What would Microsoft need to do and say to you for you to be happy to call yourself a fan?

In part she’s reacting to Frank Shaw’s Microsoft by the Numbers in which he highlights the success of Windows 7, and makes the point that Windows netbooks will likely outsell Apple iPads by 7 or 8 times in 2010, that Linux has not ousted Windows either on the desktop or the server, and that Nokia smartphones will likely outsell iPhones by 2.5 times in 2010.

That last one is interesting. Why is Shaw puffing Nokia, when he is VP corporate communications for Microsoft? Well, the enemy of my enemy applies; it’s a jibe at Apple.

Unfortunately for Shaw, Nokia itself admits that Apple iPhone and Google Android are hurting its market share, or at least that is how I interpret this remark:

Nokia now expects its mobile device value market share to be slightly lower in 2010, compared to 2009. This update is primarily due to the competitive situation at the high-end of the market and shifts in product mix.

Nokia is being driven down-market. The same thing has happened to Microsoft in the laptop market, with the high-end going to Apple. This is a worry for both companies, since if a company becomes known as “the best” in a particular sector, it may well extend its market share simply by lowering prices or introducing cheaper product variants. This happened to some extent in the portable music player market – only to some extent, because Apple is still more expensive than most of its competitors, but its market share is now huge.

I digress. Here are a few observations on the ZDNet post. First, has Microsoft really changed as stated?

Microsoft is still paying for the bad old days of arrogance and dubious business practices. I think they’re the bad old days – I spend a lot of time talking to Microsoft insiders, partners and competitors and the attitudes I see have changed, inside and out.

The trouble is, Microsoft is so large and complex that it is hard to generalise. I think of it more as a set of united (or disunited) states than as a single corporate entity. This has always been the case – at least, as long as I can remember, and I don’t go back to the very early days.

I can believe that regulation has mitigated the worst practices of the past. But why on earth is Microsoft suing Salesforce.com (and getting itself counter-sued)? It’s terrible PR; it looks as if Microsoft wants to compete in the courts and not on product quality. If it wins and hurts Salesforce.com, what is the benefit to the industry? I realise Microsoft is not a charity, but we are talking business ethics here.

More broadly, there are two separate topics that need to be addressed. One is about the quality and prospects for Microsoft’s products and services, and the other is about how it is perceived and why.

I’ll take these in reverse order. Microsoft has history, as Mary Branscombe says, and more history than just Clippy. It’s the perceptions of the web community that are most visible to many of us, and the piece of history that counts for most is over the web browser. Microsoft beat off the competition, then froze development, an evil act that is particularly hard to forgive because of its cost in terms of devising workarounds for web pages. Yes, that’s changed now, and we have had IE7, IE8, and the promising IE9; but has Microsoft convinced the community that it would not do the same again if it had the opportunity?

There are other things I can think of. The whole Office Open XML (OOXML) saga, and hints that Microsoft is not following through on its promises. The BlueJ incident.

There is also the question of pricing, especially for business users. When I reviewed a Toshiba Netbook recently I figured that installing Windows Pro (to join a domain) and Office would cost more than the hardware. I suppose you cannot blame a company for charging what the market will bear; but when the commodity software costs more than the commodity hardware, you have to wonder whether monopolistic pricing is still present.

OK, what about product quality? I tend to agree that Microsoft often does better than it is given credit for. Windows 7 is good; Visual Studio 2010 is great; Silverlight 4 was a bit rushed but still impressive, to mention three offerings about which I know a good deal.

Nevertheless, Microsoft still had deep-rooted problems that I’ve not yet seen addressed. I’ll mention a couple.

First Microsoft still has an OEM problem. Going back to that Toshiba Netbook: it was nearly wrecked by poor OEM software additions and the user experience of a new Windows machine often remains poor. Many users do minimal customisation and as a result get a worse experience of Windows than they should. Apple will carry on winning if this is not addressed.

Second, Microsoft is conflicted, caught between the need to preserve its profits from Windows and Office, and the need to keep up with the new Cloud + Device model of computing. It is drifting towards the cloud; and developments like Office Web Apps and other one about which I am not allowed to tell you yet are encouraging (wait until next month). This issue will not go away though.

Third, mainly as a result of the above, Microsoft still does not convince when it comes to cross-platform. Silverlight is cross-platform, sure; except on the Mac you don’t have the COM integration or any equivalent, sorry, and on Linux, well there’s Moonlight or maybe we’ll work something out with Intel. It is the Windows company. Having said that, I put the Live Messenger app on the iPhone 4 I’ve been trying and it’s great; so yes, it sometimes gets it.

What can Microsoft do in order to be better liked? The key to it is this: ensure that our interactions with the company and its products are more often pleasurable than painful. Windows Phone 7 will be an interesting launch to watch, a product where Microsoft has made its best effort to break with past and deliver something users will love. We’ll see.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Silverlight: 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it
2. Love and hate for Microsoft Small Business Server
3. Silverlight versus HTML, Flash – Microsoft defends its role

The biggest problem I’ve had is on Linux. Supposedly Firefox 3.5 on Linux is supported. I ran up Ubuntu and Firefox 3.5, and went to look at a document in Word Web App. When I selected the document, Firefox quit. Every time.

After checking that Firefox was up-to-date it occurred to me that the problem might be related to Moonlight, the Linux implementation of Silverlight done by the Mono team. I disabled it. Suddenly, everything worked, even Edit in browser.

Moonlight is not just an open source project like the original Mono. It has a certain amount of official blessing from Microsoft. Here’s what VP Scott Guthrie said back in September 2007:

Over the last few months we’ve been working to enable Silverlight support on Linux, and today we are announcing a formal partnership with Novell to provide a great Silverlight implementation for Linux.  Microsoft will be delivering Silverlight Media Codecs for Linux, and Novell will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called “Moonlight”.

Moonlight will run on all Linux distributions, and support FireFox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers.  Moonlight will support both the JavaScript programming model available in Silverlight 1.0, as well as the full .NET programming model we will enable in Silverlight 1.1.

You would think therefore that Microsoft would test the Firefox/Linux/Moonlight combination with its shiny new Office Web Apps. Apparently not. Here’s what the user experience is like for Office Word App. I figured that the solution might be to upgrade Moonlight to the latest version, so I did, installing what is now called Novell Moonlight 2.2. I went back to Word Web App. Firefox no longer crashes, but I now get a blank area where the Word document should be shown, and an error if I resize the browser window:

Now let’s see what happens if I disable Moonlight:

Everything is fine – except now there is a banner inviting me to “Improve my experience” by installing Silverlight. If I follow the link I eventually get back to the same Moonlight install that I have just enabled, which would actually break rather than improve Word Web App.

It is obvious that if users have to disable Moonlight to work with Office Web Apps, this will not help Moonlight adoption on Linux.

Office Web Apps are new and I’d hope this is something that Microsoft, Novell and the Mono team can soon fix between them. One reason for highlighting it now is the hope that something could be done before the full roll-out of Office and SharePoint 2010 on May 12th.

The real point though is what this says about the extent to which Microsoft cares about Moonlight and Linux users, and how much or little communication takes place between Microsoft and Novell. Silverlight isn’t required for Office Web Apps – as you can see from the above – but it is used to good effect where available, and this Office release is therefore an important release for Silverlight as well.

Microsoft should make up its mind. Is Novell really a trusted partner for Silverlight on Linux? Or a third-party product that has to take its chances?

Related posts:

1. Moonlight 2 released; no Microsoft codecs unless you get it from Novell
2. Microsoft, Moonlight and open source
3. Silverlight on Linux: Moonlight or moonshine?

For those few still unfamiliar with Mono, it is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, enabling your .NET applications to run on other platforms. One compelling use is to have your ASP.NET web applications run on the free Apache web server, rather than Microsoft’s IIS.

Mono Tools works with both Windows Forms and web projects.

This is just the sort of thing Mono needs to move it further into the mainstream, though another less welcome sign of business acceptance is that this is a commercial product, currently costing $99.00 for an individual or $249.00 per seat in an organization. There is also an Ultimate edition at $2,499, which comes with a commercial non-LGPL license to redistribute Mono.

The Mono Tools team is now looking for testers for its 1.1 edition, which supports Visual Studio 2010.

Related posts:

1. Code for Mac Cocoa in Visual Studio – surprised to see this?
2. Amethyst from SapphireSteel: Develop Flex in Visual Studio, an alternative to Tofino
3. Visual Studio 2010 RC arrives with go-live license

Quarter ending December 31st 2009 vs quarter ending December 31st 2008, $millions

The poor performance of Vista meant latent demand for Windows 7, as both individuals and organisations deferred upgrades, which was unleashed in this quarter. Microsoft said it was a “record quarter for Windows units” and “the fastest selling operating system in history”. Windows 7 is also a strong product in its own right.

There isn’t much else to cheer about, though given the general weakness of the server market the sliver of growth there is impressive. There is still no sign of a profitable online business, which is of major concern as interest in cloud computing accelerates.

Entertainment (Xbox) is now a steady business; I’m guessing that the huge growth in profits reflects lower investment and a reduction in cost of fixing endless red rings of death thanks to better quality hardware. Revenue on the other hand is somewhat down.

Windows 7 will continue to do well, though once the upgrade bump is passed the results will be less spectacular. Windows 8 will not get the same easy ride, unless Microsoft delivers something that surprises us all with its excellence.

The positive spin on these figures is that the company still has an opportunity to reinvent itself, financed by Windows profits. It needs its own iPod equivalent to show that it can escape its Windows and Office legacy. Windows Mobile 7? Laugh if you like; but the two things with obvious growth potential in the market generally are mobile devices, and cloud computing – the two go together, of course. That said, there is no evidence yet that Microsoft has the energy and agility to reverse its poor performance to date in both areas.

Who knows, perhaps after a couple of months of mobile focus, with details to be revealed shortly at Mobile World Congress and Mix10, the picture will look more promising?

Related posts:

1. Keeping track of Microsoft financials
2. Microsoft quarterly results: server and tools shine, overall decline
3. Microsoft reports weak financials, still failing in the cloud

Note the right-click menu which offers some handy debugging features as well as the invitation to “Install Microsoft Media Pack”. If you choose this, you get a dialog offering the Microsoft codecs which are downloaded from Microsoft, not from Mono servers. You have to agree a EULA that restricts use to Moonlight running in a web browser.

That last bit is intriguing; it seems Microsoft is trying to prevent desktop or out-of-browser Moonlight (or Mono) from taking advantage of its codecs.

So what is in Moonlight 2? Miguel de Icaza explains:

Moonlight 2 is a superset of Silverlight 2. It contains everything that is part of Silverlight 2 but already ships with various features from Silverlight 3.

Those additional features include the pluggable pipeline, easing animation support, writeable bitmaps, and partial out-of-browser support. Further, de Icaza says:

We are moving quickly to complete our 3 support. Microsoft is not only providing us with test suites for Moonlight but also assisting us in making sure that flagship Silverlight applications work with Moonlight.

There is also a new patent covenant that:

ensures that other third party distributions can distribute Moonlight without their users fearing of getting sued over patent infringement by Microsoft

That said, the media pack is a source of friction. Only the Novell Moonlight distribution will raise the above dialog to install the Microsoft codecs; others will have to make their own arrangements; at least that is how I understand de Icaza’s post.

It seems an odd restriction, and means that most users should download from Novell.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft – make up your mind about Moonlight
2. Moonlight update: Silverlight 2 on Linux hardly started
3. First baby steps for Moonlight 2.0: Silverlight for Linux

“Never ask for permission, ask for forgiveness – that’s how we’ve done a lot of things in the Mono world,” said de Icaza, who also remarked that in the beginning “we thought it would be a walk in the park, we thought it would up and running in 6 months.” His motivation: “We think that .net is a fantastic development platform – we were envious when Microsoft came out with it.”

Eight years on and the Mono team is now around 35 people at Novell, plus 30-70 external contributors. “We don’t dictate the direction of mono, it’s mandated by the direction of the community,” says de Icaza. He talks about MonoDevelop, the Mono IDE, which is now licensed under LGPL allowing commercial plug-ins; about MonoTouch which lets you develop for Apple’s iPhone and “will expand towards Android”; and about XNATouch, a Mono game framework for iPhone.

The task of keeping up with Microsoft – insofar as Mono succeeds – has become easier thanks to open source. “In the last couple of years Microsoft has become very open-source friendly in some areas,” says de Icaza. “For example ASP.NET MVC, we don’t have to do anything, it just runs on our ASP.NET implementation.”

Someone asked about Mono’s plans for WPF, which is becoming more important on Windows, and this led to some intriguing comments on Moonlight/Silverlight and its future. “I think Silverlight has more potential than WPF has, because it runs on the Mac, it runs on Linux, it runs on Windows, and Silverlight is easier to learn than WPF is. We like the Silverlight model but we don’t like that it is limited to a sandbox on the browser,” he said.

“Moonlight can be used in two modes. One of them is moonlight in the plug-in, like you do with Microsoft, and you can out-of-browser if you want, but you are still restricted by the sandbox. We also offer the same graphical engine that we use for Silverlight [Moonlight] but with the .NET 4.0 APIs. You have full access to .NET 4.0 with the Silverlight UI. Isn’t that awesome?”

“WPF is interesting but a lot of work, and we don’t have the bandwidth and the resources. Our best possible option is to use Silverlight with the .NET 4.0 APIs. Our wish is to bring this expanded Silverlight to Windows and Mac OS. Maybe we’ll gently push Microsoft in that direction.”

One of his team is working on “the whole desktop rendered by Silverlight.”

In general I agree that Silverlight is more significant than WPF, particularly if Microsoft keeps up its current energetic level of development. I will be surprised if we don’t hear from Microsoft about an enhanced desktop Silverlight at the forthcoming PDC and Mix conferences.

There is another side to this though: if you can do your cross-platform .NET development in Microsoft Silverlight, do you still need Mono? Particularly if official ports to Linux start appearing?

Of course there is more to Mono than Moonlight. Running ASP.NET on Linux web servers is an attractive proposition, though historically its performance and reliability hasn’t matched that of Microsoft .NET – not surprising given its relatively small resources. Eight years on, and Mono has done more than just survived, yet has not quite tipped over into a platform popular enough to attract the level of contributions it needs.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft brings Silverlight – not Mono – to Linux via Intel
2. First baby steps for Moonlight 2.0: Silverlight for Linux
3. Silverlight 2.0 is released, Eclipse tools for Silverlight announced

Microsoft and Intel announced today that the two companies have agreed to work together to bring support for Silverlight 3 to Intel’s Atom-based Mobile Internet Devices (MID). These Atom-based devices run on Windows and Moblin, an open source, Linux-based operating system targeted at Atom-based devices. In order to help bring Silverlight content to these devices, Microsoft has provided Intel with Silverlight source code and test suites, and Intel will provide Microsoft with an optimized version of Silverlight for Moblin devices that Microsoft can then redistribute to OEMs.

There are a couple of curious aspects to this. One is why Microsoft would not simply feed optimisations into the Moonlight project, which would benefit Silverlight/Moonlight on all Linux systems. Goldfarb did add:

The Silverlight for Moblin announcement is independent from Microsoft’s work with Novell on Moonlight. The Intel/Moblin effort is specifically about building great out-of-box experiences for consumers on Atom-based devices. Microsoft’s efforts with Novell remain critical as they build an open-source, compatible, and broadly available Silverlight solution for Linux.

Another is whether Intel/Microsoft are devising some way for Silverlight to run as a desktop application, rather than just as a browser plug-in. I’m hopping to clarify these points soon.

Intel has a press release here.

Related posts:

1. What is happening with Silverlight on Intel Moblin/Meego?
2. Silverlight (and AIR) for MeeGo Linux coming in October?
3. Microsoft, Moonlight and open source

You might assume that to be good news for Mono, the open source implementation of .NET sponsored by Novell; and I suppose it is, though not in any major way.

The key point here is that Microsoft’s .NET platform goes well beyond what is covered by the promise. ASP.NET, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight: all this falls outside. The promise covers only what is standardised by ECMA.

Mono leader Miguel de Icaza is clear about the differences in his post, and says Mono will be split into safe and – presumably – unsafe parts:

In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.

A good thing? Well, it could help promote the core of Mono in the open source community, which is wary. Open source champion Richard Stallman recently stirred up debate on the subject by proclaiming C# dangerous, in what has become a somewhat perplexing post:

It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. … The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents.

he says (and is unlikely to be comforted by Microsoft’s recent moves), though he adds:

This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.

Confusing. Still, it’s a valid and important question. Is Mono safe to use?

I have been asking myself this for many years; and have asked Microsoft about it on a number of occasions with no clear answer. However, to me the breakthrough came when Moonlight was announced, an implementation of Silverlight for Linux for which Microsoft has partnered with Mono. The dual significance is first, that Microsoft is working with Mono; and second, that it shows how Microsoft has realised that overall Mono is more a benefit than a threat to its platform.

Action against Mono now seems less likely than ever. That opinion is not based on legal knowledge, but on the business & PR case.

Nevertheless, there could be limits. Stallman’s recent statement was provoked by discussions over whether Mono should be part of the default Debian install. It is not; but it is rising higher on the list of packages that are likely to be installed sooner rather than later by users, because Mono applications are growing in number.

On the server, Mono’s implementation of ASP.NET is now rather good. I’m using it on ITWriting.com for a Silverlight demo. I’ve been impressed by its compatibility with Visual Studio, though I’ve also found it increasing resource usage more than I would like. I’m using what is now an old version though, so I expect this to improve.

The cost savings in using Linux+Mono rather than Windows+ASP.NET are significant, which implies that the potential cost to Microsoft is significant too. It’s only a potential cost, because frankly the official platform is still less risky for a commercial deployment, from a technical rather than legal perspective. Mono is currently more likely to attract free or hobbyist users; but that could change. If Microsoft saw server license sales bleeding away because of Mono, my guess is that there would be rumbles.

What then of de Icaza’s move to separate Mono into safe and unsafe parts? I see the sense of it, but wonder if it could be counter-productive. While Mono is, errm, monolithic, Microsoft cannot take action against the unsafe parts without also blocking the safe parts. After the split, it will be easier for Microsoft to agitate about the pieces of Mono which might (or might not; I’m no lawyer) infringe its rights.

It still strikes me as unlikely that Microsoft would risk full-on legal action against its partner and against what is now a significant part of its platform story. However, I doubt we will get any further comfort from the company, beyond what it has already given.

*updated to acknowledge that Silverlight and WPF are covered by the open spec promise – see links in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Patent threat lifted from Mono
2. Miguel de Icaza on eight years of Mono, its future, and the Silverlight desktop
3. Mono Tools for Visual Studio: code on Windows, run on Linux

It comes from Delphi Prism, a new product from Embarcadero/Codegear which lets you code for .NET using the Delphi language, an object-oriented version of Pascal. The product is not as new as it first appears. It is based on an existing product from RemObjects, called Oxygene, which it now replaces.

Here’s the story in a nutshell. 2003: Borland, the company which created Delphi, decides (rightly) that .NET is here to stay, and releases Delphi 8, a pure .NET version. Nobody wants it, because it has no advantages to speak of over Win32 Delphi (which is faster), or C#, which is the Microsoft .NET language.

At that time some voices muttered that what Borland should do is to integrate Delphi into Visual Studio, rather than doing its own .NET IDE.  One was Marc Hoffman at RemObjects, only he did more than mutter: his company developed its own implementation of Delphi Pascal for Visual Studio, called Chrome.

Borland soldiers on with Delphi 2005, which does both .NET and Win32 in a single IDE. Developers are happy to have a new Win32 Delphi, but most still don’t see the point of the .NET stuff. Further, Delphi 2005 is buggy; many stick with Delphi 7. Next comes Delphi 2006: more of the same, but less buggy.

There’s a couple of problems with Delphi’s .NET support. First, it is always out-of-date compared to Microsoft’s .NET tools. Second, it has component library schizophrenia. There’s VCL for .NET, based on Delphi’s component and GUI library, but that’s not compatible with .NET components built for Windows Forms. There’s Windows Forms, but that’s not compatible with existing Delphi code. Borland decides to deprecate use of Delphi .NET with Windows Forms. This is really for VCL developers, it says.

Next comes Delphi 2007. Nice product, but where’s .NET? Gone. Nobody seems to mind [and it turns up later in RAD Studio 2007*]. Delphi 2009, gone again. But now there’s Prism, and it is a complete U-turn. Forget VCL.NET. It uses standard .NET libraries, runs in Visual Studio, supports Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF, and soon Silverlight. Oh, and it’s based on what that other guy did back in 2004, with some Borland Codegear Embarcadero technology thrown in: dbExpress database framework, client support for DataSnap multi-tier applications, and the Blackfish pure .NET database engine.

Very good; but there’s still that awkward question: why not use C#? The answer, I guess, being either that you love coding in the Delphi language, or you want to use one of the Delphi-compatible libraries.

Or that you want to use Mono, which of course is what enables those tasty Mac options in the New Project dialog above. You can also use C# with Mono – possibly you should, since it is Mono’s core language – but in Prism it comes nicely integrated into Visual Studio. Well, somewhat nicely. In practice there are a few extra steps you need to take to get it working. The recommendation is to run Visual Studio in a VM on a Mac, since Windows cannot run Cocoa applications. And you’re going to be using Apple’s Interface Builder; there’s no GUI designer in Visual Studio itself.

Hardly enterprise-ready then; but still an intriguing development.

*Added correction thanks to John Moshakis’ comment below.

Related posts:

1. Prism: official Delphi language comes to Visual Studio
2. Embarcadero RAD Studio 2009 is done
3. Mono Tools for Visual Studio: code on Windows, run on Linux

Not really a surprise, but nonetheless a significant moment for Microsoft. I have been watching the project closely since it was first announced at PDC 2005 as Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere. I am particularly interested in the cross-platform aspect. When .NET was first released in 2001, as Microsoft’s answer to Java after falling out with Sun, it had obvious cross-platform potential, yet the company held back form any commercial implementation outside Windows. Miguel de Icaza took independent action to create an unofficial open source Linux implementation, that also runs on Mac and Windows, called Mono. Microsoft was initially wary of Mono, but in my view the company had more to gain than to lose by supporting it. That now appears to be recognized, with Microsoft working formally with Mono to support Moonlight, Silverlight on Linux, and to provide it with multimedia codecs.

Microsoft has also announced Eclipse tools for Silverlight, in partnership with Soyatec, the idea being to enable Java developers to develop for the Silverlight client within Eclipse.

One clarification: although the press release says “This includes support for Mac, Windows and Linux”, the Mac support for Silverlight 2.0 is Intel Mac only, and the Linux version lacks multimedia support and the 2.0 version is described as “Experimental”; it is a long way from full release. Although Microsoft is now working with Mono, cross-platform currently means Windows and Intel Mac, though this does account for a large proportion of active Web users.

Press release is here.

Related posts:

1. Silverlight 4.0 released to the web; tools still not final
2. Silverlight is released for Windows, promised for Linux
3. PHP Development Tools 2.0 released, joins official Eclipse “Galileo” release