Eric Knorr

Dell XPS 13Lately I've been changing things up a bit. For several months I used a little Lenovo ThinkPad X220 running Windows 7 and had a great experience -- it felt rock solid and responsive, with fantastic battery life. Then I switched to a MacBook Pro, and now that I've gotten used to it, I actually find it more or less a wash between the two (sorry, Apple fanboys).

So it was with considerable excitement that I decided to take my first Ultrabook, the Dell XPS 13, for a spin. As you know, Ultrabooks are the Wintel world's answer to the MacBook Air. But there are no hard-and-fast specs for what an Ultrabook should be other than thin and light and cool-looking, so each manufacturer has its own interpretation.

Now that it turns out our smartphones have been spying on us, it's easy to imagine the possibilities. Think big! And by big, I mean big data.

Just imagine dumping all that near real-time smartphone log data on app usage, buying habits, and physical location -- daily commutes, lunch spots, hotel room trysts -- into a gargantuan Hadoop hopper. Add a generous helping of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Amazon clickstreams. Process vigorously. What do you get?

As the market reacts to the S&P downgrade of the U.S. credit rating (more help from the folks who gave a AAA rating to toxic mortgage-backed securities -- thanks, guys), the entire world is holding its breath at the prospect of a double dip.

So far, the tech sector has escaped the worst privations of the Great Recession. It's the polar opposite of the dot-com bust a decade ago; instead of leading the plunge, tech has been doing considerably better than the economy as a whole.

The old-fashioned PC paradigm has run out of gas. Conventional Windows systems are too hard to manage and pose too much of a security risk -- and sales are declining. For lack of a better alternative, you may need to live with Windows for the foreseeable future. But now that the sins of Vista and the antiquarian vulnerabilities of Windows XP have been corrected by Windows 7, what could possibly induce you to upgrade to Windows 8?

The answer may lie in the latest build of Windows 8, where Hyper-V 3.0 can be found in Control Panel (see Peter Bruzzese's post "Windows 8 and Hyper-V 3.0: Revolutionary benefits await admins"). Hyper-V is Microsoft's Type 1 hypervisor -- that is, a virtualization layer that runs on bare metal instead of as a guest of the operating system. Until now, Hyper-V has been available only as part of Windows Server. Making it the foundation underneath the next desktop version of Windows changes everything.

I've been eagerly anticipating the Android-based Motorola Atrix ever since it was announced at CES. Now that it's here, I have to say -- despite some rough edges -- Motorola seems to have pulled it off: This is the most innovative device I've seen in a very long time.

It's more innovative than even the iPad. The basic idea for the iPad (not to mention failed previous attempts at tablets, mostly by Microsoft) has been floating around since the 1980s. The iPad's triumph was in Apple's uncanny ability to sync fresh hardware capabilities with superb software and industrial design, as last week's iPad 2 intro reminded us.

I've been eagerly anticipating the Android-based Motorola Atrix ever since it was announced at CES. Now that it's here, I have to say -- despite some rough edges -- Motorola seems to have pulled it off: This is the most innovative device I've seen in a very long time.

It's more innovative than even the iPad. The basic idea for the iPad (not to mention failed previous attempts at tablets, mostly by Microsoft) has been floating around since the 1980s. The iPad's triumph was in Apple's uncanny ability to sync fresh hardware capabilities with superb software and industrial design, as last week's iPad 2 intro reminded us.

Everyone knows the Windows desktop monolith is breaking into pieces. Yes, Microsoft is still making money, mainly from the big rollover to Windows 7 -- but where does Redmond go from here? And which alternatives are truly viable?

This is the year when we'll start to find out. New, overlapping client computing paradigms are popping up all over the place. The overriding theme -- even from Microsoft -- is that whatever personal computing device you use, desktop or mobile, serves only as a temporary access point for data, preferences, and applications. The permanent home for your computing life, to the degree that it exists, will be on a server in the cloud or in your own data center.

Chris Anderson is a brilliant man. Here at InfoWorld, we are devotees of his Long Tail theory, which posits that unpopular content is just as valuable as popular content. That just seems to work incredibly well for us. As for his endorsement of all things "free" -- well, are you paying to read this?

Now comes Anderson's revelation that the Web is dead. As with any Chris Anderson pronouncement, it took me a while to wrap my head around such enormous thoughts. When I finally understood, I felt I was party to a great scientific discovery.

Everyone loves to hate an archvillain. In the tech industry, it has been clear for some time now that Microsoft is no longer up to the role -- you can't have an archvillian that keeps spouting empty threats -- so auditions have opened for a successor. Could it be Apple? Antennagate and those restictive App Store policies make its candidacy plausible. Google? Equivocation on the China issue and flirtation with deals that damage Net neutrality show promise. Facebook? Sure, but it's not exactly a tech goliath.

Then along comes Oracle. By suing Google over Android's supposed infringement on Java patents, Oracle has confirmed the worst fears of those who questioned its stewardship of Java. In one bold stroke, the company has damaged the most promising alternative to the iPhone, hastened Java's slide into legacy-hood, and thumbed its nose at the open source community -- both by enforcing Java patents and, in a flourish worthy of The Joker, deep-sixing OpenSolaris on the same day. (MySQL customers, how are you feeling right about now?)

If you haven't noticed, Microsoft has done a pretty good job with its core products lately: Windows 7, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010 are all fine pieces of work. The Vista debacle seems like ancient history.

Unfortunately for Redmond, customers have been trying for years to escape the old desktop upgrade treadmill, which Microsoft still relies on for the bulk of its revenue. And while I believe the personalized desktop metaphor will persist for the foreseeable future, the argument for tying that user-customized environment to a particular desktop or laptop gets weaker every day.

Google's valuation now stands at $124 billion. How big is that? For reference, IBM is worth $173 billion. Once the big, friendly St. Bernard of tech companies, Google has turned into Godzilla overnight. And it's better positioned than Microsoft ($204 billion) to capitalize on the Web-centric future, from mobile to social networking to converged TV to cloud computing.

With the E.U. and the FTC breathing down its neck, Google must be careful to avoid pushing its domination of search and online advertising into monopoly territory (the recent $750 million Google acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising startup, seemed to barely squeak by). So what other opportunities for growth does Google see in the near term? The recent Google ad campaign to induce Office users to forget about upgrading to Office 2010 and adopt Google Docs should give you an indication.

Steve Jobs' 1700-word indictment of Flash is a classic piece of marketing guile. Several of his reasons for barring Flash from the iPhone and iPad hit the mark, from Flash's lack of respect for battery life to the "reliability, security, and performance" problems of many Flash apps.

But Jobs' hypocrisy shows through when he assails Flash as proprietary -- that takes some nerve -- and reiterates his assertion that HTML5 is a panacea that makes Flash unnecessary. He also says the lack of support for Flash video is no big deal because most videos on the Web, whether in a Flash player or not, use the popular H.264 video codec supported by his platform. Well, sure, H.264 videos will play if, like YouTube, you decide to write an iPhone app or, like the New York Times, you change your Website's video delivery technology.