French phrase sums up Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer got his Francophile on last week in answering a question about the leadership transition at Microsoft.

"Well, I probably shouldn't just lapse into French," Ballmer said during an interview at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., "but I would say, 'plus ça change, plus ça reste la meme.' The more things change, the more they stay the same. As a little kid, I grew up in a French-speaking country, so I apologize for that."

Ballmer's family moved in the mid-1960s from Detroit to Brussels, Belgium, where he learned to "speak perfect French," according to one biography.

The old saying, Ballmer continued, fits the situation at Microsoft well.

"There are basic core principles that have been at the backbone of Microsoft, and I don't think anybody ought to expect to see any change," he said. Among those core principles: an expansive footprint that crosses entertainment, online, enterprise and desktop businesses; a focus on innovation; the Live platform; and tenacity.

"The bone doesn't fall out of our mouth easily," Ballmer said.

Grits on Windows

Motion pictures

About 3 percent of U.S. cellphone subscribers, or 8 million consumers, take personal videos with their cellphones.

Source: Telephia

Keeping track of the different versions of Windows was hard enough, with all the different flavors of Vista and antitrust variations of XP.

Now Microsoft blogger Charlie Owen has let slip technical details of Windows Vista Southern Edition RC1, an update of the old Winders XP chestnut.

Owens said Winders Vista has exclusive programs:

Tiperiter, a word processing program; Colerin' Book, a graphics program; Cyferin' Mersheen, calculator; Outhouse Paper, notepad; Inner-net, Internet Explorer 7.0; Pitchers, a graphics viewer; Bubba Tube, Windows Media Center.

Microsoft hasn't said exactly when they'll ship — it still has to git-r-done.

Open to suggestions

Mozilla has set up an online suggestion box of sorts for future versions of its Firefox browser.

"We are currently in the early development stage for Firefox 3, and would like to collect all the ideas for feature enhancements in a single place," the Web site explains. Suggestions are being accepted for all future releases.

People have already made dozens of suggestions to improve the open-source browser.

The feedback could come in handy as July browser usage figures, released last week, show Firefox was down for only the second month since One-Stat.com started tracking it in 2002.

Closing the divide

How wide is the digital divide?

A University of Washington professor says we don't use the right tools to answer that question as information technology has become more pervasive and complex.

Karine Barzilai-Nahon, an assistant professor at the UW's Information School, published a paper this month arguing that a more sophisticated approach is needed to measure who's being left on the far side of the gap.

"Ten years ago, when someone had a connection, it was enough," Barzilai-Nahon said in a statement. "Today, in some places it's nothing. The idea is what do you do with the content? Do you know how to use it?" For those people who don't, "Ten years from now, who will hire them?"

In planning solutions to the digital divide, she argues that policymakers should look at socioeconomic factors such as age, race, geography and language; affordability of technology; support such as training and funding; and, frequency, purpose and skill level of technology use.

Download, a column of news bits, observations and miscellany, is gathered by The Seattle Times technology staff. We can be reached at 206-464-2265 or biztech@seattletimes.com.