Companies play the upgrade waiting game, MS massages its stats | Bangkok Post: tech

COMPUTER Currents

Microsoft recently made the claim that they had sold 90 million copies of Windows 7 since it reached the manufacturers in July last year. What actually happened then was that OEMs were told to put Win 7 on new machines by default. So the word "sold" is a little misleading here.

The figures look good in marketing and sales terms but the real figure would be how many migrated from XP to Win 7. The OEM sales figures trick would work just as well for Joe's new Great Operating System if Joe could convince the OEMs, and if GOS actually existed.

So instead let's consider a large organisation that would appear to be close to Microsoft - Intel.

At the recent CeBIT trade show, the Intel representative was urging people to scrap any PC that was over four years old. This would, of course, mean new CPU sales for Intel. Within Intel itself their engineers get a new PC every three years, their road warriors get a new machine every two, and their servers get rotated every four.

This is about standard for many larger organisations but in many cases you can add a year or three to those figures for smaller businesses.

Intel argues that any longer and it costs more to keep them running that it would to simply replace them. On the server side, you can often consolidate a bunch of them into a single machine which will save maintenance. I imagine that in some countries the replacement times will coincide with the national depreciation schedules.

More interesting to this discussion is that so far Intel has swapped about 3,000 out of over 80,000 employees to Win 7. Like any large organisation, they want a stable and tested operating system as their base and will delay implementing a brand new one for at least a year. In Intel's case the upgrade cycle has another three more years to go.

In other problems for Microsoft this week, the software giant has admitted that over 2,000 well-known websites remain incompatible with Internet Explorer 8. Re-read that sentence again. It is not that IE 8 is incompatible with the existing websites, but the other way round. With IE 8, after IE 6 and IE 7, many developers are hesitant to start changing things around because for the previous two versions they were being asked to move in other directions.

In a recent announcement, Microsoft revealed that less than 20 percent of websites were running in full IE8 'standards' mode but that 41 percent were operating in the IE 8 "almost standards" mode. Another 26 percent were operating under what MS called "quirks" mode, leaving the remainder to run under IE 7 standard mode to operate.

Websites operating under full IE 8 mode will have problems being viewed by other browsers. As a web developer, you want you site to be visited by all browser types so you will normally write to what MS would consider a less compatible mode. Less compatible for Microsoft, of course, not for industry standards that MS still has some problems with.

So that leaves us with IE 9 that may support the 2D graphics specification and SVG. The reasons given by MS for not including these and other W3C standards in IE 8 was that they

wanted to do a "good job" with the implementation, which included lots of testing.

Industry news

Intel has fought back against Apple and declared that schoolchildren need computers, not e-readers. To back this up, they showcased their Classmate tablet design at the recent CeBIT show. The unit uses the Atom processor that will run either Windows or Linux. They were demonstrating Win 7 with a reversible touchscreen that can be written on using a stylus.

In Australia, the government recently announced that they were going to put Apple iPads into some schools, essentially locking the classrooms into Apple-only software. The Intel device can survive being dropped from desk height, which will be useful for schools. They also do a lot more than function as a e-book reader.

As the Intel spokesperson said: "We believe in e-learning, not just e-reading." The new Classmates will ship in the next quarter.

At the recent SMX West conference, Google was boasting that they personalise as many as 20 percent of your searches. While searches have been country-specific for some time now, the trend is to move towards a deeper level of personalisation based on geo location, web history and even your online contacts.

Unlike Microsoft, however, Google has realised that they may not always get it right and they are not as tight when it comes down to personal searches versus the country-specific ones.

The personalisation takes place even when you are not connected or using Google. The search engine will check a series of cookies it has placed on your machine and work from these to tailor search results. This includes narrowing things down to city or suburb level. So, if you ask for a bus timetable, it will look for hits in, say, Bangkok rather than New York if you don't specify a city.

The next level is the social search, where information from, say, your Google chat or Google Buzz is used to determine online relationships. I find this to be somewhat intrusive and I minimise what information I put into any social site.

IBM is working on light-based chips. Rather than copper wires, the aim is to use photons travelling through optical circuits. They have developed a detector that will recognise up to 40Gbps, that is pulses per second. The unit works on a 1.5-volt supply rather than the higher voltages found in your current computer. This will improve power usage. The other good news is that the circuits are germanium and silicon-based, just like current technologies.

IBM says that they are ahead of the competition in the field because other detectors can't recognise the photon avalanche effect to this level of speed. The bad news is that the nanophotonic technology is still 5-10 years away from being found in your next computer.

Something that is a little closer is a portable brain-to-computer interface. You start with a few electrodes taped to your skull and these pick up impulses that can be used to duplicate hand movements. The target is of course those people who have lost limbs, or the use of them. The technology will allow these people to control wheelchairs or prosthetic replacements.

Your mobile phone does not meet the criteria for Win 7 if you are running Win 6.5. Take, for example, the HD2 that has a 1GHz processor, a high-resolution touchscreen and a 5 MP camera. Unfortunately the HD2 has five buttons, one of which is not a dedicated search key. Win 7 phones have only three buttons.

Yes, your phone probably has too many buttons and does not meet the as-yet unspecified hardware components also required to run Win 7 Mobile. The OS is probably not due until the end of the year - a lifetime in mobile terms.

What this will mean is a lot of very unhappy customers who have the basic technology and are expecting to be able to upgrade. I have found the same kinds of issues in the past with my O2 phone and was similarly annoyed. It looks like Microsoft is making Apple's case for them as to date any kind of upgrade path for Windows Mobile users has been all but non-existent. MS looks to have dropped the ball once again.