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Yay, Microsoft. Now go back and build the service we want, please.

Those other productivity suites are a) free, and b) browser-based. They don’t require that you pay for and then install software on your PC.

I believe Microsoft could make an honest Google Docs competitor without killing its Microsoft Office business. Eventually, Microsoft will have to. So it might be smart for Microsoft to encourage people to start thinking about the company as an expansive supplier of productivity solutions–desktop and Web-based–rather than just a company that makes desktop office products that, by the way, also have some add-on Web support.

There are people who say that Office Live is a Google Docs competitor. It certainly could be, someday, and I’d like to see that. But it’s not right now. What it is right now is a way for people who have paid for the
Microsoft Office suite to share files with other people who have the suite. It’s useful, but it’s no Google Docs, nor Zoho for that matter.

Microsoft has announced a milestone with its Office Live Workspace product: It’s scored its millionth user. And the company has announced the product will be out of beta this year.

As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley writes, Microsoft believes that users don’t want to create big files and documents “on the Web.” Maybe that’s because they can’t.

Offlice Live does have its own text editor, but it’s rather weak and doesn’t have Google Docs’ killer feature: simultaneous editing. If someone edits a document you’ve got open and you then try to save it, you get a conflict error and have to decide whose edits you want to kill.

Tidbit: Office Live Workspace works nicely in Internet Explorer and also in
Firefox. But you get a blocking error page if you try to use it in Google Chrome.

Any TinyURLs on a Twitter post or elsewhere on the Web will automatically be converted with shortText.

(Credit:
Shorttext.com)

Webware reader Amy wrote in to let us know one of her favorite
Firefox plug-ins shortText just got updated with a handy new feature. It will now automatically go through any page you’re on and seek out any TinyURLs, converting them to the actual URL so you can see where the page links to.

If you want to accomplish a similar feat, there’s also a bookmarklet called Embiggen, which will do the same thing without you having to install anything. The key difference between the two is that shortText packs in a bundle of other features like letting you write Twitter tweets that are well over the 140 character limit and link all your posts up to a centralized page where you can keep track of replies more easily than on Twitter.

Space Shuttle Endeavour is on standby (in the background) in case something happens on Atlantis' mission to fix the Hubble telescope.

It’s not just a pretty picture. This NASA photo from Kennedy Space Center shows how, for the first time since July 2001, two shuttles are on launch pads at the same time. Atlantis is in the foreground on Launch Pad A, and Endeavour is behind it on Launch Pad B.

(Credit:
NASA/Jack Pfaller )

Plus, as the Associated Press points out, Atlantis “faces an estimated 1-in-185 chance that a piece of space junk or a micrometeoroid will cause catastrophic damage to their ship.” Those odds are greater than for a typical shuttle flight because of Hubble’s unusually high and debris-filled orbit.

Once Endeavour is cleared from its rescue spacecraft duty, it’s scheduled to move to Launch Pad A for planned November 12 mission to the International Space Station.

Endeavour was moved into position Friday so it could be on standby in the unlikely event that a rescue mission is necessary for the Atlantis’ planned October 10 mission to repair NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the agency said.

What makes the Hubble repair mission particularly dangerous is that if Atlantis gets seriously damaged during flight, the seven astronauts would be stranded–they couldn’t just hang out at the International Space Station waiting for a ride.

There was also discussion at the hearing over whether Microsoft was losing ground in providing documentation. Microsoft acknowledges that the number of outstanding issues has risen, but said it is to be expected as the company makes more documentation available to more testers.

The company is expected to take this another step further with Windows 7, the new version of Windows that Microsoft is aiming to ship late next year.

The comments, by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, came as part of a regular status conference to discuss Microsoft’s compliance with its antitrust consent decree. A difference of opinion had arisen over whether the technical details were required in addition to the licensing of actual communications protocols. Microsoft said it would continue to offer the so-called “overview documents” but had maintained that it was not required to do so under the consent decree, while the plaintiffs in the case had argued the documents were required.

It’s an interesting issue, particularly as Microsoft works to more closely tie its desktop programs to online services. In addition to efforts on the application side, Microsoft has also dabbled in linking various parts of the operating system to online services.

Windows Vista, for example, was shipped in November 2006 with a built-in Windows Mail e-mail program and Windows Photo Gallery, a tool for viewing and organizing photos. Since then, though, Microsoft has released downloadable programs that essentially replace those operating system components. Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Mail are more tightly integrated with Microsoft’s online photo, blogging, and e-mail services.

According to Dow Jones, Kollar-Kotelly said the technical documents are “integral to interoperability” when it comes to creating Windows programs. According to the wire report, Microsoft officials told Kollar-Kotelly that they can have a draft version of the requested documentation by March and a final version by the end of next June.

Updated 10:55 a.m., with more details

The judge presiding over Microsoft’s antitrust case said Tuesday that the company must release details on how different parts of Windows work together, according to a Dow Jones Newswires report.

Shamir gave a short recitation of hacks within the last year or so on various cryptographic systems, mentioning in particular recent attacks on various municipal transit systems, such as Boston’s Charlie Card and London’s Oyster Card. Most curious, however, were his final comments about the adoption of Blu-Ray DVD discs by Warner Bros. He said he’d wondered about the tipping point in the Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD battle, and said he’d heard a rumor–and stressed it was only a rumor–that Blu-Ray had better security overall than HD DVD. If true, he said, security is finally starting to become a factor in consumer electronics.

First, panel members offered their perspectives on the state of security since last year, then they answered questions posed by a moderator. The panel included: Whitfield Diffie, chief security officer at Sun Microsystems; Martin Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University; Ronald Rivest, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT; and Adi Shamir, professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The moderator was by Burt Kaliski, founding scientist at RSA Laboratories.

Diffie began the discussion, saying that after 80 years, “we’ve gotten cryptography to a fairly good point,” but added that “the Internet’s a mess.” He said that on the Internet, “defense–pure defense–simply doesn’t work.” He said that where it takes us months and years to secure something, it takes the opponent only hours. “They can run rings around us.” He then mentioned that some in the government are starting to talk about going to where the opponents live and using a variety of means to shut them down.

On Tuesday, the creators of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, a cryptographic protocol, and two of the creators of EMC security division RSA gathered onstage for the annual cryptographers’ panel at RSA 2008 in San Francisco.

Rivest briefly mentioned Alan Turing, to whom this year’s RSA conference is dedicated. Turing is best known for the Turing Test, a process that determines a machine’s ability to demonstrate intelligence. What Rivest really wanted to talk about, however, was electronic voting. He said cryptography is relevant to creating end-to-end security. He’s part of a group that has released a public proposal on voting system standards. One of the key parts is the definition of “dependent” and “independent” software on a voting system. He said software dependent is a category where a bug or a flaw could easily change the end result; this is along the lines of work done recently by Professor Ed Felten and his grad students at Princeton. Software independent is where the system doesn’t entirely depend on the software and uses paper or some other means of capturing the vote. He favors voting systems that are software independent.

Hellman showed a photograph of a glider flying over a runway. Himself a pilot, he said the greatest risk was executing a maneuver that most people consider 99.9 percent safe. Hellman said that “humans are not good in judging low-probability events,” and cautioned against complacency. He said he hoped that the non-security world would reach a tipping point and start taking security seriously. (Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, is an RSA keynote speaker on Thursday.)

So, yes, the obvious reason for Red Hat to do this deal–KVM–does indeed appear to have been the main reason. But a number of folks within Red Hat, are genuinely excited about leveraging Qumranet’s VDI assets as well.

My first observation is that virtualization remains a hot acquisition property. Now, $107 million may not seem like a huge sum. After all, Citrix bought XenSource for something closer to $500 million about a year ago. But XenSource was the well-known entity behind the Xen Open Source hypervisor project, and its commercial XenEnterprise product was gaining at least some market traction. By contrast, Qumranet is largely unknown by all but the most serious virtualization watchers–$107 million for a company whose “acquisition is not expected to contribute materially to revenue in the fiscal year ending February 28, 2009, but should add up to $20 million in revenue in the following year” has to be seen as a nice cash-out for Qumranet investors.

Some aspects of this buy are pretty straightforward and obvious. Others less so. As a result, I held off writing until I had the chance to discuss some of the specifics with Red Hat and my colleagues.

commentary

By way of brief background, Qumranet has two overlapping, but somewhat independent, technology sets. The first–for which it is probably best known–is KVM, an open-source hypervisor that is in the process of being added to the Linux kernel. The other is its SolidICE virtual desktop solution that uses a back-end Linux server (virtualized with KVM) connecting to clients with the company’s own Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) protocol. The virtual desktops themselves can be Windows, as well as Linux.

It seems clear that KVM was the major impetus behind Red Hat making this buy. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens has been making favorable noises about KVM for a while. And, last June, Red Hat announced that it would be releasing an embedded hypervisor based on Xen. Red Hat prefers KVM over Xen for both technical and business reasons. I won’t rehash them here (see this previous post), but suffice it to say that KVM plays a key role in Red Hat’s OS strategy. Given that, and given how virtualization-oriented companies are being gobbled up at a torrid pace, Red Hat probably felt that there was considerable risk in not having some level of control over its prime virtualization asset–especially as almost every major Red Hat competitor does have at least some degree of such control.

VDI is a hot technology area, and Qumranet’s products are, by many accounts, solid offerings.
As an established data center infrastructure software player, Red Hat is much better positioned to bring VDI to market than a start-up selling only VDI. In general, pretty much all the major server virtualization and operating system vendors seem to have accepted that they need to display at least a base level of interoperability and compatibility. (Thus, Windows and Linux guests have to play with pretty much every virtualization platform whether Windows-based, Linux-based, or something else.) It is at least Red Hat’s hope that general client computing trends will make Microsoft’s current desktop dominance a less compelling  factor as more computing moves into the network.

In contrast to Novell (with SUSE) and, especially, Canonical (with Ubuntu), Red Hat has never shown much of an interest in the client side of computing. True, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) clients run on a virtualized server; they’re basically VMs that get delivered to a thin client or other client endpoint rather than “fat client” Linux desktops as they’ve been most commonly promoted. But, in some ways, this would seem to make the technology even a worse fit for Red Hat, given that the vast majority of deployed virtual desktops run Microsoft Windows, whatever the back-end infrastructure delivering them is.

My conclusions? What seemed straightforward is straightforward. What didn’t seem straightforward? Well, that’s going to need some time to play out. Nonetheless, I got some good color and food for thought, which I share here.

Last week’s big virtualization news was Red Hat’s purchase of Qumranet for $107 million.

My impression is that even Red Hat isn’t certain quite how the desktop end of things will play out. On the one hand, it’s clearly less of a clean fit than is KVM. At the same time, there’s more than one reason to think that VDI and Red Hat aren’t exactly oil and water.

Given that, it’s tempting to suggest that Qumranet’s desktop products just came along for the ride.

Several blogs (see Techmeme) are reporting that Apple will roll out new products on September 9. As previously rumored, starting with missive from Digg’s Kevin Rose, Apple may be revamping the
iPod Nano and tweaking the iPod Touch with new software, as well delivering iTunes 8.0 with a recommendation engine and selective price cuts.

However, from various sources CNET News is hearing that Apple is gearing up its engine for something the week of September 8, so the September 9 date is likely more accurate than the rumors so far of what will be delivered to the
Mac and iPod devotees. Stay tuned as the build up to the next appearance of Steve Jobs and the unveiling of Apple’s latest wares continues.

Per usual with the cone of silence that encapsulates Steve Jobs and the Apple troops surrounding new product announcements, it’s uncertain what will actually be unveiled next month.

Looking for signs that netbooks are catching on? And even morphing into notebooks? Here’s a few.

A Microsoft person on the floor said that a lite version of Windows 7 will run on 1GB of memory and 16GB of (solid-state drive) storage. Higher-end Netbooks will have a 160GB hard disk drive, according to Microsoft “guidance.”

At 8 watts, the chip has a higher power envelope than single-core Atom processors, but 8 watts is still low compared with a mainstream Core 2 Duo processor. Other specifications for the Atom 330 include a core clock speed of 1.6GHz, 1MB of level-2 cache, and support for DDR2 667MHz memory.

Netbook market share appears to be growing too. A little more than 5 million Atom processors shipped in the third quarter of 2008, according to Shane Rau of IDC, a market researcher. “Will it add to the total market or will it eat into the total market? Another question might be is Atom eating into another processor brand such as Celeron (Intel) or Sempron (AMD)?”

Rau says that the total market can grow while Netbooks eat into notebook market share. “The TAM (Total Available Market) can grow even as Atom eats into another brand. But we don’t know how it’s shaking out yet,” he said.

(Credit:
Brooke Crothers)

Beginning to sound more like a low-end notebook? I think so.

And here’s evidence of Netbooks penetrating the consumer consciousness. Best Buy now has a separate category for Netbooks on its Web site. Right under laptop computers you’ll see “Netbooks”. Interestingly, the Netbooks category is ranked above desktops and most other “computer” categories.

Other signs. Dell has a 12-inch laptop, the Inspiron Mini 12 based on the Atom processor. Is this a Netbook or notebook? You tell me.

This person also said something surprising. Dual-core Atom processors will be used in Netbooks. I tried to disabuse him of the notion that netbooks would get dual-core Atom processors. No, I said, it was Nettops (Atom-based desktops) that would get dual-core. But he assured me that vendors were planning to bring out dual-core Netbooks.

And all the Netbooks at a Microsoft booth were running
Windows 7, Microsoft’s next-generation operating system due next year.

Microsoft displayed Netbooks running Windows 7 at WinHEC

Netbooks were the big end-user gadget on display at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference that ended Friday.

So, I contacted Intel. There are no immediate plans for dual-core Atom chips designed specifically for Netbooks, according to Intel. But what’s stopping a netbook supplier from using a dual-core Atom 330 (designed for nettops) in a Netbook? Answer: nothing.

Electronista spotted a post from a German site called Eee PC News on an AMD processor apparently known as the “BGA CPU,” according to what appears to be a presentation slide authored by AMD. As The Register notes, the BGA CPU sounds an awful lot like a processor core called Bobcat that AMD first unveiled in 2007 but has said very little about since.

Intel has been putting lots of time and money behind its Atom processor for similar types of systems, and AMD will have to follow suit at some point if it wants to cash in on the growing mobile trend. Its revamped Puma notebook technology is starting to reach customers, but AMD hasn’t really addressed the mobile processor market, despite selling graphics chips into cell phones and handheld devices.

While AMD does have experience making processors for low-cost systems such as the ill-fated Personal Internet Communicator and the more successful XO laptop sold by the OLPC project, those systems use its Geode processor, which is getting a bit outdated. The BGA processor would likely bring a significant increase in performance to AMD’s products for this category, although it consumes far more power than the 0.8 watts used by the Geode chip inside the XO laptop.

Bobcat was supposed to be a sub-10 watt processor core for things like thin notebooks and UMPCs, which have since evolved into the mobile Internet device concept. The BGA processor consumes 8 watts of power running at 1GHz, according to the slide, and uses an integrated memory controller. Eight watts is a little too much for handheld devices, but could work well inside a “netbook” such as the Eee PC.

AMD took a big step toward improving its mobile offerings earlier this month, but it reportedly has other plans to match Intel’s moves into this market.

Ralph de la Vega, head of AT&T’s wireless unit, told the Journal he has reviewed the technology closely and is “confident it is something we are going to want in our portfolio.”

That said, it’s not surprising that AT&T has expressed interest in Android. Verizon executives have also said they are looking at Android for their consumer branded phones but, like AT&T, they are not willing to commit to Android. Still, Verizon’s newly launched open device program would allow device makers to use Android. My guess is that if a handset maker comes up with a compelling phone that uses Android, Verizon and AT&T will surely offer them on their networks. But for now, it’s hard to say what those phones will look like since no manufacturer is actually selling Android handsets yet.

LAS VEGAS–AT&T’s top wireless man told the Wall Street Journal at the
CTIA tradeshow here this week that the company is considering using Google’s Android handsets.

Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile signed on as part of the consortium, but AT&T and Verizon Wireless, the No. 1 and No. 2 operators in the country, had not committed to using Android.

This is good news for Google, which benefits greatly from having as many carriers and handset makers as possible using its new operating system.

Google’s Android is one of many Linux-based operating systems designed for mobile phones. But because the software is backed by Google, it might actually have more legs than other versions of the software. Ultimately, Android’s success will be determined by what phone manufacturers and application developers do with the software. After all, consumers don’t buy operating systems. They buy cool devices that can do really cool things.

When Google announced it was developing the open-source, Linux-based Android platform last year, the company also announced the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of handset makers, carriers and chip designers that will work to implement Android.

While there’s been a lot of hype surrounding Android, the reality is that Android is simply an operating system just like Windows Mobile and Symbian, which are operating systems designed for smartphones. Operators also use dozens of other operating systems on their regular phones. This has turned into a bit of a problem for operators because it’s difficult for developers to come up with new applications and services quickly. Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone, the biggest cell phone company in the world, addressed this issue during his keynote at the CTIA show. And he urged the industry to work with fewer operating systems.