The cards are on the table. The cat is out of the bag. The twist ending has, well, twisted. Google is finally getting into the PC operating system market … for real. And not just with some Android port on steroids. Chrome OS will be something new, a platform that stands apart from, and in some cases competes with, the company’s nascent mobile device OS.

My take? It has an ice cube’s chance in Hell of succeeding. [Read more...]

Looking to focus on the budding — and game-changing — HTML 5 specification, the W3C said Thursday it plans to increase available resources for the effort by discontinuing further development of XHTML 2.

XHTML been an XML-based version of HTML and has been the subject of several W3C efforts ranging from XHTML 1.0 to XHTML Modularization and XHTML 2. The 2 version of the XHTML language was to offer capabilities for mobile systems and internationalization.

The XHTML 2 Working Group charter, scheduled to expire at the end of 2009, will not be renewed. By discontinuing the XHTML 2 working group and increasing resources in the HTML 5 Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate progress of HTML 5 and clarify the organization’s position regarding the future HTML. [Read more...]

The glowing reviews of Microsoft’s next operating system, Windows 7, and the announcement Tuesday that it will go on sale Oct. 22 have prompted talk of an Apple-Microsoft battle for attention.

Van Baker of Gartner thinks Apple has to step it up to stay in the game. “Windows 7 is an enormous improvement over Vista,” Baker said, “and it will steal the limelight if Apple doesn’t have anything that one ups it.” While he’s not sure if Apple has a “just one more thing” surprise planned for Snow Leopard, he thinks that it needs one to match the behind-the-scenes improvement the company has made in such areas as multi-core support and offloading tasks to the graphics processor.

Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research on the other hand, conceded the win to Windows 7. “I’m not sure that Apple can do very much, there’s not any miracles they can pull off in the interface. So I think they’ll have to let Microsoft have the limelight this time.”

Microsoft’s success with Security Development Lifecycle has security experts buzzing and offers lessons — along with a heap of free resources.

Talk about a turnaround. It’s always hard to recognize the larger, slow-moving paradigm shifts as they happen. But after a decade of bad press regarding its commitment to software security, Microsoft seems to have turned the tide. Redmond is getting consistent security accolades these days, often from the very critics who used to call it out. Many of the world’s most knowledgeable security experts are urging their favorite software vendors to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft.

Haters will always continue hating, but the technical press is giving a lot of favorable coverage to Microsoft’s successful efforts to make itself a computer software security leader. Here are some recent examples: [Read more...]

Apple’s new iPhone 3G S and iPhone 3.0 are loaded with important new features and upgrades, including more speed and more memory. But AT&T can’t keep up. The latest example: delays and confusion over the future of tethering and MMS. If there was any doubt that the exclusive arrangement between the companies is an ugly roadblock on the way to true handheld computing, it’s now gone.

Fortunately, there’s a lot of motion at the federal level, including both houses of Congress and the FCC, to do something about the sad state of competition in the wireless world.

A hearing by the antitrust subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee next week will focus on text messaging rates and broader competitive issues. Given the workload of a committee occupied with hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, that’s a signal of significant interest in those issues, says Chris Riley, policy council for Free Press, a nonpartisan public interest group working to reform the media. [Read more...]

The new iPhone 3G S sounds great. It’s not a huge update to the iPhone, but it packs a few very important things: More speed, more storage more battery and a better camera that can do video. It’s a no-brainer to upgrade to it, just as many did from the original iPhone to the iPhone 3G last year, right? Wrong.

While current iPhone owners last year got to upgrade to the iPhone 3G for the fully subsidized $199 and $299 prices, the same will not be true this year. Instead, current iPhone 3G owners only 1 year into their 2 year contracts, will have to pay $399 and $499 to upgrade. The reason for this is simple: AT&T subsidizes the phone down to $199 based on a 2-year payment agreement with the customer. If you only paid one year of that contract, AT&T would have to eat those costs. So instead it’s putting that cost back into this new phone. It didn’t do that last year, because the original iPhone wasn’t subsidized. It makes sense, but here’s why that’s a bad idea. [Read more...]

Apple is once again in hot water again over British TV ads for its iPhone 3G. An ad that repeatedly showed an iPhone 3G accessing data “really fast” was recently ruled “likely to mislead” by the country’s Advertising Standards Authority. The ad has been banned from British airwaves, with the ASA telling Apple that “[t]he ad must not appear again in its current form.”

Apple defended the ad by saying that the claims were general in nature and meant to reflect the improvements over its original, EDGE-based iPhone. The company also pointed to disclaimer text that stated, “network performance will vary by location,” and said that the average viewer would know that a 30-second spot would be simplified for illustration purposes. But the ASA disagreed, instead arguing that the average viewer would believe that the iPhone “actually operated at or near to the speeds shown in the ad.” Indeed, 17 people filed claims to that effect with the ASA, resulting in the ban. [Read more...]