The two themes are performance, with GPU-accelerated HTML and graphics and a new Javascript engine that compiles code in the background, and standards support. This latter was not a surprise to me, as I’d heard the well-informed Molly Holzschlag praise Microsoft’s commitment to HTML5 at a workshop here on Sunday – see this earlier post.

During the keynote, we saw IE9 playing a video using the HTML 5 video tag – no Flash or Silverlight needed. Microsoft also showed that in this instance IE9 performed better than Chrome thanks to better hardware acceleration. Although one should always mistrust one vendor’s demonstration of another vendor’s product, it should not be surprising that Microsoft is able to deliver a browser that is better optimised for Windows.

Video, hardware accelerated graphics, audio element support, fast JavaScript: there is considerable overlap with the features of the Microsoft Silverlight (and Adobe Flash) plug-ins.

The plug-in approach has advantages. It offers consistency across browsers, and enables rapid evolution without the hassles of standards committees. The multimedia features in Silverlight and Flash are well ahead of those in HTML 5 – Holzschlag nailed this when she described today’s HTML 5 demos as reminiscent of Flash demos a decade ago.

Still, if you can do without the plug-in you end up with cleaner code, removing the awkward transition between what is in HTML and JavaScript, and what is in the plug-in. There is also a better chance that your code will run on Apple’s iPhone and iPad, for example.

The question though: can Microsoft do an equally good job of supporting HTML 5 throughout its platform, as it will do with Silverlight? This is where I’m doubtful. The Visual Studio and Expression tools will continue to drive developers towards Silverlight rather than HTML 5.

It’s notable that shortly after Microsoft’s IE9 demos at Mix, we saw demos of fun technology like code-name Houston, develop databases in the cloud using just your browser and … Silverlight.

Related posts:

1. What’s on at Mix 2010 – some surprises as Microsoft talks standards
2. H.264, AAC comes to Silverlight. Game over for VC-1?
3. Microsoft Silverlight: 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it

In her view, Microsoft is now fully on-board with IE, and committed to implementing the W3C HTML spec as it evolves. So too are Mozilla and Opera. She is less warm in this respect towards Apple, Google and Adobe, who she described as the “new Microsoft”, meaning I think that their business interests may be detrimental to their work on progressing the standard.

It is surprising to see Google mentioned in this context, since it is the company most obviously concerned to advance the browser’s capabilities, thus increasing the capabilities of its web-based platform. Ian Hickson, who is the editor of the HTML 5 specification, works for Google. Still, HTML 5 is a subject full of contradictions. One of its most curious aspects is that there are two HTML 5 specifications, one at WHAT WG, and one at the W3C, both edited by Hickson.

The history is that at one time the W3C, the official body in charge of the HTML specification, decided to replace HTML with a stricter XML-compliant language called XHTML. Real-world adoption was limited, and WHAT WG was set up by Google and browser vendors as a renegade group to work on a new version of HTML outside the W3C. When it became clear that XHTML was not achieving its goals, and that HTML 5.0 was meeting real needs, the W3C changed direction, stopped working on XHTML, and adopted the WHAT WG spec.

At this point you would have thought that WHAT WG might have closed itself down, job done. That is not the case though; it continues to work on its own version of the spec. I asked Holzschlag why this is, given that the existence of two HTML 5 specifications seems on the face of it to be destructive:

I think it’s very destructive. It’s very problematic. The WHAT working group is into innovation, and pushing the envelope, where they can’t do that in the W3C. The reason why the W3C’s stuff is important … is because it’s about open standards. The WHAT working group has no validation or validity or standing as an organisation other than its own self-involvement. The W3C is clearly the authority for most of these things.

Holzschlag emphasized that the W3C is a cross-industry body, with every browser maker and other interested parties such as Adobe represented.

Get us all round the table, and once we’ve spilt enough blood [laughs] we get on with the work and that actually goes through a very rigorous process, which a lot of people criticise and I feel it could be streamlined as well, but the bottom line is to ensure that it stays open, and it’s open standards, whereas the WHAT working group can decide any day that they want to close that door. At the W3C that can’t happen. That’s why if you’re really going to commit to anything in HTML 5, go with the W3C specs not with WHAT WG.

It’s a political issue in part, and in part it’s an ego issue. I think that Ian and his mates are great, very bright people but they are not totally mature yet … and I think that there’s a sense of self-importance going on, to be perfectly honest … I’m a little concerned about the monoculture that HTML 5 has created. So that exists and is a known factor. Everything I’ve said is nothing that hasn’t been said before publicly.

Strong words; yet overall Holzschlag conveys great enthusiasm for HTML 5 and its potential. She says that the mere fact of having all the leading browser vendors on board and talking to one another is of great significance.

But does HTML 5 exist? In some ways it does not; it is work in progress and not implemented consistently across browsers yet. That said, Holzschlag noted that the latest versions of the main browsers already implement significant parts of HTML 5; we will no doubt see more of it in Internet Explorer 9, for example. Even though Hickson said HTML 5 might not be done until 2022, it will be usable long before that.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft playing HTML 5 standards game alongside Silverlight game
2. Reinventing HTML: it may be too late
3. HTML5 vs XHTML2 vs DoNothing

According to Ballmer:

about 70 percent of our folks are doing things that are entirely cloud-based, or cloud inspired. And by a year from now that will be 90 percent

I watched the webcast, and it struck me as significant that Ballmer kicked off with a vox pop video where various passers by were asked what they thought about cloud computing. Naturally they had no idea, the implication being, I suppose, that the cloud is some new thing that most people are not yet aware of. Ballmer did not spell out why Microsoft made the video, but I suspect he was trying to reassure himself and others that his company is not too late.

I thought the vox pop was mis-conceived. Cloud computing is a technical concept. What if you did a vox pop on the graphical user interface? or concurrency? or Unix? or SQL? You would get equally baffled responses.

It was an interesting contrast with Google’s Eric Schmidt who gave a talk at last month’s Mobile World Congress that was also a big strategy talk; I posted about it here. Schmidt takes the cloud for granted. He does not treat it as the next big thing, but as something that is already here. His talk was both inspiring and chilling. It was inspiring in the sense of what is now possible – for example, that you can go into a restaurant, point your mobile at a foreign-language menu, and get back an instant translation, thanks to Google’s ability to mine its database of human activity. It was chilling with its implications for privacy and Schmidt’s seeming disregard for them.

Ballmer on the other hand is focused on how to transition a company whose business is primarily desktop operating systems and software to one that can prosper in the cloud era:

If you think about where we grew up, other than Windows, we grew up with this product called Microsoft Office. And it’s all about expressing yourself. It’s e-mail, it’s Word, it’s PowerPoint. It’s expression, and interaction, and collaboration. And so really taking Microsoft Office to the cloud, letting it run in the cloud, letting it run from the cloud, helping it let people connect and communicate, and express themselves. That’s one of the core kind of technical ambitions behind the next release of our Office product, which you’ll see coming to market this June.

Really? That’s not my impression of Office 2010. It’s the same old desktop suite, with a dollop of new features and a heavily cut-down online version called Office Web Apps. The problem is not only that Office Web Apps is designed to keep you dependent on offline Office. The problem is that the whole model is wrong. The business model is still based on the three-year upgrade cycle. The real transition comes when the Web Apps are the main version, to which we subscribe, which get constant incremental updates and have an API that lets them participate in mash-ups across the internet.

That said, there are parallels between Ballmer’s talk and that of Schmidt. Ballmer spoke of 5 dimensions:

• The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities
• The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action
• The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions
• The cloud wants smarter devices
• The cloud drives server advances

In the most general sense, those are similar themes. I can even believe that Ballmer, and by implication Microsoft, now realises the necessity of a deep transition, not just adding a few features to Office and Windows. I am not sure though that it is possible for Microsoft as we know it, which is based on Windows, Office and Partners.

Someone asks if Microsoft is just reacting to others. Ballmer says:

You know, if I take a look and say, hey, look, where am I proud of where we are relative to other guys, I’d point to Azure. I think Azure is very different than anything else on the market. I don’t think anybody else is trying to redefine the programming model. I think Amazon has done a nice job of helping you take the server-based programming model, the programming model of yesterday that is not scale agnostic, and then bringing it into the cloud. They’ve done a great job; I give them credit for that. On the other hand, what we’re trying to do with Azure is let you write a different kind of application, and I think we’re more forward-looking in our design point than on a lot of things that we’re doing, and at least right now I don’t see the other guy out there who’s doing the equivalent.

Sorry, I don’t buy this either. Azure does have distinct advantages, mainly to do with porting your existing ASP.NET application and integrating with existing Windows infrastructure. I don’t believe it is “scale agnostic”; something like Google App Engine is better in that respect. With Azure you have to think about how many virtual machines you want to purchase. Nor do I think Azure lets you write “a different kind of application.” There is too little multi-tenancy, too much of the old Windows server model remains in Azure.

Finally, I am surprised how poor Microsoft has become at articulating its message. Azure was badly presented at last year’s PDC, which Ballmer did not attend. It is not an attractive platform for small-scale developers, which makes it hard to get started.

Related posts:

1. New HP and Microsoft agreement commits $50 million less than similar 2006 deal
2. PDC day one: Windows in the cloud
3. Microsoft’s cloud platform, multi-touch Windows 7: mining the PDC schedule

The broadcast was coming all the way from the UK to west coast USA, which was apparently why the avatars spent some time watching a buffering thermometer. Still, it worked eventually.

More on Ballmer’s cloud perspective later.

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1. Microsoft fixes Xbox 360 license transfer
2. Sony’s Flash advantage for PlayStation 3 vs Xbox 360
3. Silverlight 3 coming to Xbox 360

Clearly the BBC needs the space to evolve as audiences and technologies develop, but it must be far more explicit than it has been in the past about what it will not do. Its commercial activity should help fund and actively support the BBC’s public mission, and never distort or supplant that mission.
Where actual or potential market impact outweighs public value, the BBC should leave space clear for others. The BBC should not attempt to do everything. It must listen to legitimate concerns from commercial media players more carefully than it has in the past and act sooner to meet them. It needs the confidence and clarity to stop as well as to start doing things.

Why such negativity? The essence of the problem is that the BBC has been too successful for some. Commercial broadcasters and web sites have to compete with an organisation that is publically funded, and complain that it is unfair competition. The BBC demonstrates the effectiveness of the subscription model, especially when that subscription is all-but compulsory. In the UK, you have to pay the licence fee if you have equipment capable of receiving its TV broadcasts.

My main interest is in the BBC website. It is one I use constantly, and I do not think there is anything like it in the world. It offers comprehensive news, features and comment, on a site that is fast and resilient, and without the irritation of advertising. For example, if I want to know the latest state of play in financial markets, I head straight to the BBC’s Market Data page.

The absence of advertising has several benefits. First, it increases confidence in the neutrality of the site. Second, it improves performance – I’m aware that my own blog is slowed down by ad scripts, for example, and I’m not happy about it; but I’m also trying to make business sense out of running the site. Third, it improves usability in other ways, with less distraction and increased space for content. Note though that the BBC site does carry advertising when viewed from non-UK locations.

The BBC web site is an enormous success, the 44th most visited in the world according to Alexa, and the top news site (cnn.com is next at 61) unless you count Yahoo, which is something different to my mind.

So what do you do with a world leader? Cut it, apparently. The report talks about “focusing” the BBC web site by:

• Halving the number of sections on the site and improving its quality by closing lower-performing sites and consolidating the rest
• Spending 25% less on the site per year by 2013
• Turning the site into a window on the web by providing at least one external link on every page and doubling monthly ‘click-throughs’ to external sites

This is made more explicit later in the report:

• To help ensure that this refocusing takes place, the BBC will spend 25% less on BBC Online by 2013, with a corresponding reduction in staffing levels
• The number of sections on the site (its ‘top-level directories’, in the form bbc.co.uk/sitename) will be halved by 2012, with many sites closed and others consolidated
• New investment will be in pursuit of the five content priorities only, and there will be far fewer bespoke programme websites
• BBC Online will be transformed into a window on the web with, by 2012, an external link on every page and at least double the current rate of ‘click-throughs’ to external sites.

There is an even more explicit section on BBC Online further down (pages 36-37) – the report seems to say the same thing several times with more detail on each iteration – but I won’t quote it all here. I will note that the sections identified for removal are not ones that matter to me, with the possible exception of local news:

Restricting local sites in England to news, sport, weather, travel and local knowledge (where ‘local knowledge’ means supporting BBC initiatives such as Coast and A History of the World in 100 Objects where there is local relevance, but not general feature content)

I do understand the problem here. Consider, for example, UK newspaper sites like the excellent guardian.co.uk – disclaimer – there are a few of my own contributions there. Such sites do not really make money, because they depend on synergy with print media that is in decline, not least because of advertisers turning to the web. There is a big debate in the media industry about whether to charge subscriptions for sites like these, as the New York Times has done, and will do again. However, the existence and quality of the BBC’s free site significantly impairs the prospects for subscriptions to UK newspaper sites.

This, I presume, is why the BBC intends to increase the number of external links; a small compensation for its unfair advantage.

Nevertheless, I think the BBC is mad to consider reducing its online investment. It is against the trend; the web is rising in importance, and traditional broadcasting decreasing. It is bad for the UK, for which the BBC is excellent PR and a genuine service to the world. It is bad for subscribers such as myself, enforced or not, who want the online service to get better, not worse.

Rather than cutting back on the BBC’s most strategic services, I’d favour looking again at the way the BBC is funded and what happens to the licence fee, which is an anomaly. I don’t see any reason in principle why it should not be shared with other organisations that are serving the public interest in news and media.

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1. Internet Explorer 40.5%
2. Firefox 34.1%
3. Chrome 10.5%
4. Safari 4.3%
5. Opera 2.9%

Chrome usage has more than doubled in six months, on this site.

I don’t pretend this is representative of the web as a whole, though I suspect it is a good leading indicator because of the relatively technical readership. Note that although I post a lot about Microsoft, IE usage here is below that on the web as a whole. Here are the figures from NetMarketShare for February:

1. Internet Explorer 61.58%
2. Firefox 24.23%
3. Chrome 5.61%
4. Safari 4.45%
5. Opera 2.35%

and from  statcounter:

1. Internet Explorer 54.81%
2. Firefox 31.29%
3. Chrome 6.88%
4. Safari 4.16%
5. Opera 1.94%

There are sizeable variations (so distrust both), but similar trends: gradual decline for IE, Firefox growing slightly, Chrome growing dramatically. Safari I suspect tracks Mac usage closely, a little below because some Mac users use Firefox. Mobile is interesting too, here’s StatCounter:

1. Opera 24.26
2. iPhone 22.5
3. Nokia 16.8
4. Blackberry 11.29
5. Android 6.27
6. iTouch 10.87

Note that iPhone/iTouch would be top if combined. Note also the complete absence of IE: either Windows Mobile users don’t browse the web, or they use Opera to do so.

I’m most interested in how Chrome usage is gathering pace. There are implications for web applications, since Chrome has an exceptionally fast JavaScript engine. Firefox is fast too, but on my latest quick Sunspider test, Firefox 3.6 scored 998.2ms vs Chrome 4.0’s 588.4ms (lower is better). IE 8.0 is miserably slow on this of course; just for the record, 5075.2ms.

Why are people switching to Chrome? I’d suggest the following. First, it is quick and easy to install, and installs into the user’s home directory on Windows so does not require local administrative rights. Second, it starts in a blink, contributing to a positive impression. Third, Google is now promoting it vigorously – I frequently see it advertised. Finally, users just like it; it works as advertised, and generally does so quickly.

Related posts:

1. Chrome browser memory usage: a good start
2. Google Chrome usage one month on
3. The new Google Chrome browser: a bad day for Firefox

The very definition of a private cloud, in fact; and this chimed nicely with some other research I’ve been doing on cloud security. Current cloud computing models are flawed, for the following reason among others.

So-called private clouds do not relieve organisations of the IT burden, though they may simplify it, and do not fully yield the benefits of multi-tenancy, elasticity and economies of scale except perhaps in the case of the largest enterprises, or governments.

On the other hand, public clouds are also flawed, because the customer retains legal responsibility for their data but loses operational responsibility. That split surfaces in debates about SLAs, legal liability and consequential loss, compliance with regulations concerning data location and segregation, and conflicts over whether customers should have the right to audit their cloud provider’s technology and security practices. The public cloud is not yet mature; it lacks the standards and regulatory frameworks that it needs, though work is being done.

VMWare may not mind about this, because it has positioned itself as the first choice for technology to drive private clouds. I talked to Chief Operating Office Tod Nielsen (formerly of Microsoft) after the event, and he told me that the majority of enquiries from potential customers relate to setting up private cloud infrastructures.

Another big growth area is desktop virtualisation, where customers with thousands of aging PCs running Windows XP want their next desktop upgrade to be their last, and see virtual desktops as a route to that goal.

I am intrigued by the desktop issue, since maintaining desktop PCs remains a significant maintenance challenge. The rise of non-PC devices is also relevant here. Isn’t the future more in pure web applications – perhaps enhanced with RIA technologies like Flash and Silverlight – rather than in virtual desktops? Nielsen said that the huge numbers of legacy applications out there made this impossible in the near future.

Nevertheless, you can see how VMWare is planning for more of a pure web play longer term, with acquisitions such as the Java application framework Springsource. One idea that was mentioned during the roundtable was a sort of server app market, where you can plug in pre-built applications into VMWare’s ESX platform.

Finally, one side-effect of increasing desktop virtualisation, in Nielsen’s view, is that more users will choose to run Apple Macs as the host. He also says that the number one customer request, in the weeks since Apple’s announcement, is for iPad support for their virtual clients. Make of that what you will.

Related posts:

1. Windows comes to Amazon’s cloud
2. Making the cloud reliable
3. Traditional IT is a scam, says Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, introducing Service Cloud 2

It’s notable that Microsoft is making more than a nod to web standards and open source. There is a full day workshop from Molly Holzschlag on HTML5 Now: The Future of Web Markup Today, John Resig on How jQuery Makes Hard Things Simple, and Doug Schepers from the W3C with Microsoft’s Patrick Dengler on SVG: The Past, Present and Future of Vector Graphics for the Web; Christian Heilmann on Participating in the Web of Data with Open Standards; and not forgetting Miguel de Icaza on The Mono Project.

Why would Microsoft talk about such things? Arguably it is a kind of smokescreen, talking standards while busily promoting proprietary stuff like SharePoint and Silverlight. I think there is some of that; but that this new focus also reflects power shifts in the industry. In the new cloud-based era Microsoft has to compete with Google, Mozilla and others; and to make sure that its stuff works in some measure on a diversity of clients, from Android to iPhone. Note the session on Practical Strategies for Debugging Cross-Browser Display Issues.

I would not call this a conversion. I would say this is more about “Windows if we can, standards if we must”. That necessity is increasing though, and the sessions at Mix reflect that.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft playing HTML 5 standards game alongside Silverlight game
2. Adobe: friend or enemy of open source, open standards?
3. Apple rapped by ad standards body for not supporting Flash and Java

I only saw the top five in Microsoft’s post; but here are the words:

Google Chrome: A fast new browser. Made for everyone.

Mozilla Firefox: Your online security is Firefox’s top priority. Firefox is free, and made to help you get the most out of the web.

Safari: Safari for Windows from Apple, the world’s most innovative browser.

Internet Explorer 8: The world’s most widely used browser. IE8 makes your web experience safer and easier than ever.

Opera: The powerful and easy-to-use web browser. Try the only browser with Opera Turbo technology, and speed up your internet connection.

Needless to say, there is little here that would really guide a user’s choice, though there is a “tell me more” link for each. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the target readership is the subset of computer users who did not realise until now that they could install a web browser other than IE.

Still, Google is right to emphasise speed; that is the main reason I use it. It is also my first choice for sites that do not render properly in IE. Firefox plays the security card, trading on recent public fretting over IE insecurities, but doesn’t mention its real strength: rich add-on availability. Microsoft is bland as usual; Apple says nothing of note; and Opera talks about some strange feature called Turbo.

But which browser should a user choose? Personally I leave IE as default and run up one of the others as I want to; this fits with my instinct to keep Windows running as closely as possible to how its designers intended. My most-used browsers after that are Chrome and Firefox; I rarely touch Safari or Opera, though both are installed.

Related posts:

1. Is Safari the world’s fastest browser? You need to test more than just JavaScript
2. The new Google Chrome browser: a bad day for Firefox
3. Chrome browser memory usage: a good start

Our aim is to develop core public service apps that bring some of the BBC’s most popular and distinctive content to mobile in a genuinely user-friendly and accessible way.

In another post Erik Huggers explains our mobile future.

I have reservations about this approach, and wonder if the BBC has been unduly influenced by Apple’s iPhone marketing – “there’s an app for that.” The iPlayer desktop application makes perfect sense for downloading and viewing video offline; but why make an app to view a web site? I can think of several objections:

1. It introduces inequality between devices. So iPhone is first. Blackberry and Android are mentioned. What about Palm WebOS? What about Windows Phone 7? Maybe Flash can help with that as a common runtime; but Flash won’t be on Windows Phone in its first release. Older devices will be left behind, even where they have decent web browsers.

2. It breaks the web. Well, one app does not break the web. But if every major web site decides it has to deliver its content through an app, what happens to hyperlinks? You can go from app to Web, I imagine, but if the target site also delivers its best mobile content through an app, what then? Imagine what the web would be like if, instead of browsing, you were constantly app-switching.

3. It moves mobile to a separate world. The truth is, there isn’t a hard and fast distinction between a mobile device and a desktop device. A laptop is mobile, but more like a desktop in terms of web browsing. What about the iPad? What about all the new form factors coming down the line? There isn’t any more reason to have apps for mobile devices than there is for desktop devices.

4. It distracts investment away from what the BBC should be doing: optimising its web site for mobile, and degrading gracefully for less powerful web browsers.

Are there cases where a BBC app might make sense? Maybe a special for the 2012 olympics, that delivers the latest results, for example? Quite possibly; but what concerns me is the idea that apps become the main way to view BBC content on a phone, rather than the web browser. It is a bad precedent, and one that I hope is not imitated by others.

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