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Meanwhile, word began to circulate that McCain had decided on his running mate, though there was no specific indication yet as to which of several likely individuals had made the cut. The Republicans hold their convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul next week.

Catch up on Wednesday night’s developments in this video with Katie Couric of CBS News:

Earlier in the evening, former President Bill Clinton addressed the party faithful as well.

Day three of the Democratic National Convention wasn’t just about speeches. It also marked the official anointing of Barack Obama and Joe Biden as the Democratic ticket for the 2008 presidential election.

But there were speeches aplenty, of course. Biden gave the climactic address of Wednesday evening in Denver, laying into the Republicans and their presumptive nominee, John McCain, after which Obama made an unscheduled appearance on stage, offering a few words in advance of his speech Thursday night.

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Of course, Adobe’s numbers may be anomalous. It has a different buyer/user profile than, say, SAP.

Looking at Adobe’s excellent quarterly earnings, I have to admit that there are days when I’m grateful for proprietary software. Or, rather, days when I’m grateful for any software company that does well. While a recession may be good for open source, I’m not really going to exult over a market that contracts. I’d rather open source grow with a growing market, rather than grow into a contracting market.

While I’ll enjoy seeing Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc. lose out to open-source vendors, during this tricky spell I’ll be glad to see any vendors do well. I’d rather put the proprietary vendors out of business in a market when their employees will be able to find jobs with open-source vendors. I have a heart, after all.

It’s almost a truism that while Microsoft struggles to do anything right (in the media’s eyes), Apple can pretty much do no wrong.

The U.S. Congress is fixated on taxing the oil and gas companies for their “windfall profits” today, while Apple’s profit margins as a percentage of sales are actually higher than Exxon’s and those of the other bogeymen of Congress.

At that point, we’ll start looking for a new savior and wonder when we allowed ourselves to become so dependent on Apple, just as we once asked of Microsoft. For the moment, I think the giddiness of having a real choice sends us from Microsoft to Apple, Google, and others.

There was a time that we said similar things about Microsoft and happily bought into the lock-in that we’d eventually come to mistrust and seek to escape. Few are saying this now of Microsoft. And its cash hoard of roughly $23.7 billion has simultaneously become a cause for envy and concern: what will the convicted monopolist do with that pile of money? Can it possibly be in our interest?

It’s the cash that I find particularly surprising. Apple is swimming in cash, more than $20 billion of it. The company adds more than $1 billion in cash to its stockpile each quarter. Today we give Apple a free pass on its iTunes/iPod lock-in, which delivers much of the Apple profits, because we can still happily apply such adjectives as “cool” and “innovative” to Apple.

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I suspect that even ardent Apple fans like myself will someday be asking similar questions of Apple. As we buy our way deeper into the Apple ecosystem by adding various pieces of Apple hardware to our homes and offices, Apple will eventually accelerate our dependence on its technology by adding more software offerings (e.g., MobileMe) that make it easier for us to keep this sea of hardware connected and productive.

It won’t last. We’re a fickle lot. I can’t buy Apple’s hardware fast enough today. I’m guessing I’ll regret it tomorrow.

This is as true of Apple’s cash position, which BusinessWeek recently noted may soon surpass that of Microsoft’s, as it is of Apple’s product portfolio and business strategy.

Google's Android phone software, scheduled to arrive later this year.

The Symbian Foundation will unify those user interfaces, which will likely make application development easier and more consistent across a wide range of phones. This is exactly what Google wants to do with Android: unify the mobile Linux community behind a consistent interface that’s compatible across a wide variety of phones and available under an open-source license.

The opportunity is clear: the smartphone market is growing by leaps and bounds as people start to realize what is possible with an Internet connection and a powerful operating system in the palm of their hand. But despite the fact that Symbian’s operating system is used by 60 percent of the world’s smartphones–most of which were sold by Nokia–upstarts like Apple and Google have pushed the established smartphone industry to evolve their software with the times.

Forget RIM and Apple for a moment, since those companies are taking a different tack than the rest of the industry by building the entire widget themselves: both hardware and software. The Symbian Foundation’s goal is by 2010 to develop a royalty-free open-source operating system based on Symbian’s existing software that phone makers will license to use on their phones.

Unless RIM and Apple change their strategy to start licensing their operating systems, Nokia and Symbian will be competing for the affections of phone makers and carriers with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Google’s Android, and Linux-based mobile operating systems from the likes of the LiMo Foundation and others.

The next two years will be fascinating ones for the smartphone industry as processing power increases, software grows more sophisticated, and wireless networks become faster and more prevalent. This evolution of computing will not follow the PC industry’s lead and coalesce around a dominant player anytime soon, and there’s no better spur for innovation than competition.

We’re about to see what full-blown competition for the future of the computing industry looks like when multiple players get a shot to make an impact.

The evolution of the mobile operating system is being defined by traditional players like Microsoft and Apple, the younger establishment represented by RIM, Nokia/Symbian, and the Linux consortia, and the 800-pound gorilla of the 21st century: Google. They are raising the bar with features and design while attempting to make sure developers have a chance to participate, and the results of this competition should delight the smartphone buyers of the next decade.

Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, Nokia owned 47.9 percent of Symbian. That close relationship with Nokia–the world’s largest handset vendor–ensured its software would appear on a large number of devices sold throughout the world. But application development for Symbian phones was somewhat confusing in that there were several different user interfaces in use, depending on the phone vendor. Nokia’s phones used the S60 interface. Motorola’s Symbian-based phones used the UIQ interface. Symbian phones that ran on NTT DoCoMo’s network used the MOAP interface.

“(Symbian) is transitioning from a profit making licensor of the leading mobile device operating system, to an open source provider of a mobile OS that anyone can use on a royalty free basis,” wrote Jack Gold, principal analyst at J.Gold Associates in a research note distributed Tuesday. “This is a direct challenge to Google’s Android initiative, although somewhat belated.”

Right now, with Symbian, Microsoft, LiMo, Android, Apple, RIM, Palm, and other Linux consortia all fighting for a place at the table, somebody’s going to have to lose. Malik thinks that LiMo, Symbian, and Apple have the best chance of “winning big,” with Android and Microsoft fighting for that remaining spot at the table.

Nokia, Symbian, and their main partners–Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, and DoCoMo–have all agreed to contribute their user-interface technology under the open-source Eclipse license to any company that wishes to join the Symbian Foundation. Those components will start to become available in 2009, when the Symbian Foundation is formally established, and will be available as open-source projects up until the point when the first formal Symbian Foundation operating system is released in the first half of 2010, the companies said Tuesday.

Gillis recognizes that by the time the Symbian Foundation releases an operating system in 2010, some of today’s current players may have fallen by the wayside. “The question is really what is the right number of platforms from the industry. Major players say there has to be rationalizations down to some number, but the right number is not bigger than four. …It’s much more efficient to have a small number,” he said.

Scott Rockfeld, group product manager for mobile communications at Microsoft, said that putting together a modern mobile phone represents a significant investment of time and money even if you choose a royalty-free path, and that Windows Mobile demonstrates enough value in getting that system up and running quickly that certain phone makers will continue to pay for it.

Nokia's N95 smartphone, which runs Symbian's operating system and the S60 user interface.

As Om Malik puts it, and as I’ve written before, phone makers can’t get by on flashy hardware anymore. “Indeed, the mobile industry’s old guard is experiencing the business equivalent of heartburn as players like Apple prove that software platforms, and the innovation they foster, are the only way to withstand the whiplash-inducing forces of commoditization,” Malik wrote Tuesday.

The next great operating systems wars are about to be fought, as traditional computing companies collide with teams representing the mobile phone industry. Nokia’s decision Tuesday to unify, then open-source, the Symbian operating system for smartphones clarifies how today’s most-widely used handset operating system will evolve to match the open-source initiatives headed by Google and the LiMo Foundation and competition from companies like Microsoft, Research in Motion, and Apple.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

It’s not immediately clear how the Symbian Foundation will affect the LiMo Foundation, which actually has phones out in the market using a Linux-based operating system developed by a consortium of industry players. Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, called Nokia’s move a “strong endorsement of the philosophical underpinnings” of the LiMo Foundation, although the LiMo Foundation focuses more on the plumbing of the operating system rather than the user interface.

Gold wasn’t so sure. “It may be difficult for Microsoft to continue to justify its relatively high license fees for an OS that competes with a fully featured one that is offered for free. While I do not expect Windows Mobile to simply fade away, I do expect that ultimately Microsoft will have to be more competitive (i.e., free or close to free) if it wants to remain a major factor in the wider mobile device platform marketplace. It will have to make its revenues on applications and services instead,” he wrote.

The Symbian Foundation will also match Android and the LiMo Foundation in a key way: the operating system and its components will be available to phone makers royalty-free. One of the main attractions of mobile Linux was the low cost of getting a mobile Linux operating system up and running, as opposed to paying Symbian or Microsoft royalties or licensing fees for the software. This could cause major problems for Microsoft, who is expected to continue its pay-for-play mobile operating system business, Gold wrote in his report.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

But is LiMo now caught between two giants, Nokia and Google? Motorola and DoCoMo were founding members of the LiMo Foundation, but have chosen to hedge their bets by participating in both the Symbian Foundation and the Open Handset Alliance.

Second, open source changes the way customers expect value to be delivered in software and drops the start-up cost to $0.00. Microsoft has, in part, pushed so hard to set up patent toll booths to open source to raise this price tag above $0.00. Microsoft can compete with $0.10. It has yet to figure out how to compete with free, the tool that helped it to kill Netscape.

So, Ray Ozzie has gone on the record to suggest that open source could be a bigger threat to Microsoft than Google is. Savio isn’t buying that line, and I’m not sure that I do, either.

Can you imagine Microsoft making that sort of a statement? Never. And that is why it fails on the web.

So why is open source potentially so disruptive to Microsoft? Two reasons.

Open source has disruptive potential. Google is disruptive now. Google is making money now in markets that Microsoft covets, while open source is not cutting into a single Microsoft revenue stream. Not one. Red Hat and Novell’s SUSE are almost entirely eating away at the Unix market, while MySQL is creating new markets with web properties. Open source? It doesn’t (today) make a dent in Office, Windows,
XBox, Dynamics, etc.

Let’s be clear about what Ozzie actually said:

Google’s Vic Gundotra, vice president of Engineering for Developer Products, declares:

…[O]pen source [i]s much more potentially disruptive [than Google].

“After years of competition among platforms, the web has won because it’s open, because it’s ubiquitous, and because there’s a passionate community working together to move it forward. Openness is great for developers and for users because it knocks down hurdles to building great applications, and because it speeds the next wave of innovation by letting good ideas be shared. The web doesn’t depend on any one API or tool or product, from Google or anyone else. What makes the real difference is the aggregate effect of us all working together, with open standards and open source.

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Microsoft’s Jason Matusow has long argued that the more open source looks like commercially-licensed software, the easier it is for Microsoft to compete. He is almost certainly right, though even commercial open-source projects offer disruption that is difficult for Microsoft to match.

Arguably, commercial open-source projects are not the disruptive force of which Ozzie was speaking. Commercial open-source projects aren’t free (at least, not all versions are free as in price tag) and don’t offer all the benefits of organic open source (Absolute flexibility being the primary one) while simultaneously offering others (Trusted support, “guaranteed” longevity, documentation, etc.).

Microsoft’s biggest fear must be the Googles of the world: Companies that fund open-source development without the need to sell that software directly. Microsoft knows how to compete in selling software. It still has no clue how to use free software to create more free software, while offering proprietary services on top of that software. It still believes it has to build everything itself.

First, open source is providing a robust, free foundation upon which Microsoft’s biggest future competitors are building. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. are all children of open source. Without open source, they are arguably not nearly as viable as businesses because they would lose both flexibility and funding in and to their infrastructure.

Ray Ozzie is right to be afraid.

In sum, Microsoft still doesn’t understand the Internet, the ultimate child of the open-source movement. It is the Internet that simultaneously makes Google and open source so brilliantly destructive and disruptive to Microsoft’s future.

According to the Journal, Tate is expected to vote to approve the deal, provided that a consent decree is drafted that would call for a fine of roughly $20 million and address several enforcement issues, such as complaints revolving around satellite radio receivers surpassing the FCC power limit.

The report, however, notes that FCC commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, seen as the swing vote, has yet to vote on the proposed merger, but is expected to take the plunge shortly.

If she signs off on the deal, Tate will join two other commissioners, also Republicans, who have already given their blessing to the deal. The two remaining commissioners, both Democrats, from the five-member board oppose the deal.

After more than a year of kicking the tires on a proposed merger between XM Satellite Radio Holdings and Sirius Satellite Radio, the Federal Communications Commission has reached a tentative deal with the companies, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Tech has changed our lives in so many ways. Two areas that interest me are our thoughts about knowledge itself, and our experience of solitude.

This potentially transforms the experience of being a new driver. I don’t know yet how I feel about these systems. As much as I relished my independence as a teen, I was a bad driver initially and I am lucky that I didn’t have a serous accident. Teen drivers definitely need to develop skill and earn trust. We want them to develop experience, while avoiding life-threatening situations. The WSJ article profiled a 16-year-old girl whose parents had nagged her to wear her seat belt, based on the DriveCam system’s video evidence that she was not buckling up. Two weeks later, the girl rolled the car, totaling it, but she was only slightly injured because she was wearing her seat belt.

What about the experience of solitude? Mobile phones connect us like never before. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it made me realize that we are losing the experience of truly being on our own. The second story that got me thinking about these issues this week was The Wall Street Journal article, “Mom called and said, ‘Slow down!’” I remember getting my driver’s license and feeling the rush of freedom that I was on my own, alone. Now there are detailed monitoring systems that parents can install, including GPS, systems that will send parents text messages when their teen drivers speed, and multiple camera options for
car interior and windshield view.

Teens need to earn trust, parents need to give responsibility. I believe that the teens should at least know they are being monitored. Such a system might be an angel on the shoulder, or a Big Brother nightmare, but either way, teens are not on their own they way they used to be.

But now, with Google and smart phones, we have all that information at our fingertips, so who cares whether we can memorize facts any more? The LA Times had a funny article about this, “The risk for Apple iPhone users: They know too much.” Being a know-it-all quickly becomes annoying, especially when you cut into a good-natured bull session about what year a Springsteen album was released by looking it up on Wikipedia.

I used to like the game show Jeopardy and even tried out for it. I flew to Los Angeles for the day and passed the test when my daughter was five months old, proving to myself that my brain hadn’t totally gone to mush. I didn’t get called to be on the show, but the tryout was still a good experience.

Every time I go to Amazon I am greeted with a huge Kindle ad that takes up most of the screen space. Amazon’s computers know that I have seen this ad hundreds of times but they persist in showing it to me instead of products that are based on my viewing and purchase history and would have a higher probability of getting me to spend money.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos loves to talk about the Kindle e-book reader. He’s even got media mogul Oprah Winfrey pitching the device: “I’m telling you, it is absolutely my new favorite thing in the world,” she recently said.

Reading his statement, it’s apparent that Kindle buyers are already book lovers, and haven’t yet weaned themselves off of print. But Bezos is very patient, and clearly willing to invest long term in his Google-like vision–digitize the world’s information and sell it through Amazon.

The Oprah endorsement is just the latest marketing scheme Bezos has applied to making the Kindle the next
iPod. He has been relentless in promoting the Kindle at the expense of maximizing Amazon.com revenue on the virtual storefront.

Perhaps with Oprah’s help and a new and improved version due next year, the Kindle will achieve escape velocity and Amazon can stop showing me the annoying Kindle ad and disclose how many units have been sold.

One can only presume that Bezos worries that the sales numbers are not sufficiently stellar to share with the world. Disclosure of what could be perceived as lackluster Kindle or e-book sales would heap a lot of negativity on the fledgling device on Amazon, which pulled in $4.26 billion in its last quarter.

During the Q3 earnings call, Bezos downplayed any cannibalization of print book sales by the Kindle: “Kindle’s effect is additive to physical book units. Post the purchase of a Kindle, owners buy 1.6 times as many book titles and the same amount of physical books.”

For Bezos, the Kindle is a second revolution. He started Amazon more than a decade ago as an online bookstore, and gradually added other product lines. As iTunes and Netflix took off, Bezos moved into digital music and movie delivery, and with the Kindle he is laying the groundwork to empty Amazon’s warehouses of physical books.

As for eliminating physical books from the warehouses, books are lagging music and video. The end of print is not near, but the writing is on the virtual wall. The economics of the Internet, as well as technology innovations such as improved virtual paper, instant translation, and always on, fast connections to a universe of knowledge indicate that Bezos is on the right track, just as he was in creating a virtual shopping mall for physical goods in 1994. And, he will have lots of company, or competition, as the digital age gets into full swing.

At the same time, Amazon refuses to talk about the number of Kindles sold, but willingly discloses that the wireless device provides instant access to more than 185,000 books, blogs, newspapers, and magazines.

Apple, on the other hand, is happy to let the world know that 6.9 million iPhones and 11 million iPods were sold in the last quarter, and the iTunes catalog has 8.5 million titles.

You can either disable or remove the program from Vista’s auto-start lineup. If an item is grayed out, click “Show for all users” at the bottom of the screen. When you disable a program from auto-starting here, you don’t get nagged about any settings changes the way Msconfig bugs you with pop-ups about diagnostic and selective startups whenever you reset something.

In addition to startup programs, Software Explorer lists the processes currently running on your PC, the programs connected to the network, and Winsock Service Providers, which handle TCP/IP and other network protocols. You can end a process listed under Currently Running Programs by selecting the entry and clicking End Process. However, choosing the Task Manager button merely opens that utility; you have to navigate manually to the process’s entry in Task Manager to see more information about it there.

(As I mentioned yesterday, the $30 WinPatrol, the free CCleaner, and many other Windows utilities can be used to prevent applications from starting with Windows. Here I’m focusing on the tools built into Windows.)

A lot of programs you don’t need to start with Windows do anyway, or try to. And many that you try to prevent from auto-starting just re-enable themselves. Yesterday I described how to remove recalcitrant apps from Windows XP’s auto-start list via the System Configuration utility, or Msconfig. Vista’s new Software Explorer makes it easier to get rid of the unnecessary auto-starters on your PC.

To open Software Explorer, press the Windows key, type defender, and press Enter, or click Start > All Programs > Windows Defender. Select Tools > Software Explorer, and choose Startup Programs on the drop-down menu (if it isn’t already selected). Scroll through the list of programs in the left pane, and select one to see information about it, such as the date it was installed, whether it is part of Vista, and its location in the Registry.

Tomorrow: smoothing the transition to OpenOffice.org.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Vista's Software Explorer provides information about the auto-start programs on your PC.

But that way of doing things is over for Dell now. The company has struggled to find the right mix of products and now has less opportunity to be picky. But it’s a good sign that the company is trying out smaller, more innovative, and more practical ideas like wireless charging, docking, instant on, and touch interfaces. Though it’s only in the Latitude Z right now, we hear these features are stirring a lot of interest in other product groups at Dell. It’s easy to see how, for a cheaper price (the Z starts at $1,999), these new features could find much broader acceptance with retail customers.

What Dell, and DeviceVM, and Phoenix, and plenty of others are doing is part of a trend that’s gaining steam: doing a sort of end-run around Windows. HP came out with its own interface on Touchsmart PCs last year that allows for quick sorting between photos, e-mail, and Web browsing on a few models. Lenovo recently introduced a new touch-screen interface for its tablet, and Asus has its own for its popular Eee PC Netbooks and touch-screen desktop called TouchGate.

That Dell is releasing a new laptop for business customers is the opposite of surprising. But the fact that it contains notable features not seen in any other laptops certainly is.

Both cost extra, and are by no means cheap ($199 for each), but the intention is for companies to buy, not necessarily individual consumers.

The Latitude Z on wireless charging station, and wireless dock adapter on the right.

It’s part of what Dell is terming its new “wireless eco-system.” Besides being able to get juice without wires, the Latitude Z will also be able to dock without them. A smaller separate adapter can hook up the laptop with any accompanying monitor, whether it be one in a cubicle, or in a conference room.

Companies like DeviceVM and Phoenix have built businesses out of instant-on capabilities–basically a quick-booting interface built right into the computer’s BIOS that isn’t dependent on Windows. Dell said it decided not to go with either of those because they wanted to use the separate low-power processor for the background syncing.

Most people aren’t used to seeing Dell trying new things like this, some of it actually ahead of competitors. Last year, we wrote about how Dell was starting to be a little more risky about the types of products it was trying out. Not new to the market, just new to Dell, which has traditionally had a habit of waiting, analyzing the market’s response to new products, and jumping in later with a more efficient, and less expensive way of making that product.

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET)

The wireless charging is handled elegantly enough. An inductive pad that’s built into a laptop stand can accomplish a full recharge in “about the same amount of time” as a standard-issue cabled charger, according to Dell. While smartphone maker Palm has a similar (albeit smaller) wireless charging system for the Pre, and companies like Visteon and Wild Charge have debuted wireless charging accessories for phones, no PC maker has incorporated the idea until now.

The sliding touch controls–not visible to the naked eye–are located on the right side of the bezel and appear when contact is made. Any controls can be customized and placed there, such as screen brightness, volume, or easy access to specific applications. When controlling an application like Excel or a Web browser, the right side of the bezel can be used as a sort of touchpad for scrolling through a spreadsheet or Web page.

But you probably wouldn’t guess that the Latitude Z charges wirelessly. And as far as we can tell, it’s the first laptop to do so. Surprised that this is coming from Dell? You’re not alone.

The wireless charging stand.

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET)

The ARM processor doesn’t have access to the main motherboard or the ports, which should alleviate security concerns, according to Todd Forsythe, vice president of Dell’s commercial client product group. The secondary processor–used mostly in smartphones–also draws much less power than a more robust desktop or notebook processor and so while it’s running in the background it doesn’t drain the battery as fast: using just the instant-on mode will provide up to two days of battery life; when using Windows and the accompanying Intel Core 2 Duo processor, it will get four hours.

Other cool things Dell is introducing: touch-sensitive controls on the screen’s bezel, and its first take on “instant on.”

Most everything about the new Latitude Z is expected: It’s yet another very thin notebook (a metric which PC manufacturers keep using to try to one-up each other), with a different kind of exterior finish (soft-touch, in this case), and comes in a black cherry. It measures 16 inches across, and is 14 millimeters thin at its most narrow point.

The instant-on capability works exactly the way it sounds. Instead of waiting for Windows to boot up, the computer uses a second smaller motherboard and a separate ARM processor. Through a separate, non-Windows interface, it allows e-mail, contacts, calendars, and a
Firefox-based Web browser to be accessed right away. E-mail, contacts, and calendars are always running in the background and are constantly being synced.