Week in Windows 7 news: Family Guy, Michael Dell embrace OS; the netbook OS of choice?

A look back at the week's biggest Microsoft Windows 7-related news stories:   Family Guy meets Windows 7 According to PC World, "Microsoft is sponsoring a Windows 7 television extravaganza next month in collaboration with FOX and 'Family Guy' creator/voice actor Seth MacFarlane. It's a dramatic improvement."   Existing PCs, laptops okay with Windows 7  Nearly 90% of existing desktops and laptops within corporations can support Windows 7, but many of those assets are aging and will provide only limited grease on the skids of a migration to the new Microsoft operating system, according to a new survey. The program's working title is 'Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show,' and will weave Windows 7 promotions into the television special."   Michael Dell: hates netbooks, loves Win7 The Dell CEO, answering questions at a Churchill Club dinner in Silicon Valley, gave netbooks a big thumbs down, but said he thinks Windows 7 can restore our faith in PCs. "If you get the latest processor technology and you get Windows 7 and Office 2010, you will love your PC again," Dell said. "And we actually have not been able to say that for a long time.

Companies will have to weigh the potential costs associated with maintaining those aging machines against the cost of a migration to new hardware/software and upgrading of some existing applications.   Windows 7 is hot pick in enterprise netbook market  Microsoft has a lock on the enterprise netbook market. IT staffers were asked by Chadwick Martin Bailey, a custom market research and consulting firm, which netbook operating systems they had decided to standardize on in the next 24 months (respondents could standardize on more than one). Nearly a third, 29%, said they planned to standardize on Windows XP, which Microsoft repositioned in 2008 and 2009 as it saw netbook sales beginning to soar.   Apple stealing some Windows 7 thunder  The latest reports on PC sales are relatively encouraging given the overall economy, with Gartner saying they were up 2.5% in September vs. last September and IDC finding them up 3.9%. But sales of Apple Macs are up even more.   Acer can't wait for official Windows 7 announcement  Acer has unveiled a new version of its Aspire One netbook running Windows 7 and plans to put it on sale simultaneously with the new operating system's debut next week. According to a new study of 145 IT professionals, the operating system of choice for IT netbooks is Windows 7, followed by Windows XP. The three alternatives, Linux, Mac OS X and Google Chrome, each won the allegiance of 10% or fewer respondents. The Aspire One D250 has a 10.1-inch screen, which is the same size as current Aspire One computers but the resolution has been increased to 1,280 pixels by 720 pixels. The computer features a 1.66GHz version of Intel's Atom N280 processor and a 160GB hard-disk drive.   For more on Microsoft, visit Network World's Microsoft subnet, an independent community.  IDG News Service and Network World's sister publications contributed to this report.

Verizon CTO: 'We told you so' about FiOS

Verizon CTO Dick Lynch has a simple message to anyone who doubted his company's wisdom in building out a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network: We were right, you were wrong. Lynch put particular emphasis on chiding skeptical analysts and rival companies that tried to cast doubt upon Verizon's fiber plans. "In an attempt to maintain the status quo, our competitors did their best to create customer confusion around fiber-optic services," he said. "They claimed that their networks had been fiber for a decade, and they distributed misleading messages about the quality of FiOS. Their communications strategy was to create confusion and apathy and some people fell for it." Slideshow: Ma Bell's 25-year oddysey   Specifically, Lynch singled out a "potential customer" that told The Washington Post a few years back that "there's nothing on the Internet that requires that kind of bandwidth." Now, with the rise of YouTube, Facebook and other bandwidth-intensive Web applications, Lynch said that Verizon is having the last laugh. "With the exception of our competitors, everyone secretly hoped we would succeed," he said. "The industry experts would publicly say, 'Verizon is spending too much' or 'consumers don't need fiber.' But then they'd turn around and call us to find out how soon FiOS would be coming to their neighborhood." Verizon's FiOS services offer customers peak download speeds of 50Mbps and peak upload speeds of 20Mbps. Speaking at the FTTH Conference and Expo in Houston Tuesday, Lynch crowed about his company bringing FiOS Internet services to an estimated 3.1 million subscribers in the United States. Cable companies this year have begun ramping up their tests for faster services to compete with FiOS, as Comcast and Cablevision have started rolling out new Internet services based on the DOCSIS 3.0 standard that will offer businesses potential peak download speeds of 100Mbps.

Verizon has said in the past that it is trialing 100Mbps FiOS technology, although the company has given no timeline for when that technology might hit the market.

High-tech hardware spending returns, no help for IT jobs

IT decision makers will be investing in hardware in the coming six months, according to recent research, but high-tech executives say staffing will remain flat as companies not only slow the pace of jobs cuts but also hold off on new hires. The latest release of the CDW IT monitor reveals that more than two-thirds of some 1,043 IT decision makers in corporate and government sectors plan to make IT hardware purchases in the next six months. Podcast: Have IT budgets hit bottom yet?

More than 80% of large businesses and 84% of federal government high-tech executives polled expect to invest in hardware, with a majority pointing to operational efficiency gains as motivation. "Hardware refresh cycles have been pushed to limits we've rarely seen, and anticipated investment in this area is encouraging as companies prepare for a larger economic recovery," said Mark Gambill, CDW vice president, in a statement. Nearly 50% of both corporate and federal IT decision makers expect budgets to stay the same, with just more than 30% expecting slight budget increases. The survey, conducted over two weeks in September, also showed that more than 50% of federal government IT workers anticipate increased budgets in the next six months. Twenty-seven percent of those polled expect to also invest in software across a significant part of their organization, while 45% anticipate software purchases for a smaller portion of their companies. Eighty percent of IT decision makers do not anticipate adding staff and plan to keep their personnel counts at current levels. While spending is set to increase in various sectors in big and small ways, depending on the organization, questions regarding IT staff seemed to garner the same response across the board.

Twelve percent do plan to hire additional IT workers in the next six months, and 8% continue to consider cutting staff, the research found. "The confidence we began to see emerge in April with decreases in planned job cuts has now evolved into planned capital investments in IT infrastructure to increase efficiency and productivity," Gambill stated. "The down side is that the percentage of organizations planning investments in IT staffing has held steady and in some cases declined." Do you Tweet? Follow Denise Dubie on Twitter

Google Makes It Easier for News Sites to Opt-out

In what will be seen as a concession to media baron Rupert Murdoch, Google has made it easier for news sites-such as those Murdoch controls-to opt-out of Google News. Murdoch has previously threatened to take News Corp. content, including the Times of London, and the Australian, off Google when at some point in the future they become paid sites. Where they used to have to fill out an online form to opt-out of Google's news aggregation site, publishers will soon have a means to opt-out or set other options automatically, using a small file placed on their sites.

His Wall Street Journal and Barron's are already largely subscription-based. As for the aggregators, "these people are not investing in journalism," Murdoch said. "They're feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others." "To be impolite, it's theft," he added. On Tuesday, Murdoch told a U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearing that "there is no such thing as free news" and reiterated his statement that News Corp. sites would move to a paid model. His remarks targeting Google prompted Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington to respond that "aggregation is part of the Web's DNA" and that old media needs to "get real." Murdoch has also reportedly been in talks with Microsoft that would result is News Corp. content being removed from Google and enhanced on Microsoft's Bing, which would pay News Corp. a fee in return for exclusivity. Google, which also attended the FTC meeting, made its announcement Tuesday in a blog post outlining extensions to the Robots Exclusion Protocol, already used to prevent Google and other search engines from indexing Web sites. Recent reports, however, say the talks have been overplayed in the media.

The extensions will give publishers control over how their sites are treated by Google News. "Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today," wrote Google's Josh Cohen in the post. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Robots.txt is a small file that developers can place in the root directory of their Web sites that contain the Robots Exclusion Protocol commands. "In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search?

Go ahead. Feel free. It's not likely most users will notice any difference as a result of the change, unless a large number of publishers decide to abandon Google News and the estimated 1 billion clicks-a-month it generates for participating publishers (including PC World) "Most people put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose to exclude their material from Google. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP," Cohen added. But we respect publishers' wishes.

We're excited about this change and will start rolling it out today," Cohen said in concluding his post announcing the change. If publishers don't want their websites to appear in web search results or in Google News, we want to give them easy ways to remove it. David Coursey has been writing about technology products and companies for more than 25 years. He tweets as @techinciter and may be contacted via his Web site.

Microsoft pushes Bing in China with mobile portal

Microsoft stepped up promotion of Bing in China with the launch of a Web services platform for mobile phones this week, a possible step toward challenging the dominance of Google and Baidu.com in the country. Bing has not caught on in China and Microsoft has done little to promote it in the country. The Microsoft portal, an effort to spur use of its services in a market crowded by local competitors, offers downloads of mobile clients for Bing and Windows Live Messenger, along with instructions on how to use Microsoft services, including Hotmail, from a mobile phone.

However, Bing, launched in June, has grown quickly in the U.S. and attracted about 9 percent of online searches there last month, according to Internet monitoring companies. Baidu and Google together account for as much as 95 percent of online searches done in China, leaving Yahoo, a range of local search engines, and any new players like Bing to compete for the remaining slice of the market. China's online search market is dominated by local player Baidu, with Google in a distant second place. The Bing mobile client lets users search for local information such as maps, restaurant locations and weather forecasts. Bing has strong potential but will face difficulty competing with Baidu and Google in the near term, said Ben Cavender, senior analyst at China Market Research Group in Shanghai. Microsoft "will continue to strengthen and expand the service scope of its mobile Internet products," the company said in a statement.

While Baidu and Google have well-established search services for free music downloads that keep Chinese users coming back, Microsoft so far has done little to localize Bing, Cavender said. Bing did not make a list of China's top 10 most-visited search engines in August, as posted on the Web site of local online traffic analyzer CR-Nielsen.