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Google’s Safe Browsing API is a core security feature of Chrome that Google shares with Firefox and Safari. Now, a security research firm that specializes in measuring the effectiveness of these filters says its most recent data suggest Google is not playing fair with its partners.

This past weekend, Google quietly held the first-ever Solve for X conference, gathering top minds to tackle the world’s problems.

Founded by a group of former Google employees in San Francisco, Adku used basically big data for the personalization of online shopping experiences.

Redbox will buy NCR’s entertainment kiosk unit and launch a streaming service with Verizon. Meanwhile, Redbox parent Coinstar blows away its earnings targets.

Wolfram|Alpha’s founder explains the next big step in the evolution of the “knowledge engine,” which is touted to enable users to dig deeper than ever into its vast library and personalize their experiences.

Mobile traffic saw a huge increase in Google searches during commercial breaks, likely with more viewers out and about at Super Bowl parties.

Hard drives represent 11 percent to 12 percent of the PC bill of materials.

Windows 8's Metro: The face of a DOA operating system.

Some of my die-hard Windows friends are very excited by Windows 8 arrival later this year. Others fear that Windows 8 will be a repeat of Microsoft’s Vista disaster. Me? I know Windows 8 will be a Vista-sized fiasco.

Before jumping into why I think far most PC users will still be running Windows 7 in 2016 than Windows 8, let me explain that while I prefer Linux as my desktop operating system, I don’t see Windows 8 charge into a brick wall as being a pro-Linux or anti-Microsoft issue.

In fact, as desktop operating systems go, I rather like Windows 7.  Yes, really. Besides, it’s not like Windows 8’s forthcoming failure will help desktop Linux. Looking back, when Vista flopped, in the long run it actually hurt desktop Linux. That’s because Vista’s failure, combined with the threat of netbooks, caused Microsoft to revive Windows XP. If Windows 8 goes down the same path, I’m sure Microsoft will extend Windows 7’s lifespan.

So, why is Windows 8 destined to be a non-starter? Simple:

1. No one needs Windows 8 on the desktop.

Quick: Name one thing about Windows 8 that they don’t already get from Windows 7-or a great desktop Linux like Mint or Mac OS X Lion? I can’t.

Indeed, I can’t think of a single significant new improvement in Windows 8. The ability to refresh the operating system? Faster booting? A Windows Store? Live boot from a USB drive? Come on! All these features have been around in other operating systems for years, and while sure, they’re nice, put them all together and at most they’re worth a Windows 7 Service Patch–not a whole new operating system.

2. Metro: An ugly, useless interface.

As everyone knows, Windows 8 has a totally new default interface: Metro. When I look at Metro, however, I see gaudy colors, boxy designs, applications that can either run as a small tile or as full screen with no way to resize or move windows. Where have I seen this before? Wait, I know! Windows 1.0!

More to the point, almost everyone knows the current Windows interface. It’s changed over the years, but you could take someone who last touched Windows back in the Windows 95 days and drop that in front of them of Windows 7 and they’d be able to get work done. Metro? It’s entirely different. Heck, Microsoft has even dropped the Start button in the latest version!

In short, even if Metro was the best thing since sliced bread, which it isn’t, it will still require users to learn a new way of doing the same old thing. That’s a failure of an idea right here. Sure, you can use the ‘Classic’ desktop experience instead, but hey, I have an idea! Why not just use the Windows XP or 7 “classic” interface instead?

3. Where are the Windows 8 Applications?

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview (read Windows 8 public beta) will be here real soon now and we still don’t know next to anything about Windows 8’s applications. As Mary Jo Foley recently pointed out we still don’t even know where Office 15 will be Metro, non-Metro, or partially Metro.

Seriously? Windows 8 will probably be out by this fall and we still don’t know jack about its apps? Not even Microsoft’s own flagship office application? Come on! How can you take this operating system seriously?

4. Vexed Windows developers.

If you’re unhappy about the state of Metro applications, think about the poor Windows programmers. You’ve spent years learning .NET, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and now they have to learn WinRT and Jupiter/XAML.

Even developers who like WinRT give it “complements” like “It’s a great time to get involved with WinRT, as the platform is still in its infancy, and will need a lot of developer support to build even more robust tools.” Really? That comment was made in January 2012, and the development tools are still in diapers!?

Last, but not least, Windows developers will need rewrite their Metro apps for the more traditional Windows-style desktop. Oh, and they’ll also need to build them for both x86 and ARM platforms. That’s a heck of a lot of work to do without a lot of time to do it in. Put it all together and I see little chance about Windows 8 having many mature, ready-to-run applications come launch day.

Heck, Brandon Watson, head of developer experiences for Windows Phone, just left Microsoft for Amazon’s Android-based Kindle team Think he might know something?

This reminds me, what do you call an operating system without developers or applications? The answer? Dead.

5. Too little, too late for the smartphone/tablet market

Metro’s real point, of course, isn’t for desktop users. It’s Microsoft’s last gasp attempt to be a player on tomorrow’s computers: smartphones and tablets. If Microsoft was bringing something truly revolutionary to mobile devices, or they were still able to strong-arm original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s into loading Windows on their devices, I think they’d have a shot at the mobile space. Neither is true.

Smartphones are a dog fight between Android and iOS. Tablets did belong to Apple, but now Samsung, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are giving the iPad a fight for the tablet marketplace. Android and IOS are mature, have enormous developer communities and are wildly popular. Heck, if you count smartphones, thanks to the iPhone Apple is now the number one “PC” vendor in the world.

On top of that, the U.S. phone carriers have no interest in a Windows Phone. Too old, too slow Microsoft is arriving much too late to the 2010s style of mobile computing to be a significant player and that means Windows 8 Metro won’t find an audience either. I see no room left for a major third-party platform. A minor player, like KDE or Ubuntu? Sure. A Microsoft? No.

Add it up. The majority of Windows users have only just switched over from XP to Windows 7 in, at best, November 2011. Microsoft is now asking for its users to switch to a platform with no significant improvements, a radically different interface, and which is very likely to have few applications. The result? Window 8 will be dead on arrival.

Related Stories:

Microsoft removes ‘Start’ button from latest Windows 8 build

Windows Phone developer lead leaves for Amazon’s Kindle team

Windows Phone 8: What’s on the feature list

Windows 8 Consumer Preview nears - what we know about Metro apps

Windows 8 ARM devices to have a ‘classic’ desktop experience?

Barnes & Noble, maker of the Android-based Nook, shouldn’t be found in violation of Microsoft patents, an attorney with the ITC has said before hearings in the matter commence.

Apple sold the most smartphones in Q4 2011, but Android might win the race as it is attracting more first-time buyers than iOS, according to NPD research.

HTC is betting that new products in March can “normalize” its profit margins. The reality may be that HTC’s glory days may be gone forever as Samsung and Apple run away from the smartphone pack.

Microsoft will deliver mobile versions of its Dynamics CRM app and service for iPad, iPhone, Android phone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 in the second quarter of 2012.

Overall, IDC said it was heartened by the IT spending trends given the wild cards in the global economy. Europe remains an economic mess, but BRIC countries will spend heavily on tech.

In their social business effort, the luxury goods designer was clearly thinking big: A true digital company must use digital channels through and through for all interaction.

Q&A with Ernst & Young Americas CIO David Nichols: Everyone wants cloud, but no one has a clear strategy yet for managing it.

EMC’s VFCache is designed to meld the storage array to the server. The storage giant is targeting Fusion-io in an effort to bring more Flash memory to data centers.

Over twice as many consumers at the nation’s largest banks are using mobile banking more than are those at credit unions, according to a new report.

This guest post comes courtesy of Chris Harding, Forum Director for SOA and Semantic Interoperability at The Open Group.

By Chris Harding

This week, I’ve been at The Open Group Conference in San Francisco. The theme was Enterprise Transformation which, in simple terms, means changing how your business works to take advantage of the latest developments in IT.

Evidence of these developments is all around. For example, when I took a break and went for coffee and a sandwich to a little cafe on Pine and Leavenworth, it seemed to be run by and for the Millennial Generation. True to type, my server pulled out a cellphone with a device attached through which I swiped my credit card. An app read my screen-scrawled signature and the transaction was complete.

Then to make dinner reservations, the hotel concierge tapped a few keys on her terminal and, presto, we had a window table at a restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. No lengthy phone negotiations with the maitre d’. We were just connected with the resource that we needed quickly and efficiently.

The power of ubiquitous technology to transform the enterprise was the theme of the inspirational plenary presentation given by Andy Mulholland, Global CTO and Corporate Vice President at Capgemini. Mobility, the cloud, and big data are the three powerful technical forces that must be harnessed by the architect to move the business to smarter operation and new markets.

If you had thought five years ago that no technical trend could possibly generate more interest and excitement than SOA, cloud computing would now be proving you wrong.

Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Center for Information System Research, shared her recipe for architecting business success with examples drawn from several major companies. Indomitable and inimitable, she always challenges her audience to think through the issues. This time we responded with: “Don’t small companies need architecture too?” Of course they do, was the answer, but the architecture of a big corporation is very different from that of a corner cafe.

Corporations don’t come much bigger than Nissan. Celso Guiotoko, Corporate VP and CIO at the Nissan Motor Company, told us how Nissan is using enterprise architecture for business transformation. Highlights included the concept of information capitalization, the rationalization of the application portfolio through service-oriented architecture (SOA) and reusable services, and the delivery of technology resource through a private cloud platform.

The set of stimulating plenary presentations on the first day of the conference was completed by Lauren States, VP and CTO Cloud Computing and Growth Initiatives at IBM. Everyone now expects business results from technical change, and there is huge pressure on the people involved to deliver results that meet these expectations. IT enablement is one part of the answer, but it must be matched by business process excellence and values-based culture for real productivity and growth.

My role in The Open Group is to support our work on cloud computing and SOA, and these activities took all my attention after the initial plenary. If you had thought five years ago that no technical trend could possibly generate more interest and excitement than SOA, cloud computing would now be proving you wrong.

Interest in SOA continues

But interest in SOA continues, and we had a SOA stream including presentations of forward thinking on how to use SOA to deliver agility, and on SOA governance, as well as presentations describing and explaining the use of key Open Group SOA standards and guides: the Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM), the SOA Reference Architecture, and the Guide to using TOGAF for SOA.

We then moved into the cloud stream with a presentation by Mike Walker of Microsoft on why enterprise architecture must lead cloud strategy and planning. The “why” was followed by the “how.” Zapthink’s Jason Bloomberg described Representational State Transfer (REST), which many now see as a key foundational principle for cloud architecture. But perhaps it is not the only principle. A later presentation suggested a three-tier approach with the client tier, including mobile devices, accessing RESTful information resources through a middle tier of agents that compose resources and carry out transactions.

In the evening we had a CloudCamp, hosted by The Open Group and conducted as a separate event by the CloudCamp organization. The original CloudCamp concept was of an “un-conference” where early adopters of cloud computing technologies exchange ideas. Its founder, Dave Nielsen, is now planning to set up a demo center where those adopters can experiment with setting up private clouds. This transition from idea to experiment reflects the changing status of mainstream cloud adoption.

The public conference streams were followed by a meeting of the Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group. This is currently pursuing nine separate projects to develop standards and guidance for architects using cloud computing.

A later presentation suggested a three-tier approach with the client tier, including mobile devices, accessing RESTful information resources through a middle tier of agents.

The meeting in San Francisco focused on one of these - the Cloud Computing Reference Architecture. It compared submissions from five companies, also taking into account ongoing work at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with the aim of creating a base from which to create an Open Group reference architecture for cloud computing. This gave a productive finish to a busy week of information gathering and discussion.

Ralph Hitz of Visana, a health insurance company based in Switzerland, made an interesting comment on our reference architecture discussion. He remarked that we were not seeking to change or evolve the NIST service and deployment models. This may seem boring, but it is true and it is right. Cloud computing is now where the automobile was in 1920. We’re pretty much agreed that it will have four wheels and be powered by gasoline. The business and economic impact is yet to come.

So now I’m on my way to the airport for the flight home. I checked in online, and my boarding pass is on my cellphone. Big companies, as well as small ones, now routinely use mobile technology, and my airline has a frequent-flyer app. It’s just a shame that they can’t manage a decent cup of coffee.

This guest post comes courtesy of Chris Harding, Forum Director for SOA and Semantic Interoperability at The Open Group.

You may also be interested in:

• Capgemini’s CTO on Why Cloud Computing Exposes the Duality Between IT and Business
• MIT’s Ross on how enterprise architecture and IT more than ever lead to business transformation
• Overlapping criminal and state threats pose growing cyber security threat to global Internet commerce, says Open Group speaker
• Exploring Business-IT Alignment: A 20-Year Struggle Culminating in the Role and Impact of Business Architecture
• The Open Group’s Cloud Work Group Advances Understanding of Cloud-Use Benefits for Enterprises

For consumers, Ajax looks like magic. Developers know differently, of course.