Technology News and IT Business Intelligence

In a bold new experiment for distributing Office that, quite surprisingly, does not involve Office Web Apps, Microsoft announced this afternoon its plans to let OEMs pre-install the full Office 2010 on new PCs, but enable it to run in a limited format until users purchase their licenses. That format, for the first time, will be ad-supported.

When Office 2010 premieres (the official date is still unknown at this point), a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews, new Windows 7 PCs will be made available through participating OEMs (no list has been revealed yet) that contain, pre-installed, a product that will be known as Office Starter 2010. It will contain partly functional versions of Word and Excel — or perhaps more accurately, it will appear to contain partly functional versions, because the complete Office 2010 software will be installed on these systems.

Rather than sell upgrade software separately, however, Microsoft will enable retail outlets to sell simple plastic cards containing license numbers, for the various consumer SKUs of Office including Home and Student, and Professional. Customers can enter the numbers from these cards to instantly “upgrade” their software from partly-functional, ad-supported mode to fully-functional, ad-free mode, as well as activate components that were not functional in Starter such as PowerPoint and Outlook.

This will be Microsoft’s first venture into the realm of ad-supported commercial local software. Earlier, the company had considered introducing Office Web Apps, at some level, as the replacement for Microsoft Works, the long-extended entry-level software that relatively few people are aware still existed. But conceivably, Starter Edition could give Microsoft a way to more effectively monetize its entry-level software, subsidizing it continually through advertising rather than once only through OEMs. Whether OEMs will even be charged to pre-install Office Starter is doubtful; it’s feasible that they may even be given incentives to do so.

However, this may still be seen as a setback for the premiere of Office Web Apps, which up until today was being described as the entry level of Office. More and more, Web Apps is looking like a way for mobile users to obtain and freshen their Microsoft Office documents on the go, which could make the suite less competitive against Google Apps, Zoho Apps, and future entries from Adobe.

Also today, Microsoft announced it will be distributing full versions of Office 2010 online, through a service entitled Click-to-Run. Trial editions of the package will be made available through this service on virtual machines, probably executable through Virtual PC on XP and Vista, and Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7. This will solve the problem that Betanews discovered with the current Office 2010 Technical Preview: Because of the way Office 2007 configuration works, Office 2010 applications in general (not just Outlook) cannot effectively co-exist on the same PC with Office 2007 apps. So anyone trying a future trial edition of Office 2010 in the conventional manner would have to uninstall Office 2007 — not something folks will have an incentive to do.

On the bad side, a virtual Office 2010 will not be able to co-exist with the customer’s current e-mail profile, which will make testing Outlook 2010 more difficult within the virtual envelope. But it will be safer. Microsoft said today that customers of Click-to-Run will be able to purchase Office 2010 directly online, download it, and then install it.

Both Click-to-Run and Office Starter will contribute to Microsoft’s efforts to reduce publishing costs, as both methods are no longer reliant upon physical media at the customer end.

The half-life of any piece of modern electronics, which was once measured in years, is now barely a few months. It’s no one’s fault, of course, but it’s a reality that vendors need to integrate into their own life cycle planning lest they get caught with the product line equivalent of grandma’s wardrobe.

Simply put, the half-life of today’s uber-hot phones is shrinking. Fast.

To wit, Palm’s Pre. Although Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said earlier this year that his company planned to bring “devices like the Pre” to market, more recent reports suggest the Pre may be ditched in favor of the Pixi. Early price cuts and less-than-enthusiastic messaging from current and prospective carriers reinforce the growing belief that the Pre is already old hat.

Similarly, Research in Motion’s Storm, which bowed to great fanfare late last year as the first touchscreen-based BlackBerry, has spent much of 2009 enduring multiple rounds of price cuts. Don’t feel bad if you weren’t aware of this: the device’s marketing has also been virtually non-existent, another sign that the bloom is off the device’s rose.

As accelerating market forces turn formerly superstar devices into also-rans, product pipelines become more critical than ever. You’re in infinitely better shape if you’ve got a new device to sell before customers tire of the suddenly old one. But not even a packed-full pipeline will save you if you insist on hanging on to those old devices for too long.

Case in point

RAZR in PinkI remember my first RAZR. Well, it wasn’t exactly mine, it was my wife’s. It was pink. And it was oh-so-much more attention-grabbing than the dowdy old Nokia it replaced. When she’d take it with her to get-togethers, and pull it out nonchalantly to check in on the babysitter, her friends would deluge her with questions. For a while way back in 2005, the Motorola RAZR was the hottest mobile phone on the planet. And my wife — for a little while anyway — was happy to be riding the popularity wave.

Against that backdrop, I felt more than a twinge of sadness when, a few months ago, I happened across a pile of them in a discount bin at a local electronics liquidator. Even at $15 apiece for an unlocked, pristine device in the buyer’s choice of colors, they all sat forlornly in a shadowy corner, with enough dust on the packages to suggest they hadn’t been touched in weeks.

Time had passed the RAZR by. So had my wife: When her RAZR’s battery finally stopped holding a charge last year, Motorola wasn’t even on her wish list when she went looking for a new phone. And to be frank, it wouldn’t have mattered even if it was, because our carrier no longer carried any Motorola products at all. Her new Samsung slider — also pink — may not be the life of the party, but it lets her call or text the babysitter without first having to hold court for the adoring crowd.

The post-RAZR reality

The Razr (which I refuse to spell in all-caps anymore, because companies that insist on such silly naming conventions deserve an eternity in OBLIVION) mimics the complete fall from grace of Motorola as a phone manufacturer. Any vendor that currently sells handhelds, or hopes to in the near future, should study the many lessons this unfortunate company learned during Razr’s short market lifespan, like an historian studies the Roman Empire. In so doing, it will come face to face with a number of difficult realities:

* Time is your enemy. Today’s hottest phone is fodder for tomorrow’s bargain bin. Leaning heavily on fashion to sell phones makes an already tight market window of opportunity even tighter.
* Milking is for cows. Motorola didn’t know when to say when. Years after its Razr had peaked, it was still basing the core of its product line on it. Even supposedly “new” devices were thinly disguised variations of the same old thing.
* Customers aren’t stupid. They know if you’re milking. And they’ll stay away in droves at the first whiff of suspicion.
* Fashion or function — not both. Devices based on sexy form factors often force tradeoffs in battery life or network performance that buyers discover only after getting home from the store.
* Variety is the spice of mobile life. One device won’t cut it. Everyone’s got different needs and tastes, and vendors that offer more than one form factor stand to pick up sales from those that stubbornly stick with one offering.
* Pipeline is crucial. A regular flow of consistently updated devices keeps offerings fresh until successive generations are ready. Keeping old units in the product line for too long damages the brand integrity of more recent offerings. Vendors need to get rid of the old stuff before it becomes a liability, and introduce fundamentally new offerings at regular intervals to prevent rot from setting in.

That last point is especially notable, as it illustrates why manufacturers have utterly failed to gain (like Nokia) or retain (like Motorola) traction in the North American market. The instant a two-year-old design (ancient by modern wireless standards) shows up in a shrink-wrapped package in-between the discount batteries, lip balm, and tube socks, any shred of high-end credibility in the mind of consumers is lost for good. Buyers who might otherwise have considered your device as an alternative to an iPhone or BlackBerry, for example, now avoid the entire brand like the plague because, while everyone loves getting a great deal at Wal-Mart, no one wants to run into their boss as they cart their purchases through the parking lot.

Until now, issues surrounding end-of-life management of devices haven’t garnered much attention because from where vendors sit, this isn’t what sells new hardware. Consumers, focused on looking forward toward the next big thing, don’t want to talk about stuff that’s on the way out. All they care about is counting down the months until they get their cheap or free upgrade. But when that day comes and they walk into the store, only to be surrounded by devices only a grandmother could love, vendors run the risk of turning them off of their wares before potential buyers even have a chance to pull them off the shelf and take them for a test drive.

Time to get mean

I’d like to humbly suggest a slight change in strategy. Vendors may not want to brutally end a given device’s life before its time, but they may have no choice. Product cycles are shorter than they’ve ever been, and the situation will only become more brutal as competition in the space intensifies.

As I look at my two-month-old BlackBerry Tour 9630 and idly contemplate calling my carrier and begging for an iPhone that it just announced this week, part of me says I should simply ignore the iPhone altogether. Barely-there-multitasking, non-exchangeable/sub-one-day battery notwithstanding, it’s a two-year-old design that, unless Apple reconnects with its mobile design mojo, is already flirting with yesterday’s news status among the fashion forward elite.

Like my wife’s Razr that not so long ago defined the state of the art in chic mobility, nothing lasts forever. And heroic efforts to milk a design long past its best before date often do more harm than good.

When the US Federal Trade Commission last Monday published its amended Guidelines for commercial publishers’ behavior, set to go into effect December 1, many sources ended up passing judgment on the document before having read it in its entirety. One misinterpretation that was passed around the blog-O-square like a hot potato was the notion that the FTC would impose an $11,000 fine for each offense where a blog failed to disclose its connections to the manufacturer of a product for which it posted a review.

One blogger, whose tagline is “an Internet entrepreneur who generates six figures online per year,” chocked up the supposed fine as another example of the government’s “infinite wisdom.” Meanwhile, quite ironically, discussion of the fine on one of the world’s more popular blogs managed to become newspaper material by way of the Washington Post.

The problem is, the whole idea is a fantasy; and in a group interview arranged by the publishers of Fast Company, published today, FTC Assistant Director for Advertising Practices Richard Cleland said as much, in response to a direct question from a blogger who stated her opinion that such a fine is “a little crazy.”

“That $11,000 fine is not true,” responded Cleland. A first-time violator, he said, would be given a cease-and-desist order. Any monetary penalty that may arise would come only when the recipient of such an order fails to take heed, and it might not even get that high. A first offense, Cleland said, could be categorized as a “mistake;” and the FTC’s response to such a mistake would be a more “educational approach” to regulation, helping to make bloggers aware of the seriousness of their conduct in the commercial space.

Almost immediately, bloggers reported Cleland’s comments as a case of the FTC saying one thing and taking it back, behaving more like a software company than a government agency. Of course, the original incident was another case of a story being reported enough times that it was almost true.

Aircell has made a commanding name for itself in in-flight Wi-Fi systems. In its first year offering GoGo InFlight Internet service, the company has secured Wi-Fi contracts with Virgin America, American Airlines, US Airways, Delta, AirTran, United, and others.

At the beginning of 2009, United announced that it would begin to offer Aircell’s GoGo Wi-Fi on its transcontinental service between New York and California “in the second half of this year,” and it has finally been able to deliver.

The first flight featuring this service took place last Friday, and the airline is said to be outfitting 13 more Boeing 757s with Aircell’s Wi-Fi hardware, with completion expected by the middle of November. On the transcontinental flight, Wi-Fi access costs $12.95 for laptops and $7.95 for Wi-Fi smartphones and PDAs, and all flight classes have access. Aircell varies the price depending on the length of time the flight is in the air. For short hops, it costs $5.95, for 1.5 to 3 hours, it’s $9.95, and for up to 24 hours it’s $12.95.

Five airlines have commercially deployed Aircell’s Wi-Fi, and three more are expected to be complete by next year, putting GoGo on more than 570 aircraft.

But Aircell isn’t the only one making a name for itself. Southwest Airlines is taking a different approach with a different system, built by California company Row 44, supplemented by JiWire’s in-flight advertising platform. Rather than only allow paying customers online, limited access will be freely available to all passengers.

Of course, free access will be limited to a portal called “Skytown Center” which is the online equivalent of the Skymall catalog, rife with advertisements. But paying customers will be granted unfettered access for likely a much lower cost if still ad-supplemented.

The Wi-Fi Alliance recently released a survey of 480 frequent business fliers, in which 76% said they would choose an airline based upon the availability of in-flight Internet.

Some 71% of respondents also said they would choose Wi-Fi over an in-flight meal. Let the contrived airline food jokes begin.

“We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski warned at CTIA Wireless yesterday. “So we must ask: what happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?

“The short answer: We will need a lot more spectrum.”

Given the current allotment of spectrum, Genachowski’s statement sounds like Roy Scheider in Jaws.

But his portents were even more severe.

“I believe that that the biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis,” Genachowski also said.

It’s not often that the FCC uses a term like “crisis,” especially when the issue is one as ostensibly benign as a bottleneck in the flow of data. But Genachowski is not warning of a crisis where economies crumble and families are forced to move into bomb shelters. This is a crisis of design, where more people are consuming far more bandwidth than originally anticipated.

Let’s put this “crisis” into perspective: Genachowski said that there will be a 30-fold increase in wireless traffic, which will demand new wireless technologies be put in place by 2013.

The DTV transition freed the 700 MHz block and increased the available wireless spectrum by a multiple of three, Genachowski estimated. But that took more than five years to complete.

At that rate, it would take 50 years to accommodate our wireless data growth.

So fixing the “spectrum gap” is one of the FCC’s highest priorities, Genachowski said. Looking at the wireless spectrum chart, anyone can see that sorting out licenses will be like sequencing the human genome, but the Commission has no choice: It must identify spectrum that’s being underutilized, and re-allocate it to mobile broadband.

In the wake of a Dept. of Justice Statement of Interest last month questioning whether Google had the right to negotiate a settlement deal on behalf of publishers that aren’t direct parties to the deal — and that may not even exist anymore — the federal judge overseeing the case, Judge Denny Chin, ordered Google and publishers’ groups to draft a completely revised settlement proposal by November 9.

At issue now is that several of the groups on whose behalf Google was claiming to be acting, actually do exist; and a number of them filed objections to the settlement, most recently on September 22, asking why they weren’t made direct participants. Last September 2, Judge Chin ruled that groups representing photographers whose scanned works would be made public through Google Books, were too late in making their objections heard.

“This case was filed some four years ago and has been conditionally settled,” Judge Chin wrote at the time. “It is simply too late to permit new parties in the case.” But these groups, led by the American Society of Media Photographers, won’t take no for an answer. Yesterday, they filed their Notice of Appeal to the Second Circuit.

While Google had apparently thought about the interests of authors of printed textual material — albeit late — the interests of photographers whose work may be scanned in as well, perhaps did not factor in as highly as they should. Sources inside the courtroom yesterday, including from Judge Chin’s alma mater, quote the judge as giving credence to objections to the proposed settlement — objections which may include from the Justice Dept. as well as the photographers’ groups. “Clearly, fair concerns have been raised,” Princeton University quotes the judge as saying.

It’s unknown if Judge Chin is a reader of Wired; if he is, he might have seen a timely article yesterday by Kevin Poulsen. That article noted how Google’s last attempt to save history, through the 2001 purchase of Deja.com and its Internet archive, the Google Groups record of the early Usenet has sat largely untouched, with “beta” features still under development after having literally been announced in 2004.

It would have been an article like that which caused Judge Chin to make the curious comment noted by Princeton this morning, in which he said he wasn’t sure Google Books would offer society ample benefits.

Whether Judge Chin will be the presiding judge in the District Court case on November 9 now depends on whether his transfer comes through. On Monday, President Obama announced Chin was his nominee for elevation to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. If he is confirmed, ironically, he may have to recuse himself from hearing the photographers’ groups’ appeal to that very court.

Online music store 7Digital officially gained support from all major labels in March of 2008, and has since enjoyed substantial growth by offering its platform as an API for developers to integrate into other services such as RIM’s BlackBerry music download service and EMI’s music discovery portal.

The store offers full DRM-free albums for $7.77 and single tracks for 77¢, the service claims to have a library of over 6 million downloadable MP3s, encoded at 192 kbps and 320 kbps.

But one of the most exciting things about this release is 7Digital’s inclusion in open source media management software Songbird. For music consumers who may not want to be tied to the ubiquitous Apple iTunes for managing their music and media content, Mozilla XULRunner-based Songbird has provided a robust alternative for a little more than two years. While enhanced by social Web plug-ins, the software really couldn’t compete with iTunes because it lacked a native music store (and comprehensive PMP device support…but it actually supports a ton more hardware than iTunes!).

However, in March 2009, Songbird launched version 1.1.1 with the 7Digital music store built in. At the time, 7Digital CEO Ben Drury said, “7digital and Songbird is a killer combination for anyone who wants a dynamic, open music player. Songbird blows other media players away in terms of device support and extensibility and we’re very excited to be partnering with them to allow users to buy, download, and transfer MP3s onto a multitude of devices. The Songbird Platform made it quick and easy to integrate 7digital into Songbird.”

Unfortunately though, only UK users had complete access, so United States and European users had access to only a beta version of the store.

But now that the 7Digital store has opened fully to the US, you can find it by simply erasing “songbird” from the end of the URL (http://us.7digital.com). Songbird has not officially updated its native 7digital interface yet, which includes a recommendation engine based upon your library; but when songs are purchased through the store in the Songbird browser, they are still automatically queued, downloaded, and catalogued in the application.

Up to now, Apple’s prohibition against anyone’s runtime modules from appearing on its iPhone without authorization has been one of two central reasons that Adobe’s Flash video and Flash platform have not made their appearance there — the other reason being simply that Steve Jobs doesn’t like it.

But at its annual MAX developers’ conference in Los Angeles this week, Adobe’s engineers unveiled a surprise: It’s planning a public beta release of Flash Professional CS5 that will go through a new and unique set of hoops to enable developers to write or export apps built for the Flash runtime, to run on the iPhone as native apps. The new Flash Pro will use a mechanism for Flash application developers to deploy their apps on the iPhone anyway, even without the Flash mobile runtime.

That mechanism is the evolution of an academic project — namely, the work of the Computer Science Dept. at the University of Illinois-Champaign. It’s an open source project called Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), and it’s a way to effectively bury the compilation element of a language interpreter below the application layer where the runtime module normally resides, deep into object code.

“On the iPhone, we don’t have a browser plug-in. Flash Player 10.1 isn’t available, and you can’t browse to this application and just start using it,” explained Adobe engineer Adrian Ludwig, in a company video released during MAX.

“So what developers have to do is go inside of Flash Pro, and they have to export that project to a native application for the iPhone. While you’re using Flash Pro to build these applications, it’s being converted from SWF down to IPA, which is the native file for applications on the iPhone. So it’s installed — there’s no runtime interpretation, there’s no JIT. These are applications that are built according to all of the rules that have been established in the iPhone developer program.”

Adobe Flash engineer Adrian Ludwig demonstrates a Flash app appearing in Apple’s iPhone App Store for the first time.

Seven Flash games have already been developed for iPhone, and have begun distribution this week through Apple’s App Store — a clear indication that these apps do follow Apple’s rules.

As Aditya Bansod, another Adobe engineer, blogged on Monday, “We created a new compiler front end that allowed LLVM to understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to output native ARM assembly code. We call this Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation — in contrast to the way Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR function on the desktop using Just in Time (JIT) compilation. Since we are able to compile ActionScript to ARM ahead of time, the application gets all the performance benefits that the JIT would offer and the license compliance of not requiring a runtime in the final application.”

The downside of this architecture is that the hoops Apple made Adobe jump through, bypass the normal route an iPhone app would take to communicate with the iPhone itself. As a result, much of the iPhone API is inaccessible from within an exported Flash app; although Flash evangelist Mark Doherty presented an initial list of iPhone features that will not work in a Flash app, one gets the distinct feeling that it’s not yet even an exhaustive list.

Which limits the class of Flash apps one can port to the iPhone to mostly games; and indeed, that’s the focus of the first seven such apps that Adobe is demonstrating. As for rerouting Adobe’s ingenious detour closer to the phone itself in the future, Doherty pointed to a future version of the company’s Flex Mobile Framework, whose code-name “Slider” gives you a hint as to where it’s directing at least one offshoot of its platform.

Dell has smartphones on the way, but it’s not talking about them yet.

In fact, the first Android-powered smartphone on AT&T’s network could be coming from Dell, according to reports Wednesday afternoon.

Citing unnamed “people briefed on the plans,” The Wall Street Journal today claimed that Dell will have a smartphone on AT&T as early as 2010.

In September, a 3.5″ touchscreen Dell smartphone known as the “Mini 3i” was shown running Open Mobile System (OMS), an Android-based operating system central to China Mobile’s “OPhone” platform. That platform thus far has been supported by Lenovo and HTC subsidiary Dopod, with many more to come.

The smartphone that Dell is saying is not really its Mini 3i, at least not yet.

The Texas PC company, however, has thus far been hesitant to discuss its movement in the Chinese mobile sector, even though China Mobile has highlighted Dell’s participation in the Android-based OPhone project several times.

Dell declined comment today to Betanews and others on its plans for smartphone distribution, domestically or otherwise.

Mozilla’s stated goal for its next version of Firefox, first and foremost, is a perceivable improvement in the time it takes to do things, not just render pages. We saw a big performance jump in JavaScript execution and page rendering in Firefox 3.5; but for 3.6, the developers want to apply the same level of improvement to responsiveness and process activation.

Although all Mozilla daily builds — even the “private” alphas — are publicly downloadable, the public may be formally invited to render its opinions on version 3.6 on Wednesday, October 14. That’s the decision made during a Mozilla planning meeting Monday.

Originally, Mozilla wanted to have 3.6 release candidates available by this time; the public beta process was supposed to have been in full-swing by now. In the interim, the organization has been posting daily builds labeled “beta previews” instead of “alphas” or “alpha previews” — almost ready to be not ready for prime time.

Still, the new browser has an opportunity to make a public show of its everyday performance improvements, including in departments such as page loading. Betanews tests on recent daily builds of Firefox 3.6 show just over 40% speed gains in that department. Our recent CRPI index for a preview build of 3.6 Alpha 2 is 8.67, versus 6.80 for the stable Firefox 3.5.3.

According to the minutes of Monday’s planning meeting, released yesterday, engineers in charge of the “Namoroka” development track (where Firefox 3.6 currently resides) plan to freeze code development on the current “beta preview” sometime this week. A daily build of 3.6 was released at about 9:30 EDT this morning, and there’s no word as to whether it’s the last build before the planned freeze.

There is no formal release date for the finalized version 3.6 just yet. However, a newly published list of goals for upcoming releases places 3.6 release as sometime within the fourth quarter of the year, with a promise to be “less crashy than Firefox 3.5.” Also on that goal list is Mozilla’s intention to produce a public alpha of version 3.7, the focus of which will be a completely revised theme for the front end. A recently published Mozilla page on the topic now points to a “firm initial direction” for a new design, which makes more liberal use of aesthetic features such as transparency and dimensionality.

A Mozilla artist’s mockup of the likely design direction for the new theme of Firefox 3.7.

“Firefox feels dated and behind on Windows,” the design team writes. “Especially Vista and Windows 7. These issues include absence of Glass, anemic purple toolbar color on Vista, tall and bulky UI footprint, element overload, inconsistent toolbar icon usage/style, lack of a tactile look & feel and perhaps too great of a divergence between the look on XP and Vista/7.” The team aims to overcome these perceived deficiencies by reducing the number of buttons — for example, by converging Stop and Reload into one button — and adopting neutral tones and glass textures to enable the application to blend better with the desktop and the user’s choice of color themes. The same degree of transparency may not be available in version 3.7 for Mac or Linux yet, but the design team aims to implement similar aesthetics for non-Windows users “going forward.”

October 14 is also the scheduled date for the first public betas of version 3.5.4, the next round of bug fixes to the stable release.