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1. Windows XP still has more market share (57%) than Windows Vista (12%) and Windows 7 (21%) combined. More to the point since Vista and XP are affected, more than three quarters of Windows systems are affected. They should care. We sure as hell care. If all Microsoft cares about is W7, that tells us a lot about their commitment to support and security. It's not 2002 any more. It's now 2011, and if being "all in" in the cloud and "all in" in mobile, and committed to "Dynamics" (whatever the heck that was) has distracted from their commitment to security, then we need to know because WE USE THEIR SOFTWARE for more than a year or two.

2. Windows is a brand. A label. A blank symbol. It's not, and never was an operating system. It has been an operating environment for some time, or as some would say, several. It doesn't, and can't, "give a flying fuck" about anything. Windows is a brand that's owned by a legal fiction, a "corporate person". Since there is some fictional personhood attached to the legal entity Microsoft, and some history, we may be able to ascribe some motivation to that with the understanding that anthropomorphizing soulless corporations is in itself a trap. Some here would probably say that Microsoft is the cruel bargainer the devil himself hopes to be someday, but at least we're agreed that it has some personification to hang motivations on. Please don't say "Windows" when you mean "Microsoft" it confuses many issues. They also make very good mice. Ok, they don't actually make the mice, but you should get my drift.

And yeah if it drives adoption of their new product off of their old product without too much escape to actually good product as a goal, we'd all have thunk it. Because that's what they do. The prevention of actual progress is their goal.

citation? I can't find any history on IBM's JVM. (IBM is notorious for keeping this kind of information locked away on the 9-net...)

http://www.devsource.com/c/a/Architecture/IBM-Extends-Java-License-with-Sun/

(There's this little thing called Google, you know.)

I dimly remember IBM announcing that they would develop their own JVM not based on Sun's JVM, but I certainly can't find any citation either.

http://harmony.apache.org/contributors.html

They have been fighting with Sun/Oracle for years now over licensing and certifying.

while (paraphrasing) "Windows CE may be poor and kind killed the demand for mobile computing", MS is set to push hard into this area, in my opinion, with their "Unified Communications" project http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1895,2200699,00.asp While more netcentric than cell, it will impact cell phones. Also, in my opinion, this "Unified Communications", if well received by larger companies, will end up doing more to harm linux in the long run than anything else I have seen or can see. [off topic: It appears to me that MS really doesn't think much about the server OS much - they think more about services, and service that matter to corporations. Unified Communication looks like it could be the next thing that OSS will chase, like it has chased Exchange. In my opion, though, controlling the corporate voice communication via Unified Communication, will end up having as much if not more lock in as Exchange does now. Lock-in this voice communication, and all of a sudden things like google phones and iPhones might not work properly when trying to communicate with the office.]

The question is -- what is left to blog about at Microsoft at the moment anyway?

Oh, I don't know...maybe from their developer division, in no particular order:

• Windows Presentation Foundation, which basically defines a whole new way of building Windows UIs, complete with designer focused tools
• WPF/E, the subset of WPF which is supposed to run in browser and cross platform - including a .NET BCL subset.
• Windows Workflow Foundation, which has the potential to redefine basic business application development - including a rehostable designer that a business user can comprehend and possibly use.
• LINQ, which gives C# and VB compile time support for querying Sql, object graphs, and XML.
• Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, which brings database development into the same world as code development.
• The fact that Sql Server 2005 is slowly being morphed into an application server, complete with the ability to host the CLR, expose web services, perform data integration, etc.
• Office 2007 being (re?) positioned as a custom business application environment.
• A push towards supporting Domain Specific Languages within Visual Studio.
• Exchange Server 2007, which exposes a web services api, and allows for OWA embedding.

Yeah...that's about all the interesting stuff I can think of coming out of the developer division in the near to medium term. Note that I didn't state this stuff was any good (I haven't had the chance to toy with most of it yet), but I do think it's interesting and worth talking about.

Of course, their other divisions are no slouches either, so we also have (again, in no particular order):

• A brand new deployment format for Vista called Windows Imaging Format, which could make multiple Ghost images a thing of the past.
• A ridiculous number of Office 2007 servers, including a new version of Office SharePoint Server, not to (evidently) be confused with the new Windows SharePoint Services v3.
• OneNote Mobile, which finally puts OneNote where it belongs - on a Windows Mobile device. Now if they'd just add PocketPC support...
• Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003
• Virtual Server Host Clustering, catching up

This article:

http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1759,1778148,0 0.asp

talks about some of the cool stuff that Tcl does. My favorite thing about the language is that it hits a real sweet spot with its level of abstraction. Python has an event loop now, in Twisted, but Tcl's had the same thing for ages, and it's very easy to use.