The other day I took my workhorse Windows Vista desktop machine over to Windows 7. It was a move that was somewhat overdue - but one that would finally put my desktop on the same level as my regular HP tablet. My usual way of working is to drive Vista and 7 through the search box - so it took me a couple of days to realise that the All Programs section of the Start Menu was blank.

All the shortcuts were there, just nothing showing.

Odd, I thought.

Annoying, I thought.

Ooops, I thought.

Search was still working, but I was trying to remember the name of a program for a friend who needed an unarchiver for a Windows PC he was setting up - and of course search doesn’t work if you don’t know what you’re looking for…

Hmmm.

Google showed that I wasn’t the first person affected by the problem, but most of the solutions people were suggesting (a) didn’t work and (b) could have left me reinstalling Windows again. It’s never a good idea to wholesale copy the registry from one PC to another.

Finally I found this blog post.

It turns out that there’s a bug in Windows 7 upgrade installs, where it limits the number of items in the All Users program menu to 70. While you can transfer items to a hierarchical directory structure (which will then let you see all your items as you open folders in the start menu), you could also do what I did - clear out the cruft of an untold number of installs of the odd downloaded utility or 30.

The result of the uninstallfest?

I can see all my applications again - and I’ve got a cleaner, less crufty PC.

It’s a fairly innocuous bug as bugs go, but it’s still annoying. Hopefully it’ll be fixed by the time Microsoft releases Windows 7 - but as we in the EU (unless we’re signed up to SA) won’t be able to do upgrade installs, we won’t know…

No matter how fast the 3G chipset in your mobile phone, you’re not getting on the Internet at that speed; you might have 3, 7 or 14Mbps between your phone and the base station but that base station is connected into the net at the same DSL speed as your home broadband. And you’re sharing that with everyone else  connected to that base station; say the 50 people in the same mile radius on the same network. Wimax and LTE promise speeds of 80-100Mbps; that means backhaul will have to get much faster and wider - according to a recent In-Stat report, backhaul capacity has to triple by 2013 to a worldwide total of 90,000Gbps to match demand. To get faster speeds needs faster physical  connections; faster DSL, expensive fibre optic cable or laser links. And that costs money…

Vodafone and T-Mobile both use BT for backhaul. Last year Vodafone started rolling out Tellabs’s Ethernet-based backhaul to replace the legacy voice network it was previously built on top of (getting an IP network for next-generation services at the same time);or rather BT is doing it for them (it’s all part of the ’21st Century Network’). O2 is taking the same service, and T-Mobile had signed up for it a year before that. Currently the system promises to deliver up to 60Mbps (a big improvement on the 2Mbps at most base stations). If T-Mobile is further along with the rollout, buying them could give Vodafone better bandwidth faster - and in the long run that could be worth as much as buying market share.

T-Mobile users might want to cross their fingers that the deal goes through (which is far from certain). Coverage and the weather and device configuration and the number of other people around and whole bunch of other variables make it hard to compare networks precisely, but of all the networks I test phones with Vodafone consistently gives me the best connection and coverage.
-Mary

Microsoft’s response to the EU is to take IE 8 out of Windows 7 in Europe. That means ‘upgrade’ versions for end users are clean install versions at upgrade price (with limits on not moving them onto a new machine).  The complaints for this will be aimed at the EU and Microsoft, with a few brickbats for Opera for causing all this trouble in the first place. The end result will be (we predict) a lot of people buying Windows 7 online from the US to save the trouble of re-installing all their apps, and a lot of small businesses deciding that as you can buy the Enterprise version of Windows 7 through Software Assurance for as few as five users, it’s time to switch to volume licensing - because SA versions of Windows 7 will allow in-place upgrades, on the grounds that when you have SA, you build an image with the components you want and if you don’t want IE you don’t put it in, so it was never forced on you and you don’t have to be given the choice. Microsoft is happy to use consumers for a game of brinkmanship with the EU over browser choice; businesses who mandate IE for internal use because they don’t want to rebuild line of business apps are too important to them for that.

What about the battle that really matters - what browser goes on new PCs? That’s up to the OEMs and they don’t care as much about choice as they do about cold hard cash, which is bad news for Opera again. Why so?

Well, OEMs have several browser choices. There’s the devil you know, the devil your customers know and the easy option - Internet Explorer and the Live Essentials (including the really rather good Windows Live Photo Gallery). Expect Dell and perhaps HP to offer this, along with a number of smaller ‘just hand me the CD’ OEMs.

There’s ‘we have a pot of cash and we’re going to use it’ Google; expect to see the Mountain View boys to pay to put their only-as-popular as Firefox 2 browser, Chrome onto the best selling version of Windows ever. There’s ‘would you like a nice deal bundling iTunes on your home PCs?’ Apple with Safari (currently neck and neck with Chrome). Firefox is free, which always appeals. And then there’s this little company in Norway that would like the OEMs to pay them money to put a copy of their Opera browser on new PCs. Sounds like Opera’s attempt to get more market share is going to backfire on them.

Taking a step back, do Europeans really need to have browser choice forced on them, at the expense of easy upgrades? Not according to the latest figures.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share - click through to see share by browser version

IE has more market share than Firefox in Europe - barely - if you group together all the versions of IE. IE 6 is slightly more popular than IE 8 (oddly - perhaps it’s all those IE 6 LOB apps). But the hand-down winner at nearly 36% is - Firefox. Perhaps Opera should complain to the EU about the Mozilla foundation?
-Mary

Here’s Seer in action:

Augmented reality is one of the upcoming killer applications for mobile devices, where the built-in sensors mix with geocoded information to tell you just what you’re seeing - and at the same time give you more information about it. Seer’s an annotated window into the Wimbledon, using the device’s camera, built-in GPS, compass, and G-sensor. The combination of the four lets the software know where the phone is, and where it is pointing - and at what angle - at which point it overlays relevant information on the camera view of the world, in your own personal heads-up display.

What IBM is doing is an interesting example, as it links straight into IBM’s Wimbledon data feeds (and its Twitter stream!). It’s easy to see how this type of tool can be adapted to business applications. Plug Seer into a logistics feed, and you’ll be able to “see” just what’s in each package on a shop floor, or in each truck on a loading dock. Perhaps it’ll help your sales staff identify the products your customers are using, or give estate agents a new tool for annotating houses.

Seer’s not the only AR application out there. I’ve been playing with a shiny new HTC Magic for a few weeks now, the G-2 Android phone in the guise of a Google ION developer device, and as part of my explorations I’ve been looking for interesting applications in the Android Market. That’s where I found one of the nicest pieces of mobile software I’ve seen - Google Sky Map.

It’s not surprising that Google has done such a good job with this software, after all, Android is their phone platform, and they should know it (and the reference hardware inside out). The folk in Mountain View also have a huge database of data they can take advantage of - in the shape of Google Earth and all its varied information layers. Where Sky Map differs from most computer based star maps is that it’s live.It then calculates the current view, and displays it. Google is augmenting reality, making it part of its world of search.

On a deeper level it’s actually a specialised version of what Mary calls a “What’s-That”, a device that when pointed at something, well, just does that. It annotates the world with an overlay of information to give us the information we want and need. Phones don’t have the power needed to deliver that level of image recognition, but they do know where you are. Constrain the problem to maps of the heavens, and you’ve got a winner on your hands.

The sky at night can be confusing - with light pollution and high cloud making identification hard. Just being able to point a phone in the right direction to get the names of the objects you can see is an excellent solution to the problem. After all, it’s the most personal of devices and one that’s going to be with us when we most need it.

Then there’s Wikitude, which is a step even further in the direction of the What’s-That, using the device camera and the device sensors to overlay points of interest from geo-coded data in Wikipedia and Qype on the phone screen.

Here it is, letting me know what’s in the world outside a hotel room somewhere in Oregon. There’s still not enough data in the world of public geo-coded information - but what there is is enough to make you want more.

You know, I really like living in the future.

(I’ll go into all the hassles involved in screen-capping Android another time!)

–Simon

As the name suggests, it was originally designed to make the Windows clipboard more useful. You know how you see something interesting, like a URL or the instructions for fooling Windows 7 beta into upgrading to Windows 7 RC and you copy it, only to get distracted and copy something else before you get around to pasting the first clip anywhere…

Personally, I think that’s one of the main reasons that the Web page you’re most likely to open is the one you’ve just closed, but ClipMate saves everything you copy into a rolling list (mine goes back to May 30th). If there are things you paste a lot (frequent flyer numbers, your address, directions to your house that stop people taking what looks like a short cut, basic instructions for internal applications that don’t work the way users expect, a scan of your signature for pasting into that one fax a year you still have to send…) you can put those into a ’safe’ collection that doesn’t get cleaned out automatically and you can have multiple collections to keep handy scripts separate from Polite Responses To Stupid Requests.

But once you have something copied, ClipMate also has a bundle of tools for working with it. You get a word and character count at the bottom of the window, or the dimensions if it’s an image. You can see spelling mistakes  (and correct them before you paste the text back). You can remove line breaks - ideal for fixing URLs that break apart in email. You can strip out fancy text formatting (very handy if you like to compose your blog posts in a real word processor and paste them in to the blog editor without worrying about getting weird fonts and weirder HTML codes in there). You can show non-printing characters like tabs and spaces to see why text doesn’t lay out the way you expect. Or you can just highlight HTML formatting and URLs in the clip, to make it easier to read. You can strip out any formatting - the >> quote marks on email inclusions or any other specific character that’s in your way (the icon for this is a magician’s top hat and wand). You can add macros and regular expressions to clips that activate when you paste them (ideal for scripts). And you can swap the case of the clip - not just by clicking an icon or a menu entry, but with a keyboard shortcut.

So you can iterate through your list of image names going click (select filename), click (rename file), Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Alt-C (open ClipMate), Ctrl-Alt-M (Change To Leading Caps), click (select filename that’s still live for renaming), Ctrl-V. It’s the kind of soothing repetition that you can speed through even while you fume about whoever decided Leading Cap Image File Names were a good idea in the first place.
ClipMate: it’s just so useful.

Professionally speaking, should I be pleased that the European versions of Windows 7 will be browser free? Not if you know what you’re doing. Organisations who want to install Windows 7 without IE can do it by customising their setup image; they’ll be doing that anyway and they can choose the components that go in the image, including whether they want IE 8 or not.
Have all the court cases forced Microsoft to clean up its act? Maybe. It always amused me when Netscape revealed their distribution figures as part of the DoJ case against Microsoft. Despite charging ISPs anything up to $20 per users to distribute the Netscape Navigator browser, Netscape distributed it to half as many people again as were online at the time (or to everyone online 1.5 times). Which says to me the reason Netscape didn’t succeed wasn’t lack of access to the market - it was lack of being a better browser than IE.

The counter-argument was that even though they got a copy of Navigator, IE users wouldn’t bother to install it because they had a browser they thought was good enough. Leaving aside the implicit criticism of users in that view, maybe a majority of people do use IE because it’s there and we’ll now see the true popularity (or not) of IE, but I think we’ll mostly see a lot more support calls. Perhaps Microsoft could suggest that some of the fines the EU is doubtless totting up could be ear-marked to pay for free phone support for all those users who are having trouble getting a browser installed?
-Mary

For some reason, the marketing team at VMware decided that D was the way to go when they got their hands on some VMware-internal video of Hyper-V ‘crashing’, adding in a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument blaming Hyper-V for the MSDN site not keeping up with the Windows 7 RC downloads on the morning of April 30th (rather than Microsoft’s explanation of the site traffic increasing not by 100% as had expected, but by 500% - and isn’t being that much in demand is a pretty good problem for Microsoft to have?). Shame that they declined to include the necessary technical details about the test or even to put their name behind it until Microsoft dug out that the YouTube poster was actually Scott Drummonds of VMware.

When the Hyper-V team asked for some details about the test, VMware’s Bruce Herndon popped up to explain the video, express regret that the discussion is in a public forum (presumably that one is actually aimed at Drummonds) and ask why there was so much “kerfuffle” over it.  Probably because posting videos on YouTube defaming the competition isn’t a good idea for anyone (Microsoft included). Probably because VMware came across like a group of pranking teenagers confronted by their parents. And probably because the copy of Hyper-V that you see blue-screening is apparently running on pre-release Intel hardware that you get under the kind of agreement that says you won’t do benchmarking on it, certainly not for public consumption.

It’s obvious from the tenor of the Microsoft blog posts that the virtualisation team is hopping mad; I don’t blame them. Unfortunately, arguing in public can come across more as a spat than a serious debate and benchmarks and stability tests are too important to anyone using virtualisation in anger to be left to YouTube videos and obviously partial arguments. In saner moments, VMware knows this: the EULA for ESX explicitly states “You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study.”

I’ll be as surprised as the Hyper-V team if VMware has found a bug rather than proving that anyone can crash any system if they approach it with that intention. And I don’t know whether it raises issues of third-party certification. When I asked Jeff Woolsey at TechEd why RIM had just certified BES 5 for virtualisation under VMware and not Hyper-V, he pointed out that you don’t need to certify apps to work with Hyper-V because for virtualisation to be useful, it has to be the same as working with Windows Server (or the server OS of your choice) - it should be the hypervisor that’s tested, not the apps. As with Windows 7, Microsoft has spent a lot of time testing thousands of applications with Hyper-V. If we do need third-party tests, it’s going to have to actually be a third party conducting them - not an interested party.

Even if the video had shown a legitimate problem in a well-constructed test, releasing it anonymously on YouTube would be reprehensible. As an enterprise customer, wouldn’t you like VMware to act like a mature and responsible software company that you could count on to work with other vendors to deal with problems in a constructive way? As it is, I’ll be taking any benchmark claims from VMware with a pinch of salt from now on, and I expect many enterprise IT shops will feel the same.
-Mary

When Acer accidently let slip that they’d be shipping hardware with Windows 7 on October 23rd we all nodded, as it was clear that the conveyer belt was rolling along happily. Even their later denials left us nonplussed. The end of October it was, then. It had to be then, if Microsoft was to meet its target of getting many many Windows 7 machines into channel in time for the November shopping rush - the US Holiday season.

This morning Microsoft’s Bill Veghte revealed what we knew all along. The consumer launch will be on October the 22nd, in plenty of time for what the US calls the “Holiday Season”. It’s not surprising that Acer already knew that date…

So the clock is ticking. There may be a second RC for MSDN and Technet users in the middle of June, with the RTM version in July. Shortly after that it will arrive in MSDN, and should be on Select for enterprise subscriptions in late August, early September (based on the Vista timelines). At the same time the RTM code will be shipped to OEMs, ready to be installed on hardware to be shipped in time to arrive in stores in October.

Not long to go - not long for hardware manufacturers to get their drivers through certification. That might be a problem, and could yet be an Achilles heel for Windows 7. Microsoft’s code is solid and works well, but some popular drivers just don’t seem to work very well. A case in point are the drivers for Intel’s 965 chipset - which seem to have got flakier and flakier with each each public build. The latest version causes interesting screen corruptions on our test machines. It’s not just Intel dropping the ball - AMD appears to be dropping support for many of the ATI Radeon cards that are out there.

The clock is ticking, and it’s up to hardware vendors to make Windows 7 a success. If they fail, well, they’re going to be in a lot of trouble - as the much anticipated holiday boom in PC sales just won’t arrive.

–Simon

Wave certainly appears to be an impressive piece of work. Developed by the team that created Google Maps, it’s a radical reworking of the many different tools we use for collaboration - mixing IM and email with document creation and editing. Unlike most online collaboration tools it’s a real time experience - and it all runs in the browser. Communication takes place in “waves”, conversations and information streams tied to groups of online IDs - so each participant can be verified. New arrivals can scrub back through the history of a wave to see just what was said and by who.

Anything you type is echoed in the browsers of all the people you’re working with, as soon as you press each key. There’s no waiting for someone to hit return, everything is there as soon as it’s typed, so you can start your reply at the same time as you’re waiting for the last word to come in. Edits are in real time too, and anyone can edit anyone else’s text.

That last feature is ideal for document collaboration. The Wave user interface supports rich text and images, and there’s very little isolation between user edits. Two or more people can work on the same document just a few characters apart, with no locking at all. If you’ve grown used to the line or paragraph locking of most online collaboration tools you’ll find this an effective - and much faster - way of working. There’s even scope for inline commenting in documents, and as comments are associated with users, moving a document from one wave to another.

Google’s Wave implementation is only one possible Wave. Like Microsoft’s Live Mesh the real secret sauce is in the protocols. Anyone will be able to write a Wave server or a Wave client, and they’ll be able to federate with each other - so my Wave server will be able to work with yours in a (sorry, Ray) big mesh of Wave servers all over the world. The open Wave is an interesting place, and it’s one where there’s going to be a lot of innovation - even if it’s not just the Emacs client that Google demoed in the keynote.

As Google goes on to evangelise Wave with the rest of the industry (after several years of complete secrecy), it’s going to be interesting to see just how much uptake we see. It’d certainly be interesting to be a fly on the wall during the call Vic Gundotra says he’ll be making to Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie…

–Simon

A. Give them all a phone.

No, that’s not a riddle - that’s just what Google did this morning at its IO event here in San Francisco. After a keynote that majored on the future of the web - specifically on HTML 5 - and only touched on some of the features in the upcoming “Donut” release of Android, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra unveiled not just one more thing, but three more things.

The first was the return of the Android Developer Challenge, this time with the added appeal of user votes. I’m not quite sure how The Web’s Got (Developer) Talent would televise, but the folk at Google seem to think that they’ve got the software needed to manage a large scale user driven voting process. Certainly tools like Google Moderator seem to have the user voting process working well - and it’s been heavily stress tested by hosting a White House electronic town hall meeting.

The second was a box that would be given to every attendee at the event, a box that would contain details of the Android SDK.

The third was what else would be in the box: an unlocked Android phone running the 1.5 “Cupcake” release. It was what Gundotra called his “Oprah moment”, not giving away a car, but more than 4000 3G devices with a month’s unlimited data (and a far chunk of voice).

It was quite an impressive giveaway, especially when the phones turned out not to be the familiar G-1, but the new G-2, the HTC Magic, which was unveiled at MWC in Barcelona in February. By the end of the afternoon most of the developers in the conference centre were clutching their boxes, and the 3G bandwidth in and around the Moscone Center was starting to get a little thin…

Of course it’s going to take time to see just how well Google’s bet pays off, but it’s certainly one of the more interesting gambits - and even more interesting considering the tough financial constraints many developers are under. If having a device to test code on is the difference between working with Android and working with Windows Mobile or iPhone, then Android will certainly pick up a hefty new constituency.

I suspect that Google will be watching the number of Android SDK downloads very carefully over the next few weeks…

–Simon