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There a handful of emerging platforms that look to bring the features associated with desktop applications, such as offline access to data, to the Web.

The area of rich Internet applications is fast becoming one of the most hotly contested among infrastructure software providers.

In addition to Adobe AIR, there is Google Gears for offline access as well as JavaFX and the Mozilla Foundation’s Prism project.

Adobe on Monday released the long-awaited AIR download for running Web applications offline, but Microsoft is readying an update to its Silverlight platform that it hopes will keep Web developers in its camp.

Silverlight is now available on Windows or
Mac browser but Microsoft said that it intends to have versions for Linux desktops and mobile devices.

Guthrie said that Silverlight 2 has a stripped-down version of the .Net Framework that lets people use many different languages to write for the Web. These applications can run in Internet Explorer,
Firefox, and Apple’s
Safari browser.

“Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). We will ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support that enables great developer/designer work flow and integration when building Silverlight applications,” he wrote.

Microsoft hopes to exploit its strengths and developer tools as it battles Adobe and others for developer attention. Developers can use standard Ajax toolkits or Adobe’s Flex, which is now open source, to write AIR applications.

Silverlight 2 is a significant upgrade to the existing edition because it’s designed to let programmers write rich Internet applications for Windows and Macintosh browsers using Microsoft’s popular .Net tools.

Microsoft will release the first beta of Silverlight 2 “shortly,” said Scott Guthrie, a general manager in Microsoft’s developer division in charge of Web development, in his blog on Friday. Next week, the company is hosting its Mix ‘08 Web development and design conference in Las Vegas.

“In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded. This in turn did two things: 1. Decreased focus of OEMs planning and shipping higher end graphics for Vista-ready programs and 2. Reduced the focus by IHV’s to ready great WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) qualified graphics drivers. We can see this today with Intel’s inability to ship a compelling full featured 945 graphics driver for
Windows Vista.”

In the meantime, I suspect Intel is likely to get an earful from its OEM customers as more e-mail revelations surface detailing backroom pressure on Microsoft over its “Vista Capable” program.

“In fact, Gates said, Intel could not count on Microsoft to support Intel’s next generation of microprocessors as long as Intel was developing platform-level software that competed with Windows. Intel’s senior executives knew full well that Intel would have difficultly selling PC microprocessors if Microsoft stopped cooperating in making them compatible with Windows and if Microsoft stated to OEMs that it did not support Intel’s chips. Faced with Gates’ threat, Intel agreed to stop developing platform-level interfaces that might draw support away from interfaces exposed by Windows.”

Time was when Microsoft inspired dread in the tech industry. With a few exceptions, most rivals and partners did their best not to get on Bill Gates’ bad side.

That was then and this is now. In the post-antitrust case era, Microsoft has new and equally pressing worries. On one hand, it has Neelie Kroes and the European Union to please. On the other, it’s desperate for all the allies it can muster. Would Microsoft have risked alienating Intel had Steve Ballmer picked up the phone to Paul Otellini and told him to back off? You can only wonder.

So why did Microsoft agree to a two-tiered Vista upgrade program that its managers knew was a mistake? The trove of e-mails released in connection with a pending class action lawsuit paint a Microsoft strangely unwilling to stand up to pushy Wintel partner Intel.

“We are caving to Intel,” wrote Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra in a February 2006 e-mail to Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s Windows chief at the time. “We are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience. (Computer makers) support our goals here and they’ve made graphics investments to drive the (user experience) with consumers. I don’t understand why we would cave on this when the potential to drive the full (user experience) is right in front of us.”

Check out these juicy passages highlighted by Todd Bishop at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Gates pressured Andy Grove to dump the development of its NSP software. He also held a one-on-one where he told his Intel counterpart that Microsoft had a big problem with Intel funding the development and distribution of free platform-level software. Here’s an excerpt from the court’s finding of fact:

Or this one from John Kalkman to Scott Di Valerio, who ran Microsoft’s relations with PC makers at the time:

The love-hate MS-Intel relationship goes back years. But back before getting gobsmacked by Google and the Web 2.0 crowd, Microsoft was famous for throwing its weight around–even with Intel. We got a peek at some of the back-and-forth between those two during the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit in the late 1990s.

At the time, rumors emerged of a “blacklist” that was circulating as a precursor to some sort of punishment in compliance with new regulations that require video providers to be state-run (but were modified to grandfather in already existing sites if they were vigilant about SARFT’s rules).

That story got more complicated after a mixture of denials and partial acknowledgments of SARFT action and a 24-hour shut-down of Tudou that the website said was for a server upgrade, a reason few commentators believed at the time. But the site did come back online on schedule.

As for YouTube, it’s been much reported that YouTube is inaccessible in China since the beginning of the current situation out west. (I have been in Japan the whole time, so haven’t experienced this myself.) But this is not the first time YouTube has been blocked. The most recent example I know of was during last year’s 17th National Party Congress when the site was blocked and then unblocked at a time suspiciously near that important political event.

Beating the AP with a bit of detailed information, Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei reports that Tudou will be one of 32 sites to be punished, while 25 others will be shut down all together. So, after all, unless the penalty is massive, Tudou will live on to fight (and probably keep on with free illegal TV and movies) another day.

On Monday, I’ll be able to talk first-hand about what’s on- or off-line from Beijing. For now, Osaka is my new favorite city in Japan.

As I reported earlier, rumors that Tudou had been ordered to shut down started circulating in the first week of March, with a failure to catch some pornographic material on the site as the justification.

A Chinese agency promised to shut or punish video sharing websites for hosting prohibited material, but this was going on before the incidents in Tibet made a different agency’s occasional blocking of YouTube famous.

An AP reporter says the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) announced Friday that the leading Chinese video site, Tudou, would be penalized. The report notes that no mention was made of Tibet, but doesn’t make clear the most important part: that this all started before the demonstrations in Tibet did. I am sure SARFT takes politically sensitive films into account in addition to their advertised concern about obscene material, but it’s important to note how Tudou’s travails began.

All well and good. Brad is a fantastic speaker and an earnest, good person. What came out in the Q&A period was just how wide is the chasm between Microsoft and the open-source community on how to “cross-license” intellectual property.

commentary (Credit:
Matt Asay)

Tonight Brad Smith, general counsel for Microsoft, delivered the “footnote” address at the Open Source Business Conference 2008. I asked Brad to speak because I figured it was the shortest path to getting clarity from Microsoft vis-a-vis open source and the nettlesome legal issues that have plagued Microsoft’s relationship with open source.

Direct monetization. We invest money, we hire engineers, we develop products, we sell licenses to that software. But this was not the first business model for software. That first model was indirect monetization.
Indirect monetization. In the early days of computing the mainframe companies gave software away in order to sell their hardware. Microsoft uses this model fairly routinely.
Ad-funded monetization.

There is no easy answer to this. It feels to me that Microsoft is struggling to listen and to heed the counsel it’s being given by the open-source community, but has a long, hard road to go (which won’t be comforting to it given how much it’s already slogged through).

(With interoperability in mind…) we’re trying to find a way to balance our belief that some of our innovation should be kept proprietary while still working together with the open-source community, commercial or otherwise. This is an ongoing process that needs dialogue. We do want to make strides forward, but it requires dialogue.

It is a big world, and it is a diverse world….We dreamed of a diversity in computing devices, and today we have them….Business models have also become more diverse. It is hard for us to discuss where the industry might go without taking into account the diverse business models that we have.

Brad spoke for 30 minutes, and then participated in a follow-up panel with an A-list group from the open-source community, including Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), James Bottomley (CTO, SteelEye and Linux kernel maintainer), Andrew Updegrove (standards lawyer extraordinaire), and Stephen O’Grady (Redmonk co-founder). The audience then had the opportunity to ask him questions for another 30 minutes. It was no doubt a grueling “opportunity” for Brad, and he represented himself and Microsoft well. (See also Charles Cooper’s report.)

Brad indicated that “We believe that patents spur innovation.” So, Microsoft benefits from patents. Balanced against this, however, he also stressed that Microsoft is the recipient of more patent lawsuits than any other software company. It’s therefore unclear to me why Microsoft would want to perpetuate a system that is inimical to its own interests. Why take a stance against open source that looks similar to the adverse relationships it has with patent litigants against Microsoft?

We need to a have a direct conversation about hard issues, with patents being among the hardest. We all believe in the magic of software. We can find bridges between us.

(Credit:
Matt Asay)

The interesting thing to me in these different business models is how much good we as an industry have done for the world. How much more could we do if we find new ways to collaborate across the borders that divide us?…

But it didn’t result in any great “Ah ha!” moment, unfortunately. There are serious chasms between Microsoft’s position(s) and the open-source community’s position(s). It’s very possible that both sides will have to compromise. What would compromise entail?

If you look at the history of our industry, the market leader has never been the primary driver of interoperability. We’ve been on both sides of this. Interoperability has become a major trend in software today, and it’s being driven by customers. Customers want software to work together….

In the audience Q&A session, Larry Rosen suggested that Microsoft could license its patents to the market and it would hardly make a dent in the company’s overall revenue. Patent licensing can’t really be about money, he went on to say, but must be about trying to restrict distribution of open-source software.

Brad talked around this in his opening remarks:

We respect and appreciate the important role that open source plays in our industry. We respect and appreciate the important role that open source plays for our customers, customers who almost always have heterogeneous networks. That’s not what you’ve always heard from us, but I did want to start with this….

Brad responded that “What gives me pause is the premise that…Microsoft should make its intellectual property expensive or free, but not cheap.” He may have a point–there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. But I do wonder if the middle ground that Microsoft is proposing is actually closer to its home territory than open source’s.

We’ve evolved to an industry that has these three models, and we can’t really predict where things go from here, though I would venture to guess that we’ll continue to see diverse models for monetizing software….

James pointed out that patents are particularly troublesome for open source because open-source licenses are effectively promises to downstream users that they have rights to use the software. Even Microsoft’s patent licensing, no matter how small the fee (calling to mind Brad’s comments that Microsoft will make its IP available at a very low price), is incompatible with open-source licensing.

We really have three fundamental business models in the industry today:

Brad didn’t have a good answer to this other than, “There’s no easy answer to this problem.” I don’t fault him for this. There really is no easy solution.

With this underwriting of Linux by Microsoft, Novell is able to sell its Linux software at highly advantageous pricing. As Novell’s Linux business has grown, it has been able to stand more and more on its own and discount less, but to follow Deepthroat’s counsel, you really need to ask why Microsoft would want this.

$100 million is $100 million (added to the $240 million Microsoft paid Novell before), and this investment is clearly paying off for Novell, though it has yet to even remotely slow Red Hat’s pace.

It’s just business for Microsoft, and business is better when Linux is limping. So Microsoft is trying to kill off the Linux market leader by giving Novell a compelling differentiator. The day that Novell becomes a threat to Microsoft’s business, however, is the day that the deal is shut down.

Novell’s benefit is obvious, if not self-destructive. The deal allows Novell to exist in the shadow of Windows Server, sustaining on its table scraps. Microsoft can offer customers that simply must have some Linux servers a sanctioned source for good tools ensuring interoperability with Windows Server.

This, however, is probably not polite enough to Novell and is far too polite to Microsoft. Microsoft wants to kill Red Hat. Period. If Novell were the market leader, Microsoft would have done this deal with Red Hat. (That said, inside sources tell me that Microsoft spent nearly a year trying to get Red Hat to agree before it ever approached Novell.)

“Follow the money” was Deepthroat’s suggestion to journalist investigators in the Watergate scandal. Several decades later, that same advice helps to unravel the mystery of why Microsoft keeps upping its investment in Novell’s SUSE Linux certificates…while simultaneously denouncing Linux for violating its intellectual property and generally wishing that Linux would cease to exist.

How do the two companies benefit? As eWeek’s Joe Wilcox suggests:

As context, Microsoft and Novell today announced an expansion of their 2006 interoperability agreement, which included a controversial covenant not to sue over patent infringement. “The investment focuses on enhanced programs from Novell to provide tools, support, training and resources for customers seeking an enterprise-class Linux platform and specifically, the optimal interoperability solution between Microsoft Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server,” writes Fox Business.

But it’s not the interoperability provisions that anyone is going to be talking about. It’s the $100 million in additional SUSE Linux certificates that Microsoft is buying. I know from friends at Novell that customers are indeed lapping these up, but not for the reasons publicly stated (patent protection (Microsoft) and interoperability (Novell). No, the primary reason is that they are cheap.

It may be too late at that point.

I used to rebuke Novell for its complicity in helping Microsoft with this deal, but I’m having second thoughts. Novell has never dampened its enthusiasm for Linux, though it has occasionally let its hunger for greater Linux revenue lead it astray in its marketing messages. People make mistakes. On the whole, however, Novell is playing Microsoft against Microsoft to its own profit, and has thus far done so with aplomb.

commentary

In short, while Novell is treading a dangerous line in this deal, the only loser so far in it is Microsoft. Red Hat continues to thrive. So does Novell’s Linux business. Microsoft’s Windows server business has shown no signs of slowing, either, but $340 million into its efforts to cripple Linux it has yet to demonstrate a dime’s worth of return.

Whether Novell can continue to pull it off is a different question, but for now both Novell and Red Hat continue to grow, and Microsoft is helping to feed that growth (at least, on Novell’s side). The dummy, it would seem, is Microsoft.

Novell, for its part, is playing a dangerous but currently highly profitable game. Microsoft has helped to rejuvenate its once lagging Linux business. While I don’t like the patent provisions included in the deal, I think Novell has done a good job of largely side-stepping these provisions, however much hay Microsoft has tried to make of them.

Thanks to Facebook Connect, Qik members can now automatically upload their videos to Facebook, set their status messages to link to the video on Qik when they start live-streaming, and have the update show up in their news feeds. Windows Mobile smartphone users (non-touchscreen) can also selectively upload Qik videos to Facebook, an extra feature that the company hopes to roll out to other devices soon.

Live streaming, much like location-based mobile networking, is one of those niches of social media that doesn’t have a real frontrunner yet. There are a ton of players in the space, both Webcam- and mobile-focused, and getting a few extra steps ahead is often a matter of being the first to get on a popular platform.

In the live-streaming wars, mobile service Qik has a new weapon in its arsenal: integration with Facebook’s video player.

You can’t use Qik to live-stream videos directly on Facebook, at least not yet. But regardless, it’s the first mobile video app to allow automatic uploads to Facebook through the social network’s application program interface, Qik representatives said.

(Credit:
Qik)

Sending a Qik video stream to Facebook via Windows Mobile

Pentaho competes with other open-source BI companies like JasperSoft and Actuate (and I suppose Greenplum, too, in a way), but the more interesting competition is the big proprietary vendors (Business Objects, Cognos, etc.) and the net new opportunities bringing BI to the masses.

commentary

If there was an open question as to which venture capital firm is the king of open source, Benchmark just settled that question with its most recent investment in Pentaho, a leading open-source Business Intelligence company. Not surprisingly, Peter Fenton is behind the deal.

It will be intriguing to see how this investment pans out for Benchmark. The firm has so many eggs in the open-source basket that it will either (continue to) win big (Red Hat, Zimbra, MySQL, etc.), or lose big. My bet is on the former outcome.

Delete a troublesome Outlook profile to have the program re-create one from scratch the next time you open it.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

I don’t mind resetting my mail profile because I have Outlook set to keep messages on my ISP’s server until I choose to delete them. So after I delete my Outlook account, a new one will be created automatically the next time I open the program. Once I re-enter my ISP’s server settings, my old mail is downloaded again.

When you restart Outlook, you’ll be prompted to set up an account as if it were the first time the program ever loaded on your system. Sometimes square one is the best place to be.

I couldn’t even open Outlook long enough to delete the new account. This wasn’t a big problem for me for a bunch of reasons. For one, I didn’t really need to access my company e-mail account from the version of Outlook on my notebook because I automatically forward messages from the most important senders (my boss, for example) to my Gmail account, which I use as my primary repository.

A couple of weeks ago, the IT guy at my office added my company Exchange Server e-mail account to my notebook computer’s copy of Microsoft Outlook 2007. The first time I tried to open Outlook after I left the office, the program crashed because it was unable to connect to the server.

I also have the mail from my personal ISP account forwarded to my Gmail account.

There’s one big caveat to this technique: you need to be ready to say “adios” to your outlook.pst file, which is the file that holds your Outlook e-mail and settings.

And last but not least, I knew it would take only a couple of minutes to delete the troublesome account and get Outlook to reopen, though downloading all my old e-mail from the server would take quite a bit longer than that
.

To change this setting, click Tools > Account Settings, choose your account, click Change > More Settings > Advanced, and check “Leave a copy of messages on the server.” Then click OK > Next > Finish > Close.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

In the Mail Setup dialog box, click Show Profiles, choose the account (it may be the only one listed), and click Remove > Yes > OK.

Of course, this won’t help much, if you’re unable to open Outlook at all, which was the predicament I faced. You could make a copy of your outlook.pst file and restore it after you delete the problematic account, but restoring the outlook.pst file may simply cause the glitch to resurface.

The easiest part of the process is deleting the buggy profile. In XP, open the Control Panel’s Mail applet by clicking Start > Control Panel (or Start > Settings > Control Panel) and choosing User Accounts > Mail (in Category View) or double-clicking Mail (in Classic View). In Vista, press the Windows key, type mail, scroll to Mail (not Windows Mail), and press Enter.

Set Outlook to leave a copy of your incoming messages on the server via this setting.

The How-To Outlook site offers step-by-step instructions for backing up and restoring your Outlook data. Once you get Outlook going again, you can automate the Outlook backup-and-restore process by using Microsoft’s free Outlook Personal Folders Backup utility.

Hogwarts fans looking for something to do this holiday season will have to settle for the December release of J.K. Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard.

On the bright side, scientists are apparently closer to developing a real invisibility cloak.

Warner Bros. announced Thursday that it is delaying the release date for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince until next summer. The film had been expected to be released later this year.

Warner Bros. pictures group president said the release change, to July 17, 2009, will not affect the production for any future Potter films. The studio plans to do the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as a two-part movie.

“Our reasons for shifting ‘Half-Blood Prince’ to summer are twofold: we know the summer season is an ideal window for a family tent pole release, as proven by the success of our last Harry Potter film, which is the second-highest grossing film in the franchise, behind only the first installment,” Warner Bros. President Alan Horn said in a statement. “Additionally, like every other studio, we are still feeling the repercussions of the writers’ strike, which impacted the readiness of scripts for other films–changing the competitive landscape for 2009.”

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $299.99
View the latest prices for LG Rhythm - black (Alltel)

On the music front, the Rhythm claims 3D sound capabilities, plus it claims to have Digital Signal Processing with a graphic equalizer tuned by Mark Levinson. It also has a 3.5-mm headset jack and stereo Bluetooth.

(Credit:
LG)

The LG Rhythm is available Thursday in both black and white for $119.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service agreement.

LG Rhythm from Alltel

Alltel has just announced the LG Rhythm, a music phone almost in the style of the LG Chocolate with the middle scroll wheel and the slider form factor. The wheel is touch-sensitive with an “interactive user interface,” plus it comes equipped with a 1.3-megapixel camera, an MP3 player with FM transmitter, voice dialing, GPS, and a microSD card slot.