Artist's Depiction of Apple Tablet

It’s been fun and frustrating trying to sift through the hype and hysteria surrounding Apple’s forthcoming tablet device. I’ve got some ideas about what I’d like to see — and what I think we will likely see — from Apple. Maybe I’ll throw some predictions into my next post. This post is about names.

Most guesses at the name have hinged around recent Apple trademark activities. Specifically, iSlate and iPad keep popping up.

Evidence points to Apple’s ownership of iSlate.com domain

More evidence of ‘iPad’ name…

Most people are assuming the device will be named as if it were in the iPod/iPhone family of devices. I’m not so sure. OK, it will likely run the “iPhone OS”, and it will likely look a lot like an iPhone, but that doesn’t mean it has to have a name starting with an “i”.

You may remember that the AppleTV was originally names iTV, but Apple switched the name just before its release due to trademark issues. The “i” meme is just a fad, imho. I think Apple is ready to move on.

Ever since Apple discontinued the white and black MacBook lines, I thought it looked like they were making room for a new product. Later, I’d find I was right: the forthcoming tablet device is that new product. Placing it squarely between the iPhone/iPod and the MacBook is a clever and obvious way to expand the iPod “halo” effect. So why not name the device after the MacBook line to solidify the expected upgrade path?

iPod –> tablet –> Mac

So here are some of my guesses:

MacBook Me (my favorite)
MacBook Slate (obvious)
MacBook Pad (obvious)
MacBook Tablet (ditto)
MacBook Nano (hybrid iPod/Mac)
MacBook Touch (hybrid iPod/Mac)
MacBook Slice (sounds like a soda)
MacBook Vibe / iVibe (too retro)
MacBook Neue

Do you have a good name?

Updated 2010-01-25:

MacBook Palette / iPalette
MacBook Prism / iPrism
Apple Personal TV (PTV)

As I surmised in a previous post (Restrospectives on 2008 and Prognostications for 2009), Google announced a new Internet-oriented meta-operating system in 2009. OK, well, I predicted that they’d release it, not just announce it. An announcement is nearly as good as the real thing, right? Microsoft does that all the time!

It’s really a bit freaky. Last night I was discussing the upcoming operating systems, including Google’s, with my wife, Jen. (That’s right, guys, be jealous. She’s a gorgeous blonde and she tolerates my geek side.) The freaky part is that we were talking about it at the exact same time that Google made their announcement.

OK. It’s not that freaky. Statistically, it was even probable. I talk about operating systems almost every day, and non-IT people (like Jen) talk about how much operating systems suck almost every day. At the time, she was wishing that her MacBook Pro’s OS was more like her new iPhone. She said something like, “Is Windows this daunting, too?”

(I assured her it was worse. Either she accepted that as fact or she smartly decided not to debate it.)

She continued, “The iPhone is so intuitive. Everything is so easy to use. Why can’t computers be like my iPhone? I don’t really need all of that other stuff.”

“Ah ha!” I said. “That’s exactly what Apple and Google are working on…”

The new OS will be radically different

Think about it. Does it make sense for Google to release yet another Linux-style operating system? Not at all. Why would anybody except Microsoft haters and Apple-phobics use it? No chance.

Unless, of course, it’s radically different. Now we’re starting to make some sense.

It’ll have to be consumer-centric. Corporations are way too slow to adopt anything new, even obviously better technologies.

And what do most consumers want? Let’s see…

• A care-free device (no viruses or malware threats)
• Fast, easy access to their favorite apps (email, social networks, chat)
• Low cost (or free)

That’s a very short list, isn’t it? Of course it is! That’s all most consumers need. In the early days, operating systems were for nerds and geeks, programmers and scientists. Geeks need power. Geeks need control. Geeks need to have a multitude of ways to accomplish a task and need not to be told to pick one. Geeks want it all.

Consumers just want to keep up with the social aspects of technology and to have fun doing it.

What will set Google apart from Apple’s iPhone and MID (Mobile Internet Device, whether it emerges as a tablet or a MacBook Mini) is that it will be almost entirely Internet-centric. All of its built-in applications will, naturally, be Google apps. Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Docs, Picasa (photos). That’s why they’re calling it Chrome OS, named after Google’s fledgling browser, Chrome.

An astute person will now be asking, “Hm, why did they build a browser that runs on several operating systems, if they really wanted to make a whole new operating system?” Here’s why:

• The browser will be central to the operating system, so it’s good to get some expertise in browsers, first.
• The distinction between browser and operating system has been getting blurry lately. Why not make it even more so?
• Users of other operating systems should be able to enjoy the same advanced features that a browser-based operating system provides when using Internet-centric apps.

These postulations lead me to think that we’ll see more even browser-OS integration in the near future:

• More support for OS-integrated notifications (e.g. Growl on Mac OS X, system tray popups on Windows).
• More support for multi-threading and multi-process management to do some of the heavy lifting needed by typical desktop applications.
• Location-based services (like the iPhone already has).
• Offline support for those times when you can’t even get a cell phone signal.

What?!?!?! Most of this stuff already exists in browsers? Well, the future is now, baby!

Let the browser-OS confusion begin.

So what will Apple and Microsoft do?

Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft will strive to stay relevant in this Internet-centric environment. Apple will have the easier job of the two. Their lustful machines are hard-wired to their operating systems. To the average person, it’s all part of the same package. They buy the Apple experience. Who cares if some of the apps are online?

Microsoft, on the other hand, is getting squeezed. All of their efforts to kill the Internet, control it, and monetize it are failing. Meanwhile, Apple is raking in all of the top-end revenue from consumers who can afford to buy into the Apple experience. And soon, Google will swoop up from the low-end with ultra-cheap, but capable systems.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

But overall, Facebook disappoints for several reasons. I’ll start with the non-technical reasons so I won’t bore my non-geek readers.

Managing friends

As I mentioned above, I keep my friends organized and it paid off this time. But many of my friends and colleagues don’t. I imagine that this is indicative of the population at large. Therefore, the new News Feed Filters feature is fairly useless to most of us. That is, unless we start organizing our friends into groups. If you have hundreds of friends, you’ll probably never, ever find the time.

With all of the computing power available to Facebook, why can’t they help organize our friends for us? They already mine our data to suggest new friends, and, if you notice, they even show the source of the relationship. For instance, I’ve got several friend suggestions for people whom I know from high school and college. But I know that it’s not that simple. UMass recruits 20-30,000 students per year. The suggestions are way too accurate to based off of our mutually-attended school alone.

No. Facebook mines our personal relationships to find friend suggestions. So, why can’t they use the same computing power to help us organize our friends? The simple is answer is they can, but for some reason, chose not to.

Relationships are not like trees

One might argue that our relationships are too complex to effectively mine. This is a good argument on the surface. Let’s dig in a little deeper to see why:

As humans, we like to organize our data — our thoughts, our belongings, our relationsip — into simple structures. Here’s a typical illustration of a friend graph that you’d find on a presentation or blog post. It looks very much like a corporate “org chart” or a family tree.

Hub and spoke graph from UnderstandingSociety

However, in real relationships, the following picture is often a more accurate situation when extended to a few “degrees of separation”. (Can you find Kevin Bacon?)

Mesh social network graph from Wikipedia.com

Yes, it’s a mess — or more accurately, a mesh! How on Earth can anybody make sense out of this?

You can’t easily. Not without a some degree of uncertainty. The more complex the mesh, the more uncertainty. Unfortunately, it’s the Facebook users that have the most friends and, therefore, the most tangled meshes.

It all starts with one

Fortunately, our social networks don’t start out looking like a mesh. They start out with a single link and build continually, one link at a time. Valuable and informative data can be discerned every time you add a new friend. If you’ve used Facebook’s Friend Finder features to find a friend, you’ve informed Facebook that their guess about your relationship with this friend was correct.

Even when you’re not using the Friend Finder feature, many of your friends are. When they use the feature to discover mutual friends, they’re helping Facebook discover the nature of your relationship with these mutual friends.

More importantly, there’s usually a flurry of “friending” that happens soon after a friend comes into a new group (whether defined explicitly as a group or not). The relationships defined during this flurry are highly likely to define a group of some sort.

Facebook stores all of this data. They use this data to suggest friends. They mine our other data to show us (hopefully) pertinent advertisements. So why aren’t they using it to help us build our friend groups?

If you’ve used Apple’s iPhoto or iTunes, you’ve already seen what a little bit of data mining can do. iPhoto’s Faces feature can identify and catalogue photos of people you’ve identified in only a few pictures. iTunes’ Genius feature will find music that you’ll likely find interesting based upon the music already in your collection. Amazon and Google aso use data mining (and very effectively) to suggest products or advertisements.

I hope Facebook has at least considered mining their vast repository of relationship data to provide usability features like this. So far, they’ve only used this vast resource to grow membership and increase revenues. These are important endeavors, I know, but it shows a serious lack of focus on the needs of their most important asset: us.

Lameness #1: You missed the boat, Facebook, when you failed to make it easy for us to use the new features.

Who put that guy in charge?

Earlier today, my wife came across a very funny web site and decided she wanted to share it with her friends. We investigated Facebook’s new Publisher feature that unifies the interfaces for publishing your status, a link, a video, etc. We copied and pasted the link into the box labelled “http” and clicked the Attach button. As in the previous Facebook, it showed a preview of the link, including a snippet of the first few words of the site.

Unfortunately, the first few words of the site included about 80 underscores. They were all scrunched together in an effort to create a horizontal line, apparently since the author of the site isn’t aware of the <hr> element just for this purpose. No biggie, right? Well, this exposed a bug in Facebook’s link preview. The preview appears between the time you attach a link or video and you publish it by clicking the Share button. If you’ve used this feature you probably know that you can edit the snippet, the title, and the thumbnail image before publishing. You simply click on any of these and an editable version of them pops in place.

This is called “Inline Editing” and is perfect for this application. It’s apparent, though, that Facebook’s developers don’t have much experience building inline editors. Remember in the previous paragraph that I mentioned that there was a long sequence of underscores? A bug caused the underscores in the preview text — as well as the inline editor — to push the Share button off the screen! (Hello, Facebook QA? The developers aren’t the only ones to blame! This should have been a standard test case!)

[Update: the fix for this is a simple 1-line CSS property called max-width in all browsers except Internet Explorer 6, which requires a more complex fix.]

Screenshot of broken Publisher

No love. We could not navigate to the Share button. At first, I thought the worst: “Facebook did not make the Publisher feature handicap accessible!” But this was not [completely] true. She was using Safari, which has a configuration option that allows the user to specify whether buttons and links are accessible via keyboard or only accessible via the mouse. My wife typically uses the mouse, like most folk, so she has this feature turned off.

I eventually figured this all out after doing some snooping behind the scenes. Facebook is using links and buttons as they should. Score one for Facebook!

But wait. Why can’t I see it working? If I hit the Tab key, I can’t seem to navigate to the links all over the page. Again, I did some snooping and found out that they have turned off the visual indicator for all of the links! Usually, there is a thin outline that encircles a button or link that has the keyboard focus (it’s actually called an “outline”). Since they have turned this outline off, we have no way of knowing which link is currently active.

There’s absolutely no reason to hide the outline. Well, except one. The only reason one might want to hide the outline is because she/he doesn’t like the way it looks.

This was truly one of those WTF moments for me. Somebody took the time to ensure that the entire site was fully accessible to people who could not use a mouse. It was probably no small effort by a couple of engineers. But apparently somebody who has no experience building web applications of this magnitude b0rked the whole effort through one CSS (HTML styling) rule.

(Actually, after further study, it seems that there are a handful of styling rules affecting the outline, with some specifically targeted to certain browsers. This only further strengthens the evidence that this was done purely for aesthetics.)

I imagine it all originated as an edict from management. At least I’d like to think this is the case since I have to trust that Facebook has some great design and engineering talent on staff.

Lameness #2: Clueless Facebook managers rule-out over good engineering and accessibility.

Let’s punish our smartest users and ourselves, too!

Later, while investigating the new Facebook facelift some more, I started clicking around to see what hidden features I could find. I noticed that a note below the Filters at the left stated that they could be reordered by dragging them. Neat! “What else can I drag and drop?” I thought. “Maybe drag-and-drop can help users manage their unwieldy task of organizing their friends!”

So I did what any ordinary geek would do. I clicked on an avatar (a.k.a. profile picture thumbnail) with my mouse and pulled it across the screen to one of my groups. For a second, I thought my browser was freaking out. The image did not move when I tried to drag it. Instead, there was a strange spread of dots across the page. Whaaaa????

I tried it again and watched more closely this time. Sure enough, my mouse captured and dragged an image composed of small dots, not the avatar. I had to drag the image around a bit — over dark images and lighter ones to see the dots more clearly. It didn’t take long for me to understand what I was seeing. The Facebook designers thought they’d be clever. They’re using an image clipping technique to round the corners of the avatars.

This technique, unfortunately, is not actually very clever. I found out several years ago that this technique causes more headaches than it solves. The technique uses a mostly-transparent image that covers the corners of the image with tiny curved triangles. These tiny curved triangles match the background color. When placed over the edges of the avatars, it looks like they have curved corners.

Since avatars come in all shapes and sizes, there are several of these sets of tiny curved triangles. One for each combination of avatar size and background color. The entire image of tiny triangles is about twice as wide and four times taller than the 50 pixel by 50 pixel avatars. Only one set is shown at a time, though, since the image is effectively clipped to the right size and position and placed on top of the avatar to hide its corners. (Web designers and developers might be thinking that I am describing the “CSS Sprite” technique, but that technique uses background images.)

(In the Safari web browser, this is much more evident since Safari expands the image to its full height and width when dragged. Try it out if you are using Safari!)

The two major drawbacks to this technique are that (A) the user cannot interact directly with the avatar image and (B) each avatar now requires 60% more HTML code. Drawback A means that we can’t right-click the image to copy it and we can’t drag it to our desktop. OK. Minor points. Drawback B, though, means a degraded experience for all of us. 60% more code means slower loading pages. It also means our browsers must use 60% more memory (roughly).

Lastly, the 60% more HTML also likely means more sluggish drag-and-drop in Internet Explorer if/when Facebook decides to add drag-and-drop.

Ugh. Strike 3 for the Facebook developers: first, inline editor FAIL; second, link accessibility FAIL; lastly, rounded corner overlay FAIL!

If you’re wondering why Facebook chose this method, it is solely to allow Internet Explorer users to see the rounded corners. All other browsers created since 2006 (Firefox, Safari, and Opera, for instance) are able to draw rounded corners with only 1 line of code. But not Internet Explorer.

As usual, Internet Explorer lags way behind the rest of the bunch. And because of sites like Facebook, we’re all suffering for it. You suffer because your superior browser’s features are not being used and its resources are being unnecessarily over-burdened. You also suffer because the Facebook engineers had to work extra hard to work out this half-assed solution. They could have spent this time working on better tools to organize your long list of friends. So what if Internet Explorer users see square avatars? That’s what they saw before the facelift!

(The consensus around the globe is that working to ensure compatibility with Internet Explorer consumes an additional 20% to 40% on all web projects. I am looking for a link to confirm this, but haven’t found one yet. However, you can ask any talented web developer and they’ll tell you that their own experience holds this to be true.)

Lameness #3: Facebook forces us all to suffer even if we’ve made good technology choices.

Of course, I suspect that the Internet Explorer work-arounds were implemented because Microsoft is [allegedly] a 3% stakeholder in Facebook. Hmmmm…. Wow. It’s all making sense now. Yes, it’s crystal clear: Microsoft is handing down the edicts. It makes me wonder who it might be…

Is it the same committee chair that mandated that Internet Explorer 6 should annoyingly click and beep at the user as she/he navigates through pages and forms? (True story, according to inside sources. Doh! Need link to support this!)

Is it the same engineering manager who decided that it was safe to embed ActiveX into web pages? (”Sure, it’s unsafe, but nobody’s gonna figure out how to exploit the security holes… Right?”)

Or maybe it’s the Vista security oversight committee that decided that the user needs to be reminded every 5 minutes that running programs on their Windows machine could be hazardous to the privacy of their personal identity and to the security of their financial information and passwords? (Don’t get me wrong. Vista desperately needed additional security measures over XP. They just screwed it up when they decided the best way to handle it was to pop messages in the user’s face ad nauseum.)

So what’s this all mean?

Let this be a wake-up call to Facebook. If the foibles of this release are a result of its relationship with Microsoft, it’s time to start listening more closely to the other 97% of your shareholders. If it’s not a result of Microsoft’s big investment, then it’s time to start hiring real web developers over there and not college interns.

Oh. And let this be a wake up call to all of you Internet Explorer users: you’re not just unnecessarily suffering by yourself, you’re also dragging the rest of us all down with you.

It’s time to download and use a real, modern browser. Try any of these awesome choices. You won’t be disappointed. They’re several times faster than Internet Explorer. They have awesome features you’ll love to use. And, best of all, the more you use these browsers, the more time companies like Facebook will have to create features you’ll love.

Firefox (Mac, Windows, Linux)

Safari (Mac, Windows)

Opera (Mac, Windows, Linux)

Chrome (Windows only at the moment)

Browser Wars Heat Up, Again
Browser Wars, Again
United States vs. Microsoft

First, A Retrospective on 2008

Rather, 2008 seemed more like a battle of egos. Each browser team had something to prove to the world. Safari boasted about being the fastest browser on the planet, proving that its browsing experience could be as fast and rich as a desktop experience. (Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome weren’t far behind.) Mozilla touted it’s “Safer, Faster, Better” mantra and proved that many users do care about their browsing experience, particularly in regards to safety and personalization. Firefox managed to garner more than 20% of all users worldwide. (Firefox usage is actually much higher at home, since many users are restricted from using the better browsers at their place of work.) Finally, Google reiterated it’s “Do no evil” slogan by creating a browser that was blindingly fast on Windows, but didn’t crash. Google proved that there is still room for innovation and improvements in browser design.

(In fairness to the Opera devotees, Opera showed us how the web experienced could be enhanced by better organization and streamlining, but again, unfortunately, Opera failed to gain any market share in 2008. And, NO, Opera is not the fastest browser any more. Not since Safari 3.0. In my own tests and every other test on record, Safari 3/Mac wins over Opera on any OS. Chrome 1.0 and Firefox 3.1 beat it, now too.)

And The Winner of the Browser Wars is…
Three New Safari 3.0 Tricks Are Producing Leopard Lust
Browser Market Share

We also saw some new special-purpose browsers come on the scene. Some of these were introduced in 2007 or earlier, but most people didn’t take notice until late 2008. Some special-purpose browsers to note:
Flock (for social networking)
Songbird (for discovering and listening to music)
Blackbird (for African Americans)
Gloss (for women)

Notably absent from this discussion is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. What did it have to prove? Hm. I’d have to say that IE proved that the majority of users — the common consumers and stagnant corporations — don’t know what is good for them, they’ll use whatever you give them, and you can repeatedly abuse them without fear of too much retribution.

Microsoft is working on IE 8 and expects it to be ready some time in 2009. This is the second time since 2000 that Microsoft resuscitated the IE team from near death, both times to answer to the threat of Firefox. And in both times, they plan to do just enough work so that users won’t rush over to Firefox. Of course, early previews show that it will again be lagging behind the other browsers in every way (features, capabilities, and speed). More importantly, will attract almost no attention because nobody will care about an upgraded bottom-of-the-line browsing experience. But, of course, the majority of users will probably use IE 8 because it will just appear on their machine one day after an automatic software update.

The arrival of IE 8 will be especially ho-hum because all eyes will be focused on the hot news for 2009: the arrival of the next-generation Operating Systems.

2009: The Year of the OS Wars

OK. Enough of 2008. This Keep reading and you’ll soon see that there are many parallels from the browser space to the OS space. And much of what motivated the browser developers to charge ahead is also causing ripples in the fabric of the entire personal computing universe.

History Repeats Itself #1: Speed is King

It’s no secret that Apple has gotten Microsoft’s attention lately. The market share of their Mac OS has neared 10% worldwide. It is significantly higher than 10% in the consumer sector (again, as with Firefox, this can be measured by observing weekend and evening browsing statistics). Apple seized the opportunity to avenge itself when Microsoft blundered with Vista in both the technical and marketing arenas. It’s no surprise, then, that when Apple announced that it’s new OS, “Snow Leopard”, will arrive in early 2009, Microsoft decided to shorten its timeline. “Windows 7″ is now slated for release some time in 2009, as well.

“Get a Mac” Ads

Like Safari, Snow Leopard will introduce its user into a new realm where tasks once thought impossibly slow are now feasible — or even fast! Apple’s engineers will accomplish this by tapping into the most under-utilized chip in almost every machine: the Graphics Processing Unit. On most recently built machines, especially the latest Macs, the GPU hardly breaks a sweat when rendering the graphics necessary for browsing the web or reading emails. It typically sits nearly idle until needed by a graphics-intesive task like watching full-screen video or playing a video game.

Many GPUs are capable of handling hundreds of simultaneous tasks. This is exactly what your machine needs for handling video and photography. Scientists are even starting to see the light: right now, astrophysicist are proving Einstein’s Theory of Relativity on a matrix of Playstation 3’s!

Playstation 3 Supercomputer

In addition, Snow Leopard promises to provide a 10% to 15% speed boost on everyday tasks without even touching the GPU. This will allow the Mac OS to provide an even richer, smoother experience than ever before. And if the Mac has a compatible GPU (this includes almost all Macs manufactured after Jan 2008 and some in 2007), certain tasks will see a 800% increase in performance — or more! Tasks that seem painfully slow now, such as creating slideshows, editing family videos, or browsing huge photo libraries, will be lightning fast.

History Repeats Itself #2: Open Source is a Viable Competitor

So what about Linux? Ubuntu (the Linux for the rest of us?) has certainly come of age. It’s a very capable operating system. It’s flexible and customizable, much like Firefox, and it has plenty of third-party software for consumers, including an iTunes alternative (Songbird) and a complete and compatible office suite (OpenOffice.org). But it hasn’t made a dent in the Windows stronghold.

Ubuntu
OpenOffice.org

The same was true of Mozilla’s Firefox. It wasn’t making a dent in Internet Explorer’s dominant position, despite being safer, faster, customizable, and much more pleasant to use. But Mozilla got a break. It got a sponsor: Google. Can Ubuntu get a sponsor? Maybe. And some people think it may be Google!

For some reason, Google has been hiding information about the operating system on 1/3 of its personal computers. Some have surmised that it’s because Google is creating it’s own Internet-oriented operating system. If this is true, it could further push Ubuntu into obscurity. On the other hand, some people believe that Google is only developing a meta-OS: an operating system that runs on top of your existing operating system and making it easier to find and consume online software and services. If this is true, then it could help Ubuntu by making the OS choice moot.

Does Google Have a Secret OS?

There’s also a chance that Google is using Ubuntu as the basis for it’s OS (similar to how the special purpose browsers, such as Flock and Songbird, use Mozilla’s engine underneath), but I find this very unlikely. Google seems to have taken more interest in Solaris. Besides, they have a track record of choosing technology solely on technical merits. They forked Chrome from the more modern Webkit (the engine inside Safari) rather than use the popular Gecko engine from their long-time partner Mozilla. They purchased the then-unknown Android, rather than license the most popular (but barely capable) mobile OS, Symbian. Just because Ubuntu is the most popular Linux-based consumer OS does not mean it’s on the short list even if it is a technically sound OS.

If Google is building an Internet-oriented meta-OS, it is not the only one. Dell and HP are rumored to be testing Linux-based OSes. These will also focus on online applications and services. In addition, several entrepreneurs have responded to the sudden popularity of Netbooks, which due to their low computing power, rely heavily on online services. Jolicloud (bad name, I know) and Eeebuntu even take it one step further by presenting an iPhone-like experience with a home page consisting of large square icons. We’ll see a few more of these special-purpose OSes in the coming year.

Don’t expect to see a “Grrls Only” OS or one aimed at music lovers, though, in 2009. It could be a year or two before those come along. (Although I wouldn’t put it past the French to create their own Euro-Linux sometime soon.) Again, expect Apple to burst onto the scene with a new Netbook-like offering in 2009.

Netbook (wikipedia)
Netvibes Founder Building iPhone-Like Operating System For Netbooks
Eeebuntu

History Repeats Itself #3: Microsoft Plays Catch-up

Meanwhile, up in Redmond, Microsoft scrambles to complete the next version of Windows: Windows 7. So what can we expect in Windows 7? Well, hopefully, Microsoft has finally made up their mind because it’s getting awfully late. They’ve already changed the name twice and have changed the proposed feature set on several occasions. As of today’s date, here’s the list. (Mac and Linux users: try to resist slapping your head and exclaiming “their copying us again!”)

Multi-touch*
Speech*
Handwriting recognition
Virtual hard disks*
Multi-core support*
Improved boot performance*
Kernel improvements*
Support for multiple, heterogeneous video cards
Gadgets*
Taskbar improvements (that are incredibly similar to the Mac’s Dock)*
Improved Calculator*
Home Networking*

The asterisks mark features that the Mac OS already has (or will be available in Snow Leopard). Linux has many of these, too. So, apparently, Windows 7 will yet again be a catch-up release. So fret not Windows users! As long as you can figure out the complicated Windows 7 pricing (which apparently will be even more confusing than Vista since several components will now be sold separately), you will get to enjoy a similar experience to your Mac and Linux brethren.

Of course, Mac and Linux users will be onto bigger and better things by the time Microsoft has the kinks worked out.

No Big Surprises on Your Phone

I wish I had something big to say about mobile OSes, but I don’t. Not that there won’t be a war raging. It’s already started. However, don’t expect any major new releases or shifts in power in 2009. The iPhone OS will keep its lead and will get the most visibility. Android will appear on a half-dozen new phones, but will still be the second-favorite mobile OS overall. Blackberry’s OS will continue to be the fave of business-oriented email junkies. Symbian will continue to be the least-liked, but most pervasive mobile OS on low-end phones. And, finally, Palm OS and Windows Mobile will see upgrades, but will be so ho-hum, that even advocates won’t have much good to say about them.

No, the big news in phones will be about attrition, unfortunately. I expect that either Palm or Motorola — or both — will drop out of the race.

In a year, we’ll look back and see if I had the faintest notion about what 2009 will bring. But if I am right, remember, you heard it here…