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SanDisk said Monday that
Windows Vista is not optimized for solid-state drives, delaying the delivery of optimized drives until next year.

(Credit:
SanDisk)

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are used instead of hard disk drives in select high-end notebook PCs today such as the Apple MacBook Air and Toshiba Portege R500.

The next generation of SSDs will use multilevel cell (MLC) technology, which will require a more sophisticated controller–a crucial component in solid-state drives. These drives will have capacities ranging up to 128GB, 160GB, and later, 256GB. MLC drives are expected to appear in a wider selection of notebooks later this year.

Speaking during SanDisk’s second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid-state drive makers. “As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid-state disk,” he said.

This is due to Vista’s design. “The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls,” he said.

“Unfortunately, (SSDs) performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we’ll start sampling end of this year, early next year,” Harari said.

Harari said this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. “We have very good internal controller technology, as you know…That said, I’d say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment,” he added.

In the very low-end of the market, however, this is not an issue. “In very low-end, ultra low-cost PCs, existing controllers can get the job done for 8-, 16-, and 32-gigabyte storage because these are relatively unsophisticated…requirements,” he said.

SanDisk has a production joint venture with Toshiba, which also makes solid- state drives.

After a few years of waiting, Flickr videos have finally arrived. As a long-time Flickr user, I have been wondering what took so long to add videos (more on Techmeme) to the service. In the meantime, YouTube managed to sprint way ahead, leaving Yahoo Video and the nascent Flickr Video in the dust.

Despite taking the gestation period of an elephant to appear, I like the Flickr Video experience, except for the limitation to 90 seconds of video. It’s the video analog of Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters. It’s a fine communications constraint, but it doesn’t apply as easily to video content.

The addition of video content doesn’t disrupt the simplicity and utility of Flickr. It offers the same privacy controls, user interface, licensing options, and comments, captions, tags, APIs, etc.

Flickr videos live along side photos

According to Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s director of product management, Flickr Video is intended to capture the “little moments of life.” She told me that the goal was not to invent a new kind of video site or take on YouTube, but to focus on “authentic user-generated and personal content.”

“It’s not our desire to be biggest site. We are not going after the hour-long wedding videos,” she said. “People are taking videos on still cameras and mobile devices, and they are not doing much in terms of sharing videos.”

If you compare the number of people posting more commercial videos on sites like YouTube and Yahoo Video, people capturing the little moments is a huge unmet need and taps into existing behaviors, Srivastava added. Users can directly upload videos from their phones. She expects that the addition of video will bring in a new audience, although uploading videos is limited today to paying Flickr users.

“If it means being more conservative out of the gate, that’s fine,” Srivastava said. “We want to maintain consistency of the feel and experience on Flickr. We don’t want to be the biggest video site day one, but the most interesting.”

She explained the difference between Yahoo Video (which is the underlying technology for Flickr Video) and Flickr Video as follows: “Yahoo Video is about the broadcast experience, while Flickr is more personal content that you want to share with friends and family…and the world, but it’s more personal and authentic.” Yahoo will be patrolling Flickr Video and relying on the community to eliminate inappropriate and copyrighted content, she said.

Maintaining the differentiation will be difficult. Users are putting long and short videos on a variety of other sites, including new sites such as Seesmic and Qik. But, the Flickr experience has attracted 25 million active users, and they will appreciate the addition of video.

The 90-second limit on playing time and 150MB maximum file size for upload will encourage users to post their little moments, but it will also be a cause of frustration. For example, I did an interview with Srivastava with my Flip Video camera that was 156 seconds in length. To post it on Flickr I had to go through the pain of editing it, which I would rather avoid for shorter pieces. I expect that the Flickr team and community will think seriously about raising the limit on playing time.

Interview with Kakul Srivastava on Flickr Video–the shorter version:

Interview with Kakul Srivastava on Yahoo Video–the longer version:

Sure, it’s still big. Yes, it still competes vigorously. But with the odd exception (Bing, perhaps), Microsoft just doesn’t seem to have the energy to compete anymore. One indication of this is that most of the dirt that Roy Schestowitz digs up on Microsoft is from old court records. It’s as if Microsoft struggles even to be nasty anymore.

But Microsoft doesn’t wow in its traditional businesses. Surface, yes. Project Natal, yes. But there doesn’t seem to be much creative gas left in the enterprise computing tank.

And perhaps that’s the point. How much innovation can there be, really, in Office? Or the Windows operating system? These are old paradigms that don’t need window dressing: they need the window shattered and shifted to completely new methodologies of computing, similar to what Google (Web) and Apple (entertainment) are doing.

Google may be resorting to some of Microsoft’s most frustrating practices, using its strong products to prop up weak siblings, but at least those siblings promise a different mode of computing.

Simply put, Nokia and Microsoft are the equivalent of two St. Bernards that are forced to run in 90 degree heat and high humidity. They’re big. They’re winded. And they could knock you over–if they could only catch you.

It leaves Microsoft desperately needing to refresh its approach to the market. Immediately. It can live off its billions for a long, long time, but it risks becoming like CA: ever-present but not very relevant.

The desktop is a tired metaphor. This is why Google’s Chrome OS, while not necessarily manna from heaven, is a welcome change, and just the sort of thing that Microsoft should be investing in, but is structurally, financially incapable of promoting in the same way and to the same degree that Google does. Because Microsoft dies if it innovates its way out of its Office and Windows businesses too quickly.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

As news broke this week that Microsoft and Nokia would be partnering to (brace yourself!) port Office to Nokia phones, followed by the equally momentous (or not) news that (sit down for this one!) Microsoft will replace Entourage with Outlook for Mac OS X, I couldn’t help but agree with Larry Dignan’s assessment of the Nokia deal:

I happen to compete with Microsoft in one area that it is growing from strength to strength (SharePoint), but for everyone else, Microsoft is becoming a footnote in the history of computing.

So Microsoft dresses up tired press releases like the Outlook on
Mac announcement “like they’ve been working in the lab for some time now and have had some technological breakthrough that allows them to bring Outlook to Max OS X,” as ZDNet’s Sam Diaz puts it. The breakthrough would be putting Outlook in the cloud, Google Apps-style. It would be creating products that wow in the same way that Apple’s do.

commentary

Apple offers a premium “desktop” experience that makes old feel new. Google replaces the “desktop” with the Web. Open source commoditizes and then innovates enterprise IT, as Accenture’s Alex Wied recently wrote. What does this leave Microsoft?

Marty Cooper and Arlene Harris: wireless power couple.

(Credit:
GreatCall)

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As creator of the Jitterbug, Harris has given much thought to what consumers need and want in a cell phone. She says she imagines future phones incorporating more features that track health and wellness, such as the button on the Jitterbug that calls emergency services. “In our company in particular,” she said, “we are very focused on what else we can do with cell phones that will actually improve the quality of life, and not just by delivering a new ringtone.”

Standing on the corner of New York’s 56th and Lexington 35 years ago Thursday, Marty Cooper was nearly run over. And no wonder. Drivers were hardly used to seeing people gabbing on the telephone while walking down the street. Not to mention that the phone was impossible to miss.

Also on the line from Del Mar, Calif., was his wife Arlene Harris, an inductee into the Wireless Hall of Fame and founder, along with Cooper, of GreatCall. In 2006, the company launched the Jitterbug, a cell phone with features, such as a large backlit screen, geared toward seniors. This week, GreatCall announced that the Jitterbug won the “Best Small Business” award from the American Society on Aging.

Cooper, a former Motorola executive, on April 3, 1973 placed what is widely believed to have been the first public call from a portable cell phone. Earlier this week, on the anniversary of that occasion, I chatted with him for the CNET News.com daily podcast.

To hear the podcast segment with Cooper and Harris, click on the link below (and please forgive the occasional random clanking noises; sometimes, as well all know, technology just behaves badly).

“It was huge. It weighed 2-1/2 pounds. It was about 10 inches high by an inch and a half wide by perhaps 3 inches deep,” Cooper recalled. “The battery lasted only 20 minutes, but that was no problem because you couldn’t hold it up for more than 20 minutes.”

Lessig was talking about the need to keep an eye on government corruption all the time, not just when there’s an election around the corner, but his argument stands when it comes to the rest of the conference: Too much of the talk about technology and politics is still focused on how to win an election using Facebook and YouTube. But as the conference indicated, that’s going away as the American political system matures into its 21st-century incarnation and more serious topics bubble to the surface.

I asked Larry Lessig to name the most overlooked tech policy issue facing America, and he said it’s the management of the broadband spectrum. And at a cocktail party Monday night for Right Is Wrong, the new book from Huffington Post co-founder and Personal Democracy Forum speaker Arianna Huffington, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark explained in a conversation that while there are more pressing issues facing the country than anything “tech,” that access to broadband technology nevertheless demands attention.

We’ve already learned the basic lessons about the digital campaign trail. Ask nicely for small donations (thanks, Barack Obama). Pay attention to niche communities of political junkies on the Web (thanks, Howard Dean). And whatever you do, don’t say anything stupid when there’s a camera around, which more or less means don’t say anything stupid ever (thanks, George Allen).

“The ‘96 telecom act is a dud. It didn’t work, it wasn’t enforced, and it didn’t take Internet into account in it,” Web pioneer Vint Cerf said in a panel Tuesday afternoon about the future of tech policy. “Broadband is important, it’s part of the country’s future, and we’ve got to fix it.”

And it’s clear that the message is getting out about the issues that matter, finally. A discussion on Tuesday afternoon debated the ambiguous definition of piracy, whether to nationalize telecommunications, and whether the U.S. should declare Internet access to be a civil right. A panel about the use of live video streaming in campaigns, on the other hand, devolved into a talk about what happens when the births of babies are broadcast on the Web.

“Use the bully pulpit to be able to explain to some 90 percent or more of Americans that the media that they consume every day is all transforming to a digital platform,” Josh Silver, director of Free Press, said in the same panel when asked what he’d do first to change tech policy if he were elected president. “It’s all gadgets and terabytes and widgets and they don’t’ get it. (Explain) how it connects to their lives.”

“The ‘96 telecom act is a dud. It didn’t work, it wasn’t enforced, and it didn’t take Internet into account in it. Broadband is important, it’s part of the country’s future, and we’ve got to fix it.” –Web pioneer Vint Cerf

“We need to bring affordable, truly high-speed broadband connections to everybody regardless of where that is,” FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said to an audience at the conference. “The government has to make it a higher priority than it is today.” He cited reasons including healthcare cost management, education reform, public safety, and energy policy.

Good thing, because there are plenty of issues that need some attention.

“It’s like forming a new academic field,” Harvard law school professor and Personal Democracy Forum speaker Jonathan Zittrain told me. The early years of the relationship between politics and technology were all about defining the medium, he said. “Once the hard work recedes, you’re left actually figuring out what you want to do.”

But just as difficult as bringing tech issues to the forefront in Washington is bringing them to the millions of Americans who still haven’t heard about Net neutrality or the broadband spectrum. It’s an issue that just doesn’t look quite as good on a cable news ticker as presidential candidates’ gaffes caught on YouTube, but it’s important–and relevant.

We talked about bloggers in 2004, we talked about YouTube in 2006, and the 2008 version of the conversation (social media) has already worn out its welcome. Instead, as the sentiment of the Personal Democracy Forum conference here overwhelmingly indicated, it’s time to redirect the tech-politics spotlight to what really matters.

That was a big topic of discussion on Tuesday, when the focus of the Personal Democracy Forum was consciously oriented toward ongoing policy rather than elections–an admirable decision on the part of organizers Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry. The conference’s big announcement was Internet for Everyone, a new initiative designed to ensure open Internet access as a “basic right” in the U.S.

Americans should know that they can only use their iPhone on the AT&T carrier because of “a conscious policy decision that allows Steve Jobs to do that,” Silver suggested as an example of a newsworthy item that could clue the public into the importance of broadband and telecom policy.

Enough said.

But there’s much more to the American political system than elections, something that’s difficult to augur in a media business that gorges on weekly poll numbers and campaign scandals. “We have this radical, exciting party and activism surrounding this ideal every fourth year and then we crash,” free-culture advocate Lawrence Lessig said in a speech Tuesday morning. “We depend too much, we lean too much, we rely too much on this one year, this fourth year. It blinds us to the fact that there’s something much more fundamentally missing.”

NEW YORK–It’s time to stop waxing philosophical about how this thing called “new media” is shaping American elections and time to focus on the real tech issues, like broadband policy.

There was a healthy dose of cynicism among audiences over whether anything could actually get done on such a feel-good issue, especially given the kind of telecom dollars flowing into Washington. But there was nevertheless a sense of urgency, given that Europe and Asia continue to leap ahead of the U.S. in terms of broadband speed and affordability.

According to Kuchera, Microsoft may well be readying a new round of price cuts for the Xbox 360.

Remember, just prior to E3, Microsoft lowered the price of the 20GB Xbox 360 from $349 to $299.

Right now, the lowest-priced of the next-generation consoles is Nintendo’s
Wii, which runs $249. Sony’s
PlayStation 3 can be had for $399 for a model with a 40GB hard drive, and this fall it plans to introduce an 80GB model for that same $399 price.

Microsoft said it does not comment on rumors.

If the Ars Technica report is true, then, Microsoft could be the first to break the magic $200 barrier and such a move could go a very long way to helping the company reach its declared commitment to winning the console wars.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

If I hear from Microsoft with comment about this, dear readers, so will you.

If the report is true, however, Microsoft could be making an important move. According to many industry observers, the magic price point in video game machines is $200. Go below that, the theory goes, and you potentially open up your machine to the truly mass market.

Now, writes Kuchera, courtesy of his source, “the mole,” Microsoft is planning to roll out new pricing on the entire line of Xboxes. For a console with no hard drive, the price could be $199; for one with a 60GB hard drive, it could be $299; and the high-end model, known as the Elite, with a 160GB hard drive, could go for $399.

Update (Monday, 2:43 PM): This story has been modified to reflect correspondence from Microsoft this morning.

If you can see past the extremely odd prose style of this Ars Technica piece Friday by Ben Kuchera, there’s actually some potentially very interesting news there: Microsoft may be ready to truly reach out to the mass market with its
Xbox 360.

Add sync support to new and existing applications, services, and devices

Microsoft officials aren’t saying much about the mesh other than, “Stay tuned.” As noted in this post, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch discovered that Microsoft owns the mesh.com URL, but there is no site as yet.

Ozzie teased the next evolution of his decades-long exploration of synchronization and collaboration, which he referred to as a “seamless mesh”–or what I’ll call “syncromesh”–in his Mix ‘08 keynote in Las Vegas: Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications. Imagine an app platform that’s cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we’ve had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

Groove Networks was sold to Microsoft in March 2005, and Ozzie began his next major iteration on a much bigger stage, as Microsoft’s chief software architect.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Ray Ozzie has a history of trying to break through software and usability barriers. With Lotus Notes, he and his team spent years creating the underlying client/server collaboration technology to enable synchronization, or replication of e-mail online and offline.

From what I can gather, Ozzie and team are working on the plumbing required to create a seamless mesh that can synchronize content, services and applications across a variety of devices and user scenarios via the Web as a hub.

Leverage sync capabilities exposed in Microsoft technologies to create sync ecosystems

The “seamless mesh” concept is part of Microsoft’s next-generation software platform. Of course, Microsoft cannot abandon it’s lucrative client/server software franchises, such as Office or
Windows Vista, but Ozzie is taking a practical and measured approach to building bridges that span the client-server and services worlds. Synchronization is a key for working online as well as online in the loosely coupled, collaborative Web.

With Silverlight, the XAML markup language, and multi-programming language support, Microsoft has a cross-platform development environment for creating rich Internet applications. Add in synchronization plumbed from the cloud that invisibly manages devices, applications, and services, whether online or offline, and the mesh starts to make sense.

(Credit:
Roy Williams/Caltech)

Roam and share information from any data store, over any protocol, and over any network configuration

One question for the future is whether Microsoft will make this synchronization layer for the Web–a kind of worldwide mesh–truly open, or whether it will find ways to bind it a little more closely to its own Live environment. I’m betting that Ozzie’s Microsoft takes the open road.

Extend the architecture to support custom data types including files

Ultimately, the “mesh” requires an overhaul of the back end to support utility computing on a grand scale. In addition, applications need to be “refactored,” Ozzie said in his keynote. He didn’t fully explain the notion of refactoring, but applications need to have a common user interface across different devices and to leverage the unique capabilities of each form factor. In addition, development tools needs to be “refactored” to support the broad variety of usage scenarios and devices without having to rewrite lots of code or use different tools for each target device.

At the core of the mesh are data synchronization and sharing engines. With the Web and cloud computing becoming more pervasive, users want to be able to access their data from any device, and for the data to be up-to-date, secure and without duplicate content. That requires an standard synchronization infrastructure between services and applications no matter where they originate.

Enable collaboration and offline capabilities for any application

Ray Ozzie is synchronizing Microsoft's software strategy.

Ozzie conceived of Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) in 2005 as the foundation for a decentralized data bus that synchronizes any feed to any device or platform. It has morphed into FeedSynch, a Windows Live service that enables data sharing via RSS and Atom feeds.

FeedSynch is part of Microsoft’s Sync Framework, which allows the following capabilities according to Microsoft’s documentation.

His second major initiative, Groove Networks, took the synchronization and collaboration concept into the peer-to-peer realm, allowing individual PCs to communicate directly with one another.

After client/server and peer-to-peer comes the services cloud, small pieces loosely joined in a “mesh.”

Cisco, the world’s largest supplier of equipment that shuttles traffic around the Internet, reported a net profit for the fiscal quarter of 2008 of $1.8 billion. This was down from profits of $1.9 billion in the same quarter a year ago, but it still beat analyst expectations.

Network equipment maker Cisco Systems beat analyst expectations when it reported earnings Tuesday, but its lukewarm guidance showed that the slowing U.S. economy is still impacting the company.

Last quarter, CEO John Chambers said the company was seeing a slowdown in technology spending in Europe and the U.S. And he predicted it would take two to five quarters for things to rebound.

On Tuesday’s conference call, Chambers said that spending in the U.S. is still tight. And he anticipated that budgets will be constrained through at least the next two quarters. He said the company will likely see sales growth in the 9 percent to 10 percent range in the quarter that ends in July. But he maintained that the company’s long term forecast of 12 percent to 17 percent revenue growth is still doable, indicating that he thinks the slump will be short-lived.

Analysts believe that Cisco’s results mean the company’s business is stabilizing. But the sagging economy will still continue to impact its earnings for the next few quarters.

Revenue for the quarter was up 10.4 percent to $9.8 billion. The company had forecast an increase in revenue of 10 percent.

Why both of us? Because Seth knows more about using Firefox than I do, but I’ve spent some time with the Mozilla and Firefox executives, and can talk about the strategy behind the browser.

Join our live forum from 11 a.m. to noon Pacific Time on Thursday.

It should be fun. I love these live sessions. So come on over and join us.

Seth Rosenblatt (from CNET’s Download.com) and I are co-hosting a CNET Ask the Editors live session, during which we’ll be answering questions about
Firefox 3. So if you’ve got any, check in to join our chat forum. We’re here to help.

See all our Firefox 3 resources.

In June 2008, ICANN decided to act. The organization stopped refunding the 20-cent annual fee for each registered deleted domain name beyond a certain limit.

ICANN said the new policy resulted in a 99.7 percent decrease in domain deletions from June 2008 to April 2009.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is responsible for managing and doling out Internet domain names.

It’s not an easy job. And making it harder was a scheme used by some registrars known as domain tasting. Someone would buy up lots of domain names, try them out, and then get rid of the unprofitable ones, all without losing any money. As long as the registrar dumped the domains within the five-day grace period, known as the Add Grace Period (AGP), a full refund was given.

Designed by ICANN to help registrars who made errors in their domain names, the grace period refund was quickly abused by Web sites that populated their domains with lots of ad links that redirected visitors to other sites. It also led to the unavailability of popular names that were scooped up by domain tasters.

But since 20 cents per domain wasn’t much of a penalty, ICANN got tougher. The organization began charging registrars $6.75 (the cost of a current .org domain) or higher for each deleted domain beyond a certain limit during the grace period.

In its report, ICANN used the following example to illustrate the policy change:
Someone registers 1,000 domain names and gets rid of 300 of them during the grace period. Under the policy, the registrar is allowed up to 70 deletions. The remaining 230 cost 20 cents each for a total of $46. Plus, each excessive deletion costs the registrar at least $6.75. Dumping 230 domain names rings up a bill of $1,552.50 for a grand total of $1,598.50.

(Credit: ICANN)

ICANN has won a major battle over the abusive tactic of domain tasting, said the organization in a report released Wednesday.