[Editor: We are currently going back over the news of last week - you may remember we had a bit of technical hitch then]

Apparently its going to be powerful, familiar, reliable (and a whole bunch of other woffle words):

Built on Windows 7, Windows Embedded “Quebec” will offer developers a powerful, familiar and reliable experience that will include the following benefits:

. Rich user experience. The latest Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation tools deliver the next generation of media experiences and rich Internet applications for devices.

. Enhanced security and control. Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption and key management to protect data on embedded devices provide greater security. In addition, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 will provide defense from malicious Web sites and keep data private with improved security and InPrivate Browsing.

. Enhanced stability and improved performance. The new platform will offer enhanced stability and improved performance with investment in multicore architecture, including 64-bit processor support.

. Extended Web capabilities to the embedded device. Customers will have the ability to enable Web capabilities to their devices with Internet Explorer 8 accelerators and Windows Web services, benefitting from powerful, efficient Web applications, including offline capabilities.

Source: Microsoft PressPass

This is actually pretty exciting. Seeing Silverlight and WPF getting first point attention in the press release is pretty telling. If you’ve been unsure about Silverlight, then wake up – it’s the future.

And yes, Windows powered coffee machines are coming.

As we recently posted, the .NET Micro Framework marketing hacks have their Dare to Dream Different challenge, and now the Windows Embedded team, not to be outdone, have their own challenge. At least they’ve been sensible enough to admit it is a contest.

It’s call the Sparks will Fly 2009 Challenge, and it involves

1. Submitting a 3 page paper with your idea
2. Building a working prototype (and providing a 3 minute video)
3. Demonstrating it (if one of the 3 finalists)

As usual there’s a stack of cash ($15K) and a trip to TechEd 2009 (which they seem to include in all their competitions these days since it makes to the total $50K prize value seems so much bigger!)

Yet another example of Microsoft trying to drum up interest in their products in entirely the wrong way. But this is just the beginning. Expect more and more ‘challenges’ from Microsoft in the coming months as it tries desperately to get the cool kids involved. Good luck with that one.

Entries are taken from now until January 9, 2009. Full details on the site.

Sure, it’s great when Microsoft gets good results, but this kind of fluff, complete with lame puns (‘the automotive industry is at a cross road’) is a little disconcerting. Leave it for the press releases please.

On the good side, it’s great to see that Microsoft is firmly pushing benchmarks in the high performance computing (HPC) space.

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As Joseph Tartakoff updates us, the discussion has now moved to whether Windows Update is a good medium to send out notifications to potential class members. This has got to be one of the biggest fucking jokes in a long time.

But don’t worry this joke has a lot of mileage left. The legal bill for this will be in the tens of millions and at the end no one will come out at all happy. Microsoft will have learnt a costly lesson in being lax with their marketing – and keep in mind this was just silly little sticker on machines.

And if you’re having trouble getting to sleep at night, just take a few pages of the court filing to bed with you – this little number had us snoozing in no time.

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Brad Brooks, Vice President of Windows Consumer Product Marketing used the term ‘Apple tax’ when comparing a purchase of a Windows based machine with an Apple machine. Actually he blurred the line a bit – because he included a Mac running Windows in the ‘Windows based machine’ category. We’re going to exclude that configuration from our discussion below.

Of course, we know Microsoft isn’t allowed to say anything negative about its competitors, because that’s just. not. right. Apple on the other hand can put the boot in and it gets congratulated. It’s an old double standard that’s been well documented over the years.

So, knee-jerk criticism of Brad aside, is he actually right? And surely the answer is a resounding Yes! Using a Mac is always a more expensive process. Don’t get us wrong, there’s plenty to like about Apple products (we’ve used Macs ourselves over the years, and have enjoyed the experience), but don’t go trying to tell us its price or functionally comparable to a Windows setup.

One reason we don’t use a Mac is because it doesn’t run the software we like. Look around, everything is written for Windows XP or Vista. Just getting a half decent game on the Mac is difficult. Yes, we still have problems with some software on Windows 2008 and Vista 64bit, but to be fair, these aren’t aimed at the general consumer.

Brad has a good run down of the various extra costs associated with running a Mac environment, and it’s hard to fault.

The interview by Ina Fried is a great insight into Microsoft’s own perception of Vista in the market place.

Microsoft still dominates the desktop PC market, with something in the order of 90% of desktops (still!).

If Windows dominance diminishes it won’t be over to Apple.

Lately we’ve been hearing that this dominance is going to be  endangered by Cloud computing and the like. This argument has some weight. But that extends out to other vendors to.

Apple is not a huge threat to Windows. If Cloud computing is really a game changer, then it will affect Apple just as much.

Kit Ong blogged about the possibility that the so-called Windows Cloud operating system may in fact be called Windows Strata. By the time we got around to checking (we were too distracted watching the Microsoft stock price fall even lower) the Strata sessions had vanished from the PDC site agenda page.

Now, we’re not saying Strata isn’t the new name, but to us what’s more interesting is how a little update on the PDC site can lead to so much blogger activity (us included!).

We reckon if we were PDC organizers we’d be sneaking in little changes every few days just to build up more hype. Perhaps they’ll try a different name tomorrow.

The real question of course – that everyone is wondering – is how many visits did Kit* get to his site today, has his RSS count gone up significantly, and did his AdSense income take a jump to the Strata (<- Lame pun alert).

* We’re assume Kit is a guy but apologies if we’re wrong

Yeah, sorry about that.

But, our point remains (read the original post here): this is simply Microsoft listening to feedback and responding appropriately. They still get the thumbs up from us.

Just blame it on Jim Alchin we say. Oh hang on, that’s what they’re doing.

The Vista Capable case is a whole bunch of people complaining that the ‘Windows Vista Capable’ stickers that got stuck on piss-poor performing PCs were misleading, and that Microsoft was aware of the fact but pushed it along anyway.

Our view on it is this: if Microsoft did knowingly promote Vista on boxes that couldn’t really handle it, then they’re fucking idiots. Why make your operating system look shit? Surely you’d want to only have it running on grunty machines that made it look slick and superfast. If they didn’t knowingly promote it then they should have at least made a point of stopping it. We think they fucked up which ever way you look at it.

UPDATE: Oh, and in terms of keeping all the plaintiffs up to date on proceedings, Microsoft plans to contact them via Windows Updates. ROLF!

Unlike Mary-Jo, we don’t think this is confusing at all (to Vista, XP or any other users).

Basically, Microsoft listened to its customer base and responded to feedback. There’s no reason to think this suggests Vista isn’t ready for prime time (as Mary-Jo alludes to) – rather it’s just that Vista isn’t appropriate for some customers at this point in time. Simple.

In a totally unrelated event Steve Ballmer was at the Churchill Club (in Silicon Valley) recently talking about his ‘red dog’ – Project Red Dog that is. Red Dog is basically EC2 for Windows, and is going to be given airtime at PDC in October (here’s Mary-Jo’s notes from April).

He also woffled on about Mobile devices, the threat of Google and how Apple is unlikely to increase market share in the personal computer space because they won’t license their software to others.

Steve rightly worries about Linux in the server space (Especially web servers) with Windows only having 40% of the share.

He has both a red dog and black one on his hands we suggest.

So, take this latest ‘analysis‘ with a grain of salt. In it Microsoft finds that (amazingly!) it aint cheaper to use Linux than it is to use Microsoft (at least over a 5 year time span). Skills shortage is the main reason attributed (p7) with Linux professionals earning 12.5% more than equivalently experienced Microsoft professionals. Mary-Jo has the rundown.

Of course the numbers only apply to large deployments, so don’t go thinking it impacts any home consumer environment.

When it comes to deploying large numbers of computers to emerging markets (ie poor countries who desperately need to be given access to the right tools for internet-izing their people) why you’d want to go for Linux anyway is beyond us, surely you’d want an operating system that has all the cool Aero graphic capabilities.