What’s the best way to tell the whole world that your competitors are actually gaining on you against the founding premise of your business? Start advertising that one service you’ve never had to advertise. Google did just that during Super Bowl XLIV, showing off not a phone nor even a new service, but merely an ad promoting Google Search.

Since Bing and Yahoo are effectively on the same side and Bing has been gaining marketshare against Google, this is an obvious sign that Google actually feels threatened by Bing.

Competition is good. Windows 7 arose out of competitive need, and we might now see two amazing search platforms arise out of a heated Google v. Bing war. I’m looking forward to it.

NVIDIA confirmed last night their intention to launch their Fermi-based GF100 graphics cards during Q1 2010 now that delays in the Fermi architecture have been settled. The board and others in the Fermi lineup will include DirectX 11 support while adding other features such as live raytracing to the mix.

The demo box was running the UNiGiNE benchmark, and while I didn’t have time to run through that benchmark last night, I will have time to run through it after this morning’s NVIDIA press conference in just under three hours.

Catch the video of GF100 after the break!

Watch in High Definition

ASUS (pronounced ah-soos, apparently) demonstrated four laptops at their press conference yesterday. Announced were

• the ASUS NX90 Bang&Olufsen concept (pictured).
• a new line of EeePCs designed by Karim Rashid.
• ASUS’ latest gaming laptop, the G73. It wasn’t branded as a Ferrari or Lamborghini this time.
• the U Series Bamboo Collection.

All of them had an unusual focus on aesthetics, with each focusing on some theme related to the target market. The G73 took on a stealth look, while the U Series focused on Bamboo (the explanation was that Bamboo grows back quickly, though the laptop isn’t exactly green in any other sense). The Karim Rashid EeePC and the Bang & Olufsen laptops are both designed for the sake of design. I’m not entirely certain how usable the dual trackpad design of the B&O concept is, but it does make for a clean design.

As for specs, the G73 and the NX90 are top-tier, with both allowing for the use of quad-core Core i7 processors. The G73 uses AMD’s Radeon 5870 for the GPU, while the Bang & Olufsen concept focuses on nvidia’s wares by using the GeForce GT 335M. The Bamboo collection can run with either Core i7 or Core i5 processors, while the EeePC sticks to the latest generation Intel Atom.

Videos of the NX90, the EeePCs, and the U Series are after the break. I’m still working on the G73.

After the Chevy Volt and OnStar mobile app demonstration by the guys of GM, I got some quick time with Walt Dorfstatter, president of GM’s remote assistance subsidiary OnStar. There were only three questions I had for Walt since the Chevy Volt, no matter how spectacular a vehicle it has shown itself to be thus far, isn’t actually a part of what winJade’s focus. The questions focused on possible future platforms for the app (Windows Mobile was not mentioned while the iPhone was), the inspiration for creating a mobile app for the sake of controlling OnStar in the first place. and whether applications such as these could boost subscriptions.

Check it out after the break!

Starting today, I’ll be at the Consumer Electronics show looking for new Microsoft-related happenings. This means that I’ll be skipping a lot of the new TV-related news (3D TV, basically) and most other home entertainment bits. Most of what I catch will either be with computers or Microsoft-based gadgetry.

That said, if you’re looking for broad CES coverage beyond video interviews and reviews, be sure to watch Neowin’s dedicated CES-related postings.

Enjoy the show!

My thanks goes, as noted before, to Microsoft for providing the licenses to give away. Best of luck to you all!

Last Update: the final drawing has been completed. Congratulations to @wizardcm for winning the last license! I’ll strive to find more to give away from CES.

Windows 7 launched on October 22nd to mass fanfare, and a good friend of mine at the event thought it would be fantastic to spread the Windows 7 spirit. In addition to assisting with Mary Jo’s Windows 7 afterparty in NYC (giveaway video here), he passed a few licenses my way to give away on winJade, so here it goes.

I’ve got three Windows 7 Ultimate licenses to give away (pictured above), and they’ll be given away as follows:

• The first on Christmas Day (25th). @yertosaurus nabbed this one!
• The second on December 28. @migue333 won this license!
• The last on December 31. @wizardcm got this last license!

If you want one, dive in to find out what you need to do. It’s pretty simple.

There are three steps for you to take part:

1. Tell us what you think is the best new feature in Windows 7. You can expand on this with whatever else you want, such as what you wished made it into Windows 7 prior to RTM or what you hope ends up in Windows 8. Remember to comment with a valid email address, and a valid twitter URL (twitter.com/yourtwittername) as the URL in your comment. Otherwise, I’ve got no way of getting in touch with you if you’ve won. If your comment doesn’t immediately appear, don’t fret; I need to approve comments before they show up, but I’ll still see your comment either way.
2. Follow @eganist on Twitter. Otherwise, you’ll have no real way of knowing whether or not you won, which would truly suck if you happened to be one of the ones to win..
3. Retweet This. Or, if you’d prefer using your own client, just tweet “RT @eganist Win 1 of 3 #Windows7 Ultimate licenses for Christmas, New Years’ from #winJade: http://is.gd/5v9lu” without quotes.

I need at least 100 qualifying retweets by 11:50 AM Eastern Time on Christmas Day for this giveaway to go ahead, so be sure to enter!

Each retweet counts as an entry, so if you want multiple chances to win, you can retweet that line (at most) once every 12 hours. The comment and any tweets need to be up before the drawing dates listed above to qualify for said drawing dates. That’s it, really. 

Regarding shipping, here’s the thing: I can send the physical disc to any winners within the continental United States. However, I cannot ship the disc on my own to any winners outside the continental United States. As such, if you happen to win and you’re not in the continental United States (meaning the 48 states that happen to be touching each other), you have a choice of either reimbursing my shipping costs or agreeing to receive only the key on one of these discs. To the rest of you within the continental United States, if you happen to win, we’ll discuss how to get this thing to your place via email.

I should note that Microsoft employees, any employees working with the PR firms Waggener Edstrom and Edelman, as well as close friends and immediate family of me or anyone working for winJade cannot participate (it would be unfair, and you know it).

As the person who headed the Office user experience teams and the person who is now running the Windows experience teams in Microsoft, Julie drove the idea for the Ribbon user interface in Office 2007 and led the conceptualization and development efforts behind all of the new user interface elements in Windows 7. At PDC, I had a chance to speak with her about her efforts within the Windows and Office teams. During this interview, we discussed:

• the inspiration and need for a new interface for Office
• the circumstances which led to the superbar and the multi-touch-oriented user interface in Windows 7
• how the PDC laptops came into existence
• the decision to use various new technologies such as gaze tracking, heat maps, among others.

Highlights:

Office 2007’s Ribbon: “A lot of the things they would ask for would already be in [Office], and so we felt we could come up with a better way to expose capabilities that were in Office and help people create better, more powerful documents”

The Windows 7 superbar, jumplists, etc.: “We wanted to simplify the whole experience and take away the differences between launching applications and switching applications and making it easier to get back to documents you did the day before. That was kinda the inspiration: to put the customer more in control of everything they’re trying to do on their PC”

Multi-touch in Windows 7: “There were a lot of cool things going on both inside Microsoft and outside Microsoft with touch, things like the iPhone which has the touch interface as well as Microsoft Surface, and so we felt that your PC experience could be very much enhanced by having direct manipulation [of objects on the screen], and you’d work much more naturally with it.”

The PDC laptops and how they happened: “We worked together with Acer to spec-out a PC and we kinda had the idea that ‘what would the ultimate developer machine look like?’ and ‘what can we do to put all the things in it that would be the things we want developers to do with Windows?’ So we had location awareness, the touch screen, all of the virtualization capabilities in it, 64 bit, etc.”

The direction of the Windows 7 beta program: “We used a lot of the beta feedback from Vista to help inform the plan for what we were going to do with Windows 7, as well as things on the blogs, the customer research that we did”

How the Office 2007 UI itself was researched: “We always try to apply new technologies to learn about how people use [our software]. We even talked about trying to figure out if we could put electrodes on [people’s heads] and measuring brain waves to see how they responded to one interface over another, but we didn’t get to that point.”
(You can catch the Ribbon presentation where the gaze tracking and heat mapping bits were discussed on Jensen Harris’ blog. ~Bryant)

Catch the full video interview with full answers to these topics after the jump.

Update: I made the video public prior to posting this, but within the last ten minutes (as of 6:54 PM GMT-5), something happened to revert the video back to private again. Video has been re-established as public.

As the first of my interviews from PDC, I noticed that Loic Le Muer was quick to familiarize himself with me as a part of the interview. This fact coupled with his persistent praise for the Seesmic devs who worked on Seesmic for Windows have led me to believe that Seesmic might actually be one of the better small software companies in existence.

Loic demonstrated Seesmic for Windows at PDC 2009 during Tuesday’s keynote. The obvious difference between Seesmic for Windows and Seesmic Desktop (the AIR version) is that the Windows client is native and written on top of the .net CLR. The plus sides to this include far better performance figures, a more Windows-integrated UI, and a lower tendency to leak handles (and fill my ram). The only downside to this is that it’s Windows-only… well, until you realize that moving .net code from a Windows native environment to Silverlight is actually not nearly as bad as writing another app from scratch.

My interview with Loic takes a browse through Seesmic for Windows v. Seesmic Desktop. I also decided to run through Silverlight Seesmic with Loic during our quick block of time, and while the Silverlight version still requires some polish before going live, the Windows preview version is solid enough for everyone to take a look.

Both parts of the interview can be found below the read link. Blame YouTube for forcing me to split a 13 minute video.
My thanks goes to Andrew Lyle from neowin for manning the camera.

The interview with Dan Polivy from PDC 2008 can be found here.

For those of you visiting from AeroXperience, you guys are likely well aware of how AeroXperience was started. We began as a set of forums in March of 2004 dedicated to Windows Code Name Longhorn, which later became Windows Vista. We’ve prided ourselves with breaking news about some of the most coveted features in Vista during the Vista development process as well as with breaking the initial reports of the direction of Windows 7. AeroXperience has been one of the most accurate (and most opinionated, in some cases) sources of Windows coverage and news; amongst our bloggers, we’ve had the pleasure of having both Stephen Chapman and Rafael Rivera posting on behalf of AeroXperience during our run, and as I sit here next to them now in the PDC press room, I want to shift the attention to what winJade is and how we plan on rolling this out.

winJade is, in some senses, a new direction for us while allowing us to persist in our current mission of delivering relevant and informative Microsoft coverage. During this initial blog roll-out (planned for PDC), the purpose of the blog will still be to deliver the informative material and solid commentary on the world of Windows which you’ve come to expect. However, the purpose of the forums will shift from merely being a place to discuss Windows to becoming more of a home for novice Windows users, experienced users, and Windows experts to come together and not only talk about Windows and help each other but to also work on individual and group projects. winJade will be a home for people with ideas to implement those ideas, gather feedback, and gain an audience for the next great Windows program, tool, or concept. Stan and I have a few ideas we will be revealing on winJade when the time comes in addition to the innovative ideas which continue to find development time on the forums.

My utmost thanks go to Sam Johnson for implementing my vision for the new winJade blog, to Frank with Contrast Hosting for helping us in this transition, and to the many members on the forums who kept track of our progress and offered the many suggestions we’ve read.

From AeroXperience’s start as a home for discovery in Windows Longhorn to winJade’s mission for information and innovation, we’re looking forward to being your home not only for Microsoft news but for some of the most promising Windows-related projects.

We’ve tried to withhold ourselves from sourcing our news from leaky valves in Microsoft as of late (and you can see where that’s gotten us. ahem), but we don’t just stay away for the sake of keeping ourselves out of that eternally stressful race for content. We tend to stay out of it because behind every leak, someone’s job suffers as a result.

I had a very open interview with someone at the launch event. This person frequently deals with product leaks, and as a result, it’s fair to say that the person knows exactly how said leaks impact work, the lives of everyone connected to the project, the public perception of a product, and so forth. My interview with this particular Microsoft employee was fulfilling in the sense that I’m able to offer an uncensored glimpse into what Microsoft has to deal with whenever someone decides to leak a build, leak a screenshot, break an embargo, and what not.

Check the break to read about how it all went down. Keep in mind that there’s no video or audio and that this is, indeed, a long read apparently not as long as some people have seen in the past. Thanks is due to the anonymous commentators who pointed this out.

Anonymous Softie: So, with regards to leaks

Bryant: Yeah

Anonymous Softie: Leaks can affect the public perception of a product. For instance, there’s a reason why we only release specific builds. You know, because we want to release a certain level of quality that people can take a look at, have faith in, and [say] "okay, this is the product, the product is progressing as planned." Sometimes, interim builds, leaked builds, they often haven’t passed any of our quality checks. They were never meant to be released.

Bryant: Right. They can easily have nasty bugs.

Anonymous Softie: Yeah, exactly, and all of a sudden, you’ve got everyone in the world taking a look at this build; everyone wants to see the leaked build, right? ’cause it’s mysterious. It’s rare. It’s from the inside. So yeah, there could be bugs in it. People [find] bugs in it. They question functionality they find in it. And so when all of that happens, my phone starts ringing [with] people asking for comments. I’m not doing my day job at that point.

Anonymous Softie: And so, one, it’s a huge distraction on all of us. Phones ring off the hook. [People say] "I can’t believe there’s this shitty quality build out there!" It’s like, look, I’m not going to take time to talk to you, first of all, ’cause you, you know, that was an unplanned leak. It’s not representative of what we ultimately want to sanction and release.

Anonymous Softie: So, there’s the distraction, the bugs… if it’s really buggy, people might think that that’s the current state of the product when, in fact, it’s not. Internally, we’re already many many builds beyond the one that’s leaked. We don’t really care about that one. It doesn’t exist.

Bryant: Right.

Anonymous Softie: –for all we care.

Bryant: Right. It never happened.

Anonymous Softie: It never happened! But everyone is quick to jump to an opinion about that particular moment in time. They often draw incorrect conclusions, "oh my gosh, the product is incomplete, it doesn’t have this, it doesn’t have that." So that’s one.

Anonymous Softie: And quite often we have features that come out over time, right? You don’t necessarily have all the features in [Windows 7 Milestone 3], for instance. We didn’t have any [of the new] UI.

Bryant: Right. Well when we posted [the article about Milestone 3], that was it. It was just very bare and everything was hidden by a bunch of switches. I remember when we originally posted the very suggestive "we know what’s coming but we don’t actually… know" article, we got a lot of hits. We really killed your day job with that one.

Anonymous Softie: Yeah. So it’s a big distraction; it causes people to form incorrect opinions which I as a communications professional ultimately have to fix. Right? The world starts thinking "Wow, this is it?" and I go "Wait, wait wait"

Bryant: "Yeah, this was like a few months in the past. We’re much further ahead of this now, and there are different branches [besides the one with the leaked build], etc."

Anonymous Softie: Exactly. It’s a distraction for developers that are… you know, so we have an enormous [Independent Software Vendor] community that tests various milestones. They test their software. They test their drivers. They test their apps.. and for them it’s a distraction too because they’re wondering "wow, what’s going on? Should I look at this? Should I stop what I’m doing and look at this leaked build?" and so it tends to slow everything down.

Anonymous Softie: Those are the biggest issues that we have. And then so many people get sucked into potentially having to respond to all the questions that people are raising about that particular moment in time. We just don’t have time to deal with that, and so, generally, we don’t comment on unreleased builds.

Bryant: There you go.

Bryant:
I guess… how does it affect, I mean, you talked about how it affects you guys, what you guys do, but let’s say… how does it affect the actual development of a product itself? Or, on a similar line, how does it affect the timeline? Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of leaks setting things back.

Anonymous Softie: It generally doesn’t affect the timeline. The developers are always heads down; they’re writing code, they’re fixing bugs, but even they will stop and read the reviews of the leaked build. So there’s loss of progress there, potentially. And so, when you add it all up, it really does no one any good. ’cause even all the people that pause to download it– we also have the problem of viruses. People leak builds. They stuff them with payloads, and everyone wants the leaked build. They get a bunch of viruses, and now I have to deal with that problem. So, in some sense, it’s "dangerous" as well, and we have no control over what’s out there, what the quality is…

Anonymous Softie: but leaks generally don’t affect the schedule, but they affect the communication. They affect the perception They’re a distraction for all of the outside developers in the world that are trying to be focused on the right builds, and they might see something they didn’t expect, but when you catch us in between, all bets are off. We establish a contract with developers. We say "here are the APIs." It’s a contract between Microsoft and the developers. [We tell them] "we’re not going to change these APIs." and interim builds could actually have changes, maybe some things that we’re actually just testing out, prototyping. And so, you get some people on the outside that are, you know, wondering "Gosh. Did Microsoft– Did I not– Did I miss something? Did Microsoft not tell me what’s happened?" And so it’s pure theater.

Bryant: Right.

Anonymous Softie: People like to see it because it’s secret and nobody else can see it, but if you download some rogue binary from some site and you get infected, or you download something that, you know… people accuse that, even, of being Microsoft’s fault, and I’m generally the one that has to deal with… you know, whenever press call, my phone rings. I would rather spend my time preparing for that next big real milestone, making sure people have the most accurate information and keeping everyone on track instead of being distracted by all of these external issues.

Bryant: Now that was with regards to, um, actual build leaks. How about news leaks? Like, um, if somebody leaks a screenshot of something in progress– I figure that would possibly be the same ordeal. You know, news leaks, perception leaks [such as reviews], let’s say an embargo is broken about something. How about those? How does that work?

Anonymous Softie: Both a similar and a whole different set of issues as well. You know, we have a… I have a very professional relationship with all of the professional journalists that I work with. And so, it’s difficult. When I en masse pre-brief journalists and I say "okay, all of the information that I’m telling you under confidence–" professionals embargoed under this certain date. For the most part, people respect that. But then, somebody breaks the embargo, and then all the other journalists look around [and think] "well, they went! I gotta go!" And then it jeopardizes my relationship with other people ’cause suddenly everybody is going. At the end of the day, it often causes a lot of misinformation to be out there because people– I haven’t had a chance to talk to you, Bryant, yet, to let you know what’s our intent, What do we do and what is this about, why are we delivering this thing, who is it for, what’s it capable of doing. And so, if I don’t have that opportunity to kinda frame everything with everybody and put it in context, everybody starts speculating. "Maybe it means this. Maybe it means this. Maybe it means that.” Again, huge distractions. The people that need accurate information don’t have that accurate information any longer, and I spend weeks trying to sorta put things back in order so that everyone has the accurate Microsoft view of things instead of 30 different conspiratorial opinions on what may or may not be true.

Bryant: Yeah, of course. And, well I suppose for now that’s all I’m really looking for.

Anonymous Softie: Cool.

Whether this person’s account of how leaks affect things at Microsoft represents the Microsoft way of thinking is beyond me. I didn’t ask, but it’s safe to infer that this person isn’t the only person who thinks along these lines.