Jacob “Jack” Goldman, who left Ford Motor Co. to launch Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, died on December 20, 2011 at age 90.

A physicist by training, Goldman taught at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and MIT before leaving academia for industry. As director of Ford's Scientific Research Laboratory, he succeeded by recruiting top talent and giving them free rein to innovate. He maintained that tradition at Xerox, where he served as chief scientist, chief technical officer, and senior vice president for research and development. Goldman established two of the company's R&D centers: the Xerox Research Center of Canada and Xerox PARC.

It is not hyperbole to say that researchers at PARC created the modern computing world. Among their inventions are the personal computer, the laser printer, the graphical user interface, Ethernet, bitmap graphics, the WYSIWYG text editor, the Smalltalk language and IDE, and the notion of ubiquitous computing.

People say that Xerox PARC did the research that made Apple and Microsoft successful, and in a sense that is true. Apple's pre-Macintosh GUI-based system, the Lisa, was heavily influenced by Xerox PARC work. In fact, Xerox earned the right to purchase 100,000 shares of pre-IPO Apple stock by giving Apple engineers three days' access to PARC. It was during those three days that the Lisa – and ultimately the Macintosh – were born. Microsoft's Bill Gates was also a visitor to PARC. Microsoft tech visionaries Larry Tessler, Charles Simonyi, and others were recruited from PARC.

PARC – it's a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox now, and no longer called Xerox PARC – continues to do important research on cutting-edge topics in computer science.

Web recommendation: Irresistible. 'Nuff said. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. At the moment, he doesn't own a suit.

Remember WordPerfect? In the 1980s, it was the leading word processor on the PC platform. The program became part of Novell Corp.'s plan to challenge Microsoft as the leading software supplier for PCs. A vestige of that battle lives on in a $1.2 billion lawsuit that refuses to die.

Forgive me if I indulge in a little history here. There's no way to understand these events without appreciating the way the PC world looked in the days of MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows.

Utah-based Novell was a very successful company in the 1980s. It published NetWare, the network operating system that ran on virtually all networked PCs. The company was also the market-leading seller of network cards. Even in those days, Novell walked an anti-Microsoft line. The boot loader for NetWare was DOS – not MS-DOS, but Novell DOS, a descendant of MS-DOS clone DR DOS, which Novell acquired in 1991 with its purchase of Digital Research.

Following the Digital Research purchase, Novell went on a buying spree, seemingly to compete with Microsoft. It bought WordPerfect to compete with Microsoft Word and Quattro Pro to compete with Excel. Novell bought Unix Systems Laboratory from AT&T, and was for a time the only publisher of Unix.

Events did not play out in Novell's favor. Novell DOS never made a dent in the MS-DOS market. Microsoft Office outsold Novell's competing offerings. Desktop Unix required computer horsepower beyond most consumers' reach, and Windows solidified its position as the ubiquitous OS on the desktop.

Novell wound up selling off virtually all of its products just a couple years after acquiring them. The company remains in business today as a subsidiary of Attachmate. Novell is the vendor behind SuSE Linux and a publisher of various enterprise tools, most of which, I admit, I've never heard of.

Oh, and one more thing. Novell is the plaintiff in a long-running legal battle against Microsoft, a battle that could result in a $1.2 billion return on Attachmate's investment.

Novell's lawsuit against Microsoft centers around the introduction of Windows 95. This was a major release for Microsoft, which was looking to transform the kludgy, DOS-with-a-pretty-face Windows 3.x line with a significant rewrite, 32 bits from the ground up. Novell's WordPerfect was the leading word processor in the days leading up to the Windows 95 launch, and Novell expected to continue to milk the WordPerfect cash cow.

But it didn't turn out that way. Windows 95 turned out not to be a good host for WordPerfect. Novell claims that Microsoft disabled four APIs that were necessary for Windows versions of WordPerfect and Quattro Pro to run in the Windows 95 environment. Microsoft doesn't deny this claim, but says the changes were necessary to make Windows 95 more robust. WordPerfect's market share dropped from 50 percent in 1990 to less than 10 percent in 1996.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who was chairman and CEO of the company during the time period covered by the lawsuit, testified in the trial that Microsoft's actions were not intended to thwart Novell. Microsoft's lawyers argued in court that Novell made a series of poor decisions that meant WordPerfect couldn't keep up with Windows technology.

However, an internal e-mail seems to contradict this testimony. The e-mail, from Gates to senior vice-president Brad Silverberg and other Microsoft employees, covered the shell, which displayed file names in Win95, and API extensions that allowed developers to access it. Gates wrote: “I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage.”

The Novell-versus-Microsoft suit has been raging since 2004. It has been dismissed a couple times for technical reasons, but Novell has continued to pursue the matter. The most recent resurrection of the suit resulted in a deadlocked jury on December 16. The Associated Press and other sources have reported that while 11 jurors were inclined to accept Novell's arguments, one juror remained irrevocably unconvinced. The judge asked both Novell and Microsoft if they would accept a verdict that was not unanimous, and Microsoft declined. The judge then dismissed the case.

Novell has promised that it will seek another trial. With more than a billion dollars at stake, and with 11 of 12 jurors apparently agreeing with its arguments, it has little to lose.

Web recommendation: I don't usually track stock-market transactions, but I've followed with bemused interest the hailstorm of news stories about last week's initial public offering of Zynga Inc. It was the biggest U.S. IPO since Amazon went public in 2004, and it put $1 billion in Zynga's bank account. Not bad for a company that's best-known for the annoying Farmville app on the Facebook platform. Pundits are reading a lot into the “fizzle” of Zynga's stock, which opened at $10 per share but ended the day at $9.50. Analysts are using these results to prove their pet theories about the end of easy money in the tech sector. (My own thought: A billion bucks? For Farmville? If that isn't easy money, I don't know what is.) The most sensible analysis of Zynga's IPO comes from Robert Hof at forbes.com: Zynga IPO goes SplatVille. What went wrong? J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently learned that the monkey called Curious George in American children's books is known as Zozo in England and Coco in Germany. In other countries he is known as Bingo, Nicke, Piete, and Peter Pedal. Go figure.

Softchoice conducted a survey of 1.6 million PCs representing 300 organizations and found that Windows 7 is being adopted at a rate that surpasses Vista's initial adoption. 

In the first two years of Vista's launch, it was only deployed on 3% of total PCs, whereas 18% of all corporate PCs currently have Windows 7. 

“In the span of less than a year we’ve seen organizations move from a cautious ‘wait and see’ mentality to rolling out Windows 7 pretty rapidly,” said Dean Williams, manager of assessment services development for softchoice. “Given the activity of the past few quarters we’ve clearly reached a tipping point. This is a completely different picture than what we saw with the adoption of Vista.”

This infographic gives you a better picture of how adoption of Windows 7 is progressing. Do you agree with the numbers? What is the status of adoption in your workplace? 

Microsoft yesterday made significant announcements around its Azure cloud platform, notably improved experiences for Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, Solr and Memcached. The goal, Microsoft said on its Port25 blog, is to allow developers to continue "to work in the languages and frameworks they already know." The company has created a new open-source Azure SDK for node.js, and has put Azure libraries for .NET, Java and node.js hosted on GitHub. Another highlight of the release is the limited preview of the Apache Hadoop distribution service on Azure. Many more details on the release can be found on the Azure team's blog.

My son likes getting under the hood of his car, tweaking and tinkering.  I like getting under the hood of my computer and tinkering.  Just as my son likes to push the performance of his machine, I like pushing the performance of mine. 

Occasionally, my son will bump up against the limits of his knowledge, so he’ll come into the house, sit down at the dining room table, boot up the spare laptop, and start googling around.  Depending on the size of the problem, or what piece of machinery he’s working on, he can be engaged for hours.  Sometimes, he pulls out his phone and starts calling friends with expertise.  Not once in all the years he has been working on cars has anyone told him to get a Ford/Chevy/Dodge/Toyota, or etc. 

I also will occasionally bump into some esoteric little quirk of high-tech behavior that I have never seen before.  If I can’t find an answer on Google, sometimes I ask on Facebook.  I have over 4300 “friends” on Facebook, many of them are wizards.  Some are not. Inevitably, one of the non-wizards will say,  “You wouldn’t have this problem if you had a Mac.”  And just as inevitably, I will unfriend that person.  It’s not like I don’t warn them ahead of time—but they say it anyway.  It’s the cyberspace version of Tourette Syndrome.

Actually, they're right. If I had a Mac, I wouldn't be having that problem—but I also wouldn't be running a state-of-the-art machine either.  Inside my custom case lurks a Sandy Bridge motherboard, an i7-2600K running at 3.40ghz, 16gb of RAM, a 240gb SSD for the OS, and 6TB of onboard storage—so when I'm trying to change a tire on my Ferrari, I don't want to be told I'd be better off with a Lexus. I wouldn't. The Lexus is very pretty. It’ll get you to the grocery store and the movie theater and the mall.  But it won’t get you the other guy’s pink slip at the track. 

100 years ago, and if someone driving a horseless carriage had to stop to change a tire, passersby would yell "get a horse." The "get a Mac" remark is the 21^st century equivalent.  It’s thoughtless.  It’s stupid.  It’s rude.  It’s what falls out of the mouth of someone who has nothing useful to say, but has to say something anyway. 

The remark doesn’t address the problem I'm trying to solve—it simply asserts that I’ve been wrong in all my choices.  It’s no different than a bible-thumper insisting that I’m going to Hell unless I accept Jesus as my savior. The remark is an arrogant assertion that my years of expertise in the x86 architecture has been wasted, and that my decades of investment in high-end hardware and software is immediately inferior to an overpriced and underpowered exercise in style that offers me significantly fewer options, almost no opportunities to get under the hood to tinker, and a much smaller menu of available games and applications. 

I don’t want to join iCult.  I see no advantage in living in a "walled garden" controlled by a corporation that has proven itself more interested in serving its own needs than mine.

Friends don’t tell friends to get a Mac.  So if you tell me that, I will unfriend you.  Honest.  (Unless you’re a redhead who owns a chocolate store. But that’s the only exception.)

SweetLabs, the creators of Pokki, an app platform that creates a mobile-like app-centric desktop experience, is running a $50,000 app developer contest through November 15 to encourage developers to create Pokkies.

Pokkies are applications that Web developers create using the Pokki platform to distribute connected desktop applications using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. As of right now, Pokki only supports Windows XP, Vista and 7, but according to their website, support for Mac is coming soon. 

The contest started on Sept. 23 and runs through Nov. 15. Developers can enter the contest and have their Pokki judged on Utility, Appearance, User Experience, Uniqueness and Quality. The prizes range from $7,000 to $30,000 and three winners will be selected at the end of November. 

Do you have a Pokki application? Tell us about it below. You can also enter it into the contest here. 

The NPD group, a consumer market research firm, found that 44% of all smartphone users, shoppers are interested in purchasing a Windows Phone 7 based phone as their next purchase. 

According to LaptopMag.com, Android may face competition from Windows Phone 7 now more than iPhone 5. The article also said 63% of those polled were interested in the Android OS, but that isn't too far ahead of the 44% interested in WP7. 

The survey also found that 45% of consumers are still not aware of Windows Phone 7, which could be a problem for Microsoft. Are you aware of WP7? Interested in it? 

What do you think is so appealing about Windows Phone 7? Do you think it will soon be a three way split between iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7, knocking the BlackBerry platform off it's teetering lead? 

Share your ideas below. 

What does the future of software development look like? For the first time in decades, it appears that no one knows.

It used to be fairly easy to peek a few years into programming's future. Languages evolved according to a predictable path from lower to higher levels of abstraction. We incorporated objects, then visual development environments, then Web architectures, then managed-code platforms. Development methodologies and project-management philosophies approached with plenty of warning – it took no special insight to see them coming.

My subjective feeling – backed up by a few hours of earnest Googling – is that all of that has changed.

The future? Well, let's see. We have some broad agreement that development methods will become more agile, though we are not entirely sure what agility means. It seems clear that the future will be cloud-oriented, though every definition of “cloud” is different. Our code will need to adapt to the availability of parallel architectures, though we can't say whether the parallelism should or will reside primarily in the code we write, the libraries we incorporate, the tools we use, or the architectures we employ. Security, mobile platforms, portability, interoperability, declarative programming, functional programming...all are likely to be important. One way or another.

As for languages – oh my! At the moment it appears that every nontrivial app will incorporate modules, libraries, frameworks, and custom code written in multiple programming languages. Or maybe we'll resolve that complexity by adopting a new language with the flexibility to address all the challenges we face.

For once, the pundits are quiet. Search the net for predictions about the future of software development and you'll retrieve a list of Web pages that are years out of date and devoted to particular narrow problem or language domains.

We are in need of the same sort of paradigm-buster that object-oriented programming and visual development environments were, back in the Windows era.

Search long enough through all the partisan arguments and language-specific rants, and one name keeps coming up: Anders Hejlsberg.

Hejlsberg has been around the programming world since before the IBM PC. He is the original author of Borland's Turbo Pascal and Delphi, and since he joined Microsoft he has created C# and become director of Microsoft's programming-language strategy.

You can learn more about Hejlsberg and his views in these videos:

• Where are programming languages going?

• Trends and future directions in programming languages

• Tour through computing industry history at the Microsoft Museum

(Disclaimer: Hejlsberg's views are pretty much guaranteed to be the official views of Microsoft. I'm the last person to sign up mindlessly to Microsoft's view of the world. While I don't see the company as a customer-exploiting evil empire, neither do I think it has always acted in the development community's best interests. Although I owned and edited Windows Tech Journal, my relationship with Microsoft was always an arm's-length one – much, as it turns out, to my personal cost. But that's a long story for another day. What I'm trying to say is that you have a responsibility to take Hejlsberg's point of view with a grain of salt.)

I think the Hejlsberg videos have great value. They identify both the challenges facing our community and some of the technologies and approaches that will help us address them. Hejlsberg has proved himself to be a visionary throughout his career, and he is uniquely positioned to see the problems and possible solutions that we will encounter in the next few years.

What's your view of the future? Drop a keyword or two into the comment section below and I'll use your feedback to shape a future post. Because ultimately, the future isn't something that just happens. It's something we create. Together.

Web recommendation: Research for this post brought me for the first time to Microsoft's MSDN Channel 9. This Web site contains hundreds of videos about (Microsoft) technology and how to get the most out of it. There's a predictable amount of corporate flag-waving, of course. But there's also tons of useful content. I have some reservations about video as the medium for dispersing such information – text is more readily searched and recalled, in my view. But there's no denying that there's real value here, for free. And the site has a mission statement you can dance to. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.

Polar Mobile is joining with Nokia to deliver over 300 native apps in the next 12 months. The apps are for brands like Wired UK, Kompas, Advertising Age, The Globe and Mail, Shanghai Daily and 7DAYS. All apps will be available on Nokia Symbian phones and the future Windows Phone collaboration devices. 

Polar Mobile's technology caters to media companies to launch applications across a variety of smartphone and tablet operating systems to deliver native experiences on all those devices. 

It appears that Nokia may be realizing that the key to a successful OS and smartphone hardware business lies in how large your application eco-system is. Do you agree with this? What implications will this have for the other mobile vendors? How does this change your mind about developing for the Nokia, Symbian and Windows Phone systems?

It seems, at least lately, that the smartphone vendors and OS providers are "going to the mattresses," or in today's world, the app stores. 

In case you've been living under a rock for the last year, Microsoft executives spoke the company's going-forwardstrategy loud and clear: Cloud, and devices. It also announced the next version of Windows Phone 7, codenamed Mango, will be out late in the year, around the holiday season.

Robert Wahbe, Microsoft vice president and head of the Server and Tools Division, reminded the attendees (who numbered in the thousands for the keynote) that "people expect data from the business to be available on the device they want, optimized for that device, with security, control and visibility." During his presentaiton, he showed the run rate for physical servers at 7.8 million, but for virtual servers, it was 10.7 million. This sets up for the next, bigger inflection point, which he said is the cloud -- "taking virtualized resources and pulling them together for dynamic provisioning and scaling."

Microsoft, he said, offers the broadest public cloud offering, with Windows Azure and SQL Azure, as well as Office 365 productivity suite, Dynamics CRM and Windows Intune for management. For private clouds, Microsfot offers Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center, which Wahbe said is the base infrastructure to run the workloads business need, including their own servers and custom applications. Microsoft provides the common elements across identity, virtualization, management and deployment for either public or private clouds, he said.

As for devices, Wahbe showed a stat that showed in 2011, the average number of connected devices per adult is 4.3. Projected smartphone growht between 2011 and 2014 is 81 percent he said, and as industry, more smartphones than PCs are shipping now -- 453 millino to 372 million. The

Microsoft demonstrated access of Office 365 from the phone, with Lync Light offering secure communication via email (Outlook and Exchange) and support for IRM for protected emails.

Finally, Kinect technology was displayed as a way to bring computing power into places it hasn't been, such as third-world health clinics, where ultrasounds can be performed using inexpensive tablet devices, and operating rooms, where surgeons can manipulate CT images without affecting the sterile environment in which they work.