In 2001 Bill Gates categorically declared that within five years tablets “will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.” It’s three years since his prediction expired, and looking back it seems preposterously quixotic. So here’s a preposterously quixotic update of our own on Gates’s prophecy: within five years tablets will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.

The reason, in one word: Education. As we wrote in 2008, the prize for the right student-friendly portable e-book is worth billions, and current models of Kindle, Sony Reader and iRex are simply inadequate for textbooks, illustrated books, schoolwork and homework. Even the much ballyhooed Plastic Logic Something or Other (we’ve dubbed it the “Teasle”) isn’t shaping up to handle tablet-sized tasks. For one thing, none of these gadgets is in color.

It appears, however, that Microsoft is ready to step into the ring for the Tablet PC Sweepstakes Round #2 in the form of something called the Courier. According to Gizmodo and PC World, this tablet has “two 7-inch, presumably color, touchmicrosoft courier tabletscreens that use a combination of multitouch and stylus inputs. From what we’ve seen so far, Courier does not have any kind of keyboard — virtual or physical — and depends completely on handwriting recognition software for entering text. Tech specs are scarce, but Courier would have Wi-Fi connectivity and a camera.”

And Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, in Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC published in the New York Times, report that “In June, Archos, a French consumer electronics company, began selling a small touch-screen tablet running Google’s Android software. Later this month, it will introduce another tablet that runs on Microsoft’s Windows 7, which has built-in support for touch screens.”

The iPhone? Steve Jobs has said “Never” to a tablet-sized iPhone. That could actually mean Never, Maybe Never, or Tomorrow Afternoon. The latest rumor places Apple’s rollout of a $700 tablet at early next year.

There are certainly hurdles to be overcome. The absence of a keyboard, even a virtual one, is a big drawback for any computer designed for classroom use. And touchscreens are fun but they can slow reactivity to a crawl. The ultimate in touchscreen tech, Microsoft Surface, is not ready for tablet prime time but if you’d like to see a mindblowing preview, visit the Surface website and be tantalized. Nevertheless, the time is right for Bill Gates’s prediction to come true. Okay, so he’s a few years late. Who of us has not been a few years late with something!

The key to successful prophecy is Don’t Be Too Specific. But we stand by our prognostication: five years from now there’ll be a tablet under every student’s arm.

Richard Curtis

The exclamation point in Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft is no error. You’ll undoubtedly add a few of your own when you finish the dramatic inside story of the creation of Windows NT by Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary.

Driven by the legendary Bruce Cutler, a picked band of software engineers sacrifices almost everything in their lives to build a new, stable, operating system aimed at giving Microsoft a platform for growth through the next decade of development in the computing business. Comparable in many ways to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Showstopper! gets deep inside the process of software development, the lives and motivations of coders and the pressure to succeed coupled with the drive for originality and perfection that can pull a diverse team together to create a program consisting of many hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

RC
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Some reviews…

Released in mid-1993, Microsoft Corp.’s Windows NT software is arguably the best attempt yet at a universal operating system for personal computers, allowing PC users to open a file, move text or graphics, calculate a row of numbers and run several word processors, spreadsheets and other applications at once. With Windows NT (which stands for New Technology), Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates hopes to extend his dominion, with NT serving as the foundation for everything from desktop systems to corporate information networks. Critics, however, observe that the hardware required for NT is expensive and note that a forthcoming Microsoft operating system, Chicago, may eclipse NT. Wall Street Journal reporter Zachary tells how Microsoft wizard David Cutler and his team of programmers, working intensely for five years, overcame technical snafus, thousands of bugs, workplace skirmishes and collapsing personal lives to create Windows NT. This is both an enlightening primer on the management of complexity and a rare behind-the-scenes look at the cutthroat software wars.
Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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I found this an absolutely riveting read. The book provides a view into a type of company and an approach to software development that is different from anyplace I’ve ever worked. Many things about it have stuck with me–the perspective on testing an operating system that will have to work with every popular software product; the staffing philosophy at Microsoft; the “eating your own dog food” concept (developers and testers had to actually use NT as they were developing it, thus constantly exposing themselves to its flaws). The author does a good job of telling the stories both of the big players and the worker drones. It’s a very personal book about what strikes me as a very impersonal company. It’s one of those rare non-technical books that I recommend to people who are new to software engineering. I read it for the first time when I’d just gotten my first software development job, and again several years later, and I didn’t enjoy it any less the second time around.
Kevin B. Cohen for Amazon

My grandmother used to say You can’t attend two circuses with one tuchus. Last time we looked, Google CEO Eric Schmidt possessed one rear end. But he was trying to occupy seats on the executive boards of both Google and Apple and hoping he wouldn’t run athwart of the Federal Trade Commission.

He ran athwart of the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC’s Bureau of Competition is investigating whether Google and Apple are in violation of antitrust laws aimed at discouraging competitive companies from sharing common board members. The principle is known as interlocking directorates and though it’s not not necessary unlawful, when the companies are high profile the government’s antennae start to quiver. Are these corporations in the same business? Are they competitive? Would cooperation between them subdue competition, freeze out smaller competitors and tend to create a monopoly? How independent are board decisions at both corporations?

Though two companies may not overtly be subverting each other’s independence, they may nevertheless fail to pass what lawyers call the smell test. Wikipedia has this to say on the subject:

Watchdogs point out that interlocking directorates may cause conflicts of interest, poor governance and poor compensation decisions, a lack of fresh perspective, and the concentration of corporate power into a single extended social network. CEO interlocks are seen as a particular concern for potential conflicts of interest. Proving direct harm to stockholders is difficult, though, because there is no clear definition of how much overlap is acceptable, and in any case board members are selected by stockholders’ votes.

Not wishing to be suspected of any of the above, Schmidt gave up his seat on Apple. Perhaps the companies had as little in common when they started out as a fruit farm and a phone company. Or in the case of Google and Apple, they felt safe in teaming up against a third party, rival Microsoft. At any rate, in time Google’s and Apple’s products and services have expanded onto each other’s turf to the point where they waved bright red flags in front of Uncle Sam’s eyes. “Mr. Schmidt’s resignation from Apple’s board constitutes a stark admission — Apple and Google had previously played down the issue — that the companies are now directly competing in the crucial race to develop the next generation of software for mobile phones and personal computers.” writes Brad Stone in the New York Times.

How? For instance: “In recent weeks Apple rejected two of Google’s applications for the iPhone, including one for Google Voice, a service that allows people to make cheap international calls and send free text messages. The software could have hurt the business of Apple’s partner in the United States, AT&T, which subsidizes the cost of the iPhone and recoups that money through monthly charges,” Stone notes. You can read details here.

Tail tucked beneath his tuchus, Eric Schmidt has departed the Apple circus. For now, a front-row seat at Google’s will keep him quite well occupied.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

It’s tempting to overdramatize Microsoft and Google as engaged in a war to the death between corporate behemoths. Being only human, and loving to spectate a major gladiatorial battle, we ourselves succumbed to the temptation to get hyperbolic (see Google Plans to Toss Chrome through MS’s Windows).

Robert X. Cringely, who for many years was technology columnist for PBX and now writes his own blog, has a radically different view of the Microsoft’s thrust into Google’s Web browsing territory (“Bing”) and Google’s thrust into Microsoft’s PC operating system territory (“Chrome”).

He thinks it may be posturing. The same kind of machismo threat display that birds and animals employ to assert their dominance, but not necessarily designed to draw blood.”It’s just noise,” says Cringely, “a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.”

“Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.

“Neither company really cares because both make so much from their core products that it simply doesn’t matter. But companies, like people, strive and dream and in this case both dream, at least sometimes, of destroying the other. Only they can’t — or won’t — do it in the end, because it is against the interests of either company to do so.”

For this offbeat, candid and completely refreshing take Google vs. Microsoft, read Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me.

Richard Curtis

A major clash is shaping up on the battlefield called netbooks, the compact, stripped-down, lower priced portable computers that are thriving while larger PCs falter. The combatants are Google and Microsoft, and the prize is dominance over the consumer’s choice of operating systems.

It will truly be a clash of titans. Microsoft sits like a Goliath on the throne, but none too securely as Google seeks to unseat Windows. Google’s Web browser strategy (which they dub “cloud computing”) has caught Microsoft flat-footed in a number of skirmishes but this is nothing less than full-out war because it determines which operating system businesses will choose. So, if you have a storm cellar, proceed to it and stay there until you hear the all-clear.

Google’s weapon of choice is called the Chrome Operating System, and two of the company’s executives posted a statement on the company’s blog characterizing Chrome’s virtues as “Speed, simplicity and security,” according to Miguel Helft and Ashlee Vance of the New York Times. “Google released Chrome last year, describing it as not only a Web browser but also a tool to let users interact with powerful Web programs like Gmail, Google Docs and online applications created by other companies.”

An open-source license a la Linux (or Google’s own Android) will enable outside programmers to work their ideas into the OS.

“To combat these efforts,” the Times writers point out, “Microsoft began offering its older Windows XP operating system for use on netbooks at a low price. In addition, the company has vowed that its upcoming Windows 7 software, due out this fall, will run well on the tiny laptops, which have stood out as the brightest part of the PC market during the global economic downturn. Microsoft’s current Vista operating system is designed for more powerful machines.”

Here’s the full story: Google Plans a PC Operating System.

Richard Curtis
Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by New York Times.

If they told us that the National Academy of Sciences had finally adopted Archimedes’ Principle, we could not have been more surprised to learn that Gmail was still in beta until yesterday. Google’s fine-print notice that Gmail was still in beta had become so much a part of the screen’s landscape that we stopped noticing it. Like the Londoner who awoke with a start one night when Big Ben failed to toll and exclaimed “What the hell was that?”, a colleague shouted “Something’s wrong!” yesterday when he gazed at his Gmail screen. He finally realized the beta notice had, at long last, disappeared.

What’s behind it? Miguel Helft, writing about it in the New York Times, notes that there are two answers. The obvious one, stated by Matthew Glotzbach, a product management director at Google, is that “we haven’t had a consistent set of policies or definitions around beta.”

With Google, however, things are seldom simple or obvious, and Helft sussed out a more cogent underlying motive:”It could help the company’s efforts to get the paid version of Google Apps adopted inside big companies, where Google is trying to compete with rival offerings from Microsoft and others.”

The word “compete” must be taken with a grain or two of salt. “Mr. Glotzbach said Google Apps was being used by roughly 1.75 million businesses,” Helft writes “though most have little more than a handful of users. In all, Google claims that about 15 million people are using the service and that several hundred thousand of those pay for it at a cost of $50 a year for each user. By comparison, Microsoft Office has more than 450 million paid customers.” [italics ours]

In case you failed to notice the removal of Google’s beta notice and want to to learn what’s behind it, click on After Five Years, Gmail Finally Sheds the ‘Beta’.

Richard Curtis
Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by New York Times.

Photo: Reuters/Jim Young

When I was a young man apprenticing at a literary agency, our boss sent me and several fellow staffers on a confidential mission to the offices of a prominent and flamboyant publisher. His company had just published a novel represented by our agency. The publisher handed us envelopes containing cash and instructed us to visit one of several large New York City bookstores and buy a copy of the book. We were then to bring our copy back to his offices, go to another store and do the same. And again and again until we had spent all the cash. The object, he explained, was to inflate sales figures and put the book on the bestseller list. The ploy succeeded.

This little piece of chicanery came to mind when I read a New York Times story by Stephanie Clifford that Microsoft had brought a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court in Seattle against a number of individuals and corporations that Microsoft alleged had manipulated clicks on an Internet ad. The corporation is seeking at least $750,000 in damages. What exactly did these folks purportedly do to incur MS’s wrath?

The offense is called click fraud. Fraud is broadly defined as deliberate deception committed either for personal gain or to damage someone else. It’s a serious tort (violation of civil law) for which one can be sued, or a serious crime for which one can go to jail, or both.

The Microsoft case has to do with the way companies measure their ads’ exposure to viewers who are potential buyers of the advertised products and services. The effectiveness is gauged in cost her click. Clifford cites an outfit called Click Forensics as asserting that “about one in every seven clicks on an advertisement is estimated to be fraudulent.” If the dodge is so commonplace, why would anyone spend a lot of money suing? “Microsoft is trying to make that kind of deception more expensive for perpetrators,” says Clifford. Making an example of click fraudsters, in other words.

Here’s how the reporter explains what happened.

“Advertisers bid on what they will pay to appear in the paid-search results for certain key words. The more an advertiser pays, the higher they are on the list, and advertisers usually pay for each click on their ad.

“In March 2008 several audo insurance advertisers began complaining to Microsoft that traffic to their ads was spiking suspiciously…And clicks to the advertisers appearing at the top of the paid-search results listings for those terms were high. Although traffic appeared to come from different computers, it was actually coming from two proxy servers, which mask the original address of a click.”

Clearly, if the charges stick they will show that this was not a bunch of students in a dorm room earning beer money for repeatedly stroking “Enter” on their keyboards, but rather powerful robot servers that MS investigators tracked to various accounts registered to the defendants. The complaint stated that one of them “directed traffic to competitors’ Web sites so [Microsoft}] would pay for those clicks and exhaust their advertising budgets quickly, which let the lower-ranking sites that he sponsored move up in the paid-search results,” writes Cliffor. You can read more about the investigation and lawsuit here.
Click fraud is as old as the Internet, according to Stefanie Olsen, writing in 2004 for CNET News. “The practice…began in the early days of the Internet’s mainstream popularity with programs that automatically surfed Web sites to increase traffic figures. This led companies to develop policing technololgies touted as antidotes to the problem.”

Nor is Microsoft the first company to take action over click fraud. “In one recent example of the problem,” Olsen wrote in 2004, “law enforcement officials say a California man created a software program that he claimed could let spammers bilk Google out of millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks. Authorities said he was arrested while trying to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program.” Considering that advertising is the foundation for Google’s fortunes, it will come as no surprise that the firm has taken the most stringent actions to protect itself. Olsen quotes a statement issued by Google that it has been “the target of individuals and entities using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years. We have applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employ a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyze clicks.” Olsen called it the “Google Fraud Squad.”

Though click fraudsters are fiendishly clever and possess powerful tools and weapons, the good guys are well armed to combat them. You can visit the website of the Click Fraud Network, “a community of online advertisers, agencies and search providers working together to develop an industry solution to the click fraud problem. Network members that provide data to the network receive free access to online campaign and risk assessment reports.” Among other services the Network offers are a “Click Fraud Index™” tracking click fraud rates by quarter and even a “Click Fraud Heatmap.”

Though the commercial reasons for such aggressive warfare are plain, there’s another less obvious but extremely important one. As newspapers and magazines desperately fight for their lives, they are turning to online advertising as a possible key to salvation. If the metrics are unreliable, however, that door will be closed to those industries. Says Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics, the company sponsoring the Click Fraud Network, “Click fraud activity continues to grow especially on made for ad sites, parked domains and on the content networks. Advertisers, publishers and search engines need to take notice because content networks are becoming the fastest growing source of click fraud. Ensuring their quality is essential for the pay per click advertising market to continue its growth.”

Looking back at that bit of skullduggery committed by the publisher years ago, I wonder if, today, we would have been asked to perpetrate some variety of click fraud to boost his book’s fortunes. Knowing what I’ve just learned about the consequences, I’m certain I’d think long and hard before I started clicking.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

The Holy Grail of screen technology is the gesture-activated virtual screen portrayed in Stephen Spielberg’s 2002 blockbuster futuristic film Minority Report. Technologists inspired by the brilliant effects have been laboring ever since to interact with screen images, getting them to do what we want them to do by a mere wave of the hand or point of an index finger.

The iPhone’s introduction of multitouch was an astounding innovation that brought Spielberg’s vision closer to actualization. But the Apple device still requires physical contact with the surface of the device, whereas the next generation of virtual screens will liberate our hands from any contact whatsoever.

Where are we on the continuum between touchscreens and Minority Report‘s magic one?

Rebounding from an Apple-led consumer flight to handhelds, a number of PC manufacturers are developing applications designed to lure consumers back to their desks and, according to Ashlee Vance of the New York Times (PC Touch Screens Move Ahead), high on the list are touchscreens. For instance, Hewlett-Packard is pushing the TouchSmart, a desktopper with an upright screen on which you can access every function with your stylus or index finger. TouchSmart offers a variety of great applications. Vance points out that “Customers can turn these machines into bespoke kiosks for, say, ordering merchandise at a sporting event or flipping through a menu while waiting at a restaurant.” Indeed, touch screens are commonly used for keeping track of tables and food orders at restaurants. They can also be embedded in homes to control lights, music, thermostat, etc., and in he kitchen to follow recipes.

However, after you’ve worked an iPhone screen with multitouch, one-finger functionality feels pretty limited, and we have to wonder how practical the TouchSmart approach is for business offices. Here’s a simple test: next time you’re sitting in front of your desktop monitor, try stretching your arm out and poking the screen every time you want to open a file, drag, drop, highlight, cut and paste or perform some other task. Do we really want to reach out to our screen every time we want to move something around or shift to another function? Don’t be surprised if your arm grows weary and your back strained. Let’s face it: some functions are best left to keyboard commands or mouse navigation. And – sitting at a desk is not necessarily where today’s sedentary or peripatetic computer users want to be. If you’re thinking about students, so am I. We’ll get to them in a moment.

You can google lots of HP promotional videos and demonstrations and decide for yourself.

But soon, even five digits may be passé. Enter advanced multitouch and an Israeli outfit called N-trig. Its advanced PC screen technology called “DuoSense” enables users to use both hands as well as a pen.

N-trig is the only industry provider to offer a combined pen, touch and multi-touch solution, having overcome the technological hurdles of combining the two seamlessly in a single device. DuoSense is an intelligent digitizer, fully compatible with Microsoft natural input standards. N-trig’s DuoSense digitizers are are easily integratable, support any type of LCD, keep devices slim, light and bright, can support numerous applications, and can be implemented in a broad range of products ranging from small notebooks to large LCDs.

For a cool demo check out this video of N-trig. By the way, if you’re fascinated by the possibilities and have some clever ideas of your own for Windows 7 apps, N-Trig offers a $900 touchscreen kit that software developers that can use to develop their own.

Note that N-trig’s demonstration is being performed on a tablet computer, as well as on a convertible laptop/slate. Why tablets? Aren’t they just a niche? So far, yes. But that’s going to change big time. There’s a whole population of computer users that is simply not deskbound. It’s called students, and, as we have stated in these pages again and again, the only viable computer product for students is the tablet. “Textbooks and other illustrated books simply cannot be crammed into anything smaller than a screen close to the size of a laptop,” I wrote. “Tablets have all the virtues of laptops PLUS touchscreen functionality. For students, reading books on an e-reading device is highly desirable but not as imperative as the ability to handwrite notes on their device’s screen.”

Students will certainly give N-trig’s DuoSense two thumbs up, plus the other eight digits as well. “Such touch software can handle lots of fingers hitting a screen at once rather than just relying on one or two digits, as most of today’s touch screens do,” writes Vance.

In anticipation of a major push into the tablet market, Microsoft is reported to have invested $24 million in N-trig, and the forthcoming Windows 7 (look for it in 2010) “supports gestures such as pinching and fingertip scrolling,”reports Wired. “Other Windows programs, such as Paint, will also include new brushes designed for multi-touch and features such as panning across a page in Internet Explorer.” But the outer limits of known touchscreen tech is Microsoft Surface’s Cynergy Labs, and it’s likely that Surface will dominate the field until 3D replaces it. Check out these dumfounding videos.

Microsoft’s Surface is probably the direction consumers will go over the next few years, but shimmering on the distant horizon is a means of projecting action onto a screen without any contact whatever. We caught a glimpse of this with the wearable “Sixth Sense” device demonstrated at a recent TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference. But for a mind-bending look at the state of the art of virtual, check out Project Natal by Microsoft designed for XBox 360. Stephen Spielberg, eat your heart out.

Richard Curtis

This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers. Without them our free society would not only be impoverished but imperiled. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry, even if it means nothing more than buying a paper on the street. Support your local newspaper.

Though he was the perpetrator of one of history’s most heinous frauds, Charles Ponzi’s swindle failed to gain him admission into one of humankind’s most elite clubs. For “Ponzi” has never achieved higher status than that of mere adjective – as modifier of the noun “scheme.” To gain admission to the lexicographical Olympus, his crime would have had to be so colossal that his name became a verb. The laurels for that achievement, like so many other dubious honors he has garnered, belong to Bernard Madoff. His scheme attains the distinction of becoming a verb, both transitive (to madoff) and intransitive (to be madoffed).

Even such distinguished brand names as Kleenex, Band-Aid and Frigidaire have been excluded from this pantheon. We do not Kleenex a nose, Band-Aid a wound, or Frigidaire a bottle of milk. But Madoff’s notoriety entitles him to hobnob with the likes of Xerox and TiVo and…let’s see, have I forgotten any others?

Ah yes. Google.

These ruminations were stimulated by an article in the New York Times by Miguel Helft about Microsoft’s efforts to produce a search service so indomitable, so ubiquitous that the noun assigned to it – “Bing” – will in the phrase of the company’s chief exec Steven A. Ballmer “verb up”. Looking for the author of the poetic line “trailing clouds of glory” or the first son of Elector Ernst of the House of Wettin? Why, just bing it and you’ll learn it’s William Wordsworth and Friedrich the Wise respectively.

“Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on ‘The Sopranos’ but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the ‘aha’ moment when a search leads to an answer,” writes Helft. Another Microsoft executive, Yusuf Mehdi, said that if MS’s brandsmiths have done their job right, “bing” will become synonymous with “the sound of found”. We’ll ignore the fact that “Bingo!” has been the sound of found since its the game was introduced in the United States 75 years ago.

Though boosted by an $80 to $100 million ad campaign and a “Bing-a-thon” on Hulu, Bing’s verbward ascent will be arduous. Even in a fluid linguistic world where nouns morph into transitive verbs overnight – to impact, to message, to text – Google’s preeminence dwarfs all competitors. Its name verbs up to Heaven itself, or at least to the next best thing to Heaven, the Oxford English Dictionary. OED conferred verbitude on the word in July 2006. (And by the way, “morph” and “dwarf” are nouns turned verbs too.)

You would think that the verbing up of your company name would be a little like entering Valhalla. Quite the opposite: it happens to be fraught with danger and you should be careful of what you wish for. Candace Lombardi, writing for CNET News, writes that “ubiquitous use of the company’s name to describe something can make it harder to enforce a trademark. Bayer lost Aspirin as a U.S. trademark in 1921 after it was determined that the abbreviation for acetylsalicylic acid had become a generic term. The trademarks Band-Aid, Kleenex, Rollerblade and Xerox have had similar issues.”

And Xerox? Many of us remember its advertising campaign urging us not to use its company name as a verb. We thought it was brilliant, reverse-psychology publicity. But apparently they weren’t kidding. We owe it to a blogger, “ghouly05″ writing on Yahoo, for an explanation of whether Xerox is a noun or a verb:

It is used as both, although the corporation does not really like that as they are afraid it will becoming a “generic” word for photocopy. This has happened with other brand names before (Kleenex comes to mind as a generic name for a tissue) and can be a legal problem for the parent company.

…. Though both are common, the company does not condone such uses of its trademark, and is particularly concerned about the ongoing use of Xerox as a verb as this places the trademark in danger of being declared a generic word by the courts. The company is engaged in an ongoing advertising and media campaign to convince the public that Xerox should not be used as a verb.

To this end, the company has written to publications that have used Xerox as a verb, and has also purchased print advertisements declaring that “you cannot ‘xerox’ a document, but you can copy it on a Xerox Brand copying machine”. (Note that xerox is functionally a verb in this sentence.) Xerox Corporation continues to protect its trademark diligently in most if not all trademark categories. Despite their efforts, many dictionaries continue to mention the use of “xerox” as a verb, including the Oxford English Dictionary.

Could Google’s trademark be threatened by its grammatical canonization? You can read one opinion that says absolutely. “Google does have something of a genuine concern, in as far as the inclusion of google as a verb does push it ever closer to becoming part of the general lexicon, and that would mean exclusion from legal protection for the trademark. The fact that Merriam-Webster’s chose a lower case google, rather than the upper case OED usage, will ease the concern a tad.”

So, maybe Microsoft shouldn’t be so eager to verb up its search service. You can visit the Bing website and check it against its behemoth rival. If you’re not sure how to find it on the Web, you can just do what I did: google it.

Richard Curtis

Annalee Newitz posted a segment of a film called Oh Hello, made specifically for Microsoft, demonstrating What Computers Will Look Like in Utopia, According to Microsoft. But at MIT, Utopia has already arrived.

First, Microsoft. Newitz says,

I actually think this depiction of future interfaces is pretty accurate, with transparent wall monitors (these already exist), gesture-controlled computing, multi-use devices that are location-aware, and best of all real-time translation between natural languages. Plus, apparently, the “pinch” gesture from the iPhone has become ubitquitous on PCs in this happy world.

Possibly the translation scenes are the most utopian, however. We see kids in the US communicating seamlessly with Indian kids; and later, a woman meets a business colleague and her comments to him on the phone appear to get translated instantly into text he understands. This is obviously supposed to be the refined version of Google translation, which today can get the job done but still leaves a lot of words weirdly translated.

But if you’re impatient to get to Microsoft’s virtual future, instead of waiting fifty years you only have to wait as long as it takes for this video of a mindblowing demo to buffer up. At a recent TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Conference, MIT Media Labs’ Pattie Maes presented a wearable “Sixth Sense” device developed by colleague Pranav Mistry that produces astounding virtual effects at the wave of a finger.

Prepare to be astonished.

RC