing one, hugging its edge. For example, if you drag an open tab toward the center of the left edge of an open Chrome window, the symbol will show two windows beside one another. You have to touch this symbol (bringing it from transparency to the forefront) and release the mouse button to snap the new window to the edge of the existing one.

• Inserting an open tab into any open Chrome window, even if it only has one tab open, and releasing the mouse button, results in that tab being reinserted in the open window at that location. This is how you expect things to work, but up until today’s release of build 3.0.190.1, that’s been a problem for Chrome.

While Google has been working since last year to show up Mozilla in the functionality department, you can’t help but think this time around, it can’t resist the opportunity to one-up Microsoft.

Next: What helps Firefox in one way, holds it back in another…
Since Firefox relies on a conventional window device as its homebase, there’s certain limits as to how sensitive it can be to unconventional mouse events, such as those that Chrome is experimenting with now. Many of the browser’s more versatile tab functions are actually provided by way of third-party add-ons such as Tab Mix Plus, ColorfulTabs (which tints tabs by group and order of spawning, like IE8), and Tab Kit (which, we note, beat Tab Mix Plus to being updated for Firefox 3.5). But that’s the way Mozilla development typically works: If a feature provided by an independent developer in the community is good enough, Mozilla would rather sanction and promote that feature rather than absorb it into Firefox without accreditation.

Until Mozilla’s developers get bold and try a non-standard window, however, it will not be able to compete with Chrome or any other browser in the area of desktop arrangement. So the add-ons are limited to providing functionality within Firefox windows. And since Firefox 3.5 has only now enabled the user to drag an open tab between two windows without the receiving window reloading the tab’s contents, add-ons such as Tab Mix Plus have to rethink the way they work. Tab Mix Plus’ biggest benefit (and Tab Kit’s as well) is enabling multiple tab rows within a single window, eliminating the need for scrolling through infinite open tabs along a partial row (until you try to open more than three row’s worth of tabs, that is…something I can end up doing quite easily).
For now, when you drag an open Firefox 3.5 tab outside its window, you can deposit it on the desktop. Firefox will open a new window for it, but its location appears to be designated in the old-fashioned manner determined by Windows itself. Using the window device model Microsoft conceived in the 1980s, when a window produces another window, the child’s default location is just below and to the right of the parent’s, leaving just enough room for both title bars. So the position of the mouse pointer when you release the button is inconsequential, since Firefox’s window device doesn’t have the sensitivity to record the location of the pointer at the time of release.

Arguably, if Firefox had a Chrome-like ability to let the user group open tabs in multiple locations on the desktop, Tab Kit’s or Tab Mix Plus’ stacks of rows might become outmoded. For example, if I could just open a small window and keep it on the lower left of the desktop, and just dump multiple pages on the same topic into that window as I find them, then break them out into categories such as “trusted” and “suspect” at will, then I might never end up with a single window full of more than three stacks of tabs.

Maybe this heat was a gimme for Google from the beginning, but given the fact that Chrome hadn’t scored any points in our showdown up to now, it really needed the break. In lieu of absolute answers for the moment about how the Web should differentiate published pages from functional applications, Chrome offers a much richer tool set for the user to figure it out for himself. That leaves our running score for now at Firefox 3.5 (2), Chrome 3 (1).

AT&T: Without a landline phone, you could die

On the off chance that you may accidentally discover you’re allergic to peanuts (we wish we were joking), AT&T says a landline is superior to a cell phone.

AT&T and an associated group of telecommunications companies under the name “National Emergency Number Association” (NENA) released the results of a June survey which concludes that Americans need to have an emergency communications plan based around a landline connection.

“A big part of this is knowing about the options available for dialing 911,” NENA Chief Executive Officer, Brian Fontes said in a statement. “The more choices you have to reach 911 in an emergency, the better, and a corded landline phone should be one of those options. It provides the security of a home phone line connection to 911 so that in most cases first responders know your home address.”
Landline abandonment is a trend that just keeps growing, and AT&T’s fixed line subsidiaries are employing tried and true fear-based marketing to stanch the persistent customer loss. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics released a survey for the first half of 2008 which showed that 17.5% of American homes were wireless only, and that among homes with both wireless and wireline phones a further 13.3% did all or almost all of their calling on their wireless phone. By the second half of the year, the number of wireless-only homes had jumped 2.7 percentage points, the largest 6-month increase in the six years NHIS has been doing the surveys.

AT&T therefore says a home base connection is simply a security essential, citing such crises as — citing the company’s report directly — “that time you discovered you were allergic to peanuts,” or losing your cell phone.

While it is true that unlike mobile phones, a landline can work with no electrical power, and that emergency preparedness is always wise, there’s an equal number of situations where a landline will not come in handy:

1. You live alone.

2. Your home is engulfed in flames and you’re forced outside.

3. An escaped murderer is hiding in your attic (see 2.)

4. There is a telecommunications workers’ strike.

5. An emergency happens when no one is home.

These are all situations where the redundant connection (mobile) becomes the fallback option. But the problem is that maintaining a legacy connection is costly, and when customers are receiving comparable service from their wireless or cable VoIP providers, they’re really being presented with no incentive to keep paying.

It’s official: Google Chrome, the operating system

Perhaps the single biggest threat to Microsoft as a viable software concern could be delivered by Google, if any part of yesterday’s announcement becomes reality.

Well, this answers the question about why no Android for netbooks. In a stunning announcement late Tuesday evening, the company that for years had been suspected of developing an operating system but which had never entirely denied the claim, has come out with it: Yes, Google is making a Linux; yes, it’s for netbooks (at least for now); no, it’s not Android.

“Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android,” reads yesterday’s company blog post from VP Sundar Pichai and Engineering Director Linus Upton. “Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.”
At this point, what we know for certain is in that blog post, and it’s not much: Chrome OS is being designed for not just x86 processors but also ARM processors, getting into the embedded devices field, or what ARM itself calls “smartbooks.” Initial sales will be through OEMs who are expected to pre-install Google OS on their netbooks. With Acer’s contentious history with Microsoft and its already having embraced Android for smartphones, that manufacturer stands perhaps the biggest chance of benefitting from this news. “Acer Aspire Two,” anyone?

As a software platform, though, Google’s play is bolder than just netbooks: Its aim is clearly to leverage the whole Chrome idea, including the existing Windows-based Web browser, as a foundation for a Web-based software platform to challenge both .NET and Java.

“For application developers, the Web is the platform. All Web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite Web technologies,” reads yesterday’s post. “And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.”

This explains why Google has been strengthening Chrome’s windowing capabilities at the expense of work on other features. It’s developing a way for windowed applications that are more functional than Microsoft’s, to run cross-platform inside Microsoft’s OS, and still have the virtue of running on Mac OS and Google’s new brand of Linux. This solves the whole issue of “base” for Chrome OS developers, which is analogous to “audience” for media developers — it’s the perceived group of people for whom software authors write. Historically, a software firm doesn’t have much to gain if it writes for the base with the smallest niche, which has been Macintosh’s problem since 1984, and Linux’ perennial problem on the desktop for commercial software players.

But if developers think of the Web platform on a very high level — the plateau that Sun/Oracle Java has always hoped to reach, and Adobe Flash (now incorporating Flex) has recently aspired to grasp — then “reach” is conceivably everyone. Should Google extend its Chrome Web browser, for instance, to Linux distributions other than its own Chrome OS, extending its windowing environment to all the other open source players; and if the Chrome browser also gets its act together on Mac OS; then that is everyone. An app built “for Chrome” would conceivably run on any x86/x64 system in the world, plus a good chunk of ARM processor-based devices. Chrome OS’ blanket would extend beyond the reach of Windows and even of Java.

And if Chrome OS runs on x86, after all, what is there to prevent an everyday system owner from installing it on a desktop or notebook instead of Windows?
ADDITION: If writing a Web application is essentially writing “for Chrome,” then what makes Google’s intention the creation of a “Chrome platform?” After all, Chrome OS opts to be lightweight, in order to keep its profile down for netbooks.

When you see what Google is cooking up with its Chrome browser, you get an understanding of the architectural power play it’s working up: Think of a “good” and “better” scenario, where everyday Web apps will run in Chrome and run in Firefox and run in Windows (IE), and everyone’s happy and the European Commission is placated and all is right with the world. That’s “good.”

But then there’s “better,” a world full of Google Gears and that Chrome OS windowing environment that last night’s post mentioned. It’s a world where the windowing environment is directly and safely accessible at a low level through remote procedure calls (which in Windows is extremely dangerous), and Web apps that are effectively “Chrome-aware,” to coin a phrase, can do more things in more ways than they can when they just run “good.” That’s the platform play Google is making: Sure, your Web app supports Chrome by default (if you write it “correctly,” which translated into English means, “not in Flash or Silverlight”). But to make it better, you add support for Chrome that turns on when Chrome is present. And all the user has to do to make it work is install Chrome.

And when will they do that? Conceivably right when the Web app, running on a non-Chrome OS application, places a call to a resource that Google is hosting. “I see you’re not running Google Chrome,” says the popup. “Would you like to install it now? It’s free!”
It is an extraordinary market play, a gamble for the entire pie, not just a slice of it. And Google is the only player other than Microsoft at this point with both the moxie and the resources to pull it off.

Success for Google OS, however, in any conceivable scenario, would leave a wide path of carnage in its wake. Think of it: Google would uproot Microsoft’s entire value proposition for Windows: that it has the biggest platform and the strongest base, so any investment in Windows is a secure one. Google would perhaps indirectly, but certainly inevitably, challenge Apple’s position as the turnkey applications distribution channel for iPhone (does anyone think that compiling a Chrome platform attachment for iPhone, if Chrome runs on Mac OS already, would be impossible?). Chrome OS would capture the latent smartbooks market that Microsoft has publicly dismissed as irrelevant, which might conceivably lower the final curtain on Windows Mobile as an embedded platform (if you’re an embedded software developer, wouldn’t you rather write for the platform that also works on x86?). As an applications distribution platform, Chrome OS would seek to capture the prize that Java originally made relevant, and that Microsoft’s .NET sought to “embrace and extend.” And as a Web browser (if anyone’s still thinking that small), Chrome would leave Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox in smoking ruins after a very bloody battle.

That’s assuming everything works according to Google’s plan, and that’s assuming Google really has a plan. As last night’s blog post pointed out, Google would only provide more news about Chrome OS “in the fall,” which suggests that there’s nothing much for it to share with its esteemed community of devoted developers, and may not be much real code to present to them until deep into 2010.

But if Google really does have a plan (and it might), then capturing the king, the flag, the castle, and the whole kingdom — which is genuinely the intention that Google signaled yesterday — would require every other player in this industry to sit back and gingerly let it happen. I don’t mean just Microsoft, but also Apple, Adobe, Oracle, and Mozilla. There are some who are uncertain just how much fight these old players have in them. But to assume that they will cede their respective claims to the software market without a serious counter-offensive, is to ignore history. If Google does that, then its game is already lost.

Yet it is a game, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Microsoft Security Essentials is aimed at home users.

A trial version of Microsoft’s free anti-virus software has been launched in the US, China, Brazil, and Israel.

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) promises to provide people with basic protection against viruses, trojans, rootkits and spyware.

The software giant has been criticised in the past for failing to include free security software with Windows.

Its first security package, Windows Live OneCare, failed to attract many customers and will be discontinued.

Microsoft is hoping that MSE, available as a free download from its site, will prove more popular. It has said it will automatically update it for users.

However, rival security vendors have questioned whether Microsoft can compete with more established anti-virus players.

Family doctor

“Early reviews of the beta are showing that it under-performs when compared to existing freeware products, and well below paid solutions,” said security firm Symantec in a statement.

“Referring to Microsoft’s basic anti-virus and anti-spyware product as an essential security solution is misleading. Consumers need firewall protection, web protection, anti-spam and identity safeguards,” it said.

J.R Smith, chief executive of security firm AVG, said Microsoft’s entry into the security market could “further confuse consumers about the inherent security of their computer”.

“It’s important to recognise that Microsoft’s role in the internet security realm is much like your relationship with your trusted family doctor. They can help diagnose the problems. In addition, they treat many general ailments. In the end, though, they are not a replacement for a specialist when you need one,” he said.

Initially 75,000 trial versions of MSE, codenamed Morro, will be available in the US, Brazil, China and Israel.

The software will be rolled out in other countries later this year.

Analysts say mobility and portability is the way of the future

The world’s largest chip maker has teamed up with the world’s largest mobile phone maker to create what they say will be a “new exciting industry”.

Intel and Nokia said their “technology collaboration” would deliver new mobile computing products – beyond existing smartphones, netbooks and notebooks.

But both companies added it was still too early to talk about product plans.

The deal gives Intel its first real breakthrough in the multi-billion dollar mobile-phone market.

“This collaboration will drive exciting new revenue opportunities for both companies and shape the next era of mobile computing,” said Anand Chandrasekher, Intel’s senior vice president of its ultra-mobility group.

Nokia’s executive vice president for devices, Kai Oistamo said: “It will be compelling not only for our companies, but also for our industries, our partners and, of course, for customers.”

“Brave new world”

Both companies said the partnership would centre around several open-source mobile Linux software projects, including the Moblin platform for Atom-based processors and the Maemo operating system developed by Nokia.

Intel will also acquire a licence from Nokia that is used in modem chips to connect to third generation cellular networks.

Intel’s chips power most of the world’s personal computers

Although Intel makes chips for Wi-Fi and WiMax networks, it has previously lacked the technology to provide a complete technology package for portable device makers.

In a conference call with reporters, neither company would not be drawn on what any future products would look like.

“We will talk about products when we are ready to talk about products,” said Mr Chandraseckher

“With the convergence of the internet and mobility as the team’s only barrier, I can only imagine the innovation that will come out of our unique relationship with Nokia. The possibilities are endless.”

ABI Research says that last year a total of 1.2 billion mobile phones were sold globally.

Mr Oistamo was equally tight-lipped on the subject of future products, but he added: “We will explore new ideas in designs, materials and displays that will go far beyond devices and services on the market today.

“The future is truly exciting and there is a lot of room here to redefine what mobile is and what it can do as we create this brave new world.”

“Wave of the future”

Intel’s microprocessors are found in eight out of 10 personal computers, while Nokia boasts around a billion customers but is not as big a player in the US as it is in Europe.

The alliance could spell stiffer competition for ARM Holdings, which is one of the biggest suppliers of chips in the cell phone marketplace.

The deal will boost Nokia’s presence in the United States

Analysts welcomed the collaboration, which they described as significant for both companies.

“Intel has really been trying to get a foothold in the wireless world in the worst way,” Will Strauss, principal analyst with Forward Concepts told the BBC.

“They know portability, mobility is the wave of the future. Nokia is the world’s biggest cell-phone maker in the world so getting a piece of Nokia’s business is a big deal.

“For Nokia its a way to get into notebooks and netbooks. They are not big there and partnering with Intel as the largest manufacturer of chips will lend them credibility in that market,” said Mr Strauss.

Gerry Purdy, who is the chief mobile analyst at Frost & Sullivan agreed the deal is a win-win for both Intel and Nokia. He added that while the first product could be a year or so away, it should have the potential to shake up the market.

“I believe this will impact the industry for many years to come and accelerate the adoption of smartphones in the world. At the moment they are at 10% of market share. I predict that will grow to 50-60% in the next five years as a result of this partnership.

“The direction we are heading is more computing power. We are seeing some exciting iPhone-like capability out there like graphics interactivity, multi-touch, video, lots of multi-media and the like.

“All those things are exciting in the industry but they are not pervasive and I think maybe this collaboration will help create that,” Mr Purdy told  News.

Sugar runs on the XO and rival Intel Classmate PC

Software originally developed for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project can now be used to power any old PC.

Sugar on a Stick, as it is known, can be run from a USB drive to give aging PCs a new look and access to collaborative educational software.

The computer interface is designed for use by children and was announced at the LinuxTag conference in Berlin.

It has been developed by Sugar Labs, a breakaway organisation from OLPC.

“Sugar on a Stick is a great way to try Sugar without touching your computer’s hard disk,” said Walter Bender, founder of Sugar Labs.

The release could dramatically increase the use of the free software, which has until now been predominantly distributed with the XO laptop, the machine sold be OLPC.

The child-friendly computers, originally marketed as the $100 (£60) laptop, currently cost $199 (£120) each. Sugar on a stick, however, can be used on any machine.

“It is also well-suited to slower, older PCs and low-powered netbooks,” said Mr Bender.

It has already been shown running on an Intel Classmate PC, one of the main rivals to the OLPC machines.

Sweet release

Mr Bender was formerly second in command at OLPC. He left in April 2008 after it was announced that the low-cost laptops would be offering Microsoft Windows software.

The software can be run from a 1GB USB stick

“I didn’t leave OLPC because of the Microsoft deal – it was a symptom rather than the cause,” he told News at the time.

“I left OLPC because I think the most important thing it is doing is defining a learning ecosystem.”

Mr Bender went on to found Sugar Labs, an independent effort to develop the software and interface used on the OLPC machines.

The interface emphasises collaborative learning, allowing children to share material between different machines. For example, they can write documents or make music together.

The open source software also contains a journal and automatically saves and backs up all data.

It has been used by more than one million children on the XO laptop and has also been released as part of other operating systems. For example, it was bundled with releases of the Ubuntu and Fedora Linux systems.

The latest release – Sugar on a Stick – allows anyone to run the software from a 1GB USB stick. It includes 40 programs, including a word processor, drawing application and games.

It can be downloaded for free from the Sugar Labs website.

It can be run on Linux machines, as well as Macs and Windows PCs. Recent Mac users must use an additional CD, whilst Windows users must run Sugar through a virtualisation progam, a piece of software that allows a computer to run two operating systems.

The software will also be used to power newer versions of the XO laptop, shipped in the autumn. In the longer term, OLPC may no longer use Sugar as the primary interface for the machines.

“Our current belief is that Sugar should have always been on a stick,” said a spokesperson. “In our case it should have been an application on top of a native Linux. We have been working on decoupling Sugar from our hardware since [Mr Bender] left.”

Testing of the new software in US classrooms is already underway.

“One year after its founding, Sugar Labs is delivering on its education promise for its second million learners,” said Mr Bender.

Collecta vs. Google in real-time search matchup

With public discussion increasing over whether Google may be overrated, some former AOL executives are slowly mounting a challenge…right this moment.

If you have a completely new search engine — in other words, one that’s not a renamed version of Windows Live Search — you need to give it a niche that somehow emphasizes thequality of its results compared to those from Google. Wolfram Alpha’s niche of choice is the intelligence of its results, in an effort to wring the educational power out of the verbal sponge that is the Internet. So that slot’s taken for now.

Enter Collecta, the product of former AOL search chief Gerry Campbell, and an indicator of what AOL could have accomplished had its previous leadership chosen to invest in ingenuity. Launched last Thursday in public beta, the ideal of Collecta is that it searches content that tends to be updated quickly and frequently, and that it conducts those searches on the fly — it’s truly searching for what you’ve asked it to search for, rather than look up results from a massive index.

Although you have to wait several seconds for a response from Collecta (a lifetime for users stuck in their parents’ basements), the results that come up from Collecta are merely seconds old. In a spur-of-the-moment Betanews test this morning, about an hour after Apple CEO Steve Jobs was cited in a statement regarding iPhone 3G S sales, we wanted to see how soon Collecta would yield results from folks noticing Jobs’ apparent return to some degree of health.

Our query to both search engines was “Steve Jobs” statement. After a countdown of 22 seconds (Collecta provides you with its own clock to let you know its ticker is as healthy as Steve Jobs’), Collecta retrieved a complete list of entries pertaining to the hour-old statement, and kept adding to that list over successive minutes until we had about three dozen in a stockpile. By comparison, a search of Google News claimed to have 1,208 pattern match results, though a check of the list itself revealed zero stories actually dealing with the hour-old statement.

So there’s something to this Collecta, evidently. But if Google can inflate its own assessment of accuracy by an infinite percentage, what could Collecta get away with? It took about 90 minutes for press accounts of the story to make Yahoo News. Prior to that time, checking the initial list of Collecta’s results, those which floated to the top were mostly Twitter feeds. And quite a few of them, by virtue of the fact that Twitter can often become an echo chamber (talk about infinite inflation of accuracy) were actually the same tweet repeated a handful of times.

But those tweets did include a link that led to the actual story, so anyone using Collecta to verify what she may have thought to be a rumor about Jobs’ health, would have had that rumor verified in under a minute. The results themselves, however, speak to Collecta’s choice of “news” providers.

Conceivably, Collecta should have been able to locate the page of information which all those tweeters were echoing to one another, prior to, or at least in tandem with, the tweeters having located it. So how old was the news, according to Collecta’s own dating, by the time it was being repeated? Timestamps show those tweets came one hour after Apple released its statement at 8:30 am EDT this morning, though it was on PR Newswire at 8:30 on the dot. (Anyone familiar with Apple would know that if it’s going to release a statement to the press, it will be at 8:30 — not 8:00, not 9:00.)

Going down the list of “Older Results” in Collecta’s middle pane, we didn’t find any links whatsoever to PR Newswire’s posts, which are carried on places like CNNMoney.com and Betanews. So while Collecta had the early scoop on the second-hand information, neither it nor Google led their users directly to the first-hand news.

Getting first-hand news is getting to be a big problem for folks who’d like to become journalists when they grow up (as noted by blogger John Gruber this morning, one of the first to realize The Wall Street Journal’s “scoop” story over the weekend on Jobs’ liver transplant was not sourced.) As journalists this week give more credit to Twitter for becoming “the network of record,” to borrow an old phrase from Bernard Shaw, for the latest Iranian Revolution, perhaps Collecta could become the search engine of choice for folks looking for real-time news from the Middle East. We decided to test that theory.

With the Iran government locking down principal sources of information emerging from the country’s borders, the unofficial channels are becoming flooded with information from everyday citizens everywhere chronicling the changes to their country from their perspective. So a search anywhere for Iran election could provide you with reports or correspondence having to do with any number of events triggered by the election itself.

Suppose you’re specifically interested in the status or well-being of the opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the subject of our next test query. This is a touchy subject, especially for Iran where knowing where a popular candidate is located is not always a good thing.

In a chain of events that is literally unfolding by the minute, it is astounding to find that Google News’ latest entry on Mousavi is dated last Tuesday — six days ago. There’s some good biographical information in there for folks who are just tuning into the story, but nothing for someone who would like an update on whether the fellow is still alive and safe. In fact, what you’d see here is no newer than what you might find in your dentist office’s waiting room.