And if they decide to open it up even just a little, this could be a major breakthrough in tearing down the virtual wall between the desktop and the web, a trend we’ve been noticing for years.

The service would essentially be capable of providing you with a secure unique ID for all the files and folders on your desktop, enabling users to share, comment on, tag and search files like photos and videos via a dedicated web page powered by .NET. Think of this as social URLs that link to files which could easily be pushed to third-party services like Twitter or Digg but also Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger without the need for you to copy, move or upload anything. Furthermore, social interaction around the files would be visible from inside the Windows desktop OS, blurring the line between the desktop and the web even more.

You can have a URL drill into a subportion of a document or a PowerPoint deck, or data can come from a Web service or a database. Social Desktop is a local service that maps the user’s local data into a .NET service bus service, enabling local data to be accessible through firewalls. Social Desktop also provides a Web-service view over the same data, with inherent RSS event streams for any container. New data sources can be mapped into the URL hierarchy, enabling a distributed view to be built. There are simple sharing paradigms that enable URLs to be shared temporarily or permanently.

Social Desktop runs on Silverlight and leverages both the Windows OS and Windows Azure, the software giant’s very own cloud services platform which Microsoft announced in October 2008. TechFlash reviewed the service as well last week, and asked the project leads how Social Desktop differs from Live Mesh. The response came from Lili Cheng, who manages Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems Group: “In the Mesh model, you can almost imagine your PC being pushed to the cloud,” she explained. “In this, you can almost imagine the Web being embedded inside your desktop.”

I don’t know about you, but to me this all sounds very promising and I’m curious if using Social Desktop would change my file sharing habits. Even with the plethora of free, simple and fast online backup and sharing services around, there’s still a trust barrier not easily overcome by startups who need to market their services extensively on an inherently low budget to reach any kind of scale. Besides, Social Desktop even relieves you from the not-so-cumbersome task of moving a file to the cloud in order to store or share it, so that makes for one hell of a substantial benefit compared to other services where you’d be required to register and do a series of actions before that happens.

Unfortunately, a Microsoft spokesperson told NetworkWorld that Social Desktop at this point is merely a research prototype which will not be a feature in Windows 7, nor will it be available for public use.

But I still want to get my hands on Windows 7 Beta (it makes use of the new operating system’s file-preview functions) right now even if just to test this application once (and if) they release it.

Original URL: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/23/microsoft-research-a-look-at-the-intriguing-social-desktop-prototype/

The company says it will end availability of Windows 7 Beta on Feb. 10.

There are a couple of loopholes, however. Users who started to download the OS before that date will have until Feb. 12 to complete the process. Also, Microsoft will continue to distribute product keys beyond Feb. 12 to users who have previously downloaded Windows 7 Beta but have yet to obtain a key.

“We are at a point where we have more than enough beta testers and feedback coming in to meet our engineering needs, so we are beginning to plan the end of general availability for Windows 7 Beta,” said Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft’s in-house Windows blogger, in a post Friday.

Microsoft will post warnings on its Web site that the download program for Windows 7 is about to end starting Tuesday. A final version of Windows 7, Microsoft’s follow-up to Windows Vista, is expected to be available in late 2009 or early 2010.

Perhaps due to Vista’s unpopularity, computer users have been downloading Windows 7 Beta in droves. Microsoft dropped limits on the number of available copies of the software after a crush of download requests for the new operating system brought the company’s servers to a halt during the first weekend of availability earlier this month.

Windows 7 offers numerous new features, including native support for touch-screen interfaces and more than 20 hotkey combinations designed to simplify use.

Microsoft needs Windows 7 to be a hit. Vista has failed to catch on with mainstream computer users and businesses have shunned it outright. Many users have complained about Vista’s hardware requirements, intrusive security measures, and lack of compatibility with older applications.

Dissatisfaction with Vista has allowed Apple to gain share against Microsoft in the computer operating system market in recent months. Windows’ market share in November fell below 90% for the first time in years while Mac OS is now flirting with the 10% mark, according to market watcher Net Applications.

It’s all taking a toll on Microsoft’s bottom line. Last week, the company said second quarter profits tumbled 11%. It also announced a restructuring plan that will see it lay off 5,000 full-time employees and an additional 5,000 contract workers.

Original URL: http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212902415

The title of the report, “Should Your e-mail Live In The Cloud? A Comparative Cost Analysis,” is actually somewhat misleading. The cloud implies a diffuse network of servers that hold partially redundant copies of information. Some of the services examined by the report don’t necessarily offer that sort of setup, although the report frequently refers to any off-site service as “the cloud.”

Semantics aside, Forrester surveyed over 50 IT workers at major enterprise companies to see how they handle e-mail, contacts, and calendaring services. They also discussed options and costs with 21 vendors of these services, and created some rough estimates of how much each portion of the various services cost.

One of the things they discovered is that the business community is largely unaware of the costs of running an e-mail account. Many of those surveyed gave guesses from $2 to $11 per user, although a detailed accounting showed that the costs were often several times that (Forrester came up with $25.18 per month, compared with $8.47 for Gmail). Part of the problem is that costs are often split among several cost centers, with software licenses part of a different department’s budget from the salaries of the people that support it. In some cases, the e-mail system was running on older hardware that had initially been bought for a different purpose and had been depreciated.

Despite the confusion, a lot of companies realize that e-mail has become expensive for two simple reasons: spam and malware. Nearly half of those surveyed were evaluating off-site solutions because e-mail costs had risen, while another 30 percent were performing the evaluation as part of an upgrade or service consolidation process. Fully 85 percent of these companies were leaning towards moving some of the services off-site.

The biggest reason for doing this seemed to be so that someone else could deal with staying on top of spam and malware; over half of those surveyed were planning on implementing a hybrid system where an external service filtered mail on its way into and/or out of the company’s internal servers. Reasons cited include the challenges of staying on top of the threats and up-to-date with the software, as well as the resource-intensive nature of combating mal-mail. Another 30 percent were leaning towards a complete outsourcing of the service, presumably in part because of these costs.

The author of the report calculated the monthly costs for the components of various systems, such as storage and client software. The biggest cost was clearly archiving, which is often legally required for a lot of positions. Beyond that, the software and filtering costs all came in at roughly 10 to 15 percent of the costs when they’re needed—off-site services, for example, eliminate separate purchases of server and filtering software, and lower staff costs in exchange for a monthly subscription. The overall conclusion is that any company with an employee count of under 15,000 would probably benefit from using off-site services.

The two examples of actual cloud services, Microsoft’s Exchange Online and Google Apps for Business, came out significantly ahead. Exchange Online provided significantly lower costs until somewhere above 30,000 seats, while Google Apps’ monthly cost consistently came in at half the cost of others, in part because its subscription cost is so low, and in part because the “client software” is a free web browser.

The author of the report cautions that there are a lot of variables to consider, such as how often the company adds and removes users, the frequency of large attachments, and the archiving requirements. Still, the results make it clear that Microsoft is now undercutting most of other services available, including those that rely on Exchange itself. But Google has managed to significantly undercut Microsoft. Although its solution is nowhere near as integrated as Exchange, an increasing percentage of the workforce is getting comfortable with managing their life and e-mail through a web browser.

Original URL: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090108-report-gmail-about-one-third-as-expensive-as-hosted-e-mail.html

Microsoft issued a security advisory late Monday, saying that the bug could be exploited to run unauthorized software on systems running versions of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005.

Attack code that exploits the bug has been published, but Microsoft said that it has not yet seen this code used in online attacks. Database servers could be attacked using this flaw if the criminals somehow found a way to log onto the system, and Web applications that suffered from relatively common SQL injection bugs could be used as stepping stones to attack the back-end database, Microsoft said.

Desktop users running the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine or SQL Server 2005 Express could be at risk in some circumstances, Microsoft said.

The bug lies in a stored procedure called “sp_replwritetovarbin,” which is used by Microsoft’s software when it replicates database transactions. It was publicly disclosed on December 9 by SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab, which said it had notified Microsoft of the issue in April.

“Systems with Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Service Pack 4, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 are not affected by this issue,” Microsoft said in its advisory.

This is the third serious bug in Microsoft’s software to be disclosed in the past month, but it is unlikely to be used in widespread attacks, according to Marc Maiffret, director of professional services, with The DigiTrust Group, a security consulting firm. “It is rather low risk given other vulnerabilities that exist,” he said via instant message. “There are a lot of better ways to currently compromise windows systems.”

After seeing the Internet Explorer flaw used in a growing number of online attacks, Microsoft rushed out an emergency patch for the issue last Wednesday. The company says it has also seen “limited and targeted attacks” exploiting a serious bug in the WordPad Text Converter for Word 97 files. As with the SQL bug, this WordPad converter vulnerability has not been patched, but is a prime candidate to be fixed in Microsoft’s upcoming January 13 security updates.

Original URL: http://www.pcworld.com/article/155940/microsoft_warns_of_sql_attack.html

When users log into their Gmail using Internet Explorer a red text link appears at the top right of the page saying ‘get faster Google Mail.’

If you click on the link then you are taken through to a Google answers page that suggests that you should use a faster browser.

The suggestions it makes are Google’s own Chrome browser or Firefox 3.0.

We suggest you upgrade

“Browsers are getting faster and better at running web applications like Google Mail that use browser technology to its limits. In order to get the best Google Mail experience possible, we suggest that you upgrade your browser to one of the fastest Google Mail supported browsers that work on Windows,” reads the text.

There is a proviso that IE8 is being worked on ‘Note: A faster version of Internet Explorer, IE8, is in development and available in a beta release.’

Although not all users appear to be affected in our early investigation, at first glance it is a particularly aggressive approach from Google.

To actively push two browsers over the currently dominant Internet Explorer is far from the normal Google softly, softly approach – especially in a week where Internet Explorer has been beset by news of a major security problem.

It seems, however, that Google is only pushing users to the other browsers if they are currently using Internet Explorer 7. Those that are using Internet Explorer 6 are told to upgrade to either Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 for a faster Google service.

Whether this is a silly overview on Google’s part or an active push away from Internet Explorer by the search kings remains to be seen.

What is for sure, is that Google is sending out mixed messages to its users, depending on what version of browser they are using.

Original URL: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/google-pushing-users-away-from-ie–496216

During the past several years, Microsoft has been testing out the idea that it can host and run business software cheaper and more effectively than individual enterprises can do on their own. The effort started in 2005 with a single customer–battery maker Energizer–which had Microsoft essentially handle all of its PC desktops.

Over time, Microsoft narrowed the service to an option in which it hosts Exchange and SharePoint, runs the software in its data center, and charges customers on a monthly basis. Microsoft officially launched the products, known as Microsoft Online, at a customer event at the St. Regis hotel here.

“We can help you save money,” Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop told the crowd, saying Microsoft estimates that companies can save at least 10 percent by letting Microsoft run their messaging and collaboration software for them.

One of the early customers is video retailer BlockBuster, which has been using Exchange Online for about six months. Blockbuster CIO Keith Morrow said in an interview that Microsoft’s online services came at a good time for the company, which was on a several-generations-old version of Lotus Notes.

Morrow said the video rental company needed to make a change of some kind, and the option to move to Exchange without having to bring that skill set in-house was a key selling point, as was the ability to offer better mobile options, including Outlook Web Access and iPhone support.

Another Notes switcher in the crowd was Eddie Bauer, which has been a Microsoft Online customer for about five weeks. Chief Information Officer Rich Mozack said the clothing retailer wanted to move off Notes but couldn’t make the numbers work to run Exchange on its own.

“We just couldn’t justify the up-front investment,” Mozack said.

Microsoft’s Ron Markezich said about two-thirds of early customers are moving from Notes to Exchange. But even as Microsoft continues to target those moving from Lotus Notes, the company faces the threat of its own Exchange customers moving to other hosted options, including Google Apps.

Just last week, Serena Software said it was switching to Google from Exchange in a move it said would save it $750,000 a year, according to several reports.

At the event, Elop made Microsoft’s familiar case that, while the cloud is great, customers are better served by an option that allows software to run on customers’ own machines as well as over the Internet.

The software maker said last year that it would offer the hosted option for large businesses, later expanding the offer to businesses of all sizes. At last month’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft also confirmed that it would offer Web-based versions of its Office applications, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

While many of those at Monday’s event were the company’s early customers and partners, not everyone at the event was ready to sign off. I spoke with a municipality that was highly interested in Microsoft’s product, particularly as it plans to move from GroupWise to Exchange. Still, with a dearth of other governments to point to, this CIO told me that he still faced challenges in getting the city’s upper management and government to sign off on the deal.

Original URL: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10098573-56.html

If you’re a Gmail user, what you’ll want to do after a few more unsuccessful, increasingly frantic attempts is to speak with a Google customer support representative, post haste. But that’s not an option. Google doesn’t offer a toll-free number and a live person to resolve the ordinary user’s problems.

Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks. They were innocent victims of security measures, which automatically suspend access if someone tries unsuccessfully to log on repeatedly to an account. The customers express frustration that they can’t speak with anyone at Google after filling out the company’s online forms and waiting in vain for Google to restore access to their accounts.

Tom Lynch, a software entrepreneur who lives near Austin, Tex., discovered early last month that he had been locked out of both Gmail accounts he used; he had no idea why. He received boilerplate instructions for recovering his accounts that did not apply to his particular circumstances, which included his failing to maintain a non-Gmail e-mail account as a back-up. He said it took him four weeks, including the use of a business directory and talking with anyone he could find at Google, before he succeeded in having service restored.

A Google spokesman placed the blame on Mr. Lynch, saying he did not follow Google’s guidelines. The spokesman characterized Mr. Lynch’s ordeal as a praiseworthy illustration of Google’s tough security: “We have had no cases of falsely recovered accounts.”

Google does provide phone support to Gmail customers who subscribe to Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 annually and includes larger storage quotas and other benefits. Customers who use the advertising-supported version of Gmail, however, must rely solely on what Google calls “self-service online support.”

Microsoft and Yahoo similarly offer phone support only to their premium e-mail customers. (Yahoo says it offers phone support for its free e-mail service “in some cases,” but it does not publish the phone number; it is revealed to the user in distress only after e-mail communication fails to resolve the problem.)

Last month, Google’s official blog dispensed advice for those unfortunate souls who find themselves locked out. The post, “What to do if you can’t access your Webmail,” scolded users about not sharing passwords with anyone, pointed customers to a form to reset the password and, if that doesn’t solve the problem, to another form to start the “account recovery process.”

As customers, we bring the same expectations to Google’s personalized information services, like Gmail or Google Docs, its word-processing service, as we do to our bank’s Web site. These are places that hold information very dear to us. My bank recognizes that losing access for days at a time is unacceptable. It provides me with round-the-clock phone support for account problems. So, too, should Google, even if I pay the company not in the form of a monthly account fee, but with my attention, which Google commercializes by selling slices to its advertisers.

Last month, with cases like Mr. Lynch’s in mind, I contacted Google to see what the company had to say about my suggestion that it add phone support for its customers with account-related problems. The company returned with a debate team of three to argue the negative position: Matthew Glotzbach, who works with Google’s business customers; Roy Gilbert, who handles consumers; and Greg Badros, who is an engineering director.

Mr. Glotzbach began by saying that “one-to-one support isn’t always the best answer” because it would take Google too long to collect lots of data about a problem that is affecting many users simultaneously.

For systemic problems, data collection is important. But not for other categories. Account recovery could be slow for a locked-out customer who doesn’t have a backup e-mail account, and who declined to provide a security question and answer because of concerns that someone else could use it to get in (which is what someone did to Gov. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account).

Mr. Badros argued that Google asks so little personal information of a new Gmail customer that it’s hard to determine identity when the genuine user and the impostor both present themselves to claim the account, and neither can produce the verification. He said more information could be asked of users when they sign up, but the inconvenience would dissuade them from trying the service.

Mr. Gilbert added that proving identity with only minimal information is a problem, whatever form of communication is used to reach customer support. He said, “Even if they were standing right in front of us, it wouldn’t help.”

THIS makes sorting out competing claims seem permanently hopeless, when, of course, this is not the case; it simply means that standard security questions will not suffice. But if Google were to use real people to sort out identity problems over the phone, the only remaining consideration would be the one that Google’s panel of experts didn’t mention in our talk: cost.

Google says it has “tens of millions” of Gmail customers. (It declines to be more specific.) If it’s willing to consider phone support for account-access emergencies, it can take heart in the example of Netflix, which last year adopted phone support with enthusiasm, replacing online support completely. For all customers. For all problems. And without resorting to an offshore call center.

It turns out that a staff of 375 customer service representatives are enough to handle calls from Netflix’s 8.4 million customers, answering most calls within a minute. Netflix says with justifiable pride that it has received the top ratings in online retail customer satisfaction by both Nielsen Online and ForeSee Results.

A Netflix spokesman explained the complete switch to phone support: “Most people don’t need customer service,” he said, “but when they do, they want it now.”

Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/business/05digi.html

At the end of its third week of availability, Google Inc.’s Chrome accounted for 0.77% of the browsers that visited the 40,000 sites tracked by Net Applications, down from a 0.85% share the week before.

“The trend line on Chrome still has a slight downward angle, and these weekly numbers reflect that,” said Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications’ executive vice president of marketing. Although Chrome popped above 1% within hours of its release, the new browser now reaches that mark only in the middle of the night, U.S. time, Vizzaccaro added.

Chrome’s numbers, like those of Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox and Apple Inc.’s Safari, typically climb after work hours and then fall as work resumes the next day. Many businesses standardize on Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer (IE) and don’t allow employees to use alternate browsers.

IE and Firefox still showed share erosion compared to the period immediately before Chrome’s Sept. 2 debut, but both browsers regained users last week, Vizzaccaro said. IE picked up 0.24 percentage points last week, while Firefox regained 0.06 points. Both, however, remained down for the month, as was Opera Software ASA’s Opera and AOL LLC’s now-defunct Netscape.

Safari, the only browser to escape Chrome’s impact, was still on the plus side for September, ending last week up 0.45 percentage points before Chrome, although that was down from the prior week’s 0.68-point net gain.

Last week, Vizzaccaro said Safari’s immunity could be traced to the lack of Chrome competition. Although Google has promised a native Mac OS X edition, its browser is currently only available for Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Computerworld’s site metrics echoed Net Applications’ trend for Chrome. The percentage of visitors to Computerworld.com who used Google’s browser dropped to 4.01 points last week, down from 4.96 points.

Chrome’s slow slide may be because of Google’s low-key promotion, Vizzaccaro said. “The only marketing effort I’ve seen from Google is in sponsored links on search results for ‘browser’ or ‘browsers’ search terms,” he said. “On Google, Chrome is naturally the top sponsored link. On Yahoo, it was second. And on Windows Live, I couldn’t even find it in the first five pages of organic results.”

Original URL: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9115341

But Mozilla CEO John Lily said that “it should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here – their business is the web, and they’ve got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better.” Lily believes that Chrome “will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.”

The executive agrees that Google’s Chrome will have a competitive effect on Mozilla. “As much as anything else, it’ll mean there’s another interesting browser that users can choose,” he wrote in a blog post. “With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc — there’s been competition for a while now, and this increases that. So it means that more than ever, we need to build software that people care about and love. Firefox is good now, and will keep on getting better.”

That being said, Lily noted that” Mozilla and Google have always been different organizations, with different missions, reasons for existing, and ways of doing things.” While they are tied together in certain collaborative efforts such as security features as well as a financial commitment from Google until 2011, the executive hinted that the future relationship between the two organizations is not ironed out yet. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the coming months and years. I personally think Firefox 3 is an incredibly great browser – the best anywhere – and we’re seeing millions of people start using it every month,” he wrote in his blog

“It’s based on technology that shows incredible compatibility across the broad web – technology that’s been tweaked and improved over a period of years.”

Lily’s blog is carefully worded, but it surely seems that Google will be aiming to gain the upper hand in this relationship and at least ask Mozilla to adopt key features of Chrome features for Firefox. Mozilla could be caught between a rock and a hard place: Play with Google or compete against them and the mighty Microsoft? There is no need to answer this question immediately, as the first version of Chrome seems to be very rough around its edges and appears to be lacking key features that would let Google compete with Firefox 3 and IE8 in a much more serious way.

Original URL: http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-39148-118.html

Unless Vista was properly activated, it would drop into “reduced functionality mode”, in which the only thing you could do with it was access the Internet in order to complete online activation — or buy a valid product key.

In Service Pack 1, the behavior was changed so that the operating system would still operate, but the background turned black and nagging boxes warned you that you “might be a victim of software piracy”.

Now, Microsoft is going to bring this “feature” to Windows XP Professional with a new version of the Windows Genuine Advantage. From the WGA blog:

With this update to WGA Notifications in Windows XP, we’ve implemented a couple of related features that draw on the notifications experience we designed for Windows Vista SP1. After installing this version of WGA Notifications on a copy of Windows XP that fails the validation, most users will discover on their next logon that their desktop has changed to a plain black background from whatever was there previously.

The desktop background can be reset to anything else in the usual ways, but every 60 minutes it will change back to the plain black background. This will continue to happen until that copy of Windows is genuine.

Also, the user will see the addition of what we call the “persistent desktop notification.” This notification is similar to a watermark but works a bit differently. The image appears over the system tray and is non-interactive in the sense that you can’t click on it or do anything to it.

This update will come only to XP Pro users, since Microsoft says that’s the most-pirated version of XP. If you use XP Home or Media Center Edition, you won’t get this new release of WGA. It will take several months before all XP Pro users have the new WGA.

Blog author Alex Kochis claims this is something XP users actually want:

. . . Our research has clearly shown that customers value the ability of Windows to alert them when they may have software that is not genuine, but they also want the ability to stay up to date with the least effort required on their part. . . .

OK, Alex, if you say so . . .

While I don’t think users of activated, valid copies of XP Pro will care much about this, it could become an issue if WGA malfunctions, as it has in the past. If Microsoft’s WGA servers mistakenly report a valid copy as being not genuine, XP Pro users aren’t likely to “value” this feature all that much.

Original URL: http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2008/08/got_a_pirated_copy_of_xp_expect_to_be_nagged.html