Dell, HP and UEFI

A big issue right now in the world of operating systems – especially Linux – is Microsoft’s requirement that all Windows 8 machines ship with UEFI’s secure boot enabled, with no requirement that OEMs implement it so users can turn it off. This has caused some concern in the Linux world, and considering Microsoft’s past and current business practices and the incompetence of OEMs, that’s not unwarranted. Dell has stated it’s plans to include the option to turn secure boot off, while HP was a bit more vague about the issue.

You believe OEMs and Microsoft on their blue eyes. After years of abuse and patent troll behaviour, smart people don’t.

Dell confirmed that they have plans to ship Windows 8 machines with the ability to turn secure boot off in UEFI, while HP had no idea what was going on. BIOS maker AMI, meanwhile, has said it will advise OEMs to not remove the option, but adds that they can’t mandate as such.

A Dell spokesperson has stated that “Dell has plans to make SecureBoot an enable/disable option in BIOS setup”. Dell plans to move to UEFI with secure boot in the Windows 8 time frame.

HP, sadly, was less clear. “HP will continue to offer its customers a choice of operating systems,” HP said, “We are working with industry partners to evaluate the options that will best serve our customers.” Nobody at HP was apparently even aware of the issue, which means this is a general PR statement with zero actual value.

Lastly, BIOS maker AMI stated that it “will advise OEMs to provide a default configuration that allows users to enable/disable secure boot, but it remains the choice of the OEM to do (or not do) so”. This is entirely reasonable – AMI just provides a software package, it doesn’t control what OEMs remove and include.

Michael Reed is the latest person to write about “restricted boot” (or UEFI) in a major GNU/Linux Web site. Matthew Garrett, who started a lot of the outcry, calls it a bug and Groklaw helps remind us that “Microsoft’s license provision [was] prohibiting OEMs from modifying the initial boot sequence…” There are several other examples of Microsoft sabotaging Linux adoption through booting complexity [1, 2, 3, 4,5, 6, 7] . The worst thing one can do is assume good faith from Microsoft. The people who run the company are extremely anti-competitive. Don’t blame Microsoft; it’s in their nature.

My biggest fear is that like with BIOS today, every computer – even revisions within the same model – will have its own unique UEFI implementation, some of them broken and/or limited, without any means of telling which features are supported and implemented and which aren’t. Heck, I’ve encountered countless BIOS implementations over the years which only allowed you to change the boot drive order, and nothing else.

All in all, this issue is far from over, and Considering Microsoft’s history of anti-competitive practices, its current patent troll behaviour, and the general incompetence of OEMs, it’s entirely reasonable and smart for us geeks to be on our toes.

Windows 7 is supported til 2020 … most large businesses are only just thinking about moving to it and doing testing … the will probably never move to Windows 8. Windows 7 is going to be around for the next good few years as well as businesses that will use XP forever and ever … will need new hardware.

Dell Drives Short

As mentioned mentioned previously, Dell’s build-to-order business model makes it the most vulnerable to the drive shortages that are wreaking havoc across the industry, channel analyst Context reckons.

http://jet-computing.com/hard-drive-costs-rising/

http://jet-computing.com/drive-availability-decreases-30/

The chaos resulting from the killer flooding in Thailand has sent the disk drive supply chain into turmoil, making PC shortages inevitable. So far Asus, as well as Acer, Samsung and Sony, have confirmed they expect some shortfall in supply during the run up to Christmas.

Channel analyst Context expects “all vendors to be affected with Dell to be most impacted”, although the beancounter did not quantify the extent of the shortages.

“Dell’s ‘just in time’ modus operandi means the vendor tends to hold low levels of inventory due to computers’ high rate of depreciation. Whilst this has been enormously successful in the past the impending shortages will have an adverse effect on them,” it added.

Consumer lines rather than commercial products are expected to be directly in the firing line to reflect the lower margins that vendor make on retail kit, the analyst said.

Dell did not give a straight answer to any potential supply constraint, simply confirming that it was “continuing to actively monitor” the market and anticipating drive shortages.

“We are working aggressively with our HDD suppliers to mitigate any customer impact. We have teams engaging daily with affected suppliers regarding this industry situation to most effectively and efficiently manage our HDD supply chain,” it claimed in a statement.

Rival US firm HP isn’t doing much to clarify the outlook either. Responding to questions about shortages, it added: “We are in constant communication with our employees, customers and partners to optimise business continuity in this dynamic situation.”

Distribution stated that there could be 20 per cent to 30 per cent shortfall in PC supply across the UK in December, a pretty cataclysmic prediction. But ODMs in the Far East are expecting closer to a 10 per cent supply constraint worldwide.

In other drive-related news, Context saw reseller HDD unit sell-through shoot up 109 per cent in the week commencing 17 October – five days after the flooding in Thailand – with WD, Seagate and Buffalo shipments up 118 per cent, 175 per cent and 200 per cent respectively.

However, the supply chain did not react as quickly to the looming threat of shortages with unit prices remaining stable, “emphasising distributors’ sluggishness in raising price to react to the shortage”, said Context.

As revealed however, in the past fortnight drive prices have doubled and are expected to rise again with WD suspending production for six months and rival Seagate hit by some sub-assembly issues.

Hardware Catalog for Ubuntu Linux

“But will it work with Linux?”

That’s a question that many end-users has asked over the years about PC components and peripherals. Lately, the answer is usually yes. Thanks to vendors like Dell and the efforts of the Linux Driver Project, very few devices and components won’t work at all with Linux. At the same time, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have faced the same problem at a lower level. Now, Canonical and Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has announced that it’s opening up its complete database of certified components for Ubuntu and Linux.

After doing many installs of the Linux operating system and it’s wonderful flavor of distributions, rarely do I find it it impossible to install on any new or older server, laptop/netbook or desktop computer.  I have had VERY good results with Dell, HP, Nvidia and Xerox.

This is good news. It means Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) working on Ubuntu or Linux notebooks and PCs can much more quickly design systems that they can be sure will work with Linux and Ubuntu in particular.

The catalog presents ODMs and OEMs with a selection of over 1,300 certified components from 161 manufacturers. The database laid out both by vendor, and by type of component. With the former you can quickly see, for example, what ATI, NIVIDIA, and Broadcom have to offer, and with the latter you can find out who’s offering Linux-certified Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), USB and touch interfaces. You can also search the catalog for specific equipment.

In a statement, Victor Palau, Platform Services Manager at Canonical said, “There has not been a comprehensive, up-to-date freely available catalog like this for a long time. By making this open and easily searchable we want to speed the component selection for Ubuntu machines, and allow us and our partner manufacturers to focus on the value-added user experience.”

According to Ubuntu, with this database, “corporate buyers can specify the design of their Ubuntu desktops or servers from manufacturers much more efficiently. Individuals can be sure that the key components of the machine they are considering will work with their preferred Ubuntu or Linux distribution. The PC and server industry will also have a simple single source to publicize the work that they do in certifying Linux components and making that knowledge freely available.”

In addition, Canonical has also released a listing of Ubuntu certified complete PCs, laptops and servers.

While this new catalog is handy, it leaves me wanting more. It would be great if say the Linux Foundation could put together a comprehensive list from not just Canonical but all the major Linux distributors, such as Red Hat and Novell, and the hardware members of the Linux Foundation like Intel, NEC, and Qualcomm. What Canonical has done is useful. A comprehensive vendor-neutral catalog would be even better.

Era of Windows gone, HP pushes WebOS to market

HP’s recent press conference with Linux on center stage, revealed the details of its mobile device strategy. HP announced two new WebOS phones and more importantly an impressive new tablet that is a clear contender against the iPad. While I don’t for one second underestimate Apple, that was not the most interesting part of the event.

The most interesting part of the event came near the end when HP announced that it is going to ship WebOS not only in phones, tablets and printers, but in PC’s as well. In doing so, the worlds largest PC supplier is indicating that they are going to ship PC’s without Windows. For Microsoft – who was nowhere at this event – that has got to hurt. Perhaps this really IS the year of the Linux desktop.

Considering HP is the world’s biggest PC maker, this could have serious reverberations. HP exec Todd Bradley said, “Do the math on two PCs per second. You easily exceed 100 million devices with WebOS deployed annually. That’s the start of something pretty big.”

For investors and developers alike, this is your canary in the coal mine in case you haven’t been paying attention lately. There are very few things in computing that are not made with Linux these days. Linux is the underpinning technology for nearly every sector of the market in every form of computing and everyone uses it daily without even knowing it. Have you used Google for a web search recently? Purchase anything from Amazon or Ebay? All three use Linux exclusively for business operations, system stability and millions of dollars saved. Lost revenue to Microsoft.

The odds are slim that it actually affects Microsoft, but it just shows how little confidence Microsoft’s traditional partners have in Microsoft these days. Dell is working with Google on Android phones and tablets. And now HP is building its own software.

HP is among a number of leading companies who understand that when consumers expect sophisticated devices and innovation is happening super fast, they can’t go it alone. HP could not have untethered itself from Microsoft and created the devices it revealed today or come to market this fast, if it had started from scratch. And, WebOS would not be what it is today without all of the technologies that is provided with Linux and the myriad of projects that make up a typical Linux platform. All the work that goes into these Linux-based mobile devices helps other solutions succeed.

By using Linux to capture what analysts predict will be a $30B market for tablets by 2012, HP is further validating Linux as the foundation from which next-generation mobile devices will run. Companies are choosing Linux because it supports more architectures and more devices than any other OS and is freely available and is able to be custom-branded. No other OS on the market can deliver on all of this.

HP’s decision to build its next-generation of devices on Linux and WebOS is good for HP, good for other Linux-based OSes, and good for the platform. The more companies who are building on Linux, the stronger the platform becomes. We’re looking forward to bringing HP and other community stakeholders together on future Linux and WebOS innovations.

In dealing with the next generation of software and operating system development,  don’t get left behind!

• Change Happens
  • They Keep Moving The Cheese
• Anticipate Change
  • Get Ready For The Cheese To Move
• Monitor Change
  • Smell The Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old
• Adapt To Change Quickly
  • The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese
• Change
  • Move With The Cheese
• Enjoy Change!
  • Savor The Adventure And Enjoy The Taste Of New Cheese!
• Be Ready To Change Quickly And Enjoy It Again
  • They Keep Moving The Cheese.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Summary: Linux Foundation Announces Broadcom as New Member

Global communications leader Broadcom Corporation follows its move to open source 802.11 chipset drivers with increased open development

SAN FRANCISCO, January 10, 2011 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Broadcom Corporation is its newest member.

In September, Broadcom® announced it had open sourced its drivers for selected Wi-Fi chipsets, a pivotal move that garnered applause throughout the Linux community. Since then, the driver has been integrated into the latest Linux kernel release 2.6.37 and, as a result, is actively being improved upon by the entire Linux community. Given its portfolio of semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, Broadcom is an important addition to The Linux Foundation.

Broadcom is looking to extend its open development and collaboration with the Linux community by joining The Linux Foundation and continuing its work with the Linux Driver Project. It plans to participate in The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, where it can work directly with community developers, as well as other industry players and suppliers.

“There is no question: Linux has become a major platform for communications devices and technologies,” said Michael Hurlston, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Broadcom’s WLAN line of business. “Our decision to open source the drivers for Broadcom’s 802.11 chipsets is in response to our growing base of customers using Linux and is the first of what we expect to be many open development success stories.”

Better late than never. The driver will get reworked from Linux developers and all will be well. A very big category of devices now works out of the box (e.g. a lot of Dell laptops), which is good news for sure. Used to be if it was wireless and it was labelled ‘broadcom’ the best thing to do with it for Linux was to toss it into the bin. The unfortunate part was that these were among the most popular wireless devices on the planet for consumers which helped contribute massively to Linux being incompatible with many people’s laptops.

“Broadcom understands what almost every major technology company today knows — that collaborative, open development results in benefits that include everything from supported hardware to reduced development costs,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at The Linux Foundation. “We applaud Broadcom for its recent move to work more closely with the Linux community; their membership in the Linux Foundation speaks volumes of their commitment.”

This is terrific progress and shows how things can be worked out.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting technical events, including LinuxCon, and generating original Linux research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month. The organization also provides extensive Linux training opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors.

How The World’s Technology Juggernaut Lost Its Buzz And Became The ‘Underdog’

It’s worth pointing out that Web sites recently highlighted the loss of “Genuine Advantage” in Microsoft Office. It’s dead, reveals a source close to Microsoft:

Late last week, with absolutely no public announcement, Microsoft quietly retired one cog in its antipiracy machine. Microsoft has no “antipiracy machine”. It’s called counterfeiting, not piracy. And Microsoft loves counterfeiting in many cases. In a way, “Genuine Advantage” cannot possibly qualify as a product. It’s just a two-word euphemism which strives to spin an antifeature as a feature (using two positive words, “Genuine” and “Advantage”).

When you have a great product as OpenOffice, why does one need to fork $100+ dollars??

Changing the discussion, Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently took the stage at a joint press conference alongside another large technology company. He described his partner using a once-unthinkable designation.

“The thing that makes Microsoft a great partner for us is that they really are the underdog,” Zuckerberg said. “Because of that, they’re in a structural position where they’re incentivized to just go all out and innovate.”

Microsoft as underdog. At the beginning of this decade, this description would have been ridiculous, like referring to the Yankees as an unsung, longshot baseball club. From the spread of personal computing through the dawn of the World Wide Web, its software governed the desktops of more than nine in ten desktop computers. Microsoft was so dominant that it became a symbol of monopoly power run amok, supposedly snuffing out innovation. Its rivals affixed pejorative labels like “Death Star” and “Evil Empire,” accusing Microsoft of exploiting its control of the desktop to smother any and all potential competitors. Antitrust authorities in Washington and Brussels pursued a veritable crusade to break Microsoft into bite-sized pieces.

“Back in the 80s and 90s, Microsoft was seen as invulnerable,” says Howard Anderson, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

But now, after a lost decade that has seen its fortunes sag in multiple businesses, this same company is–not without justification–referred to affectionately as the underdog by the head of a Web business that did not even exist when Microsoft first developed an Internet browser. A Newsweek columnist recently dismissed Microsoft as no longer a source of fear in the technology world, but rather “a bit of a joke.” Nearly ten years ago, a newspaper had declared Microsoft a step away from “world domination.”

How did such a seemingly indomitable enterprise lose its formidable grip on the marketplace? Are Microsoft’s best days now behind it? Can it recover its former glory (if not its notoriety) in the twenty-teens?

Microsoft’s conspicuous slide attests to the tenuous nature of power and supremacy in the Internet age, and the degree to which the product itself–technology–can radically reshape business models, creating new markets for upstarts and opening pathways around previously insurmountable gatekeepers. In an era in which innovation is perhaps more important than ever, Microsoft’s experience illustrates how nothing is really certain for anyone.

To be sure, Microsoft remains huge and powerful. It stands as the second-largest technology company on earth after Apple in terms of market capitalization. It boasted record sales of $62.5 billion in the 2010 fiscal year. Still, it has clearly lost much of its luster, suffering through a decade pockmarked by a series of spectacular disappointments made all the more frustrating by the glittering ascents of rivals such as Apple and Google.

For Microsoft, failures and missed opportunities have recently come to outshine its many successes. There was the delay–and disaster–of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, widely considered one of the worst tech debacles of the decade. The software that came to market months behind schedule was panned by frustrated customers who found the too-expensive upgrade bloated, slower than its predecessor, and incompatible with hardware. There was its failed attempt to purchase Yahoo, which rebuffed many months of advances in what became a humiliating spectacle, depriving Microsoft of a crucial expansion into Web searching. There was Microsoft’s new line of Kin smartphones–a D.O.A. product the company killed just 48 days after launch. There was Microsoft’s disappointing effort to launch a digital music player, Zune–which has proven no match for Apple’s iPod–and its failure, thus far, to produce a credible rival to the iPad, even though Microsoft led the way with a “trailblazing” tablet PC in 2001.

Seven years ago, Microsoft still controlled 35 percent of the market for software running mobile phones, but that share has since slipped to 15 percent. Internet Explorer, the Web browser whose dominance put Microsoft cross-wise with federal antitrust authorities, recently dipped below 50 percent of the market.

All of this has diminished the biggest number of all: After reaching a peak market capitalization of $642 billion in September 2000, Microsoft’s worth has been sliced in half.

These reversals have occurred even as Microsoft has spent astronomic sums on research and development–$8.7 billion in the last year alone. Microsoft has also lost ground in key areas in which the Redmond giant had viable contenders well before the competition. Microsoft saw the potential of television in the mid-1990s with WebTV, years before companies like Apple and Google took up the battle for the living room.

In short, changing appetites of the marketplace, technological evolution and questionable decision-making inside Microsoft itself have combined to accomplish what antitrust regulators never did: rolling back the company’s dominance and opening the terrain for newer, nimbler entrants.

Captive To Its Own Monopoly

In the telling of many technology experts, many of Microsoft missteps and stumbles are, ironically, the direct result of its very successes and core strengths. Its stranglehold on the desktop, while hugely profitable, helped turn Microsoft into an out-of-shape competitor focused on defending turf rather than scoring new hits. In seeking to maintain its dominance on the desktop, it failed to anticipate and plan for the spread of computing to mobile phones, handheld computers, the cloud, and Web-based services delivered by companies such as Google. Now, people can write documents, run spreadsheets and browse the Web without indulging any Microsoft software, steering right around the software giant.

“The fundamental challenge for Microsoft is that it is trying to protect an enormously profitable core franchise at a time in which alternative means of achieving same results put the core franchise at risk,” says David Yoffie, a professor of international business administration at Harvard Business School.

Microsoft declined requests for comment.

For a time, Microsoft’s size, market share, and clout meant it was large enough to smother challengers.

“If there was a market someone wanted that Microsoft had, Microsoft would roll over them,” says Anderson, the Sloan School of Management professor.

Most famously, when Netscape offered a Web browser for free, Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, effectively inserting it smack on to the screen of the vast majority of the world’s desktop computers. Suddenly, Microsoft controlled the primary gateway to the Web, with all the attendant opportunities.

But this mode of building new markets by tying new products to Windows sowed a monopolistic culture inside Microsoft, one that has proven damaging in a swiftly changing marketplace. As the company focused its energies on defending its grip on the desktop (not to mention defending itself against high-profile lawsuits aimed at curbing its power), it was slow to develop new products to serve changing ways of computing, such as relying on the Web-based software that has been central to the rise of its competitors.

“It has an executive team that had not truly lived in a world of competition for perhaps a decade, and its performance in the years between 2000 and 2010 have showed this,” says George Colony, CEO and chairman of Forrester Research, a technology and market research firm. “Essentially, the company had no competition for a decade and so it became out of shape and not ready to truly compete.”

The trouble for Microsoft is that its core business is so huge that it indeed warrants defending. Its Windows operating system and Office suite of applications together generated around 60 percent of Microsoft’s sales in the 2010 fiscal year. But time and again, Microsoft’s focus on defending these areas appears to have come at the expense of timely strategic thinking about how to expand into promising new areas.

Web searching, for example, seemed in the 1990s like a niche service that could be found anywhere. Many companies failed to realize that search could be turned into the immensely profitable business that Google has proven it to be, using it as a way to attract Web surfers who could then be pointed toward other experiences including services that Microsoft previously dominated, from e-mail to instant messaging to digital calendars.

Many observers argue that Microsoft has never recovered from the departure of its co-founder, the visionary and fierce Bill Gates. He was so adept at steering the behemoth he’s proved all but impossible to replace. His successor, Steve Ballmer, who became chief executive in 2000, has by many accounts fallen short, failing to match Gates’ technical expertise and foresight.

While Gates was a coder, Ballmer is known as a numbers cruncher, a math and economics major at Harvard, where he first met Gates. Without Gates’ tech knowledge, some say, Ballmer has been unable to see the competitive opportunities and threats ahead.

Ballmer is “a brilliant Wall Street tactician,” says the futurist Mark Anderson. “However, he couldn’t program an Xbox game. He doesn’t have that tech background.”

Ballmer famously scoffed at the iPhone when it first launched. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” he told a television interviewer when Apple’s now-ubiquitous smartphone was first released. Today, Apple owns nearly one-fourth of the market for software powering smartphones, while Microsoft has only one-tenth, according to ComScore, a marketing research firm.

An ongoing survey of over 1,000 Microsoft employees by review website Glassdoor.com concluded that 50% did not approve of Ballmer’s performance as CEO, even though the company reported record revenue in the 2010 fiscal year.

Like perhaps any major company, Microsoft has also struggled to manage an increasingly enormous and fragmented operation, one with over 88,000 current employees worldwide and five major business units. In the telling of many insiders, internal politics and power struggles have often stifled innovation and thwarted coordinated action.

“A lot of time the phone division doesn’t even know what the Windows division is doing,” says Mary Jo Foley, a technology journalist and author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era.

In an op-ed in the New York Times published earlier this year, a former Microsoft vice-president, Dick Brass described the company as “a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.”

The Found Decade?

Whatever happens next, at the dawn of a new decade, Microsoft appears set for a significant makeover. In recent years, as its many of its core businesses have suffered, the company has come to be seen as a predominantly business-focused enterprise, the supplier of software and services to major American companies. Many consumers have disdained Microsoft as an unsexy brand encountered primarily at work, while giving their leisure time over to the sleek realm of Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Now, Microsoft aims to change that, regaining the engagement of the American consumer even as it attempts to build on its strong legacy in the enterprise.

Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie says he believes the firm’s way forward is to speak directly to the consumer, a strategy no doubt informed by Apple’s success in getting parents, students, designers, and others to crave its white and silver devices.

“Apple has shown that if you don’t focus on the consumer in this market, there’s enormous risk,” Yoffie says.

But many experts are dubious that Microsoft can pull off such a transition.

“Apple builds fanatics,” says MIT’s Anderson. “Microsoft builds people who are sullen, but not mutinous. Their DNA is large organizations, operating systems, and applications. Their DNA doesn’t understand design and the consumer mind.”

Microsoft’s failure to see the opportunities that Apple handily seized upon hardly means it is doomed in the consumer space. HP, Sony, Nokia, and Research in Motion are just a few of the titans that missed what the Cupertino company anticipated and developed, from the rise of apps to the demand for a digital storefront for music. Some would even have bet on Apple’s demise, a sign of just how much a technology company is capable of changing course–Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell said of Apple in 1997 that his advice to the then-ailing firm would be to “shut [...] down and give the money back to shareholders.”

In its strange new incarnation as the underdog, Microsoft is adopting a different set of habits than those embraced by Microsoft, the overlord of yore–a cultural shift that may lead to greater innovation.

“The lost decade of Microsoft is propelling them forward now to be more daring,” says Colony.

Zuckerberg, the famously youthful chief of Facebook, said he enjoyed partnering with the Microsoft because–in contrast to its days as an entrenched monopolist–the company is “just trying to rapidly gain share by doing awesome stuff that no one has talked about doing before.”

In mobile, for instance, Microsoft has demonstrated a willingness to start from scratch. Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, with its trademark homescreen made up of colorful square tiles looks little like the competition and has drawn critical praise as fresh and unique. Its latest versions of Internet Explorer and Windows, and its search engine, Bing, all stand as major improvements over their predecessors.

By some accounts, Microsoft’s efforts at refashioning itself have already reaped dividends. Its new mobile phone software is the product of a previously unmanageable cross-company collaboration in which the Zune, Xbox and browser teams all worked together to create an operating system that felt unified and consistent for the user. Microsoft has also scored points with Kinect, its new controller-free gaming peripheral that allows users to play games just by moving their body, which has been praised as the “future of gaming” and sold faster than the iPad during its first month on the market.

But the positive reviews mean nothing unless the customer buys in. The mobile phone now stands as the single most important venue for Microsoft in the consumer space, the place that will determine whether the company goes down as an atrophied giant or can rise anew.

The Pew Research Center’s 2010 Mobile Access survey found that 40% of adults in the U.S. now use their mobile phone to go online, compose email, or instant message–a number that will almost certainly swell.

“Phones are do or die for Microsoft,” says Foley.

Microsoft’s deep pockets make it impossible to dismiss Windows Phone 7′s prospects. The company is trying to woo developers with free phones and cash–they offered game-maker PopCap $100,000 to create marquee apps–and are investing a reported half-a-billion dollars in a blowout marketing campaign.

As the iPad solidifies its place in the technology landscape, and as other tablet computers proliferate, Microsoft will need to catch up in that sphere as well–a painful reality for a company that launched its first tablet computer almost a decade ago.

According to research from Strategy Analytics, Apple controlled 95% of the tablet market in the third quarter of 2010. There’s also Google to contend with, as a host of new tablets and laptops running its Android and Chrome operating systems will be coming to the market over the next several months. While the last decade witnessed the browser wars, the coming decade will see Microsoft battle to be the operating system of choice across the slew of new devices that have come into play: phones, tablets, and TVs.

Some argue that Microsoft’s aim for the consumer’s affection is bound to fail, while distracting the company from its only viable mission: building on its already dominant position in the American workplace.

“If I were Steve Ballmer, I’d be doubling down on enterprise,” says Foley. “That’s where they’re strongest and that’s where they make their money.”

Microsoft is hardly turning its back on the corporations that have been so good to it for so many years. It has been refining a range of offerings intended to tempt corporate IT departments, such as Azure, a cloud computing service that launched earlier this year and has attracted clients like eBay and the Department of Agriculture, and SharePoint, a line of business software products that has been Microsoft’s fastest-growing ever.

But the giant is clearly gearing up for a major run to recapture the masses–this time, not by dint of its monopolistic grip on the desktop, but by the force and appeal of its innovations, another phrase not frequently uttered in connection with the company back in its halcyon days.

The only certainty is this: Microsoft will be around in a major way if for no other reason than the dollars at play.

“They have more money than God,” says MIT’s Anderson.

Dell Says Ubuntu Is Safer Than Windows and we agree!

In a brief but bold statement, Dell’s U.S. website suggests that Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft Windows, especially for customers looking to avoid viruses. The statement, also suggests that Dell will begin shipping Ubuntu 10.04 on selected U.S. systems sometime in mid-2010. Truth to the matter is they *are* correct, and I add a mention that it is more robust and a more efficient system overall.

Visit, Dell’s web site (www.dell.com/ubuntu) and you’ll find a “Top Ten” list of “things you should know about Ubuntu.” Item number 6 on Dell’s list states:

In addition, Dell describes why Ubuntu may appeal to customers and compares features customers would expect from a Windows operating system.

On the one hand, Dell states the obvious: Hackers target Windows (rather than Linux) because of Microsoft’s massive installed base, and poor design. But on the other hand, it takes guts for a major PC maker to state — in black and white — that Canonical’s Ubuntu is safer than Windows. The move will surely ruffle some feathers in Redmond, and one can only wonder if Microsoft will come calling to pressure Dell to retract the assertion…Among the reasons listed: Ubuntu, Dell says, is a safer choice than Windows because so many viruses are written to target Windows.  Dell also hints that Ubuntu 10.04 preloads could arrive on Dell U.S. systems in mid-2010. That certainly represents some progress for Dell, which typically sticks with older Ubuntu releases as its preload options.

Either way, Dell’s Ubuntu endorsement arrives as Canonical tries to line up more Ubuntu hardware partners.

No doubt, Dell remains committed to Windows 7. But Dell’s decision to ship Google Android-based tablets and Ubuntu 10.04 systems reinforces a hard fact: PC industry leaders continue to seek alternatives to Windows, especially in emerging markets like mobile devices.

Ubuntu 10.04 is a long-term support (LTS) release that launched in April 2010. The offering has been generally well-received and is designed for longer-term commitments from customers and partners.

But back the story at hand: Is Dell’s statement — suggesting Ubuntu is safer than Windows — really news? Perhaps not. But it does take guts for a major PC vendor to endorse Ubuntu at a time when Microsoft is aggressively pushing Windows 7.

To see who is running Ubuntu these days check out the following:

Tracking more than 380 deployments so far. Fill out this quick survey to have your organization added to the list below. We update the list the first Tuesday of each month.

• WorksWithU 1000, A-C
• WorksWithU 1000, D-F
• WorksWithU 1000, G-I
• WorksWithU 1000, J-L
• WorksWithU 1000, M-O
• WorksWithU 1000, P-R
• Works With U 1000, S-U
• Works With U 1000, V-Z

Plus: A Few Bonus Items

• Top Ubuntu Server Edition deployments from the WorksWithU 1000
• Top Ubuntu Desktop Edition deployments from the WorksWithU 1000
• Top Ubuntu mobile deployments from the WorksWithU 1000