A Win for PCW!

I'm pleased to say that several of us PC Worlders spent Friday night at the Western Publications Association's annual Maggie Awards banquet, which recognizes magazines and Web sites published west of the Mississippi--and we didn't go away empty-handed. Chris Null's feature "The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time," which we published on PCWorld.com last year, was recognized with the award for best consumer Web article.

The story wasn't just a hit with the Maggie judges; it was also a blockbuster with site visitors. And it remains a rollicking good read. If you missed it the first time around, check it out here...

No MicroHoo? Hallelujah!

When I saw the headline, I smiled: "Microsoft Abandons Yahoo Acquisition." Absent a surprise ending, the behemoth of Redmond's attempt to go head-to-head with Google in Web advertising by paying billions to snap up Yahoo has failed. And I'm relieved--if the merger had gone through, it would have been one of the more soul-crushing moments in recent tech history.

I didn't like the idea when Microsoft went public with its bid back in February, and nothing in the last three months has made me reconsider. With the likely exception of Yahoo stockholders, I can't imagine that anyone would have ultimately been happy with the outcome of a merged Microsoft-Yahoo--not Microsoft or Yahoo's users, not its employees, and probably not even Microsoft itself.

Not that the bid falling apart leaves Yahoo in great shape: It's likely to face a bruising reaction from investors in the form of a hit to its stock price and lawsuits from shareholders who think that CEO/founder Jerry Yang and the rest of the company's management should have taken Steve Ballmer's money and ran. The company is still short on bright ideas for truly competing with the Google juggernaut. And it may yet have to undergo dramatic change--in the form of a scaling back of its ambitions, the outsourcing of its ad business to Google, or an acquisition by somebody else. Despite everything, though, I think the company's far more likely to come up with interesting new services for consumers than if it had been gobbled up by Microsoft.

And as for Microsoft? I'm not saying I know how to run the company better that Ballmer and Company, but I kinda think it would make sense if the company gracefully backpedaled on its desire to be an advertising kingpin. Modest proposal: Howsabout going back to basics and doing everything in its power to come up with a next-generation Windows that the world will find more appealing than Vista in its current form?

So what's your opinion on all this?

The $199 iPhone: Cool! Possibly Imaginary!

As nifty as the current iPhone is, there are muliple reasons not to buy it: It's got a slow data connection, it doesn't yet run third-party applications...and at $399 with no subsidy from AT&T, it's kinda pricey. We know that a 3G iPhone is on its way, and that Apple's upcoming iPhone SDK will make the phone into a first-rate platform for apps of all kinds. And now it looks like that 3G iPhone might be downright affordable.

In theory, at least. A Fortune blog is reporting that a source has told it that AT&T will offer a $200 subsidy for iPhone buyers who sign up for a two-year contact, bringing the price of the hip handset down to $199. That would also address one of the most irritating things about the first-generation iPhone: The fact that AT&T currently makes you sign up for a two-year contract and doesn't offer any sort of price break in recognition of that commitment.

(I hate phone contracts myself, so I'm assuming and hoping that you'll also be able to pay the full-freight $399 for the iPhone without a contract.)

I don't have any reason to think that Fortune's report is false, but it always pays to be extremely cautious about accepting any fact about an upcoming Apple product as gospel until Steve Jobs himself declares it to be so. And the New York Times' Saul Hansell points out that it seems implausible that an iPhone sold at an AT&T store could be had for $200 less than one sold at an Apple Store, especially since Apple-Store iPhones must be activated on AT&T's network anyhow. The bottom line is that I wouldn't be the least bit amazed if the $199 iPhone turns out to be fantasy.

And speaking of being suspicious of Apple rumors, the Fortune story says that the 3G iPhone will be 2.5mm thinner than the current model. Just a few days ago, Engadget was reporting that the new phone would be a tad thicker than its predecessor. Somebody's got it wrong. (My money's on Fortune being right; it's hard to imagine Steve Jobs ever releasing a next-generation product that's even a nanometer thicker than the one it replaces.)

As I've mentioned before, I passed on the first-gen iPhone, for all the reasons I outlined at the top of this post. But if I can snag the 3G model for $399 with no contract, I'll be tempted.

How about you?

Sorry, MSN Music "Buyers!"

As I've said before, I don't have any religious opposition to the very notion of Digital Rights Management. But boy, does DRM in the real world keep turning out to be a compelling argument for the elimination of DRM, period.

I'm thinking of today's news that folks who "bought" songs on MSN Music won't be able to move them to new PCs after August. That's because Microsoft, which shut down MSN Music's "buy song" option when it launched the Zune in 2006, is deactivating the DRM servers that would allow a new PC to become an authorized device for music playback.

In this interview over at News.com, Microsoft exec Rob Bennett justifies the company's decision, saying that making the DRM work properly with operating-system upgrades was impractical. It's a shame that thecompany discovered that DRM was tough after marketing its DRM under the name PlaysForSure, a boast that was disproved again and again. ("PlaysForSure" has since morphed into the less sweeping-sounding "Certified For Windows Vista.")

So the upshot is that anyone who purchased tracks from MSN Music didn't really buy them in the traditional sense that you'd buy, oh, a CD. Microsoft's server shutdown means that the songs will be forever tied to the computers they're authorized for as of June.

The situation is pretty similar to what happened with Google Video last August, when the company stopped selling video downloads. After some squawking by consumers, Google ended up both giving customers their money back and providing an additional Google Coupon credit. I haven't seen any word on what if anything Microsoft plans to do for MSN Music customers who feel like their time and money was wasted.

Both Microsoft and Google are, ahem, rather large companies that aren't short on money or resources. And both cheerfully took consumers' money for content that those people were allegedly buying, and then decided that maintaining the DRM that made that content usable was inconvenient. It makes me glad that I've bought most of my music on CDs, where it's safe and sound from any business decisions made after the fact by the companies I bought the discs from. (A high percentage of my CDs came from Tower Records; it doesn't even exist anymore, and my music still plays just fine.)

Both the Microsoft and Google DRM decisions leave me just a little less likely to believe any claims those companies make when they're trying to part me from my money--and a whole lot more distrustful of DRM in any flavor.

If content wasn't locked up with DRM, of course, none of this would happen. Coincidentally, I've been visiting Microsoft in Redmond over the past couple of days, and I met today with Brian Seitz, senior marketing communications manager for Zune, the music device and platform that essentially replaced MSN Music. He told me that about two-thirds of the 3.5 million or so songs available on the Zune Marketplace are now available in DRM-free MP3 form--and that the company's goal is for all of its catalog to be available without DRM by the end of the year.

Sounds good to me. Perhaps Microsoft might like to give all those folks who purchased MSN Music tracks free versions of those songs in MP3 format?

Mysteries of Lending Tree

Okay, so I'm trying to buy a house. As with anything I do, I naturally wanted to do as much of it as I could online. So when mortgage shopping, I signed up for Lending Tree--the guys with the TV ads involving bankers lining up to beg for the business of consumers.

So I guess I can't complain that bankers did, indeed, beg for my business--sometimes by calling me and sometimes by e-mailing me. I settled on a bank that I didn't find through Lending Tree, so when I just got another e-mail from a Lending Tree bank, I decided to tell Lending Tree to stop soliciting my business.

But when I tried to do that, I got a database error and the following message:

Apparently, Lending Tree thinks I applied for mortgage information in December, 1899. If I had, wouldn't I most likely have found a loan in the interim, and/or passed away? And therefore be less than an attractive loan candidate?

Seven Ways to Fix Technology Retailing

No doubt about it: The last few months have been weird and dismal in the world of technology retailing. First, CompUSA announced plans to shutter all its locations--then got a sort-of-reprieve when TigerDirect bought the brand and said it would maintain the Web site and a smattering of stores. And earlier this week, ailing DVD rental outfit Blockbuster said it was trying to acquire ailing Best Buy rival Circuit City--a deal which nearly everybody thinks would result in one larger, possibly even more sickly entity. Did I mention that sales are down sharply at RadioShack, a retailer that seems to be in business for the purpose of making buying electronics a little like visiting the DMV?

With few exceptions--mainly Best Buy, the Apple Store, and west-coast geek outfitter Fry's--almost nobody seems to be very successful at being in the business of selling technology gear at retail. I'm convinced that's in part because almost nobody makes the experience very pleasant. Or, actually, provides compelling reason to buy at retail rather than online, where plenty of merchants do a good job of making the buying experience fast and even fun.

Herewith, some suggestions for making the tech retail experience less taxing on us poor consumers:

1. Make support less stressful. The Apple Store has a huge advantage over most retailers in the fact that the Geniuses pretty much only need to know the wares of one company that doesn't make all that many different models of computer. But there's a lot that any retailer could crib from the Genius Bar experience. Let us make reservations in advance. Give us benches to sit on rather than force s to slump in a line that never seems to get shorter. Provide free Wi-Fi so we have a way to kill time.

2. Don't cater to the lowest common denominator. Want the latest, coolest tech products? They're almost always available first online. Which is why when I need something like an 8GB MicroSD card, I don't even think about shopping locally. And too many PCs at retail are stripper models--bare-bones units that seem to be tailored to achieving a lowball price for Sunday circulars.

3. Let us check out the merchandise. In theory, the single biggest edge that brick-and-mortar stores have over online ones is that you can see and touch products before you buy them. But many retailers throw away this advantage in multiple ways. Computers aren't connected to monitors, or are missing keys. Laptops are bolted into anti-theft lockdown devices so you can't gauge how easy they are to tote. PCs, cameras, and other products aren't plugged in. Displays aren't calibrated. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

4. Fix pricing. And by that I don't mean "match the price of online merchants." That's probably not realistic given the costs involved in storefront retailing. But it drives me bonkers when it's difficult to determine the price of a product I'm planning to buy, and many electronics sellers are prime offenders here. In an ideal world, every single box in the store would have an old fashioned price sticker on it; short of that, there needs to be a tag on the shelf with a clearly-marked price. Also, when manufacturer price drops do happen, many electronics merchants seem to be ridiculously slow about marking down items correspondingly-a sort of de facto markup, since online sellers typically implement price cuts very quickly.

5. Tell us what's inside. Sometimes, retailers have pretty decent lists of specs next to desktops and laptops. Sometimes they're incomplete. Sometimes they're for the wrong system. Sometimes there's absolutely nothing there at all. We need system information that's at least as good as what we'd get at Dell or Amazon. Other products, like digital cameras, also need complete and correct spec sheets. After all, there's almost no chance that the salespeople will know any of these facts off the tops of their heads.

6. Make it easier to get stuff. One of the reasons I think Best Buy provides a better overall shopping experience than Circuit City is that a higher percentage of its merchandise has historically been out on the floor, so I can simply pick up whatever I want and proceed to checkout. But even there, some stuff--especially small, pricey stuff-is under lock and key, and it's often tough to find a clerk to retrieve it. (Mysteriously, the same clerks who I can't find when I need them are available in droves when I want to be left alone.) I've been known to throw up my hands and take my business elsewhere. Why not rip off the system once used by retailers such as Service Merchandise, which kept almost everything in a stockroom and let customers place orders by filling out slips of paper with stock numbers for the products they wanted (or, in later years, by using a terminal)? Seems like it would be faster for us customers and cheaper and more efficient for the retailer.

7. Speed checkout. Sorry to keep using Apple Stores as a point of reference, but checking out tends to be reasonably speedy in them, in part because of the roving clerks who can ring up your sale using a wireless terminal. Why isn't this standard procedure everywhere?

Anyhow, those are my ideas--ones which, if implemented anywhere, would earn lots and lots of my business. Got any proposals of your own?

Help Emru Townsend Find a Bone Marrow Donor

The blog item I'm about to write is one of the most unusual I've ever posted here on PC World. But it's also one of the most important. And while it doesn't relate directly to technology, it has an awful lot to do with PC World.

For several years, Emru Townsend has been a frequent contributor to this site, writing such popular features as The 10 Worst Games of All Time and Five Things We Don't Miss About Old-School Computing. He's a friend of mine, a friend of PC World's, and a friend of yours if you've enjoyed any of his pieces. He's also a noted writer on animation and pop culture, and an all-around good guy--not to mention a devoted father, husband, brother, and son.

Emru continues to be a valuable contributor to our cause, but in recent months he's been fighting a battle of his own against leukemia and a condition called Monosomy 7. He's undergoing chemotherapy, but what he really needs is a bone marrow donor transplant. Finding the right donor can literally save his life. And while there are eleven million potential donors out there, identifying one and making the donation happen is a huge challenge.

Emru's family has set up a Web site, Heal Emru, to get the word out about his condition with the hopes of finding a donor--and to spread information about bone marrow donations in general.

Here's a favor you can do for me that can also help make the world a better place in general: Visit Heal Emru. You'll learn about bone marrow donations--an extraordinarily important subject which most of us know little or nothing about. You'll also get information on how to become a donor. And if you do that and turn out to be a match for someone who needs marrow, you can truly be a lifesaver. (I've given blood for years, but it never even occurred to me to register as a marrow donor--until now.)

You might or might not be a match for Emru--though anyone from any ethnic background could be--but anyone who's lucky enough to be healthy is a match for somebody.

Cancer touches every family sooner or later, not to mention every workplace--we at PC World lost our lab director, Uli Diehlmann, to it in January. It's easy to feel helpless. And good to know about things that literally anyone can do to help fight it.

Even if you can't register as a donor, you can help Emru and others who face his challenge by simply spreading the word about Heal Emru, as I'm doing here, and wll be doing elsewhere online. Emru and his family will thank you, and so will everyone here at PCW.

Microsoft's Bizarrely Patronizing Anti-Piracy Campaign

I've said it before: If you use Microsoft's software, you oughta pay for it. I have no sympathy for pirates, especially in an era in which there's a good-to-excellent free alternative to just about every major desktop application that hails from Redmond.

But just because I wish a pox on the houses of software thieves doesn't mean I'm an ardent supporter of Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts. Actually, they drive me bonkers. For one thing, the "Windows Genuine Advantage" technologies designed to foil pirates have a history of making honest customers jump through hoops--and sometimes screwing up innocent bystanders' PCs. (At least Windows Vista SP1 removes WGA's ability to almost completely disable a PC when it thinks it's running fake Windows.)

But it's not just Microsoft's anti-piracy schemes that rankles me--it's the way Microsoft markets them. Consider this new Q&A on the Microsoft site with the worldwide director of the Microsoft Genuine Software "Initiative." It says--over and over again--that Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts are all about protecting customers from unwittingly buying counterfeit software. For good measure, it throws in the argument that reducing software piracy can create hundreds of thousands of new jobs and billions in economic growth. (Full disclosure: It makes this argument based on a study conducted for anti-software industry group the Business Software Alliance by IDC, a sister company of PC World.)

It all sounds like benevolent work in the public interest. Pirated software is full of spyware! It's hurting the global economy! Kind-hearted Microsoft is stepping in to help us combat this menace!

I buy the notion that fake software can be a problem for the people who unwittingly buy them; I even buy that Microsoft sincerely wants to take steps to help folks who have accidentally bought stolen (and potentially spyware-ridden) merchandise.

But not once in the Q&A does the company mention the notion that it wants to impede software piracy because counterfeiting costs it money.

Am I the only person in the world who'd be more likely to sympathize with Microsoft's efforts if it honestly explained that it's entitled to a profit from its wares than when it insults my intelligence with propaganda that says it's acting selflessly? Wouldn't you rather do business with a company that treats you like an intelligent adult?

The Microsoft Q&A repeatedly says it's trying to help people who have been "duped" by software counterfeiters; by failing to be up-front about its anti-piracy efforts, it's doing some duping of its own.

Mentioned towards the bottom of the page is a new pilot program that will add nag notes to Office for customers in Chile, Italy, Spain, and Turkey. Okay, it doesn't use the term "nag"--I got that from ZDNet's indispensable Mary Jo Foley Microsoft's explanation involves words like "help" and "alert."

Gee, how thoughtful...

The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears

Back on May 30th of last year, Google released Google Gears, a browser plug-in designed to help Web-based applications work even when they couldn't connect to the Internet. I was pretty jazzed up about it, and so were my PCW colleagues: We eventually named Gears as the most innovative product of 2007.

I still think that Gears is a fabulous idea. But I'm beginning to worry about its viability. Even though Google's release last week of a test version of its Google Docs online suite that lets you do word processing offline is a major moment in the life of Gears.

The first time I blogged about Gears was a few days after it appeared. I was excited about the new Gears-enabled version of the nifty Australian to-do list Remember the Milk. (At the time, it made up half of the library of Gears-ized applications, the other one being Google's own Google Reader.) I thought the fact that the RTM folks were able to put together an offline version so quickly, and thought it was evidence that lots of other folks would soon follow its lead.

Boy, was I wrong. There are still only a handful of Gears-powered offline services available, including Zoho Writer (which beat Google Docs to the punch with offline Web-based word processing) and a very primitive tool from Google for posting blog items to Blogger. And now Google Docs--which, as my colleague Ed Albro explained in his hands-on look, is promising but an exceptionally rough draft. A month ago, Google rolled out a Windows Mobile version of Gears that brings the basic idea to cell phones:

If Google Gears is a bandwagon, in other words, it's one that almost nobody--including the proprietors of most of Google's own services--has jumped on yet...

How come? Well, it's clear that even with the advent of tools and platforms such as Gears and Adobe Air, moving online apps into the offline world is just plain hard. No current Gears-enabled app is anything like its full-blooded self in offline form--and since most of them are stripped-down compared to traditional desktop software even in their online versions, that means the offline ones are barebones at best.

The fact that Google itself hasn't done that much with Gears-enabled applications yet--at least in any form that it's willing to make public--is probably the best evidence that doing great stuff with Gears is far from a cakewalk. It's true that Google sometimes releases neat ideas and then fails to do much with them (say, whatever happened to Google Base?). But Google is clearly pretty serious about Google Docs (and Google Apps, which rolls in Gmail and other applications). And full-fledged offline functionality would be such a major step forward for Docs and Apps that you gotta think that Google will make it happen if it can.

As for Web developers other than Google, I'm not sure whether they're struggling with Gears, or whether there's simply less interest in offline apps than I hoped and guessed there would be. And the chance remains that some good ones are in the works right now. (One of the problems with Gears is that there doesn't seem to be a good repository of information about existing apps that use it--if Google tells you about all of them when you download and install Gears itself, I've missed that info.)

Maybe I'm just being inappropriately impatient--there are certainly other examples of late-blooming ideas in technology that eventually became roaring successes. (One good one: Firefox, which didn't explode until six years after the Mozilla project got launched.) But I'd love to see some real evidence that Gears is not just a good idea but one that will make the world a better place, and the only evidence that really matters will be an array of well-done Gears apps.

Of course, with broadband on airplanes getting real, the other possibility is that it won't be that long until we're always online. In which case, Gears might turn out to have been a clever stopgap that didn't gain momentum while we still needed it...

Windows XP Gets a Reprieve--Kinda Sorta

Yesterday, rumors surfaced that Microsoft would extend sales of Windows XP past the cut-off date of June 30th it had announced--but only for low-cost laptops. Today, the company is confirming the buzz: It'll still sell Windows XP Home as an operating system for what it calls Ultra Low-Cost PCs--small, cheap, less-that-powerhouse notebooks along the lines of Asus's EEE PC.

Microsoft is also re-confirming that it plans to end all other OEM and retail sales of XP on June 30th, and to discontinue "mainstream" tech support for XP in April of next year. The bottom line is that it'll still try to mostly kill off the world's dominant operating system in the next year...but it's conceding that Vista is simply too resource-intensive to make sense for extremely low-cost computers.

(It would, of course, be a nightmare scenario for Microsoft if ULPCs became popular and it didn't have a competitive OS for such devices, since Linux is very much viable on very basic hardware.)

This is an interesting twist to be sure, but it won't do anything to calm down the far-from-tiny number of people who passionately believe that Microsoft should simply continue to offer Windows XP for the foreseeable future. We heard from thousands of them when I did a little survey on XP vs. Vista, and more than 100,000 folks have signed our sister publication InfoWorld's Save XP petition.

I know where I stand on this: Microsoft has a lot of customers who have no desire to move to Vista any time soon, and rather than deny them the option of buying a new Windows XP computer, it ought to sell them the Microsoft product they want. They'd be happy; Microsoft would still make money. And nobody could accuse it of shoving Vista down anyone's throat.

Assuming that only really cheap, basic laptops will have XP starting on July 1st, there will be a strange scenario for XP holdouts: They'll only be able to get what they see as a superior version of Windows by paying less for a new computer. I wonder if people will opt for an ULPC not because of tight budgets but simply to get the edition of Windows they want?

And another question: Did Microsoft ever envision a scenario in which its current version of Windows simply wouldn't run satisfactorily on a popular PC platform a year and a half after that version of Windows shipped?

And a question for you, in the form of a poll: What's your take on today's development?