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chrplace forwards an article in which Gartner's Brian Lewis offers his perspective on what led to last year's Xbox 360 recall. Lewis says it happened because Microsoft wanted to avoid an ASIC vendor. "Microsoft designed the graphic chip on its own, cut a traditional ASIC vendor out of the process, and went straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., he explained. But in the end, by going cheap — hoping to save tens of millions of dollars in ASIC design costs, Microsoft ended up paying more than $1 billion for its Xbox 360 recall. To fix the problem, Microsoft went back to an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United States and redesigned the chip, Lewis added. (Based on a previous report, the ASIC vendor is most likely the former ATI Technologies, now part of AMD.)"

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Apro+im points out a NYTimes report which states that Microsoft and the OLPC project have officially agreed to put Windows XP on the XO laptop. While Microsoft has been working toward this for some time, analysts began to think a deal was more likely after Walter Bender resigned from the project and was replaced by Charles Kane. Former OLPC security developer Ivan Krstic had a lot to say about Windows on the XO as well. From the Times: "Windows will add a bit to the price of the machines, about $3, the licensing fee Microsoft charges to some developing nations under a program called Unlimited Potential. For those nations that want dual-boot models, running both Windows and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or so to the cost of the machines, Mr. Negroponte said. The project's agreement with Microsoft involves no payment by the software giant, and Microsoft will not join One Laptop Per Child's board. 'We've stayed very pure,' Mr. Negroponte said.

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Dixie_dean writes "Microsoft researchers are developing a way to enable you to capture every moment of your life and store it on your computer. The principal researcher with Microsoft's research arm, Gordon Bell, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. 'The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages. Calculating that he saves about a gigabyte of information every month, he noted that he tries to only save photos of a megabyte or less. Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage." This is a project we've been talking about for a long time.

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Open source has grabbed a big part of the server and app dev market. Apple has redefined the mobile device market and rendered Windows Mobile devices beyond passé. Firefox has blunted Internet Explorer's dominance, reversing the ActiveX hegemony for interactive Web apps, and removing one more barrier for widespread Macintosh usage. Vista is a dud -- "a piece of junk," one Gartner analyst called it yesterday in an interview.

This week, it got worse. Google is now challenging the Office cash cow and Microsoft's cautious steps into on-demand services through its new offering to let software vendors build Google-based apps. Salesforce.com has been remaking itself into a business app development and provisioning platform, and is likely to link up with Google next week on a joint offering.

Almost everywhere you turn, Microsoft is challenged. (Exceptions: Its SharePoint collaboration platform is well liked and the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's history, noted Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald, which could help preserve Office's fortunes against Google's incursions. Its Windows Server 2008 is a good OS that will serve businesses well. And its app dev tools dominate in the Microsoft-centric world of .Net.)

An enterprise strategy may have blinded Microsoft

Microsoft spent a small fortune to beef up its enterprise creds in its investments in business apps like Great Plains Software and the Dynamics CRM tools, in an attempt to get a way from its PC origins and the lack of serious that 1990s businesses treated Microsoft with as a result of those origins, notes Gartner's MacDonald. It succeeded, creating a $1 billion business.

But despite that effort, Microsoft is still No. 4 in that space, even though it gained the enterprise creds it wanted. But Microsoft may have fought the wrong battle, argues Gartner analyst Darryl Plummer. The world has moved beyond enterprise computing to global computing, where the needs of one user are as critical as the needs of millions.

That requires a strong customer focus -- ironically what Microsoft had in its PC-oriented days -- that "enterprise class" doesn't deliver. Enterprise apps are optimized for large groups, not also for individuals, Plummer says. That's why it's a new breed of provider -- Salesforce.com, Google, Amazon.com and Facebook -- that are emerging as the new opportunities for both markets and technology.

A lock-in strategy doomed to fail

The "enterprise" apps are in what fellow analyst Yvonne Genovese calls a "terminal state of decline," consolidating into four vendors: SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. These vendors are trying to own their customers through a strategy of owning the entire stack that enterprises use, such as by adding their databases and middleware under their apps. The goal, she says, is to make an enterprise dependent on that integrated stack, creating a mat around their customers (and locking their customers in it). The four companies have different tactical approaches but the same goal.

SOA's abstraction and standards-based integration approach are meant to counter that lock-in strategy, but the app vendors already have figured a way to make SOA useless for that purpose, Genovese notes: They don't use standardized business processes, even when they use standard SOA mechanisms, so their apps won't in fact interoperate with independent services. Unless of course they are design to be part of the app vendor's "ecosystem," which exists to lock customers in and competitors out.

These vendors may get a five-year lock-in from their impose-our-stack strategy, argues analyst Richard Hunter, but customers will eventually escape to something else -- just as happened when AOL played the same game in the 1990s. That "something else" is likely to the likes of Google and Salesforce.com, he says. He and his Gartner colleagues all cite cloud computing as the vague but increasingly clear space that this new world will exist in.

What Microsoft just might be able to do

Microsoft could have taken its individual-facing expertise and created the kind of global computing technology that serves one as well as 1 million -- the essential mass-customization and scalability attributes that represent cloud computing -- rather than leave that space open to the Googles, Plummer says. But Microsoft didn't, instead trying to be a stodgy, ultimately brittle company like IBM, Oracle and SAP.

None of the Gartner analysts suggested the four major app vendors are destined for the dust heap, but a common thread was that they are in no-growth areas, while the future's new horizons are elsewhere.

Microsoft's challenge is to move into that new horizon, which its "enterprise class" detour may have made that much harder to do. Now that Microsoft is quintessential legacy technology, it can't be as experimental or agile.

"Google can go anywhere, and it does," says MacDonald. "It's strategy is to keep Microsoft off-balance, and away from Google's own core strengths." Microsoft is stuck: "How do you do something radical without spooking the installed base?"

Now's the time for Microsoft to find the answer to that.

(I've spent the week at Gartner's ITXpo conference, which is why you're seeing just Gartner voices in this story.)

Open source has grabbed a big part of the server and app dev market. Apple has redefined the mobile device market and rendered Windows Mobile devices beyond passé. Firefox has blunted Internet Explorer's dominance, reversing the ActiveX hegemony for interactive Web apps, and removing one more barrier for widespread Macintosh usage. Vista is a dud -- "a piece of junk," one Gartner analyst called it yesterday in an interview.

This week, it got worse. Google is now challenging the Office cash cow and Microsoft's cautious steps into on-demand services through its new offering to let software vendors build Google-based apps. Salesforce.com has been remaking itself into a business app development and provisioning platform, and is likely to link up with Google next week on a joint offering.

Almost everywhere you turn, Microsoft is challenged. (Exceptions: Its SharePoint collaboration platform is well liked and the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's history, noted Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald, which could help preserve Office's fortunes against Google's incursions. Its Windows Server 2008 is a good OS that will serve businesses well. And its app dev tools dominate in the Microsoft-centric world of .Net.)

An enterprise strategy may have blinded Microsoft

Microsoft spent a small fortune to beef up its enterprise creds in its investments in business apps like Great Plains Software and the Dynamics CRM tools, in an attempt to get a way from its PC origins and the lack of serious that 1990s businesses treated Microsoft with as a result of those origins, notes Gartner's MacDonald. It succeeded, creating a $1 billion business.

But despite that effort, Microsoft is still No. 4 in that space, even though it gained the enterprise creds it wanted. But Microsoft may have fought the wrong battle, argues Gartner analyst Darryl Plummer. The world has moved beyond enterprise computing to global computing, where the needs of one user are as critical as the needs of millions.

That requires a strong customer focus -- ironically what Microsoft had in its PC-oriented days -- that "enterprise class" doesn't deliver. Enterprise apps are optimized for large groups, not also for individuals, Plummer says. That's why it's a new breed of provider -- Salesforce.com, Google, Amazon.com and Facebook -- that are emerging as the new opportunities for both markets and technology.

A lock-in strategy doomed to fail

The "enterprise" apps are in what fellow analyst Yvonne Genovese calls a "terminal state of decline," consolidating into four vendors: SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. These vendors are trying to own their customers through a strategy of owning the entire stack that enterprises use, such as by adding their databases and middleware under their apps. The goal, she says, is to make an enterprise dependent on that integrated stack, creating a mat around their customers (and locking their customers in it). The four companies have different tactical approaches but the same goal.

SOA's abstraction and standards-based integration approach are meant to counter that lock-in strategy, but the app vendors already have figured a way to make SOA useless for that purpose, Genovese notes: They don't use standardized business processes, even when they use standard SOA mechanisms, so their apps won't in fact interoperate with independent services. Unless of course they are design to be part of the app vendor's "ecosystem," which exists to lock customers in and competitors out.

These vendors may get a five-year lock-in from their impose-our-stack strategy, argues analyst Richard Hunter, but customers will eventually escape to something else -- just as happened when AOL played the same game in the 1990s. That "something else" is likely to the likes of Google and Salesforce.com, he says. He and his Gartner colleagues all cite cloud computing as the vague but increasingly clear space that this new world will exist in.

What Microsoft just might be able to do

Microsoft could have taken its individual-facing expertise and created the kind of global computing technology that serves one as well as 1 million -- the essential mass-customization and scalability attributes that represent cloud computing -- rather than leave that space open to the Googles, Plummer says. But Microsoft didn't, instead trying to be a stodgy, ultimately brittle company like IBM, Oracle and SAP.

None of the Gartner analysts suggested the four major app vendors are destined for the dust heap, but a common thread was that they are in no-growth areas, while the future's new horizons are elsewhere.

Microsoft's challenge is to move into that new horizon, which its "enterprise class" detour may have made that much harder to do. Now that Microsoft is quintessential legacy technology, it can't be as experimental or agile.

"Google can go anywhere, and it does," says MacDonald. "It's strategy is to keep Microsoft off-balance, and away from Google's own core strengths." Microsoft is stuck: "How do you do something radical without spooking the installed base?"

Now's the time for Microsoft to find the answer to that.

(I've spent the week at Gartner's ITXpo conference, which is why you're seeing just Gartner voices in this story.)

twitter writes "The New York Times has a piercing analysis of documents from the Vista capable lawsuit. The documents show that Microsoft seems to have put a wrench in Vista's driver situation only at the last minute. 'Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues,' said one slide in a Dell presentation dated March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista's launch at retail and availability on new PCs.' We have all heard the lazy vendors don't believe Vista will launch excuses but few of us have heard Steven Sinofsky, chief of Windows development, second and third opinions. 'Massive changes in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM,' he said. 'This change led to incompatibilities. For example, you don't get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver.' Finally, said Sinofsky, other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether. 'This is across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on. Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.'

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dionysus writes "Last April, Microsoft was sued over its 'Vista Capable' labeling, and in hearing last week, attorneys for the plaintiffs presented evidence that Microsoft employees were skeptical about the 'Vista Capable' marketing. Some of the most damning evidence comes from Microsoft executives: 'Mike Nash, currently a corporate vice president for Windows product management, wrote in an e-mail, "I PERSONALLY got burnt ... Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? ... I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine." Jim Allchin, then the co-president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division, wrote in another e-mail, "We really botched this ... You guys have to do a better job with our customers."' The judge in the case is currently considering the plaintiffs' request to make it a class-action lawsuit."

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dionysus writes "Last April, Microsoft was sued over its 'Vista Capable' labeling, and in hearing last week, attorneys for the plaintiffs presented evidence that Microsoft employees were skeptical about the 'Vista Capable' marketing. Some of the most damning evidence comes from Microsoft executives: 'Mike Nash, currently a corporate vice president for Windows product management, wrote in an e-mail, "I PERSONALLY got burnt ... Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? ... I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine." Jim Allchin, then the co-president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division, wrote in another e-mail, "We really botched this ... You guys have to do a better job with our customers."' The judge in the case is currently considering the plaintiffs' request to make it a class-action lawsuit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recently published Microsoft patent application should send shivers down the spines of those already paranoid about companies' employee-monitorning capabilities -- and once the technology in question is developed, companies will gain access to those shivers to trigger a little heart-to-heart with the spine owners' managers.

According to a report in The Times, the patent, which was last month published by the U.S. Patent Office after an 18-month filing period, describes a monitoring system that would enable computers to wirelessly pick up on a user's heart rate, galvanic skin response, brain signals, body temperature, facial movements and expressions, blood pressure, and respiration rate.

Although the sense of this sentient system would seem to be to provide nefarious means for employers to spy on employees, the patent describes a more empathic rationale. Detecting frustration by mapping biorhythmic changes against profiles corresponding to employee's weight, age, and health, the system would gently nudge managers to conduct a quick, how-are-we-doing-today pop in -- certain to ensure further off-chart trajectories for the monitored biorhythms that alerted the system in the first place.

Not surprisingly, such a patent, which could be granted within a year, according to the U.S. Patent Office, pretty much shakes the notion of privacy to its very core. And civil liberties groups and privacy lawyers are experiencing elevated heart rates and noticeably troubled facial expressions over the patent.

According to The Times, one such expert on data protection law, Hugh Tomlinson at Matrix Chambers, said, "This system involves intrusions into every single aspect of the lives of the employees."

Fortunately, brain signals will likely not have to spike to keep such a system out of employers' hands, should it even come to fruition. Yet, as an analyst speaking to this editor yesterday pointed out, people are becoming much more identified with their technology, as the iPhone and iPod phenomena suggest. How much longer before, culturally, we become accepting of computing-human emotive kinship going two ways?

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Yesterday, we discussed reports of Microsoft and the OLPC project working towards a dual-boot version of the XO laptop. Now, BetaNews tells us that Microsoft has issued statements denying such plans. The software giant has also reaffirmed their intention to develop a Windows-only version of the laptop. Microsoft's statement to BetaNews had this to say: "While we have investigated the possibility in the past, Microsoft is not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for the One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop. As we announced in December, Microsoft plans to publish formal design guidelines early this year that will assist flash-based device manufacturers in designing machines that enable a high-quality Windows experience. Our current goal remains to provide a high-quality Windows experience on the XO device."

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