Boot up: Windows Explorer gets ribbon, Microsoft launches cloud CRM deal, and more

A quick burst of 6 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

The fascinating thing in this is how few commands are used most of the time, and the appalling user interface decisions made in the new ribbon: "people use lots of commands, so let's cram them all in there explicitly."

An alternative view: keep the most used commands visible. Put the others in contextual menus. Simplify, don't complicate.

"Microsoft has rolled out a special deal (and new spoof video) for its cloud Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service, in an effort to draw customers away from from Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP.
"The Redmond company will pay $150 in cash per user seat (minimum 50 seats per company; maximum 500) for customers that switch to its Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online service.
"However, to qualify for the service, businesses must be located in U.S. or Canada, subscribe to at least 50 Microsoft CRM Online licenses, and sign a 2-year licensing subscription for the service."

Interesting how Microsoft's principal business is built around the idea that it's expensive to shift from its products to rivals'. How does it go when the boot's on the other foot?

"Let's say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here's how you do it."

Witty.

Probably the best title for the COTD ever. Now you'll have to click through to understand it.

"One of the several new features in Chrome is the addition of HTTP Strict Transport Security. HSTS allows a site to request that it always be contacted over HTTPS. HSTS is supported in Google Chrome, Firefox 4, and the popular NoScript Firefox extension.
"The issue that HSTS addresses is that users tend to type http:// at best, and omit the scheme entirely most of the time. In the latter case, browsers will insert http:// for them.
"However, HTTP is insecure. An attacker can grab that connection, manipulate it and only the most eagle eyed users might notice that it redirected to https://www.bank0famerica.com or some such. From then on, the user is under the control of the attacker, who can intercept passwords etc at will."

Chrome will start having a preloaded list of must-HSTS sites. Seems like other major browsers should do this too.

A fun open data project in Toronto, Canada: "The City's controversial Core Service Review, a consultant-led examination of which municipal services might be cut or reduced for cost savings, involved public consultations in May and June. Those consultations generated over 13,000 responses from residents who either attended a consultation session, or filled out a form online.
"The City, being the City, crunched all that data into some black-and-white PDFs and posted it on an obscure section of its website. Brian Gilham had other ideas.
"What Toronto Said, a cleanly designed website that Gilham, a professional web designer, built over the course of three weeks in his spare time, provides a search-bar interface for the entire corpus of feedback data. It makes filtering the raw opinions of thousands of Torontonians about as simple as using Google to find a recipe for soup. It launches August 29."

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Boot up: Microsoft Windows 8 tablets, interview with ex-Anonymous hacker, and more

A quick burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Raises all sorts of questions about how the Windows 8 desktop/hybrid behaviour will be managed. Intriguing.

Inspired by this XKCD strip.

The total BitCoin economy has a value of £39m. At current exchange rates, anyway. Unless someone finds the lost wallet.dat that someone left on an Amazon web instance which got restarted.

Quote from a speech (much more at the post): "What we're seeing in the cloud era is not just hundreds of millions but billions of new users and devices now coming into play. Three years ago over 95% of the devices connected to the Internet were personal computers. Three years from now that number will probably be less than 20%. More than 80% of the devices connected to the Internet will not be Windows-based personal computers."

Obvious, really (think: smartphones) but intriguing to see it put that way. Maritz's real point though is about what becomes important when that is true.

Well, it isn't streaming, except that you can listen to it while it's downloading. And it's only sort of downloaded, as it might be in a cache. Anyhow.

From the conclusion: " the stellar 9900 shows that when its back is against the wall, RIM can produce winners. This phone is the best BlackBerry RIM has ever produced, but against the gigantic technological and marketing forces of iPhone and Android, it's a whisper in the wind. Let's hope that there are enough BlackBerry fans left to support their favorite phone and that the company completes its reboot in time to prevent the 2013 headline, 'RIM R.I.P.'"

Interview with @SparkyBlaze, who is in his 20s and from Manchester (but wants to keep the rest under his to-be-white hat).

"Q: What are some of the biggest challenges you see out there?
"SparkyBlaze: In my mind social engineering is the biggest issue today. We have the software/hardware to defend buffer overflows, malware, DDoS and code execution. But what good is that if you can get someone to give you their password or turn off the firewall because you say you are Greg from computer maintenance just doing testing. It all comes down to lies, everyone does it and some people get good at it."

James Surowiecki, the New Yorker's financial writer, dissects the problem around the virtual currency in typically astute fashion: "many--probably most--Bitcoin users are acquiring bitcoins not in order to buy goods and services but to speculate. That's a bad investment decision, and it also hurts Bitcoin's prospects.
"True believers in Bitcoin's usefulness prefer to deny that speculation is driving the action in bitcoins. But the evidence suggests otherwise.":

And if hoarding, instead of trading, takes over, then nobody uses it, so it becomes useless - trapped in a deflationary spiral where the velocity of the currency is zero.

Ed Bott finds the same thing that we pointed you to a while ago: a real-life crackdown by Russian police, rather than any fiendishly clever piece of technology, is what killed off Mac Defender and various Windows workalikes.

Trouble is, that could mean that more will be along soon, depending on when the next gang gets its act together.

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Boot up: China's PC market overtakes US, Windows Phone 7 – the (preliminary) verdict, and more

China's PC market ... now bigger than US's

A quick burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

"PC shipments in the China market have exceeded those of the United States in the second quarter of 2011 (2Q11). Approximately 18.5m units worth US$11.9bn shipped in China during the quarter, compared to 17.7m units worth US$11.7bn in the U.S. China represented 22% of the global PC market's unit shipments compared to the US at 21%."

Nice implementation in HTML5 - though of course you'll need a compatible browser. Code at https://github.com/emmasax/Phone-hacking by Emmasax.

"Look, I recognize that no phone is perfect, no mobile OS is perfect, no technology is perfect, I'm not perfect, all of that. And Mango is, by and large, a good effort. But at this stage in the game, it's got to be on point if Microsoft has any hope of convincing people to turn their adoring eyes from iPhone or pull them away from the massive marketing machine of Android. Mango is good. A lot of people could use it every day and be totally happy with it. But it's not great."

Molly Wood is usually thought of as a Windows fan. (Thanks @Avro for the link.)

"Pretty much ever since Paul Buchheit suggested "Don't be evil" as a corporate values statement (and Amit Patel begun writing it on whiteboards around the office), any time Google does something people don't like, they begin calling it 'evil' and complaining that Google is violating its prime directive.
"But surely 'evil' means something more than just 'wrong' or 'bad'. If the girl across the street peers through your window to watch you undress, we might say that was bad and wrong and awful, but I don't think anyone would try to claim it was evil."

Thoughtful: captures the essence of how Google, and companies that succeed in building loyal customer bases, think, and how it differs from those which don't.

Intriguing investigation of how the ability to build stuff has leaked away across the Pacific: the two companies given as examples make an interesting contrast.

"The series of pie charts shows the sales of various music formats: Thus, you can see cassettes begin devouring the LP, and then CDs devouring cassettes, and then, of course, downloadable MP3s decimating CD sales:"

The trouble though is that it's jerky and less easy to follow than the same data as a straight line graph. Only us?

Includes Michael Dell.

"Robert McMillen, president of Portland, Ore.-based All Tech 1, a security solution provider with a strong mobile security business, said his company wasted no resources on the WebOS software or the TouchPad hardware because neither offered a value proposition for his customers.
"'We never had a single meeting with our staff about supporting [the HP TouchPad] platform,' he said. 'There was almost no information on security for this product. It wasn't built for business, it was built more for consumers. It wasn't even a blip on our radar.'"

And he's not alone. HP has burnt a lot of boats with this move.

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Microsoft's Windows XP countdown widget: oh, the irony

Hilarious, but true. Microsoft, as part of its drive to get people and companies to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 (and you really ought to, you know: Windows 7 is more secure and it was designed in the 21st century so it knows about things like SSDs, which make your computer go like a rocket) has developed a little Windows widget that you can use to count down the days until that moment in 2014 when XP hits its End of Support (which gets its own TLA: EOS).

So, that's a widget to get people and companies off Windows XP. With us so far?

And here's the page. Mmm... yes... System requirements... "Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7, Windows Vista."

Microsoft's XP countdown widget: it won't run on XP.

We look forward to lots of stories and people who upgraded so that they could run the widget to tell them how long it was until they had to upgrade.

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What does Microsoft's Windows sales announcement tell us about PC sales?

PC sales are going well - but how do they compare with previous years? Photograph: Arcaid / Rex Features

Microsoft says that it has sold 400m Windows 7 licences. As I noted back at the end of April when Microsoft said it had shipped 350m licences, the takeup has gone better, proportional to the total number of PCs sold each year, than it did with Windows XP in 2001 (and definitely better than with Vista in 2007).

But what do those two numbers – the 350m and the 400m – taken together with their dates of announcement tell us about PC sales in the second quarter?

Actually, they suggest that they aren't going that swimmingly. Here's why.

In the second quarter of 2010, the research companies Gartner and IDC say that about 80m Windows PCs were sold (I've subtracted the number of Apple Macs sold for the quarter). In the second quarter of 2009, the figure was 66m. (So that was a rather impressive year-on-year growth of about 20% from 2009 to 2010.)

So: 350m sold by 22 April (the blogpost actually says "more than", but let's round it down, because that puts a better light on PC sales for this quarter.)

Two months (and a week) later, Microsoft is saying that it has sold an additional 50m licences. Assuming that sales have been going at a steady rate through the quarter, that implies sales of just 75m PCs in the second quarter - which would be a 6% dip. That's quite substantial, and if correct, would come after a 2% dip in Windows PC sales in the first quarter. Possible reasons could include financial squeezes on businesses and the Japan earthquake slowing business in the Far East.

One factor that objectors might raise: my calculation in April showed that Windows 7 licences were 67% of PC shipments in the first 18 months. (That's because you get an overlap with older systems, including XP and Vista.) If that's still the case, then that 75m would actually be 125m. But as there's never been the slightest sign of the PC market ever hitting that size, we can discount that as wrong. The 67% figure for the first 18 months will have arisen because of that OS release overlap; but now you can't get XP - Microsoft stopped selling it on October 22 - so it's Windows 7 all the way now.

Allow perhaps for some small mix of Vista licensing and/or "white boxes" being shipped without licences, and you're still looking at zero or very small growth in PC sales over 2010 - perhaps a total of 80m. Financial snalysts such as Richard Windsor at Nomura forecasting a total growth of only 3% in PC sales this year.

Yes, but what does it mean? It means less money for Microsoft. If there were only 75m Windows PCs sold in the second quarter, that translates directly to its bottom line.

Going by Microsoft's own financial results (whose fourth-quarter figures are coming up next week), the three-year average for revenue per Windows PC sold is $56.47, and profit is $39.91.

Plug those in to two scenarios and the following emerges for the Windows division:
• 75m PCs sold: revenue: $4.23bn; profit $2.99bn
• 80m PCs sold: revenue: $4.52bn; profit: $3.2bn.

Those are still big numbers - but they're not showing the growth that Steve Ballmer might have hoped for. (The 75m is pretty pessimistic; the 80m would be level-pegging with the first quarter, but if netbook sales have collapsed further then it might be too large.) Those Windows 8 tablets really can't come soon enough.

Update: There is another confounding factor which might mean that the number of PCs sold is actually higher than 80m, but that Windows licences aren't following them: PC sales in China. The Wall Street Journal in May reported a speech in which Ballmer noted that Microsoft only gets about 5% of the revenue from China that it gets from the West, because of rampant piracy. For 2011, the WSJ noted, IDC "projects PC unit shipments in China are likely to increase 12% to 71 million units, just shy of the 75 million units in the U.S., where it expects sales to be flat."

If those shipments aren't matched by Windows licences, then we could see an increase in PC sales even while Microsoft's revenue from them doesn't grow. It's a possibility: we'll find out next week.

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Windows phone 'Mango' production released: now wait until October

Cut mango slices. If Microsoft people buy five a day can... get Photo: Helen Rimmel

Microsoft has signed the code for the "mango" version of the operating system Windows phone - officially, the code has RTM had (appeared on production) - according to Windows team blog.

It, explains Terry Myerson, corporate Vice President in the Windows phone team (in fact of the daily Manager), that "this is the point in hand, where we code to our listeners and mobile operator partners to optimize of mango for their specific telephone and network configurations development."

(See our previous coverage of Windows phone mango for an idea of, what it contains.)

The good news: this is slightly above where it was expected, be (and certainly better than the original release of Windows phone that rewrite acquisition of risk Rosa - members and Windows Mobile Entertainment & device about the project from the $500 m caught up in the internal struggles within the Division have miles).

The bad news: It will be called "Windows Phone 7.5". We liked mango. For now stay with, we.

So it's at the end of July, in and out of the code is now so they have the entire August so mean, that should release in September, right...? Fear not. The complicated dance are telephone code right contains an extra layer that is not to the release of Windows OS to PC OEMs: the carriers.

So the mango into peoples hands (or a retailer shops), the processes are navigated:

• Cell phone manufacturers have mango against their new designs make sure that the code is run, really well on their systems to test

• Cell phone manufacturers have mango their old designs ensure that the code none caused catastrophic things happen, and that in fact only good things happen - not even indifferent to test. This worked with the first update to Windows phone ("Pre NoDo" update), which some LG phones mess when it rolled out in April.

• who have cell phone manufacturers (Nokia) to take their mobile phones to the carriers and allow them to test their networks. All air carriers insist on this as a precondition for the phones go in the network - new mobile phones; It is the same for Apple. (New iPhones are sent to carriers in sealed boxes, that the software can be tested.)

• If all in best order, then the carrier is will be know the cell phone manufacturers. This is of course by the slowest carrier to respond, in General.

This year there is a larger problem: much of Android phones and of course the new iPhones - expected in September - which are in the queue before the Windows phone mango phones. This may be a traffic jam, which will keep things.

This means that you should not expect the mango update to be rolled, or the new Windows phones (including Nokia's Sea Ray - no doubt, they find an exciting name, such as N9487) appear as a whole before October.

What was telling at least in terms of Nokia, which is I since February, have.

You may also want to consider, much like mango world, in the new OS be issued, the it in will be added. Many said that Windows phone non-competitive when (no cut + paste and various other things) published. Mango is a big improvement. The Windows team blog notes that it to talk to a single person multiple connections (IN IM, email, text) threading in a single view. Multi-tasking; and Internet Explorer 9. Not a word about Flash.

The question is whether it is large enough be after Apple's iOS 5 is released, and whether the next version of Android - codename ice cream sandwich - it is available until then. That is likely to have ingredients such as face tracking, a new application launcher, USB hosting (for a game controller), and simpler updates. Given the fact that Android notifications system is almost perfect, but its gingerbread keyboard system (in my opinion) is dire, perhaps is the UI improvements.

Whichever, not go mango, to have a soft landing.

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What does Microsoft Windows distribution announcement you inform us about PC sales?

PC sales are good - but how they compared to previous years? Photo: Arcaid / Rex features

Microsoft says that it has sold 400 m Windows 7 licenses. As mentioned back at the end of April when Microsoft said it had delivered 350 m licenses, the storage better gone, proportional to the total number of PCs sold each year, as it is with Windows XP in 2001 (and in any case better than with Vista in 2007).

-But do the two numbers 350 m and 400 m - be together with their announcement tell us about the PC sales in the second quarter?

Actually, they suggest that they are not, go the swimmingly. Here is the reason.
In the second quarter of 2010, the research company Gartner and IDC say that about 80 m were sold Windows PCs (I've deducted sold for the quarter the number of Apple Macs). In the second quarter of 2009 was the figure of 66 m. (Sun, that was a pretty impressive previous year growth of about 20% between 2009 and 2010.)
So: 350 m from 22 April sold (the blog post actually says "greater than", but let down, round us, because that puts a better light on PC sales for this quarter.)

Two months (and a week) later Microsoft says that it has sold an additional 50 m licenses. Assuming that sales through the district are to go, implies, sales of only 75 m PCs in the second quarter - which would be one 6% dip. This is quite significant and if properly, according to a 2% of bath in the Windows-PC sales in the first quarter would come. Possible causes can financial squeezes on companies and the earthquake in Japan slows business in the far East included.

One of the factors that could cause of conscience: my calculation in April showed that 7 licenses Windows 67% of PC shipments in the first 18 months. (This is because you get an overlap with older systems, including XP and Vista.) If this is still the case, then, would be that 75 m 125 m. But as there has never ever been the slightest hint of the PC market meeting this size, we can as the wrong discount. The figure of 67% for the first 18 months will release due to its OS overlap occurred. but now you not XP - Microsoft stopped on October 22 - sales, making it now the way Windows 7.
Allow maybe some small mix of Vista licensing and/or "white boxes" without licenses delivered will and Windsor at Nomura are still looking to 0 (zero) or very small growth 2010 - perhaps a total 80 m. financial Snalysts such as Richard PC forecast total growth rate of only 3% in PC sales this year.

Yes, but what does it mean? It means less money for Microsoft. There were only 75 m in the second quarter Windows PC directly on the bottom line sold, translated.
Going to Microsoft's own financial results (numbers come from the fourth quarter until next week), three-year average sales per Windows PC sold is $56.47, and profit is $39.91.

Close the two scenarios and the following result for the Windows Division:
• 75 m PCs sold: revenues: $4. 23bn; Enjoy $2-. 99bn
• 80 m PCs sold: revenues: $4. 52bn; Profit: $3 billion.
Are still large numbers - but they are not showing the growth of the Steve Ballmer could have hoped for. (75 M is pretty pessimistic, level access to the first quarter, but if more sales have reduced NetBook would be 80 m then may be too large.) This Windows 8 tablets are not really early enough can.

Update: It is actually higher than 80 m is what could mean that the number of PCs sold an another confusing factor, but the Windows licenses are not for them: PC sales in China. The Wall Street Journal in May reported a speech in the Ballmer said that Microsoft just about gets 5% of the revenue from China, which receives from the West, due to the rampant piracy. For 2011, Wall Street Journal IDC announced "projects PC unit shipments in China are 12% to 71 million units, just shy of 75 million units in the United States where it expected sales that flat increase."

If these programmes accesses Windows licenses are not, could we see doesn't grow sales PC even during Microsoft's revenue from them. It's a way: we find out next week.

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Microsoft's Windows XP countdown widget: oh, the irony

Omitted, but true. Microsoft, as part of its drive, people and companies to obtain migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 (and you should really, you know: Windows 7 is more secure and developed in the 21st century, so that it knows about things like SSDs that to go your computer like a rocket) developed a small Windows widget that you can use to count down the days until that moment in 2014, if XP end of hits, support (which gets an own TLA: EOS).
So, this is a widget to get people and businesses from Windows XP. With us so far?
And here is the page. MMM... Yes... System requirements... "Supported operating systems: Windows 7, Windows Vista."
Microsoft XP countdown widget: It is not running on XP.
We look forward to many stories and people who updated, so that they the widget to tell them how long it was until they had to be upgraded.

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