Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, was characteristically upbeat at the launch of Windows 7, the new version of its operating software in New York today. Mr Ballmer had good reason since Windows 7 (whether or not is numbered correctly) looks like a good product.

Microsoft has had enough of being pilloried by Apple for the complexity and unreliability of Windows. The software not only appears to be more reliable and much easier to use than previous versions but it does things like setting up a home network and streaming video across it with impressive ease.

The most notable absentee at this morning’s launch, however, was the netbook. When Mr Ballmer unveiled the array of computers from Microsoft’s partners running Windows 7, none of them that I could see were netbooks,  the cheap and popular portable machines about which I have written.

Indeed, Mr Ballmer went out of his way to claim that many people were dissatisfied with the slow graphics performance of netbooks. Instead, he showed off some small laptops that had faster chips and superior graphics cards from manufacturers including Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard.

It was yet another heavy-handed attempt by the Wintel industry to wean customers off netbooks, which are so cheap - and thus offer such low margins - that companies like Dell seem to be making them only under protest. Michael Dell recently made scathing remarks about the category.

Microsoft is only allowing netbook manufacturers to install the hobbled Starter edition of Windows 7, thus depriving users of some of the most attractive and time-saving aspects of Windows 7 - in particular the improved desktop navigation.

The truth, however, is that full-strength Windows 7 runs perfectly fine on netbooks. I have this on authority from a senior Microsoft engineer who told me he had installed Windows 7 Ultimate on his netbook with no problem whatsoever.

This encouraged me to defy Mr Ballmer’s advice today and buy an Asus netbook, which comes with Windows 7 Starter edition. Despite the heckling from the industry against customers who dare to like an inconvenient product, that should do me fine.

I do, however, have one advantage. Microsoft handed out a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate (in fact, Windows 7 Ultimate Signature Edition with Mr Ballmer’s inscribed on it) to journalists at the event. So I plan to upgrade my netbook with it and will let you know how it goes.

Those who want to upgrade their netbooks from Starter to Home Premium and did not get invited to today’s event will have to pay $80 for the licence in the US.

A reader points out that, according to the software numbering system Microsoft itself uses, Windows 7 is really Windows 6 rather than, as I calculated, Windows 8.

Windows 95 was Windows 4 and Windows XP was Windows 5. Vista was Windows 6 and, under the hood, this week’s release counts as 6.1 - making it Windows 6 as well.

You can read the full software numbering system here.

Microsoft seems to have a good product in Windows 7, its effort to scrub away the embarrassment of Vista, which is being launched next week. I have not tried it, but those who have report that it is not only less troublesome than Vista but works faster.

However, I am a bit puzzled by the numbering of Windows 7, which seems to me to be rewriting history - or at least leaving out a large chunk of it.

The first two versions of Windows were so forgettable as not to count and it was only with Windows 3 in 1990 (or more exactly 3.1 in 1992) that the franchise really took hold.

Then Microsoft broke the plain numbering pattern in its consumer editions with Windows 95 which appeared in 1995. This was presumably the equivalent of Windows 4.

Following 95 came Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition, both in the years the names suggest. I would lump them together as Windows 5 since ME was really another version of 98.

That makes Windows XP, which appeared in 2001 and which many people still use in preference to Vista, Windows 6. In turn, Vista would be Windows 7.

So surely Windows 7 is really Windows 8 (even ignoring the branch of corporate Windows releases - Windows NT, Windows 2000 etc)?

The best explanation seems to be that Microsoft has decided to ignore Windows 98 and ME on the grounds that they were upgrades of 95. That suggests that nothing happened to Windows between 1995 and 2001, which was not what Microsoft told us at the time.

Or maybe Microsoft is trying to erase memories of Vista by not including that in its numbering pattern. Either way, there is a missing Windows.

The news that Arthur Levinson, the former chief executive of Genentech, has resigned from Google’s board of directors to eliminate the overlap between directors of Apple and Google, will cause some tremors in Silicon Valley, I would have thought.

Google tried to resist pressure from the Federal Trade Commission, which opened an anti-trust investigation into ties between the two companies earlier this year. It has now backed down, with the other overlapping director, Eric Schmidt of Google, having resigned from Apple’s board in August.

The FTC enforced the change by invoking Section 8 of the Clayton Act, which prohibits one person from serving as director or officer of two competing corporations, with a few exceptions.

The broader point is that Silicon Valley companies often have keiretsu-like links, not only because it is a small place where a lot of people overlap at conferences and other events but because of the role of venture capital companies such as Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Many large Silicon Valley companies were once start-ups in the portfolios of venture capital companies and had partners of those funds on their boards.

Mike Moritz of Sequoia, for example, was once a director of both Yahoo and Google, although he left the Yahoo board in 2003 and the Google board in 2007. Similarly, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins is still a director of both Google and Amazon (about which the FTC does not appear to be concerned).

In Silicon Valley, this strikes no-one as posting any problem, or even as being particularly odd. However, the FTC’s newfound zeal against overlapping directorates could make things less cosy.

I went to an interesting media briefing in New York this morning given by Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin, the chief executive and the co-founder of Google.

They covered various topics, including signs of economic recovery in Google’s business and its tussles over the US class action settlement that would allow Google to digitise many “orphan” books that are no longer in print.

The most gripping moment, I thought, came when Mr Schmidt responded to a question about why Google would not go the same way as Microsoft now that it is so large and powerful.

This, in full, was his response:

“There are many, many reasons why we are not going to be like Microsoft. The first has to do with the culture of the founders, the culture of the company, the value systems. The second has to do with the majority of the users, and usage is one click away from moving to a competitor, which is not true of more embedded platforms in high tech. It is very difficult to move out your database system, it is very difficult to move out of Windows, for technological reasons whereas it is quite easy to move out of these online services.

“The third is that, having taken such a strong position as a company, if somehow we went into a room with the evil light, and somehow evil came all over us and we exited that room and we announced an evil strategy, we would be destroyed. We would be destroyed in reputation, we would be destroyed in consumer behaviour, consumers would mass against us, and so forth. There is a fundamental trust relationship between Google and its users.

“And the fourth is that none of us would ever want to go through the kind of legal proceedings that would then follow in enough countries to make it painful. So there are positive reasons and there are good negative reasons, plus I do not think any of us are going anywhere and we have not yet found the evil room on our campus.”

I then asked him if this implied that there was an “evil room” on Microsoft’s Redmond campus, and he responded:

“I did not say that. You may interpret it in any way you wish.”

I suppose there are couple of lessons from this, apart from the fact that I have never actually heard the chief executive of a public company suggest that a competitor has an “evil room” before.

One is that the question clearly concerns him. When it was posed, he launched straight into the elegantly structured reply with hardly a pause. That suggests to me that, with regulators and courts now circling Google more closely, it is on his mind.

A second is that Google’s executives still regard themselves as acting in the public good in a way that sets them apart from others. This sense of righteousness, sometimes shading into self-righteousness, was a mark of Google from the beginning.

Last, it feels hubristic to me. Any company with Google’s power and influence that believes so firmly that everything it does is for the public good is surely riding for a fall.

Update: There are a couple of reports of the meeting here and here, which include details of other topics covered by the Google executives

Is China becoming the Silicon Valley of the green world?

The question is prompted by the news that Wang Chuanfu, founder and chairman of BYD, the battery and electric car company, is now estimated to be China’s richest person, followed Zhang Yin, whose family controls Nine Dragons Paper, a paper recycling and packaging company.

As Rupert Hoogewerf of Hurun, the Shanghai consultancy that draws up the annual list, says in the FT story reporting the 2009 results:

“It seems to me pretty significant that the two richest people in China are both now from companies that have an important green element.”

It reminds me of a comment by Andrea Spring, a Republican staff member for the House of Representatives energy and commerce committee at last week’s FT US Energy Business conference:

“China is moving so rapidly on wind power that the US is being outstripped . . . The CEO of Suntech is the 7th richest man in China and is going to be the next Bill Gates. China and India will own [green technology].”

In fact, as the FT story says, Shi Zhengrong of Suntech has slipped down the rich list this year:

Not all China’s green entrepreneurs have fared so well over the past year. Peng Xiaofeng of LDK Solar and Shi Zhengrong of Suntech, both solar panel manufacturers, have dropped out of the top 10 after their share prices fell sharply on fears of substantial overcapacity in the industry in China.

Still, the point remains. Chinese technology companies are managing to combine the global demand for green technology with low-cost manufacturing to get ahead of their global rivals.

Someone at AT&T is a reader of this blog, it seems.

One of my posts was last week picked up by AT&T and quoted at length in a complaint that the company made on Friday to the Federal Communications Commission about Google Voice. The first I knew about it was when I read news reports at the weekend.

The point AT&T seized upon was my argument (drawing on James Surowiecki) that Google was caught in an intellectual contradiction over its Google Voice service. You can read the post here and the AT&T complaint quoting it here.

The AT&T complaint says that if Google Voice is a telecoms service, then it ought to be covered by common carriage rules. If it is not, as Google claims, then it is an internet application that should be covered by the network neutrality principles for which Google has lobbied.

Unsurprisingly, since AT&T is using my blog as supporting evidence, I think that is a smart argument. It may or may not convince the FCC but it puts Google on the spot publicly.

Incidentally, although the AT&T letter quotes me accurately, it misleadingly attributes the argument to the Financial Times. These are my views, not those of the FT as a whole.

Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington media and telecoms counsel, responded on its public policy blog that Google is not bound by the same rules as AT&T:

AT&T is trying to make this about Google’s support for an open internet, but the comparison just doesn’t fly. The FCC’s open internet principles apply only to the behavior of broadband carriers - not the creators of Web-based software applications.

Mr Whitt could be right in law but it does not come across well as a defence. The first commenter on the Google blog, Visnhu Gopal, gently pointed this out:

Not to sound offensive, but that sentence does sound a bit disingenuous doesn’t it? Open internet doesn’t apply to web-based software applications? What should it apply to, then?

In fact, Mr Whitt’s argument last week in the Wall Street Journal for why Google Voice should not be covered by common carriage rules, allowing it not to connect some high-cost calls, was reminiscent of AT&T’s own argument against network neutrality.

Mr Whitt said it would become “a real challenge” to justify Google’s investment in Google Voice if the FCC declared it was subject to common carrier rules. “Imposing legacy common carriage requirements would be unfortunate not just for Google Voice, but also for lots of innovative companies, large and small, who are using the Web to revolutionize the way people communicate with each other.”

Telecoms and cable companies argue that network neutrality rules would, by preventing them from charging for faster delivery of services, weaken their incentive to invest in new networks.

When you find yourself in an intellectual hole, Mr Whitt, stop digging.

With apologies for lateness - travel and problematic internet connections are to blame - here is my column from the FT on Thursday:

What is the most influential piece of personal technology of the past two years?Amazon’s Kindle? Apple’s iPhone? Research in Motion’s BlackBerry? All of these North American devices are worthy but my prize goes to the Asus Eee PC made by Asustek of Taiwan.

“A lot of people scoffed at them and I must admit I was an early disbeliever,” says Bob O’Donnell of IDC, the research group, about Asustek, which in October 2007 came up with its small, light, cheap laptop computer known (misleadingly, it turns out) as a netbook.

Few analysts grasped the significance of the Eee because they did not think that people in the developed world would buy a not-very-powerful device with a tiny screen and a small keyboard. Meanwhile, US companies from Dell to Microsoftand Apple gazed studiously elsewhere.

Yet, nearly two years on, evidence of the Eee’s influence is everywhere, from the weak outlook reported by Dell this week to Google’s announcement that it will build a rival to Windows in its Chrome OS operating system, and Microsoft’s move to offer a free web version of its Office software suite.

The Asus Eee, and rival netbooks made by Acer, another Taiwan company, have converted consumers and caused havoc in the personal computer industry, reducing revenues and margins at both software and hardware companies. Everyone except Apple has ended up following Asustek.

This, however, leaves a question. If the netbook, now defined as a mini-notebook with a screen of up to 10 inches, costing between $300 and $600, weighing two or three pounds and usually running on Intel’s Atom chip, is so appealing, why did it take so long to arrive?

You can read the rest of the column here and comment below.