Mary Jo Foley, writing in her ZDNet blog “An unblinking eye on Microsoft,” recently provided an insider’s scoop into how Microsoft is already applying the lessons it learned from its recent Vista model launch towards the development of its next platform, Windows 7:

First and foremost: Keep Windows architectural changes to a minimum. And secondly, be more predictable (and believable) when it comes to delivery targets.

That’s according to Mike Nash, Corporate Vice President of Windows Product Management, who is chatting this week with press and bloggers about the state of Vista, just about a year after the company released the product to manufacturing.

Nash isn’t apologizing for Microsoft’s decision to introduce User Account Control prompts, default to standard-user mode (instead of administrator) or move the graphics subsystem out of the kernel space — all choices the company made in developing Vista. Nor does he think it was a mistake for Microsoft to delay the final RTM of Vista, resulting in the company missing last year’s lucrative holiday retail season.

Nash said Microsoft had to make the under-the-cover changes it did, for security and performance reasons, to Windows Vista.

“I don’t regret that we made a lot of changes to Vista,” Nash said in an interview on November 14. “But I don’t anticipate that level of architectural change in Windows 7.”

Get the whole story here.

What do you think? Were Vista’s wide-ranging changes a little too ambitious? Or was it good to approach the upgrade on such a comprehensive scale? Sound off in the comments section and let us know what you think.

Note: No updates until next week. To all our readers: Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday!

The buzz surrounding the concept of “Software as a Service” (or SaaS, as it’s more often called) is getting pretty loud.

Similar to the concept of “Web 2.0″, SaaS is, according to Wikipedia, “a software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet. Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it.” (Quoted from Wikipedia’s page on SaaS as it appeared on Tuesday, November 20, 2007.)

In simpler language, SaaS is a means of renting out software rather than selling it. It’s appealing to customers because they have a much lower price to pay, and they don’t have to worry about installation or maintenance. The advantage to companies is significant, as well, because they can focus on development and implementation more than packaging and merchandising.

Salesforce.com is widely acknowledged to be the company that’s carrying the torch for this new innovation. It may not be the first business to offer SaaS, but it’s definitely leading the pack among those companies actively carving out a new market niche for the concept.

And the media is taking notice. Actually, industry-focused media have been reporting on the trend for years — Aplus.Net’s own Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Clarke Caines, was interviewed by CompareWebHosts.com earlier in 2007 on this very topic.

But now the mainstream media is reporting on the trend on a much larger scale. A recent article from The New York Times runs down the history of SaaS while also hailing Salesforce.com as its ringleader:

In the late 1990s, Salesforce was one of a group of start-ups exploring ways to capture a share of the lucrative business software market using the leasing model, also called “software as a service” and “on-demand computing.”

The leasing model, its supporters say, permits companies to avoid the expense and headache of installing complex software packages that typically require huge outlays of cash for hardware and software upgrades.

“It’s all about letting our customers pay attention to innovation and not infrastructure,” Mr. Benioff said. “Software as a service is about freeing them from having to hook up another computer in another data center to another database to another application server to another security server.”

In the battle for a share of business software dollars, Mr. Benioff chose to focus on customer relationship management tools, a relatively small corner of the market. Such software would help sales representatives track customers and potential customers.

“C.R.M. seemed a perfect place to start and prove our concept,” he said.

(Read the entire New York Times article here.)

The story above is just one more sign of the increasing momentum behind this movement. What do you think? Is SaaS indeed the wave of the future, and will it change the way business is done? That certainly doesn’t seem as far-fetched anymore as it once might have. Feel free to share your comments below.

Hey, Internet cruisers: Are you by any chance looking for yet another story examining how blogging is becoming the new standard for communications in the twenty-first century?

We thought so!

Walter Pincus, national security and intelligence reporter for the Washington Post, writes today of an interesting and relatively new tactic that the U.S. government has been implementing to reach out to the Islamic world’s young population “in the hopes of steering them from terrorism.”

The State Department, departing from traditional public diplomacy techniques, has what it calls a three-person, “digital outreach team” posting entries in Arabic on “influential” Arabic blogs to challenge misrepresentations of the United States and promote moderate views among Islamic youths in the hopes of steering them from terrorism.

The department’s bloggers “speak the language and idiom of the region, know the culture reference points and are often able to converse informally and frankly, rather than adopt the usually more formal persona of a U.S. government spokesperson,” Duncan MacInnes, of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs, told the House Armed Services subcommittee on terrorism and unconventional threats on Thursday.

… To prove that it, too, can plug into the modern media world, the Pentagon’s Central Command has a blogging operation at its headquarters. Its Joint Forces Command also has the capability and has even written a brochure on how to do it. “It’s an area we’re moving into,” Navy Capt. Hal Pittman, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for joint communications, told the House panel. He added that Central Command may not be using its own Arabic or Farsi speakers, but rather contract personnel. “We’re sharing with State and trying to, you know, better our knowledge on how to do it.”

Whoever said that diplomatic types couldn’t be hip?

Even though the State Department employees were not going into hard-core terrorist sites, the worry, MacInnes said, was that after identifying themselves and using their own names, “we would be, in the parlance of the Internet, ‘flamed’ when we come on” — meaning their entries would be subjected to intense attacks.

What do you think? Is this the kind of story that signals a new way of communicating, made necessary by a dire and complex situation? Or is it grasping at straws and — quite possibly— playing with fire?

Check out the original article here and let us know what you think in the comments section, below.

A survey by renowned database hacker David Litchfield has found a whopping 492,000 Microsoft SQL and Oracle database servers directly accessible to the Internet without firewall protection.

Today we link up with another ZDNet blog, this one written by Ryan Naraine and outlining yesterday’s disturbing story about a well-known hacker’s revelation that 492,000 Oracle and SQL servers are unprotected.

The number is alarming considering recent efforts to better secure such servers via improved firewall protection, among other measures.

Of the SQL Servers found, more than 80% were running SQL Server 2000 and of those, only 46% were running Service Pack 4, the most recent, and the remainder were running Service Pack 3a or less. “Indeed, 4% were found to be completely unpatched and are vulnerable to the flaw exploited by the Slammer worm as well as an authentication flaw known as the ‘Hello bug’,” Litchfield added. …

“These findings represent a significant risk: whilst it’s not possible to say how many of these systems are engaged in a commercial function, with just under half a million servers accessible there is clearly potential for external hackers and criminals to gain access to these systems and to sensitive information,” he warned.

Read the real deal here.

Most readers probably already know about the incredible, and encouraging, success of Mozilla’s open-source Firefox web browser.

For the benefit of those who don’t:

Only a couple of years ago, Firefox was the little browser that could — an open-source program created by thousands of contributors around the world without the benefit of a giant company like Microsoft to finance it.

Since then, Firefox, which has prospered under the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, has grown to be the largest rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with 15 to 20 percent of the browser market worldwide and higher percentages in Europe and among technology devotees. It is the most popular alternative browser since Netscape, with about three times as many users as Apple’s Safari.

The above paragraphs are an excerpt from an article in yesterday’s New York Times examining the success story of Firefox and contemplating just what that success is likely to mean a few years down the road.

It’s an article we’d recommend to anyone who likes to keep our eye on the developments in the web world and who enjoy success stories (especially when they come in the form of underdog open-source software platforms).

But it’s also interesting from a larger perspective of what Firefox’s success means to the Internet as a whole, and just what role Google has played in all of this. After all, Firefox’s incredible rags-to-riches story seems a little less amazing when you consider that they have a special partnership with Google, the biggest of the Internet players.

According to Mozilla’s 2006 financial records, which were recently released, the foundation had $74 million in assets, the bulk invested in mutual funds and the like, and last year it collected $66 million in revenue. Eighty-five percent of that revenue came from a single source — Google, which has a royalty contract with Firefox.

… When the connection with Google was revealed more than a year ago, the question on popular tech Web sites like Slashdot.org was whether Mozilla was acting as a proxy in Google’s larger war with Microsoft and others.

… A Google spokeswoman would not comment on any of the issues raised by the Google-Mozilla relationship, but issued a statement: “Mozilla is a valued business partner because many users utilize Firefox to access Google products and services. We will continue to work with a variety of technology providers, including Mozilla, to ensure our mutual users have the best experience possible with our products and services.”

Of course, without that special relationship with Google, how would an upstart company have ever been able to compete with Microsoft—that other gorilla in the room?

Ms. [Mitchell] Baker {Chief executive of Firefox and chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation} says it was the community, not Google’s money, that made Firefox a player in the field. “Mozilla is successful because we have this giant set of people who care about it,” she said. “The fundamental infrastructure piece that keeps Mozilla independent from even a single source of income like Google is the diverse set of people.”

She added: “No amount of money would have allowed us to be as successful as we are.” Then, referring to Microsoft, she said, “We cannot outspend them.”

The rise of Firefox can be seen as an extension of the Netscape-Microsoft battle of the mid-1990s. After Microsoft largely wrested control of the market, Netscape decided in 1998 to release its code to the public, and immediately developers took up the challenge.

By 2003, AOL, which had acquired Netscape, released the browser code to the newly created Mozilla Foundation, and by November 2004, the first version of Firefox was released. At the time, it was promoted as pursuing the goals of being user-friendly, able to work on different operating systems and more secure. The corporation was created in 2005.

The browser’s other, unstated advantage, shared with other open-source projects, was A.B.M: Anybody but Microsoft.

The original article, by the Noam Cohen, is not only an informative rundown of the Firefox story but also an interesting peak into the Microsoft/Google dynamic that fuels so much of the computer and Internet industries. Read it here.