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2008 – Psystar came on the scene earlier in the year with a machine that would contain Windows, Linux or Mac software. Of course, this has not been without controversy. Apple finally put together a lawsuit, but instead of Psystar accepting, they decided to countersue. The reason why: Anticompetitive Nature.

Other items in Day in Tech History:

• Bloomberg publishes Steve Jobs death
• Scientific American is first published
• Powerbook 5300 recall

Bloomberg reports that Cisco Systems has released its first server for use in corporate data center environments. Read the full story here.

According to the story, Cisco is banking on having designed a box that is easier to administer and manage in a network environment. Two excerpts:

“The way you get high-performance data centers is through very tight integration between storage, computer and network,” Sam Wilson, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC in San Francisco, said in an interview. “Cisco is entering a world where it historically hasn’t played.”

and

“We never enter a market from the standpoint of just a box,” (Cisco CEO John) Chambers said today. “We enter it with the idea of an architecture.”

This sounds almost like a holistic view of networking.

Netbooks seem to be the newest hot thing. I saw my first one a week ago, and it was slick. It was an XP box, but the user was running Ubuntu Linux under Wubi (we talked geek for almost an hour).

Windows is promising a stripped down version of Windows 7 adapted to netbooks. In this storyBloomberg News considers whether it will help Microsoft’s business model.

Part of Microsoft’s strategy is to encourage purchasers of Windows XP netbooks to “upgrade” (that is, spend money) to Windows 7. (They were not able to squeeze Vista into a netbook; XP was their fallback choice.)

Analysts (not computer analysts–the Wall Street kind) are skeptical. The news story quotes one as follows:

“Many netbook buyers won’t go for it, because they want the cheapest option possible, said John DiFucci, the JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst who asked the question that prompted Ballmer’s comment. That means investors shouldn’t expect Microsoft to make much more money on netbook software, the New York-based analyst said in a note to clients. Microsoft hasn’t released specific prices for the different versions of Windows 7.”

Plus, a lot of computer users don’t upgrade simply because an upgrade is available. I was looking at the stats for my website the other day and I’m getting hits from computers running Windows 95 (though it can be argued that the type of person who would buy a netbook is the type of person who would be most likely to upgrade).

I have no experience with Vista and a lot of experience with Windows XP and its predecessors. Having used Microsoft products since Windows 3.1, I will agree that Microsoft can write good applications that do a lot of things and do them well. I am very very good at Microsoft Word and have always figured out how to make it do what I want; and I have wanted it to do some very unusual thing for user guides, training manuals, and the like.

I am, however, skeptical of Microsoft’s ability to write tight code to run well on netbooks, which are typically under-powered in terms of memory, megahertz, and hard drive space. Tight code does not seem to be part of their corporate culture.

I guess that we shall see. If they pull this off, they will prove me wrong. I’ve been wrong before. I don’t plan to stop now.

_____________

I mentioned the other day that I ordered a netbook. Despite the header that said, “[Vendor] recommends Windows XP,” I stuck with Ubuntu Linux.

Here’s why:

(I’m going to cite Slackware Linux because I just happen to have a Slackware box that is still in out-of-the-box condition, and Slackware typically starts out with far more applications on the hard drive than do most Linux distros).

A full Slackware Linux out-of-the box install takes about 4.5 gigs of space (I just checked). It includes the entire KDE environment: editors, an office suite, browsers, computer managment tools, utilities, a DVD/CD burner, and loads of other software.

There are several media players and graphics viewers, four browsers, two news readers, several email clients, multiple graphics programs, six different graphical interfaces, just a whole lot of stuff ready to go.

I’ve not yet sat down at an out-of-the-box Windows machine that was good-to-go without having additional software installed.

This week we poke fun at Bloomberg who apparently made a small mistake earlier. A report was “accidentally” released that Steve Jobs had passed. Steve Jobs health has been in the spotlight recently, so this article could have hit people hard. The report was retracted.

It really begs the question: Do news wires pre-make stories for when things like this happen? It kinda reminds me of an older SNL skit where Dana Carvey played Tom Brokaw making possible news stories of Gerald Ford’s death.

Anyway, lets hear from the (very much alive) CEO, Steve Jobs in this week’s Bitstrips: