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Component supply and software development problems delayed the launch of Acer’s netbook but demand appears to be strong, the company says

Component supply problems and software development delays caused Acer to delay the launch of its Aspire one netbook  by a month, leading it to revise down its shipment target for this year.

The world’s third-largest PC vendor now expects to ship 5 million to 6 million Aspire ones in 2008, down from a previous estimate of 5 million to 7 million, said Gianfranco Lanci, CEO of Acer, during a conference call.

[ For more on products in the hot mini-notebook category, check out our hands-on looks at Asus' Eee PC 901 and 1000, the Cloudbook Max netbook, Elitegroup's G10IL mini-laptop, MSI's Wind low-cost laptop, Giga-byte's M912X mini-laptop, and Acer's Aspire one. ]

“Originally, the plan was to ship by the end of May,” Lanci said. “We lost about one month for different reasons.”

Despite the product delay, Lanci remains bullish on prospects for the Aspire one. He said that demand appears to be strong for the product and that Acer is talking to 3G (third generation) mobile network operators to supply them with Aspire one laptops built to access the Internet via their networks.

Aspire one is among a new breed of mini-laptops  that weigh less than 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs), sport 7-inch to 10-inch LCD screens, carry long-lasting batteries and connect wirelessly to the Internet. They generally cost far less than the average notebook PC as well, between $199 and $599.

The market for netbooks was jump started by the Eee PC from Asustek Computer of Taiwan. Asustek has only forecast sales of five million Eee PCs this year, even though the company has had a six-month head start over Acer. Analysts say Acer’s size is its advantage over Asustek. Acer is active in all major markets and can launch products in multiple markets at the same time. Asustek isn’t as adept at such large-scale product launches yet.

Acer’s Lanci also allayed fears of a component shortage for netbooks or laptops. He said there are no visible component shortages right now, but that if Acer ships more than 6 million Aspire ones, there could be a problem. He declined to say what components might be in shortage.

Last year, a serious shortage of laptop batteries threatened shipments, and supplies have remained tight due to brisk growth in the overall laptop PC market.

PC vendors have also voiced concerns that Intel might not be able to supply enough Atom microprocessors for their netbooks, a fear Intel has answered by saying it is prepared to “hose” the chips out of its factories, if necessary. PC makers like the chips because they conserve battery life by running at low power levels, take up little space inside devices and give off little heat.

Lanci was asked if the delay in launching the Aspire one was caused by a delay in the Atom. He declined to respond.

Excluding the Aspire one, Acer expects to ship 25 million laptop PCs this year and as many as 30 million next year. Demand for laptop PCs remains brisk, Lanci said.

“We really don’t see any slowdown in demand,” he said.

Sun launches its entry into the RIA framework wars minus support for features such as 3-D vector graphics and streaming video.

Developers will be able to get their hands on a preview SDK (software development kit) for JavaFX  as of Thursday, marking Sun’s entry into the RIA (rich Internet application) framework wars.

“Our strategy with JavaFX is that we’re providing the presentation layer for Java,” said Param Singh, senior director of Java marketing. Over time, JavaFX will enable programmers to develop applications that can be deployed across “multiple screens” — i.e. mobile devices, browsers, desktops and TVs — as well as reinvigorate existing Java programs with fresh front ends, according to Singh.

“In the enterprise, you will start getting the ability to take existing applications, add a rich client interface and then have the ability to deploy it on the Web or the desktop,” Singh said.

Among the SDK preview release’s features are the JavaFX compiler and runtime tools; 2-D graphic and media libraries; tutorials and documentation; the 6.1 version of the NetBeans IDE (integrated development environment) containing a JavaFX plug-in; and a tool code-named “Project Nile,” which allows the import of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files to JavaFX programs.

However, support for features such as 3-D vector graphics and streaming video will apparently have to wait until a future release, as Simon Brocklehurst, CEO of the U.K. software development firm Psynixis, noted in a blog post.

The SDK has two sets of APIs (application programming interfaces), according to Singh. One is a common set, intended for building applications that run across platforms, and the other is for the desktop. However, the mobile runtime won’t be out until early 2009. The TV runtime is scheduled to ship later in 2009, according to Sun’s site.

Sun contends that developers can at least begin building and prototyping applications now with the common APIs.

As it progresses, JavaFX will bump elbows with a host of competing RIA frameworks for the hearts and minds of developers. Some observers have questioned whether Sun is too far behind its competitors, which include Microsoft and Adobe.

“Many Java developers have been using [Adobe's] Flex of late,” said Michael Coté, an analyst with Redmonk. “That said, the Java community is very patient with stuff like this. Once JavaFX and related tools [are in general release], that’ll be the test of the desire for the overall Java community. I don’t think you can write it off just yet.”

Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond said the reality is mixed.

Flex has been out for a while, and the company has had time to polish it, he noted. Meanwhile, Microsoft has made more modest strides with its Silverlight platform. “So, yeah, [Sun is] maybe a year behind Microsoft,” he said. “But the feeling I get is that it’s still early. Development shops haven’t committed to a single platform at this point, so from that standpoint it’s not too late.”

“The nice thing is [that Sun has] got a huge body of [Java] developers to target,” he noted. “From a technology perspective, clearly they are well-positioned. They have to execute.”

Redesign might give Live.com’s home page more aesthetic appeal, but it doesn’t address the problem of Microsoft’s confusing online branding.

A redesign of the Live.com home page may not be quite what analysts had in mind last week when they asked Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about how the software giant plans to streamline its online presence .

Starting Wednesday, visitors in the U.S. are being shown a new Live.com page — although they may not notice it’s new. The page looks mostly the same as before, except it now features a background photo that apparently will change periodically.

The photo features a few blurry squares that show up when a mouse passes over them. If the user hovers for an extra second, a box pops up with a message that, when clicked, brings them to a page with additional information, including maps and photos.

The current photo features a man on a long boat on an African river. The information squares point to photos of animals that live in Botswana and other facts about the country’s natural features.

The design was well-received among customers trialing it last month, according to a blog post by Chris Rayner, senior product manager, and Zach Gutt, senior program manager, both of Microsoft’s Live search user experience team.

Like the previous design, the page predominantly features the search bar and lets users choose to search images and videos. Links point to Web pages for Live maps, news and other Microsoft offerings.

“We think the new design is a great start, but there’s more to come, with lots of interesting directions that we’ll be exploring in our next releases of the home page,” the employees wrote on the blog.

Analysts who asked Ballmer last week how the company might fix its confusing online branding to make it easier for users to find Microsoft’s online services might be relieved to hear that there are more changes to come. Microsoft maintains both the MSN and Live online brands, and in some cases the same online services carry both names.

Ballmer said Microsoft has been working on a way to combine its online services under a single Web page. However, the new Live.com page includes links to MSN.com and the Windows Live home page, so the current redesign hasn’t addressed that problem.

Indeed, while the pictures might give the Live.com home page more aesthetic appeal, Microsoft is unlikely to gain ground against Google in online search and advertising until it clarifies its online services. In search, Google continues to hold a daunting lead over Microsoft, which runs a distant third even to Yahoo, the company Microsoft failed to acquire  after months of negotiations.

Oracle plans to provide training content modules for all its application products using GKS tools.

Oracle has bought Global Knowledge Software, a developer of enterprise software training automation tools, the companies said Thursday.

Global Knowledge Software (GKS) develops tools for building self-service training courses for enterprise software vendors including Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP. Its former parent, Global Knowledge, sells IT and business training services.

Such training tools for enterprise employees are increasingly necessary as more and more business functions are automated and turned into self-service applications.

Oracle, a long-standing GKS customer, used the company’s tools to build its Oracle User Productivity Kit as a complement to its Oracle Tutor software. It plans to provide training content modules for all its application products using GKS tools, it said.

GKS also supplies development tools to some of Oracle’s competitors, including SAP and Microsoft.

Oracle said it will continue to support customers that use GKS tools to train on non-Oracle applications, and hopes to expand this part of the business. Customers building their databases of training materials on database engines other than Oracle’s, such as MySQL, will also continue to receive support.

The companies hope to close the deal in the third quarter. They did not disclose financial details.

Around 130 GKS employees will join Oracle as a result of the deal.

With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system and the growing prevalence of virtualization technologies, there likely will be a day when the Windows client OS as it has been developed for the past 20-odd years becomes obsolete.

According to published reports, Microsoft Corp. seems to be preparing for that day with an incubation project codenamed Midori, which seeks to create a componentized, non-Windows OS that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived.

Although Microsoft won’t comment publicly on what Midori is, the company has confirmed that it exists. Several reports — the most comprehensive to date published on Tuesday by Software Development Times — have gone much further than that.

That report paints Midori as an Internet-centric OS, based on the idea of connected systems, that largely eliminates the dependencies between local applications and the hardware they run on that exist with a typical operating system today.

The report claims Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system project that creates “software-isolated processes” to reduce the dependencies between individual applications, and between the applications and the OS itself.

With the current ability to run an operating system, applications and even an entire PC desktop in a virtual container using a hypervisor, there is less and less need to have the OS and applications be installed natively on a PC, said Brian Madden, an independent technology analyst.

“Why do you need it?” he said. “Now we have hypervisors everywhere.”

Madden suggested that a future operating system could actually be a hypervisor itself, with virtual containers of applications running on top of it that can be transferred easily to other devices because they don’t have client-side dependencies to each other.

And while he has no information about Midori beyond the published reports, he said descriptions of it as an Internet-centric system that provides an overall “connectedness” between applications and devices makes sense for the future of cloud computing and on-demand services. Microsoft likely recognizes the need for this, even if the actual technology is still five or more years out, Madden said.

“They’re preparing for the day when people realize we don’t need Windows anymore,” and thinking about what the company has to do to remain relevant, he said.

Indeed, Microsoft has been emphasizing its virtualization strategy, based on its new Hyper-V hypervisor. The company also is moving full steam ahead with plans to virtualize applications and the desktop operating system as well.

Using virtualization in these scenarios would eliminate the problems with application compatibility that are still giving headaches to Windows Vista users, and that have made the OS a liability rather than a boon for some Windows power users and enterprise customers.

If Midori is close to what people think it is, it will represent a “major paradigm shift” for Windows users and be no easy task for Microsoft to pull off, said Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at the consulting firm Twentysix New York.

Brust said the challenges faced by Microsoft on a technology like Midori would include technical complexities as well as the “sobering compromises” that must be made when a product moves from being a research project into commercialization. “I would expect those in abundance with something of this scope and import,” he added.

Although he hasn’t been briefed by Microsoft on Midori, Brust said the idea makes sense because the company needs to drastically update Windows to stay current with new business models and computing approaches — particularly to help it compete against Google Inc. on the Web.

“Breaking with the legacy of a product that first shipped 23 years ago seems wholly necessary in terms of keeping the product manageable and in sync with computing’s state of the art,” Brust said. “If Midori isn’t real, then I imagine something of this nature still must be in the works. It’s absolutely as necessary, if not more so, to Microsoft’s survival as their initiatives around Internet advertising, search and cloud computing offerings.”

Symantec’s latest iteration of NIS tries to do its job without overloading your system — and it seems to be succeeding.
Security software customers are speaking with their feet: They want security updates and other security interruptions out of their faces, and they won’t hesitate to dump their security suites because of performance drag — whether or not it’s actually the security software that’s to blame.

That’s why Symantec is working on the next iteration of Norton Internet Security, NIS 2009, with the mantra of what it’s calling Zero Impact Performance: “Security so light and fast you never even know it’s there — until you need it.”

We’re talking about more than 300 major overhauls that the company asserts will affect almost every aspect of the security suite, from scanning engines to user interface. Symantec says that NIS 2009, released to public beta on July 14 and due to ship in the fall, will include the industry’s fastest protection updates, half the memory usage of its next-most-memory-stingy competitor (Bit Defender IS 08) and a blink-of-an-eye install time of one minute.

NIS 2009’s simplified interface.
Click to view larger image.

Interestingly, Symantec says that underpowered systems with pre-existing performance problems are the root cause of the majority of complaints it receives in its support center every month. A Symantec representative stated that of some 1 million people who contact Norton technical support monthly, 40% are running PCs with 512MB or less of RAM and 75% memory utilization, and another 31% are running with 1GB of RAM and 57% memory utilization.

So in order to test Symantec’s Zero Impact Performance promise, the system I chose to run the beta on was a sputtering lemon — an older, underpowered Windows XP machine equipped with a 3.06-GHz Pentium 4 CPU and 480-MHz RAM that had performance problems.

The results? After having suffered far too long under the tyranny of NIS 2008’s constant intrusions and the near-comatose reaction time of an outdated system, I found that the beta actually delivered the goods.

Ready, set, go

I installed the NIS 2009 beta and found the security suite already clocking in at impressive speeds. The install time has vastly improved over that of NIS 2008, which takes 30 minutes to install. It took me between three to four minutes, which doesn’t quite hit Symantec’s claimed one-minute install, but I’m not going to quibble over two or three minutes with such a quantum leap in install speed.

The process itself was painless except for a script-loading error, which didn’t interfere with the beta install. The initial, full-system scan took 2 hours, 9 minutes, picking up only two tracking cookies out of 195,176 items scanned.

NIS 2009’s user interface has been overhauled into a sharp, high-contrast and semitransparent screen stripped down to the bare essentials of what most users want to see: computer stats, network stats and a way to quickly access all of the user’s log-in data (featuring a link to a new Identity Safe technology that will lift the hassle of passwords and log-ins off of users’ shoulders).

Getting performance up to speed

Regardless of whether NIS deserves it, customers are in fact blaming security suites for sluggish performance. In fact, Symantec has been citing an August 2007 NPD Group market study of customers who switched security suites. It found that of those who switched, 39% blamed performance, 28% blamed functionality, and only 23% pointed to price.

In fact, in NIS 2009, Symantec is covering its butt when it comes to getting blamed for performance drag. Instead of just assuming that your security suite is causing performance degradation, you should be able to check NIS 2009’s version of the Task Manager’s CPU Meter, which should spell out whether Norton or other system components are to blame.

I say “should” because I couldn’t find this feature, even though other reviewers have cited it as being on the main home screen. Ultimately, a support technician told me that the CPU usage meter is found only in the NIS 2009 .61 build but is missing from the later .69 build that I tested. When the final product ships, you should be able to find the meter under Settings –> Auto Protect –> Configure –> Miscellaneous.

So I couldn’t drill down into CPU Meter, but I’m looking forward to seeing it in the final product. I question why Symantec is so thoroughly hiding it away from easy access, however. After all, if security companies are tired of being blamed for poor CPU performance, shouldn’t a don’t-blame-me feature be front and center?

Makers of Cuil tool claim to have larger Web index than any other search engine

While there has never been a shortage of would-be “Google-killers” — upstarts aiming to beat the search giant at its own game — few have generated fanfare like Cuil Inc. The start-up company’s founders say that their search engine, also called Cuil (pronounced cool), offers an index that’s three times larger than that of any other search engine.

Perhaps in anticipation of today’s launch, Google Inc. on Friday boasted that it has tracked more than 1 trillion URLs on the Web. And the market leader’s position was bolstered a bit today because the Cuil site was unavailable for some periods of time throughout the day.

Nonetheless, Cuil’s reputation benefits from the backgrounds of those who launched the start-up firm. Anna Patterson, Cuil’s president and chief operating officer, worked as an architect of Google’s search index and led that company’s Web page ranking team. Her co-founder and husband, Tom Costello, who is Cuil’s CEO, researched and developed search engine technology at Stanford and IBM.

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A startup founded by engineers from Google Inc. and other tech giants is launching a search engine that claims to cover three times as many Web pages as Google.

The startup, Cuil Inc., plans to launch its product Monday and aims to deliver better results than other major search engines by searching across more Web pages and studying them more accurately. The site’s results page resembles an online magazine — a different look and feel from search juggernaut Google’s.

Cuil

A Web-screen view from Cuil, whose results page offers a different look and feel from Google’s.

“You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president, and one of the engineers who helped build Google’s search index. “You have to be an alternative and bigger.”

Cuil, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is the most recent in a long string of search-engine startups to try to take on Google in an industry that has been difficult for even giants like Microsoft Corp. to crack.

Many have tried to compete by focusing on particular areas, such as searching images or allowing users to review and edit results. Many of these Google challengers have crumbled after failing to build enough scale to support their growth through advertising; a few others have been acquired by larger players.

Cuil has raised $33 million from venture-capital investors and has a deep bench of career search engineers, including Ms. Patterson and her co-founder and husband, Tom Costello. Mr. Costello built search technology for International Business Machines Corp. and was on the research faculty at Stanford University.

Greg Sterling, an Internet analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence, said that bench, along with the fact that the company has already built such a large search engine from scratch, bodes well for its ability to compete in the long term. But like all new search entrants, the company must still find a way to generate enough advertising revenue to fund the hefty infrastructure and technology costs of scaling a search engine, he warned. “It won’t be clear at least for a year or so whether they can break into the top group,” he said.

Ms. Patterson said other search startups have failed because they haven’t found a way to search more Web pages than Google.

Cuil, which claims to be able to search for results across 120 billion Web pages compared with across Google’s estimated 40 billion, says it has solved that problem. Ms. Patterson said it has developed a faster and better way to index Web pages that relies on fewer machines.

In addition to looking at the popularity of a Web page, Cuil also analyzes the concepts on the page and their relationships — grouping similar results under different menus. A Cuil search for “Bruce Springsteen,” for example, pulls up a section for results on the artist and a section for results pertaining to tickets.

A search on Google for “Bruce Springsteen” pulls up similar results — including the same homepage and some fan pages — but displays them in one long list of links. Google doesn’t comment on how many Web pages it searches, but a company spokeswoman said the search giant welcomes “competition that stimulates innovation and provides users with more choice.”

Cuil eventually plans to make money through advertising, although the service won’t display any ads at launch. Ms. Patterson said the company hasn’t decided whether to sell advertising itself or whether to partner with a third party. It has developed various mock-ups that allow users to collapse ads or to scroll through them, she said.

Cuil said it won’t collect personal information about its users, such as the addresses of their computers and their individual search histories — although it does track the terms people search for overall. While all major search engines have taken steps to cut back on the time they store data related to individual searchers and to make the data more anonymous, Ms. Patterson said Cuil can stop collecting information about individuals’ behavior altogether because its algorithms rely more heavily on analyzing the content of a particular Web page than on the popularity of the page.

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com