OK, geek alert (and for the return of this blog—for shame!), but I just saw Transformers 2 and an odd thought struck me*: it has an evil Volkswagen. And this made me think: what a difference a huge pile of cash makes to a company’s morals.

If you’re thinking “er, what?”, Volkswagen somewhat recently nixed a major redesign of the Transformer Bumblebee, who was due to join an absurdly detailed toy line (the decidedly ‘not for kids’ Alternators) as a new Volkswagen Beetle. Volkswagen said no, reasoning that the company didn’t want to associate its vehicles with war-themed media. Fair enough—after all, a quick peek into VW’s history shows a somewhat… murky past.

Fast-forward four short years and evil Decepticon Sideways is on Earth in Transformers 2, presumably having fun killing various things. He changes into a silver Audi R8. Audi, of course, is owned by Volkswagen.

Like I said, what a difference a huge pile of cash makes to a company’s morals. Sadly, this isn’t in the slightest a shock.

* And, no, not “why on Earth did I go and see this?”—it’s actually quite fun, if not as fun nor nearly as coherent as the first film. And Bay and co. should really cut down on the racist Autobots, which even give Jar Jar Binks a run for his money.

Marvellous. Finally, the EU has had the bottle to give Microsoft a slap, and reports now state Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer 8. Good news, everyone!

Expect that it isn’t. Now the internet is practically ubiquitous and so important in many people’s lives, the prospect of an operating system lacking a browser in the default install is an appalling notion that will only cause a world of pain. What’s worse is that we now appear to be in an age where a weakening Microsoft is being beaten by all and sundry, several years after such actions might have actually had some benefit.

To clarify, I’m no Internet Explorer fan, nor a particularly huge Microsoft fan. The company as a whole has engaged in truly shocking business practices over the years (the nadir perhaps being the ‘knife the baby‘ incident with Apple’s QuickTime), and the company’s browser is a joke. Eight versions in and it’s still stuffed full of bugs, and it now has a confusing and misleadingly named ‘compatibility mode’ welded on. Since I spend about half my working life designing websites, I’d like nothing better in the browser space than for Trident—the engine powering Internet Explorer—to be taken round the back of the shed and shot, and for IE9 to be driven by WebKit. (Alternatively, IE9 could be WebKit and the ‘compatibility mode’ could switch the IE engine to Trident for a couple of versions.)

But—and this is a big ‘but’—the EU’s decision, if it comes to pass, will ultimately hurt users and benefit no-one. At best, a user with a new PC will have to install a browser from a standalone disc, or they’ll have to launch a utility to download and install a browser. This shouldn’t be necessary.

Arguments rage that this might at least offer users a choice—a multi-browser installer of some sort. Thing is, most people stick with what they know, and the typical home user will only have heard of IE. Corporates will also stick with Microsoft. IE’s market-share won’t significantly change due to the EU, but PC users in the area will have to do a little more work to get a system with a piece of software that almost everyone needs in the modern age.

This decision (assuming it’s more than a rumour) could have been an effective means of giving Microsoft the slap it needed years ago. But the browser wars are over and they have been for a long time. IE’s hold is slipping, slowly but surely, like the browser equivalent of the British Empire after the war. With savvy users, Firefox is gaining ground, as are Safari and Opera, and it’s only a matter of time before Chrome claims a large chunk of the market, driven by Google’s massive marketing clout. So quite what benefit the EU thinks depriving new PC users of a default browser is, especially now that Microsoft’s largely knocked on the head trying to warp web standards to its own ends, I really don’t know.

TechRadar just put an opinion piece online sure to grate with the Apple faithful. Rob Mead asserts that Snow Leopard is “little more than a service pack” and that “Windows 7 has raised the bar—and OS X 10.6 can’t reach it”.

The article goes on to lambaste Apple for having the audacity to release a system upgrade that doesn’t have any huge new features, and suggests that because of this it will “inevitably be crushed under the wheels of the mighty Windows 7 juggernaut”. I find that viewpoint perverse in the extreme.

First and foremost, criticising Apple for Snow Leopard being all about architecture rather than new features is rather like having a go at the driver in front of you for turning left after they’ve had their left-hand indicator flashing for the last quarter mile. Apple has been upfront about Snow Leopard from the start, saying that it’s about next-generation technologies and not new features.

Mead claims that this will make it a tough sale, and there at least I agree. But the fact that Snow Leopard looks much the same as Leopard isn’t something we should complain about. While I’d love to see a unified UI, I’m glad Apple—with the exception of QuickTime X—has avoided yet more pointless ‘make it look different in screen grabs to make people think it’s new’ gimmicky UI changes (see: the hideous Leopard ‘glass’ Dock and the semi-transparent menu bar, the latter of which subsequently caused much back-peddling).

Also, I’d sooner see Apple plugging the gaps for once, rather than losing focus by concentrating on the next big thing. It’s done the same with OS X iPhone 3.0, largely making important tweaks rather than wowing the audience. Likewise, Mac OS X 10.6 improves Stacks, Finder and Mail. AI for ‘intelligent’ PDF text selection in Preview might not be a show-stopping feature like Time Machine, but it’ll certainly provide the “real world benefits these changes will bring” that Mead thinks is missing from this release. The same is true for the 6GB you’ll claw back on your hard drive, the video-editing and sharing now built directly into QuickTime X, out-of-process Safari plug-ins, and the Exposé/Dock mash-up that obliterates one of the consumer-oriented Windows 7 features that had stolen the limelight—its revised taskbar.

Mead also complains about PowerPC support being ditched, and here I just say: tough. Technology moves on, and we’re three years past the Intel switch. It’s not like you have to bin a PPC Mac if the latest operating system won’t run on it (in fact, my sole PPC Mac quite happily waddles along on Tiger and is still regularly used), and to attack Apple by claiming people who splashed out on powerful Macs three or more years ago will lose out is risable.

Apple is a company that has always moved forward far more quickly than the likes of Microsoft, and it doesn’t look back. Apple shouldn’t compromise its important ‘overhaul’ upgrade, which sets the foundations for its future, just to cater for products that were end-of-lifed three years ago.

When Tim Kring’s Heroes first aired on British TV, I admit I was hooked. Despite being in my 30s, I’m a big fan of comic books (albeit mostly those written by Brits, and not the ‘superhero’ genre), and this series looked like it could be an exciting and different television adventure.

Initially, this was the case. Although lumbered with a US-style season, there was relatively little padding, and a genuine feeling that anything could happen. The nature of the series—combining various elements of ‘real life’ drama, superhero-style powers but without the ‘superhero’, sci-fi and imagination—meant I always tuned in to see what would happen next, and the series culminated in a suitably satisfying finale.

Since then, it’s all gone a bit wrong, and I found myself genuinely bored with the last series of Heroes far too often. I think I know what the problem is: Heroes has become too much like a US superhero comic book.

Some explanation is clearly needed here, so: generally, in British comics a character gets killed and stays dead. There’s mercifully little retconning, and stories are typically pretty linear, taking into account past history. Things happen and they affect what subsequently happens. In the traditional US superhero comic, this isn’t the case. Major characters are often killed off (such as in the Death of Superman) or their histories massively changed on a whim (such as in Spider-Man: Brand New Day), largely to boost sales, after which point there’s usually a return to the status quo via typically convoluted means.

The difference is stark: in the UK, you never entirely know who’s going to be safe; in the US, even death is not the end. Sadly, the US model is now endemic in Heroes. The stars have become too big and the characters are too popular, and so Kring and his team refuse to take risks. Only minor characters get the chop (in fact, they might as well dress them in Star Trek-style red jerseys), while the writers dream up increasingly implausable means of bringing back the leads time and time again. Net result: you know that major character will almost always survive, which leads to a lack of tension in the series, no real suspension of disbelief, and, eventually, boredom.

If Heroes could inject a little more of the British sensibility into its ethos, it would become more like the show I always assumed it was trying to be: “What if these people exited in the real world?” As it is, we’re increasingly getting a marginally more plausible version of X-Men, crossed with the worst facet of Star Trek, and sooner or later that’s going to drive even relativly dedicated fans away.

So, the new touchscreen Zune is on its way, which Microsoft believes is going to give Apple’s iPod touch a serious kicking. Aside from the fact that the new Zune looks a little too much like a lighter, I’m still confused regarding Microsoft’s strategy for this product.

On the face of it, the Zune has a lot going for it: strong media support, a decent screen, HD out, WiFi, a built-in HD radio tuner. But many reports suggest it’s still going to be a US-only product, which seems absolutely bonkers if true—after all, I’m pretty sure Apple sells one or two iPods in Europe, Australia, Japan and elsewhere around the globe. (Some rumours contradict this, suggesting Microsoft is planning to release the new Zune in a ‘limited number of European markets’.)

Mostly, though, this appears like the perfect product to kill off the iPod, rather than the iPod touch. This is the device Microsoft should have released before September 2007, not some time in 2009. The reason: objectively speaking, OS X devices aren’t about the hardware—they’re about what you can do with the device. Microsoft can crow all it likes about HD output (especially given that the device’s storage will be filled rather rapidly if you add a load of HD content) and a radio receiver, but until the company has something that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the App Store, Zune will be yet another also-ran.