Over at TechCrunch, my new biggest fan, Michael Arrington, is giving away a dozen signed copies of The Big Switch.

Go win one.

eWeek’s Joe Wilcox is ready to say the last rites for so-called “Office 2.0” software after a report from NPD showed that relatively few consumers know about online productivity applications like Google Apps and Zoho. But Wilcox misreads the study. He writes that “94 percent of U.S. consumers have never heard of Web-based productivity suite alternatives.” Actually, the survey, as indicated by a chart in Wilcox’s post, puts that figure at 73%. That means that more than a quarter of PC users are aware of the online alternatives, which actually strikes me as fairly high given that it’s so early in the market’s development. The study also shows that 4.5% of PC owners are users of the apps, usually in conjunction with traditional word processing and other programs, which while certainly modest again seems fairly high.

What would be interesting to see is the percentages by which awareness and use have increased over, say, the last year. The numbers would, I’d bet, be very high and would help put NPD’s study in context.

As I argued in my post Office Generations last year, we’re in the early stages of the “hybrid phase” of personal productivity applications, when most people will use web apps to extend rather than replace their old Office apps. This phase will play out over a number of years as the web technologies mature, at which point it will become natural to use purely web-based apps (with, probably, continued local caching of data and program code).

What this means is that Microsoft has a good opportunity to maintain Office’s dominance during the switchover by pursuing what it calls its “software plus services” strategy. But Microsoft should be anything but complacent right now. Maintaining market dominance does not necessarily mean maintaining traditional levels of profitability. The biggest threat posed by online alternatives may well be to undermine Microsoft’s pricing power – a trend we’re already seeing in the student market.

And it’s markets like the student market – markets where people actually have to shell out their own money for copies of Office – that Microsoft faces its biggest immediate threat. If you get Office as part of your job, you don’t have a whole lot of motivation to move to Google Apps, Zoho or Buzzword. Indeed, it might not even be allowed. But if you’re facing a multi-hundred-dollar purchase, the free alternatives suddenly become a lot more attractive.

Damon Darlin, a New York Times tech reporter, recently wrote about his decision to use Google Apps when faced with even a fairly modest $150 outlay for a family version of Office. What he’s discovered is that the online suite actually suits his needs better than Microsoft’s workhorse. He declares: “I’ve lived for a month without Word. And it has set me free.”

Once people get used to using the online apps at home or at school, they may well find the idea of buying an expensive piece of software, installing it on their hard drive, and regularly patching and updating it to be awfully old-fashioned. That’s the scenario that should be of greatest immediate concern to Microsoft, and it’s a scenario that is beginning to play out, even if the numbers aren’t yet huge.

In Wilcox’s post, by the way, an NPD analyst makes an interesting suggestion: that to begin speeding adoption of their online apps, companies like Google, Zoho, and Adobe may want to create a packaged version to sell through traditional software retailers, the way Apple does with its .Mac online service. Boxing the cloud: it would be kind of like selling a bag of air, but it may well be a smart move.

Pew researchers have issued a new report (pdf) on personal web behavior. There’s nothing particularly surprising in the findings – other than the shockingly low rates of self-googling – but I had to chuckle when I saw Pew’s Mary Madden offer an explanation for why teens are more likely than adults to restrict access to their social network profiles:

Pew also found that teens were more likely than adults to restrict who can see their profiles at an online hangout like Facebook or News Corp.’s MySpace, contrary to conventional wisdom. “Teens are more comfortable with the applications in some ways, (but) I also think they have their parents and teachers telling them to be very careful about what they post and who they share it with,” Madden said.

Yeah, right. I’m willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that the primary reason teens restrict access to their Facebook and other online profiles is not because they are dutifully following their parents’ and teachers’ advice but because they’re trying to hide stuff from their parents and teachers.

As for adults, the reason they’re happy to let it all hang out is because, alas, there’s nothing much to see. When was the last time you saw an adult being photographed while engaging in the ancient rite of tap-sucking?

This past week, Jonathan Koomey, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, released an update to his study of the electricity consumed by server computers. The research, funded by AMD, underscores the rapid increases in data-center energy use, showing that the power consumed by servers and related cooling gear doubled over the first five years of this decade, reaching 123 billion kWh in 2005. Koomey expects servers’ energy use to jump by another 76% between 2005 and 2010.

Such figures provide a good backdrop for a new article on server energy efficiency, by Google engineers Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle, that appears in the December issue of IEEE’s Computer magazine. The Google duo argue that achieving a big increase in efficiency will require a new way of thinking about server design.

Current efforts to improve computer efficiency, such as improved power supplies, sleep modes, and chip designs, are important, but don’t go far enough, they write: “Long-term technology trends invariably indicate that higher performance means increased energy usage. As a result, energy efficiency must improve as fast as computing performance to avoid a significant growth in computers’ energy footprint.”

One of the shortcomings of current efforts is that they often focus on the extremes in the usage profile of a computer, “emphasizing high energy efficiency at peak performance levels and in idle mode.” But servers are rarely either idle or operating at peak output. They usually run “at between 10 and 50 percent of their maximum utilization levels,” and at these levels energy efficiency is weak: “We see that peak energy efficiency occurs at peak utilization and drops quickly as utilization decreases. Notably, energy efficiency in the 20 to 30 percent utilization range – the point at which servers spend most of their time – has dropped to less than half the energy efficiency at peak performance. Clearly, such a profile matches poorly with the usage characteristics of server-class applications.”

Barroso and Hölzle argue that addressing this problem requires a new commitment, on the part of the makers of servers and server components, to create what they call “energy-proportional machines” – servers that operate efficiently at every stage of capacity utilization, rather than just at the extremes. Microprocessors are already doing a pretty good job of managing consumption across the usage spectrum, they write, so the onus for improving efficiency falls mainly on the manufacturers of other subcomponents like memory modules and disk drives.

Energy-proportional servers, write the engineers, would lead to dramatically greener data centers. They “could cut by one-half the energy used in data center operations. They would also lower peak power at the facility level by more than 30 percent, based on simulations of real-world data center workloads. These are dramatic improvements, especially considering that they arise from optimizations that leave peak server power unchanged.” As a first step, they recommend that energy consumption benchmarks be expanded to include readings at different levels of capacity utilization. That would put pressure on component manufacturers to green up their act.

The tipping point approaches.

As Amazon Web Services fleshes out its utility computing package with SimpleDB, Dave Winer reads the economic tea leaves:

Today, when a company raises VC, it’s probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There’s a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven’t had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.

Meanwhile, the Sunday New York Times, in a long feature story, lays out the terms of engagement between blood enemies Microsoft and Google as computing shifts to the net’s “cloud.” First, Google:

So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud? “In our view, yes,” [CEO Eric] Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does.”

Then Microsoft:

At Microsoft, Mr. Schmidt’s remarks are fighting words. Traditional software installed on personal computers is where Microsoft makes its living, and its executives see the prospect of 90 percent of computing tasks migrating to the Web-based cloud as a fantasy. “It’s, of course, totally inaccurate compared with where the market is today and where the market is headed,” says Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, which includes the Office products.

No doubt, it’s going to take many years before we get any where near Schmidt’s 90-10 ratio. Still, in reading Raikes’s comments, it’s hard not to think of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.

Just to underscore the impetus behind the launch of Googlepedia – er, Knol – I went back to rerun a test I first ran over a year ago to see how high Wikipedia pages rank in a random set of Google searches. Here were the results on August 10, 2006:

World War II: #1

Israel: #1

George Washington: #4

Genome: #9

Agriculture: #6

Herman Melville: #3

Internet: #5

Magna Carta: #2

Evolution: #3

Epilepsy: #6

And here are the results today:

World War II: #1

Israel: #1

George Washington: #2

Genome: #1

Agriculture: #1

Herman Melville: #1

Internet: #1

Magna Carta: #1

Evolution: #1

Epilepsy: #3

This kind of looks like a trend, no?

I’m guessing that serving as the front door for a vast ad-less info-moshpit outfitted with open source search tools is not exactly the future that Google has in mind for itself. Enter Knol.

As if the slutbot didn’t give us enough to worry about, spammers and other net-baddies are ramping up their use of holiday e-cards to distribute malware, according to the Christian Science Monitor. “While malicious e-cards are not a new problem,” says the Monitor, “their numbers have grown, their tactics have improved, and their victims are still falling for it.”

It gives a couple examples of this year’s ploys:

One suspicious e-card crawling the Web this year tries to exploit users’ feistier side. When opened, the e-mail loads an image of a rascal throwing a snowball at your screen. “You have just been hit with an e-mail snowball!” reads the card, which Symantec included in its December spam report. The card tells readers to forward it on to friends and share the fun … “Each time the e-mail is read, a request is sent to the server hosting the image, and the user’s e-mail address is stored … on the spammer’s server,” says the Symantec report. So, next time the spammer wants to send out junk mail, he has a fresh list of addresses.

Another of this year’s crop put a professional polish on an old trick. The card used Hallmark’s official logo and a convincing e-card template to hide its intentions. All the links led to Hallmark.com, except the line “To see it, click here.” That link would download a program onto your computer that unlocks the PC to hackers.

In my mind I have an image of the Grinch sitting in his icy hovel tapping at his keyboard, that big, diabolical grin spreading across his face.