Beyond Binary

Microsoft appears to be getting relatively strong early adoption of Windows 7 in the 10 days since its official launch.

According to Net Applications, more than 3 percent of PCs accessing the Web in the past two days have been doing so using the new operating system. Usage of the operating system has been growing strong in recent days, though Windows 7 already accounted for 2 percent of global Web traffic in the days ahead of its formal launch.

"The early adoption of Windows 7 looks very strong, and I don't believe Vista enjoyed the same early success," said Vince Vizzaccaro, an executive vice president at Net Applications. "Plus, we've seen surges the past two weekend days, and Windows has historically seen much higher usage market share on weekdays than on weekends."

However, weekends tend to see stronger usage by consumers. And consumers are more likely to move quickly to a new version of Windows than businesses, which tend to do extensive testing before adopting a new operating system.

The news is not all positive for Microsoft, though. As a whole, the Mac OS continues to gain on Windows. As of October, Windows had 92.5 percent of the worldwide operating system market, but Mac OS reached 5.27 percent, up from 5.12 percent in September. (Past numbers from Net Applications showed the Mac OS with significantly higher market share, though the market research firm says it has changed its methodology to better reflect the relative traffic of the countries from which it is getting data.)

Apple's recent anti-Windows 7 advertising has touted that if users are going to upgrade their Windows XP machines and have to transfer their data anyway, they might as well move to a Mac. Vizzaccaro said the early numbers suggest that the Mac might indeed be benefiting from such a trend but said it is too early to know for sure.

"We'll know much more in the months ahead," he said.

Microsoft on Monday announced plans for mobile software that aims to allow people in emerging markets to access various Internet programs using lower-end feature phones.

The software, known as OneApp, is due out later this year and should allow people in emerging markets to access services like Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger using the kinds of inexpensive phones most often sold for $20 or $30. Microsoft said Blue Label Telecoms in South Africa will be the first to use OneApp and will use it to offer phones that ship with a dozen mobile applications, including a mobile wallet program as well as the social-networking tools.

A mock-up of OneApp running on a feature phone allowing access to Facebook and other applications.

(Credit: Microsoft)

While not an operating system, OneApp is a software environment within which many kinds of programs can run. The key to OneApp, Microsoft said, is the fact that the applications and data run largely from the cloud. That means that OneApp can run on phones with rather meager memory and processing abilities. OneApp itself takes up only about 150 kilobytes of memory, as opposed to the many megabytes often used on programs for smartphones. Individual applications can be as small as 10 to 15 kilobytes.

"When you launch an application, (OneApp) only loads the part of the application that you want," said Amit Mital, the corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft's "unlimited potential" unit, which focuses on emerging markets. "We use very intelligent and sophisticated caching. The rest of it sits in the cloud."

Microsoft has been working on OneApp for the past year and a half, noting that there are hundreds of millions of feature phones in emerging markets, most of which aren't being used to run software.

"People have used them just for voice and SMS" (Short Message Service), Mital said. "What we want to do is unlock their power so they can be used from a broader set of services and applications."

The move comes as Microsoft is also struggling to keep up in the smartphone race against heightened competition from the likes of Apple, Google, Research In Motion, and others. Microsoft said that OneApp is separate from its Windows Mobile efforts.

Mital stressed that OneApp is an adjunct to Windows Mobile, which is still the company's bet for smartphones, and is largely aimed at emerging markets, rather than developed ones.

OneApp is Microsoft's plan for developing markets for the here and now. Longer-term, Microsoft has been exploring a concept called "phone plus," in which a smartphone could be plugged into a television and keyboard to act as a sort of basic computer.

With OneApp, Microsoft will find itself competing against applications written for Sun's J2ME.

Mital said that the big advantage of OneApp is that programs written for it should run on most OneApp-enabled phones, something he said is often not the case with Java.

"If you build an app for one phone it may or may not work on another phone," Mital said. "The development cost is extremely excessive. You go through the development cycle over and over. That is just debilitating."

For now, Microsoft is working directly with select partners to develop OneApp, but eventually Microsoft plans to release a software development kit to allow others to write their own OneApp programs. Programs for OneApp can be written using tools like XML and JavaScript, Mital said. "The world does not need another new programming paradigm. We were very determined to use existing programming paradigms."

In addition to Blue Label Telecoms, which is launching shortly, Mital said that Microsoft hopes to announce one or two more carriers using OneApp before the end of the year.

Although there are plenty of feature phones still shipping in developed markets, such as the United States and Europe, Mital said Microsoft is focusing on emerging markets.

"Right now my team is extremely focused on emerging markets," Mital said. "There's literally billions of customers in these markets."

Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco plan to announce Tuesday that they are working together to help ensure that proper standards are created for measuring digital literacy.

Microsoft VP Anoop Gupta

(Credit: Microsoft)

The three companies aren't coming up with the assessment criteria themselves, but rather bringing together a group of education leaders and academics to identify the characteristics that should form the basis of global standards.

While such standards have emerged for math and science, they are also needed for other kinds of 21st century skills, Microsoft Vice President Anoop Gupta said in an interview last week.

To head the effort, the troika has tapped professor Barry McGaw, currently the director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, to serve as the project's executive director.

Gupta, who heads Microsoft's emerging markets effort, said that although leading companies are often advocating for similar education reforms, their work is often done solo.

"Today we often speak in different voices," Gupta said in an interview last week. "That confuses the decision makers."

Microsoft itself has been pouring millions into its emerging markets programs, including its Partners in Learning effort. Gupta said education remains a focus for Microsoft, but declined to say whether any cuts in his budget were looming amid the troubled economy.

"Certainly for us, like any company,...we are evaluating," he said. "We are being wise in how we manage the spend."

Overall, he said, there should be more dollars heading to education, particularly in the United States, where incoming president Barack Obama has outlined plans for major spending on infrastructure, including schools.

"Then, in fact, when we emerge out of this, suddenly the schools are truly wired for broadband," Gupta said.

Redwood City start-up NComputing, whose technology uses the power of a single PC to power up to seven computing terminals, is set to announce on Monday that it has started the process of equipping 5,000 schools in India with its technology.

NComputing will provide about 50,000 students with access to the Internet as part of the deal, which will use two PCs in each computer lab to power 10 terminals at schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The deal itself is part of a $100 million effort that includes operating and powering the lab for five years, as well as all the needed gear. NComputing's chunk of that is about $2 million.

CEO Stephen Dukker said in an interview that his company is proving that virtualization doesn't have to be technologically complex, noting that of the more than 1 million seats his company has sold, 60 percent are in the developing world.

"Virtualization, which arguably is the most advanced state of the art, does not have to be this complex mix of acronyms we seen," he said. "What we've shown is it can scale down to some of the most economically challenged environments in the world."

Dukker said that by using two PCs in each computer lab, the set-up in India helps provide some redundancy. That helps address one of the limitations to NComputing's approach--because one PC powers several terminals, if something goes wrong in that PC, a whole classroom could find itself offline.

"When you share a PC you do have a single point of failure," Dukker said.

Last month, NComputing announced it had recruited longtime Microsoft executive Will Poole to serve as the company's co-chairman.

Updated at 1:20 p.m. PDT with closing stock prices.

Tech stocks took another beating on Monday, although shares recovered somewhat in the final two hours of trading.

The Dow Jones Industrial average was down more than 700 points in mid-day trading, but recovered to close at 9,955.50 points, down 369.88 points, or 2.6 percent. The Nasdaq, meanwhile, dropped below 1,800 points, before closing at 1,862.96, down 84.43, or 4.3 percent. The CNET Tech Index closed Monday at 1,267.87 , down 63.1 points, or 4.7 percent.

Several major indexes, including the Dow and Nasdaq, traded at multiyear lows during the session, while the CNET Tech Index was at its lowest point since 2006.

SAP, which warned on Monday that its third quarter sales fell below estimates as business spending on software dropped, saw its shares off more than 15 percent, changing hands near the close at $39.76, down $5.89, or nearly 13 percent.

AMD, Palm, and RIM were all down double digit percentages for part of the day, though all the stocks managed to pare those losses significantly before trading closed. Google shares closed at $369.14, down $17.77, or 4.6 percent. Microsoft shares closed at $24.91, down $1.41, or more than 5 percent.

Yahoo shareholders, meanwhile, have even more reason to resent management that rejected Microsoft's $33-per-share offer. Yahoo shares closed Monday at $15.19, down 81 cents, or about 5 percent.

Apple was among the rare companies to end in positive territory, closing regular trading $98.14, up $1.07, or 1 percent.

I talked about the stock drop on today's CNET News Daily Debrief, above.

(Credit: Susan Dove/CNET Networks)

RNC eCampaign director Cyrus Krohn, Huffington Post Editor in Chief Arianna Huffington, and Democratic strategist Mark Penn onstage Tuesday at Microsoft's advertising conference.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

REDMOND, Wash.--Before starting in on her politics, Arianna Huffington wanted to make sure she was in a friendly crowd.

"Are there any Hungarians in the audience? Are there any eggs in the audience?" asked Huffington, editor in chief of the Huffington Post. It was a reference to an incident earlier this week in which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer found himself ducking as a protester in Hungary tossed three eggs at him.

From that point, on, though, the barbs flew between the other two panelists--Hillary Clinton strategist Mark Penn and Republican National Committee eCampaign director Cyrus Krohn.

But what was most striking was their shared experience in discovering the power of the Internet. Penn talked about the "3 a.m. ad" in which Hillary Clinton sparked a huge conversation through an ad asking which candidate voters would rather have getting a late-night phone call about a crisis.

The ad, which was based solely on stock images, was cheap to produce but viewed millions of times, mostly online and at no cost to the campaign.

"You can really generate $50 million, a hundred million (dollars) worth of footage," he said.

Krohn, meanwhile, pointed to the power of the Net in organizing voters. He said that their Internet effort to register voters online has cut the cost of boosting the rolls from $23 per voter to less than $10 per voter. He also pointed to a governor's race in which the RNC was able to get 75 percent turnout from those it was communicating with electronically, compared with 48 percent overall turnout.

The committee also got more than 700,000 people in a 72-hour-period to visit a Valentine's Day e-card site in which visitors could send e-cards with Clinton or Barack Obama's picture and such phrases as "my liberal heart bleeds for you." The RNC also got something in return--e-mail addresses that it could then use as a base for soliciting funds or other marketing.

Next up, Krohn said, a cell phone text-message campaign.

A Windows prize fight, starring Ralph Macchio as Windows Vista.

(Credit: Microsoft Japan)

Sometimes, internationalizing Microsoft's products just means translating the same, boring packaging into another language.

Every now and then, though, one of Microsoft's subsidiaries goes out on a limb. Such is the case with a new bundle Microsoft has in Japan that combines Windows Vista Home Premium with Windows Live OneCare in one eye-popping hot pink box. (Kudos to Long Zheng for spotting this one.)

I'm not sure how much adding hot pink will add to the software's appeal (though it has made Hello Kitty's career), but it is interesting to see Microsoft thinking of new ways to sell its gear.

Sorry Hello Kitty fans, you have to be in Japan to get this version of Vista.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

I did some more poking around on the Microsoft Japan Web site and found another marketing approach that might have more global appeal than pink packaging. On its site there, Microsoft has a cool Japanese cartoon prize fight between Windows XP and Windows Vista, really illustrating how the new OS is different than its predecessor in areas like desktop search, security, and performance.

Its U.S. marketing, by contrast, just didn't seem to do the trick when it comes to really making a compelling case for an upgrade.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has talked about the company's need to do better when it comes to Vista marketing, and I think the U.S. folks might want to take a page from their Japanese counterparts. In case there was ambiguity here, that page is the prizefight one. I'm not that into pink.

Maybe instead of Johnny Knoxville, what Microsoft really needs is a little more Ralph Macchio.

At its Government Leaders Forum in Berlin on Wednesday, Microsoft plans to announce that it is reinvesting in its Partners In Learning program, a global effort to provide software and training to teachers, students, and schools. The company is committing to another five years of the program.

In its first five years, Microsoft said the program reached 90 million people in 100 countries. The company plans to spend $235.5 million over the next five years, bringing its total investment to $500 million, but reach twice as many people in the next five years as it did during the first five.

Among other efforts, Partners in Learning provides training and certification for teachers, as well as an online gathering place where teachers can collaborate and share new curriculum ideas.

"We believe it is really the cornerstone of economic opportunity," said Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft's emerging segments unit, dubbed Unlimited Potential. "Our software has been an important enabler of economic wealth."

Ayala highlighted several programs as recent highlights, including a Swedish teacher who partnered with a school in Madagascar to do a joint education project on biodiversity in Africa, and a robotics project in Malaysia where students created a mock disaster and used robotics to examine public safety issues.

In Colombia, Microsoft has a program in seven schools where students essentially do independent study on a laptop, using a curriculum that can move at exactly the student's own pace. The program was quite controversial when it began five years ago, Ayala said. "Today those students are scoring better in the national tests than traditional (students)."

In the U.S., Microsoft is sponsoring the Philadelphia School of the Future, where students use tablet PCs instead of textbooks.

Partnering with local governments and nonprofits is an important component of the program, Ayala said. "We know that no single model is going to fit everybody."

It also makes good economic sense, he said, noting that a greater level of partnership is what Microsoft believes will allow it to reach twice as many people in the next five years while actually spending slightly less than it had in the previous five.