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Enterprise 2.0 Conference Preview: Harnessing The Web Transformation(TechwebNews.com Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) InformationWeek Daily - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 Windows 7 Will Be A Lightly Tweaked Windows Vista Last week, Microsoft gave a teeny, tiny bit of information about the successor to Windows Vista, currently named Windows 7. There wasn't a lot of real meaty data in its disclosures, but it said enough to reset any expectations you might have that Windows 7 would be a radical departure from Windows Vista. The biggest clue about the necessarily modest goals of Windows 7 is the time frame. In the team blog, Chris Flores says it's "still on track to ship approximately three years after the general availability of Windows Vista." Since Vista became available in November 2006 for businesses and January 2007 for consumers, the company has a few months of leeway built into that goal. However, Vista has been a slow seller. Microsoft would be best served financially by having Windows 7 ready by the 2009 holiday season. That would mean Windows 7 needs to be wrapped up by September 2009 so that OEMs can test and preload systems for retail sale. Here we are in June 2008, about 18 months from that date, and Microsoft hasn't shown its Windows 7 work to the public so far. We knew a lot more about Vista when it was 18 months from ship -- of course, that was because it slipped several times so we didn't know it was 18 months away at the time. If Microsoft really wants to meet that date while still providing a product that's faster and more compatible than Vista, it doesn't have a time to add major new features. Windows 7 will not be nearly as disruptive as Vista was to XP. So what will be in Windows 7? We can expect to see a few new trimmings such as Internet Explorer 8.0, and probably a new version of Media Player. There will be an obligatory new default UI theme so that users will know they're not running XP or Vista. The most important changes will probably be tweaks to excise the bloat and performance hiccups that Vista introduced into the Windows foundation. Perhaps Microsoft will finally provide some tools that help users and developers determine which software and drivers are clogging the system; they got tantalizingly close to that with Vista's performance event logging, but it requires too much sleuthing to connect the dots and find the culprit. The development of Vista was a major a nightmare for Microsoft; it started out with incredibly ambitious goals and ended up totally resetting those goals in the middle of the process. It cannot afford to let that happen again. The best way to guarantee a firm ship date is to set modest goals for Windows 7 and avoid risky features or major changes to the operating system. Vista may not be as far from that goal as it appears; Windows Server 2008 is built on the same foundation but is much faster. The success or failure of Windows 7 will depend on how well Microsoft does those tweaks. Thoughts? Comments? Leave them here. Dave [email protected] "It's the first time I've really changed my career since I was 17 years old." -- Bill Gates, in his last keynote as a full-time Microsoft employee Enterprise 2.0 Conference Preview: Harnessing The Web Transformation Get ready for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston June 9 - 12. where attendees will get an up-close look at how SaaS and Cloud Computing, Search 2.0, and social networking in the enterprise are reinventing the way companies do business. An Evening in the CloudSponsored by Amazon, BungeeLabs Monday, June 9, 2008, 5:30-8:30pm " Boston The organizers of Enterprise 2.0 invite you to join them for a FREE evening event during which Amazon and other purveyors of cloud-based computing will publicly pitch you and your peers on the idea of running all of your IT -- yes, all of it -- in the cloud. RSVP here. Q&A With Thomas Harpointner: Should Smaller Businesses Kiss The Post Office Goodbye? Rising stamp costs may make smaller businesses think twice about going to the post office. Online advertising expert Thomas Harpointner explains when it's still necessary to make the trip and when to avoid it at all costs. Acer, MSI Launch Ultra-Portable Notebooks Powered By Intel's Atom The sub-$500 mobile Internet devices will be available with Windows XP or Linux. In Crowded Field, Web Video Provider Veoh Grabs New Funding Veoh offers a Web platform that allows users to find and watch video content from major studios and TV networks, user-generated clips, and independent productions. Gamers Like In-Game Ads, Claims Microsoft For example, among the gamers who remembered Adidas ads placed by Massive in 2K Sports' "Major League Baseball 2K7," 73% said the ads enhanced the realism of the game. Verizon Offers Free Tools To Improve Child Safety On Internet The parental controls can block objectionable content, filter applications, and limit time spent on Internet activities. Starbucks Offers Free WiFi For Rewards Card Holders Customers receive free Internet access and coffee discounts in exchange for giving Starbucks detailed data about their purchasing preferences. Apple Launches Back-To-School Promotion Customers would first need to buy a Mac and the 8 GB model of either the iPod Touch or iPod Nano and get up to a $299 rebate. Cyberbullying Conference Fights For Online Victims Tina Meier, present at the New York City conference, knows there's little she can do about the suicide of her 13-year-old daughter Megan, except embark on a crusade to protect other children. E-Commerce Sites Need A Wireless Selling Strategy Cisco finds that using cell phones as a purchasing point offers a major growth opportunity for retailers. Time Warner Cable To Test Metered Internet Access Time Warner Cable may start charging customers $1 for each gigabyte of content they download from the Internet over a specified allotment. Windows XP To Live On Aboard Cheap Desktops, Microsoft Says The move would allow system vendors to preload the Home edition of Windows XP on nettops through June 2010, or about one year after Windows 7 becomes available. Bill Gates Gives Last Big Speech Before Leaving Full-Time Microsoft Role "It's the first time I've really changed my career since I was 17 years old," Gates told a crowd of software developers at Microsoft's TechEd conference. Yahoo Opposed Google Deal Before Microsoft Bid Yahoo executives dismissed a search-advertising deal with Google due to antitrust concerns, one day before Microsoft made its takeover offer earlier this year, according to court documents made public on Monday. All Our Latest News See InformationWeek's daily breaking news on your mobile device, visit mobile.informationweek.com and sign up for daily SMS notifications. Acer, MSI Launch Ultra-Portable Notebooks Powered By Intel's Atom In Crowded Field, Web Video Provider Veoh Grabs New Funding Gamers Like In-Game Ads, Claims Microsoft Verizon Offers Free Tools To Improve Child Safety On Internet Starbucks Offers Free WiFi For Rewards Card Holders Virtualization At The Desktop? Examine how more than 250 companies plan to adopt server virtualization technology in this recent InformationWeek Research report, Server Virtualization. The BI Explosion Examine the business intelligence strategies of 500 companies, including deployment drivers and challenges, spending plans, and vendor selection, in this recent InformationWeek Research report. More Than A CIO: Piling On Operations HSBC North America, "the world's local bank," according to its tagline, has promoted(?) its CIO to something called a Chief Technology and Services Officer. I'm all for CIOs taking on more responsibilities, but isn't there a limit? Twitter Management Stood Me Up I was all excited to do an interview with the Twitter management team this afternoon, but the appointed time came and went and they didn't show up when they said they would. They were unavailable. This is ironic because one of the points of the interview was going to be Twitter's unreliability and unavailability over the past few weeks. Why Does Carl Icahn Think He Should Play A Role In Shaping The Future Of Tech Giants? I am sorry, but is this guy the biggest egomaniac ever? The activist investor, cum corporate raider not only fiddled with the fate of Motorola, but now he is seeking the removal of Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang. Will Icahn ever stop? Goosh: A Command Shell For Google, By Gosh At first I thought this was a nerdy joke, but I played with it a couple of minutes and by gosh it looks useful: Goosh is a Unix-like command line for Google. Type in any of about 20 different commands, and Goosh returns the output from Google. Type web microsoft and Goosh returns search results on the Web for Microsoft, ordered by number - enter any number to go to the corresponding Web page. wiki microsoft returns a Wikipedia search, video Microsoft returns a video search, and so forth. Supreme Court Backs Online Fantasy Leagues Striking a blow for fantasy-league owners everywhere, the Supreme Court on Monday declined to intervene in a suit involving Major League Baseball and a Web-based fantasy-league operator. ProStor Boosts RDX to 500GB Taking advantage of the new 500GB 2.5" laptop drives recently released by Hitachi, Samsung and Fujitsu ProStor is boosting the maximum capacity of their RDX removable disk cartridges making them an even more viable alternative to tape for SMB backup and archival storage. While still about twice the cost of consumer USB hard drives on a per GB basis RDX has the advantage of looking to backup and archive applications as removable, rather than fixed storage. Most backup applications will span backup sets across multiple pieces of removable storage media but won't span multiple fixed disks even if they're USB connected. SMB users outgrowing DAT can shift to RDX gaining the fast single file restore advantages of backup to disk without changing their backup process. Meet Me In Boston On June 9 For A Free 'Evening In The Cloud' While there's no shortage of events that you can attend to find out more about the various Internet-based substitutes for the solutions you might normally run on your own servers or in your own data centers, there's no event where the question "Can you run all of your IT in the cloud?" is being asked. That's the public conversation that I and other CIOs and IT pros will be having with Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com at this coming Monday's free tech meetup in Boston. I'm calling it an "Evening in the Cloud" and you're invited to come, join the conversation, network, and enjoy a few cocktails on me. Details are below. Computer Science 101: Gates And Google A corner of Carnegie Mellon University's normally quiet campus is a noisy mess these days, due to construction of the new Gates Center for Computer Science, a steel-framed building perched high atop concrete columns. The site is only a hundred yards from CMU's Collaborative Innovation Center, home to none other than Google. Nokia: Video Calling Uptake Slow Because People Are Vain This is rich. Video calling services that send live video feeds to/from mobile phones are really interesting technology that have many potential uses. The problem is, most people have decided that the view of themselves captured by mobile phones "isn't very flattering." A Quick Look At Facebook's Open Source The other week, when representatives from Facebook mentioned that they'd be open-sourcing significant portions of their platform, I hazarded a guess that they would be providing at most a set of APIs. Now that Facebook's actually released some code under the aegis of the Facebook Open Platform, I had a look-see. To my delight, I saw more than just APIs. OmniUpdate Upgrades Its Flagship CMS As the school year comes to a close and students and faculty start to thin out, it's a good opportunity for campus IT departments to look at making the upgrades and system changes they've been delaying until they have minimal user impact. For schools looking at upgrading or evaluating a content management system, OmniUpdate's latest revision to OU Campus, its flagship CMS, comes at the right time. Does UC Improve Productivity? The whole reason for Unified Communications, it's believed, is that UC makes your workers and your business processes more efficient and productive. But productivity benefits are almost always tough to quantify and measure reliably, and that's certainly the case with UC. Real-World SOA: Definition, Implementation and Use of SOA with CentraSite Web services are having a dramatic impact on improving enterprise architecture and application development practices. This paper highlights three sample case studies illustrating how Fujitsu's CentraSite delivers SOA solutions. Forrester Consulting: Unified Communications Delivers Global Benefits This Forrester Consulting study shows how Unified Communications (UC) makes it simpler to contact others over any device in any location, enhancing business agility, cutting costs, and boosting employee productivity. Forrester finds that UC is already delivering major savings for organizations around the world in retail banking, manufacturing and education. Download the full report for free. Software as a Service Research Report No longer a niche software delivery model, software as a service (SaaS) can help small and midsize companies get access to enteprise-class software functionality without having to commit enterprise-level capital resources. Download the full report for free. The Internet & the Developing World The evolution of the Internet has been full of surprises - surprises that have sometimes resulted in radical changes in the commercial landscape, such as the arrival of Amazon, eBay, Google, YouTube, and Skype. Could one of the next big surprises turn out to be linked to developing countries? 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