EC enters talks with Microsoft for new licenses

The European Commission confirmed that it is in talks with Microsoft with the aim of keeping its licensing agreement for Windows.
The current deal with Microsoft is set to expire May 31. The commission decided to start negotiations with the software giant rather than hold a public tender. The decision has sparked controversy among supporters of open standards. Those talks started on March 24.
However, the negotiated procedure measure is allowed by European Union rules under certain conditions and allows the commission to acquire software made by a single vendor. But the length of such contracts may not exceed three years.
Everything the Commission has done is above board, said Antony Gravili, commission spokesman for Inter-Institutional Administration, on Friday. "The commission is committed to getting value for money and negotiates on behalf of all the E.U. institutions, agencies and other bodies - 42 in all. Representing such a large number allows us to drive costs down and we will drive a hard bargain."
The commission assesses products and must make a business case in terms of feasibility and total cost of ownership. At a task force meeting in December, when the decision was made to take the negotiated procedure route, representatives from the budget department (DG BUDG) asked why it was not being put out to tender. But the Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT), which sets the commission's IT strategy, said Microsoft met all the requirements.
Under the license agreement, the commission already has the right to upgrade to Windows 7 . "This is standard for big corporate contracts with Microsoft, and is highly unlikely to change under a new contract," Gravili said.
Any deal will have a huge knock-on effect potentially worth millions of euros to Microsoft, as other bodies and organizations seek to keep pace with the commission's technology practices. European governments represent 19% of all software purchases in the E.U., according to IDC with more than 36,000 desktop computers in European institutions.
But the commission's plan to stick with Windows appears to be at odds with its own European Interoperability Framework, a set of guidelines for governments installing IT systems, which broadly supports the use of open specifications and warns of the danger of being locked in to one software vendor. The head of the task force deciding on the current Windows licenses said that it was important that "decisions taken now do not lock the Commission into any technology providers for more than a few years." DIGIT was also told that it should "inform the group of other mainstream IT supplier negotiated procedures where contracts are approaching their end date."
Jan Wildeboer, the EMEA evangelist at Red Hat, said that "comparing [Digital Agenda Commissioner] Neelie Kroes' statement at the OFE conference on unintentional lock-in being a waste of public money with the commission negotiating a deal with Microsoft on cementing exactly the lock-in that Neelie Kroes warned of leaves me wondering about practicing what one preaches. We, the open standards and open source implementers, are ready to compete -- if proper tendering is done."
"In tandem with negotiations on the licenses, the commission will also seek to renew its services contracts," explained Gravili. "The current agreement includes a baseline service agreement for all the institutions, but larger institutions such as the Parliament and the commission have a services contract to help manage any issues that require a deep knowledge of the software at code level. As recently as last week when we came under cyberattack, we made use of Microsoft experts, who worked alongside our own," he added.

Facebook cracks top 10 in ComScore U.S. ad rankings

The massive audience at Facebook helped it take a top-ten ranking for the first time in ComScore's January survey of the number of unique visitors to U.S. Internet sites and advertising networks.
The Internet research company said Facebook was viewed by 153.0 million unique visitors in January, or 72.2% of the overall U.S. Internet audience that month, putting the site in 10th place in ComScore's Ad Focus survey of U.S. sites and advertising networks. The top spot went to Google Ad Network, with 197.1 million unique visitors, or 93.1% of Americans online, ComScore said.
Facebook's rising popularity has helped it move up significantly in ComScore's rankings. Last June, Facebook ranked 26th in the Ad Focus survey with 141.6 million unique visitors, or 65.9% of the U.S. Internet audience that month. In December of last year, however, Facebook was already on the verge of the top 10, sitting in the 11th spot.
Excluding the advertising networks, Facebook ranked fourth among the top 50 Web properties in the U.S. in January, behind Yahoo sites, Google sites and Microsoft sites, respectively. Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site, was not among the U.S. top 50 properties in January.

Pillar kicks Intel's SSD to the curb, upgrades storage array

It blames the solid-state drive for operations time-outs

Pillar Data Systems Inc. said this week that it's replacing Intel's X25-E solid state disk (SSD) drive as an option for its storage arrays with a drive from STEC Inc. because of firmware problems with the Intel's drive that lead to performance slowdowns.
The SSD change was one of several upgrades to Pillar's modular storage array, the Axiom. The company also said it is now doubling the available cache on the array to 192GB, shipping boxes with 2TB hard drives -- double the capacity of previous drives -- and replacing the current dual-core processor controller blade with a quad-core AMD Opteron 2354 chip.
The new hard disk drives push the Axiom's overall usable capacity to more than 1.6 petabytes per system, while cutting overall power consumption by 50% and reducing the space required for the array. The change-over to STEC's SSD also means the company will be able to offer higher capacity 256GB flash drives, since Intel's X25-E tops out at a maximum capacity of 64GB.
Bob Maness, Pillar's vice president of worldwide marketing and channel sales, said the company decided to go with STEC's Mach8 SATA SSD because it proved to have better performance in the array. Intel's X25-E, which has had firmware problems in the past, causes operational timeouts, Maness said.
Pillar is continuing to test its arrays with the X25-E and said Intel is working closely with it to solve the issue. Intel has admitted to firmware problems with the X25-E SSD in the past, but said it resolved them with an upgrade.
Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Pillar's decision.
Based on commodity hardware, the Pillar Axiom acts as an application-aware storage-area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) server all controlled by a single management interface. The company's claim to fame is the software used to manage the array by automatically allocating CPU, cache and storage capacity separately to applications as they need more resources.
In June, Pillar announced it would begin shipping the Axiom storage system with Intel's X25-E solid state drive as one option. STEC's Mach8 SSD is a consumer-rated drive not normally used in high-performance storage arrays. STEC's Zeus-series SSDs have a Fibre Channel interface normally used for enterprise-class data center operations. Maness said Pillar's Axiom achieves the maximum performance capable with the Mach8 SSDs, which use a serial-ATA interface and are less costly than the Zeus SSD.
"I'd like to get back to Intel's SSD, but I think STEC has a corner on the market," Maness said. "STEC is just a little further along in terms of their drive."
The Pillar Axiom enables users to use any number of drive types, from serial-ATA hard disks to SSD in order to tier storage and utilize the level appropriate to the application being supported. Maness said a single tray that houses SSD drives for the Axiom will retail for $49,000, roughly the same cost as Fibre Channel hard disk drives, but with six times the performance.

Microsoft files European antitrust complaint against Google

Microsoft filed an antitrust complaint against Google with the European Commission on Thursday, accusing Google of taking technical measures to squeeze Microsoft and other competitors out of the advertising and search markets.
Google has been engaging in a "broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping anyone else from creating a competitive alternative," Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith alleged in a blog post detailing Microsoft's concerns.
Microsoft joins four other companies that have filed complaints about Google with the European Commission. U.K. price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and German product review and shopping site Ciao, now owned by Microsoft, filed their complaints in February 2010, prompting the Commission to launch a wider investigation of Google's practices in November. Then in February this year ejustice.fr's parent company 1plusV filed another complaint against Google.
The Commission will ask Google for its views on the complaint, but no further information will be released, said a spokeswoman for Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia.
Google said, "We're not surprised that Microsoft has done this, since one of their subsidiaries was one of the original complainants. For our part, we continue to discuss the case with the European Commission and we're happy to explain to anyone how our business works."
Microsoft's antitrust filing, its first ever according to Smith, shows how frustrated the company is with Google. Smith wrote that some people will point out the irony in the filing given Microsoft's extensive legal battles in Europe concerning Web browsers and interoperability of its systems with competitor's products.
"Having spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot with the European Commission, the filing of a formal antitrust complaint is not something we take lightly," Smith wrote.
Microsoft and Yahoo together hold about a 25 percent share of the market for search in the U.S. Microsoft's Bing search engine powers searches on Yahoo after the two companies reached a deal in July 2009. But Europe is different: Microsoft, Yahoo and other smaller players hold less than a 5 percent share, while Google has around 95 percent.
Google, Smith alleged, has walled off some of its content to prevent indexing by Microsoft's Bing search engine, and consistently undertaken measures to lock advertisers into using its systems.
Bing is prevented from "properly accessing" Google's YouTube video website, Smith alleged. Microsoft's latest mobile phone operating system, Windows Phone, also has problems accessing the site, with Google restricting the rich metadata associated with videos to prevent Windows Phone devices from offering the same user experience as, say, Android phones do.
"We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide," Smith wrote.
Microsoft also alleges that Google prohibits advertisers that are using its online advertising services from formatting their data in a way that could easily be used with competing ad platforms, including Microsoft's adCenter.
As for search, Smith also complained that Google prohibits leading websites from distributing other search boxes on their sites.
"It is obviously difficult for competing search engines to gain users when nearly every search box is powered by Google," Smith wrote. "Google's exclusivity terms have even blocked Microsoft from distributing its Windows Live services, such as email and online document storage, through European telecommunications companies because these services are monetized through Bing search boxes."

Google gets more social with its search engine

New +1 feature lets users share and see search results recommendations. Google is diving deeper into social networking.

The company hasn't released a long-rumored but unconfirmed social networking platform, but it has made its search engine more social.
Google announced Wednesday that it is enabling users to give and get recommendations on search results. Called +1, the new service lets people share their recommendations with friends as well as strangers.
"Say, for example, you're planning a winter trip to Tahoe, Calif.," wrote Rob Spiro, a Google product manager, in a blog post. "When you do a search, you may now see a +1 from your slalom-skiing aunt next to the result for a lodge in the area. Or if you're looking for a new pasta recipe, we'll show you +1's from your culinary genius college roommate.
"And even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1'd your local coffee shop," he added.
So how does Google search know who your friends are?
According to Spiro, the search service checks to see who your Google chat buddies are and who is in your list of connections for Gmail. He added that in the future, Google might be able to check and see who your connections are on social sites like Twitter.
To know whom they're connected to, users can check Google Dashboard
For months, Google executives have said they plan on making Google services, like search, more social. They're making good on that promise with +1, said Brad Shimmin, an analyst with Current Analysis.
"This is like when fuel injection came out and car makers said, 'Hey, that's a better way to put gas into an engine,' " Shimmin said. "It didn't revolutionize automobiles, but it made them better automobiles. This +1 acts in the same way. It's not revolutionizing Google, but it makes search a better version of itself."
Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group, said this is another sign that Google is taking the burgeoning world of social networking seriously. With companies like Facebook increasingly becoming a competitor for users' attention, as well as for ad dollars, Google needs to have a strong social presence.

Crisis expert bashes Microsoft over Windows Phone 7 update fiasco

Microsoft needlessly botched getting timely updates for Windows Phone 7 to customers and antagonized some of its most loyal fans by not delivering on its promises, a crisis communication expert said today.
"There are two kinds of crises, ones that you cannot anticipate, like a natural disaster, and those that you can," said Patrick Kerley, a senior digital strategist with Levick Strategic Communications, a Washington, D.C.-based crisis management firm.
"Microsoft's dealing with the second," said Kerley, referring to the public relations problem the company has on its hands after failing to deliver updates for Windows Phone 7.
Last week, Microsoft published schedules for the first two updates of its new mobile operating system, a move that prompted customers to rage about broken promises and an opaque timetable.
That followed comments by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last month that the latest update, nicknamed "NoDo," would be released in the first half of March. Within weeks, Eric Hautala, the general manager of Windows Phone 7's customer experience engineering team, retracted that, saying that the NoDo update would be delayed until the second half of this month.
According to Microsoft, no U.S. users have yet seen the NoDo update, although yesterday T-Mobile said it was pushing the update to owners of the HTC HD7. And today, Dell said that T-Mobile was starting updates for its Venue Pro.
Last week, Joe Belfiore, the Microsoft executive responsible for Windows Phone 7's design, apologized to customers, acknowledging that he was wrong when he said earlier that most users had received last month's update.
Users had accused Belfiore of coming across as flippant and insensitive to their frustrations over waiting months for updates, and appearing to be out of touch with the reality of a process they claimed was clearly broken. Some called for Balefire to step down.
Belfiore said he had not been ready with the facts when he was filmed for a video posted on Microsoft's site, during which he said that updates were going out. "I wasn't as prepared for this interview as I should have been...and I didn't have the right up-to-date information to give a good explanation on updates," Belfiore said.
Kerley said Microsoft should have anticipated the problems rolling out updates.
"With their numerous partners, both phone makers and carriers, they should have anticipated that [there was] going to be some stuff outside their control," said Kerley, referring to the process under which Microsoft completes the update, then passes it off to carriers for additional testing.
Microsoft's mistakes included telling customers that the updates were "completed" when in fact those updates were weeks away from being delivered, said Kerley, as well as not pushing the carriers to wrap up their testing faster.
"Microsoft should have anticipated [the backlash]," said Kerley, and now is reaping what it's sown. "Microsoft is the common denominator here, not the carriers, so Microsoft is the focus of the negative response."
Kerley compared Microsoft's job with Apple's ability to push updates to iPhone users, and said the former failed to mimic its rival.
"Apple waits until they can do it right," said Kerley, talking about situations where Apple's been flooded with consumer complaints, as it was last summer when customers griped about the iPhone 4's antenna problem or when users demanded additional features after the 2007 launch of the first-generation iPhone.
"Apple has a history of executing, making sure it's done right," said Kerley, who gave Apple a C- grade last year for the company's handling of what CEO Steve Jobs called "Antennagate."
Microsoft faces the same problems that Apple does, Kerley argued, and so the comparison is fair. "It's not like Apple doesn't have to have carriers test its iPhone updates," he said.
Part of Microsoft's problem stems from the territory it's staked out. Apple, for example, uses a closed ecosystem that it completely controls -- including manufacturing the phones -- while Google has taken a different tack, giving users more freedom to modify their Android-based smartphones, and ceding updates to a wide range of handset makers and carriers.
"The way that Microsoft has positioned itself, it's the worst of both worlds," Kerley maintained. "It wants to control the update process but it's trying to work across a disparate ecosystem."
And Microsoft may have rushed the updates, or at least told customers they were coming, because it faces an uphill battle in the smartphone operating system market.
"There's a feeling here that in its rush to catch up [with Apple and Google], it may have tried to add features that hadn't been tested enough," Kerley said.
The update debacle doesn't mean Windows Phone 7 is sunk, said Kerley, even though many of the complaining customers -- influential "early adopters" -- are exactly the ones Microsoft must satisfy.
"They need to act a little more like a startup," said Kerley, "and tell people 'here's what we can say that's true,' and 'here's what we can say that we're working on.' It needs to show customers that it's learning from its mistakes. But they're playing catch-up, and Microsoft isn't used to not being dominant."
The Windows Phone 7 part of Microsoft could learn some lessons from Microsoft's Xbox group, which has faced consumer complaints in the past, notably about faulty game consoles. In 2007, Microsoft took a $1 billion charge against earnings to account for an "unacceptable" number of hardware failures of the Xbox 360.
"Microsoft needs to make sure its fan base sticks with it through thick and thin," said Kerley, "as they did with the Xbox."