João Saramago

Marc Maiffret, numa entrevista para o Otago Daily Times:

Quando olhamos hoje para a Microsoft, [vemos que] fazem mais pela segurança do seu software do que quaisquer outros. Não são perfeitos; há espaço para melhorias. Mas eles têm feito mais, definitivamente, do que todos os outros nesta indústria.

in Former hacker praises Windows security.

É impossível não concordar. Não seria sério. A minha maior crítica vai para o facto de, apesar de terem vários controlos de segurança adicionais, controlos que podem marcar mesmo a diferença, não os encontramos activos logo após a instalação. Exemplos? Dou-vos três: O AppLocker activo e configurado para permitir a execução exclusiva de aplicações instaladas, a inibição incondicional de macros no office e a inibição da instalação de ActiveX. É evidente que os parâmetros poderiam ser revertidos, se os utilizadores o quisessem, desde que o fizessem num modo administrativo. Mas se a configuração base fosse esta, já nos dava uma grande ajuda.

Digam o que disserem, sejam quais forem os argumentos – melhores ou piores –, no limite, o que falta mesmo é a coragem, não é?

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Earlier today, I posted “10 things Microsoft did right in 2009.” I originally planned to post the did-wrong list tomorrow. But in view of today’s news about Microsoft’s out-going chief financial officer, Chris Liddell, I changed the timetable. Liddell’s departure is one of the things Microsoft did wrong in 2009 (He will become CFO at GM).

The did-wrong list was way too much easier to compile than the did-right list. I could easily put 20 items here. The year 2009 was perhaps the most difficult for Microsoft since Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company nearly 35 years ago. Company executives can thank economic turmoil for the hardships. But Microsoft could have handled 2009 much better than it did. Hopefully, 2010 will be better.

I present the list of 10 things Microsoft did wrong in 2009 in no order of importance. They’re all important. Microsoft:

1. Let Chris Liddell get away. Liddell has proven to be an exceptionally adept Microsoft CFO. He managed Microsoft finances in better times and bad, doing a resounding good job overseeing difficult cost cutting as global economic crisis sapped software sales. Liddell has an excellent relationship with Wall Street analysts and — until January (see #4) — he offered continually conservative guidance to them. His departure is a huge loss at Microsoft’s highest executive level.

There is simply no excuse for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his board of directors letting Liddell leave for General Motors. No incentive should have been enough to keep him, although given Liddell’s tight-fisted financial operations during the econolypse, as CFO he might not have allowed it. How ironic is that?

2. Offered no direct Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade. Some Betanews readers will be surprised to read that this only marginally makes the list. From a customer relations and software sales perspective, the Windows XP upgrade path to 7 is a frak up. Windows XP users shouldn’t have to backup everything, do a clean installation and restore data from backup. For many enterprises, a fresh image would be business as usual. For consumers and small businesses, Microsoft has placed a huge deterrent to Windows 7 upgrades.

But like with Zune HD (see #7 in the did-right list), Microsoft backed away from the shackles of its longstanding practice of putting backwards compatibility before anything else. From that perspective, the Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade is something Microsoft did right — and hopefully foreshadows more of it. Microsoft can’t support every customer running any old version of its software. Such practice keeps Windows from being the modern operating system it needs to be.

3. Laid off Don Dodge. Microsoft’s January announcement of 5,000-plus layoffs showed how quickly the economic crisis waylaid the company. Or did it? In a future post I will apply a magnifying glass to Microsoft layoffs, which appear to have been more about firing highly paid, tenured staff than making necessary cuts of employee fat. Microsoft’s ambassador to Silicon Valley, Don Dodge, was the most surprising of the layoffs — and yet from the perspective of lopping big salaries it was not. Microsoft lost three things with Dodge:

• Vital experience sussing out good startups
• Someone well respected in Silicon Valley
• An ally, who became a competitive enemy

In mid November, less than two weeks after being laid off by Microsoft, Dodge took a job with Google. How the frak did Microsoft executives not see that one coming?

4. Withheld financial guidance. Starting in January, Microsoft stopped giving financial guidance to Wall Street. It was simply a disastrous decision that established an even worse precedent. Sure, the guidance couldn’t be good (given sagging sales) and risked further run on the stock, as if the last quarter of 2008 wasn’t bad enough for Microsoft and nearly every other public company. But bad guidance would have been better than none. Successful public companies don’t just manage finances, they manage perceptions about their performance.

By withholding guidance, Microsoft let uncertainty and gossip determine perceptions about its sales and earnings performance. By comparison, Apple continued to release guidance and, combined with marketing and product launches and leaks, generated positive perceptions. These perceptions helped to lift Apple’s share price to new heights. Meanwhile, Microsoft shares remained in the doldrums, even while quarterly results remained relatively buoyant considering economic conditions. Microsoft lost opportunity to generate really positive perceptions on Wall Street during Windows 7′s late development and October launch.

5. Botched the mobile phone strategy. Earlier this month, I encouraged Microsoft not to hang up on its mobile phone strategy. But the company has fewer options by the day, as hardware manufacturers hang up on Windows Mobile and shift to Google’s Android. In October and mid-December posts, I observed how Google has put together a winning mobile strategy — in third quarter, according to Gartner, reaching 3.5 percent smartphone market share, up from zero a year earlier.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has got simply nothing to offer. Windows Mobile 6.5, which launched in October, lags behind Android and iPhone OS in critical areas of innovation. Meanwhile, Windows Mobile 7.0 is MIA, with rumors running about delays into late 2010 or early 2011. Microsoft’s mobile browser is oh-so early century, and the company is rapidly losing developers to Apple and Google. With sophisticated handsets and smartphones poised to be, with cloud services, the next-generation computing platform, Microsoft’s disastrous, run-aground mobile strategy is just short of corporate malfeasance against shareholders.

6. Chased Google in search — again. Microsoft should just give up its pursuit of Google in Web search from PCs. Google’s search share lead is insurmountable. Microsoft’s only real hope is mobile, which will be the future of search, but the company’s mobile strategy is hosed (as explained in #5). Microsoft frittered away 2008 chasing Yahoo, only to bag a Yahoo search deal in July of this year.

I called the agreement “Google’s Christmas-in-July present.” As I predicted then, and as recent ComScore numbers show, Microsoft can only take search share from Yahoo; when the deal is complete and implemented, Microsoft will cannibalize Yahoo share rather than combine with it. Microsoft’s Google search obsession distracts the company from what’s important: Mobile and the cloud, which will be the next-generation computing platform.

7. Retrenched into enterprise. Microsoft responded to the economic crisis by doing exactly what Ballmer recommended against. In January, during his Consumer Electronics Show 2009 keynote, Microsoft’s CEO extolled the importance of investing during hard times — that historically successful companies reaped from research and development and other investments sowed during recessions. But Microsoft did something else: Retreat to the enterprise. Microsoft also killed vital incubation projects (see #9).

Nearly as bad (reiterating #6), Google continued to set the development agenda, with Microsoft again chasing the search giant’s every cloud software or service. Aside from some modest Bing features and user interface changes, Microsoft failed to leap ahead of its rival.

8. Allowed netbooks to grow unchecked. Netbooks are a plague, sucking the margins out of the PC industry and from Microsoft. The company should have used every means imaginable to discourage these pesky, cheap underpowered portables. But somewhere inside the hallowed halls of Microsoft’s corporate campus, someone freaked about all those early netbooks running Linux, resulting in the disastrous 2008 decision to license Windows XP Home for the little buggers. If Linux on netbooks is so bad an experience, as Microsoft product managers claim, sales collapse should have been the future without Windows licensing.

Instead, Microsoft encouraged netbooks’ continued sales surge by licensing Windows 7 Starter Edition for them, all the while pushing costlier, thin-and-light laptops as the better alternative. Cheap rules the day. Gartner predicted that netbooks — and not Windows 7 — would lift sagging 2009 PC sales.

9. Killed incubation projects. Microsoft didn’t just wield the cost-cutting axe against valuable employees, it whacked vital incubation projects. The nastiness started in earnest with April’s gutting of Live Labs. As I blogged then: “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Did I not say stupid?” Microsoft continued jettisoning projects all year, again, contradicting Ballmer’s January assertion “that companies and industries that continue to pursue innovation during tough economic times will achieve a significant competitive advantage positioning themselves for growth far more effectively than companies that hold back. That’s why Microsoft continues to focus on R&D.”

Oh, yeah? How is killing incubation projects investing in R&D? Some of Microsoft’s best product development over the last three years came from incubation groups that acted more like internal startups. Who’s running this company, if the CEO says one thing and underlings do something else — or, worse, he is the contradiction?

10. Licensed ActiveSync to Google. Synchronization is the killer application for the connected world. So why in hell would Microsoft license its synchronization protocols to competitor Google? Perhaps someone at Microsoft saw advantage for Exchange Server. That’s one way Google used ActiveSync, but not where the company got the real bang.

Immediately, Google used ActiveSync for e-mail, calendar and contact synchronization from its cloud services to iPhone and Windows Mobile handsets. Google also used the technology to provide Exchange Server sync with Google Apps, so that businesses could use the hosted service instead of Outlook. Sync is quickly defining Google’s mobile handset and mobile cloud strategies, and Microsoft helped move it along faster. How dumb is that?

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

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longacre writes “Apple CEO Steve Jobs won over 30% of the vote in an online poll published by personal finance and investing news site SmartMoney.com, enough to earn their ‘Person of the Decade’ title by a solid margin over luminaries such as Warren Buffett (17%), Ben Bernanke (13%) and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (12%). From the article: ‘Certainly, Jobs accomplished more than probably any other CEO since he returned to Apple in the late 1990s: Not only did he revive sales at the failing computer company, he led the stock to a more than 700% increase in value, and forever changed the way people buy and listen to music.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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oranghutan writes “Computerworld is reporting Canonical has made available the Release Candidate of its latest Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu 9.10, on the same day Microsoft launched the long-awaited Windows 7. ‘The upcoming Canonical release, which is code-named Karmic Koala, is the latest version of the popular flavor of the Linux OS. The development release on Thursday pushed the OS one step closer to final release, which is due on Oct. 29, according to the company’s release schedule Web page. An image of the OS is available for download on Ubuntu’s Web site. Test versions of Karmic Koala RC available for download include the server, desktop and netbook versions’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser.

- General George S. Patton (as portrayed by George C. Scott)

Throughout the information technology industry, there has been a certain pathology that somehow precludes any segment of it from evolving in any pattern other than consolidation, centralization, and the investment of authority and leadership in a dominant power. With every new market segment that’s ever come into fruition — “PC clones,” laptops, smartphones, applications, operating systems — the initial players can be scattered across the field like seeds strewn randomly in a flower bed. Once they coalesce, the pattern tends to look the same: a few dominant players, but usually just one, with the rest searching for new ways for their marketing or legal teams to plea for fairness and relief.

The argument against any government regulation of technology markets is that, left to their own devices, businesses will seek their own level of competition, manufacturers will develop their own unique strengths, and customers will decide for themselves which one provides the best product or service. Yet historically that has always been half-true: Left to its own devices, a technology market will always wind up with a dominant player, whether it’s by accidental circumstance, fair competition, or fiendish design.

Markets make dominant players in order to have a center of activity — almost every strategy among vendors leverages the dominant player’s position either toward mutual goals or opposite goals. You’d think it would be nice if governments seeking to regulate the activity of dominant players could find them wholly guilty of the circumstances that led to their unfair success, and present to public scrutiny the evil motives and terrible plans that led to their rise to power. And yet it’s never happened that way:

• Intel. As documents emerging from antitrust proceedings against it in Europe, Asia, and from AMD in the US indicate, Intel probably did make deals with its customers for exclusivity or near-exclusivity. Yet those documents also very clearly indicate that it was Intel’s customers themselves who specified those terms, like a would-be victim who gives the bank robber the gun to hold to his head, asking him to make him open the vault so he too can get a share of the loot. Customers such as Dell and HP were willing to buy CPUs in quantity, and appear to have been auctioning their virtues to the highest bidder. Intel’s customers constructed its platform of dominance during the 1990s and early 2000s; they paved the way for it to become an exclusive supplier, to tip the scales against AMD. They fostered Intel’s desire to win and they used it to their advantage. Any government seeking to assess Intel’s liability for creating an unfair market must take into account the conduct of its customers for their mutual role in its creation.
• Apple. There is absolutely no question about the fact that Apple won the digital music market, and is leveraging that stake to gain a big share of the smartphone market, through its brilliant marketing strategy and fabulous designs. But Apple knowingly, intentionally, and probably without malice rushed into a void left by its competitors. Apple did not create the MP3 player, but it was capable of building a digital music empire that continues to undermine the existing business model for media, mostly because it accurately assessed the short-sightedness of competitors in not reconstructing that business model for themselves. With Macintosh, every tenth-of-a-point of market share gained for Apple has been a hard-fought, bloody slog. But with iPod, Apple walked into a market that no one else was willing to build, and was immediately welcomed as the dominant player. Instantly Steve Jobs became the icon of the revolution, whereas with about 20 minutes more foresight, it could just as easily have been Michael Dell.
• Google. In the history of cakewalks, however, Apple’s will not be the most astounding. The Internet has really never had a viable, long-term business model. Almost every company whose revenue is dependent upon the Internet, rather than just invested in it as a side venture, perceives what it’s doing now as a stopgap or an interim business, in lieu of what it can or should be doing once the “Second Bubble” bursts or the recession ends or someone else comes up with a better idea…or when Google invents it. Google has been everyone’s savior. It’s the lovable giant, the big daddy, the central source from which all fairness springs forth. It has cleaned up everybody’s mess. When no one was successful at building “portals,” Google created a big one for everyone. When no one could sell ads for themselves because it meant having to differentiate and strategize and all those…thinking things that require brainpower, Google stepped in and sold ads for everyone. When publishers couldn’t find a way to build libraries, Google said, we’ll make a digital Alexandria just for you (whether you’re dead or alive). If only publishers and manufacturers and vendors and advertisers and governments could just let go and let Google, it would be just so happy to take care of everything for us while we have our nappy-time.
• Microsoft. The road to power for Microsoft has always been paved by the blunders, errors, and completely foolish ideas of its adversaries. Everyone knows now that Microsoft came into being through the short-sightedness of IBM. And along the way to software market dominance, it made severe errors in judgment and committed illegal acts. But the facts that Windows is the dominant operating system, that x86 is the dominant CPU architecture (because it runs Windows), that Office is the dominant applications suite, and that Exchange and SQL Server are becoming the sources for digital communications and digital storage, respectively, are due to the most obvious reasons of all: This is what Microsoft’s customers want, and no one else ever stays in a position of competitiveness long enough to offer a reasonable, affordable, working alternative. WordPerfect and 1-2-3 and, as time goes on, Oracle didn’t lose their dominance entirely because Microsoft drove them into the ground; it’s because they had their own shovels and, for whatever reason, dug their own graves. Microsoft leads, in markets where it does lead, because it lets its competitors fail on their own account. And in markets where it doesn’t lead, it almost doesn’t matter all that much.

The reason there are dominant players in IT markets is because we made them — we the customers, we the OEMs, we the software developers, we the Internet users, we the readers. And the reason we made them is because we wanted to make them, and circumstances favored these candidates at the time and not others. If not for maybe a missed appointment here or a botched marketing campaign there, Motorola, Dell, Yahoo, and Digital Research could have been the subjects of this column.

We talk about “net neutrality,” as if our goals for any one technology market have always been to level the playing field, favor no one, and let the best design concept succeed through the merits of pure and fair competition. But who are we kidding? In what other competitive field do we not seek a dominant player — a majority party, a “most-watched network,” a “nation’s team,” a “best seller,” a “blockbuster,” a “guaranteed hit?” We expect Darwin to select the survivor, but then we always rig the ballot box. In the absence of a dominant player, we will appoint one.

I was in the room for the unveiling of the world’s first clamshell portable computer, the Data General One. It was a thing of beauty, or so it seemed, being able to boot up DOS from any place with an electric outlet. Too bad, an analyst told me at the time, because once IBM sees this it’ll do it too, and Data General will be a remnant of history and IBM will own the market. Why? “Come on, seriously?” the analyst returned at me, like I just fell off a turnip truck. “Tell me you see the pizza-box computer market being owned by Data General!”

Nearly three decades later, the need persists for a dominant player, if only to generate Web site traffic. In market segments where a dominant player doesn’t develop itself organically, publishers and bloggers often strive to invent it artificially. In data storage, for example — a segment which editors have historically found dull, and have even used to banish writers they don’t like, like stationing them in Siberia — from time to time, the talk among editors will inevitably turn to, “What dirt can we get on EMC?” If only EMC could be framed as some kind of Microsoft or Apple or Intel, with an evil moustache and a pocket protector and electrical tape holding up its glasses, we could centralize our focus, get commenters to start bashing someone…and we’d really get traffic.

To some extent, a great deal of so-called “technology news” — or at least the chunk of it that people actually read — isn’t even really about technology (tell me you read our series on high-k-plus-metal-gate fabrication). It’s about the dominant player, or when dominant players collide as was the case with Google Voice on Apple’s iPhone, or when dominant players flounder in unfamiliar territories. Just the word “Zune” excites exponentially more readers than will ever own a Zune or touch a Zune. In the IT news business, there has been one word for fair markets: boring. So even when companies make fair deals with purely benign, mutually advantageous goals — for instance, between Microsoft and Novell, or Microsoft and Yahoo, or Google and Verizon — even in the absence of any evidence of unfairness or collusion or anti-trust activity, people will inevitably invent it.

The biggest irony there is in this entire scheme is that every government investigation involving a dominant player using its dominance to obtain more dominance, has been conducted in the name of protecting something called “competition.” In the real world — in the world that has existed for millennia, since the distant ancestors of Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt swung from trees — since when has competition not been about winning? And how can anyone win without, at some point, whether by accident or its own design or someone else’s design or perhaps, just perhaps, by necessity…becoming dominant?

Imagine there’s no dominant player. I wonder if you can.

The viewpoints expressed here are those of Scott M. Fulton, III, who is solely responsible for his content.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

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Um negócio imparável, em franco crescimento, que vai continuar a disseminar malware, entupir as linhas de comunicação e as caixas do correio electrónico por muitos e longos anos. Segundo Asher Moses, no The Sydney Morning Herald:

Thousands of tech-savvy Eastern Europeans are earning up to $US4000 (€2700) a day for each spam campaign selling illegal penis pills, fake anti-virus software and counterfeit luxury products (…) The affiliates are paid a commission for every product they sell or for every computer they infect with malware, depending on the type of scheme (…) The products include generic drugs produced without a licence, fake Viagra, pornography, pirated software, casinos, dating services and fake Rolex watches.

A solução? Não existe uma silver bullet para este problema… Por um lado, existe claramente uma questão económica: o envio de milhões de emails é [quase] gratuito. E enquanto o risco e o custo destas campanhas for muito menor que o retorno, não existe motivação para parar; Por outro lado, enquanto existirem milhões de máquinas sem controlos de segurança adequados, vão continuar a existir sistemas vulneráveis a ataques que os transformam em zombies, pontas-de-lança para continuar a enviar mais spam.

Uma aproximação? Atribuir um custo ao correio electrónico, definir configurações de segurança reforçadas no momento da instalação dos PCs, e continuar a investir nas campanhas de sensibilização para os riscos de segurança. Se quisermos reduzir o problema, claro.

O artigo? É este: Geeks earn $4600 a day selling penis pills online.

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