The monopolist's dilemma.

• NotN: Jacqui Smith denies expense wrongdoings.

Windows 7 Starter Edition for netbooks: you can run three apps. That's all. They want to upsell you to the next version up. ($0-$5 a copy to OEMs is what they blame for their bad January financials. Welcome to competition.)

Make one of those apps Firefox or Chrome running Google Office, Google Mail and Google Chat.

If I thought Microsoft was good at Apple-style joined-up thinking, I’d think they were planning to put something like this out themselves and cannibalise their own market instead of letting Google cannibalise it for them. But they’re not, happily letting one division cripple another division's ideas. I suspect they’ll make a half-arsed effort such as a cut-down Office Live.

Imagine ... a usable Windows 7 Starter Edition, because one of the apps is an app platform.

(I've been trying the Windows 7 in a 512MB virtual machine. Even virtualised, in that little memory, it's quite usable and nicely responsive. Slow to start up and sucks power like anything, of course. Anecdotal reports are it's fine on netbooks if you don't mind a five-minute boot. Of course, your battery will still last twice as long on Ubuntu.)