Technology News and IT Business Intelligence

For the last few months, there’s been a steady stream of rumors about Motorola’s forthcoming Android handsets; speculating on form factor, carrier and OS version. Earlier this week, the Schaumburg, Illinois telecommunications company sent out invitations to a San Francisco press event on Thursday, September 10 adorned with the lime green Android logo.

Since the invitations didn’t contain many details, the rumors have thusly picked up steam. It is widely expected that the two devices shown on September 10 will be the “Morrison” on T-Mobile, and the “Sholes” on Verizon.

Today, an identical invitation has reportedly been sent out to international journalists for an event in London on September 15.

Unless another company releases an Android-powered device in the US between now and September 10, Motorola will become the second company to support the platform behind HTC in the United States.

In Europe, Samsung has already attained that honor by releasing the Galaxy on O2 in Germany.

On the eve of easily the most important Federal Communications Commission open hearing since being sworn in as its chairman, Julius Genachowski is taking the strong personal stand he was expected to take, in favor of equal and open access to Internet services. Returning to the heart of the original debate from which the term “net neutrality” was coined, Genachowski told the Capitol Hill daily The Hill yesterday that he remains committed to enforcing net neutrality principles, assuming they actually become law.

“One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles,” the FCC Chairman told The Hill.

The Chairman is choosing his words very carefully. The “principles” to which he refers are basically a set of guidelines crafted in 2005 (PDF available here), the extent of which has been to prevent the FCC from adopting rules that would encroach upon Americans’ right to an unencumbered and neutral Internet, and to encourage the further development of the Net in that direction. Net neutrality, both as it was originally conceived and as it has been sculpted by public debaters to become, is not exactly yet the law of the land.

That fact probably weighs heavily on Genachowski’s mind as he prepares for Thursday morning’s open hearing, the stated goal of which is to launch regulatory procedures for the creation of a National Broadband Plan. For such a plan to be embraced by Republican lawmakers and adopted into law, it will probably need to give credence and legitimacy to Republican concerns and goals, including those that spawned the net neutrality debate three years ago.

One of those goals has been the creation of a national franchise body for broadband service providers — a way for telcos and ISPs such as Verizon and Comcast to bypass the municipal authorities that currently grant them licenses to do limited business over limited territories, and provide service to the whole country. In 2006, Republicans led by Rep. Joe Barton (R – Texas) crafted legislation that would create such a franchise authority, presumably to be overseen by the FCC. The Commission’s leadership at that time was believed to be in favor of that proposal.

The benefits of such a franchise system, Rep. Barton and others argued, included the creation of competition, especially in rural areas where zero or one provider offered service. Often those rural areas were being served by smaller telcos, serving customers in areas that larger providers had thus far overlooked.

Opponents of the Barton Bill noted that it lacked the typical provisions prohibiting a franchisee from granting favorite status to selected content providers; in fact, it actually contained a provision encouraging national franchisees to charge extra for premium carriage, perhaps as a way to offset fees franchisees would eventually owe the government. This opposition was responsible for coining the phrase net neutrality. But supporters of the bill commandeered the new phrase for themselves, claiming that the “poison” amendment Democrats inserted into the Barton Bill would effectively cement into place the rural monopolies that smaller providers were enjoying at the time, along with municipal monopolies granted to the bigger CATV and telco providers, blocking out competition and insuring high prices for the consumer.

Suffice it to say that the Barton Bill ran head-first into a maelstrom of red tape, and never became law. In the intervening time, the Democratic party increased its majority in Congress and reclaimed the White House. President Obama appointed to the FCC chairmanship the man believed responsible for overseeing, if not completely writing word-for-word, then-candidate Obama’s campaign policy regarding net neutrality — the first-ever such policy for a presidential candidate.

“Because most Americans only have a choice of only one or two broadband carriers, carriers are tempted to impose a toll charge on content and services, discriminating against Web sites that are unwilling to pay for equal treatment,” then-Sen. Obama’s campaign policy stated (PDF available here). “This could create a two-tier Internet in which Web sites with the best relationships with network providers can get the fastest access to consumers, while all competing Web sites remain in a slower lane. Such a result would threaten innovation, the open tradition and architecture of the Internet, and competition among content and backbone providers. It would also threaten the equality of speech through which the Internet has begun to transform American political and cultural discourse.”

The “fast lane/slow lane” metaphor comes directly from Democratic opposition to the Barton Bill, led at the time by Sen. Ron Wyden (D – Ore.). The problem is, that metaphor recalls to mind sour memories among Republican lawmakers who recall their opposition’s unwillingness to come to any compromise, instead raising the question of the national franchise authority to the level of a civil rights issue.

“Obama will protect the Internet’s traditional openness to innovation and creativity and ensure that it remains a platform for free speech and innovation that will benefit consumers and our democracy,” the candidate’s policy read. Today, Chairman Genachowski is looking for legislative help from Rep. Ed Markey (D – Mass.), the author of the latest net neutrality legislation currently under debate. Arguably, Democrats may have the super-majority they need to pass such legislation in Congress now without Republican support. But if that’s the card they choose to play, they may ensure that opposition to that legislation, if not completely effective, is at least as loud as it was in 2006.

The FCC open hearing is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. EDT tomorrow morning. Later that afternoon, the Commission is scheduled to conduct another session in its week-long workshop on the National Broadband Plan, this time with participation by representatives from Microsoft and Google.

This past year, what has very clearly distinguished one company’s cloud services from another has been their intended uses. Whereas Microsoft Windows Azure has been a custom applications platform, and Salesforce.com has built a business logic platform around Force.com, Amazon Web services has been about deploying entire servers in the cloud, letting customers lease the processing time and bandwidth to deploy their own Web fronts on Amazon’s hardware.

Up to now, the question for AWS customers has been to deploy or not to deploy; but this morning, data center architects will be asking how much to deploy. With the rollout of what it’s calling Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, the service will enable a new class of customers to deploy limited resources into the cloud, and then secure and administer those resources through the customers’ own firewalls and admin software. Amazon announced the initial beta of VPC to select customers this morning.

Technically speaking, the VPC is a group between 1 and 20 subnets, given the class of IPv4 private addresses that would normally define a local network or private intranet (192.168.x.x being one example). The VPC is given one public-facing gateway and one private, with the latter being accessible through the customer’s own network. Then, instances of Amazon EC2 servers are built and deployed within the VPC address space.

All communication between the customer’s on-premise hardware and off-premise resources take place over IPsec encrypted connections (and there’s where the extra charges apply). To some administrative software, the network layout may not even appear as though the VPC portion of the network is off-premise.

“Once you have done this,” reads a post on Amazon’s Web Services blog today, “all Internet-bound traffic generated by your Amazon EC2 instances within your VPC routes across the VPN connection, where it wends its way through your outbound firewall and any other network security devices under your control before exiting from your network.”

In addition to the EC2 instance fees, other bandwidth charges will apply. In keeping with Amazon’s flat-rate principle, customers will be charged 5¢ per “connection-hour;” plus 10¢ per GB of incoming data, and 17¢ per GB of outgoing data, declining on a scale to 10¢ per GB should outgoing bandwidth approach 150 TB per month.

“Imagine the many ways that you can now combine your existing on-premise static resources with dynamic resources from the Amazon VPC,” reads this morning’s blog entry. “You can expand your corporate network on a permanent or temporary basis. You can get resources for short-term experiments and then leave the instances running if the experiment succeeds. You can establish instances for use as part of a DR (Disaster Recovery) effort. You can even test new applications, systems, and middleware components without disturbing your existing versions.”

Rollout begins soon for select customers in the eastern US. Availability of the beta for other zones has yet to be announced.

It’s been about three months since Skyfire officially launched on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 3rd Edition, and this week the popular mobile browser has been given a general performance upgrade.

Skyfire’s Senior Director of Product Management Robert Oberhofer said in his team blog that Version 1.1 has an upgraded algorithm to shorten load times, improved reconnect (the browser disconnects from pages to save battery), support for WML markup language, and upgrades to its support for Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight. This final upgrade is central to Skyfire, as it is one of the best mobile browsers for watching streaming video.

Though the user interface remains mostly unchanged, the user experience has been enhanced. Symbian’s scrolling and zooming has been sped up and smoothed out, and paging up and down has been added to keypad shortcuts. The “2″ and “8″ keys now act as Page-Up and Page-Down, and the asterisk key now summons the “Superbar,” Skyfire’s hybrid search/address bar.

Several bugs have been fixed in this release as well, including a bug which caused Skyfire to quit on startup on Windows Mobile 6.5 devices, and one which made it impossible to uninstall Skyfire on the Samsung Propel and Jack if the SIM card wasn’t detected.

Skyfire remains free, and can be downloaded on Windows Mobile (smartphone/PPC) devices, and Symbian S60 3rd Edition devices in the US, Canada, and UK.

One of the more bizarre architectural elements of HTML that may still be excused with the phrase, “This behavior is by design,” is the ability for a floating text frame using the <IFRAME> element to be rendered effectively invisible (or so miniature as to not be seen), and then to run JavaScript code. It’s a trigger for a disaster; and pressing that trigger tens of thousands of times today is a particularly virulent SQL injection attack, the evidence of which can be detected through a simple Google search: Wednesday afternoon, Betanews discovered about 82,800 compromised pages appearing in Google’s index just for one of the actual malicious triggers — probably just a fraction of the actual number of cases. And there are multiple triggers.

The plague was first reported last Friday by security services provider ScanSafe. In an update filed today, its engineers report that as the number of infected sites grows, their geography becomes more pronounced instead of less. It’s as if the source of the injection, whatever it is, is targeting Chinese sites.

A similar attack occurred in the spring of last year, once again appearing to target Chinese sites. Once infected, the sites deliver <IFRAME> code to their users that starts the download of executable binary code, and apparently even launches that code. Last May, security researchers discovered a new round of SQL injection attacks, also appearing to target China.

While some security software firms have posited the theory that malicious sources outside China are targeting that country in response to reports that it is supporting suppressions of ethnic-related uprisings, a more viable theory is that the latest wave — like the May 2008 wave discovered by Armorize Technologies, a security firm with assets in China — are also based in China as well.

Though the motivation behind this latest attack was not known, the most plausible theory presented for the motive in the May 2008 attack came from Trend Micro: Information that the malicious payload sent back to its host indicated that the host was hunting for data related to gaming, perhaps finding statistics about players’ assets holdings in virtual worlds. Armed with that information, a malicious gamer could conceivably manipulate entire virtual economies.

“At Opera, we love speed,” reads the beginning of a March 2009 blog post from Opera Software Product Analyst Roberto Mateu. “We work hard to make our browser faster with features that speeds you up”

That particular lead-in was for a post discussing the inclusion of Opera Turbo, a feature originally created to expedite rendering in mobile browsers, in the latest Opera 10 desktop edition. Up until recently, Opera was the browser noted for elegance, adherence to accepted Web development standards, and speed; and with regard to the latter, the company is still touting Turbo as the top addition to the first release candidate of version 10, released yesterday.

On Opera Mini, Turbo can be a real lifesaver, especially in limited bandwidth situations. It uses a connection to Opera’s own proxy servers, where contents are cached or rendered with higher-speed processors than you’d find on the usual smartphone, to produce legible pages faster. But in the PC world, broadband is becoming more common (especially in its native Norway, much more so than in the US); so for users there, Turbo mode is likely to come in handy only as a fallback during high traffic times or near-outages.

Betanews tests Wednesday morning on the latest build of Opera 10 RC reveal very heavy pixilation in downloaded images, probably due to the quality factor of JPEG rendering being turned down to expedite page loads. However, our initial tests do show that when Turbo Mode is turned on, and its default acceleration factor reads “x3,” page load and render times are as much as 358% the speed as when Turbo is turned off, 58% faster than what the mode actually indicates. This is the case even when rendered pages do not contain images.

Already, Opera 10 may be the fastest rendering browser for Windows being tested in the field. In our tests this morning, build 1733 running in Windows 7 RTM showed it could render pages with Turbo Mode turned off at 426% the speed of Internet Explorer 7 running in Windows Vista SP2 (the index browser for our relative tests). By comparison, the latest development build of Google Chrome 4 we’ve tested renders the same test pages about 28% slower than Opera 10 RC, with a performance score in rendering of 3.76 versus 4.26.

The rendering of Opera 10 RC in Turbo Mode shows heavy degradation in images and backgrounds.

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But just as broadband plays a bigger role in people’s lives these days, JavaScript plays a bigger role in more people’s Web pages. And that’s where Opera simply hasn’t competed against any of the other Windows browsers, not even Firefox — last year, Opera’s performance against Firefox won it critical accolades. In overall test scores on the Windows 7 RTM platform, the latest dev build of Google Chrome 4 scored 15.20 on our index versus 5.36 for Opera 10 RC, meaning the latest Chrome delivers 284% the general performance of the latest Opera.

An updated word about our Windows Web browser test suite

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Users who remain loyal to Opera — and there are many — have had to remain content for now that the company may devote new attention to its JavaScript interpreter for round 11 of its browser.

As far back as last February, Opera developer Jens Lindstrom acknowledged that the company’s once venerable Futhark JavaScript engine isn’t up to modern standards: “When Opera’s current ECMAScript engine, called Futhark, was first released in a public version, it was the fastest engine on the market. That engine was developed to minimize code footprint and memory usage, rather than to achieve maximum execution speed. This has traditionally been a correct trade-off on many of the platforms Opera runs on. The Web is a changing environment however, and tomorrow’s advanced Web applications will require faster ECMAScript execution, so we have now taken on the challenge to once again develop the fastest ECMAScript engine on the market.”

Half a year later, we’ve heard very little about the progress of the new JavaScript/ECMAScript engine that Lindstrom dubbed “Carakan.” But the company may have to clear out its Opera 10 development cycle before it can devote full resources to the engine that could get Opera back in the game.

As those involved in the Windows 7 community may know, Microsoft has failed to fix a crucial flaw in the User Account Control feature of the operating system which allows a specific whitelist of applications to inject code that can allow any application to silently elevate. The code was released about a month ago as a proof-of-concept by Leo Davidson showcasing the flaw elevating a command prompt window using the whitelisted explorer.exe process.

The company stands by UAC in its final form, but they’re taking it a step further by blocking the program that causes the exploit using their own security software.

Today, I just happened to download the zip file that causes the exploit when Microsoft Security Essentials greeted me with a nice dialog telling me that what I just downloaded is malware, specifically HackTool.Win32/Welevate.A and HackTool.Win64/Welevate.A (depending on architecture). While I’d agree that this can be considered a form of malware, it’s just a very bad way of dealing with the situation. However, Leo noted that Windows Defender in Vista did not detect this exploit, and Bryant confirmed that the same is true for Windows 7 (where the trick would actually work), so this seems to be exclusive to Microsoft Security Essentials.

It’s not clear what method the signatures take to detect it, but I promptly recompiled the source code under the Visual C++ 10.0 toolkit using VS 2010 Beta and the application ran undetected. Not a very good solution if it actually hash checks for the specific applications.

Leo, and I (or Bryant) will update our respective pages accordingly as we discover more. Bryant is seeking official word from Microsoft on what’s going on. Meanwhile, you can see the VirusTotal report here and grab the exploit here.

Update (~Bryant): let’s take a look at what’s going on here from a different approach. Microsoft says that the vulnerability here is not actually a vulnerability and is, in fact, by design. However, they’ve also classified Leo’s proof-of-concept as malware. Logically speaking, if a process whose sole purpose is to exploit a perceived vulnerability is marked as malware, then it’s reasonable to assume that the perceived vulnerability is indeed a significant problem. Basically, Microsoft contradicted themselves by listing the proof-of-concept as malware.

Update 2 (~Bryant): A friend of mine proposed one particular argument as a potential explanation to this issue, whereby this is a bug within Microsoft Security Essentials. The reasons I don’t believe this to be the case are:

• This exploit was specifically named as HackTool:Win32/Welevate.A (A quick googling shows only three links; one is to the aforementioned virustotal link, the second and third to a Microsoft encyclopedia entry.
• This particular label only applies to this specific proof-of-concept
• A reasonable vulnerability assessment (”Medium”) was applied to this particular proof-of-concept, which makes sense given that this security vulnerability in UAC is only really an issue if either a user runs a malicious application or if some other internet-facing application were to be compromised. I covered the latter in an older post of mine where I explain how this flaw essentially raises the vectors of attack many-fold.

Oh hey, seems like Windows 7-E is making a comeback (source-link is German) after having lived and died a very uneventful life in the EU. The German-language Microsoft Store is selling it for 299 euros, and the box art (as well as the page) clearly notes the lack of internet explorer on this version.

Mistake? Joke? A sign that Microsoft might’ve gotten pissed at Opera’s and Mozilla’s recent efforts to milk even more out of them? Who knows, but the box art for “Ultimate-E” has a weird stuttery look to it.

Credit goes to Andre Da Costa for pointing me to the buy page via MSN. I can’t read German, but from the presence of the box art, I’m certain this is for a retail copy of Windows 7-E.

My thanks goes to Ed Bott, legendary Microsoft columnist and author, for pointing me to this rather depressing article on Wired this afternoon. Before you begin reading my rebuttal, I’d like to remind all of you that I quite like my Windows and quite hate my Apples, so if you’re an Apple fan, lover, loyalist, and/or propagandist, you can save yourself a lot of adrenaline-inspired organ damage by avoiding this article.

With that aside, let’s get to it.

Brian Chen, a self-admitted Mac user (I’ll explain why this is bad at the end) and writer for Wired Magazine, has come out swinging hard at Windows 7, likely out of his own fear of seeing Apple’s marketshare decrease once Windows 7 gains traction. His current piece, eloquently titled “7 Reasons to Avoid Windows 7” strikes at the most commonly misunderstood points in Windows without properly dissecting the logic behind any of Microsoft’s decisions. In this piece, I’ll be going through each of Mr. Chen’s points, one by one, in order to explain exactly why both Windows 7 should be embraced and why Mr. Chen’s writings should be avoided. Awesomeness exposes itself after the jump.

This gets long, so here’s a summary of my rebuttals for those who would probably end up commenting with TL;DR:

• Upgrading from Windows XP requires a clean install: Users who bought computers between 2006 and 2007 (not including corporate boxes) without the intention of upgrading to Vista later on are likely out of luck and will need to back up their stuff before doing a clean install. My highly forgiving guess puts this at 5 percent of all computers in the United States once all corporate boxes and older XP boxes are accounted for, but there are no scientific stats to actually put a number on this group. Corporate networks, the largest source of XP computers in most studies, will be completely unaffected by the clean install mandate. Netbook users will also be mostly unaffected due to the direct correlation between the willingness to install Windows 7 on a netbook without an optical drive versus technology savvy-ness.
• The Upgrade is Expensive: So is the upgrade to Leopard. Users are already being charged for a service pack, and users who bought their computers with Tiger without moving to Leopard will be charged even more, unlike XP users moving to 7.
• It’ll Cost You Time, Too: but many more businesses are willing to upgrade to Windows 7 now than they were at around the same time back when Vista was first released, XP was first released, and so forth. It all boils down to doing cost-benefit analyses, which is something Brian Chen didn’t look into or even consider.
• It’s Still Windows: but Windows is more usable, far easier to use securely, is much more stable on a much wider hardware base, and is already a home run with critics, analysts, and anyone who isn’t a fanboy or Brian Chen.
• Security Isn’t Automatically Better: actually, it is. By default, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are more convenient to use securely than XP, which is enough of an incentive to upgrade. Unlike OS X which I can use without an antivirus because of security by obscurity, I can use Windows 7 without an antivirus because of security by ease-of-use and common sense.
• Built-In Support for Egregious Hardware-Based DRM: The DRM exists in Windows to satisfy the MPAA and RIAA, but it has hardly been implemented at all by any content distributers. Brian even admits that this is a reason derived from fear than from substance.
• Snow Leopard Is Almost Here: Windows 7 is more usable than OS X, to the point where Apple blatantly copied Aero Peek straight from Windows 7. That’s not including how easy it is to use Windows out of the box (unlike Brian’s argument that it doesn’t “just work,”); almost every possible hardware configuration capable of running Windows 7 is supported out of the box, and new drivers can be downloaded after installation to make those configurations which don’t work, work.
• Brian Chen is a Self-Admitted Mac User: actually, this isn’t a rebuttal. It’s just confirming the truth. I suppose this one might actually require you to read everything I wrote, which starts below.

Upgrading from Windows XP requires a clean install

because, you know, supporting an upgrade from an OS which liberally encouraged bad resource usage as well as being nearly a decade old is definitely a wise choice. Keep in mind that the vast majority of users “upgrading” from Windows XP to Windows 7 will not be doing so at home. Most computers running XP will most likely be corporate machines, and not only will this network upgrade not be immediate, it also won’t be an upgrade.

System Administrators don’t go around putting in an upgrade disk for every single computer on the network. Smart sysadmins always isolate a segment of the corporate network, test the applications which they use in order to ensure that said apps will work with the new OS, and once all of this is done, they either

• sysprep an image on a sample machine with the apps they need followed by distributing that image across the network to all computers, or
• do a network install using the disc itself (or the iso) followed by installing the needed apps, or
• do a clean install for individual machines followed by the necessary applications (or a finished image), as needed.

That’s assuming they don’t just buy new hardware.

In IT, there’s no such thing as doing an upgrade. It’s taboo to even speak the term with regards to using the upgrade feature on an OS, let alone running such an upgrade en masse. I’d go so far as to call it career suicide.

Getting to the point: the minority tend to be the loudest. Here’s a rundown of computers likely running which OS:

• Computers bought prior to 2006 (which likely won’t support most of Windows 7’s customer-enhanced features anyway): XP
• Computers bought between 2006 and early 2007: XP, upgradeable to Vista/7.
• Computers bought after 2007 strolled along: Vista (most likely).
• Netbooks: XP (most likely), Vista (least likely), Linux

So, the users most likely to want to upgrade are XP users who purchased their computers between 2006 and 2007, as well as some netbook owners. Keep in mind that a solid chunk of all computers running XP which are recorded in stats such as this are on corporate networks, and as noted above, these computers will either remain on XP until end-of-life or be clean-installed up to Windows 7.

First of all, if you want to upgrade the OS on a netbook, unless you bought Windows 7 as an upgrade early on when it was cheap, you’re spending too much money for what’s almost a disposable computer. Second, I can’t think of a single netbook which actually comes with an optical drive, so how does a layuser plan on installing Windows 7 onto his/her netbook in the first place? The technically savvy user will find some means, but these users are also likely the ones to care least about upgrading in the first place. There you have it; netbook users have been ruled out.

Moving on to the 2006/2007 group: this is the group which will likely suffer the most from not being able to upgrade directly to 7, but this is also a minority group. Anyone who purchased a computer during this window specifically for the sake of upgrading to Vista once it came out… well, they’re now running Vista. Those who are still left on XP are the only unfortunate casualty of the decision to not allow XP upgrades, though in the long run, this is better for them in terms of functionality and in terms of making sure the press doesn’t bash Microsoft for failed XP-to-7 upgrades. Businesses which have computers in this block don’t care because, as noted earlier, they’ll just clean-install their way up or replace hardware down the road.

The Upgrade is Expensive

However, Apple plans to sell its next OS, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, for $30 to current Leopard users. This Apple power move alone makes Windows 7’s pricing look pretty steep. [emphasis added]

Brian’s argument here is self-defeating, as those outside the Apple Sphere of Influence rightfully see Snow Leopard as nothing more than a service pack. Apple is charging $29 for the same quality and number of features as what Microsoft delivers in a typical Windows service pack (the best example would be Windows XP SP2), and all of Microsoft’s service packs are free. Apple’s $29 charge is almost as bad as charging iPod Touch users $10 to upgrade to newer firmware (this is, quite plainly, analogous to highway robbery, but I digress).

Of course, that $29 price doesn’t come without a rather demeaning list of caveats, which can be seen on a post written two months ago by Ed Bott. The biggest point of contention here is that Tiger users have to pay the equivalent of upgrading first to Leopard and then Snow Leopard. Worse, there’s only one way to do it if you want to go straight from Tiger to Snow Leopard, and that’s by buying the Mac Box Set, which isn’t cheap and doesn’t offer anything which you can’t already get for free.

Brian himself noted that this is a power move by Apple to stunt Microsoft’s pricing on Windows 7, which means it’s nothing more than a marketing maneuver, which is clearly evident from the fine print of Apple’s upgrade terms.

As for this service pack business, I wrote about that two months ago as well.

It’ll Cost You Time, Too

That’s right. Everything costs time, and corporate IT departments realize this better than anyone else. That’s why most IT departments will wait until Windows 7 has been battle-tested before upgrading, but while the logic is simple, it’s not as plain as Brian makes their avoidance out to be.

This piece by Ina Fried tells a much better story of what’s going on. As of the survey [pdf] referenced in her article, 59.3% of respondents had no plans to migrate to Windows 7. The remaining 40.8% (rounding discrepancy: 0.1%) have either already begun deploying Windows 7 or will be doing so before the close of calendar year 2010.

That’s a lot of companies committing to a migration to Windows 7 before its release, and it’s a lot more than the 12-14% adoption rate of XP within XP’s first year.

Not considered in Brian’s highly subjective analysis of the business situation right now is a cost-benefit analysis of upgrading to Windows 7. It differs for each company, but the fact that so many respondents said they’re looking to migrate to Windows 7 prior to the end of 2010 means that they’ve done the CBAs and they’ve concluded that the benefits outweigh the costs of upgrading. Those who said they have no plans either executed CBAs at this point and decided that migrating now wouldn’t be beneficial to them or they’re just waiting to see how it goes everywhere else.

The same goes for the antiquated software argument brought up in Chen’s piece. This also gets factored into CBAs, and businesses will eventually have to migrate from antiquated software on upwards as the cost of maintaining older configurations increases versus the drop in technicians with the knowledge to support said configurations.

It’s as simple as that.

It’s Still Windows

Despite delivering an intuitive, modern interface in Windows 7, this OS is still Windows. In our first look at Windows 7, we complained about the OS’s inability to recognize an Adobe AIR file followed by its failure to search for software to run the file.

Also, Windows 7 doesn’t immediately know what to do with some pretty obvious tasks. When you insert a thumb drive, for example, you must tell Windows 7 what to do with it (i.e. open the folder and view the files) and customize a setting to get the OS to automatically behave that way. In short, when getting started you’ll have to do a lot of tweaking and customizing to get moving smoothly. That’s unfortunately an experience all Windows users are accustomed to — things don’t “just work.”

The fact that the Adobe AIR argument was the most important argument to list against Windows 7 being “still Windows” is an indication of the lack of objective substance in this argument, and that’s barring the fact that this is a already a highly atypical scenario (all Adobe AIR apps will check for AIR before being installed).

As for the “pretty obvious tasks,” the thumb drive example is a far better usability model than Apple’s “let’s just mount the drive and let the user do whatever he wants” model. The fact that Windows throws a prompt asking if the user wants to see a slideshow, play music, or simply open the files is highly welcomed by anyone I’ve spoken to who has used both PCs running Windows and PCs running Mac OS X. In fact, I’m quite certain that this is indeed an example of the things in Windows which “just work.”

Another example of things which “just work” in Windows would be the vast majority of hardware. Unlike Apple, which circumvents this issue by bottlenecking hardware supply and charging your soul for new hardware, Microsoft’s open hardware ecosystem lets users use whatever they want, and when the drivers (not written by Microsoft!) are WHQL-certified, the hardware almost always works flawlessly. I’ve yet to have a BSOD on Windows 7 RTM, and I’ve only had a few bad-ram-related bluescreens on Vista. Compared to my record running Snow Leopard and Leopard on the Macbook from which I’m writing this article, Windows Vista and Windows 7 have been far more stable, forgiving with hardware (even with Apple’s intentionally poorly-written drivers), and more responsive.

It’s still Windows, and as a result, it still just works, and it’s now even more usable, unlike Brian’s operating system of choice.

Security Isn’t Automatically Better

Computerworld’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols stands firm that Windows 7 won’t change anything from a security perspective: “Windows 7 still has all the security of a drunken teenager in a sports car,” he wrote. “Millions of lazy Windows users are the reason why the internet is a mess. If you already do all the right things to keep XP running safely, you’re not going to get any safer by buying Windows 7.”

Good point. Because Windows 7 is still Windows, you’re again the primary target of attack for hackers and virus coders. Therefore, it’s up to you to protect yourself with anti-virus software and running update patches to keep the OS as secure as possible. (Compare this experience to Mac OS X Leopard, for which many don’t even run anti-virus software, because it’s more secure out-of-the-box compared to Windows.) Though Windows 7 does deliver some security enhancements, such as data encryption for thumb drives, and a feature for IT administrators to control which applications can run on a corporate network, these are not general security improvements that change much for the overall user experience.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols is incorrect on a number of footings:

1. Being lazy on Windows 7 just means Windows 7 will be more secure by default than Windows XP
2. Windows 7 makes it easier to be more secure than Windows XP, which means layusers won’t have an incentive to become unlazy and disable features like UAC. Windows XP’s limited user mode was highly inconvenient because it didn’t offer an easy means of temporary escalation for admin-related tasks, which is why most users just kept their accounts with admin privileges. Windows Vista and 7 made life safer and easier both for standard privilege accounts (UAC prompt asks for a password for approval of administrative tasks) and for admin accounts (UAC asks for approval).
3. Windows XP users running in limited privilege mode are practically nil because it’s not convenient (as noted in #2), which means the number of people affected by security usability improvements in both Vista and 7 will be much higher than Steven’s argument tries to imply.

Chen tries to build on this with his “still Windows” argument. He admits that Windows is a target because of its expansive size but then chooses to say that Mac OS X is more secure out of the box without explaining that this security comes from the sheer lack of ubiquity, not from the code itself. While OS X gains its security by obscurity, Windows 7 can be used without an antivirus thanks to security by ease-of-use and common sense. There’s a huge difference between the two: security by obscurity falls apart if obscurity gives way to ubiquity.

Thing is, this security convenience (UAC) is a massive improvement for the overall user experience. Not only did it get more users to run under standard privileges, it got more developers to fix their code and write for non-administrative resource settings, thus making everyone safer overall and making UAC much less of the annoyance that it was when Vista first launched.

You’d be right to assume that this was Microsoft’s plan all along.

Built-In Support for Egregious Hardware-Based DRM

This argument was around during the Vista days as well, and it never took off because the DRM was both invisible by non-pirates and hardly used by anyone at all. It was only added by Microsoft to satisfy the MPAA/RIAA. This argument doesn’t hold any substance at all, and Brian even admits that this is mostly an argument of fear than anything else

Still, there are going to be people cringing in fear that one day PUMA and PVP will screw them over.

Right.

Snow Leopard Is Almost Here

Are you using a PC running Mac OS X? Sure, go ahead and get Snow Leopard. Are you using a PC running Windows Vista? You’re better off sticking with the more usable OS (hint: it’s the OS without a bite taken out of it).

Some of you likely remember my interview with Jensen Harris of Office UX fame. The tactics used in designing the Ribbon UI in Office 2007 were also applied to Windows 7’s user interface development, which means that Windows 7 is quite possibly the most intuitive operating system in the history of operating systems. Bold claim? Sure, but at least Microsoft actually researches usability rather than arbitrarily implementing features which look cool but have a steep learning curve.

That’s not including the features Apple copied from Microsoft, the support they dropped for PowerPC, the sheer length of time it took for Apple to implement 64-bit support, and the fact that they didn’t embrace touch support in Snow Leopard at all, despite the fact that multi-touch environments are becoming the way of the future.

Brian Chen is a Self-Admitted Mac User (I’m not rebutting this one)

and boy does it show. If you just read through all of the above, you probably caught onto a well-justified trend: Brian Chen’s entire piece had hardly any substance to back it up.

This is typical of the attacks implemented by Apple during their WWDC keynote and also typical of many Apple loyalists I’ve run into. It’s the cult of Mac which keeps many people from switching to Macs and has actually inspired many of my friends to switch away from Macs. I’ll leave it to Maddox (not work safe) to show how this unsubstantiveness comes into play as well as expose the phenomenal powers of marketing behind Steve Jobs.

My free copy of Windows Live Writer running on Windows 7 on top of my 1st gen MacBook which almost died on Snow Leopard would like to thank you for reading this ridiculously long thesis on 8 reasons not to avoid Windows 7.

Lots of people are asking for the logic behind Apple’s apparent move into the tablet market. Matthew Miller of ZDNet posted this inquiry-of-a-post asking for any potential reason for why Apple would want to enter the tablet game, but it seems he (and two of my favorite colleagues, Mary Jo Foley and Zack Whittaker) may have missed the answer:

Students.

Many schools suggest tablets for note-taking or engineering work. Heck, some even mandate them. This market is currently owned by Microsoft, and given Apple’s de facto hip-couture status in universities, it’s only logical to see that Apple wants to snatch the remaining Windows tablet users and turn them to the dark side, preferably before Windows 7 strolls along. My own discussions with students of various universities which suggest or mandate tablets (the biggest one which comes to my mind is a school I was considering attending myself and which currently lists as alumni a few of my friends, Virginia Tech), lead me to believe that a vast number of the attending students wish they could use Apple’s own hardware. Sure, there are a few hackintoshy solutions (modbook) but these aren’t official, supported by Apple, or anywhere near as “hip.”

Granted, Apple’s rumored tablet offering isn’t actually aiming for the engineering students, but that’s beside the point. The point is that if one Apple tablet succeeds, they will swiftly aim for turning it into a billion-dollar business, just as they have with the iPod, the iPhone, et. al.

Here’s the problem: Microsoft is coming with Windows 7 on October 22nd. That’s long after classes begin and likely a month after Apple’s seemingly-real tablet offering, which might still find its way into the hands of hipster-poseurs and college students. If Apple’s tablet happens to be an unproductive media device with no purpose other than to watch films and browse the internet, then I suppose only the crunchpad may possibly need to worry, but if Apple’s tablet offers any decent means of taking notes or generally being even slightly productive, Microsoft quickly needs to put it to bed.

Otherwise, Apple’s legions will embrace it like the second coming of choose-your-deity rather than the outcast child the business world would much prefer to see (before these students force said businesses over to the worlds most unproductive OS). Given Apple’s recent streak of screwing the consumer, the last thing people need is another outlet for the consumer to be, well, screwed.

Yes, I wrote this on a MacBook, which thankfully currently possesses no trace of any Leopards, Snow Leopards, or any other endangered sources of luxury furs. I also gracefully stole the article’s image from PC World.