Up front: Will Windows get 'smart' with ARM chips?

Microsoft steps back from an OS battle

Are you out and about today? You could be: The 19th annual Computers Freedom and Privacy conference is on in DC, and E3 continues to ... well not exactly rage ... in LA. Because there's nothing most of us want to do more at the beginning of summer than tramp around a convention in business-casual mufti.

There's Computex, of course, where Microsoft has just made official the news that Win7 will be available on October 22. It's expected that Steve Guggenheimer, speaking from Taipei, will have news on a "Windows Upgrade Option" program designed to get recent Vista buyers out of that operating system and into a comfy Win7 setup at little or no cost.

So why no love for netbooks or smartbooks (or books, for that matter)? If there truly is no "Windows 7 for smartbooks" in ARM's future, there's a feeling that Microsoft's winning to cede the space to the likes of Linux and -- especially -- Google's Android platform, even while they're charging hard at Google on the search front with Bing.

The competition between Microsoft and Google has seemed rather Rovian lately. Back when Karl Rove was lionized as "Bush's Brain," the political strategist operates on a policy of attacking his enemies' strengths rather than their weakness. By engaging an adversary on a topic they believe they own, the attacker focuses the adversary's energy into a relatively narrow band of effort. Bing makes much more sense when you think of it challenging Google's bread-and-butter search functionality; likewise, Google was taking it to Microsoft's wheelhouse with Android.

Microsoft has of course been making sallies at this little-bitty-notebook thing literally longer than Google has existed, as owners of any of the mid-90s "subnotebooks" will know. They waded into tablets, too, and that hasn't worked out to more than a niche market (yet). Is Microsoft simply sitting this iteration out? And -- if so -- what are the chances that they'll be that guy who gets bored and leaves the baseball game early, only to miss the late-inning play that changes everything and makes the highlight reel for years to come?