Category Archives: microsoft

apple, microsoft, software, windows

Two spins on Microsoft’s excellent quarter

Microsoft has delivered an excellent set of results, showing growth in pretty much all areas.

It seems to me that you can spin this in a couple of ways. First, you could argue that Microsoft is alive and well and still in the race. Certainly, with figures like these you can hardly suggest that it is out of the race.

Second, you could argue that the figures demonstrate how monopolies can continue to make good profits even when their products disappoint, especially in a buoyant market like computing.

The truth? Somewhere in between. It doesn’t matter how good the financials are: the disappointment with Vista is real. Personally I have Vista working fairly well, though annoyingly slowly at times, but I notice plenty of people advising one another to stick with XP, for performance and compatibility. Maybe the long-awaited SP1 will fix it, but some are now resigned to waiting for Windows 7 (you know, odd-number release theory) for a really good upgrade. Vista’s problems have created an opportunity for Apple and even Linux to grab some market share.

Other shadows hanging over Microsoft that come to mind:

  • Lack of clarity over Internet strategy
  • Continuing security problems centered on Windows (for whatever reason)
  • Losing the search wars
  • Governments mandating ODF
  • Apple’s increasing market share, especially among thought leaders
  • Bureaucracy and litigation
  • PR and image problems

On the plus side I’d mention the strength of the .NET platform and languages; Silverlight’s promise; and the fact that most people still want to use Microsoft Office rather than Open Office (in my experience).

I am absolutely not a financial analyst; but I observe that having a good quarter does not fix what strike me as deep-rooted problems. At the same time it is a reminder of Microsoft’s huge resources and entrenched position; that’s not going to go away quickly either.

TechEd Europe the week after next; no doubt some more Microsoft reflections then.

Technorati tags: , , , ,
microsoft, software development

Microsoft Ruby

In what is partially a response to my earlier post, Bob Warfield asks:

Sun has “cultivated and vigorously supported” Ruby.  When will we read something similar to either announcement from Microsoft, instead of reading things like they’re going to quit shipping the JVM at the end of the year?

At least this one is easy. Microsoft announced Iron Ruby back in April.

But Iron Ruby runs on .NET. Right, so what does Sun’s Ruby run on? The JVM, of course.

By the way, I cannot think of any good reason why Microsoft should revive its JVM – withdrawn, you recall, at Sun’s insistence. Microsoft’s JVM was horribly out-of-date anyway; and there are several perfectly good JVMs that run fine on Windows.

Technorati tags: ,
microsoft, open source, software

OOXML vs ODF: where next for interoperability?

1 Comment

Gary Edwards of the Open Document Foundation has a fascinating post on the important of Microsoft Office compatibility to the success of the ISO-approved Open Document formats.

It is in places a rare voice of sanity:

People continue to insist that if only Microsoft would implement ODF natively in MSOffice, we could all hop on down the yellow brick road, hand in hand, singing kumbaya to beat the band. Sadly, life doesn’t work that way. Wish it did.
Sure, Microsoft could implement ODF – but only with the addition of application specific extensions to the current ODF specification … Sun has already made it clear at the OASIS ODF TC that they are not going to compromise (or degrade) the new and innovative features and implementation model of OpenOffice just to be compatible with the existing 550 million MSOffice desktops.

More:

The simple truth is that ODF was not designed to be compatible – interoperable with existing Microsoft documents, applications and processes. Nor was it designed for grand convergence. And as we found out in our five years participation at the OASIS ODF TC, there is an across the boards resistance to extending ODF to be compatible with Microsoft documents, applications and processes.

Summary: in Edwards’ opinion, there are technical and political reasons why seamless ODF interop cannot be baked into Microsoft Office. Therefore the Foundation is now working on interop with the W3C’s Compound Document Format, about which I know little.

Surprisingly, Edwards also says that ODF will fail in the market:

If we can’t convert existing MS documents, applications and processes to ODF, then the market has no other choice but to transition to MS-OOXML.

Edwards is thoroughly spooked by the success of Sharepoint in conjunction with Exchange, and overstates his case:

If we can’t neutralize and re purpose MSOffice, the future will belong to MS-OOXML and the MS Stack. Note the MS Stack noticeably replaces W3C Open Web technologies with Microsoft’s own embraced “enhancements”. Starting with MS-OOXML/Smart Tags as a replacement for HTML-XHTML-RDF Metadata. HTML and the Open Web are the targets here. ODF is being used as a diversion from the real end game – the taking of the Internet.

I find this implausible. At the same time, I agree about the importance of interoperability with Microsoft Office.

I would also like clarification on what are the limitations of OOXML / ODF conversion. Here’s a technique that does a reasonable job. Open OOXML in Microsoft Office, save to binary Office format. Open binary Office format in Open Office, save as ODF. The same works in reverse. Not perfect perhaps, but a whole lot better than the Microsoft-sponsored add-in that works through XSLT.  Could this existing Open Office code be made into a Microsoft Office plug-in, and if so, what proportion of existing documents would not be satisfactorily converted?

Note that Sun’s ODF converter seems to be exactly this, except that it does not yet work with Office 2007. It could presumably be used with Office 2003 and the OOXML add-in, to provide a way to convert OOXML to ODF in a single application. Some further notes on Sun’s converter here.

internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

Considering Microsoft’s “rift with the web”

5 Comments

I enjoy the SmoothSpan blog but I’m not convinced by this article on Microsoft’s rift with the web.

Bob Warfield says:

Ever since their spat with Sun over Java, Microsoft has been on an increasingly proprietary path called .NET.

I am not sure why .NET is “increasingly” proprietary. Why is it more proprietary now than it used to be? Arguably it is less so; Mono is more advanced; and in addition Microsoft is going cross-platform with the CLR, by bundling it into Silverlight. That does not make it less proprietary in itself, but means that it is less closely tied to Windows.

Warfield does not quite say, but strongly implies, that .NET is failing in the market:

It’s symptomatic that you can find about 18 million Google hits on “SQL Server” but there are 77 million hits on mySQL.  There are 2+ billion hits for PHP and 135 million for Java.  C# gets a modest 15 million hits.

Right, so by the same logic PHP is vastly more important than Java. For some reason, I get different results on MySQL, which reports 171 million hits. Just for fun I tapped in Oracle, which gets only 105 million, inflated by all sorts of non-database references, so we must conclude that MySQL is far more important in the Enterprise than Oracle.

No, this sort of Google-diving is lazy analysis. Sure, the results are interesting, but they are skewed in all sorts of ways.

I am not suggesting that .NET is bigger than Java. Nevertheless, it has been a success story for Microsoft, particularly on the server which is the focus of Warfield’s comments. So too has SQL Server; in fact if I remember rightly, the server side of Microsoft has been showing healthy growth versus the more stagnant Windows/Office side of the business.

Look at what Netcraft is saying: in its October 2007 web server survey it show gaining market share for IIS and implicitly .NET technology, and has done for several months. Don’t take the Apache drop too seriously; Netcraft’s figures are skewed by the decision to remove Google’s servers from the Apache figures. Nevertheless, Microsoft seems to be growing its web business on the server side.

Jobs? I track these from time to time in the UK, and C# has shown remarkable growth since its introduction, partly at the expense of VB, but also versus Java. Yes, Java is bigger, but you would expect that.

Why has C# succeeded despite Java? Ease of use, productivity and tools. All of these can be debated; but there is some consensus about the excessive complexity of JEE, which has benefited Microsoft. I’ve also noticed innovations in C# being quietly adopted in Java. Given its false start with Java in the early days, I think Microsoft has done well to establish its new language.

Now, I do partially agree with Warfield. Microsoft is an island and I notice strong polarization when I attend conferences and the like: there is a Microsoft crowd and a non-Microsoft crowd. And I agree that the open source community builds largely on open source technology, within which Java is more widely accepted than .NET. However, the .NET island is relatively large and so far has proved resilient.

Should Microsoft drop .NET and embrace Java or PHP, as Warfield kind-of implies? No. There is no technical need for it, because .NET works well. It is not really a rift with the web, because it is server technology and actually plays pretty well with others, through web services for example. The key thing on the web is to be cross-platform on the client. Writely, acquired by Google, was a .NET product. Did anyone care? No; in fact I doubt many were even aware of it. Now Google has incorporated it into Docs and I should think it has been rewritten in Python or something. Few care about that either; but if it did not work properly on a Mac or in FireFox we would all hear about it.

I don’t mean to minimize Microsoft’s problems. More than any other company I can think of, Microsoft has difficulty in balancing the needs of its OS and desktop application business with the migration we are all making to the Web. Further, it has big PR and image problems, and poor market acceptance for Vista must be a headache. Yes, there is a Microsoft crisis brewing. I’d suggest though that the company can succeed best by building on .NET, not by abandoning it.

Technorati tags: , , , , , ,
internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

A tale of two Adobe conferences

I am just back from Adobe’s MAX Europe. The previous Macromedia/Adobe conference I attended was Macromedia DevCon in 2002. Remarkably, the gold sponsors at the earlier conference included Microsoft, there to promote .NET technology to Dreamweaver designers. Such a sponsorship seems impossible now. Back in 2002, the big product announcement was Contribute, and its competition was FrontPage. Today, it’s war. Adobe is talking “platform”: hosted services, web applications, desktop applications, and none of it dependent on Windows; while Microsoft has suddenly got the cross-platform habit with its own Flash-like browser plug-in called Silverlight. On Adobe’s side, an amazing, ubiquitous, graphically-rich runtime that just works. On Microsoft’s side, huge resources and armies of .NET developers.

Max Europe was a good conference. There’s a buzz around the products, and I didn’t meet any disappointed delegates, although there was a little bit of concern that strong designer content was getting squeezed out by the new focus on developers. The Adobe speakers seemed very approachable, and I appreciated the willingness of senior executives to talk to the press. In fact, the company has retained something of a small company feel, at least among the ex-Macromedia team which seemed to dominate at MAX. Adobe also has a clearer focus than Microsoft, which comes over as more bureaucratic and internally conflicted.

Nevertheless, it is possible that some at Adobe are under-estimating Silverlight. One speaker assured us that it only runs in one browser (false). Flex Builder is slow and awkward in comparison to Visual Studio. Adobe does have a big advantage in mobile devices – Nokia was at MAX and is putting Flash in all its high-end phones – but I am not yet convinced of the merits of Flash Mobile.

Mac count at MAX: about 50-50 with Windows on a very rough estimate. That’s proportionally fewer Macs than at FOWA earlier this month, which was maybe 80% Apple.

internet, microsoft, multimedia

BBC to use Flash, Adobe streaming for iPlayer

1 Comment

Adobe’s Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch announced today at Adobe MAX Europe that the BBC will use the Flash runtime for its iPlayer application, which enables UK viewers to download and play broadcasts for up to a week after their initial airing. In a short announcement, he said that the BBC will use Adobe’s technology end to end, from streaming to the cross-platform player on the client.

This appears to be a setback for Microsoft, whose technology is used in the controversial iPlayer currently in beta. It is unfortunate that the existing iPlayer is based on Windows Media Player components, rather than the new cross-platform Silverlight component which would be more suitable. The BBC has endured a hail of protest concerning iPlayer, based mainly on its Windows-only implementation, but also on installation hassles and annoyances arising from the Kontiki peer-to-peer technology which it uses. See here for my own experience.

However, Adobe’s press release suggests that the Microsoft iPlayer is not dead:

The BBC iPlayer on-demand streaming service will complement the download service currently available.

On the other hand, its seems odd that the BBC would use both a Windows-only and a cross-platform player technology. My hunch is that if the Adobe solution works as smoothly as the Flash player usually does, then the Microsoft-based service is likely to wither. I’ll be teasing out more detail on this later today.

There are a few more clues in this BBC story:

The BBC has also confirmed that users of Apple Mac and Linux machines will be able to use its TV catch-up service from the end of the year.

The broadcaster has signed a deal with Adobe to provide Flash video for the whole of the BBC’s video services, including a streaming version of its iPlayer.

Technorati tags: , , ,
microsoft, multimedia, software development, web authoring

Mark Anders remembers Blackbird, and other Microsoft hits and misses

3 Comments

Here at Adobe MAX Europe I had an enjoyable chat with Adobe’s Mark Anders about his time at Microsoft. Anders is well known as one of the inventors of ASP.NET, along with his colleague Scott Guthrie. However, when he joined Microsoft in the mid nineties he worked initially on the project codenamed Blackbird. This was a kind of Windows-specific internet, and was surfaced to some extent as the MSN client in Windows 95. Although the World Wide Web was already beginning to take off, Blackbird’s advocates within Microsoft considered that its superior layout capabilities would ensure its success versus HTTP-based web browsing. It was also a way to keep users hooked on Windows. Anders told me that he never believed in Blackbird and argued that Microsoft should support HTTP instead. According to him, the executives at the time did not want to listen at first, but Blackbird had severe performance problems because of an over-complex architecture which made excessive use of multi-threading. Another colleague came up with the first prototypes of the Trident rendering engine, which we now know as MSHTML, and showed that in principle Blackbird’s layout goals could also be achieved with HTTP. In consequence Blackbird was scrapped before it was released.

What would have happened had Blackbird performed better? The momentum behind the World Wide Web would have ensured the eventual death of Blackbird, but Microsoft would have been further behind in the web server and web browser market. In retrospect, the slowness of Blackbird was the best possible thing for the company, because it enabled an earlier move to HTTP.

According to Anders – and bear in mind that he now works for a competitor – the tendency to over-complicate its software is one of Microsoft’s biggest problems. The projects that work best tend to be those which simplify what already exists, rather than those which make it more complex. Thus, the success of C# and the .NET Framework came about because of its ease of use in comparison to C++ and MFC. Anders recalls the 2000 PDC, when C# and the .NET Framework was introduced to the world, as a great success. By contrast, at the Longhorn PDC in 2003 Microsoft introduced new technology that was not fully thought-through. These were the “three pillars of Longhorn”: Avalon (now Windows Presentation Foundation), Indigo (now Windows Communication Foundation) and WinFS (now scrapped). Although WPF and WCF have been shipped, they are not in any sense pillars of Windows Vista, which is largely native code. The Longhorn Alpha that was given to PDC attendees (I still have my copy somewhere) was worked on for another year, and then much of the code was scrapped in favour of a conservative upgrade from Windows 2003 – the famous reset that became Windows Vista. Like Blackbird, the original Longhorn had performance issues. I put it to Anders that the failure of Longhorn cost Microsoft two years of momentum; he replied that it was even more than that.

When Anders was working on ASP.NET he says there was always an element of disapproval from others at Microsoft who wanted to tie users more closely to Windows. Although ASP.NET runs on Windows, it supports cross-platform browser clients. There are parallels today with what the Silverlight team is doing. Silverlight is the right direction for Microsoft, but not everyone will like the idea of a rich cross-platform client and the Silverlight team may be under that same kind of pressure. Of course Anders would say that, because he now works on Flash, but I suspect there is truth in it. Microsoft does at times lurch back into Windows-only mode, as it is did when it ceased development of Windows Media Player for the Mac. That was an extraordinary decision when you consider the wider context of the multimedia and DRM wars. With Silverlight Microsoft is once again on the cross-platform track, not just for multimedia but for .NET code. It seems to be serious about it, but it will take a lot to convince long-term Microsoft watchers that cross-platform Silverlight will endure. Personally I hope it stays the course; competition is good.

blogging, microsoft, web authoring, windows

The curious silence of the IE team – Microsoft needs to rediscover blogging

4 Comments

There are huge numbers of Microsoft bloggers; yet in some important areas Microsoft seems happy to let its opponents make all the noise.

Internet Explorer is an obvious example. There is an official IE Blog, but you won’t find anything there about IE8, just occasional news of minor IE7 tweaks. The comments on the other hand are full of questions, many of them good ones that deserve an answer, or at least an acknowledgement that someone is listening.

I spoke to Microsoft’s Chris Wilson at the Future of Web Apps conference back in February, noting that he gave a “good bridge-building talk”. There have been other similar talks, but little of substance since then. Anyone searching the web for news of browser development and innovation will find little from Microsoft, lots from Mozilla and others.

This is not about Microsoft bashing. Rather, it is about web developers and designers who need to make stuff work. Having some idea about where Microsoft is going with its browser helps with that.

Microsoft needs to rediscover the value of high quality blogging that engages with the community. It is not just IE. Soon after the release of Office 2007 I was among those who reported on performance problems with Outlook. This blog still receives thousands of visits from users who search for why Outlook 2007 is slow. Where were the bloggers from the Outlook team? Months later there was a tech note and patch which helps a little, but Outlook 2007 is still slow and there is no real evidence that the company cares.

What about Open Office XML, viciously attacked by IBM and other sponsors of the rival Open Document Format? Brian Jones has a good marketing blog; yet I’ve seen relatively little technical blogging from the OOXML folk at Microsoft, in response to questions raised.

See also Dave Massy’s blog.

Technorati tags: , , , ,
linux, microsoft, open source, software development

Great for debugging: Microsoft to release .NET Framework source

2 Comments

Scott Guthrie has the details. As my title implies, this is great for debugging. There will be benefits for the Framework as well, presuming Microsoft listens when a developer says, “Why does your code do this and not that?”

Is this a big radical step for Microsoft? I don’t think so. Nor does it merit this kind of predictable backlash – Steven J Vaughan-Nichols saying that Microsoft is tempting open source developers to use its code and become vulnerable to lawsuits.

I recall an early .NET briefing in which an IT exec from the Nationwide Building Society (an early adopter) said how grateful he was to Microsoft for sharing the source to the .NET Framework. How come? Well, ever come across Reflector for .NET? If compiled .NET libraries are not obfuscated, you can easily decompile the code. Admittedly you will not see comments, but it is still pretty effective. As far as I know, the .NET Framework has never been obfuscated, so in some ways we already had the code.

I do understand the risks for projects like Mono, which seek to be clean-room implementations, but I doubt they are significantly greater than before. Further, I suspect that if Microsoft wanted to bring legal guns to bear on Mono, it is likely that it already could. Although Mono builds on ECMA standards, it implements plenty of stuff that is not covered by those standards. I have no idea whether it breaches any Microsoft patents; but I would not find it surprising. What stops Microsoft pursuing Mono? Mainly, I imagine, because it is good for .NET and therefore a benefit to the company.

Technorati tags: , , , ,

internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

Adobe Thermo: Visual programming for designers

Adobe has taken the wraps off Thermo, a new tool aimed at bridging the designer/developer gap by enabling designers to create an interactive user interface without writing code, and making it easier for designers to create components that developers can code against. Graphical components can be converted into MXML objects.

Designers will be able to work with placeholder dynamic data, giving a more accurate idea of what an application will look like at runtime.

An important feature is round-tripping between Thermo and Flex Builder. Yes, this sounds similar to what Microsoft offers with Expression and Visual Studio:

The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.

There’s a blow-by-blow account of the Thermo demo at Max in Jen deHaan’s blog post. It sounds as if it went down well at Max. Don’t get too excited though: this is a sneak preview, so no product before 2008, maybe later than that for the release version.

I’m not at the conference myself; I’ll be attending the European Max in a couple of weeks time, and I’ll find out what I can about Thermo.

Personally I’m not excited by live data at design-time. Borland has had this for years in Delphi, and it never struck me as a huge advantage. Then again I am not a designer. Round-tripping is a big feature though, and the ability to take graphics out of PhotoShop and easily convert them to programmable components sounds great.

It’s also interesting to see the unfolding of another chapter in the Adobe/Microsoft wars. There are even family connections. The Thermo team is led by Mark Anders, one of the inventors of Microsoft’s ASP.NET.