The clock is counting down to the 6th of March and the opening of the Watchmen movie. There’s not really much point in watching it, as the real watchmen are among us, and they’re armed with database queries.

Last week we had a meeting with a senior Microsoft VP, who was to brief us on the next steps before the launch of Windows 7. As we sat on the tube we got a phone call - telling us he’d be late, due to some unspecified car trouble.It was only when he arrived, armed with a brand-new anecdote that we learnt just what had happened.

The London Congestion Charge zone is surrounded by cameras, all hooked up to a massive number plate recognition system. As his car crossed through the ring of cameras it was photographed, and the number uploaded onto the system. The car number tripped a rules engine somewhere in the CC database - as it was wanted by the police.

A nearby police motorcycle quickly intercepted his car, and it soon turned out that someone had cloned both its number plate and the taxi company’s petrol card. Someone was using them to defraud garages, getting fuel for nothing.

It took some time to sort things out, and for the driver to prove his innocence (the fact that his car didn’t match the forecourt photographs made a big difference). If it hadn’t been for the cameras and the software behind them he’d have made our meeting on time…

There’s something slightly unnerving about automatic systems sending the police off to stop a car. Any automation can be corrupted, and it’s all to plausible to think of this system being used to delay important business meetings - a real denial of service attack.

Who watches the watchmen? At this point it seems to be no-one!

–Simon

Wouldn’t you want a netbook that turned on as fast as a phone, but could still run all your Windows programs? Of course it wouldn’t do both at once, but I was half-hoping that one of the HTC announcements at Mobile World Congress last week would be an update of the Advantage or the Shift: a netbook that could dual-boot into Windows. It’s not just impatience; using 3G on a netbook eats into the already low battery life (at a good five hours using Wi-Fi, the battery life of the 6-cell HP Mini 2140 is exceptional). If I could do the Web browsing on the lower-power, better optimised mobile OS, I’d have more battery life left for my meeting later.
I-mate’s Legionnaire/Warrior combo comes close - a Windows Mobile touchscreen phone that slides into a netbook case that’s just the screen and keyboard and battery; the phone drives the screen through its XGA connector and uses the external keyboard. Oh, and works as a huge touchpad as well. The prototype we saw needs some work - CEO Jim Morrison promises the keyboard will be bigger and better - but slap Internet Explorer Mobile 6 or Skyfire (or the Fennec project mobile version of Firefox) on there and you can use Outlook Web Access and Google Docs or remote desktop into your PC. If a call comes in while the phone is driving the screen and keyboard, it automatically switches to speakerphone. And the fully-loaded Warrior ‘jacket’ includes four batteries that give you over 50 hours of use (and your phone comes out charged at the end).
But I do want the power of a local PC as well; I want to use Windows Live Photo Gallery to make panoramas and upload them to Flickr, I want to run OneNote (because without it I’d be a day early or three hours late for a lot more meetings), I want the Semagic client for my personal blog over at LiveJournal, and the ClipMate software that means I never copy something, forget to paste it and have to go look for it again. And OWA is great, but SpeedFiler doesn’t work in it and if I don’t file messages as I reply to them my inbox is a mess (OK, more of a mess than usual). (Oh, and I want to be able to use a 3G dongle, and printers and scanners and all the other peripherals; drivers are the curse of any OS.) My list isn’t going to be your list, but to my mind, the much higher returns for Linux netbooks mean that people want their PC apps as much as they mean that Linux isn’t ready as a mass market user interface.
Pre-boot environments are another option. The consumer version of the excellent Lenovo S10 has a Quick Start Linux environment (it’s the same Splashtop system that Asus has developed as ExpressGate); you can browse and IM and use Skype. But when you’re done, it takes as long to boot as ever. Phonenix’s HyperSpace is a lot more powerful: the Hybrid version carries on booting Windows in the background so you can have a little fun and then get straight to work. But the Hybrid version needs VT, which means a powerful notebook to start with (with Atom you get the Hyperspace Dual, which gives you much the same features but you have to boot Windows from scratch afterwards).
And while these pre-boot environments all cope with Wi-Fi, only HyperSpace supports a 3G dongle and so far only the Option model that AT&T sells in the US (did I say drivers are the curse of any OS?). A netbook that could dual boot into, say Windows Mobile, would come with built-in connectivity. But when I pounced on Peter Chou, the CEO of HTC, between the launch of the Touch Diamond2 and Pro2 (which will be my next phone) and  the launch of the Vodafone Magic (I think the magic was persuading Google it didn’t have to look like the Sidekick) he said that the technology wasn’t advanced enough yet - and probably neither is the market. But if netbooks continue to dominate, dropping the price a few pounds and painting them different colours isn’t going to be enough to make a new netbook standout. Putting a phone in there, on the other hand… maybe next year?
-Mary
 

Some of the more interesting aspects of this years MWC were our conversations with the two main mapping data providers. These aren’t the folk who write your GPS software - they’re the folk who capture the mapping data that’s used by your navigation devices to show you where you are, and to plan your routes.

There’s been some consolidation in the mapping market - Navteq is now owned by Nokia, and Tele Atlas is part of TomTom’s expanding mapping empire. The new relationships aren’t just giving Nokia and TomTom direct access to the mapping data they need. They’re also giving the maps a whole new source of data, feeding back live data from the many millions of navigation devices out there. Instead of having to buy data about the traffic conditions on the M4, live data from PNDs can give the map vendors real time information on just where there’s congestion, and on how traffic is flowing. There’s no need to get data from every piece of hardware out there, either, as Nokia Research has shown that you only need to instrument around 3% of the vehicles on the road to get a statistically valid real time model.

Real time road data is easy to get - there are enough TomTom systems out that have opted into returning traffic and route data to cover the entire European road network four times a day, and once a day for the US. It’s what you do with it that’s more important. Tele Atlas’ database of traffic conditions in major conurbations around the world has a 5 minute resolution for every day of the year. If a navigation application takes that data as part of its routing algorithms it can give you a route that takes into account, as well as letting you develop what-if scenarios. Real time traffic data mixed with historic data can also help navigation software determine if a re-routing is necessary - or if the congestion ahead will dissapate before you’re due to reach it.

Maps also need to be more personal. We don’t go to an address or an intersection - we go to a place. If it’s a shop or a theatre, perhaps we want to go to the nearest car park. If we’re looking for petrol we probably don’t want to backtrack (unless the next petrol station en route is much much to far away, and the one behind is very close indeed). Navigation is changing to deal with these issues, and the underlying map data has to expose the information that’s needed to make these decisions.

Then there’s the explosion in data. GPS maps aren’t just for cars any more - and simply ignoring one way streets doesn’t turn mapping data into pedestrian maps. The mapping providers are having to develop much more detailed city maps that allow you to cross parks and squares, and to use passageways that may not appear in road data. There’s a lot to be done here, from mapping entrances and exits of underground stations, to determining the timetables for public transport. The future of mapping is multi-modal, managing journeys that start in a car, switch to a ferry, and then to an underground train, then foot.

Mapping providers have a lot of problems - and a lot of tools to help solve them. We won’t see the benefits right away, but over the next year or so we’ll start seeing maps that are more accurate, routes that are more responsive to traffic, and pedestrian routes that actually understand the geography of cities.

–Simon

 Says the man who never pays for his own phone. It’s very easy as technology commentators  to say that an open technology market is always best. We see new devices and services that we’d like to use and we think users will want too and then we see the mobile operators more as a barrier to get past than as an enabler, dictating what devices people can use, how they connect and what you can do with them.

A lot of that negative opinion is the networks’ own fault: the way to avoid becoming a big dumb bit-pipe is to offer smart services, not to try and control everything and lock users into the walled garden of your branded portal. But the fact is that the mobile network has to support everyone, not just the enthusiasts who are happy to pay for features. Without subsidised handsets, we’d have a lot less innovation because far fewer people would buy the latest and greatest phones.

The iPhone broke out of the enthusiast market to make mainstream users care about being able to put applications onto their phone. But when Mossberg interviewed Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and AT&T’s CEO Ralph de la Vega, the man who brought out the iPhone first, at the Mobile World Congress this week, Vega told Mossberg he doesn’t want apps to stay on the iPhone. Not unnaturally, because AT&T sells a lot of other phones, he wants cross-platform applications that use standard APIs (like the OMTP BONDI proposal) to access resources on the operator network “in a standard and secure way”.

It’s not that AT&T has got the open religion (it’s likely they’re one of the reasons you don’t get many VOIP clients or turn-by-turn navigation systems on the iPhone). It’s lucrative business accounts he cares about: “I came back from meeting our top customers and CIOs and what I’ve said is almost word for word. They told me they were tired of trying to get apps to work across BlackBerry and iPhone and Windows Mobile and other platforms.”Me too.

Given that we’re getting more and more operating systems and platforms rather than fewer (you can add Android and Palm Web OS to the list since the last time operators hinted that they’d like less work to do rather than more), Vega doesn’t cherish the pointless hope of a single application platform on all phones. He think that a lot of phone applications can be front ends to the Web - and a network is pretty happy if you can only use your applications if you’re using the data network (and before you say offline sync, remember the sync part of that means going back online later).

Steve Ballmer understands this (rather better than Mossbeg seemed to); he pointed out that “The Internet is at the back end of all these apps. It’s not like most of these are actually applications: most of these are really front ends to the web site and doing that is easier because the interoperability comes from the Web site itself, from Facebook or whatever.” Count the My Phone service in that camp; it only runs on Windows Mobile (sorry, Windows phones) and backs them up, but once your data is up there an app running on another phone could easily work with it.

My main complaint about My Phone isn’t that there are other sync services already (some cost money, some chew battery, some use a Flash UI on the Web site that hangs and while I don’t expect any of them to fail suddenly, one thing you can say about Microsoft is that it’s going to be around long enough to be a safe place to keep a backup). It’s that you’re limited to 200MB, when I can buy an 8GB microSD card for about a tenner. I went around calling Microsoft inexplicably mean for a while, until someone on the My Phone team said the limit was to keep the operators happy: another theme of this week was how many services are springing up to do bandwidth shaping and user data capping and having 5GB of backup streaming to my new phone could be enough for them to tell handset manufacturers to leave the client off their phones.

There are issues with apps that are just alternatives to firing up a browser (talking of which, if you’re using the Skyfire browser on Windows Mobile, get the updated version: I’m finding it faster and more stable). Certifying that those apps - and the sites behind them - are legal, decent, honest and truthful is an ongoing issue (because you’re going to holler to the operator if the to-do list site you found in their application store turns into an adult portal overnight), but the smarter operators are already thinking about how to keep tabs on that. You can’t yet submit a URL to O2 Litmus, but it’s on the cards.

Litmus is one of the smarter mobile developer programmes. It’s not just another app store (and I have my reservations about how many of those we actually need and from whom); it’s a way of turning enthusiastic O2 customers into beta testers. It’s O2 using what they know about their customers and their network to help developers create better apps. And that’s not very Soviet at all…

-Mary

I’m a big fan of the new Messenger client and some of the other Live apps, especially Windows Live Photo Gallery. I do keep nagging the Live team to add information card support to Live ID- I actually pursued GM Brian Hall down a corridor at CES to say it again - but now I have a new set of complaints.

I wasn’t able to log in to Messenger for the first week after I got back to the UK from CES (apologies again to all the friends who think I either had terrible jetlag or was ignoring them!).  The Windows Live troubleshooter on Vista made valiant attempts to get me online, to no avail, but I think the problem was that I needed to upgrade the beta versions I’d been using on Windows 7. I tried a few times: the secret seems to be closing far more apps than the installer asks you to. But along the way, I want to call out some things that are really unhelpful:
The Help button that launches the front page of MSN instead - presumably reading the news will help me calm down?
The pre-populated list cramming extra software onto my system: at least it asks but should the default really be to add a toolbar?
The ‘You’re Almost Done’ screen that sneaks in an attempt to switch my search provider and home screen. IE8 has almost learned the lesson that this is my PC, my browser and I get to choose the services I want to use: Live is giving it a bad name. And the Help Improve Windows Live customer experience improvement program? That I’d be happy to sign up for to get fewer problems next time I need to upgrade? No, that’s off by default.
Losing my Live ID: the installer is asking me to sign up for Live but I’ve had an ID for more years than I care to remember. I’ve been using it with the version of Messenger I’m upgrading! Why doesn’t it know this? Or why isn’t there a Sign In option next to Sign Up?
Telling me Windows Live is on my Start menu? Why isn’t the installer offering to launch the apps I want? Why doesn’t it remember the apps it asked me to close and offer opening those again as the defaults? How about using the IE8 session restore to give me my Web pages back?

I love being able to be signed in on two machines at once with Messenger; gives me more chance of seeing a message where I happen to be. I like groups and seeing what’s new with my contacts before I talk to them. I like getting automatic picture straighening and people spotting in Live Photo Gallery. It’s worth upgrading. But The upgrade experience? Nice app, shame about the installer…

Mary

I love the way you can drag a window into the corner of the screen in Windows 7 and have it resize to fit half the screen; it makes it so easy to arrange windows neatly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite so well with multiple monitors. So far I can only get the documents to fit themselves neatly to the left of the left-hand screen and the right of the right-hand screen, which makes sense – the corners are the triggers and logically there are two even if physically there are four.
 
I’ve asked Microsoft if there’s a trick to making this work, but in the mean time, here’s my work around. I drag the first window I want into the left-hand corner on the left-hand screen and it resizes. Then I drag the document I want next to it into the same corner, let it resize on top of it and drag it by hand to the right. It’s already the right size so it’s easy enough – but if I just drag it back to where it was in one move, it goes back to the original size (which in any other circumstances is great), so I have to drag it a little, drop it and them drag it again.

It would be much easier if Windows spotted the end of the taskbar as a logical point to work with as well.

Almost everyone believes there should only be two or three versions of Windows; no two people agree on which two or three versions those should be (to paraphrase Brandon Le Blanc over at the Windows Team Blog).

With the SKU list for Windows 7, as Simon pointed out, any one person will only ever see two or three versions. If you’re a home user you’ll see Home Premium (and wonder what’s premium about it), Starter if you’re looking at the cheapest of netbooks and Ultimate if you look at really over-powered gaming rigs. If you’re a business user you’ll see Professional or Enterprise, depending on the size of company. It’s Windows Me and Windows 2000 all over again. So no, there aren’t too many versions of Windows 7; there are the number almost everyone thinks we should have.

But regardless of whether these specific versions are the right ones for users (I think they probably are, although I still see people calling for Windows Home Runs On All My PCs For The Same Low Low Price, Windows Poor Student, Windows Actually-Poor Teacher, Windows Small Business Because I Don’t Realise That’s What Professional Is, Windows Componentization Because That’s My Theory For ‘Fixing’ Windows and a few others); does it make sense for Microsoft to continue to have more than one version of Windows?

Don’t tell me there should be one version of Windows because there’s one version of OS X. There’s one version of OS X because there aren’t enough business features to need a separate business version.

It is a good thing to have a cheaper version of Windows that doesn’t have business features home users don’t need like joining a domain. It’s a good thing to have irrelevant options, like joining a domain, totally removed from home versions so no one turns them on by accident (or by following a tweaking guide that promises to fix things that weren’t broken in the first place). It’s good to be able to upgrade from Starter to Ultimate when you realise that not being able to use an external monitor with your netbook is annoying, or from Home Premium to Ultimate if you want to use BitLocker (which I still think should be in Windows 7 Professional). It’s good for businesses who buy Microsoft software year in year out to get a loyalty bonus with SA and Enterprise. But does Microsoft make enough money out of the different licences to make all the hard work make business sense?

There’s the management time to decide what’s in the different SKUs, explain to everyone, explain it a couple more times and justify it a whole bunch more times. There’s the programmer time to mark each feature for each build, and the regression testing to make sure each SKU of features works properly together. I’m willing to assume, given the high bar the Windows 7 pre-beta and beta have set that we’re not going to have a backup interface that offers me features that won’t work in my version, for instance.

There’s also the cost of the encryption system that protects all the features that aren’t in the SKU I’ve bought, because they’re all on the hard disk whichever SKU you install (so no, having different SKUs doesn’t save me disk space on features I’ll never use. And given that Windows 7 handily unloads services I’m not using any more and reloads them as needed, I wouldn’t be wasting memory or cpu cycles on them either). There’s the legal costs of pursuing people who have a go at cracking that encryption. There’s pressing DVDs with two labels and printing two sets of boxes and retailers managing two areas of shelf space….

I asked Laurence Painell, the UK Windows marketing manager who deals with OEMs. His answer is that Microsoft doesn’t discuss those kind of commercial questions and that the same protection system is used for Office-ready PCs where you don’t have to install Office for all your users, you can just distribute the keys and it appears as if by magic, so it’s not all on the Windows balance sheet. 

Either the OEMs and customers want multiple versions of Windows enough that all these costs are worth it, or having different SKUs turns out to make Microsoft more money than having one version. I rather suspect it’s the former. I just hope I’m not going to be looking at too many netbooks with Windows 7 Starter on next year, because I’ll be upgrading them straight away…
Mary

There are going to be six -well, really five, actually three, but you’ll only see two - editions of Windows 7 (not counting any special bits-left-out-please-the-lawyers N or K versions for the EU and Korea). While there’d been something of a campaign for just one SKU, like OS X, Microsoft’s multi-version release isn’t going to make much of a difference to you.

Here’s our quick guide to choosing a Windows 7 version.

Buying a home PC? You’ll get a choice between Home Premium and Ultimate. Home Premium will have most of what you’ll need, as Ultimate is the high-end wrapper of every Windows 7 feature (both business and consumer). It’s going to be a toss up as to what you’ll get, but we expect most OEM copies to be Home Premium - after all, not everyone needs to connect a home PC to an Active Directory. You’ll always be able to upgrade to Ulitmate, as the features will be on the DVD and can be be unlocked.

Buying a business PC? If you don’t have a Select licensing agreement with Microsoft you’ll get the Professional edition, which will happily join an Active Directory, and will even give you consumer features like Media Center. You’ll still be able to connect to a Homegroup though, so sharing files at work and home will be easy enough. If you’ve got Select, then you’ll be able to install the Enteprise edition which adds BitLocker whole disk encryption.You’ll also get access to DirectAccess VPN-less connectivity and the bandwidth-saving BranchCache.

Ultimate is, well, everything - all the home features and all the business features in one huge bundle. It’s also the same as Enterprise, just with a different name for the home user. So we really have five versions, not six!

There is one oddity out there, in the shape of the new Starter edition which is being described as suitable for netbooks (there’s also a Basic release, but that’s for emerging markets only). There are plenty of limitations with the Starter edition, starting with support for only 3 concurrent applications. We suspect it’s only going to be on the lowest-powered and lowest-specified netbooks, as we’ve had no problems running Ultimate on most of the Atom-powered netbooks we’ve tested recently - and new approaches like Nvidia’s Ion should make running Home Premium or Professional as easy on a netbook as on a multicore desktop.

So what does it all mean? In practice there will only be two versions of Windows 7 on the shelf, with Home Premium and Professional editions available through retail. Ultimate is going to be mainly an in-place anytime upgrade feature (with the possibility of a retail limited edition). You won’t see Enterprise unless you’ve got a subscription-based license for hundreds - if not thousands - of PCs.

Let’s just hope Microsoft makes the upgrade from Starter to Home Premium as easy as possible…

–Simon