If this is the dawn of the “post-PC era,” then the economy never got the memo. While the tablet segment is finally growing (thank you, Apple), the five-times-larger PC segment is actually growing faster in terms of units, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Industry analysis firm IDC predicts worldwide growth in tablet shipments from 2013 to 2016 to be about 32 million units per year. In the same period, the rate of PC shipment growth will be about 38 million units per year. 

For 2013, IDC predicts Windows 8-based tablets will constitute merely 6% of units shipped worldwide. This means, despite all this business about the new Start Screen bridging the functionality gap across platforms, Windows 8 isn’t really about tablets. It’s about injecting PCs with the desirability of tablets. 

Avoiding The Commodity Trap

While the PC market is not dying, PCs themselves must evolve more quickly into something more desirable, more functional, more adaptable to the purposes of consumers in this decade. Otherwise they will continue their slide into low-margin commodity products - largely indistinguishable from each other. PC vendors desperately need the next waves of their product lines to be significantly, tangibly different from their predecessors, in order to justify increasing their prices and profit margins.

This is why Windows 8 looks so different. While reviewers have raised a ruckus about Microsoft designing the new Start Screen to take over the entire display, making Windows 8 more difficult to use even for veterans, there is a reason why Microsoft did this: For a Windows 8 PC to justify a price point above that of the iPad, it has to look demonstrably different from a Windows 7 PC. You couldn’t photograph a Windows 7 machine, put it in a sales brochure, and have it look different from a Windows Vista computer. But you can see Windows 8 from the opposite end of the mall.

In 2006, vendors wanted Vista to be demonstrably different from Windows XP. Microsoft tried to demonstrate this difference with aesthetic nuances like translucent window frames and 3D task switching, and then tried to divide PCs into categories based on how well they supported these nuances. Consumers were rightly confused, and some even sued.

To avoid a repeat of the 2006 debacle, Microsoft had to make Windows 8 not only look entirely different, but enable new PCs to acquire some of the more desirable characteristics of tablets. That's why this next wave of PCs will promote noteworthy differences in two key areas:

1. Touchscreens

The relative success of touchscreens on PCs will be more important for Windows 8 than its comparable success on tablets.  

Up until now, most consumers looked for middle-tier laptop machines that provided good processing power and nice features, at price points around $900. The first middle-tier Win8 notebooks with touchscreens are  priced around $1,200. Acer’s new Aspire S7-191 has an 11.6-inch screen with 16:9 aspect ratio and respectable 1920 x 1080 resolution (“true HD”).  It’s based on Intel’s third-generation Core i5-3317U processor, has 128GB of solid state storage and 4GB of RAM, weighs about two-and-a-quarter pounds, and sells for $1,199.99.

Dell’s new XPS 12 also has true HD resolution, a 12.5-inch screen, and sells for $1,199.99 (one senses a theme).

The XPS 12 uses the same Core i5 processor, has the same storage capacity, and the same memory.  Dell’s value-add will be style, which has not always been its strong suit. Though the XPS 12 is still a clamshell laptop, its display is mounted along the middle horizontal axis to a hinge bracket.  So you can flip the display inside the bracket 180 degrees, close the clamshell, and use XPS 12 as a tablet.  While the conversion may be shockingly cool for some, for folks who’ve had experiences with Dell in the past, the effect may be just a bit creepy, like a 1959 Philco Predicta TV chassis.

Toshiba’s Satellite U925T has a touchscreen that folds all the way back like a yoga instructor, and then slides forward over the keyboard. It’s a unique effect, but to get a price advantage over Dell of just $50 ($1,149.99), Toshiba traded off screen resolution (1366 x 768) and graphics power, settling for Intel’s “dynamic memory” - allocating memory blocks from the system as needed, rather than using its own discrete graphics memory. 

For $1,399.99 ($200 more than the price of its model 191), Acer bumps the screen size of the Aspire S7-391 up to 13.3 inches. Instead of a full convertible, though, Acer extended the 391’s hinge so you can fold it all the way back, turning your PC into something of a “surface,” to borrow a phrase.

In a move that will likely confuse some customers, HP will mix the Envy, TouchSmart and Intel Ultrabook brands together in one device, which is a bit like naming a car “Cadillac Chevy Shelby.” The Envy TouchSmart Ultrabook 4 is based on the lower-performing Intel Core i3-3217u processor backed up with an AMD graphics processor, 4GB of RAM, and a standard 500GB hard drive, though with a 32GB solid-state accelerator.  All this crank the weight up to about 4 pounds.

The 14.4-inch display will project 1366 x 768 resolution, which is not well-suited for 1080p video, and will definitely look blocky compared to tablets. It also won’t have Dell’s cool tablet-morphing hinge. But it has a $799.99 price tag - a respectable price point for an entry-level PC compared against a $500 tablet. And it helps establish a precedent for PCs as having some greater value than tablets.

2. Power Efficiency

We’re getting closer to the time when you can complete a full day’s work on a single charge. The next dramatic improvements may not come from CPU manufacturers like Intel refining their architecture and manufacturing processes, but by Microsoft adopting a new application architecture.

Last July, in a self-published article on power optimization through software, Intel engineer Manuj Sabharwal showed that simply replacing the routines used by typical Windows programs to tick away the passing moments while they’re idle with the idle process code used in the new WinRT engine, battery life on notebook PCs could be extended by an order of magnitude. That means reclaiming 90% of lost battery power!

While Windows 8 battery life estimates remain similar to those for Windows 7 devices (averaging about 5 hours for laptops, closer to 8 hours for Ultrabooks), other efficiency factors could increase battery life down the road. In Windows 8 the Desktop is no longer rendered using the 3D accelerated engine. While not as cool, it’s also more power-efficient. And though it’s still difficult to find the exit from a Windows RT app (with the touchscreen, there’s a new “wipe-down” gesture), the fact that it consumes almost no power when idle makes quitting them less critical.

The Catch-22

While it’s tempting to toss away the remnants of the “PC era” as old and unfashionable, there’s still a sizable functionality gap between tablets and PCs. Until bandwidth and cloud storage are both cheap and ubiquitous), work devices will require sizable local storage and high processing efficiency during heavy workloads. They’ll also need gesture methods other than just touch, plus real keyboards - not something ripped off of an Atari 400.

The first round of Windows 8 PCs come a step closer to the mobile work device we’ll eventually settle down with. But the strange permutations of convertibility and hybrid hard-drive/solid-state combinations suggests this new class of PC hasn’t yet found its footing.  

While we wait for the perfect Windows 8 PC, tablet prices continue to fall,. Ironically, that may create reasons why tablets will not replace PCs. Tablets could become affordable enough that they don’t have to do double-duty as PC-substitutes just to remain desirable. Plenty of people will choose a tablet, but if you want PC functionality... you can still buy a PC.

PC photos courtesy Acer America, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba.

John, the computer store manager, handed me a pair of five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, and with his characteristic abandonment of everything resembling candor, told me in a voice loud enough for customers in the burger joint across the street to hear: “I’m not really supposed to have these.  And I’m not supposed to be giving them to you.  But I guess it’s too late, because I just did.  So you didn’t see me.”  A self-adhesive label on the top left corner of the first disk was marked in ball-point pen, “MS-DOS Executive.”  That wasn’t its correct name.

He had just returned from the National Computer Conference in Chicago, which in July 1985 was the largest convention of its kind.  I wished I had gone that year, but as is often still the case, publishers couldn’t afford to send me.  Like many more computer store managers than he preferred to admit, he’d been given an “advance copy” of the next version of Microsoft’s task switching program, for the express purpose of spreading the word.  Task switchers were very hot sellers; stores like his couldn’t keep Norton Commander or DESQview on the shelves.  Earlier, Microsoft had added an “MS-DOS Executive” to a special release of its operating system for what the world called “IBM-compatible PCs,” or just “clones.”

Version 0.x, 1985

Microsoft would rarely afford me the opportunity to use the phrase, “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”  In the software market, there had already been a few decent efforts at graphical task switchers with “high-resolution” VGA graphics (the highest mode supported by IBM PC ATs and 80386-based machines at the time).  By far the best of these had been Digital Research’s (DRI) GEM, the graphical environment Gary Kildall had originally intended to accompany CP/M (the OS that IBM passed up for MS-DOS). But DRI had been tied up in court with Apple, and thus we expected Microsoft’s next-generation “Executive” to look substantially non-Macintosh-ish.  So we were not surprised.

A crowd gathered as John fired up the Columbia 386 PC, one of the first clones of the post-AT era (Compaq had already beaten IBM to market with a 386). The blue title screen came up, with an interesting special effect where blocky, white characters converged in the middle to form the “O” in the Microsoft logo.  We saw the name “Microsoft Windows” for the first time. In my fake-poetic voice, I improvised Rod McKuen-like verse around the word “Windows,” before declaring it “a really stupid name.”

The problem with task switchers was that they had to remain in memory while the task was launched, so that they could resume when the task was suspended.  Since most systems only had 640K of total memory, the best task switchers left only 512K free.  Windows zero-point-something left about 400, which meant you couldn’t use it in an average PC AT to launch Lotus 1-2-3.

But this Columbia 386 had an expansion memory board that kicked its capacity up to a full, screaming megabyte, which was more memory, my first colleagues claimed, that should rightly ever be used in one machine.  The problem with this early release of Windows was that it did not recognize every one-meg memory board available.  So when we first put inserted the labeled disk in the A: drive and typed WIN at the DOS prompt, after the little “O” animation, the system froze.

It was after replacing the memory board twice, I think, and commenting out the third-party memory managers from the CONFIG.SYS file, that the graphical screen finally came up.  We had a Microsoft mouse attached to this PC, which looked like a Lifebuoy soap bar with two strips of green pepper glued to it.  Inside it was a steel ball like a shot put, so if you rolled the mouse and let go, it would travel on its own until falling off the desk and onto your toe.

I would write up a brief, 2,000-word Windows preview for a company that syndicated my articles in the little handout flyers that computer stores all over the country gave away.  It would be reprinted in PC users’ group newsletters, and on a few hundred BBSes all over North America, by virtue of a network called FidoNet (it still exists today) where host computers literally called one another up by telephone.  Despite being distributed by what today looks like the Pony Express, the article would be published prior to the product’s official release later that year, which meant I had a scoop.  In it, I declared “Windows” (hopefully they’d decide upon a better name) pointless.  If you had the memory expansion card you needed, then you already had the right driver; and if you had the right driver, chances are that it already shipped with a graphical executive. It was a cheap task switcher, I said, which only served to emphasize how far behind the technology curve Intel-based PCs were compared to Motorola-based devices from real companies like Atari.

While other companies were smart enough to quit after the first try, I said, Microsoft will probably keep plugging away at this for years to come.

Version 3.0, 1990

In the spring of 1990, many of the original editorial crew from Computer Shopper magazine found themselves suspended by the magazine’s new owner, Ziff-Davis. As with all of Shopper’s contributing editors, I worked under contract; but nearly all of us, myself included, refused to sign an agreement with Ziff-Davis that would have severely restricted the integrity and independence of what we said in print, as well as limited us to writing exclusively for Ziff-Davis.

So a Montgomery, Alabama, entrepreneur named Doug Moore, who imagined himself the next Ted Turner, bankrolled a publication where all of us could continue to publish the same magazine as before, funded in large part by all of Shopper’s former advertisers who failed to “make the cut.”  We were Computer Monthly, but Microsoft, Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Borland, and all the serious software publishers who knew us all by our first names (and me by my pseudonym) thought of us as the Shopper in exile.

Computer Shopper hired us originally because we had a knack for filling space, and it had more space to fill than any periodical ever printed: as many as 500 pages per month.  My main Windows 3.0 preview story for Computer Monthly was 7,500 words, plus I added two 2,000-word sidebars. In this series, I interviewed every major executive with a major Windows 3 product to be released in tandem with the new environment. (It was not yet an operating system.) My editor, also a Shopper veteran, told me, “Mr. Scott, you’re a whole goddamn magazine!”

Microsoft had given me pre-release samples of Windows 3.0, and interviews with its key engineers.  So I knew some things about where Windows was going that I couldn’t say even then.  Instead, I could allude to them in the intro of my main article:

The weeklies and fortnightlies have already extolled the merits of Win3's "three-dimensional" buttons, proportional text, and now-boundlessly managed memory. Their gold-star awards have no doubt been bestowed upon the product for being the best in its class, albeit the only product in its class.  The "pundits" have already laid blame upon someone for Win3's alleged tardiness to market. The entire story is so well-patterned that it may be read without ever having laid eyes to the printed page.

Yet if we follow the pattern, we miss the real story.  There is a real development taking place between the authors of and for Windows 3, which concerns the remodeling of the computer application. We are familiar with the application as a program and its associated data, which is entered and exited like a jewelry store or a bank. We sometimes see ourselves "in" an application, just as we often see ourselves "in" the subdirectory pointed to by the DOS prompt. The data we need while we're "in" the program is much like the diamond necklace behind the display case; we're allowed to look at it and touch it, but unless we're very crafty, we're not allowed to take it outside. It doesn't belong to us — even if the data's very existence is due to our having typed it in.

The entire contraption of the DOS environment — along with the guilt feelings it so subtly leaves us with — are being shattered by Windows 3.  There is a movement under way by Microsoft and its supportive independent software vendors (ISVs) to abolish the structure which grants exclusive ownership rights of a set of data to an application.  Having done that, the movement will also seek to dissolve the programmatic barricade which surrounds the once-exclusive application, and allow for the equal distribution of correlated tasks within an arbitrarily-defined computing job, to other programs non-specifically.

…

The meta-application is not an inevitable fact of computing; the marketing debacles of cross-vendor cooperation it imposes may render it as ineffective as OS/2 in changing our computing habits. Still, it is something to be wished for; and it is a far more important facet of the Windows 3 story than faceted buttons and little pictures. The way in which world industry and commerce works is not affected in the least by faceted buttons and little pictures.

Henceforth

There is good reason to believe that Windows 8 will be the last classic, all-at-once revision of the product line from Microsoft.  From here on out, Windows users will be subscribers, and improvements (assuming that’s what they are) to the system will be made automatically — for most people, silently.

One of the metrics we in the technology business have used to make milestones in our lives, will cease to exist.

There was a time in the last century when refrigerators were the very symbols of the technologically advanced household, and when Jell-O symbolized the wonders of a new world — one where an everyday family could enjoy a chilled dessert without considering the expense.  There were magazines devoted to the class of consumer who could afford refrigerators, and who wore their status proudly by displaying such magazines on their coffee tables.  Today, refrigerators are not even particularly interesting to professional chefs whose brilliance depends on them.  A fridge is a fridge. You don’t publish blogs about fridges.

So we knew it would happen sometime. A day is coming soon when folks will laugh in amazement as they recall standing in line for days waiting to buy a telephone. A PC, if it is still called that, will be a virtual appliance people use to process information and watch their media. What they watch will probably not be about the act of watching media, and whether that makes an impact on their lives, because it won’t. The degree of interest people will invest in whether their computing device comes from Microsoft or Apple will be as low as whether their dishwasher is a GE, an LG or a Whirlpool. They might not even be able to tell you if you asked.  And you won’t ask, because you won’t be interested.

And yet life will go on. Kids will still learn new things about great inventions in a brighter world.  Young people will be inspired to chronicle the history of their times.  Great new concepts will transform the way we live, work and think. Technology will mean something else than it means today.  And folks not so young any more will realize when an era has ended, by how little its passage into history makes that much of a difference. 

Screenshots of Windows 1.0 and Windows 3.0 courtesy Microsoft.

With as many as 67.2 million viewers worldwide, the latest round of U.S. presidential debates were the most closely watched since 1980, when Ronald Reagan delivered a crushing blow to then-President Jimmy Carter.

Yet with that great an audience, in all three appearances, President Barack Obama made one of only two brief mentions of information technology as an American asset.  “If we don’t have the best education system in the world, if we don’t continue to put money into research and technology that will allow us to create great businesses here in the United States,” stated the President toward the end of the third debate Monday, “that’s how we lose the competition.”

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney followed up, literally in the last few minutes, by framing U.S. digital technology in terms of its value to China:  “They're stealing our intellectual property, our patents, our designs, our technology, hacking into our computers, counterfeiting our goods,” Gov. Romney said.

Regardless of one’s feelings of how the candidates performed over the past few weeks,  the absence of any substantive discussion of the key success story of American industry — information technology - makes the divide between politics and reality crystal clear.  The debates offered more than ample opportunity to frame this country as the champion of free information and the harbinger of the fastest growing industry since petroleum. Big data, the cloud, and information services delivered over the Web are the key to small business growth. But it was as if neither candidate had time enough to glance at the world outside their jet cabin windows.

Virtual Product, Real Industry

The rise of big data as big business points to the urgent need to restructure data centers. This comes in response to three factors that have completely changed in just five years:

1. The almost inconsequential cost of data storage, precipitated in no small part by the declining cost of overseas manufacturing labor;
2. The explosion in processing power per megawatt, which led to rapid deployment of parallelism that enables analytics functions that were impossible for single-threaded processors;
3. The sudden appearance of Web-based languages that enable lightweight apps to perform the same tasks that, just a few years ago, required mainframes and even supercomputers.

It may be difficult to calculate the value of big data contribution to the nation’s gross national product. But the longer we go without including data as an economic product, the more we may be blinding ourselves to an aspect of true American recovery - along with the jobs and brighter futures that come with it - happening right in front of our faces. 

Jack Norris, who’s the VP of marketing for San Jose-based MapR — which I introduced you to last December – leads the promotional efforts for one of the commercial vendors of Hadoop, the open source big data technology.  As Norris helped verify, a recent Indeed search for full-time Hadoop-specific jobs advertised as earning at least $100,000 per year, yielded 1,377 results. At the top of the list: Hadoop Deployment Manager for Intel.  Norris has been generating these searches over the past year, and has noticed an exponential job demand curve, from literally nothing to colossal.

Norris agrees with IBM’s Anjul Bhambri, whom I interviewed last February, about the growing necessity among businesses for a new kind of role called the data scientist. “It’s not the statistician/PhD, necessarily, that will be the data scientist of the future,” remarked Norris in an interview, citing Google’s now-classic principle that simple algorithms in bulk can outperform complex arithmetic. “What we’re seeing is, when you throw data at simple algorithms, you don’t have to have complex models to approximate what the truth is. You take all the data, and you find where the patterns are, the issues - that’s the wave of the future.”

Rethinking The Database Application

Hadoop has come unto its own as an analytics resource, for observing patterns in huge collections of data across multiple volumes, and reducing those patterns to explainable variables and formulas. One tool in Hadoop’s toolkit, called MapReduce, is the origin of MapR’s brand name.

Because big data methodologies, including Hadoop, are transforming the data center, research that years or even months ago could not have seemed feasible, are now not only conceivable but remakably inexpensive. One example Norris cites comes from Ancestry.com, which now offers customers an at-home DNA sampling kit. Through the compilation of an unfathomably massive genetics database, Ancestry.com is uncovering thousands of genetic links between distantly related individuals - links that history alone could never have illuminated.

Consider if the same resources were applied to highly important, federally funded projects that mostly or entirely rely upon database analysis, such as comparative effectiveness research.  This is the long-term historical evaluation of medical diagnosis and treatment strategies. Specific aspects of this research qualify for federal grants, including $1.1 billion in funding to the National Patient Advocate Foundation just for the database. Big data technologies could conceivably reduce the costs required to run this database by three orders of magnitude.

Which would be more than enough to save Big Bird.

Unifying The Unifiers

The types of innovations necessary to facilitate such cost reductions are being unveiled literally by the day. Just Tuesday, MapR announced the M7 edition of its database architecture, which reduces the number of engine components yet again. The company’s goal is a unified database structure where “big data” and “data” are essentially the same - where HBase and dBase, if you will, are mere format distinctions.

“The premise, driven by the original Web 2.0, that Hadoop can be its own ecosystem with its HDFS [file system] API to which you rewrite everything, doesn’t really recognize what’s happening in a lot of organizations,” explained MapR’s Norris. “The ability to take Hadoop and open it up through open standards like NFS, ODBC, or REST for management, or Kerberos for security, so it can easily integrate with existing processes and solutions, is a huge step.” He cites the case of one MapR customer, aircraft maker Boeing, which reduced the cost of a database integration project to near-zero. Instead, it used M7 to avoid rewriting a million lines of legacy code in Java (which would have been required for M5), and integrate existing data with M7’s big data store.

“Big data is an approach where you’re doing compute and data together,” he continued, “and you’re not concerned about the data that you’re handling. You don’t have to pre-process it, segment it, decide what type it is and then route it to different clusters or silos. It’s just there. The developer doesn’t have to understand what his limitations are; he can just process the data.”

So if anyone out there is looking for suggestions to fill in those missing details on how the budget cuts Obama and Romney keep arguing about can be implemented... we’ve got our hands up over here.

Here’s a question you may never have thought to ask:  When you’re using an application that’s in the cloud to begin with, why is it up to you to save your documents - especially if you’re saving them to the cloud anyway?  With Box’s latest update, your cloud app saves directly to your cloud storage.

If the programs you run on your device aren’t installed there locally, and the system on which you store the documents for those programs isn’t local either, then why is saving documents a manual act?  Put another way, why do you have to “click Save?”  Shouldn’t your program know how to save? Maybe you’re thinking the answer is, “Because I have to name my file at some point.”  Well, consider the pointlessness of that act, too, if the app knew the context of your documents by their contents anyway. (If, for instance, it could tell the title of your paper by looking at the first line.)

Saving To The Cloud

Saving to the cloud has quickly become a market in itself. So there’s been a land rush among Dropbox, Box (formerly Box.net), Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive and some others to stake their claims to automating the Save command. Granted, Google and Microsoft may have a built-in advantage in this regard, but Box is playing the role of “sooner” in this land rush. Box has begun working with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to embed storage and document saving functions directly into their apps, bypassing the manual click altogether.

The fruit of their labor is something called Box Embed. Essentially, it’s an interface for allowing applications to access customers Box storage and also their Box functions, such as file preview and task management, inside of SaaS applications so that they appear on the client side.

Last March, Box was working to integrate aspects of operating systems into its ecosystem, including a desktop for launching apps from multiple devices. Box Embed is essentially along those same lines: Just as Windows and Mac desktop applications rely on the Load and Save functions of their respective operating system, a SaaS service that uses Box Embed will rely on the Load and Save functions of Box.

Can Box Pry Away SaaS Storage Customers?

There’s one extra benefit in this for Box, at least potentially: It could pry some customers loose from the built-in, exclusive storage that SaaS providers employ.

“In many cases, you see cloud products requiring that you load content into their cloud,” notes Chris Yeh, Box’s platform vice president. He cites an example of a Salesforce user who’s working with a prospective customer, and needs to load several items of sales collateral. With Salesforce, he says, you have to load that material from the service’s own content store.

“You’ve got files in Salesforce’s cloud, then you’ve got files in NetSuite, and some more content sitting in Workday.  The idea for us was to find a way to use Box as the cloud file system, if you will, and embed that – where possible – in these third-party applications.”

If a desktop application can make its operating system create convenient, personal folders for its user, then the cloud-based counterpart should be able to do the same. NetSuite (above) is one of two SaaS applications that is already enabling Box Embed (the other is SugarCRM, below). As Yeh explains it, the automated configuration process for Box on NetSuite actually peruses customer records and generates a folder structure in Box storage for customers by name. Then the existing tagging system is used to flag these customer folders for NetSuite, so that those tagged folders may be shown in NetSuite as though they were NetSuite’s own attached storage.

What Box Embed is not - at least not yet - is an interoperability or cloud integration system. It appears Box could be reserving a niche for itself in this space, perhaps someday competing with services like Informatica that encourage customers to share their own scripts for converting formats and schemas from one service’s database to another.

Box Integration 

“In the past, if you were to take two systems of record and get them integrated,” says Yeh, “there were a certain number of paths.  You could build a custom integration where you’d take data out of one database and move it into another, in some form. You’d do that with a big systems integration: It was a lot of work, and super-costly. Another would be, you’d go through an integration tool like TIBCO, where when you moved data from one system to another, you’d put it on a third-party integration product, and have it be placed onto another system of record, so data was oftentimes duplicated.”

These types of integration, Yeh continues, pre-date the advent of apps run through the browser, where user interface components are not only easily generated, but readily shared. It becomes an almost academic matter, then, to make the user interface components of one app appear in the context of another.

“So in this particular case, NetSuite is creating a place for us to run - it’s an IFRAME - and what we’re doing is putting a version of Box into that IFRAME which is contextually set up correctly to match the customer records.”

It’s integration in one sense – enabling a unified cloud storage structure that’s automatically configured to fit the context of SaaS applications. It’s not integration in the TIBCO or Informatica sense, where the data becomes interoperable from that central location.  But Chris Yeh leaves that matter open for future exploration - and the last time Box left something open for exploration, we didn’t have to wait all that long.

If Box makes itself the preferred storage system for work, since its storage agents would already be on your devices, the likelihood you’ll use Box for your personal applications also instead of the others also rises.

Lead image courtesy Shutterstock.

If Windows 8 truly is a pretty good operating system burdened by a poor marketing design choice, then you might think a little app that undoes that design choice should set everything right. Two such apps already exist, either one of which could make you reconsider the whole notion that Windows 8 is like a catastrophe imagined by Mondrian.

I’ve been told recently that I appear to have joined the “Dump-on-Windows-8 channel,” a kind of virtual publication that features my friends Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and David Gewirtz, whose ZDNet column on Tuesday could not have made a clearer case: If Windows 8’s usage model design decisions were good ones, it would not need artificial means to make people use it the new way.

That artificial decision was Microsoft’s removal of the Start Button from the lower left corner of the screen – the feature that Windows has been training us all to use to get from place to place some 17 years now. But let’s be perfectly honest: If that’s all we’re really yakking about, if we involuntary members of the Dump-8-Channel just want to keep our old, old habits and are unwilling to embrace anything newer than an Xbox 360, then a free or a $5 app could easily solve our little problem, making us all happy again so we can get back to playing Minesweeper. 

Right?

There are already two utilities in public beta that not only restore the Start Button to its rightful place but also let you designate just how much you want it to resemble the old Windows 7 (or even XP). Both apps will likely be ready for general release when Windows 8 ships later this month. Unsurprisingly to my long-time readers, one is from Stardock, the folks who single-handedly rescued the dime-store dumpiness of the Windows XP experience with WindowBlinds. The other is from a group of open-source developers who clearly know how to spot the needs of their market.

Re-Start

I was a WindowBlinds user during the lean years when Vista was dog slow, but XP’s garishness reminded me too much of a certain plastic doll’s vacation beach house. I wanted Vista’s translucent window frames coupled with XP’s speed, because aesthetics do play a role in improving one’s workplace (a fact contra-indicated by the state of my own office).

If Stardock is expert at anything, it’s giving Windows the coolness factor it has often lacked. Start8, Stardock's Start Button utility for Windows 8, approaches its task assuming two possibilities: Perhaps the user simply needs a Start Menu in the lower left corner of the screen, which would not replace her work like the new Start Screen does, but which otherwise presents the style and fluidity of Windows 8. Or maybe the user wants the old Windows Start Menu just the way it was.

If you’re trying out the 30-day free trial edition of Start8, you’ll want to make that decision before you install, because fiddling with your choices will cost you five bucks first.

If you work with Windows every day, then the option of booting to the Desktop, bypassing the Start Screen, will be a welcome relief.  If my purpose in starting my PC is to launch Word or Visual Studio, then it doesn’t make any sense for me to stop someplace else first, like a connecting flight from Washington to New York that flies through Peoria.

With each iteration of the beta, Stardock re-incorporates more of Windows 7’s old Start Menu functionality than many folks today know it actually has. For example: Clicking on Start and typing a partial phrase should give you a choice of any number of possible matches, even contextually.  Maybe you’re looking for a Word document that contains the phrase, or a piece of music categorized with something including the phrase.

And that makes my test of Start8’s search so revealing about Microsoft’s design choices. Start8 doesn’t include a search engine of its own (if it did, it wouldn’t be just $5). So what you’re seeing here comes from the Windows Search Service – the same one Windows 7 uses. A search for the partial phrase Stard quickly pulls up not just the obvious Stardock folder, but also my Tommy Dorsey tunes from my Music library (remember “Stardust?”). And amazingly, it also pulls up the screenshots I’ve taken for this very article, named with Start8, even though the match is only partial.

Since this search service is actually made by Microsoft, you’d think all Start8 is really doing here is presenting that service in a familiar wrapper, and you’d find the same search from the new Start Screen would yield the same results in a new way.

Nope. While the Start8 search yielded its results in about two seconds, this is what the Start Screen gives you for exactly the same search, after more than a minute of waiting. It’s fluid, it’s lively, but it’s bupkis.

Alternately, Start8 can pull up a Win8-style menu, complete with all your tiles associated with your account in exactly the proper order, and the colors and background styles you’ve already chosen. You set the general size for the bounding rectangle in which the menu appears, and on Wide setting, Start suddenly doesn’t look half bad. It’s here that you realize that the flipping back-and-forth is the problem with Windows 8’s design choice, not the concept of the screen itself.

So how does this setting do with search? Apparently because the Desktop is still engaged at this point, search on the Win8-style Start Menu performs the way search in Windows 8 should perform – or, at least, it tries to. Presently, the beta is a little wonky (a phrase I would nominate for Stardock’s company motto) so when search yields hundreds of results or more, it has a little trouble formatting them all, and Start8 can appear to freeze.

It’s important to note that Start8 does not have to turn the Start Screen completely off unless you want it to, and even then, the Screen becomes a link in the Start8 menu. You can still pull up Start from the middle charm of the pop-up panel on the right, if you ever feel the need.

In the current beta, Start8’s Win7-style menu does lack one feature from Windows 7: fanfold menus, which are a helpful option for condensing the use of the Control Panel from four or five clicks to just two. For now, this is my only genuine nitpick. Start8 makes up for this little omission by including WinRT (“Metro”) apps among its list of most frequently accessed programs; and you can pin one of these frequent apps to Start8’s menu along with the other Desktop applications.

Total Recall

Classic Shell is an open source project by Ivo Beltchev that, surprisingly, is older than Windows 8 itself. In fact, it was born in 2010 as a project to bring the Windows XP or Windows 95 style (no, I’m not kidding) back to Windows 7, and it won an award for how well it did just that. The XP style used a smaller menu panel, fanfold menus for navigating through folders like “Programs,” and brought up Search in a separate window.

Windows 8 actually breathes new life into this old Sourceforge effort. The latest release of Classic Shell contains options for disabling and completely hiding the Start Screen; you can literally bury it and never deal with it. Personally, I don’t need to bury it, I just don’t want to see it while I’m working.

Classic Shell’s original target market was system customizers and enthusiasts. It’s for them it has options like varying the number of milliseconds a fanfold menu takes to face in. For folks who simply want a return to a classic style and get back to their lives, the Settings dialog offers a Basic Settings option with just 3 categories instead of 13.

One virtue of being two years old already is that Classic Shell has a sizable selection of independently created, freely available skins, some by the member artists of DeviantART. Because Classic Shell was built around a chassis that emulates XP functionality, though, even the skins that look something like Windows 7 don’t really work like Windows 7. Case in point: the Programs menu. Here, the fanfold apparatus works against you (as it did in XP) by showing the whole catastrophe of the Programs menu in cascading menu form.  Win7 simplified this by encapsulating the menu into a scrollable window (a concept presumably derived from the product’s own name). I never liked this aspect of XP, and I don’t want it back even if with a translucent border frame.

Another aspect is Search, which Classic Shell covers by simply linking to Microsoft’s alternative search box in File Explorer. For the heck of it, I tried my Stard test in this context. While File Explorer did pull up 175 results, it took well over a minute to get a response… on Windows 8 running on a quad-core Intel Core i5 system. In all fairness, I’m not so fed up with the new Start Screen that I long for the last century, when nothing worked right and Windows’ logo should have been a rotating hourglass.

Still, there will be some users who will become captivated by the prospect of arranging this menu in any order they could possibly want, perhaps with links that may be useful only to them. Gamers will foresee the possibilities of launching communications tools, along with background music players and liquid cooling system monitors, in 200 or so easy steps.

While I appreciate the favor Classic Shell is trying to do for us, my observations have been that serious users don’t just want the Start Button back. They want the Windows 7 Start Menu back, because of its convenience and simplicity, not its looks. While Classic Shell does enable the fanfold Control Panel option that Start8’s current beta lacks, on the whole, Start8 does a better job of emulating Windows 7’s functionality. So if you plan on upgrading to Windows 8 but don't want to sacrifice Windows 7 features just to gain a cool new menu for apps, Start8 does a bit better job. On the other hand, Classic Shell is free, and by no means a dud.

Problem Solved? Problem Solved!

But there’s one big unresolved question: With the Start Menu back home where I keep saying it belongs, am I comfortable enough working with Windows 8 to not be so annoyed by it all the time?

Yes.

There, I said it. True, Start8 on my Desktop relegates the principal Windows 8 feature set to something fun that runs in the background and lets you waste some time. (I don’t use Windows 8 for email; I have too many sorting rules, and absolutely require Outlook.) Arguably, it nullifies much of Windows 8’s value proposition, with the exception of some nice improvements to things like Task Manager and File Explorer that you’d expect to see in a Windows 7 service pack. If the main reason for buying Windows 8 has to be shut off for you to work with it every day, why buy it?

The answers to that question may not come this month, but I do believe there will be an earnest attempt by Microsoft to answer it throughout 2013.

Notice I said, “attempt.” Windows 8 must evolve further for it to be accepted by a broad base of users, which means Microsoft must fully integrate the WinRT environment with the Desktop (.NET, COM) environment in a sensible and manageable way.  Certainly by now, Microsoft is aware of this fact; it can’t shut itself off from reality indefinitely. (Though it has certainly tried before.) Until that change arrives, those of us who must use Win8 for one reason or another will resort to tools like Start8 to help us cope.

For more on Windows 8, see my list of the new operating system's Top 10 Features:

Microsoft never has had to be the innovator in a given market to succeed. More often than not, it has followed a successful path set forth by a predecessor, only with a bit more capital and marketing panache. This time, the competition has left a clear set of footprints for Microsoft to follow. And if Microsoft follows that path precisely, Windows 8 – an operating system many have declared kludgy and confusing ­­– will nevertheless be a hit.

But First, A History Lesson

“No one cares about Linux on phones,” said the editors, “because no one cares about Linux anywhere else.” Despite all of human history, and all evidence to the contrary and the aphorisms that they themselves recite, many people who publish things for a living actually believe that times don’t change, and that consumers will do tomorrow what they did yesterday.

Only four years ago this month, which may as well have been yesterday, a very special phone premiered that you’ve probably forgotten even existed, even if you were one of the dozens who owned one: the HTC Dream, which T-Mobile rebranded the G1. It was an Android phone, which some folks in this business were rebranding a “Linux phone” just before dismissing them as things no one would ever care about. What makes this device a milestone is that, in order to give it a little push forward in the market, Google rushed to deployment with its answer to the iPhone App Store, a little kiosk offering what Google had hoped would be 50 or so apps, but which ended up being less than half that number.

It was the Android Market, which at first, many in my business declared a flop. With its initial inventory so poor, a major survey showed at the time, there was no reason for developers to cease working on their blockbuster mobility projects for the all-important .NET Compact Framework.

Today, Android continues to consist of a variety of dissimilar usage models with kludgy, untested and sometimes ill-considered methods. No single Android phone, not even the Samsung Galaxy S III, stands alone as the bellwether model that defines the genre. There are probably still a dozen fart apps for every productivity app. And to top it off, Google marketing renamed the Market the single worst name in all of retail, “Play Store” (the last time my daughter played store, she was about 8).

Yet the Android Market was the fuel that floated the ship. When customers first chose an Android phone over something as captivating and desirable as the iPhone, it was for one of two reasons: 1) You could get it with a carrier other than AT&T; 2) The Android Market looked promising, enough to bet money on. Today, editors who to this very day declare Linux “dead in the water” tweet these declarations to their writers over their Android phones. 

Despite all the factors that should make Android a flop, and certainly more to come from reliable sources like Motorola, Android’s Play Store makes it a success. And that is the lesson of this article, one which Microsoft – the greatest learner of other companies’ lessons in the history of technology – undoubtedly already knows. Customers will flock to a platform with a vibrant and lively market even when the rest of it doesn’t make much sense, and even when the device that brings you that platform is as forgettable as last year’s NBC fall lineup.

Walk This Way

Microsoft’s path to success so closely matches its predecessor’s footsteps that it, too, named the Windows 8 apps store something stupid: Store. (It’s at this point you’re thankful that Microsoft doesn’t sell things like soup or cars.)  Store is the point of presence, to borrow a phrase from the communications world, where consumers meet the burgeoning world of Microsoft’s completely new apps platform.

For those of you just tuning in, this bears repeating: The Windows 8 apps platform is not for the applications you would run on your Desktop (which, in some bizarre form of feng shui, Microsoft has literally shoved into a corner). It’s for the new class of apps called WinRT, which will run on Windows 8 devices as well as Windows Phone 8 devices. As an entirely new platform, it may as well be a new operating system. But Microsoft’s marketing strategy has always been about leverage, and this time its tactic for extending this new platform to a point in front of your face is to tack it right onto the old one.

While Store will have some Desktop apps for sale (though originally it wasn’t going to), and you will find Office 2010 there (even though the preview for Office 2013 is going on now for free), Store’s real purpose isn’t to boost sales for conventional PC software. It’s to launch the WinRT platform into orbit.

This is far from Microsoft’s first effort to sell software online. Indeed, the very first incarnation of “The Microsoft Network” (now MSN) included a retail platform for selling Windows software. But not until Xbox Live has any of Microsoft’s previous efforts had an enticing value proposition. The Windows 8 Store does: It contains free and low-cost apps that differentiate your use of Windows 8 from any other Windows you’ve used before.

Last year, when not even Microsoft knew what that differentiating factor would be, it launched a contest to incite other people to figure it out. The contest worked. During the Consumer Preview period, the contest added enough apps to the prototype Store that commercial apps vendors – including Angry Birds maker Rovio – felt they wouldn’t be adding their wares to empty shelves.  By the middle of the Release Preview period, there were recognizable brands throughout the Store.

Microsoft has been running its Store like a store since Windows 8 released to manufacturing (RTM), including enabling the first automated sales with monetary transactions. So right this moment, the Store is already open and doing business. When most consumers actually touch the Windows 8 Store for the first time later this month, they won’t be breaking the ribbon. Business will already be happening, reviews for some apps will already have been posted, and there won’t be a question of whether any of these apps will eventually take off.

Bargain Bin

You won’t find many business and productivity applications here, even though there will be departments for them.  (It won’t be the first online thing you’ll find whose business department isn’t really stocked with anything for business.)  As the decorations imply, the WinRT platform for now is about relaxing and getting to know your device (we probably won’t call it a “PC” for much longer) a bit more intimately.

So unsurprisingly, there will be more fun stuff here than business stuff.  This will probably continue to be the case, as the value proposition for trading multitasking, network sharing and multiple windows for touch sensitivity will probably never appeal to many productivity software developers. But there’s precedent that says this may not really matter. While certain apps do exist for mobile platforms that categorize themselves as “productivity,” for the most part they’re laughable. That’s fine, because people use their smartphones to communicate and to sort out their itineraries, as well as to have fun and share their media. There are other devices for work.

Store’s serious stuff falls more into the range of accessories and occasional apps, such as newsreaders, portfolio status checkers and welcome and familiar names like Evernote and Box.net (see above). Microsoft is obviously not working to extend the WinRT platform into the work realm where .NET applications, and the older class of COM applications, continue to prevail.  But attempting to do so would not only be futile but unnecessary. WinRT’s whole point of existence is to make PCs and a new class of tablets desirable, and unless you’re a network TV program executive, you can’t mix desire with business.

What’s more, the barrier to entry for independent software developers into the business market has always been steep, and no online retail ecosystem will change that. Since the very first day of its existence, Microsoft has made tools for bringing individual developers (I was one of them) into the software business to make money and have fun. In the past few years, it’s given game developers a common platform for developing products in Visual Studio and easily deploying them on Xbox, including in the Xbox Live market (the company’s other successful online retail venture).

As cloud-based funding platforms are proving today, nothing is more appealing to a small business than an automated, almost turnkey system for deploying products and reaping revenue. To that end, Microsoft’s flat royalty rate of 30% of revenue for the first $25,000 per app, and 20% thereafter, is fair and competitive. It makes 16-year-olds struggling with their algebra courses and wondering if the future will be as dull as J. J. Abrams’ latest series, dream of what they can do with $17,500. And it makes them learn things and do things they had no idea they could do for themselves. Just look at all the iOS game developers today who are too young to vote, yet when they attend startups conferences for the first time, have already started up at least twice.

End Game

There is nothing particularly innovative about building a retail software ecosystem around a platform that extends itself to smartphones and computers. Yet if Apple had done it first ­­– if a common core were introduced letting iOS apps run on Macs, and vice versa – do you really think Tim Cook wouldn’t have put on a San Francisco rollout show and sunk a billion dollars into marketing it?

No one cares about Windows any more, I’ve been told. Operating systems are dead. Mass, mainstream media is dead. People want to be entertained. It’s what they wanted yesterday, and it’s what they’ll want today.

Uh-huh. The reason people have invested so much of their time, energy, and money into anything this digital era has produced in the past two decades, is not because of what it does now but for the promise of what it can do soon. Seriously: The Web, the Net, the PC, the subscription TV service, the (aging) gaming consoles and platforms, and even smartphones have all underperformed the potential we know they have. Android’s continued success is proof that faith can sell a product when quality won’t.

So what can a Windows 8 user have faith in? The Start Screen (formerly known as "Metro") might not suddenly make sense to everyone tomorrow. But something might be happening in the Store that’s worth looking at, and maybe even worth shelling out a fiver. If Windows 8 succeeds, despite some of the poorest design decisions ever for a major tech product, the Windows 8 Store will be the reason why. And if Windows 8 fails, and Windows 7 marks the final resting point for progress in the PC era, the Windows 8 Store will also be the reason why.

The Complete Top 10 Windows 8 Features

The latest language from the company once identified for its programming languages seeks to bring a higher class of developer into the Web apps space, without changing the foundation of the Web... even if such a change wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Let’s be frightfully honest: JavaScript probably should not have been the first choice for the language of all Web functionality - at least, not without some serious reworking. It became standardized long before it was ever rationalized.  And had rationality been the goal, it should have looked much more like Java than script.

As with so much else on the Web, platform engineers are largely of the mindset that it’s too late to do much about it now. The exceptions are companies whose backbones still have some swagger to them, especially in the face of something new called “competition.” While Microsoft has been taking fewer risks quantitatively of late, the risks it does take have been bigger: the Start Screen in Windows 8, the expansion of Xbox into a media platform, the splicing of Windows Phone with Windows PC, the abandonment of Silverlight in favor of WinRT.

One Giant Step Up From Level II BASIC

Microsoft’s introduction of TypeScript is not that big, and is not really a risk. In terms of product, it’s a free Visual Studio add-on (downloadable here) that enables more learned, professional developers to adopt more formal approaches in producing code for the Web. In terms of marketing, it’s a nearly no-cost way for Microsoft to put its stake in the ground in territory Google has been working to claim for itself.

As a language interpreter, every browser’s JavaScript works like something you’d find embedded in the ROMs of a 1978 hobby shop microcomputer. For example: To have the interpreter hold a value in memory, you declare a variable. The interpreter doesn’t have any idea what to expect for that variable, so it just sets aside a big block of space in anticipation of anything that comes along. Then when you set the variable’s value to “Obama” instead of 8, or instead of $13.50, the interpreter deduces you meant to store a string of text.

This is how a weakly typed interpreter behaves, and it does so supposedly as a favor to you, to save you steps.  The problem is, adding “2012” to “Obama” is a very different thing than adding 2012 to 8.  So if you’ve gathered the contents of a text box named year using something like document.GetElementByID('year').value, and used a + operator to tack that onto your variable, despite the fact that the property is called .value, the likelihood is that it contains text.  So how you use the + operator (as addition or to append) depends on how you used the variable.  If you flip your types, there’s a good chance the interpreter will respond by doing what all JavaScript interpreters do instead of alerting you with error boxes: stop dead cold and do nothing.

TypeScript operates under a different theory:  Let’s presume JavaScript was strongly typed to begin with.  From now on, it’s up to you to explicitly declare your variable types up front before you use them, especially in the context of a function whose arguments or whose interfaces (a concept familiar to C# and Java veterans) are discrete elements of data. If we simply endow the development environment (in Microsoft’s case, of course, Visual Studio) with the rules for strong typing, then it can enforce those rules while you’re coding, instead of setting up a scenario where a misused type could derail the interpreter.

“What TypeScript does is, it basically formalizes a static type system that describes JavaScript’s dynamic types, but it describes them at development time,” says Microsoft Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg (known as the “father” of Microsoft’s other big language, C#), in a demonstration video released Tuesday. “And then it can offer excellent tooling on top of that information.” By that, Hejlsberg means that TypeScript presents a method for the developer to express variables, arrays and properties in a non-standard JavaScript way, ignoring JavaScript’s allowances that variables can be basically anything until they’re put to use (“dynamic types”), but whose product is still interpretable by any JavaScript-capable device.

Making The Editor The Enforcer

Here’s the subtle genius of the system: Only the developer uses TypeScript; nothing changes on the client side. The TypeScript rule enforcer in Visual Studio produces JavaScript code, which is then guaranteed not to derail the interpreter with a type mismatch. That code is then embedded into the webpage or the Web app just like any other JS code, because that’s what it is.

This way, as most professional JavaScript developers do, you can use JQuery, Node.js (for server-side code), or any of the functionality libraries that add real value to JavaScript, while adding the ability to call their functions safely. You do need to add interface declarations files to your TypeScript project, but their entire purpose is to ensure that inputs and outputs match the types these libraries expect.

Most object-oriented languages today utilize some notion of class - reusable components made up of functions with specified inputs and outputs, and data with specified types. JavaScript is not object-oriented, which is not really a fault since, arguably, an object-oriented programming interpreter would have been much more complex for Netscape to have implemented. TypeScript adds class, including class constructors, but in such a way that member functions compile down into methods on the prototype, which are JavaScript workarounds.

This sample, from a frame of Anders Hejlsberg’s demo video, shows a column of TypeScript code on the left being live-compiled into JavaScript on the right. Here you see where what a Java or C# programmer will recognize as a member function dist() being rephrased as a member method on the prototype Point.prototype.dist for JS.

TypeScript is far from the first effort engineers have made to add classes and types to JavaScript without impacting what some still call lovingly (for their own reasons) the “standard.” Last year, Google introduced Dart as a kind of JavaScript turbocharger. From the developer’s perspective, Dart would substitute for the JavaScript language, re-introducing aspects of class and typing from Java into the mix; while from the browser’s point of view, the Dart virtual machine would supplement its existing JavaScript VM rather than replace it. The Dart VM “digests” Dart language and produces JavaScript code, so instead of replacing your browser, you add onto it. As its name suggests, Dart is also sharp, providing applications developers with the clarity and exactitude they come to expect from a language capable of running a word processor.

But for developers to get behind any language - even a supplemental one - they need a rich development environment that understands it natively, as rich as Eclipse for Java.  Progress on that front for Dart has been mixed, which is not uncharacteristic of projects at Google.

By comparison, TypeScript has the virtue of inserting itself into an development environment that’s already somewhat rich: Visual Studio. Once the add-on is plugged in, VS 2012 recognizes TypeScript as a formal file type.

Then as you’re developing the script, as this sample from VS 2012 shows, the editor keeps track of the proper types of each variable, even when in this case, it has yet to be assigned a value. Here, pointing to member function getDist() reveals a tip showing it to be a function (the closed parentheses) whose return value is of type number.

Insert Devious Plot Here

Outside of development circles, the conspiracy theory of the day is that Microsoft is seeding the market with proprietary technologies in order to bind them to the company. It is for things such as this that the Recycle Bin was invented. Inside development circles, the allegation is that Microsoft is trying to recast Web standards in its own image, and is demonstrating its disdain for standards by rebuilding them. Such allegations ignore an obvious fact: The caretakers of the JavaScript standard (who use the term ECMAScript to avoid stepping on a trademark that now belongs to Oracle) are doing exactly what Microsoft is doing, and for that matter, Google as well: namely, retrofitting an under-qualified language for Web applications with the tools and reliability features that developers require.

Besides, TypeScript is not the first JavaScript recompiler with type and class support, including within the open source community. CoffeeScript is a highly praised project that expresses statements using tighter code. Meanwhile, Smallscript is a recompiler that borrows elements of Smalltalk, including for expressing data as objects; and the Script# extension for Visual Studio compiles actual C# source code into equivalent JS. None of these are perceived as covert conspiracies.

If Microsoft is guilty of falling into any familiar pattern with TypeScript, it’s that it’s not the first product in its class. What TypeScript has going for it, though, is no particularly good reason not to be adopted by Web apps developers, except for the possibility of a preferable alternative. Standards are for communications systems and interfaces; options are for people. TypeScript is one more option, and in my view so far, a sensible one.

“Logging onto” Windows is something a great many users don’t do. Let’s face it, do we log onto our phones?  If we’re okay with our phones pretending they’re us while they move around, why would we need to be protective about devices that mostly stay in one place?  This is a point of view that Microsoft, over the course of the next year, may render as antiquated as the dial tone.

An operating system should know its user. This was not a concept Microsoft understood at first. When it formally introduced the “My Documents” folder in Windows 98, folks asked me whether “My” meant “me, the computer” or “me, the user.” Then Windows XP introduced the notion of a user profile. At last, multiple people had personal folders that pertained to them, and “my” meant yours and not anyone else’s. When you signed into XP, the file manager would show you your folders.

For many folks, though, that wasn’t much of a convenience. People tended to have XP bypass the whole accounts thing, and created their own folders anyway, with names like “DAD’S PRIVATE STUFF DO NOT TOUCH.” (There’s a really secure folder for you.)

Identity First

Meanwhile, since the turn of the century, Microsoft has had a dream of integrating users’ Windows identities (called security principals) with their Microsoft-brand email addresses, and in turn with a Microsoft-run identity system. As was the case with almost every security-related effort during the XP era, it was rolled out in an embryonic state, and researchers poked holes in it without even trying. Only after several years of wrestling with the consequences did Microsoft come to grips with researchers’ assessments: Tying access to one’s credit cards to a single-factor authentication system that shares the same password with every component in that system, is a manufactured security hole waiting to be exploited.

So here we are on the cusp of the Windows 8 era, and we’re faced again with Microsoft’s latest incarnation of shared identity. This time, it’s in front of our face, and it will be much more difficult to bypass. What was the Microsoft Passport, then Windows Live ID and now just the Microsoft Account is the default key for entering the operating system. While you can bypass it, the act of doing so will be much less obvious than for prior incarnations of Windows, and everyday users probably won’t take the time to find out how. As a result, in the first few days after Windows 8 ships, expect the Microsoft Account identity database to eclipse the size of some major countries.

Thus the pressing question becomes, does the latest Microsoft Account offer the Windows 8 user anything of genuine value? My answer: Quite possibly.

When you install Windows 8, or when you log on for the first time, you’ll be asked to create a Microsoft Account if you don’t already have one. This time, there are good reasons for doing so. Microsoft has now fully realized that users are independent of their computers ­­– or, I should say, of their devices. So when someone is a subscriber to Windows, as a customer will come to be called, that subscription should enable her access to software and certain personal resources from any device she’s using at the time.

This is not exactly easy to accomplish, and the full implications of this promise will not yet be realized the day Windows 8 is generally released. But you’ll come to see more as time goes on. For now, the most obvious thing the user will notice is that, whenever she signs onto Windows 8 on any device (not necessarily one that belongs to her), she’ll see her basic preferences on the Start Screen and the basic style, such as her personal wallpaper, on her Desktop.

Everywhere You Roam

The way Microsoft is enabling this is through a much grander exploitation of a feature it introduced in Windows Vista called the roaming profile. Today with Windows 7 in home networks, a user creates his account on one PC.  The hidden user folder of that PC stores profile data about such things as personal folder locations, in a subdirectory named Roaming. This way, when the same user creates an account on another PC in the same network, that other PC can pull pre-existing data from the roaming profile.

You may have just figured out, after reading that last sentence, why this feature wasn’t exploited more:  You really shouldn’t have to create a separate account on every PC you own.

This is where the new incarnation of Microsoft Account on Windows 8 makes a great deal of sense. Now when you sign onto any device, the data normally stored to the Roaming subdirectory on that first PC, becomes available to the authenticated user wherever you are. Microsoft’s cloud service (the same servers that run Azure) store a snapshot of that subdirectory. Since Windows 8 uses the Roaming subdirectory to store data like wallpaper choices and application settings that can and should be portable, that data automatically becomes available to the cloud service. So any app running on any other device can call on the snapshot; and if the device is active, it can refresh the cloud server’s view of that subdirectory in the background.

Today, relatively few third-party software products make use of the Roaming subdirectory because, well, users couldn’t be counted on to care enough to actually roam. Windows 8 gives them the first really good reason to do so.

To get the best idea of why, imagine if you were an Office 365 subscriber.  With the upcoming version of Office, your subscription uses the same Microsoft Account as does Windows 8. So you effectively have a profile for Office that’s bound to you, and that moves with you. And as I’ve noted in #3 of this series, SkyDrive is also tied to Microsoft Account. What’s more, it’s now the default storage system for Office, which you now have to bypass to get to your local hard drive storage. Recall that an Office 365 app can be run from the Web; it’s not the “Office Web Apps” that we’ve come to know and loathe, but the full products in all their glory.

So if your storage is in the cloud, your profile is in the cloud, and your applications are sourced from the Web, your full installation of Office will travel with you from device to device. This is the full promise of the new era of Windows (much more so than the silly Start Screen), and the enabling factor for that promise is the Microsoft Account.

Reconciliation

The grander implications are for a kind of virtualized workspace where every app you own, or have rights to use, is accessible under your account from any place. This is not, however, completely feasible. First of all, classic Desktop applications (those compatible with Windows 7 and earlier) must be installed on the devices which run them. Technically, any of these applications that use the Roaming subdirectory to store user data should instantly, without any re-architecture on the part of their developers, enable other devices on which those applications are installed to bring up a user’s preferences. (By “technically,” I mean that the stars should all be properly aligned, there’s no wind, the birds are all singing in the trees and you’re getting paid on time.)  But nothing can be done about the fact that a Desktop application needs to be installed locally on a device to be run from that device.

The same holds true with WinRT apps, the new class of Windows 8 programs that are run from tiles you tap from the new Start Screen. What’s different in that case is that the Windows Store keeps track of those WinRT apps whose rights you’ve acquired or purchased at least once. So the Store app at least gives you a way to download and install those apps you own, even on a device you don’t own.

This could get hairy.  

Imagine a situation where a guest using a hotel lobby PC downloads some WinRT game apps under his account.  Remember, he wouldn’t be using the classic “Guest” account from Windows XP, but his personal Windows 8 setup accessed through his Microsoft Account. But once he logs off, checks out and jets to some foreign destination, how exactly can these apps be uninstalled?

This is the type of admin situation I’m happy we’re trying to solve now. I don’t believe Windows 8 will be installed to any great degree in hotel lobbies (where I still mostly find XP) until quandaries such as this are resolved; but now, at least, we’re at that level.

In my tests of Windows 8 RTM on a network with mixed Windows 8 and Windows 7 devices, including a Win8 tablet, use of the Microsoft Account as the account name, at last, improves small networks and homegroups.  With Windows 7, it’s still possible for one user to create separate accounts on multiple PCs in the homegroup, the result being that PCs throughout that homegroup have difficulty resolving which Roaming subdirectory is the authentic one. You can see the side-effects of this anomaly in the Homegroup section of Windows 7’s file manager. There, a) individual user accounts are listed separately as though they were separate members, thus creating more homegroup members than there are PCs; b) the Media Devices section lists user accounts individually as well, even though playlists and libraries on those devices are all public and merged.

In Windows 8, any homegroup user who logs on using a Microsoft Account will be recognized as one and only one person, regardless of the device she’s logging on from. This is a tremendous improvement, and a very necessary one in the era of PCs and tablets. In my own network, my wife and I each have several PCs rather than just one, though we share a Windows 8 tablet. And yet here we are as individual users rather than split identities!

This way, when you need to restrict a person’s access or his permission to change things or delete files, your policies apply to that person wherever he is, as opposed to “John on the media PC” and “John on his laptop.” If he’s logging onto your homegroup from a Remote Desktop Connection, the policies still apply.  (Where local accounts still exist (and in a hybrid network with Win7 devices, they will), those accounts will still show up in the new File Explorer under Computer.)

Schizophrenia Is Now More Difficult

Unavoidably and, from an architectural standpoint, unfortunately, this will cause some headaches for folks like me who insist on using dual-boot PCs with Windows 7. I have quite a bit invested in Win7 right now, and am not willing to disembark just yet. But this little problem may expedite that event: Because permissions for system folders and personal folders are handled through the NTFS file system that is rendered directly to those folders, whenever Windows 8 attributes policies to Microsoft Accounts, it overwrites whatever traditional, local account-oriented policies were already present.

As a result, whenever you boot back into Windows 7, suddenly none of your shared folders or libraries are shared anymore. And if you log on using a limited (non-administrator) account, as is generally wise for security purposes, you may find you don’t have access to your own Documents library until you grant yourself permission again.  =It’s not difficult; it’s just a bother, like returning to your home only to find you’ve locked all the bedroom and bathroom doors on yourself. Changing your policies back for Windows 7 does not impact Windows 8 in the slightest.

Everyday users won’t be facing dual-boot scenarios in their everyday work, and the reasons why folks like me will keep using Win7 for a while longer are perhaps peculiar. But the fact that there’s no easy bridge for this problem illustrates the breadth of the gulf we’re jumping by adopting a cloud-based online identity to log onto our devices.

There will continue to be well-deserved skepticism over how well Microsoft will be able to manage an identity system that will undoubtedly be under continual attack. (This from the guy who still refuses to join Facebook.)  It is a risk which individual Windows users will weigh for themselves. While they may opt to install local accounts for Windows 8, and to not use SkyDrive or any other cloud-based storage, the easiest way to ensure that option would be to stick with Windows 7 anyway. But I have a short list of features that could, potentially, be a bigger boon for me than the Start Screen is a bust for me. Universal sign-on is one of them.

The Top 10 Windows 8 Features So Far

Anywhere in the world, the fastest way to make anything popular is to ban it. Certainly Iran, which actually is an Internet infrastructure provider and which has by far the largest Internet using population in the Middle East, undoubtably knows that. So when Iran is handed a gold mine like The Innocence of Muslims, what should it do? 

The pitiful YouTube trailer for a possibly fake film entitled The Innocence of Muslims, whose very actors are embarrassed to have been hoodwinked into participating, may have become the most popular — or at least, the most popularly viewed — bad movie not to have been lampooned by Rifftrax.  Iran is one of the video's most vocal critics, which was probably as intended.

It isn’t immediately obvious to most Americans, for whom Iran is typically portrayed as a backward country, but actually Iran is an Internet power player. Not headquarters to an Internet giant, but an actual Internet giant in itself. A 2010 estimate by China-based communications analyst Globserver states that, of Iran’s total population of nearly 77 million people, 33.2 million - about 43.2% of the population - were registered Internet users. Only 9.8 million Saudis are Internet users. More than half (52.5%) of all the Middle East’s Internet users, and 15.6% of the entire Middle East population, were customers of Iranian services in 2010.

Black Rock East

The government of Iran owns its Internet. In 2007, the country spun off its state-owned telephone service, creating a competitive market for a new breed of mobile phone carrier there, including MTN, MCI (no relation) and Zoha Kish. But for these companies to offer mobile data services with their mobile phones (which they could choose not to do... but what would be the point?) they must pay the government (through its wholly owned Internet subsidiary, TIC) a monthly percentage. In 2010, the minimum monthly payment was sealed at around $1 million.

Or, according to 2010 exchange rates, $10.2 billion rials per month. Today, however, for Iran to reap the same value from its mobile data plan resellers, it would have to charge $12.2 billion. You see, one of the unpleasant side effects of developing nuclear technology while threatening to wipe a neighboring country off the map is that the rest of the world sells off your currency. This has resulted in a dramatic devaluation of the Iranian rial. Indeed, the rial hit a historic low today. With U.S. and European sanctions against Iran’s oil exports and banking transactions having the desired effect, Iran has to make a living somehow.

And here, you have a video that’s gone viral. Hey, if ReadWriteWeb can make a killing from viral videos, why can’t Iran? And if you want to make a bad video really viral, why not follow in the footsteps of Russia, the Phillipines, Lebanon and Germany and ban access to the video - or at least publicly debate the merits of doing so?

Because you know what happens when you threaten to ban a video: Pro-free speech groups launch a public screening of the thing. Widescreen, HD, streaming Wireless-N video, probably with popcorn.

Do Not Watch This Video

It’s not like Iran’s 33.2 million netizens are all incapable of finding the allegedly blasphemous video by other means, as this Bing search using Iran as the country code clearly demonstrates.  (An independent Iranian businessperson said as much to France24 just today.) Videos housed on YouTube may still be visible in Iran through Bing, even without a visit the YouTube URL. And even if they’re not, clearly YouTube is no longer the only source.

With oil no longer viable as the country’s only lifeblood, Iran has to take advantage of what opportunities fall into its lap. Think about it, this pitiful little video could be a bandwidth bonanza! Over the weekend, Iran took the bait, banning access to both YouTube and parent Google from clients using its state-owned Internet infrastructure.

And to start the viral marketing push with a bang, what could be better than for Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to embark on a world tour? In New York this week, before the United Nations, Ahmadinejad suggested to a conference of scholars and students that the nations of the world should band together in harmony to ban all content that offends religions.

Now, even more people want to see the practically unwatchable video that has caused all the hubbub.

Smaller Bang, Bigger Boom

Maybe it’s too late for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to become the next Steve Jobs, but he seems to already be adopting Apple’s basic lesson of owning the infrastructure, limiting access to the product and making the product more desirable than peace itself. Even as the country rails against the video, the rials (or more preferably, dollars) roll in from active participants in Iran's state-owned social media platform on its state-owned infrastructure.

Hey, maybe Ahmadinejad and filmmaker “Sam Bacile” could work out a little deal. "You provide the blasphemy and the white guys wearing bedsheets," the president could say, "and I’ll provide the audience." Mel Brooks couldn’t have worked out a better plot.

If Windows 8 succeeds, it will be because its users come to embrace three of its exclusive elements as critical to the way they work and the things they do. Here we address the first of those elements:   Windows 8’s approach to sharing media.

Unlike almost any other mass-produced product, the success of technology gadgets today is gauged by the eagerness of consumers to get rid of them and replace them with the newest version.  Witness the early reviews of iPhone 5.  Technology thrives on our innate ability to be simultaneously enthusiastic and transient.

There’s an obvious reason, of course: Business models nowadays are based on subscriptions whose payoffs only take place at the beginning, during customers’ initial commitment phase.  We may make a two-year commitment, but the hope is that we’ll last for no longer than one.  While Microsoft Windows is moving – albeit in phases – to a subscription model of sorts, for now, the success of Windows 8 depends on customers’ willingness to perceive Windows 7 as outmoded and undesirable. That perception will occur only if Windows 8 can demonstrate it has an understanding of how people work today, in the modern age of multiple devices, mobility and synchronicity, that Windows 7 fundamentally lacks.

Last year, Microsoft’s early preview of Windows 8 showed much promise in this regard.  But the final product lacks the succinctness and clarity of its original value proposition.

It Looked Better In Rehearsal

Most of the tools that desktop computer users use today to synchronize their media across devices are add-ons.  Worse, from Microsoft’s perspective, they’re not Microsoft add-ons.  Dropbox and Box (formerly Box.net) command the lion’s share of the general-purpose syncing market, although Google Drive has recently made inroads. In business, companies are finding new and more convenient means of leveraging Amazon’s S3 storage.  In the last three years, Microsoft has tried cracking this market with SkyDrive. Yet during the Windows 7 era, its usually successful tactic of leveraging one platform against has not succeeded. Tying SkyDrive to Windows Live and then to Office Web Apps made it seem subservient to them; successful syncing services are the ones that appear ubiquitous, useful to everything and everyone.

In fact, most consumers-on-the-street would define “the cloud” as the ubiquitous place where you store all your media and the documents you want to take home.  That’s not at all how cloud service providers define it, and it’s this disparity between the “tech news” definition of the cloud and the real-world definition, that Microsoft would very much like to exploit with Windows 8.

One of Windows 8’s slight-of-hand tricks is intended to take your attention away from the Desktop and relocate it to this new, tiled, more nebulous, less-defined place whose final name has still yet to be determined (formerly known as "Metro").  Here, it isn’t so obvious where the cloud begins and ends, and the add-ons upon which you’ve come to depend don’t seem so ubiquitously accessible. Dropbox isn’t king here.

It’s here where you’ll find something Windows 8 calls Photos. When Microsoft first introduced its Windows 8 concept to the public one year ago, Microsoft Senior Vice President for Windows Live Chris Jones pitched the concept to convention attendees as the beginning of a great transition for the company as a whole.

The concept Jones demonstrated was indeed a series of self-synchronizing panels adorned with just the things Jones imported to his tablet, synced through his phone, and shared through his networks. It was, far and away, Microsoft’s most impressive public Windows 8 Consumer Preview demonstration. This feature could have been, I wrote at the time, the sole reason for upgrading. 

Jones’ pitch boiled down to this: When you look at your computer or your tablet, you don’t want to see Microsoft. You want to see the people you love, like your family, and the things you do in your life. You want Microsoft to step back and stay out of the way.

Orchestrated Schizophrenia

At some time between Build 2011 and now, Microsoft stepped back into the picture, whittling down Jones’ original concept visibly into a leveraging vehicle for SkyDrive.  For the release version of the Photos app, in place of the people you love, well, there’s the London Ferris wheel.  Which isn’t all bad, but not quite the same.  To change things, you need to do things; and almost anything you do with Photos warns you in vivid language – as though you touched the wrong button and almost started the self-destruct sequence ­­– that you really need SkyDrive.

Syncing with devices requires the Photos app to know what “devices” are.  A sensible first-time Windows 8 user may assume it has something to do with the Devices “charm” on the new right-side Start menu panel. Clicking here (as with clicking on “Devices” almost anywhere else in Windows 8) reminds you that “Devices” in the context of the right side of the screen is different from “Devices” everywhere else on the screen.  Windows 8 speaks different languages at different times, and you’re supposed to be able to sort all that out.

In the context of the Photos app, “Devices” refers to the places where you have installed the SkyDrive Desktop app. You read this correctly – I’m not referring to the SkyDrive Windows 8 Metro/Modern/whatever-style app that ships with Windows 8 itself, which apparently does not render a device a “Device.”  You see, this app has to run in the background… and the WinRT-centered world of the Start Screen has no “background” for programs to run, not even its own SkyDrive app. So for the Photos app to distinguish between SkyDrive and the devices which have the SkyDrive Desktop app (an absolute necessity if the selections on the bottom are ever to make sense), you must download and install the SkyDrive Desktop app.  And if you don’t, you’ll be warned.

You wonder what Chris Jones would have said last year if a screenshot from 2012 were to have been beamed one year into the past, and if he had been asked, “Instead of seeing the people you love and the things you like to do, what would you think if the user saw this instead?”

This particular leveraging scheme isn’t really being honest with you.  You can connect two or three or twelve Windows devices together in a network, and one device will see the other one’s files, including its photos.  You don’t need SkyDrive to sync them.  But this Photos app does – or rather, it pretends it does, with messages like this one:

Once you’ve downloaded the SkyDrive app onto the device whose photos you want to bring into the Photos app, all of the device’s shared photos folders magically become visible to the Photos app, even though you weren’t technically sharing them through SkyDrive in the first place.

Windows 7 veterans will have already picked up on the presence of the Pictures library, which technically can include any shared folder in the network.  In fact, that’s the whole point of libraries in the homegroup scheme ­­– to make several locations with the same categories of media content, appear as one location.  But not here, because if it were that easy, of course there’d be no leverage point for installing SkyDrive, would there?  So the Photos app artificially limits your capability to see photos in your Photos library stored on other devices.  It may acknowledge the presence of folders within shared network folders in that library, but it presents their names as though they were empty… or somehow in “error.”  The File Explorer on the Windows 8 Desktop does not have this false limitation.

So to recap, even if you merged photos from several network locations together (for a reason), the Photos app has you distinguish between local, SkyDrive, and “Devices” photos (for a different reason). Here is where Microsoft’s irrepressible impulse to tie one platform to another, like a toddler with building blocks, knocks the whole tower down: In the current incarnation of the Photos app (which admittedly, through Microsoft’s new distribution system, could be fixed at any time), the moment you’ve used the SkyDrive app to sync with a second device, that device becomes “Devices” for the sake of the Photos app.

Function and Functionality

It isn’t obvious from the instructions (what instructions?), but once you use SkyDrive Desktop to introduce devices in your network to the Photos app, tiles for each device appear there.  Your next obvious question may be, “So what does that actually accomplish?”

The original idea was for the Photos app to serve as a kind of hub, so the photos from your phone, from Facebook, from Flickr, and from your local network could all be accessed from one outlet without all those photos having to be relocated there.  That’s a laudable goal, even if Microsoft were to make automatic photo sharing exclusive to Windows Phone.  You’d think it’s why this cloud thing was invented in the first place.

But in the time between concept and execution, it’s obvious that each of the various “chefs” at Microsoft took her turn at mixing her pet ingredients into the pot, with the result being less of a blend and more of a mud pie.  Not only is the flavor of this app completely lost, but also its purpose.  There’s nothing you actually do with photos in the Photos app except view them.  You can’t edit them, or trigger them to be edited by some outside process.  You can select them, if selecting is a thing you like to do in your spare time, and you can view a slideshow. You can replace the London Ferris wheel with one of them, if you consider that a feature.

Or, if you’re like me and you still have one of those digital camera things that was hot in the 2000s, and that you connect to the PC using a USB cable, you might try to import some more photos.  Once you find the Import function on the menu (it’s the only one there, you can’t miss it), instead of the wizard-like process that Windows 7 veterans have come to expect, you get this error message:

There are no devices, evidently.  Now obviously, there are “Devices” devices, because here you can clearly see two.  But we’re not talking about the kind of “Devices” that the new Start panel refers to.  This is a third connotation of devices, meaning a serial cable-connected storage medium.  Now, Windows 8 could have said, “First, hook up your digital camera or your memory card reader, and we’ll start the import process right away.”  But no, someone apparently concluded that an error message was more appropriate for Step 1.

SkyDrive Dependency vs. SkyDrive

All this having been said, there is still a path for sharing media on Windows 8 to succeed.  It depends on the extent of the user’s patience, which we can assume should be shorter than anyone’s ability to put up with the Photos app.

It may also depend on the user’s acceptance of schizophrenia as a design virtue.  Because the Desktop co-exists with the Start Screen, there may be many elements of Windows 8 with dual personalities.  SkyDrive has three: namely, the “full” SkyDrive app that runs in Internet Explorer in the “Metro” world; the SkyDrive app that runs from the Start Screen in the “Metro” world (yes, that’s a different app); and the SkyDrive Desktop app which we have just learned you can’t ignore.

Yet all of these, for inexplicable reasons, contain better photo browsing and file management functions than the Photos app (stand-alone “Metro” app shown above).  All the photos that you mean to share with not only your own network but with other networks in the world, would appear here by virtue of your dragging and dropping them into the SkyDrive folder on your Desktop.  Your Facebook and Flickr photos won’t appear here, but there may very well be a separate Facebook app for that before too long.

And you remember music, don’t you?  If I recall correctly, those other guys with the really popular phone built their entire platform on the backbone of a music service.  (The Metro Internet Explorer-based version is pictured above.)  It’s easy enough to play MP3 files directly from SkyDrive; and because files appearing in the SkyDrive folder may be treated as files, then any music player program that expects files will automatically accept entries appearing in this folder as entries in a playlist.

No better evidence exists of Windows 8 having been cooked by a plethora of chefs, none of them sharing the same kitchen, than the fact that its Music app doesn’t even try to leverage SkyDrive for its ability to sync music across devices.  The functionality that was so critical to the Photos app that it makes you use it even when you don’t need it, is inexplicably omitted in its entirety from the Music app.  Instead, Music opens up all the contents of your Music library for playback through a separate player.

It also tries to sell you new music through something called the Xbox Music Store.  Xbox, you ask?  I thought this was Windows.  And here is where we discover the identity of the chef responsible for the music part of our program.  While Photos wants to sell you a SkyDrive, Music wants to sell you an Xbox.  Hmm, maybe Xbox is the future of Microsoft.

In the end, perhaps it’s unfair to have me be the one judging the viability of any technology for the everyday user.  I’m the fellow with a fully working 26-year-old Atari ST, yet for whom most smartphones literally give out, if not explode, after a few months being in my vicinity.

But the following remains the truth regardless of who says it:  One of the actual causes of the mobility revolution is users being able to break free from being bound to the restrictive platforms that have come to define desktop computing.  People aren’t just moving from place to place, they’re moving from context to context.  Windows 8’s relative capability to share media between devices (with an upper- or lower-case “d”) will be a top feature simply due to the importance users place on that feature.

Microsoft cannot afford to stake its future on its ability to reconstruct what its users have so skillfully torn down.  Every once in a while, one of its people hits upon the right idea:  Give people a hub with which they can share whatever it is they share, on whatever networks they use to share it.  If someone else besides Microsoft provides people with that hub, then they probably will not need to upgrade to Windows 8 to use it.  That’s the knife’s edge on which the success of this product, and maybe its producer, now rests.

Will These Windows 8 Features Be Tops With You?

Just five years’ time, and already the tech press is declaring the iPhone era waning. Or more accurately, some elements of the tech press weren’t too thrilled by the iPhone 5 announcement, and the rest fell asleep. Boredom is as contagious as the plague (just ask anyone at CNN). But the claim says a lot more about the tech press than it does about the iPhone.

It was the early summer of 2007. The revolution was set to begin, so my colleagues scrambled to cover all the bases. They set up shop amid the TV cameras and mobile satellite units, in the metropolitan business centers of America. I drove to Columbus, Indiana.

People thought I was nuts, which is often true. But if revolutions are to change everything, everywhere, all at once - if the premiere of the iPhone truly was to transform the lifestyle of an entire people in one day - then the revolution would be also be felt in Columbus, Indiana, population 39,000. “Wow,” said one guy in front of an AT&T store who had been waiting in line since the wee hours of the afternoon. “You’re really from the Internet? Now I know this thing is big!”

The Odd-Numbered Sequels Are Never The Good Ones

My friend and long-time partner-in-crime Carmi Levy is now the most recognized technology analyst on Canadian broadcast media. Whenever a major wave in the history of technology crashes ashore, Carmi is in such high demand that he rises before dawn to appear on morning programs on multiple networks.

Carmi’s initial verdict on yesterday’s iPhone 5 announcement, as published by the Toronto Star this morning, is that the product line may have reached a point where it is no longer revolutionary, and is now sustaining itself though the same process of incremental improvement that every other industrial product goes through - every automobile, every refrigerator, every packing crate.

“Sure, it’s a highly desirable evolution,” Carmi writes, “one that will easily sell millions and further expand Apple’s mobile empire. But Apple doesn’t do well with the evolutionary game: revolution is where Apple ranks supreme. The company is at its best when it creates new markets that didn’t previously exist – think iTunes – or re-thinks existing ones in ways that other vendors simply didn’t get, a la iPad. Simply upping the features list isn’t going to keep Apple light-years ahead of the competition. Outflanking them will.”

The thinking here is that Apple has built its business plan on the execution of revolutions. And Carmi is right to point out the dangers of Apple’s incremental strategy. But Internet headlines - especially the American ones - are published in black-and-white.

So over at Wired, we’re being warned that historically, after the fifth generation of “boring” but meticulous improvements to its products, Apple has been known to actually start making products worse. And by “worse,” Mat Honan appears to mean, “no longer really new.”

“Maybe smartphones themselves are becoming boring,” he writes, just before declaring that he’s seen the future and, on the iPhone scale, it’s fairly dull. At least Nokia’s Windows Phones have an identity now, he says; the iPhone doesn’t even have that any more.

And further down the pike, the fact that Wired declared the iPhone boring becomes a headline in itself. Instant artificial journalism: just add content and poof.

At the Nieman Journalism Lab, even though it published an eight-item bulleted list of new iPhone 5 features (which is better than some tech publications), Joshua Benton proclaimed the new device not really newsworthy. And the fact of its non-newsworthiness became the headline. At the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Here at the back of the AT&T Phone Center Store in Columbus, Indiana on June 29, 2007, folks standing in line call home to tell their families they'll be late for dinner. Take a good look at what they're using.

Hot + Cold <> Cool

As a reporter, I overhear folks talking in restaurants - it’s part of the way I gauge the “buzz” around a topic. Just after the iPhone 4S was released, a fellow sitting at the bar assessed it this way: It’s like going to a strip club and finding out, instead of new, hot girls, they have the same ones you saw yesterday. That image told me more than I possibly needed to know... about the iPhone phenomenon, as well as about the guy at the bar.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, our Dan Rowinski is conducting a poll which casts yesterday’s announcement in baseball terms (if you want to get Dan’s attention, just insert a baseball analogy), and asks you whether Tim Cook and Phil Schiller hit it out of the park. Right now, just under two-thirds of respondents are judging it a double or less, or what my friend Angela Gunn would call a “meh.”

Let’s zoom out for a moment. These are telephones we’re talking about. Telephones, the one industrial product that stand-up comedians in the day lampooned for having less identity than a rock. In America, there was a time when only one company produced telephones for everyone. While that might seem unfair and monopolistic by today’s standards, in the Dark Ages,the general perception was that no other company in its right mind would want to manufacture a telephone.

It is entirely possible for a single company to produce a single line of boring, uninteresting, uninspired, non-innovative products for decades at a time, and all the while be a monolithic, overbearing, calcified colossus that rakes in enough cash to acquire its own country. All that’s needed are a few basic ingredients, all of which are in abundant supply. One: The willingness of lawmakers to sustain the status quo. That’s the one thing America produces in surplus. Two: General, sustained, and cultivated disinterest. This is a product that American media produces with both skill and aplomb. All we need to do is repeat and repeat and repeat the same waves of headlines countless times... well, really six or seven times, before the whole topic becomes muted and colorless. To help you out with this, we’ll actually be glad to tell you when a topic is now uninteresting and thoroughly consumed, when we’re kinda bored by it all, and when things are no longer, to borrow from Paris Hilton’s extensive vocabulary, hot.

With Steve Jobs no longer available to voice his objections, there’s absolutely nothing to stop Apple from following in the footsteps (or, more accurately, footstep) of the Bell System and Western Electric. Ten years from now, the iPhone 15 could be a small, flat device with rounded corners, maybe seven rows of icons instead of five, and a 3D screen whose originality of concept Apple would be contesting in court with Samsung. What would be different about this world is that, on the day of the iPhone 15’s release, there would probably not be live Web TV pictures of a guy at a microphone reading live blogs as they come in over the same Web. (I always knew CBS would be able to inject its TV knowhow into CNET, but I never thought it would be like this.)

The Revolution is Cancelled for Low Ratings

If anything is truly in danger here, it’s the business model of tech media. I know, you’re trembling at the very thought. But for once, let’s be honest: If we were truly in the business of exploring and illuminating technology, which since the dawn of humankind (way, way before 1979) has always been about incremental improvements, then we’d be merrily dissecting the details of yesterday’s announcement and reporting on such things as the accuracy of the new algorithm that improves results in iTunes search, the mechanics of the lens that enables automatic panorama, and the relative ruggedness of the new Micro SIM card in heavy 4G usage areas.

We’d be the ones called boring instead of the products we cover or their manufacturers. That's OK with me. As my friends all know, I’d rather be dull and right.

A good part of the reason the behemoth of the Bell System no longer looms over us, and that telephones are the stuff of headlines today, is because interested journalists in the 1970s and 1980s investigated the pre-established mechanisms, legal entanglements and cultural dynamics that sustained a business model predicated upon lack of innovation. People became interested in these things because journalists became interested. Journalists sparked curiosity.

And now we have a colossal company whose business model is based on innovation itself... controlled innovation. Strategic, decisive, measured, well-delivered change on the company’s own terms. From the vantage point of history, the fact that the step from iPhone 4S to iPhone 5 is as incremental and measured as it is, can be seen as a monumental achievement and a victory for free enterprise.

Think of it: It doesn’t really have to be all that different to be the most desirable thing on the planet.

If no one’s throwing a party, it’s because the tech press has become so jaded by the long lines and dramatic premieres that we have based our own business model around its continuation.

Here’s a news flash: Histrionic iPhone events may not be a permanent engagement. Apple will still be here, though we may not. And that won’t be Apple’s fault. Apple is not our mommy. If we want the more everyday and even mundane affairs of this business to be interesting to you, then we need to poke Pause on our Netflix, get out of bed, and while we’re writing cute headlines, think about taking a moment to add a story to them.

Real technology is less like a strip club and more like history. It’s a non-stop process. The smallest details don't always stay small for long.

The formal release of the final Windows Server 2012 this week sets up Microsoft for a showdown in the enterprise datacenter with its newly re-armored arch rival VMware. At issue is whether an operating system based on a consumer-grade client belongs in a server that runs thousands of virtual machines at one time. 

Microsoft has not entered this battle unprepared. Small, mobile devices are the drivers of technology stories.  Platforms are the drivers of technology.  At the heart of Microsoft’s core marketing strategy for the past quarter-century has been faith that its ability to deliver a solid platform will secure its future as a software provider for devices, and vice versa.

From the perspective of device users, there appear to be two operating environments, and the crux of competition is therefore seen as an epic battle between Linux and Windows. This is about as accurate a picture of the data center as anyone’s perspective of Russia from his or her own front porch in Alaska. In reality, Linux and Windows Server are both common components of networked computing environments. We rely on both.

The Real War

In recent years, Linux has found its place as a bedrock foundation for network computing platforms. It’s small, carries less baggage, and is highly adaptable. Windows Server is, by comparison, bulky, although since 2010, its less graphically dependent Server Core option has rapidly gained favor, especially now that it can be managed from the command line using PowerShell.  But every modern data center today uses virtualized workloads, because they’re more efficient, easier to manage, safer and more secure. Virtualization is the key to cloud computing – the addition of a layer of abstraction between software and hardware, so that applications run in an environment that is not constrained by operating parameters or location.

Windows Server vs. Linux is no longer the battle of the century, except perhaps in some comic book drawn by kids who wouldn’t know a data center if it abducted them from their parents’ basements. True, Microsoft is waging a market battle against Red Hat, but it’s not for control of the bedrock operating system of server processors. And Red Hat isn’t even the most awesome competitor here. That would be VMware, whose new CEO Pat Gelsinger hails from Intel, and who comprehends the dynamics of processors and their operating systems as thoroughly as any executive of any company, anywhere.

Gelsinger has thrown down a guantlet that aims to obliterate the present data center model, replacing it with components that render the processor OS either immaterial or non-existent. Windows Server would retain its strengths as a staging environment for critical business applications like SharePoint and Exchange, and systems like SQL Server. But that would be a tenuous position for Microsoft: remaking the image of Windows Server from a grounded platform to a floating raft, riding the waves generated by VMware and its growing network of partners.

While Microsoft would love to be able to own and operate the metaphor of floating on a cloud, it can’t afford to be perceived as floating on anything right now. So although the company did invoke its "Cloud OS" moniker (not really a trademark), during the formal premiere of Windows Server 2012, it had to present itself as rooted, as strengthening its own foundation, as extending the number of reasons why existing businesses should refrain from either investing in VMware virtualization platforms or experimenting with real cloud OSes - one of which happens to be produced by VMware.

"We built Windows Server 2012 with the cloud OS in mind," remarked Bill Laing, Microsoft’s corporate VP for server and cloud, in a video released Tuesday. That’s a very carefully phrased metaphor - a bit like saying you’re cooking something with a meal in mind, as opposed to cooking a meal.

"Microsoft runs some of the world’s largest data centers and Internet-scale services," Laing continued. "This uniquely positions Microsoft to pour all of that learning into our products, test them at scale and use our unparalleled experience in transforming data centers to address the needs and pressures of this new era of IT."

The Package And The Payload

Laing went on to correctly define the modern data center as a provider of resources through services that are scalable to suit varying workloads, that can be pooled or shared so that they transcend location, that are perpetually available and backed up, and that can be effectively automated. That much is preaching to the crowd. But for Microsoft to reserve a place for itself at the table, it needs Windows Server 2012 to be a delivery vehicle for critical components of the data center, in a manner that parallels how Windows 7 and Windows 8 are, effectively, delivery vehicles for Office. 

By "delivery vehicle," I mean something that is delivered to the data center, that roots Windows Server in its existing location and hopefully lets it expand from there. In this case, there are two somethings in particular:

• Hyper-V is Microsoft’s hypervisor component - the part that enables an operating system (which can be scaled down to Server Core size) to run any number of virtual machines on behalf of clients. To that end, Server 2012 expanded Hyper-V’s statistical maximum capabilities dramatically: 320 logical processors per server, and up to 64 virtual processors per virtual machine (imagine an OS that thinks it’s running on quad-quad-quad core) with up to 1TB of addressable memory per VM. VMware’s ESX statistics may be comparable - assuming you want to go through the trouble of comparison, which requires fathoming that company’s arcane licensing model.  While VMware holds the overall market share lead in virtualization, Microsoft continues to exploit its advantage with smaller businesses, seeding them with Hyper-V and growing them into customers the way it’s done before with SharePoint and SQL Server

.

• Windows Azure (probably just "Azure" at some point) is Microsoft’s public cloud, whose principal role has now officially changed from a Platform-as-a Service (PaaS) provider of .NET Framework services in the cloud, to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) host for virtual Windows machines.  All Windows Server 2012 systems will include the ability to migrate workloads to the Azure public cloud, which does make Server 2012 to some degree a "cloud OS." If Microsoft has one critical advantage over its competition, it’s the ability to introduce new capabilities to customers in small doses. Some folks are liable to try this out just to see what it does, whereas there’s no possibility of that happening with any other brand that requires a sizable up-front investment. Meanwhile, developers will continue to be able to deploy applications to Azure on a pay-for-use basis.

One important and impressive addition to Windows Server 2012 is worth noting here: By enabling virtual subnets that span geographies, you can create single subnet loops that span geographies. This way, if you have two data centers in different cities, you can live migrate a virtual machine between those data centers just as if they were situated right next to each other. VMware may offer similar capabilities - it’s not as though Microsoft invented this.  But what you have to pay to get it with ESX is a significant talking point.

No Two Windows Servers Are Alike

In any discussion of server operating systems, one underappreciated aspect has been their roles. When Microsoft began endowing Windows Server 2003 with roles, it was with the notion that servers ran services the way clients ran applications. You want the server to do more, you run more services. You want more services, you add more servers. In those early days, the server operating system was somewhat monolithic. Today, think of roles like building blocks. When you select roles in installing Windows Server 2012, you’re assembling elements of the operating system. Different sets of roles make for a different operating system.

That fact is important in this context for the following reason: By successfully producing a single delivery vehicle for any number of various server roles, Microsoft has positioned Windows Server to compete with many tiers of products on many levels: against VMware and Citrix XenServer for virtualization, for instance, and against Red Hat for infrastructure and databases. This makes Windows Server one of Microsoft’s most successful and most critical strategic assets. It also places the operating system in a very tenuous position, because this capability centers around the notion that admins install it first. If admins install something else first, the game is over.

Almost nothing is challenging Windows Server’s qualifications to serve as an application host. But that’s not where the payoff is.  For Microsoft to secure a permanent place for Windows Server 2012 in the data center over the next four years, it needs to make the case that scalability and versatility are not only feasible but practical with Server 2012 on the ground floor. If Bill Laing takes a trip to the ground floor anytime soon, though, he’s likely to find Pat Gelsinger already waiting for him.

The basic premise of Windows To Go sounds like it escaped from an alternate universe: Now you can take Windows home with you from work, and run it on your living room PC. "That’s crazy," you might respond, "it’s already on my living room PC!" But this is Windows 8, which is so, so different that the ability to create take-home, bootable OS instances on a thumb drive actually makes sense in a number of important ways. Ironically, though, Windows To Go isn't really about Windows 8 at all. It’s about the benefits of getting Windows into a space that used to be too tight for it to fit - and also an experimental, bottom-up approach to implementing tighter network security.

Easily the biggest threat to businesses’ network security has come from their employees’ ability to connect their PCs to corporate networks, both directly and remotely. Most unwanted activity derives from the outside, which is partly why typical security models adopt the “fortress mentality” ­­– a scheme which is largely incompatible with openness of cloud computing. Similarly, the trend toward Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work was intended to save on capital expenditures, but somne companies end up spending the savings on network maintenance: remediating all the malware and other unwanted content that employees bring with them.

So Windows To Go is an experiment in what Microsoft calls an “alternative workplace scenario.”

The Open, Closed System

Here’s the basic premise: Businesses need to be able to manage the workspaces on which their applications are being used, but employees may not want their personal computers managed for them by their bosses. Borrowing an idea from virtualization, Windows To Go creates an environment that can be managed separately from the personal environment, letting employees lend businesses the use of their processors without signing over the deed to their computers. Employees use the business workspace while the Windows To Go thumb drive is plugged in and operating. Once it’s removed, the computer resumes being personal again.

The Windows To Go thumb drive is something admins will have to prepare themselves; it’s not a device you buy from Microsoft. Back in 2006, Microsoft premiered a concept called Windows Image Manager (WIM) which is a system for preparing installations of Windows that already include both the policies and the software (including third-party) that businesses prescribe, so that it can be painted onto multiple users’ systems in one step like wallpaper.  With the new Windows Server 2013, admins can use this same WIM to paint Windows 8 Enterprise images onto thumb drives. So a Windows To Go image is a copy of Windows 8 that’s licensed to the business, not the employee. The worker can use it at work or at home, and it contains either the applications or access to the applications that the admin directly manages. And even if a worker does take her own PC to work with her, she can use the Windows To Go image during work hours separately from the (presumably licensed) operating system installed on that PC.

To pull this off, Windows To Go makes some very significant tradeoffs, some of which will render the whole idea a non-starter for some businesses and users.  The biggest sacrifice is that the user’s local hard disk is inaccessible from the Windows To Go environment. If there is any single way to absolutely ensure that the Windows To Go workspace doesn’t get infected by downloaded malware, it’s completely annihilating access to the local hard drive.

So where are you supposed to store documents, you may ask? A PC with Windows To Go can access the storage devices of systems in its local network.  Microsoft provided me with a Windows To Go drive using the last Windows 8 Release Preview for my own experiments. I have several PCs in my peer-to-peer office network, some with Windows 7, others with the Windows 8 Release to Manufactuing (RTM) version. Ironically, I had no trouble sharing documents with the Windows 7-based machines; the Windows 8 devices had more difficulty, in some cases with the whole notion of password-protected sharing.

In a test involving three PCs (one Windows 7, one Windows 8 RTM with OS provided by Microsoft, and the third Windows To Go), the Windows To Go machine appeared to kick the Windows 8 RTM machine out of the homegroup (more about that concept in a moment). While the Windows To Go machine was booted, the homegroup password created earlier by the Windows 7 machine was considered invalid. But once the Windows To Go machine was powered off, the same password was accepted.

It’s enough that admins have to deal with networking issues between their own PCs, without having to introduce a truckload of new issues with their colleagues’ PCs. Besides all that, assuming networking connections are not a problem, not everyone will have the luxury of more than one PC at home.

Given all that, the preferred response to the question of where you store your documents is, “In the cloud” – specifically Microsoft’s own SkyDrive. After all, Microsoft has always tried to leverage its strength in one platform to promote another. 

An Interesting Experiment

Windows To Go is most definitely an experiment (though not a terribly costly one for Microsoft) to see whether businesses have any influence over what operating system gets used at home. If admins like the idea of a controllable business environment that isn’t a virtual machine, that’s administrable through System Center or other common tools, and that’s guaranteed to be disconnected from the key delivery source for malware in businesses, they might just get employees to swallow it like candy. In turn, those employees get the new Windows 8 and probably Office 2013, plus a channel for syncing documents.

Here is where the enticement may start to fall apart, for both parties: The reason a consumer would want to try Windows 8 is to play with all its cool features, including the Windows RT apps installable from the new Windows Store. But such apps would have to be installed on the Windows To Go device, not on the PC. It’s doubtful that admins would permit users to do this.

For companies, the whole point of administrator control of business workspaces is to have control over the Desktop. Administering the Desktop, by definition, is taken to mean keeping it stable. But the Windows 8 Start Screen, which sublimates the old Desktop, is as unstable as NBC’s fall schedule. By design, it’s a bubbling cauldron of change, intended more to be cultivated like a garden than administered like a bookcase. Typical company manuals instructions like, “To launch the application, double-click on the icon in the second column of the fourth row,” are pointless for the Start Screen, whose tiles for Office apps can literally float off the screen if the user bookmarks enough pages in Internet Explorer.

Security & Reliability Are Still Issues

Believe it or not, there’s also the issue of security ­­– which was supposedly the whole point of Windows To Go's existence. Because the operating system is stored on a thumb drive – an easily copyable unit of memory – it cannot be considered a trusted device by any security system that relies on a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for authentication.  

For some business networks, that’s the ballgame; if you can’t log on from a system that doesn’t have TPM, forget it. What’s more, Microsoft’s own BitLocker – which encrypts and protects content stored on thumb drives and other removable storage ­­– prefers the presence of a TPM for authenticating its encryption keys. You can go without it, but in a TPM’s absence, Windows To Go's alternative is the use of something called a “secure password,” which these days ranks up there with “safe school” and “affordable health insurance.”

The final leg to stand on is reliability, and Windows To Go teeters here as well. A big part of Windows 8’s value proposition is synchronization, which takes place through what’s now called the Microsoft Account. When you log onto a new Windows 8 machine using an existing Account, many of the settings from the previous machine (your avatar, choice of colors, Desktop wallpaper among them) carry over. For syncing to happen reliably, each Windows 8 machine must be registered with Microsoft as “trusted.”

That’s a tall order for a device that isn’t really a machine at all. If you tell Microsoft to “trust” a Windows To Go instance as though it were a machine, and anyone were to copy that thumb drive, suddenly you’ve cloned the machine. Which one does Microsoft trust now? What’s the value of a trusted machine if any one of them may not actually be a machine, or that one could be more original than the other?

The quandary doesn’t end there. After having Microsoft officially “trust” the “machine” it loaned me, I had difficulties getting Windows To Go join the homegroup. On two occasions, after I shut down the laptop running Windows To Go, the fact that the machine with my Account wasn’t in a homegroup synced with the Windows 8 RTM tablet that was, subsequently kicked it out of the homegroup and forced me to retrain it to recognize my own network.  

You have to ask whose genius idea was it to synchronize a setting stating explicitly the lack of connectivity, over a machine that must obviously be connected in order to sync in the first place?

Why Windows To Go Matters

It’s the type of ridiculousness - with a capital “M” - that I've gotten all too used to over the decades. And yet I rank Windows To Go #4 on my Top 10 list of Windows 8 features. Am I an “oxy-moron?”

Here’s my thinking: One of Microsoft’s distinguishing features has been that it rarely quits anything after the first try. There is clearly something to the idea of giving employees a safe workspace they can hold in their hands. Windows 7 tried separating workspaces virtually with the homegroup concept – a way of separating home policies from work policies, so that unwanted content in one does not infect the other. Homegroups typically work well (at least in Windows 7-only scenarios), but because homegroups and workgroups share local hard drives, the concept is not perfect. And delivering virtual workspaces as virtual machines doesn’t change this fact.

If you could run an entire workspace without the need of the local hard drive, and without impacting performance, you could improve business network security tremendously. This is why Windows To Go is such a big deal: It could lead, eventually, to huge savings for business. User Account Control was a big deal for Vista too, and as you’ll recall, Microsoft didn’t get it right the first time or the second time. But the third time was the charm and I look forward to a similar progression for Windows To Go.

See All of the Windows Top 10 Windows 8 Features

Postponing operating system upgrades until the last possible moment, and even forestalling new PC purchases, is common among Windows veterans. Only recently has the ancient Windows XP lost its position as the most popular version of Microsoft's operating system. This attitude enabled many of us to skip over Windows Me and Vista, and there are signs that Windows 8 may get ignored in the same way. A close look at four everyday test cases for computer and tablet users reveals if that approach makes sense.

Wednesday, in How Much Will Windows 8 Matter to You, we raised the sticky and sometimes treacherous subject of moving to Windows 8. The next step is to examine common use case scenarios - four distinct places in everyday computing environments - to help ascertain when moving to Windows 8 might make sense for you. It could be October 26, the official release date. It probably won't be never.

1. Your Home Office PC

The productive work you do at home may involve Microsoft Office. If it doesn't, then it most likely involves some form of online connectivity to the apps you need to get things done and organized (perhaps Google Apps running in your browser). It might also include remote connectivity to your work office PC (which these days may be completely virtual).

The new Office 365, which enables full-featured operation over the Web, provides a compelling new licensing alternative without radically changing the Office software itself.  (One wonders why the Office team got the memo and the Windows team didn't.)  But you do not need Windows 8 to run the new Office - Windows 7, but not Windows XP and Vista, are supported. The Internet Explorer 10 browser will also be available for Windows 7, although Windows users increasingly prefer alternatives like Google Chrome or Firefox. There are actually two IE10 browsers in Windows 8, one that uses the new Windows 8 user interface (formerly known as Metro) and another that uses the traditional Windows Desktop. Remarkably, there is simply no compelling reason to use the former over the latter on a regular PC.

Windows 8 essentially signs everyone up for SkyDrive, the company's cloud-based storage and synchronization platform. While that may create several million new registrants overnight, the fact is that the synchronization market is already solidifying. The abundance of smartphones, and especially the need to sync Apple devices with non-Apple PCs, has elevated Dropbox and Box to prominence. If you are syncing, you probably use one or the other - if not exclusively, most often. SkyDrive has yet to crack this market, and it may already be too late. So although Windows 8 synchronization looks compelling, you probably will still use Box or Dropbox anyway. Thus Windows 8 loses that side of the argument as well.

However, if you use remote connectivity - especially to a virtual platform - the performance improvement in Windows 8 over Windows 7 is stunning. Microsoft has kicked out the Windows 7 virtualization layer, replacing it with architecture based on Hyper-V, which has been the virtualization layer for Windows Server. Windows 8 has clearly embraced the Core Microarchitecture enhancements in the latest Intel Core i3 and Core i5 series processors. For some intensive applications, the difference is night and day. That alone should be enough to make some folks switch to Windows 8.

2. Your Home Entertainment PC

The engine for Windows PC gaming is called DirectX. It gives programs much richer contact with the computer's graphics and sound components, bypassing the frameworks that productivity applications require. With Vista, Microsoft promised specific DirectX versions, creating an artificial chasm for game developers and threatening to leave XP users behind. Game developers refused to support it.

Microsoft won't make that mistake again. But the engine for Windows 8 tablet-style apps is called WinRT, and games that run in the new environment are expected to run in WinRT. At first, it did not appear that the two engines could be used in tandem - more to the point, that someone could make a game as rich as Halo and have it be installable through the new cloud-based Windows Store. That changed with the latest Release Preview, although  game developers have yet to fully understand, let alone embrace, what will be involved in making that work.

While Xbox Live is being built into Windows 8 and offered to folks who don't even have an Xbox, the first PC games to make use of that platform have yet to arrive. Microsoft plans to deploy the umbrella brand "Xbox Windows" for these games (just imagine the confusion that will cause in department stores). In the meantime, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and similar rich, online games already utilize their own platforms - typically built by their own manufacturers - and will likely continue to do so.

In the meantime, Xbox Windows Live for Windows (or whatever it ends up being called) lets player create their own avatars - a bit more lifelike than the "Mii" people for Nintendo Wii.

WinRT apps of all classes are tied to the new Windows 8 ecosystem, which has its own apps store. The one compelling reason why game developers might support WinRT is if this store, called "Store," becomes a viable and profitable platform. That's a tall order that can't possibly be fulfilled during the first three to six months of Windows 8's existence. A lot depends on Microsoft's willingness to incorporate a variety of other brands in its own marketing.

That requirement makes Microsoft's approach to its other co-branding entertainment platform, Windows Media Center, so baffling. Only the most experienced crafter of euphemisms could name this strategy "Making Windows Media Center Available in Windows 8." Here "available" means "absent but downloadable." Writes Windows division president Steven Sinofsky: "This ensures that customers who are interested in Media Center have a convenient way to get it." Here "interested" means "assuming you still care, because we certainly don't."

Media Center was once the nucleus of a sophisticated strategy that included such things as Microsoft-branded remote controls and the magnificent Windows Home Server. Ironically, Media Center was the product that first enlightened the company as to the potential power of the whole "Metro" style.  That Microsoft would toss Windows Media Center overboard - along with its Silverlight media plug-in technology - is bewildering, especially since it closes the company's main opportunity to demonstrate Windows 8-style sophistication and portability on a large screen.

3. Your Work PC

This is a key question. In five years, the shape and nature of the device you use in your everyday job may become unrecognizable to us today - even by Windows 8 standards.  Up to now, the work PC has been the platform that supports the applications upon which it depends. These typically come in two classes: apps engineered specifically for particular businesses, and Microsoft Office. If any other manufacturer were strong enough to mount a respectable challenge to Office, Microsoft today would be considered very vulnerable, and Windows' place in the workplace would be indeterminate.

That's not what threatens Windows at work. Instead, the issue is the new reality of how servers work and how functionality is served to employees. Cloud computing technologies have enabled data centers to pool their resources. Servers can, and often do, encompass a planet. And these servers are now presenting not so much applications as they the entire environment in which these applications run.

There is a strong argument for letting that environment continue to be Windows. First, Windows is what employees are most familiar with. Change requires retraining, and retraining can be expensive. Second, applications platforms are based around Windows.

But the same argument that sustains Windows in the workplace - especially in large enterprises - works against Windows 8 in particular, for two main reasons:

1. The platform upon which so much of business' existing functionality is based, is the .NET Framework - Windows 7's strong point. WinRT is not .NET, but a separate framework that relegates .NET to the Desktop. Training workers to reconcile these differences won't be trivial, and hard to justify because WinRT is based around consumer applications that administrators don't want running within the enterprise anyway.
2. The platform to which businesses (old and new) are moving is HTML5, whose intent is to enable uniform usability across different classes and brands of hardware and virtual platforms. Despite a pretty advertising campaign during this year's Olympics, there is no compelling value proposition for using Windows 8 and IE10 instead of any other environment capable of supporting HTML5.

That would appear to settle the argument in favor of sticking with Windows 7. But Microsoft has thrown a stick of dynamite into the mix: Windows 8 Enterprise adminstrators are given the capability to build instantly bootable Windows 8 instances on cheap Windows 8 thumb drives, then distribute those devices to their employees. An employee would plug a Windows To Go (WTG) device into any PC, get access to Windows 8, as well as any files stored on the device or on SkyDrive.

This is a serious wildcard: the creation of a kind of alternative, virtual Windows 8 platform that may not only be desirable by employees, but conceivably free. For those who thought they'd made the decision against upgrading their Windows 7 machines, they could plug in Windows 8 non-destructively (though with one serious limitation: local hard drives are inaccessible through WTG, for now, to prevent communicating a virus). If they use the new Office 365, it would not require any kind of local installation to work fully.  And administrator policies granting privileges and restrictions to users on their office PCs would still apply on the WTG device wherever they take it. 

So there actually is a compelling use case for admins to deploy WTG: the creation of a portable corporate desktop that does not have to rely on a hypervisor from VMware or XenDesktop, that's fully governed by admin policy and that employees can easily take home.

With all the talk about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as a trend affecting computing devices in the enterprise, here is an opportunity for businesses to affect computing in the home! Even if you don't think you need Windows 8 at home, a lot can change if it's literally handed to you on a stick in a way that doesn't impact the PCs you already use.

4. Your Tablet

This is the other wild card - the one upon which the real future of Windows 8 depends. The tablet is moving all of personal computing into a form factor that is lighter-weight, employs touch directly on the screen, relies on high-bandwidth mobile connectivity, relies more on services than installed apps, and uses less power.

Windows 7 does not belong on a tablet. Windows 7's usage model is simply too cumbersome for a touch-driven environment; it was designed for input devices that can right-click, double-click and scroll. This became clear two years ago, sparing Microsoft and HP the humiliation of offering Slate PCs as warmed-over Windows 7 devices. 

By the same token, many of Windows 8's usage principles are well suited to a touch screen. Placing menus outside the screen margin (for example, the main control menu on the right side) and using a finger-flick to slide them into view makes perfect sense - even if it fails when attempted on a PC with a trackpad or mouse. On a smaller display, the rows and columns of apps tiles on the Start Screen are a bit less confusing than on a larger, PC-style display (see Fredric Paul's How Windows 8 Throws Computer Users Under the Bus). The Windows 8 usage model is far from perfect, but a tablet makes it better.

In testing the new Office 365 on a Samsung Series 7 slate, I found myself relaxing and letting go of some of my anxiety about Windows 8's schizophrenic usage model. Word remains my homebase for most of the work I do, and the new Office 365 does not change Word to such a degree that it feels as foreign as the Start Screen.

I loathe Windows 8 less on a tablet. There, I said it.

Embrace and Extend Redux, Redux

This is where Microsoft's historically clever use of leverage comes into play - its uncanny ability to wangle its way onto new devices by extending the reach of its existing platform. Every Windows 8 user by definition will have a "Microsoft Account" bound to an email address. Through that account that Windows 8 automatically synchronizes not just your sharable media - like photos and music - but also your entitlements with respect to apps (for instance, the ability to use purchased apps on more than one device) and the state of your Desktop. Being able to have one Desktop move with you from machine to machine, even if not all the locally installed applications move with it, is a very attractive enticement. Once Microsoft gets everything together, including such things as browser customizations and Office 365 Web apps launching, you'll be able to log onto any Windows 8 machine anywhere and get, for the most part, your Desktop.

That makes a difference. If having Windows To Go or having a tablet with Windows 8 pre-installed works for you, then there may be reasons to also use the new operating system on your home office PC, for example.

The Vista debacle, along with other failed Microsoft experiments like the first Zune player and Windows Me, proved that it can often take two or three iterations of a grand, new idea before Microsoft gets it close to right. The difference with Windows 8 could be that the self-correction process will be easier and potentially less embarrassing for the company. There are better ways to integrate PC input methodologies with tablet input, so Microsoft can finish baking its without causing much fuss.

If the public is patient, it will wait until that cake is fully baked and covered with icing. But the public's patience is not infinite. Windows 8's first six months will be critical. After that time, we'll probably need to ask these same questions all over again.

At some point, you will need the next version of Windows. But that's down the road a ways. The question Windows users need to ask before October 26 is whether you need Windows 8 right now? The answer begins with "that depends..."

Fortunately, you may not have to worry about that question much longer. Although Windows 8 will look like a foreign city to many everyday Windows users accustomed to the way things have been since 1995, this may be the last colossal mindset shift in the operating system's history. Microsoft is moving to a service-based model of software distribution. Once enough users are on board the train - having transitioned from "customers" to "subscribers" - changes in the environment should appear more gradual. The concept of "versions of Windows," as we know them today, will be irrelevant.

In the meantime, though, Windows users have to ask themselves plenty of questions:

First Question: Why Is There Windows 8?

Before Windows 7's release three years ago, when folks asked whether they'd need Windows 7 right away, I answered, "Yes."  Then they asked, "Wait, don't you need to know what computer I have now?"  I said, "No."

Windows 7 remains the best operating system Microsoft has ever produced. It was the culmination of the company's best ideas that never came to full fruition with Vista.  But moreover, it was a vast improvement over Windows XP - which most folks were still using - in almost every department, especially security.

The philosophy shift Microsoft adopted with Win7 was so great that it still shocks people even today. One of the key reasons for Vista's market failure emerged from Microsoft's logo program - the deal that enables PC makers like Dell and HP to glue on Windows badges. That arrangment was engineered to convince consumers that they could not get a full "Vista experience" without buying entirely new systems. But customers didn't like being told they had to spend  $1,000 on stuff that, three years down the road, will be landfill.

Windows 7 broke that bargain completely: Invest in Windows 7, Microsoft said, and you will make the computer you already have better.  And it did. Even now, analysts are shocked, shocked that Microsoft is acting independently of Windows hardware makers. But Microsoft had little choice, because in a world where consumers' expectations are being defined by Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Toshiba, HTC, and oh yeah, Apple, Microsoft can't afford to make binding exclusivity agreements about the future of consumer devices with the likes of HP, Dell and Acer.

So you can see the vital need for Windows 8 to break with its manufacturer's earlier roadmap... from Microsoft's perspective.  That's not the same as yours.  The question that matters most to you is, "Do I need this system now?"

And the answer this time is not black-and-white, yes or no. Instead, it begins with, "That depends."

Second Question: Whom Does the Change Benefit More?

Does Windows 8 improve the PC you have today, the way Windows 7 did?  From a usability perspective, I would argue no.

The Windows 8 interface (no longer being called "Metro" for legal reasons) is foreign, confusing and impractical in the context of a PC. The Start Screen is the way it is because Microsoft must present a near-uniform environment for all Windows devices (PCs, tablets, smartphones and maybe even HDTVs) if it wants to sell Windows as a subscription service that individuals can use in multiple places. Windows 8 is the company's first try with that concept, and it's understandably less than perfect. 

Although it's a second-class citizen now, the Desktop remain the center of the PC work environment. This does not change with the new Office 365 - there are no Web apps in the new Windows 8-style UI. The changes people will notice most in their everyday work will still be realized on the Desktop. There are improvements to the operating system kernel in Windows 8, and there's a new and vastly improved Task Manager. But the lack of a Start menu on the Desktop, in the same place where your work is in progress, remains an issue.

Case in point: It's impossible to maintain your PC without the file manager program. The file manager - still, for inexplicable reasons called "Windows Explorer" - is launched (as of the last Release Preview) from the Desktop, specifically from the Taskbar. To move files between two locations accurately (especially between two computers on a network), folks often use two file manager windows. Since the Taskbar was last redesigned for Windows 7, clicking on the Taskbar icon activates the current file manager window. Without a Start menu, the only way to launch a second file manager on the Desktop is to right-click the icon and select "Windows Explorer" from the jump menu. Suffice it to say that Windows 8 artificially handicaps its own Desktop to make its vastly redefined Start Screen appear more convenient for those tasks it performs.

So now we have the truth: Windows 8 is about Microsoft changing its business model more than about customers changing their usage model. That's not really evil. The iPod was about Apple changing its business model and, well, that plan pretty much worked out for everyone. But if Windows 8 changes the way you work and play, will those changes at least benefit you as much as they do Microsoft? 

The response comes in multiple parts, each of which depends on where you are and what you're doing. We'll take a closer look at those issues in Part 2 of this explanation of how much Windows 8 really matters. Look for it soon.

Today's failure in the Senate to end debate on the latest cybersecurity bill and bring it to a final vote will likely mean no action on the issue until next year. And the debate over how government agencies should share critical security information with private software and services firms has resulted in splits in allegiance on both sides of the aisle: bill sponsor Sen. Joe Lieberman (I - Conn.) from the presidential candidate he supported, Sen. John McCain (R - Ariz.); and outspoken personal rights advocate Sen. Al Franken (D - Minn.) from the president he supported, Barack Obama.

A "cloture" vote requires a three-fifths majority of Senators for support, and is necessary to close debate on a bill and bring a motion for a vote to the floor. Last week, Sen. Franken introduced a major amendment to the bill that would have removed even more of Sen. Lieberman's original language, specifically on the subject of empowering ISPs to take their own countermeasures in response to assessed threats. Franken argued that the bill's current language would let ISPs act in any way they saw fit in countering a perceived threat, under the same blanket protections from prosecution as the rest of the public/private partnership. "If a company uses that power negligently to snoop in on your e-mail or damage your computer, they will be immune from any lawsuit," Franken warned.

Still, Franken voiced his support for the bill in principle, calling it "the only game in town." But apparently early this week, as the National Journal first reported, two Republican amendments to the bill that could best be described as poison pills were filed, forcing Majority Leader Harry Reid (D - Nev.)  to call the cloture vote - perhaps prematurely.

One amendment would have effectively repealed the Affordable Care Act (often called ObamaCare). Another would have declared abortion unconstitutional in the District of Columbia - both obvious non-starters for Democrats. The filing of those amendments signaled a likely stalemate of the debate process, perhaps setting aside the topic of cybersecurity itself for the next month. That's long enough for Republicans to have stalled debate on the actual bill, without the use of a filibuster, until Congress' August recess.

Perhaps sensing no other alternative, Leader Reid Tuesday called for a cloture vote. With the poison pills, Franken's amendment and a reported 47 others waiting in the wings, the vote failed 52-48, with 60 votes required for passage.

Divided Opposition

In an even clearer sign of the extent to which hairs have been split on this issue, two major privacy rights organizations - which had been united in opposition against the original Lieberman bill - took opposite sides in response to the failed cloture vote. Demand Progress hailed Sen. Franken, along with Sens. Ron Wyden (D - Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I - Vt.) for what it characterized as having acted to kill the bill. "Alongside us stands a newly strengthened corps of pro-privacy senators," stated the group's executive director, David Segal, Thursday afternoon, "whom we look forward to working with to fight any future attacks on the Internet... We'll surely need their help again."

But Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), lamented that Franken's amendment did not go through, and that a bill had not been passed giving individuals the right to sue the government if their private information is misused in the event of a cybersecurity incident. "When Congress inevitably picks up this issue again, the privacy amendments in this bill should remain the vanguard for any future bills," Richardson said. "Cybersecurity and our online privacy should not be a zero-sum game."

"Inevitable" is not an adjective that may describe any actual congressional action on the matter, and many experts don't believe debate on the bill will resume during the lame-duck session (between the elections and next January). One other possibility, pointed out Thursday by former DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Paul Rosenzweig, is that the Obama administration may execute an executive order to implement as many of the bill's principles as possible, "much as they have in other areas where Congressional inaction has frustrated them," Rosenzweig writes. If and when that happens, the resulting order may not satisfy any single senator - not Lieberman, not Reid, not Franken, certainly not McCain. But such is the case when the executive branch is made the de facto legislative branch of the country.

U.S. Capitol photo by Scott Fulton.

The U.S. Senate is about to deliberate a highly revised cybersecurity bill - one that last weekend won the endorsement of President Obama. The current version of the bill no longer contains measures that would essentially declare any device that may at some point contain critical government information - even via the public cloud - as subject to government scrutiny and protective regulations. Instead, it creates a new mechanism to deal with security for businesses that may house government data. 

In place of the language in the original bill - which had been introduced by Senator Joseph Lieberman (I - Conn.) - the new Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (CSA2012, or S.3414) would create a National Cybersecurity Council, whose key purpose would be to chair a public/private partnership for developing and implementing security principles and measures for businesses that may house government data, or that host "critical infrastructure."  The adoption of some of those measures by private agencies or contractors would be voluntary, while others would be "compulsory," which is somewhat less severe than "mandatory."  A "compulsory" requirement may conceivably be a "deal-breaker," without which the government won't do business with the firm. By comparison, "mandatory" implies the type of bond that's illegal for someone to break.

Whose Cloud Is It?

At issue are two things: One is the obligation of private companies that provide cloud services for the federal government to adhere to federally prescribed security policy. Here, the difference between a mandate and a recommendation is the same as between "illegal" and "not very nice." Second is the ability for private industries involved in any kind of cybersecurity to share information with the government in the interest of improving security, without being held liable for even the accidental disclosure of private information owned by innocent civilians. The CISPA legislation passed last April by the House of Representatives would grant immunity from prosecution for companies making such disclosures.

In an effort to win Republican support in the Senate, CSA2012 backers worked on refining their language to make similar grants. That effort was at least somewhat successful, with the announcement earlier this week of support for CSA2012 by Senator Jon Kyl (R - Ariz.), who had previously sponsored CISPA's Senate counterpart, the so-called SECURE IT bill.

But to keep Senate Democrats in line, the new language narrows the scope with which those grants would be made. It's a subtle but important distinction, so follow closely: As the bill was previously written, private industries that shared information with federal agencies that use that information for cybersecurity purposes, would be immune from prosecution. Under CSA2012, private industries that gathered information for cybersecurity purposes may share that information with the government if it obtained that information, and then used that information, for that sole purpose. Then and only then can it be held immune.

That was the clincher that got Senator Al Franken (D - Minn.), formerly an opponent of Senate cybersecurity legislation, on board with CSA2012. On the Senate floor on Thursday, Franken said, "In other words, once a company gives the government cyberthreat information, the government shouldn't be able to say, 'Hey, this email doesn't have a virus. But it does say that Michael is late on his taxes. I'm going to send that to the IRS.'"

Coordination Will Be Protected, But By Whom?

Franken also praised the new language for getting its priorities straight - for instance, by making certain that policies regarding information sharing are put in place between government and private companies first, rather than (as was conceivable under the old language) sharing the information first and deciding how it should be protected later. "Under this bill, privacy rules have to be in place on the first day that companies start giving the government information," said Franken.  "People can sue the government when it abuses its authority. And there will be recurrent, independent oversight by both the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and Inspectors General."

Opponents of previous legislative efforts - which included the President - noted the fact that the exchange of data between private industries and government must themselves be protected by cybersecurity policy. In his endorsement last week, Obama said, "We need to make it easier for the government to share threat information so critical-infrastructure companies are better prepared. We need to make it easier for these companies - with reasonable liability protection - to share data and information with government when they're attacked. And we need to make it easier for government, if asked, to help these companies prevent and recover from attacks."

Debate remains over whose policies those will be, and whether government or the private sector will be responsible for creating them. As the new bill is crafted now, using langauge that met with Franken's approval, the new Cybersecurity Council would coordinate a series of best practices, by way of an agreement "by the sector coordinating council in coordination with owners and operators, voluntary consensus standards development organizations, representatives of State and local governments, the private sector, and appropriate information sharing and analysis organizations." This would present the first-stage safety net for protecting and immunizing sharing of security data.

But later, the bill would enable any federal agency with security responsibility to raise the level of those policies from voluntary to mandatory, with respect to the agencies themselves. "A Federal agency with responsibilities for regulating the security of critical infrastructure may adopt the cybersecurity practices as mandatory requirements," the new draft reads.

If a federal agency has a contract with a private cloud service provider, and that agency's practices have just been deemed mandatory, it may yet be fuzzy whether the private firm's responsibilities have just become mandatory as well.

It's this potential loophole in the legislation that's being spotlighted by conservative activist groups opposed to the bill, including Heritage Action for America, which is associated with Rush Limbaugh's Heritage Foundation. In a statement released Tuesday, Heritage Action said, "Even though this bill makes adherence to the regulations 'voluntary,' the regulatory footprint imposed by this bill would still be too cumbersome and include too many unknowns to adequately protect the industry from an attack without damaging the Internet industry itself. Although it is marginally better than a fully mandatory paradigm of regulations, it would leave open the strong possibility of individual agencies making their regulations binding."

Damned If You Do...

At the opposite end of the debate, Senator Franken (who once famously declared Limbaugh "a big, fat idiot") indicated today that CSA2012 as currently crafted may yet grant federal agencies too much authority to act in concert with service providers to deploy security "countermeasures."  As currently written, the bill reads, "The Secretary [of Homeland Security] may enter into contracts or other agreements, or otherwise request and obtain the assistance of, private entities that provide electronic communication or information security services to acquire, intercept, retain, use, and disclose communications and other system traffic or to deploy countermeasures in accordance with this subsection."

Franken said he will offer amendments before the Senate floor that would strike this and other provisions, which he said would "give ISPs and other companies a brand new right to monitor communications and to deploy countermeasures. That right is very broad. So broad that if a company uses that power negligently to snoop in on your e-mail or damage your computer, they will be immune from any lawsuit."

But President Obama indicated earlier that it would not look favorably on any amendment that would result in, as a White House statement put it, "weakening the statutory authorities of the Department of Homeland Security to accomplish its critical infrastructure protection mission." That could mean efforts to give the bill more Democrat support could cost it the backing of the Democratic president.

Ironically, the passage of such an amendment might appeal to a previously outspoken opponent of the bill, Senator John McCain (R - Ariz.), who remains on record as saying DHS is not the right agency to manage a cybersecurity council. Senator McCain would prefer the National Security Agency, which answers to the Dept. of Defense. While the NSA is said to already have critical security measures in place, it isn't always clear what those are. And Democrats - including Franken - are opposed to aligning any private partnership with a branch of the military.

Just as ironically, on record as supporting Franken and Senate Democrats in that opposition is the NSA itself. Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, told a Senate Armed Services panel last March that included McCain, "I do not believe we want NSA or the military inside of our networks watching them."

So the new, improved Senate cybersecurity bill is likely to garner opposition from someone, somewhere, no matter where it heads from here.  If it's any consolation, the likelihood of its reconciliation with the already passed House CISPA bill is next to nothing, unless House leadership changes hands after the fall elections.

"Big Data" is the technology that is supposedly reshaping the data center. Sure, the data center isn't as fun a topic as the iPad, but without the data center supplying the cloud with apps, iPads wouldn't nearly as much fun either. Big Data is also the nucleus of a new and growing industry, injecting a much-needed shot of adrenaline in the business end of computing. It must be important; in March President Obama made it a $200 million line item in the U.S. Federal Budget. But what the heck is Big Data?

With hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars behind it, with billions in capital and operating expenditures invested in it, and with a good chunk of ReadWriteWeb's space and time devoted to it, well, you'd hope that we all pretty much knew what Big Data actually was. But a wealth of new evidence, including an Oracle study reported by RWW's Brian Proffitt last week, a CapGemini survey uncovered by Sharon Fisher also last week, and now a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by SAP, all indicate a disturbing trend: Both businesses and governments may be throwing money at whatever they may think Big Data happens to be. And those understandings may depend on who their suppliers are, who's marketing the concept to them and how far back they began investigating the issue.

That even the companies investing in Big Data have a relatively poor understanding of it may be blamed only partly on marketing. To date, the Web has done a less-than-stellar job at explaining what Big Data is all about. "The reality is, when I looked at these survey results, the first thing I said was, wow.  We still don't have people who have a common definition of Big Data, which is a big problem," said Steve Lucas, executive vice president for business analytics at SAP.

The $500 Million Pyramid

The issue is that many companies are just now facing the end of the evolutionary road for traditional databases, especially now that accessibility through mobile apps by thousands of simultaneous users has become a mandate. The Hadoop framework, which emerged from an open source project out of Yahoo and has become its own commercial industry, presented the first viable solution. But Big Data is so foreign to the understanding customers have already had about their own data centers, that it's no wonder surveys are finding their strategies spinning off in various directions.

"What I found surprising about the survey results was that 18% of small and medium-sized businesses under $500 million [in revenue] per year think of Big Data as social- and machine-generated," Lucas continued. "Smaller companies are dealing with large numbers of transactions from their Web presence, with mobile purchases presenting challenges for them. Larger companies have infrastructure to deal with that. So they’re focused ... on things like machine-generated data, cell phones, devices, sensors, things like that, as well as social data."

Snap Judgment

Harris asked 154 C-level executives from U.S.-based multi-national companies last April a series of questions, one of them being to simply pick the definition of "Big Data" that most closely resembled their own strategies. The results were all over the map. While 28% of respondents agreed with "Massive growth of transaction data" (the notion that data is getting bigger) as most like their own concepts, 24% agreed with "New technologies designed to address the volume, variety, and velocity challenges of big data" (the notion that database systems are getting more complex).  Some 19% agreed with the "requirement to store and archive data for regulatory and compliance," 18% agreed with the "explosion of new data sources," while 11% stuck with "Other."

All of these definition choices seem to strike a common theme that databases are evolving beyond the ability of our current technology to make sense of it all.  But when executives were asked questions that would point to a strategy for tackling this problem, the results were just as mixed.

When SAP's Lucas drilled down further, however, he noticed the mixture does tend to tip toward one side or the other, with the fulcrum being the $500 million revenue mark. Companies below that mark (about 60% of total respondents), Lucas found, are concentrating on the idea that Big Data is being generated by Twitter and social feeds. Companies above that mark may already have a handle on social data, and are concentrating on the problem of the wealth of data generated by the new mobile apps they're using to connect with their customers - apps with which the smaller companies aren't too familiar yet.

"That slider scale may change the definition above or below that $500 million in revenue mark for the company based on their infrastructure, their investment, and their priorities," Lucas said. "They also pointed out that the cloud is a critical part of their Big Data strategy. I took that as a big priority."

Final Jeopardy

So what's the right answer? Here is an explanation of "Big Data" that, I believe, applies to anyone and everyone:

Database technologies have become bound by business logic that fails to scale up. This logic uses inefficient methods for accessing and manipulating data. But those inefficiencies were always masked by the increasing speed and capability of hardware, coupled with the declining price of storage. Sure, it was inefficient, but up until about 2007, nobody really noticed or cared.

The inefficiencies were finally brought into the open when new applications found new and practical uses for extrapolating important results (often the analytical kind) from large amounts of data. The methods we'd always used for traditional database systems could not scale up. Big Data technologies were created to enable applications that could scale up, but more to the point, they addressed the inefficiencies that had been in our systems for the past 30 years - inefficiencies that had little to do with size or scale but rather with laziness, our preference to postpone the unpleasant details until they really became bothersome.

Essentially, Big Data tools address the way large quantities of data are stored, accessed and presented for manipulation or analysis. They do replace something in the traditional database world - at the very least, the storage system (Hadoop), but they may also replace the access methodology.

The world once debated whether Internet Explorer's dominance in Web browsers was fair in the wake of Microsoft's conduct against Netscape. As part of its 2009 settlement with the European Union, Microsoft offered to give new Windows users in Europe a choice of default browsers, rather than just leave them with Internet Explorer and make them manually install any alternatives. At the time, one objection to this plan came from one of the very organizations whose objections to Microsoft's conduct led to the settlement in the first place. The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) alleged that the choice itself would be perceived by users as an annoyance at best, and at worst, a threat.

The ECIS may have been right.

Tuesday's revelation that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in Europe omitted the browser ballot for 17 months - without anyone raising a fuss - suggests that users may have been better off without it anyway. As Brian Proffitt reported yesterday for RWW, Microsoft indicated to antitrust representatives of the European Commission (the upper house of the EU parliament) that the ballot was present in Win7 SP1, when in fact it was not.

European Commission Vice President Joaquin Almunia Tuesday morning continued to take credit for the success of the browser ballot initiative as though it existed. "To avoid the tying of Internet Explorer... in December 2009, the Commission made legally binding on Microsoft a commitment to make available a 'choice screen' enabling users of Windows in the EU to easily choose their preferred browser," Almunia told reporters in Brussels. "This decision, therefore, put Microsoft under an obligation to provide the choice screen to European Windows users until 2014. This has proved very effective when implemented: It gave consumers a real choice to use the product that most suited their needs."

No Effect From Choice Screen?

But evidence from one of the world's leading analytics firms suggests Google Chrome's rise to Europe's number one renderer of Web pages was not impacted by the ballot screen's absence. StatCounter's continuing measurement of which browsers render Europe's HTML pages, conducted since before the EC okayed Microsoft's settlement terms, suggests that the decline in IE's usage share for Web page rendering continued at an even pace even after the choice screen was neglected.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share

It's important to take into account how StatCounter measures usage share (which is often inaccurately confused with "market share"). StatCounter does not count the number of installed browsers. Rather, it tracks browsers that identify themselves as clients rendering requested Web pages. (StatCounter recently made an adjustment in its scoring process, to take account of the fact that Chrome pre-renders pages that are linked to the visible page - a fact which had previously given Chrome an undeserved edge.) So among the top five browser brands in Europe for June 2012, Google Chrome (all versions) now stands tied with Mozilla Firefox (all versions), each rendering 30% of the continent's pages. IE (all versions) is responsible for 28.19% of Europe's page rendering.

A Complex Failure

To say that the Windows 7 SP1 installation process failed to include the browser ballot is slightly misleading. In fact, the installer never did contain the browser ballot, but instead pointed to the site browserchoice.eu where the ballot is hosted by Microsoft in concert with the EC. Rather than be led by a Microsoft-managed process, browserchoice.eu was originally intended to be an independent service run on Microsoft's dollar.

The site displays links to the top five browsers, as well as to seven more (when you scroll right), along with advertisements for those browsers, in a random order. The decision to randomize was made after Mozilla suggested that the original order (alphabetical by manufacturer) would have been deferential to Apple, which releases Safari. Even the formula used to randomize that order came under suspicion when IBM software engineer Rob Weir, in private testing, discovered that the algorithm Microsoft chose for shuffling browsers' positions on the ballot was unfair - ironically - to IE.

Separately, there were whispers of a conspiracy by Microsoft to monopolize the browser screen by effectively giving some of the seven "secondary" browsers (the ones you see when you scroll to the right) the IE rendering engine, enabling them to report themselves as IE to services like StatCounter. The belief that the browser choice screen may actually have been a subliminal ad for IE triggered a grassroots movement by some in IT to disable the patch that delivered the link, including through the use of registry hacks.

Waste of Energy?

All of this is trumped by the realization today that the ballot never made much of a difference to users in the first place. Usually Windows service packs include "roll ups" of patches that were released heretofore. Win7 SP1 for Europe may have omitted KB976002, the patch that contains the browserchoice.eu link, which was distributed to all Windows users.

Almunia stated that the EC is opening formal proceedings against Microsoft for essentially failing to include the link as part of the rollup. But that failure actually might not have precluded all Windows 7 SP1 users from seeing the link. Conceivably, they could have downloaded KB976002 as part of their regular updates, for the reason that it was not included in SP1. Thus, European users may have actually been shown the ballot anyway, even though the SP1 process omitted it, by virtue of an online check that may have taken place once the local installation process was concluded.

The amazing thing is the revelation that apparently nobody actually knows whether users got the ballot or didn't. Although Microsoft is ultimately responsible for the truth of its own statements to the European Commission, conceivably the EC could have easily checked on the relative popularity of the site using its own means, had it bothered to do so. Some factors regarding the site's popularity (which is arguably quite low) are, and have been, in the public record.

Windows 7 Ascendant

During the browser ballot's absence, Windows 7 was surpassing Windows XP to become the operating system behind the browsers rendering more than half of Europe's Web pages, according to StatCounter's estimate for last month.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Operating System Market Share

The statistics seem to indicate that the precipitous rise in Chrome's usage share is attributable not to the kind of filtration the browser ballot was intended to achieve, but rather out of users' free will. It will be interesting to see whether investigators take note of whether users now choose Chrome because they like it better or, as one Mozilla engineer suggested in 2010, because users confuse Chrome for Google itself.

Put another way, if Microsoft owes the public restitution for IE's preferential treatment in 2009, what does Google owe the same public in 2012? And suppose Google were made to give the public a choice... Would anyone notice?

Let's be clear about what was unveiled Monday afternoon by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in San Francisco: It wasn't Office 2013 - not really. That would be the conventionally installed software application that could now be described as "offline mode." Rather, what Ballmer demonstrated was Office 365 incorporating what it should have had to begin with: Office apps running fully as services - not from the hard drive but from the cloud - and looking nearly identical to their conventional counterparts, which will from now on be offered as fallback options.

The Rise of "Office as a Service"

Office 365 began this time last year as an evolutionary mode of licensing the existing Office 2010 software on a monthly basis like a service, with Office Web Apps being added as a placeholder for the fuller online editing functionality users would expect. What Office 365 is now becoming - and indeed, what it should become - is the way to buy Office in the 21st century.

"That's what it means to say Office is designed as a service: You can just click, and start running Office immediately from the service," Ballmer told a packed room full of journalists, analysts and customers. "Office uses the cloud to remember what you were doing and where you were, and what your preferences and favorites are, your documents, and how you're working together with other people... We need to support that for people in their... private lives, in addition to supporting enterprises in their business persona."

Like Windows, Office must satiate several customer groups simultaneously, even though their requirements are vastly different. What has maintained Office's dominance in the enterprise up to this point (despite the negative reception to the Ribbon to Office 2007) is its relative consistency and reliability through the years - a huge issue for the traditional desktop computer user. If Microsoft were truly to fundamentally rethink the architecture and mission of its Office apps, devising a model as starkly different from its predecessor as the Windows 8 Start Screen is from the Windows 7 Start Menu, then users in large numbers might simply refuse to upgrade.

The Beginning of the End of Office Web Apps

One possible way to play to all parties might be for Microsoft to redress Office apps in different forms - conceivably, as phone apps, Web apps, Metro-style apps (for Windows 8) and Desktop apps. Microsoft began experimenting with this Medusa-like idea in 2010, with its original Office 365 strategy for the first generation of Office Web Apps.

Office Web Apps were never intended to be as functional as their locally installed counterparts. Instead, they were miniaturized versions of Office apps that recognized existing Office Open XML documents, but could not always create new ones, that saved those documents to Microsoft's cloud-based SkyDrive storage, and that triggered the launch of real Office apps once they reached the limits of their power. In lieu of full applications, the Web Apps seemed to remind competitors of what Microsoft could eventually do in this space.

Surprisingly, in their roles as scarecrows, Office Web Apps were successful, driving otherwise attractive competitors such as Adobe's Buzzword into similarly sidelined roles as online accessories to Acrobat. Amazingly, because Office Web Apps behaved as minor league players, Microsoft's competitors responded with minor league strategies. Google Apps have never nearly been as functional or reliable as conventional Office apps, though they were arguably superior to Office Web Apps. When Google geared its Google Drive storage essentially for Google Apps, it was perceived as a bundling maneuver more characteristic of the old Microsoft.

But bundling works best when an unknown or otherwise undesirable product is bundled with an absolute necessity, such as an operating system - and Google Apps is far from a staple of the enterprise. With its stale usage model, unreliable synchronization and security, and its new reliance upon a service that's not as flexible as Dropbox or Box, Google Apps is vulnerable. That vulnerability could be exploited by a reliable, proven product that merely relocates itself from the hard disk to the cloud without a great deal of tumult.

Uncharted Waters

So despite Ballmer's characterization of the new Office 365 as a fundamental rethinking of Office, it obviously is not. And in the real world, that's actually a good thing. If and when Office fully morphs into Software-as-a-Service, it must still retain its identity. But Monday's demonstration leaves open many questions about when Microsoft will make the hard choices to change what must still be changed about Office, if it is to truly embrace the "modern office" that Ballmer described:

• The place of Outlook (above) as a communications tool makes more sense in a more hard-wired, 2000s-style client/server environment, where Exchange is but one server, and all accounts are maintained by one PC. This is clearly not the way people want to communicate today, even if Outlook forces them to do so. Adding more Facebook and Skype to Outlook merely adds more hard-wiring to the existing wiring. That's contrary to the ideal expressed in today's demonstrations, where Office Division VP Kirk Koenigsbauer showed working with Word in Office 365 on one machine, suspending it, and picking up the same document at the same point on another machine later on. Outlook is the least portable of the Office apps, and nothing exemplifies that fact more clearly than the new, revised SharePoint (below), which uses a flexible, social communications stream that surprisingly takes more than a few cues from Salesforce.

• The divisions between Office applications make less sense in the modern office. While OneNote has been rethought with a more Metro-style-like approach to the arrangement of tabs and the flexibility of inputs, these arguably good ideas should actually be incorporated into Word, which could make the best use of them.

• PowerPoint has perhaps gone the longest without any significant upgrade, and it was a pleasant surprise to see PowerPoint getting the biggest makeover. But in a world where clients and audiences are expecting video and animation to be the foundations of presentations - not just attachments - it was disturbing to see the PowerPoint document still portrayed as a slideshow. In 2013, Apple is likely to push consumer-grade video presentation to new levels, making PowerPoint look like a dinosaur.

• As willing as Microsoft appears to be to incorporate multitouch as a guiding theme, and as much as Windows 8 is adopting rows and columns as its main design ethic, it's remarkable that Excel - our last solid connection to computing in the 1980s - remains essentially a keyboard-driven ledger sheet. Even the name "PivotTable" cries out for the type of tactile, touch-sensitive functionality that Microsoft is building into other less-needed areas of the software suite.

• The phrase "Windows Phone 8" was brought up several times in discussion. However, the functionality that Koenigsbauer demonstrated smacked of an "Office Web Apps-like" approach - a placeholder for where future functionality should appear, once Microsoft gets around to it. We've been expecting a licensing model that lets Office 365 subscribers use Office, or some respectable form of it, on their Windows Phone 8 devices. But for it to truly qualify as Office, it needs to be more comprehensive than merely enabling the user to check SkyDrive (as in Koenigsbauer's demo shown above) to make sure one's documents are still there.

Still, Microsoft's next move with Office needed to be measured and well-orchestrated - and avoid giving business users the feeling of being shoved into a new and bewildering universe.  Thus far, Microsoft seems to be navigating that narrow canyon carefully but smoothly with the new Office 365. If businesses move to the new licensing model without executives and employees complaining about the high cost of change in the enterprise, and without the same level of "disruption" we love to see in the consumer space, then this strategy will have succeeded. The trick will be to convince consumers their worlds are being completely made over... when they're really not.

Lead photo by Fredric Paul for ReadWriteWeb.