IT Blogwatch: best of 2008, part first

Welcome to a special IT Blogwatch EXTRA: as Richi Jennings watches 2008's favorite watches (today: January to June). Not to mention the Wind Waker one-man band...

January brought us the MacBook Air's thin line: between love and hate, as Barbara Krasnoff summarized:

[It's] a very thin, very snazzy-looking, not-so-cheap $1,799 notebook. I'm sure it will do well -- it's a Mac, after all -- but I also think that Apple has missed the boat on this one ... people are looking for something to use that's not as large and complex as their regular notebooks and a bit larger than their smartphones ... the revolution is happening elsewhere.

Microsoft launched its new versions of Windows Server, SQL Server, and Visual Studio in February, claiming the company had learned much from open source, which Glyn Moody found "fascinating":

What's interesting about this is not that it's astute analysis - which it is - but that [Microsoft's Sam Ramji] doesn't mind making it public while admitting that Windows is learning from open source. Of course, it would be stupid not to, but it's nonetheless an important sign of how things are finally changing at Microsoft that it's prepared to trumpet the fact - and of the irreistible rise of the open source way.

March had the Asus Eee PC 900 breaking cover, with Jack Schofield bringing a tear to your humble blogwatcher's eye:

The subnotebook PC has taken a long time to take off. Hewlett-Packard had a good go with the Omnibook 300, which had the option of a 10MB Flash drive, instead of a hard drive, in 1993. Others included the Toshiba Libretto in 1995, the Sony C1 in 2000, and the FlyBook in 2005. All failed to sell in volume. Part of the problem was that people expected a subnotebook PC to cost less than a traditional big-screen portable. However, the costs of miniaturisation, including low-power x86-compatible processors, and lower sales volumes usually mean they cost as much, or more.

April saw Apple buy processor designer PA Semi -- an unexpected move that had people scratching their heads, including Cleve Nettles:

Wow, we didn't see this coming at all. Apple buys PA Semi, a fabless chip company that specializes in high performance, low power PowerPC based processors ... This means that Apple's long term strategy includes the PowerPC platform? In their handhelds - iPods and iPhones? Will we see a 2Ghz PowerPC iPhone in the future? ... Or maybe Apple just bought PA Semi for their talent and expects the new company to help integrate chips into Apple products. Still. Wow.

In May, we reviewed the reviews of a release candidate of a browser, helped by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:

I was about to switch to Safari on Windows and MacOS and Konqueror on Linux, when Mozilla got serious about not just fixing, but rebuilding Firefox. Now, Firefox 3 release candidate 1 was released early. Based on my quick look at it, I may end up sticking with Firefox after all. ... Besides the better stability, Firefox 3 is also faster, a lot faster, at rendering Web pages. ...The malware and cross-script-aka Web forgery protection-protection mechanisms do work. ...All-in-all, Firefox 3 is more than good enough to keep me as a user. Better still, from Mozilla's viewpoint, its good enough that it should pull in another wave of new users.

June saw the by-now released Firefox 3.0 delighting and frustrating in equal measure, as Brad Linder discovered:

So you may have heard that Mozilla ... has been hyping today as "Download Day" for about a week. But a more apt name might be "Down Day." That's because GetFirefox.com is down. As in dead, kaput, service unavailable. This probably shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but if you encourage millions of users to download your software on the same day, your servers are going to take a hammering. But it appears that even Mozilla had no idea how many people would be trying to download Firefox 3 today ... there's a good chance that the company will manage to break the world record if it ever gets the servers back up.

Watch this space for July-December's best...

And finally...

• Wind Waker One-Man Band [warning: contains accordion]

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Microsoft's pay-as-you-go PC plan... patented
• Windows 7 beta blagged by BitTorrent bad boys
• State fights Diebold over e-voting security