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Editor’s Note: This post is part of SiliconANGLE’s “Predictions and Reflections” series. To view this year’s collection, click here. To participate, create an account or log into “TheANGLE” and request to join the group. –mrh / spa]

The other day I posted 2009 – Ken’s Year in Review and promised I’d follow up with this requisite annual blogger’s rite, my look ahead. There may be some bumps in the road and unexpected twists here, so hang on dear reader. Put your tray table in the upright and locked position, raise your seat back and make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened. I’ve never been particularly shy or softspoken about my look at the future, and I probably won’t be now.

Disclaimer: These are my opinions alone. They don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of any employer past or present, my lovely partner Sheryl, the companies named herein, or anyone else on the planet. Your opionions and mileage may vary widely. Cheap shot comments will be tossed into the abyss, but open conversation and debate is always welcome.

Early in 2009 I predicted it was going to be the year Cisco took a big black eye. I agree, that didn’t happen. Instead they’ve taken a light bruising all year long. 2009 was a year when Cisco excelled at absolutely nothing that mattered in the market in my view. They were vanilla custard and simply didn’t matter in the market. They got off easy, and in 2010 they won’t. I said a black eye in 2009. I’ll predict a savage beating in 2010, the likes of which they’ve never felt before. I bet you’re curious where, aren’t you?

First in unified communications and VoIP space. I’d say Cisco is going to get their lunch eaten by multiple players. The Cisco solution set is pretty decent (Call Manager and the like), although their phones are forgettable. It won’t matter. I think they’ll get beaten repeatedly by Lucent, Asterisk, Mitel, and others. Even IBM, yes IBM, will cause pain for Cisco. 2010 will be the year Cisco learns how much they don’t know about telecommunications. It will be a bitter pill to swallow.

They bought Pure Digital for the Flip and they’re about to get a bunch of hype for the new Flip with built-in WiFi. I give that buzz six weeks and then they’ll take a good old fashioned, bare knuckles ass whuppin from the likes of Kodak’s Zi8 and a handful of others. More importantly, the current generation of cameras built in to mobile phones, notably iPhone and Blackberry, are likely to shift up taking another huge bite out of the whole dedicated camera market.

Then there’s Cisco’s core business – switching and routing. Coupled with some repercussions of the recent Starent acquisition and Juniper getting serious about the market, I expect some big moves in this space. Juniper will play big and strong. The big dog, Cisco, is going to get rocked back on their heels in some major networking deals in 2010. People will start to think about other options more often before simply choosing Cisco.

Oh, and John Chambers, the Rupert Murdoch of networking, will finally move on. I’ve seen his leadership at Cisco as ineffective in recent years and I expect him to move on, flying off with his golden parachute.

Of course there’s Microsoft, the Gorgon with more snakes in its head than Medusa. (Yes, the irony of Gorgons being female is intentional, for a reason…read on). I expect more layoffs at MS. Significantly more. Microsoft is still a very fat company, with plenty of trimming to do. In 2010, I think they’ll do some in the right areas. They’ve missed the mark a time or two with cutbacks, and some course corrections will happen this year. OCS will do well, especially against Cisco. Momentum will gain there.

If Microsoft’s a gorgon, Google is a Chimera, breathing fire, part search engine, part cloud service, part telco, part alchemist. (Perhaps an interesting sidenote: The Chimera’s tail ended in a snake’s head. Something to consider.) Google has a multitude of businesses and a serious problem. They have huge opportunity, but some days I wonder if they have the nerve to go for it. Google’s an 800 pound gorilla who seems afraid to rock the boat. Rather, they telegrahp five years in advance that they’re thinking of rocking the boat. I think 2010 will be the year that changes. They have several segments in play right now.

irst there’s Google Wave. It’s hit the market with a soft thud, but it’s still in early beta. I think they gave too much hype to something that isn’t going to hit mainstream for at least five years. Then again,  recall when Gmail came out of beta. Wave has potential, but right now it’s simply the geek developers playground. Google Wave is a sandbox. I don’t expect it to be anything but a sandbox for quite some time to come. Until Wave is fully integrated with GoogleTalk, Gmail, GoogleDocs and the rest of the suite, it can only be a playground for geeks and developers, regardless of whether your company can make your own wave or not. Lots of lead time on this concept, so if you haven’t started, you’re not too late. If you have started, you’re way early.

Google Latitude, is an interesting concept. It’s one that I think Google will tie in to mapping at some point. It integrates with Google Maps today. The recent tracking option to remember where you’ve been is clearly a shot across the bow of the GPS market. That’s where Google seems to be headed. I don’t think they grasp the significance of presence, availability and location in one app or they’d have integrated with GoogleTalk. Missed opportunity, and they’ll probably continue to miss and fall behind in location based services in 2010. They’re big and powerful enough they can still recover over the course ot their standard half-decade development cycle, so don’t count them out. Just don’t expect them to deliver a solid LBS solution in 2010.

The biggest opportunity Google has is with Google Voice (formerly Grand Central), perhaps with some integration of the stuff they bought up with the Gizmo acquisition. There’s a problem here, and it’s a Google cultural barrier. They’ve got this “do no evil” image they’d like to protect. They don’t understand that when it comes to investors and profit, there are degrees of evil that your investors and customers will accept. They try, but sometimes a little evil slips into the mix. For Google to make a real play in telecommunications, they have to take the gloves off and get down and dirty in a biting, hair pulling, crotch kicking knife fight with some of the dirtiest fighters in history, the telephone companies. And Google is already the underdog in the eyes of the referees, legislators and the FCC. Because the referees are the cronies and lackeys of the incumbents. I only say that because it’s true, and after thirty years in the industry, I’m pretty sure I’m right.

And now for some highlights.

I think the hot acquisition of the year will be Voxeo, assuming they take the deal. It will be big. I think Voxeo’s worth significantly more than Twitter. I expect someone to make a play for Voxeo that’s well into significant nine figures. And it will be worth it. The deal of the decade for me? Call it a fantasy deal. Let Google step up to the 800 pound gorilla who wants to play hardball and buy Voxeo for $300M, integrate within 120 days and go live and strong with a significant telecommunications solution from top to bottom, enterprise to consumer. They could be the biggest telecom provider in the world in the space of a year if they pulled the right leadership team and strategy together. Will they? Let’s watch. I think not, but they could disrupt the telecom industry more than anyone in history. I’d like to see it. Voxeo’s a company I’d like to work for or with.

I’ve said a few times recently that location based services are on the rise. I think Foursquare is going to shake out as a big winner in the space. I recently wrote about Mainstreaming Location Based Servicesand I expect this white-hot market segment to heat up even more. Foursquare has a Blackberry app in development, with some early beta testers. Sheryl and I aren’t among them, but I’m reaching out to the Foursquare team with some ideas. Suggestions to some startups fall on deaf ears. I don’t think that will be the case at Foursquare. They’re riding on popularity and buzz, not ego. These three guys are going to be very rich, and I think by year-end 2010 they’ll own the LBS space and be growing even stronger. If they make the right moves, Foursquare will be sneaking into mainstream and business use by the end of 2010 and somebody will be looking to acquire Foursquare for a substantial chunk of change. Foursquare is another company I’d like to work with.

I’d like to predict some excitement in the mobile space, but I don’t see it on the horizon. I think there may be another iteration of the iPhone. Rumors are floating. I think it will be an incremental update. I think RIM will continue incrementally updating the Blackberry without a major win in consumer space. I think Nokia will release at least 52 new phones next year, one for each each week, but not blockbuster hits. And the droids still won’t be the ones we’re looking for at the end of 2010 in my view. Oh, and Windows Mobile will still make us WinCE in pain, although I expect Microsoft will try to do something to link it more tightly to Windows 7.

In the industry analyst space, I expect to see a couple of the major firms have less-than-notable years. I think Forrester and Gartner will both have a bit of a rough time. Conversely, I think Frost and Sullivan will have a banner year. I also think it’s going to be a year for independent analysts. Those of us who do this out of passion for the industry, without personal or financial bias, will find ourselves winning more often. That’s good news. I expect some significant highlights here actually.

The Language of 2010
We’ll see some terminology shift in 2010. Just as Gartner removed unified communications from their list of hot topics for 2010, I think we’ll see that phrase start to fade. Unified communications, Software Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Services (SaaS) Communications Enhanced Business Processes (CEBP) and mashup (blech!) all need to fade and be replaced by real expectations (market demand for solutions that work instead of buzzwords). I think we’ll see that start to happen.

Social media is one of the most abused, misused, inaccurate terms ever coined. Most of what we see is social marketing, not social media. In 2010 we’ll see more social, less media. More marketing with marketers starting to call it what it is. They all want the hype, spin and buzz. There will, unfortunately be more chaff, but there will be more meat. As reputable firms beging to figure it out, there will be more overall goodness in this space. But there will be more stupidity too.

In 2010, real expertise will win out and the independent advisors will get some real recognition as the mouthpieces and tools in the industry get noticed for what they are. For example, Sheryl coined the phrase engagement specialist almost two years ago. She and I have talked about the criticality of reciprocity and engagement for a long time. That isn’t fluff any more, and as we survey independent advisors, the value they bring to business is being seen. Businesses understand that old school, whether it’s marketing, PR, mailing lists (spam) or marcoms simply isn’t effective in the world of NOW media.

I think that’s enough, and I didn’t even get started on traditional media. So as a parting shot for this long post, traditional media will continue to decline, but journalism, real journalism will rise in both visibility and integrity. And people like Rupert Murdoch will be the catalysts in the slide of traditional media into the abyss of the dead media pool.

Want more? Drop me a note, leave a comment or send me a tweet.

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Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) on Tuesday denied that the Windows security updates it released last month are responsible for crashing users’ PCs and triggering the dreaded ‘Black Screen Of Death’.

Some reports have suggested that the November Patch Tuesday updates made changes to permissions in the Windows registry, but after looking into the matter, Microsoft says these claims aren’t valid.

“The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email.

Microsoft’s worldwide customer service team isn’t seeing widespread reports of the black screen issue, said Christopher Budd, Security Response Communications Lead at Microsoft, in a Tuesday blog post.

Since no one reported the issue directly to Microsoft, the company can’t say for sure what’s causing the problem, but previous black screen issues have been linked to malware families such as Daonol, Budd said in the blog post.

Microsoft seems a bit peeved with security vendor Prevx, which last Fridayissued a fix for the glitch and said it could affect “millions” of Windows 7, XP, and Vista users.

Prevx also claimed that the recent black screen issues were being caused by Microsoft changing the way it locks down registry keys in Windows. Microsoft says it wasn’t contacted by Prevx but has “proactively contacted” the company to share the details of its investigation of the matter. It’s safe to say Microsoft’s correspondence won’t include a holiday gift basket.

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Microsoft has confirmed that it will take its free anti-virus software out of beta today.

Security Essentials has been available in beta since June, but will go live for everyone on 29 September. The software will update its anti-virus signature daily to deal with new threats.

“Microsoft Security Essentials, the highly anticipated no-cost consumer security offering, will be released to the public on 29 September,” said the company in a statement.

Microsoft insists that it is not looking to compete with the big security vendors like Symantec and McAfee, which have paid-for security suites, but is instead looking to persuade more people to install anti-virus software.

Security Essentials was born out of Microsoft’s first attempt at security software, dubbed OneCare. The tools failed to excite interest from customers or major OEMs, and the company scrapped the project last year.

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Amazon and Microsoft have been pushing cloud-computing services as a low-cost way to outsource raw computing power, but the products may introduce new security problems that have yet to be fully explored, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cloud services can save companies money by allowing them to run new applications without having to buy new hardware. Services like Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) host several different operating environments in virtual machines that run on a single computer. This lets Amazon squeeze more computing power out of each server on its network, but it may come at a cost, the researchers say.

In experiments [4] with Amazon’s EC2, they showed that they could pull off some very basic versions of what are known as side-channel attacks. A side-channel attacker looks at indirect information related to the computer — the electromagnetic emanations from screens or keyboards, for example — to determine what is going on in the machine.

The researchers were able to pinpoint the physical server used by programs running on the EC2 cloud and then extract small amounts of data from these programs, by placing their own software there and launching a side-channel attack. Security experts say the attacks developed by the researchers are minor, but they believe side-channel techniques could lead to more serious problems for cloud computing.

Many users are already reluctant to use cloud services because of regulatory concerns — they need to have a better handle on the physical location of their data — but the side-channel research brings a whole new set of problems, according to Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor with the University of Washington’s computer science department. “It’s exactly these types of concerns — the threat of the unknown — that is going to make a lot of people hesitant to use cloud services such as EC2.”

In the past, some side-channel attacks have been very successful. In 2001, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, showed [5] how they were able to extract password information from an encrypted SSH (Secure Shell) data stream by performing a statistical analysis of the way keyboard strokes generated traffic on the network.

The UC and MIT researchers weren’t able to achieve anything that sophisticated, but they think their work may open the door to future research in this area. “A virtual machine is not proof against all of the kinds of side-channel attacks that we’ve been hearing about for years,” said Stefan Savage, associate professor with UC San Diego, and one of the authors of the paper.

By looking at the computer’s memory cache, the researchers were able to glean some basic information about when other users on the same machine were using a keyboard, for example to access the computer using an SSH terminal. They believe that by measuring the time between keystrokes they could eventually figure out what is being typed on the machine using the same techniques as the Berkeley researchers.

Savage and his co-authors Thomas Ristenpart, Eran Tromer and Hovav Shacham were also able to measure the cache activity when the computer was performing simple tasks such as loading a particular Web page. They believe that this method could be used to do things such as see how many Internet users were visiting a server or even which pages they were viewing.

To make their simple attacks work, the researchers had to not only figure out which EC2 machine was running the program they wanted to attack, they also had to find a way to get their particular program on it. This isn’t easily done, because cloud computing is, by definition, supposed to make this kind of information invisible to the user.

But by doing an in-depth analysis of DNS (Domain Name System) traffic and using a network-monitoring tool called traceroute, the researchers were able to work out a technique that could give them a 40 percent chance of placing their attack code on the same server as their victim. The cost of the attack on EC2 was just a few dollars, Savage said.

Virtual machines may do a good job of isolating operating systems and programs from each other, but there is always an opening for these side-channel attacks on systems that share resources, said Alex Stamos, a partner with security consultancy iSEC Partners. “It’s going to be a whole new class of bugs that people are going to have to fix in the next five years.”

His company has worked with a number of clients interested in cloud computing, but only if they can be assured that no one else is sharing the same machine. “I’m guessing the cloud-computing providers are going to be pushed by their clients to be able to provide physical machines.”

Amazon wasn’t quite ready to talk about side-channel attacks Thursday. “We take all security claims very seriously and are aware of this research,” a spokeswoman said. “We are investigating and will post updates to our security center.”

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Google Inc is planning a direct attack on Microsoft Corp’s core business by taking on the software giant’s globally dominant Windows operating system for personal computers. Google, which already offers a suite of e-mail, Web and other software products that compete with Microsoft, said it would launch a new operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.

Called the Google Chrome Operating System, the new software will be in netbooks for consumers in the second half of 2010, Google said in a blog post, adding that it was working with multiple manufacturers. Netbooks are low-cost notebook PCs optimized for Internet surfing and other Web-based applications.

“It’s been part of their culture to go after and remove Microsoft as a major holder of technology, and this is part of their strategy to do it,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. “This could be very disruptive. If they can execute, Microsoft is vulnerable to an attack like this, and they know it,” he said.

Google and Microsoft have often locked horns over the years in a variety of markets, from Internet search to mobile software. It remains to be seen if Google can take market share away from Microsoft on its home turf, with Windows currently installed in more than 90 percent of the world’s PCs.

The news comes as executives from the world’s biggest technology and media companies, including Google and Microsoft, gather in Sun Valley, Idaho for an annual conference organized by boutique investment bank Allen & Co.

A spokesman for Microsoft had no immediate comment. Key to success will be whether Google can lock in partnerships with PC makers, such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc, which currently offer Windows on most of their product lines.

HP, the world’s largest PC brand, declined to confirm if it would sell PCs running on the new operating system. “We are looking into it,” said HP spokeswoman Marlene Somsak, referring to the operating system. “We want to understand all the different operating systems available to customers, and will assess the impact of Chrome on the computer and communications industry.”

Google’s Chrome Internet browser, launched in late 2008, remains a distant fourth in the Web browser market, with a 1.2 percent share in February, according to market research firm Net Applications. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continues to dominate with nearly 70 percent.

FAST AND LIGHTWEIGHT

The new Chrome OS is expected to work well with many of the company’s popular software applications, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Maps. It will be fast and lightweight, enabling users to access the Web in a few seconds, Google said. The new OS is based on open-source Linux code, which allows third-party developers to design compatible applications.

“The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web,” Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, said in the blog post. The Chrome OS is “our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”

Google said Chrome OS was a new project, separate from its Android mobile operating software found in some smartphones. Acer Inc, the world’s No.3 PC brand, has already agreed to sell netbooks that run on Android to be released this quarter.

The new OS is designed to work with ARM and x86 chips, the main chip architectures in use in the market. Microsoft has previously said it would not support PCs running on ARM chips, allowing Google an opportunity to infiltrate that segment.

Charlene Li, partner at consulting company Altimeter Group, said Google’s new OS could initially appeal to consumers looking for a netbook-like device for Web surfing, rather than people who use desktop PCs for gaming or high-powered applications. But eventually, the Google OS has the potential to scale up to larger, more powerful PCs, especially if it proves to run faster than Windows, she said.

Google did not say how much it would charge for the operating system (OS), but Enderle expects Google to charge at most a nominal fee or make it free, saying the company’s business model has been to earn revenue from connecting applications or advertising.

Microsoft declines to say how much it charges PC brands for Windows, but most analysts estimate about $20 for the older XP system and at least $150 for the current Vista system. Li added: “A benefit to the consumer is that the cost saving is passed on, not having to pay for an OS.” “It’s clearly positioned as a shot across the bow of Microsoft,” she said.

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Microsoft’s revised plans for Windows 7 mean that UK and European buyers will no longer be able to get the full version of the new operating system at an upgrade price.

Microsoft originally disclosed its Windows 7 pricing in June, saying that an upgrade version would not be available in Europe owing to wrangles with the European Commission over the bundling of Internet Explorer. Instead, UK buyers were offered the full version at an upgrade price.

With the Internet Explorer issue resolved, an upgrade version of Windows 7 will now be available in Europe, and Microsoft is adjusting its pricing accordingly from 1 September.

From this date, the upgrade version of Windows 7 Home Premium will be available at a special introductory price of £79.99 until 31 December, after which it will cost £99.99.

Upgrade versions of Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate will cost £189.99 and £199.99 respectively.

The full versions of Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate will set buyers back £149.99, £219.99 and £229.99 respectively.

Under Microsoft’s original pricing plan, these latter prices would only have come into effect from January 2010.

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Microsoft is facing accusations that it sat on critical flaws for over two years before patching.

The flaws in ActiveX controls for Office were patched in Microsoft’s latest security update but according to the security researchers at TippingPoint Technologies they reported the bugs to Microsoft in March 2007.

The firm was reluctant to criticise Microsoft but said that the flaws were reported well in advance and were being used by attackers for weeks before the patches were issued.

Microsoft has always said that creating patches is more difficult for it than for other companies since it has a massive install base running different configurations of its software.

Each patch must be tested on each system, thus creating a long lead time, but some have questioned why the company took so long on flaws that it described as critical.

With many private security researchers reporting flaws to the company there is a limit to the amount of time that can be spent solving each one, but it seems Microsoft is being laggardly in fixing problems until attacks are reported in the wild.

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Microsoft is offering users the upfront option of making Internet Explorer 8 their default browser, or else staying with a rival browser, as part of a Patch Tuesday update. The new version of IE 8 comes as Microsoft finds itself losing browser market share to Firefox and other rivals, and negotiating with European antitrust officials over the inclusion of IE 8 in the upcoming Windows 7.

Microsoft has issued an update to Internet Explorer 8 that will change its setup experience, presenting users with an upfront choice about whether or not to stick with a rival browser.

The update, which had been anticipated for more than a month, rolled out as part of Aug. 11’s Patch Tuesday.

“IE will never install, or become the default browser without your explicit consent,” stated Microsoft’s original corporate blog posting on July 16. “However, we heard a lot of feedback from a lot of different people and groups and decided to make the user choice of the default browser even more explicit. This change is part of our ongoing commitment to user choice and control.”

After installing Internet Explorer 8, users who already have a rival browser set as their default will be presented with a screen that asks, “Do you want to make Internet Explorer your default browser?” Those who have already set Internet Explorer as their default browser will not see this screen.

“This change applies not only to IE8 installations on Vista and XP, but also when those users with a non-IE default browser install Windows 7,” the Internet Explorer team mentioned on the blog. “We will make this change available in the next cumulative security update for Internet Explorer.”

Microsoft’s push for Internet Explorer 8 comes at a time when the company’s Web browser finds itself battling on a number of fronts. Recent reports by research firms have seen the Internet Explorer franchise losing market share to other browsers such as Firefox; a July report by StatCounter found that Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 collectively owned 55 percent of the browser market, compared with 27.73 percent for Firefox. While that’s certainly a substantial lead, it represents a notable decline from 2008, when Microsoft occupied 78 percent of the browser market, compared with 18.2 percent for Firefox.

In Europe, Microsoft has also found itself under assault by antitrust regulators, who argued that the inclusion of Internet Explorer 8 with Windows 7 represented a monopolistic violation. While Microsoft originally countered with plans to ship an EU-only version of its upcoming operating system without the browser, it now plans to issue the same version of Windows 7 to Europe that it will issue to the rest of the world.

However, Microsoft is issuing this “regular” version of Windows 7 ahead of a review by the EU’s antitrust commission, raising the possibility that it will be forced to issue Windows 7 E after all. Microsoft seems to be betting that the commission will let a browser-equipped operating system hit the market rather than further irritate PC manufacturers and Microsoft’s partners.

The battle between Microsoft and the EU is reminiscent of the “browser wars” of the late 1990s, when Redmond faced off with the Department of Justice over the integration of Internet Explorer into Windows 98.

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When you install Windows 7 with IE 8, you’re usually going to get Bing as the default search engine – at least until you change it to Google. If you install Windows 7 on enough machines, you’re probably not going to get around to changing the search engine on all of them straight away. Sure it’s on the list with installing Office, and your favourite blogging tools, and ‘can’t live without them’ utilities like ClipMate and SpeedFiler (and in one case, downloading a 114MB NVidia graphics card driver file to get Aero Glass and flashing the BIOS on this Dell XPS M1330 to stop the display driver spinning the fan up to the speed of a jumbo jet); but between importing my extensive AutoCorrect definitions from my last PC and remembering the IRC addresses to put into Trillian, I’ve not got around to changing the search engine on a couple of my PCs. And when I have, I’ve actually considered changing back.

I’ll be honest, I’ve got most of my exposure to Bing through a game that used to be called Club Live Search (so yes, I do spend time at Club Bing, groaning at the pun). They’re fun little word and puzzle games that earn tickets you can spend on air miles (or donate to charity). And when you ask for a hint or fill in an answer, you see a Bing search in the bottom of the browser window. And over time, you start to get used to seeing related searches and your search history down the side of the page, and being able to hover over an orange dot next to a link to see the first few lines of the page previewed and being able to choose image results not just by size but by whether they’re in colour or black and white, a photo or an illustration, a picture with people in or not… You notice that, hey, Bing has a couple of useful features.

The kind of searches you do when you’re playing a word game don’t relate to the kind of searches you do for work (unless your job is writing word games), so it isn’t until you forget to switch your default search away from Bing that you also notice that, hey, Bing doesn’t suck nearly as much as it used to. I’m researching Windows 7 deployment tools and I accidentally ran the search on a newly 7-ized PC that still defaulted to Bing. I found what I was looking for on Bing, but I checked Google for comparison. Many of the results were the same, but Bing had more results about Windows 7 on earlier pages of results; Google had more results about a range of Windows versions on the earlier pages, it had more results from older pages (years older in some cases) and it had more irrelevant results overall. Google did find one useful link I didn’t spot on Bing: did you know you can use GFI LANguard (which I think of as a security tool) to deploy client software as well as patches? Handy to know now that there’s a freeware version that will scan up to five IPs…

Bing didn’t find it, because the page doesn’t mention Windows or Windows 7 anywhere and until I confirm that GFI LANguard can actually deploy an OS as well as an application I don’t know if Google was exceptionally clever or benefiting from synchronicity. I do know that if Google’s ‘all your data are belong to us’ attitude gets too irritating, I could probably stand to use Bing for searching the Web without complaining about it all day. And that really is a major improvement.
Mary

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fter leaving much of the creation of a new version of HTML to Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla, Microsoft has begun sinking its teeth into the Web standard.

The move adds clout to the effort to renovate HyperText Markup Language, the standard used to describe Web pages, which last was formally updated in 1999. In a mailing list posting on Friday, the software giant offered a host of questions and concerns with the present proposal.

“As part of our planning for future work, the IE team is reviewing the current editor’s draft of the HTML5 spec and gathering our thoughts. We want to share our feedback and discuss this in the working group,” said Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman in the message. “I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly. At this stage we have more questions than answers, but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress.”

HTML 5 in its current draft form includes a number of significant advancements, notably several that make the Web a better foundation for applications, not just static Web pages. Among the present HTML 5 features are built-in video and audio, the ability to store data on a local computer to enable use of Web applications even when offline, Web Workers that can perform computational chores in the background without bogging down Web application responsiveness, Canvas for creating sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and drag-and-drop for better Web application user interfaces.

The formal HTML standard is under the governance of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson is a co-chairman of the W3C group developing HTML. But much of the course of HTML 5 has been set so far outside that by a separate effort called the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), which browser makers launched years ago when they didn’t like the XHTML 2.0 direction the W3C was trying to take HTML.

Microsoft hasn’t been uninvolved in HTML 5. It’s the origin of technology in HTML 5 called ContentEditable, which lets elements of Web pages be edited in place by people using a browser. And Microsoft said its newest browser,Internet Explorer 8, also supports these HTML 5 components: the DOM Store, Cross Document Messaging, Cross Domain Messaging, and Ajax Navigation.

But the new message indicates Microsoft is getting serious about the effort, digging into many nitty-gritty aspects of the proposed specification. That’s important because Microsoft has of late embraced a standard-centric philosophy when it comes to what technology IE supports, and IE is of course the dominant browser on the market.

Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

Google, Apple, and Mozilla have been trumpeting HTML 5 features in their latest browsers, but Microsoft takes a more cautious tone.

“The support of ratified standards (that Web developers) can use is something that we are extremely supportive of,” said Amy Barzdukas, general manager for IE, in a July interview. “In some cases, it can be premature to start claiming support for standards that are not yet in fact standards.”

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