Best of the blogs: Tis the season to publish surveys, Ephraim Schwartz proclaims. Proving his point, Schwartz’s inbox was stuffed with at least four this very morning, ranging from the rate of IT projects that fail to deliver on expectations to one about security and storage spending. Are most surveys inherently biased? Could be. “Of course, I’m still waiting for the survey from a survey company that surveys how surveys boosted sales of companies that do surveys.” Hardware: Famed French designer Philippe Starck says that Amazon’s Kindle is “a little sad” because the designer “wasn’t quite humble enough to completely disappear.” And James Niccolai of the IDG News Service asserts that Amazon “got off lightly from the critique.” Related preview: Hands-on with Kindle. The news beat: SAP and VMware ink a pact under which SAP will support its applications running on VMware’s ESX Server through the entire lifecycle, while vulnerability auction site Wabisabilabi puts a remote exploit for SAP up for sale. Microsoft says it is forging ties between Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server by way of a patch to be delivered in accordance with the next CTP of SQL Server 2008. And CEO Mark Hurd says that cost-cutting is crucial to Hewlett-Packard’s growth. Software Development