I’ll probably never master the art of saying very little – I like to talk. To paraphrase (and ruin) a line from a movie: “Lady, I speak two languages: Fast English and Bad English”. I actually like to listen too – I just iterate quickly…

I often wonder what impression you embed in other folks minds when you say a lot of words. Here’s a nice example from His Jobsness:

Talking of Flash and Macs (don’t say that too fast!) I was reading this article from Tim Anderson on improvements to Flash on a Mac. It struck me that I didn’t realise it was that bad in the first place – but “I’m a PC” so there you go. No wonder His Jobsness isn’t a fan.

Anyway, I notice that Kevin Lynch also says:

“… there are variations depending on the browser as well as the OS -- for example, on Windows, IE8 is able to run Flash about 20% faster than Firefox.”

This interesting article from Elinor Mills about PC and Mac security contains a wealth of interesting commentary (read: flame/fanboy fodder) from a variety of expert sources.

Worth reading the whole thing but some points from the article:

• There are a number of points about social engineering attacks being prevalent and these are platform agnostic. There’s a dichotomy between the perception that Macs are safer, and the reality of attacks and frequency across users of either platform.
• PCs are attacked more frequently so Macs may be safer because there are less of them. There are a couple of things in that. Firstly, that’s really another way of saying ‘security by obscurity’ which – as at least one of the commentators points out – is not really any security at all. There will come a point where Macs will become more interesting to malware creators and then things “will quickly turn bad for Mac users”.

This quote (which I hope is balanced enough to be representative of the article) sort of sums it up:

Technologically speaking, PCs are a little more secure than Macs. Macs have a larger attack surface out of the box (Flash, Java, support for a million file formats, etc.) and lack some anti-exploitation technologies found in PCs like full ASLR [Address Space Layout Randomization]. This means Macs have more vulnerabilities and it's easier to turn a vulnerability into an exploit on the platform. Despite the fact it is less secure, paradoxically, Macs are actually safer to use for most people. This is because there simply isn't much risk of being exploited or installing malware.

The comment on Flash is interesting in view of Adobe’s comments on such matters.

So where am I going with this? There are two things to think about:

1. Engineering Practices

Who do you trust to handle a zero-day vulnerability in terms of the engineering practices to deliver patches? You could huff and puff and say “Huh! Not Microsoft” but actually I don’t see any criticism of Microsoft’s efforts from the commentators. In fact they’re making contextual recommendations about safety (Mac because there’s less of them) because it seems that the reality is that none are ever truly safe. (Some of the commenter’s called BS on this suggesting malware share should equal market share but of course that’s denying the economics at play here: why target 5% when you can target 95% means that view will be skewed?).

Moreover, I was amused that when asked for commentary, from Microsoft the author got the “director of Windows client and enterprise security”. From Apple she got told to go and look at a flashy ad that said “Mac OS X doesn’t get PC viruses”.

2. “Social Engineering”: unified attacks that are platform agnostic

So then, in thinking about attitudes towards handling security problems I was astonished by this article in which the Googlies say (of the forthcoming Chrome OS):

I guess the thing that I've learned from traditional OSes is, if you look at how that goes wrong, is that users tend to have a very hard time managing it.

We have over 200 Googlers using this every week, and we tend to just inflict a new build on them and see if they use things more or less, and we just iterate from there.

If you contrast that with the Web model, the Web mostly takes the view of "you shouldn't be able to do anything bad from a Web application." Which mostly serves the Web really, really well. You cruise the Web without worrying too much about badness lurking out there. It's not 100 percent true, because of malware and browser exploits and stuff like that, but for the most part you just cruise the Web and don't sweat it too much.

Um, I don’t remember having malware, viruses and so on until I plugged my CAT5 cable in and joined the internet (I often heard of viruses on floppy disks but never actually got one). But I guess the test group of 200 Googlies are highly representative of the mass-market. With this level of naivety what would happen if there was a vulnerability? Perhaps there’ll be a community forum with a 48-Hr wait for an official response.

Regardless of whether the argument is about security or risk, I think that the point is that any vendor needs to work to educate the end user of both of those arguments. What I think we’re actually seeing in the case of Apple is risk used as a selling point, and in the case of Google, a zealous over-confidence in stuff they just don’t know or care about.

Please say hello to Sara who has just joined our team. She’s been kicking around for a couple of weeks now, but, you know, Microsoft is a complex beast and it takes a little time to get used to it.

As an evangelist, Sara will be digging around the underbelly of the beast and producing content on what we’re thinking, why, who, how much and what of it anyway?

For starters, she’s been chatting to MikeO and Andrew about what they do.

She’s also covered the community leaders day at TVP which had great turnout – probably due to DDD8 being on Saturday! It was great to catch up with the likes of @MichelleFlynn, @Plip and @apwestgarth.

Finally, you might have seen here mixing it up with Flynny et al at The Fantastic Tavern.

You get the idea.

New Media Age picks up on a Silverlight Ad out in the wild from EA Games to promote Mass Effect 2. (What a great game by the way… unfortunately it turned up before I finished Borderlands so there’s two vying for attention).

NMA describe it in terms ad folk will understand:

The three-week campaign for flagship Xbox and Windows action game Mass Effect 2 comprises an expandable MPU which contains around 500Mb of rich content including high-resolution images that can be zoomed into by up to 30 times and buffer-free HD video trailers.

The ad is delivered dynamically depending on the speed of visitors’ broadband connection.

That means DeepZoom was involved to you and I. You can check it out here. MikeT has a couple of useful links on the ad details here.

You can view the ad here to see the smart DeepZooming stuff. Will only be alive for a while of course.

Great article in the Sunday Times this weekend profiling our MACHs (our graduate fast-track high-fliers). Microsoft is a great place to work in any case, but these programmes have got to be great for those on them, and the business in general.

Gaby Ball (or “Ball” as the article continues to refer to her in a passive-aggressive style) is the sister of our very own @alex_ball, and @SarahMelrose is also in the team. Or as she prefers we call her now: “THE Sarah Melrose” ;)

But I’m not scared of their fast-tracked success. No sir. There’s life in the old dog yet. As soon as I’ve figured out this interweb stuff, I’ll be rocking.

You know what .NET is don’t you? Sure you do. It’s the tool which… no, hang on… it’s the language that you… wait, wait, it’s the development platform for… hmm…

If you’re not already a .NET developer, then actually that question might be harder to answer than it seems. My buddies in the marketing wing (they’re the cuddly ones with crayons) have put together this site to help you understand .NET and the latest innovations in .NET 4, Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7, Azure and all that malarkey and help you to think about learning .NET or putting your existing skills to use.

I saw a tweet last week which said “Sometimes I wonder if Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ is missing ‘because we’re watching you’”. Funny (actually, no, it’s terrifying when you think hard about it). Maybe someone should ask Eric?

Another friend of mine asked whether you could really trust an organisation that had to remind itself not to be evil…

Anyway, His Jobsness is having none of it, calling out the ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra as ‘bullshit’. (There are – at this time – a couple of disputed quotes. He may have said ‘load of crap’).

He sticks a skewer in Adobe too. Lazy? Well, given their dominance over the past decade, maybe they’ve been sluggish to capitalise on that and do now face a number of threats: Silverlight, closed systems like iP* (my new mnemonic for iPhone/iPod/iPad), and maybe HTML5 (but we’ll see how that turns out).

Compare that with the rapid cadence of Silverlight.

As an aside, looks like Google circumvented the AppStore stuff with Google Voice by using HTML5 in the browser. Tsk. They also added Voice to their own Chrome browser, but there’s not much opportunity to use it in other browsers as there’s no API. That’s not very ‘open’ is it? But then, as we know, Open has some interesting definitions from Google.

Seems to me that a lot of folk made a lot of money in the last decade doing their own thing. But now they’re all trying to do the “other folks’ things” and so the drums are beating to quarters once again. A fun time to be in technology – but then when isn’t - and an interesting ride for a few years.

I remember being out in the street during the recent snow trying to figure out if the roads were passable. I didn’t fancy my chances (in the Prius) but another bloke who was there too said “he didn’t have much option” but to get to the office for meetings (despite the illogical thought process I let the comment pass).

It’s an obvious set-up to a story about unified communications, but it really did prove it’s worth to me over the week or so of “travel chaos”. It’s very easy for ‘softies to switch mode and work online rather than face-to-face which is great in those conditions, but in normal conditions also makes it a lot easier to pull together vTeams and remote teams more consistently.

Anyway, I forgot to blog about it but then my memory was jogged when I saw this post from Brett with some interesting info on how the use of OCS R2 has helped control our costs. Excerpt:

“In Microsoft UK, the Sales & Marketing and Support Group has seen average cost reductions of over 50% in both T&E and Telecoms, generating savings of £3.6m saving year on year (over the period from November 2008 to Oct 2009 compared to the previous 12 months)

· T&E costs savings are 51% T&E (£3.3m)

· Telecom costs savings are 54% Telecoms (£320k)

The cost savings are due to the adoption of Unified Communication and Live Meeting and changes in the travel policy. The travel policy changes resulted in many business meetings being hosted online and therefore business continued as before.”

And then I saw Peter Klein’s comments on Microsoft’s great quarterly results:

“Our continuing commitment to managing costs allowed us to drive earnings performance ahead of the revenue growth.”

OCS is genuinely useful to me - and clearly useful to the business. I still prefer face to face meetings if I can (as presumably most humans would), but there’s convenience and continuity capabilities that I prize. Have a look at it in on-premise form or as part of or online services.

You’ve seen the device, you’ve heard the jokes. Fickle followers of fashion have spoken.

I spent at least a little bit of time chortling over the reaction to the iPad. Much of it was fair to middling, but the interesting stuff was commentators desperately trying to rationalise the fair to middling reaction from the masses and their own previous hyperbole.

Anyway, I can’t be bothered adding to that suffice to say that really it just proves that innovation and disruption is actually pretty hard to do.

On the other hand – Viral is doing a great job summing up things in a little more detail.