Category Archives: microsoft

adobe, development, microsoft, software, software development, visual studio, windows

Adobe Creative Cloud giveaway at Microsoft Build: sign of a new alliance?

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At Microsoft’s Build conference last week, one among a number of giveaways to all attendees was a year’s subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. This was announced by Developer and Platform Evangelism VP Steven Guggenheimer during the day 2 keynote.

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Creative Cloud costs $49.99 (or £39 + VAT) per month for an individual subscription.

Guggenheimer in effect said that the gift came from Adobe; he suggested that “you guys should send them a nice email”.

The stated purpose of the giveaway is to promote the Digital Publishing Suite (DPS). Creative Cloud comes with DPS Single Edition, which lets you create rich, interactive magazine content and publish it to the iPad and Android. Announced at Build was DPS support for Windows 8.1 in “late 2013”; a sign if nothing else that Adobe is taking Microsoft’s tablet platform seriously.

The odd aspect though is that Build is a developer conference and not quite the right target audience for DPS. On the other hand, there are numerous tools in Creative Cloud that are well suited to developers, including the Edge web content tools, PhoneGap Build, and of course the mighty Photoshop for image editing.

Adobe’s Adam Lehman was interviewed at Build about the Creative Cloud tools, especially Edge, here.

Microsoft is no longer trying to compete with Adobe on design tools. Expression Web and Expression Design have been discontinued. The Flash versus Silverlight wars are also consigned to history, making it easier for these two companies to work together.

microsoft, software development, visual studio, windows

Microsoft Build 2013: Love the platform?

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The paradox of Microsoft: record revenue and profits, but yes, Windows 8 has been a disaster so far, and the company has lost developer and consumer mind share.

That might explain why there was no lack of availability for tickets to Build in San Francisco. With a smart PR move, Microsoft “sold out” of a limited first allocation, then made more available, and you could register right up to the day before. Attendance estimates are around 4,500.

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The atmosphere was good though, and someone remarked to me that it felt a bit like an early Mix event, Microsoft’s web and design conference back in Silverlight days.

Blue was the colour; and for me Build 2013 was a Windows 8.1 event, though attention was also given to Windows Azure and Windows Phone.

Microsoft has two goals with Windows 8.1.

One is to placate users who essentially want Windows 7.1 and have been wary, confused, or worse, in their reaction to the Windows 8 Modern (or Metro, or Windows Store) user interface.

The other is to establish a new tablet platform, something which has yet to happen despite significant numbers of Windows 8 installations out there since the launch.

There was solid progress on both these fronts at Build, though whether it was enough is of course open to debate. Windows 8.1 is a nicer experience, especially for desktop users, and the user interface feels more elegant and refined than Windows 8.0.

No matter what you may have read elsewhere though, Microsoft is not backtracking. The focus at Build was on the new app platform and its improvements. Developers I spoke to were generally happy with these. “It’s caught up with Silverlight”, one told me.

At Build 2011 and 2012 there was some disappointment among developers, that Microsoft seemed to be pushing HTML and JavaScript above C# and .NET, for its new app platform. There was a perception at Build 2013 that this is no longer the case, though C# architect Anders Hejlsberg spoke on TypeScript (which compiles to JavaScript) rather than C# at his session; and a Microsoft engineer I spoke to denied that there had been any change of direction internally; the official line is that this is developer choice.

In practice, the developer choice tends to be C#, which dominated the session examples, and there was no more gossip about Microsoft abandoning .NET.

Windows seems to be on a one-year refresh cycle now. No date has been announced, but the signs are that Windows 8.1 will follow one year after Windows 8.0, which means RTM (the release build) no later than August and machines on sale in time for the winter season.

Much was already known about Windows 8.1, so were there any surprises? The main one was the evolution of Bing. The key phrase is “Bing as a platform”.

Bing is much more than just a search engine. We’re always a platform company. As we’ve been building this great search experience, we’ve actually been building this rich platform.

said Program Manager David Robinson in this session. Bing services are not just search, but also speech recognition (as seen on Xbox) so that developers can create “natural user interfaces” with voice control, text to speech, and 2D and 3D mapping with driving directions.

The other twist on this is the new search app in Windows 8.1. The way search works in Windows 8.1 has changed quite a bit. Search within an app should no longer rely on the Charms menu, and developers are expected to put a search box into their user interface. Search in the Charms menu is a system search, that integrates local and web results. Thus, if I search for Build, I get the Build apps, local documents mentioning Build, my own photos, web results relating to the building industry, word definitions, and so on. If I search for “Event viewer”, I get the control panel applet, a Wikipedia entry, a couple of Microsoft support articles, and then a general web search with infinite scrolling to the right. If I search for a celebrity, I get a rich multimedia view.

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The search engine here is not pluggable; only Bing will work. This is smart strategic thinking, since it is at once a compelling app, an easy way to navigate Windows, and a way of building search share for Bing.

There are some details of search yet to be revealed. In particular, I asked how an app can integrate its own content into an “Everywhere” search, and was told it has yet to be announced (even though Windows 8.0 has a search contract that you would have thought would fit perfectly here).

My own experience of Windows 8.1 is positive, though since I have little difficulty with Windows 8.0 I am not a good test case as to whether it will win over those sticking with Windows 7. The Start button is mostly cosmetic, but I suspect I will find myself right-clicking it frequently to bring up the Win-X menu, now complete with Shutdown option.

Surface RT is greatly improved by the update. There is some performance gain, and the addition of Outlook to the RT desktop makes it twice as useful for businesses using Exchange or Office 365. Windows 8.1 also comes with Internet Explorer 11 with WebGL and some user interface improvements.

Microsoft does feel somewhat diminished these days, thanks to the decline of the PC and its smaller area of dominance, despite its continuing healthy financials. Can the company recover any of that ground? To do so it has to drive adoption of the tablet personality in Windows 8. Microsoft has made a poor start, but it may yet come together.

At a sparsely attended session on The Story of Bringing Nokia Music from Windows Phone to Windows 8 the Nokia Design Principles caught my attention:

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The speakers conveyed real enthusiasm for the last of these, “Love the platform”, which is something I have not often encountered in the context of Windows 8.0, especially as the first release felt rough and not-quite-ready from a developer perspective. There is no doubting its potential though, and if Microsoft can win a bit more developer love with the 8.1 release, then we may see growth. 

development, microsoft, open source, professional, software development, visual studio

Visual C++ will implement all of C++ 11 and C++ 14, some of C99 says Microsoft

Microsoft’s Herb Sutter spoke at Microsoft Build in San Francisco on the future of C++.

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Microsoft has been criticised for being slow to implement all the features of ISO C++ 11. Sutter says most features are now included in the public preview of Visual Studio 2013 – which has a “Go Live” license so you can use it in production – including the oft-requested variadic templates. The full list:

  • Explicit conversion operators
  • Raw string literals
  • Function template default arguments
  • Delegating constructors
  • Uniform int and initializer_lists
  • Variadic templates

More features are coming in the RTM (final release) of Visual Studio 2013 later this year:

  • Non-static member initializers
  • =default
  • =delete
  • ‘using’ aliases

A technical preview will then follow and Sutter listed possible features of which there will be a subset. Full conformance will follow at an unspecified time.

Microsoft is also promising a full implementation of C++ 14, the next update to the standard, even though the exact specification is not yet fully agreed. Some C++ 14 features will be implemented ahead of C++ 11 features, if they are considered to add high value.

Two other points of interest.

Async/await (familiar to C# developers) will be implemented in the post-RTM CTP because it is such a useful feature for Windows Runtime app developers, even though it is not part of the ISO standard.

Finally, Microsoft will also several C99 features in the RTM of Visual Studio 2013:

  • Variable decls
  • C99_Bool
  • compound literals
  • designated initializers

The reason for implementing these is that they are needed to compile popular open source libraries like FFmpeg.

I asked Sutter why Microsoft is not planning full conformance to C99. He said it was a matter of priorities and that work on C++ 11 and C++ 14 was more important. If there are particular additional features of C99 developers would like to see implemented, contacting Sutter with requests and rationale might eventually yield results.

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microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

Microsoft Build: Windows 8.1 for developers, Visual Studio 2013, Xamarin for cross-platform

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Microsoft’s Build developer conference is getting under way in San Francisco.

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Today Microsoft is expected to announce the public preview of Windows 8.1 together with technical details of what is in the latest Windows update. Sessions include What’s new in the Windows Runtime (the tablet platform in Windows 8), and what’s new in XAML (the interface design language for Windows 8) and WinJS (the interop library for apps written in HTML and JavaScript).

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for new technologies runs from the Peak of Inflated Expectations through the Trough of Disillusionment, eventually settling at the Plateau of Productivity. Inflated expectations for Windows 8 – the iPad killer – expired many months back and we are well down in the trough, with little momentum behind the Windows 8 tablet platform, OEM partners still searching for the right way to package Windows 8 and coming up with unsatisfactory and expensive hybrid creations, and iPad and Android tablets ascendant.

At this point, Microsoft needs to win over its core market, much of which is determined to stick with Windows 7, as well as injecting some life into the tablet side of Windows 8. The platform has promise, but it is fair to say that the launch has been difficult.

The advantage now is that Microsoft is in a period of incremental improvement rather than reimagining Windows, and incremental improvements are easier to pull off. More reports soon.

The schedule also includes news of Visual Studio 2013 and there is likely to be a new preview for this as well. A smoothly integrated development platform across Windows client, Windows Phone, and the Windows Azure cloud, with a dash of XBox One for game developers? Microsoft has all the ingredients but with questions about whether it is able to deliver, as it is currently losing the battle for the client (PC and devices).

One answer for C# developers hedging their bets, or just trying to take advantage of the huge iOS and Android market, is the Xamarin toolset which lets code in C# and .NET and share non-GUI code across all the most popular platforms. Xamarin hosted a large party for Microsoft-platform developers last night in San Francisco. Xamarin’s approach is winning significant support, since it ensures a native GUI on each platform while still sharing a large proportion of your code.  Mono and Xamarin founder Miguel de Icaza was there to evangelise the Xamarin tools.

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There was also a giant Jenga-like game. Here’s hoping that neither Xamarin’s nor Microsoft’s development stack looks like this.

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iphone, microsoft, mobile, software development, windows

Not just Instagram: the Windows Phone (and BlackBerry, Firefox OS) app problem

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I like the Windows Phone OS and use one day to day. However it has become impossible to do my job in technical journalism without either an Apple iOS or Android device alongside it. The reason is that I review gadgets and find increasingly that they come with app support – but only for iOS or Android.

The Fitbit exercise tracking gadget, for example.

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Or the Corsair Voyager Air wireless hard drive, almost inaccessible from Windows Phone (you can do it with a firmware update and DLNA).

 

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Or the Seagate Wireless Plus. Actually this one is better as it has a web UI, but no app.

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My bank is Nationwide and has an app – uh oh.

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It’s not just Instagram.

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Where do Microsoft and Nokia go from here? Or other contenders like BlackBerry and Firefox OS? The answer of course is to sell lots of devices so that discontented users beat up the companies that do not support them. But selling lots of devices is difficult when the customer says, “it’s a nice phone, but it does not work with my portable hard drive. Or my bank. Or my Fitbit.”

The Mac survived versus the PC for many years with this kind of problem. It takes a loyal customer base and excellent 1st party and niche apps. There are still areas of strength which Microsoft and its phone partners could exploit (though they have been poor at this to date). Enterprise integration with Windows Server and System Center. Consumer integration with Xbox.

If the company can get it right with Windows tablets that would help too, especially combined with unification of the Windows 8 and Windows Phone app platforms.

Unfortunately for Microsoft though, the market has already decided that only two mobile platforms matter, and that will not be easy to change.

microsoft, professional, software development, virtualization, windows, windows 7

Windows XP Mode hassles for Windows 8 upgraders

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One of the reasons for the success of Windows 7 was the provision Microsoft made for customers stuck with applications that only run on Windows XP. Windows XP Mode is a free add-on for Windows 7 Professional that runs Windows XP. It can also hide the XP desktop and run individual applications in their own window, though this is cosmetic and merely hides the desktop. Windows XP Mode uses Virtual PC as its virtualisation platform.

What would expect to happen if you upgraded Windows 7 with XP Mode to Windows 8? Without having researched it, my expectation was that Windows XP Mode would migrate smoothly to Hyper-V in Windows 8.

Not so. Here is the official word:

With the end of extended support for Windows XP in April 2014, Microsoft has decided not to develop Windows XP Mode for Windows 8.  If you’re a Windows 7 customer who uses Windows XP Mode and are planning a move to Windows 8, this article may be helpful to you.  
When you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8, Windows XP Mode is installed on your machine, however Windows Virtual PC is not present anymore. This issue occurs because Windows Virtual PC is not supported on Windows 8. To retrieve data from the Windows XP Mode virtual machine, perform the steps listed in the More Information section.

If you were relying on XP Mode to run some old but essential application, this is definitely worth knowing. Microsoft’s guidance on retrieving the data is unlikely to be much use, since the reason you use XP Mode is to run applications rather than to store data. Some users are not impressed:

This is SHOCKING.  I was using Win 7 Pro and had a fully configured (hours of work) XP Virtual Machine with my complete web development environment in it.  It didn’t even occur to me that it wouldn’t work on Windows 8.  I’ve only just discovered now when I tried to access it to do some updates!

I MUST recover this virtual PC.

Why did the Upgrade Advisor not mention this!?!?  I carefully resolved all the issues highlighted there before moving on.

Of course it is desirable to move off Windows XP completely, even in XP Mode, but the rationale is that it is better to be on a recent and supported version of Windows and to run XP in a virtual environment, than to run Windows XP itself.

Another oddity is that you can run Windows XP on Hyper-V in Windows 8. However you cannot get XP Mode to work unless you perform a repair install that changes the way it is licensed. Yes, it is licensing rather than technical reasons that blocks the XP Mode upgrade:

Note: The Windows XP Mode virtual hard disk will not work on Windows 8 as Windows 8 does not provide the Windows XP Mode license. The Windows XP Mode license is a benefit provided on Windows 7 only.

Users have discovered workarounds. Aside from the repair install mentioned above, you can also use Oracle Virtual Box and trick XP Mode into thinking that it is running on Windows 7 and Virtual PC. You can also run a virtual instance of Windows 7 and run XP Mode within that.

.net, microsoft, software development, visual studio, windows

Microsoft and mediocrity in programming

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A post by Ahmet Alp Balkan on working as a developer at Microsoft has stimulated much discussion. Balkan says he joined Microsoft 8 months ago (or two years ago if you count when he started as an intern) and tells a depressing tale (couched in odd language) of poor programming practice. Specifically:

  • Lack of documentation and communication. “There are certain people, if they got hit by a bus, nobody can pick up their work or code.”
  • Inability to improve the codebase. “Nobody will appreciate you for fixing styling or architectural issues in their core, in fact they may get offended.”
  • Lack of enthusiasm. “Writing better code is not a priority for the most”
  • Lack of productivity. “I spend most of my time trying to figure out how others’ uncommented/undocumented code work, debugging strange things and attending daily meetings.”
  • Lack of contribution to the community. “Everybody loves finding Stack Overflow answers on search results, but nobody contributes those answers.”
  • Lack of awareness of the competition. “No one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace.”
  • Working by the book. “Nobody cares what sort of mess you created. As long as that functionality is ready, it is okay and can always be fixed later.”
  • Clipboard inheritance. “I’ve seen source files copy pasted across projects. As long as it gets shit done (described above) no one cares if you produced unmaintainable code.”
  • Using old tools. “Almost 90% of my colleagues use older versions of Office, Windows, Visual Studio and .NET Framework.”
  • Crippling management hierarchy. “At the end, you are working for your manager’s and their managers’ paychecks.”

There are a couple of points to emphasize. This is one person in one team which is part of a very large corporation, and should not be taken as descriptive of Microsoft programming culture as a whole. Balkan’s team is in “the test org”, he says, and not making product decisions. Further, many commenters observe that they have seen similar at other organisations.

Nevertheless, some of the points chime with other things I have seen. Take this post by Ian Smith, formerly a Microsoft-platform developer, on trying to buy a Surface Pro at Microsoft’s online store. From what he describes, the software behind the store is of dreadful quality. Currently, there is a broken image link on the home page.

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This is not how you beat the iPad.

Another piece of evidence is in the bundled apps for Windows 8. The more I have reflected on this, the more I feel that supplying poor apps with Windows 8 was one of the worst launch mistakes. Apps like Mail, Calendar and Contacts on the Metro-style side have the look of waterfall development (though I have no inside knowledge of this). They look like what you would get from having a series of meetings about what the apps should do, and handing the specification over to a development team. They just about do the job, but without flair, without the benefit of an iterative cycle of improvements based on real user experience.

When the Mail app was launched, it lacked the ability to see the URL behind a hyperlink before tapping it, making phishing attempts hard to spot. This has since been fixed in an update, but how did that slip through? Details matter.

A lot is known about how to deliver high quality, secure and robust applications. Microsoft itself has contributed excellent insights, in books like Steve McConnell’s Code Complete and Michael Howard’s Writing Secure Code. The Agile movement has shown the importance of iterative development, and strong communication between all project stakeholders. Departing from these principles is almost always a mistake.

The WinRT platform needed a start-up culture. “We’re up against iPad and Android, we have to do something special.” Microsoft can do this; in fact, Windows Phone 7 demonstrated some of that in its refreshing new user interface (though the 2010 launch was botched in other ways).

Another piece of evidence: when I open a Word document from the SkyDrive client and work on it for a while, typing starts to slow down and I have to save the document locally in order to continue. I am not alone in experiencing this bug. Something is broken in the way Office talks to SkyDrive. It has been that way for many months. This is not how you beat Dropbox.

In other words, I do think Microsoft has a problem, though equally I am sure it does not apply everywhere. Look, for example, at Hyper-V and how that team has gone all-out to compete with VMWare and delivered strong releases.

Unfortunately mediocrity, where it is does exist, is a typical side-effect of monopoly profits and complacency. Microsoft (if it ever could) cannot afford for it to continue.

microsoft, open source

VLC efforts targeting WinRT with open source tools could enable more open source ports

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An email from VideoLAN concerning the port of the open source VLC media player to WinRT, the tablet platform in Windows 8, provides insight into some of the technical difficulties facing open source developers.

Large Orange VLC media player Traffic Cone Logo

This is the heart of the problem:

The build process of VLC is not integrated with Windows Tools, notably Visual Studio, because VLC uses Unix Tools to run on all platforms. This is one of the reasons why VLC media player works on Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, iOS, Android, OS/2 and so many other operating systems.

In order to qualify for Windows Store distribution, apps must pass Microsoft’s security requirements, avoiding prohibited API calls. The VLC developers have done most of that successfully, but hit a problem with the Microsoft C Runtime, MSVCRT. Many open source projects use the ancient version 6.0 for maximum compatibility, but:

on WinRT, one MUST use MSVCRT 11.0 in order to pass the validation. This meant that we had to modify our compiler and toolchain to be able to link with this version.

When we asked Microsoft, some engineers told us that this could not possibly succeed, since the validation would not allow application compiled with 3rd party compilers to link with MSVCRT110. We did not want to believe them, since this would have killed the project.

And, they were wrong. We did it, but this took us way more time than anything we had anticipated. The final work was shared and integrated in our toolchain, Mingw-W64. All other open source applications will benefit from that, from now on.

Apparently the final piece of work is working out how to call the WinRT interop layer (the bit that looks like COM but is not COM) from C code. That is now working too so VLC is now completing the work of rewriting headers to call these new APIs.

This work could have wider consequences. Since VLC is open source, all these efforts are available to others, which means that porting other open source projects that use a similar tool chain should be easier.

This is especially significant for Windows RT, the ARM port, where it is not possible to install desktop apps.

VideoLAN’s work could be a great benefit to the WinRT Platform. Microsoft’s engineers should be doing everything they can to help, rather than (as the email implies) telling the developers that it cannot work.

microsoft, professional

Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, SQL Server 14: what’s new, and what is the Cloud OS?

Earlier this month I attended a three-day press briefing on what is coming in the R2 wave of Microsoft’s server products: Windows Server, System Center and SQL Server.

There is a ton of new stuff, too much for a blog post, but here are the things that made the biggest impression.

First, I am beginning to get what Microsoft means by “Cloud OS”. I am not sure that this a useful term, as it is fairly confusing, but it is worth teasing out as it gives a sense of Microsoft’s strategy. Here’s what lead architect Jeffrey Snover told me:

I think of it as a central organising thought. That’s our design centre, that’s our north star. It’s not necessarily a product, it goes across some things … for example, I would absolutely include SQL [Server] in all of its manifestations in our vision of a cloud OS. Cloud OS has two missions. Abstracting resources for consumption by multiple consumers, and then providing services to applications. Modern applications are all consuming SQL … we’re evolving SQL to the more scale-out, elastic, on-demand attributes that we think of as cloud OS attributes.

If you want to know what Cloud OS looks like, it is something like this:

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Yes, it’s the Azure portal, and one of today’s big announcements is that this is the future of System Center, Microsoft’s on-premise cloud management system, as well as Azure, the public cloud. Azure technology is coming to System Center 2012 R2 via an add-on called the Azure Pack. Self-service VMs, web sites, SQL databases, service bus messaging, virtual networks, online storage and more.

Snover also talked about another aspect to Cloud OS, which is also significant. He says that Microsoft sees cloud as an “operating system problem.” This is the key to how Microsoft thinks it can survive and prosper versus VMWare, Amazon and so on. It has a hold of the whole stack, from the tiniest detail of the operating system (memory management, file system, low-level networking and so on) to the highest level, big Azure datacenters.

The company is also unusual in its commitment to private, public and hybrid cloud. The three cloud story which Microsoft re-iterated obsessively during the briefing is public cloud (Azure), private cloud (System Center) and hosted cloud (service providers). Ideally all three will look the same and work the same – differences of scale aside – though the Azure Pack is only the first stage towards convergence. Hyper-V is the common building block, and we were assured that Hyper-V in Azure is exactly the same as Hyper-V in Windows Server, from 2012 onwards.

I had not realised until this month that Snover is now lead architect for System Center as well as Windows Server. Without both roles, of course, he could scarcely architect “Cloud OS”.

Here are a few other things to note.

Hyper-V 2012 R2 has some great improvements:

  • Generation 2 VMs (64-bit Server 2012 and Windows 8 and higher only) strip out legacy emulation, UEIF boot from SCSI
  • Replica supports a range of intervals from 30 seconds to 15 minutes
  • Data compression can double the speed of live migration
  • Live VM cloning lets you copy a running VM for troubleshooting offline
  • Online VHDX resize – grow or shrink
  • Linux now supports Live Migration, Live Backup, Dynamic memory, online VHDX resize

SQL Server 14 includes in-memory optimization, code-name Hekaton, that can deliver stunning speed improvements. There is also compilation of stored procedures to native code, subject to some limitations. The snag with Hekaton? Your data has to fit in RAM.

Like Generation 2 VMs, Hekaton is the result of re-thinking a product in the light of technical advances. Old warhorses like SQL Server were designed when RAM was tiny, and everything had to be fetched from disk, modified, written back. Bringing that into RAM as-is is a waste. Hekaton removes the overhead of the the disk/RAM model almost completely, though it does have to write data back to disk when transactions complete. The data structures are entirely different.

PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a declarative syntax for defining the state of a server, combined with a provider that knows how to read or apply it. It is work in progress, with limited providers currently, but immensely interesting, if Microsoft can both make it work and stay the course. The reason is that using PowerShell DSC you can automate everything about an application, including how it is deployed.

Remember White Horse? This was a brave but abandoned attempt to model deployment in Visual Studio as part of application development. What if you could not only model it, but deploy it, using the cloud automation and self-service model to create the VMs and configure them as needed? As a side benefit, you could version control your deployment. Linux is way ahead of Windows here, with tools like Puppet and Chef, but the potential is now here. Note that Microsoft told me it has no plans to do this yet but “we like the idea” so watch this space.

Storage improvements. Both data deduplication and Storage Spaces are getting smarter. Deduplication can be used for running VHDs in a VDI deployment, with huge storage saving. Storage Spaces support hybrid pools with SSDs alongside hard drives, hot data automatically moved, and the ability to pin files to the SSD tier.

Server Essentials for small businesses is now a role in Windows Server as well as a separate edition. If you use the role, rather than the edition, you can use the Essentials tools for up to 100 or so users. Unfortunately that will also mean Windows Server CALs; but it is a step forward from the dead-end 25-user limit in the current product. Small Business Server with bundled Exchange is still missed though, and not coming back. More on this separately.

What do I think overall? Snover is a smart guy and if you buy into the three-cloud idea (and most businesses, for better or worse, are not ready for public cloud) then Microsoft’s strategy does make sense.

The downside is that there remains a lot of stuff to deal with if you want to implement Microsoft’s private cloud, and I am not sure whether System Center admins will all welcome the direction towards using Azure tools on-premise, having learned to deal with the existing model.

The server folk at Microsoft have something to brag about though: 9 consecutive quarters of double digit growth. It is quite a contrast with the declining PC market and the angst over Windows 8, leading to another question: long-term, can Microsoft succeed in server but fail in client? Or will (for better or worse) those two curves start moving in the same direction? Informed opinions, as ever, are welcome.

microsoft, professional, windows

Windows 8: return of Start button illuminates Microsoft’s painful transition

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The Start button is coming back. At least, that’s the strong rumour, accompanied by leaked screenshots from preview builds. See Mary Jo Foley’s post complete with screen grab, though note that this is the Start button, not the Start menu. Other rumoured changes are boot to desktop by default, and the All Apps view by default in the Start screen.

Will this fix Windows 8? Absolutely not.

There are two reasons. First, in one sense Windows 8 does not need fixing. I’ve been running it from the first previews, and find it solid and fast. The new Start screen works well, and I’m now accustomed to tapping the Windows key and typing to start apps that are not already on the taskbar. It is a better app launcher and organiser than what it replaces, though I am not excited about Live Tiles which are out of sight and out of mind most of the time.

Second, this kind of minor UI change will not address the larger problem, which is the lack of compelling Metro-style apps for the platform. Nor will it fully placate those for whom nothing but making Metro completely invisible is acceptable.

These revisions are intended to make Windows 8 more acceptable to a market that essentially does not want it to change. The core market for Windows is increasingly conservative, being formed of business users with a big investment in the platform who do not want the hassle of retraining users, and home users who are used to Microsoft’s OS and not inclined to switch. While this is a large market, it is also a declining one, with tablets and smartphones taking over many former PC roles, and Macs increasingly the platform of choice for high-end users who need the productivity of a full OS.

Rather than content itself with a declining market, Microsoft came out with its bold re-imagining of Windows, with a new tablet-friendly app platform, while keeping faith with the past by preserving the desktop environment. Predictably, this was not a hit with the conservative market described above; in fact, it was the last thing they wanted, confusing and alienating.

Microsoft made it particularly hard for these users by making the new Metro environment hard to ignore. The Start screen, some settings, default apps for file types including images, PDFs and music, and power button hidden in the right-hand Charms menu all cause confusion.

Only the modern app platform has the potential to lift Windows beyond its large but suffocating and declining market of change-resistant users. Unfortunately the first months of Windows 8 has been more or less the worst case for Microsoft. Existing users dislike it and new users have failed to embrace it.

A rough ride for Windows 8 was expected, though if the script had run according to plan there should have been mitigating factors. A wave of Windows 8 tablets should have delivered a delightful experience with touch while still offering desktop productivity when needed. Well, it has happened a little bit, but Windows 8 tablets have suffered from multiple issues including high prices, lack of availability, fiddly designs, and in the case of Windows RT (the ARM version) poor performance and confusing marketing. Here’s a review of the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 RT machine, from Ebuyer, which shows what can go wrong:

THIS IS NOT A LAPTOP. It runs the dreadful Windows RT which is NOT windows 8, but a very poor limited version of 8. You can only download what Microsoft wants you to have. It came with a free Norton. The dealer convinced me that the failure to be able to download this was my deficiency. NOT – Norton cannot be downloaded onto RT machines. Neither can any other security software except defender which is already on it. You cannot install Chrome (much better than Explorer) It does not accept I tunes, You cannot dispense with the Microsoft log in password, which I do not need. Where the instructions for how to change the settings are, is still a mystery – as usual THERE IS NO INSTRUCTION MANUAL IN PAPER. You have to hunt for everything or go to an online forum.

A shame, because personally I like the concept of Windows RT with its low power consumption and nearly tinker-proof OS.

Is there hope for Windows 8? Sure. The core of the OS is excellent on the desktop side, less good on the Metro side but this can be improved. The app story remains poor, though occasionally a decent app comes along, like Adobe’s Photoshop Express: easy, fluid, elegant photo editing which works on both ARM and Intel.

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It is fair to say, though, that Microsoft and its partners have plenty of work to do if they are to make this new Windows a success.