It’s fashionable these days to refer to Microsoft as a dinosaur whose products and thinking are stuck in the 20th century. The company that was convicted of being an illegal monopoly not all that long ago is today thought of as relatively tame. The momentum these days seems to be with Google, Apple and newcomers such as Facebook and Twitter. But the fact is, Microsoft continues to be a mighty force.

Indeed, based on what I saw at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad last week, there is still plenty of tread on Microsoft’s tires.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was one of the speaker’s at D, where he responded to questions from conference co-host and Wall Street Journal Personal Technology columnist Walt Mossberg. Although upbeat on Microsoft, Ballmer was not optimistic about a quick economic turnaround, saying “to think that things would be back in a year seems naive to me.” He went on to say that it could be a very long recovery and “maybe today is normal and yesterday was a blooper.”

He also said that Microsoft has flattened out its research and development spending. It’s not that it has stopped investing in new products; it’s just that it is no longer continuing to increase the level of spending at a steady rate.

Still, the company has been productive in recent months. For one thing, it’s only a few months away from releasing Windows 7, which Ballmer confirmed should be ready in time for the holidays.

I’ve been testing Windows 7 for months and, based on my experience, it’s the best and most stable operating system Microsoft has ever created. My PC that runs a Windows 7 “release candidate” still occasionally slows down and even crashes but far less often than with Vista or XP.

And the user interface — especially the ability to peer into the windows of running programs by clicking on their icon on the task bar — makes using Windows a lot easier.

But the big news at D was about search. Ballmer officially unveiled the company’s new search engine, which it is calling Bing. Bing.com will go live on June 3, but if you go to the site now, you’ll see a preview video. Before unveiling Bing, Ballmer showed a video about all the different brands that Microsoft has applied to its search efforts, including MSN Search and Live Search. Ballmer thinks that Bing is more likely to resonate with users. “Brand doesn’t substitute for innovation, but innovation doesn’t substitute for a brand consumers can get their mind around,” he said.

It would be a gross exaggeration to call Bing a Google killer, but that’s OK. Google doesn’t have to die for Microsoft to succeed in search. Besides, Ballmer made it very clear that he doesn’t expect Bing to overtake Google in the foreseeable future. Microsoft, if anything, is persistent. It took three tries before Microsoft Word was worthy of becoming the dominant word processing program, and it wasn’t until version 3.0 that Windows began to get serious traction.

To differentiate itself from Google, Bing is not only visually more attractive, it’s also more informative. Functioning as what Microsoft is calling a “decision engine,” rather than simply linking you to sites, Bing searches often end with information directly from Bing. For example, if you type in the name of a city you get local weather, hotel prices and other information without having to click anywhere. And, depending on the content licensing rules of sites that Bing draws from, it can sometimes display content directly — from Wikipedia for example — without the user having to click through. It even has a built-in shopping engine that, when you search for a product, shows you images, offerings from multiple merchants as well as product information, customer reviews and expert reviews.

The search engine also helps you find travel deals and lets you book travel without having to leave the site. I’m not sure how well it works, but it includes a “price predictor” that helps determine if the price of the ticket you’re thinking of buying is likely to go up or down.

Despite Google’s current dominance, search doesn’t have to be a winner-takes-all business. If Microsoft can increase its market share gradually over time, it stands to take in billions in additional revenue. In the meantime, Google isn’t standing still. Just as Ballmer was in Carlsbad talking about Microsoft’s foray into search, Google executives were in San Francisco talking about how they are beefing up their offerings, including some that will compete head-on with Microsoft’s core applications.

The economy may be in a recession, but tech isn’t in a slowdown. Thanks to startups and innovative thinking from big companies like Google and Microsoft, 2009 might be remembered as a banner year for innovation.

ATM and credit card skimming fraud is on the rise.  As you know, the back of your card has a magnetic strip which is scanned either by merchants or by ATM machines to record your account information.  Unfortunately, thieves also have access to those skimmers which can be secretly embedded into ATM machines or used by unscrupulous waiters, store clerks and others that you hand your card to.

One tactic is for a thief to install a skimmer on an ATM machine so that when you think the bank is scanning it, it’s actually being scanned by the crook. These devices can even be installed over the bank’s legitimate slot so as the bank scans your card so does the thief.  A small hidden camera can video your fingers as you type in your PIN.  With the pin and a scanned image of your card, the thief has everything they need to steal your money.  Some of these devices even have hidden cell phones that instantly transmit the account information to the criminals who could be anywhere in the world.

What can you do?

• Examine the ATM machine to make sure there’s nothing attached to the front.  
• Cover your hand as you type in your PIN so that a hidden camera can’t record it. 
• If the ATM pad is stiff or difficult to punch, there is a possibility that a recording device could have been placed on top of it.
• Be aware of who you give your credit cards to.  If a waiter or clerk takes it into a back room, there is the possibility they could skim the card and write down the expiration date and the three or four digit security code on the back or front of the card. That’s all they need to misuse your card.  
• Check your statements carefully but – better yet – get an online banking account and check recent activity on a regular basis.  Transactions are typically posted online in real time or within a couple of days.

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Check out this video from a local TV station about a clever way theives steal your ATM informatoin

One of the most popular questions asked of cell phone callers is “Where are you?”

Thanks to a new service, you may not have to ask or answer that question. Glympse, which launched on Monday, joins Loopt and Google Latitude as the newest location-based service that uses cell phones’ GPS capability to tell people where you are.

Glympse, which is free, has taken a different approach. Unlike Loopt, which requires the sender and recipient to sign up for service and download an application, Glympse requires almost no effort on the part of the person who is following you. All they have to do is click on a Web link on a computer or a Web- enabled phone to see where you are on a map.

To transmit your location, you need to download an application to your phone and use the application to send a “Glympse,” which authorizes that person to follow you for a specific amount of time and send them the link they need to see you on a map.

Another way it differs from both Loopt and Google Latitude is that Glympse can automatically time out after tracking someone for four hours. The person being followed can also choose a shorter monitoring window, like 30 minutes.

To its credit, Loopt is also permission-based and sends reminders that you may be sharing your real-time information. Google’s Latitude service, which also requires you to give permission to be followed, only displays your approximate location — within about a half mile — but doesn’t show precisely where you are.

With Glympse, you might not know the person’s exact address, but you’ll probably be within a hundred feet.

The coolest thing about Glympse is when you are following someone on the move. You can pinpoint them on the map, see their speed, and see when and where they stop.

I used it to follow Glympse co-founder Bryan Trussle as he rode in a car from my house to San Jose. I saw him get on and off the freeway and pull into a parking lot. At one point I caught his car’s driver exceeding the speed limit by a few miles an hour.

As he compared his actual location to what I saw on my PC, we found there only a slight lag between the two — a difference of 10 seconds on average.

While I realize that some will consider this technology a little creepy, there are practical uses for it.

Some police departments, delivery services and businesses spend a lot of money on equipment to do what Glympse could do for free.

For one thing, it can reassure parents and family members that their loved ones are safe.

I remember how nervous I was when my 16-year-old daughter would use the car or ride in other kids’ cars. We’d insist that she call us when she arrived and made her tell us where she planned to go. If she had a Glympse-equipped cell phone, we could have checked in on her from time to time — and we would have known if she was speeding too.

And rather than calling people to let them know you’re arriving in 15 minutes, they can track you online or on a Web-enabled phone.

The Glympse’s public beta currently works only on the T-Mobile G1, which uses Google’s Android operating system. The company is working on versions for the iPhone, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry.

Disclosure: Glympse, as well as its main competitors, Loopt and Google, are supporters of ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit Internet safety organization I help operate.

In April, Patti and I went to Malta, Florence and Rome. Here are our videos.

Rome

Florence

Malta

by Larry Magid

I’m starting to worry Google will become the world’s SPOF — that’s short for “single point of failure.” I also worry about the company’s power to determine whether certain other businesses make money.

A SPOF is a component in a system that — if it fails — brings down everything with it. We generally think of a SPOF as a point in a discrete system like a computer or a house. If the CPU or the hard drive in your computer fails, the entire machine is unusable. If the circuit breaker or fuse box in your house goes down, so do all the electrical appliances.

Mission-critical operations try to avoid SPOFs. That’s why commercial airliners always have at least two engines and two or three ways to perform many critical tasks, such as bringing down the landing gear. It’s why radio and TV stations and hospitals have backup power sources and why smart computer users back up their data.

I’m told that Google has plenty of redundancy within its own infrastructure so that, when a server or group of servers goes down, customers aren’t usually inconvenienced. But sometimes — such as happened Thursday — lots of people are affected. On its blog, Google explained that a system glitch caused it to route Web traffic via Asia, causing about 14 percent of users to experience slow services or even interruptions. The outage reportedly affected Google Search, caused Google News to slow to a crawl and created problems with YouTube, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Analytics.

As you’d expect, a lot of details about the outage came via Twitter, through which people around the world immediately shared their experiences as Google services went down and back up. Twitter’s search term for this particular outage is googlefail.

I wasn’t personally affected by this outage, but as a Gmail and Google Calendar user, I have been unable for brief periods of time to gain access to my messages and schedule. That raises an important question: Is Google too big to fail?

We lately have applied the “too big to fail” argument to banks, automakers and a few other big businesses whose failure would have an enormous economic impact on thousands or millions of people. But when it comes to reach, companies like General Motors, AIG and Citibank are tiny compared with Google, which touches the lives of hundreds of millions of people in every part of the world.

A Google failure — even a temporary one — doesn’t just inconvenience people. It can cost them money. In addition to the potential financial loss and waste of time when businesses and professionals are not able to get e-mail or check their calendar, there is a large cadre of businesses and entrepreneurs that depend on Google advertising revenue.

Any Web site that participates in the Google AdSense program — and there are a lot of them — stands to lose money if Google’s ad servers go down. Businesses that buy ads will lose sales, and the Web sites that carry those ads will temporary lose that advertising revenue.

And it’s not just outages that people worry about. Google has software that ranks Web sites based on their importance. Page rank and other factors determine where a site shows up in a Google search. The higher your site is in the results, the more visitors you’ll get, which — if you’re an e-commerce site — translates into more sales. If you use display advertising, it means more hits and therefore more ad revenue.

The algorithms that determine how a site is ranked are, of course, controlled by Google, and when Google tweaks those algorithms, there are winners and losers.

Google has also been known to punish Web sites for violating its policies. The company has a “webmaster guidelines” page where it outlines “some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized.” Google says that “if a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.”

Being penalized by Google could have a bigger financial impact on a small business than a fine imposed by a court or regulatory body for violating a federal or state law. But our legal system operates with some transparency and offers a chance to confront your accuser and put up a defense. Google does have a place where you can “submit your site for reconsideration,” but that’s not exactly the same level of protection that you would get if you were accused of breaking a real law.

This posting originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News

In my Mercury News column I explore the dangers of having a single company repsonsible for so many people’s livelihoods. 

Is Google too big to fail?