Why falling Flash prices threaten Microsoft, Mar 06, 2008

It seems that the £200 ultraportable Asus Eee PC can do no wrong. The size of a paperback, weighing less than a kilogram, with built-in Wi-Fi and using Flash memory instead of a hard drive for storage, the Eee PC has been winning positive comments not just from hyperventilating hardware reviewers, but also from ordinary people who have actually bought it.

Think of it as the biggest Linux swap partition in the world, since the whole system is running on Debian Linux. The genome project uses open source software as much as possible, and one of its major databases is run on MySQL, although others rely on Oracle.

An industry giant could drive support for Ogg, but why would they bother? What's the profit margin on free?

Dell's latest launch has really taken off. Unfortunately for Dell's crumbling profitability, it's a website called IdeaStorm, not a new PC. IdeaStorm is designed to get ideas and feedback from Dell users, and the mechanism is much the same as Digg: people make suggestions and everybody votes for the ones they like best.

I want to get a new PC, whilst if possible avoiding "lock in" to suppliers of hardware or software. I was thinking of a Linux system, but I have some DOS and Windows programs I'd like to retain, and I'm too short of time and brainpower to become technically involved.

The rest of the open source world will either react with hostility or try to do similar deals with Microsoft - or both.

Microsoft's latest rebuff to the European commission's monopoly ruling threatens values at the heart of democracy, critics say.

In my case, for example, I have not used a Windows machine for any serious purpose since 1999. And in those six years, I have never had a computer virus, trojan or worm. Not a single one.

Computer fraud has long since moved on from the activities of young geeks anxious to prove their coding virility. Today, criminal gangs are moving in, lured by the ability to rob a bank without leaving their living rooms.

Here's a cheap trick to play on an audience - especially one drawn from the business community. Ask them how many use Microsoft software. Virtually every hand in the room will go up. How many use Apple Macs? One or two - at most. How many use Linux? If the audience is drawn from corporate suits, no hands will show. Now comes the punchline: who uses Google? A forest of hands appears. 'Ah,' you say, 'that's very interesting, because it means you're all Linux users.' Stunned looks all round.

The European commission is preparing to fine Microsoft a record-breaking €497m (£333m) for abusing its dominance of the personal computer software market.

Representatives of national competition authorities from the 15 European Union governments took less than an hour yesterday to approve the proposed penalty put forward by the EU competition commissioner, Mario Monti. The meeting had been scheduled to last all day.

The penalty was far higher than had been expected. The commission has the power to levy a fine equal to up to 10% of sales, which would in Microsoft's case mean a fine of $3.5bn (£1.9bn), but penalties rarely reach the 10% limit.

The National Health Service, Britain's biggest employer, is considering ditching Microsoft software after a row over mounting licensing costs.

Richard Granger, NHS IT director, has ordered a trial of a Linux-based system from Sun Microsystems as part of a £2.3 billion computer modernisation plan. The plan could see Java Desktop software rolled out across the NHS's 1 million staff and 800,000 computers to replace Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office suite of programmes.

As our society becomes ever more dependent on information technology, the gulf between those who understand computers and those who don't will get wider and wider. In 50 years, perhaps much less, the ability to read and write code will be as essential for professionals of every stripe as the ability to read and write a human language is today. If your children's children can't speak the language of the machines, they will have to get a manual job - if there are any left.

This is yet another reason why Windows is such a dangerous commodity. It lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.