Category Archives: microsoft

cloud computing, microsoft, software development

Death of Popfly shows the dark side of the cloud

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I am not sure what goals Microsoft had for Popfly – or whether the company itself knew them – but apparently they were not met; a week ago the team announced the closure of the service, with just one month’s notice:

Unfortunately, on August 24, 2009 the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down. At that time, your access to your Popfly account, including any games and mashups that you have created, will be discontinued.

If this is a sign of a new clarity of focus at Microsoft it may even be good news, but not for those who invested time and effort in creating Popfly content.

Popfly had several aspects. It was a tool for creating mash-ups, web applications that combine data from several Internet sources; it was a game creator; it was a cloud-based IDE; and it was a visual programming tool. It was the last that interested me most. True visual programming means that program logic as well as user interface is created visually. It has never really hit the mainstream, though it is an idea that will not go away. A recent example is found in Expression Blend 3, another Microsoft product, which allow designers to add simple logic to Silverlight or Windows Presentation Foundation applications without writing code.

One day, most programming may be done this way; but not with Popfly, despite its potential and promise.

The other reflection on this modern form of software abandonment is how it highlights a risk inherent in cloud computing: what happens when your platform is removed. Software abandonment is nothing new, and most of us will recall a favourite word processor, mind mapping tool, database manager or some other utility which was chopped. In the old world though, you could still use the software, at least until an operating system upgrade came along and rendered it useless. Even that can often be overcome, thanks to virtualisation.

Not so with cloud computing. When the Popfly service closes, you simply lose access to all your work – though informally the team has stepped in with a downloader, so all is not lost.

Technically the same thing could happen to Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Windows Azure, Amazon web services and the rest, though the chance of these large concerns with millions of users (Azure aside) closing suddenly is tiny. The death of Popfly is nevertheless a warning: if your cloud computing service is either delivered by a small concern, or is of small concern to a large concern, the risks of data and service loss are very real.

cloud computing, microsoft

Microsoft announces Azure prices, availability, still haunted by legacy

I attended a briefing on Microsoft Azure, its cloud platform. We were given details on Azure pricing and availability, along with brief presentations from organizations intending or hoping to make use of it. The press release is here.

Microsoft is promising commercial availability in Q4 2009, possibly at PDC 2009, scheduled for Nov 17-19. This will be English only, and will cover 21 countries including the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, India, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In March 2010 availability will be extended to over 30 countries, though Azure itself will still be English language only.

Pricing is as follows:

  • Azure: $0.12 per hour per VM. Storage $0.15 per GB/Month plus $0.01 per 10K transactions.
  • SQL Azure: Web edition with 1GB database for $9.99 per month, or Business Edition with 10GB database for $99.99 per month.
  • .NET Services: $0.15 per 100K message operations.
  • Data transfer: $0.10 per GB inbound and $0.15 per GB outbound.

It is hard to compare directly; but my initial reaction is that Microsoft is somewhat more expensive than Amazon Web Services. SQL Server looks especially pricey; and I wonder if Microsoft is conscious of all its partners selling SQL Server as part of a hosting offering and not wanting to undercut them. Another legacy problem.

Microsoft has also announced SLAs for the new service, promising 99.9% uptime for Azure services with a 10% credit in the event of failure (that’s my summary of a slightly more complex guarantee). This is useful as a statement of intent, but not particularly valuable from a business perspective. The cost of downtime can be huge, and a 10% service credit does not begin to compensate.

I found the case studies interesting, even though they were generally expressions of intent rather than absolutely firm plans. Perhaps the most compelling was EasyJet, who told us that airport systems are generally antiquated and inefficient, and plans to bypass them as far as possible using an Azure-based alternative. If I can find time I’ll write this up in more detail.

Judging by these case studies, Azure is appealing to Microsoft-platform customers who enjoy being able to take their existing or new ASP.NET applications and migrate them to Azure with relatively few changes. Without the abandonment of SQL Data Services in favour of full SQL Server this would not have been possible.

Is Microsoft serious about Azure? I’m beginning to think that it is, though the marketing has been muted, and I am sure the company is aware of the tensions inherent in selling server licenses for on-premise use on the one hand, and services which make them unnecessary on the other. I doubt whether Microsoft would be in this space at all, if it did not fear the likes of Google App Engine eating away at its business.

cloud computing, microsoft, windows, windows 7

Windows 7 will build the global IT economy, says IDC/Microsoft, or will the Cloud kill it?

Microsoft has sponsored an IDC report on the economic impact of Windows 7 [pdf]. Among the claims:

  • For every dollar of Microsoft revenue from launch in October 2009 to the end of
    2010 from Windows 7, the ecosystem beyond Microsoft will reap $18.52.
  • 19% of the global IT workforce will be working with Windows 7 by the end of 2010
  • IDC expects that employment related to client operating systems will grow by more
    than 300,000 new jobs or more than 30% of total growth in global IT employment in
    2010 solely because of the launch of Windows 7

There is also a forecast that shows Windows 7 taking the majority of Windows client sales in 2010, and which appears to assume that Windows 8 will not be available before 2014.

Realistic figures, or some kind of fantasy? While I expect Windows 7 to take over rapidly from Vista, and to stimulate demand for PCs and laptops somewhat, I don’t believe this steadily rising graph. Cloud computing, software as a service, and growth in mobile devices, will all exert downward pressure on PC sales – even though some of those devices will still run Microsoft’s OS.

I had a conversation with Ian Osborne at Intellect while researching a supplement on software as a service. He made a good point about the unwillingness of the IT industry to embrace change. Although he thinks the cloud is changing everything, he remarked:

You’re dealing with the social phenomena of people working in ITdepartments and data centres who have invested their careers in learning how to make the other stuff work. You tend to want to cling on.

These look like “cling on” charts to me. It is an excellent point though: if the traditional IT industry is being turned on its head by the cloud, that has implications for the shape of IT employment around the world which I’ve not seen spelt out anywhere.

I don’t know if the 20-1 figure quoted by IDC/Microsoft is correct, but it is a useful reminder of how much IT ecosystem revolves around Microsoft’s platform.

microsoft, silverlight

Office 2010 puts SharePoint in the centre

Microsoft has released a semi-public preview of Office 2010 – not a beta, so more than ever subject to change – as announced at its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. I’ve been trying it out, and wrote a quick review for The Register.

For the most part this is a refinement of Office 2007 rather than anything new and radical. That’s not a surprise; Microsoft’s boldest ideas (like the Ribbon) tend to survive for at least two versions before being sidelined, and I doubt the market would have responded well to anything disruptive this time around.

Still, there are two things which deserve highlighting. One is 64-bit; this is overdue and most welcome, even though many, probably most users will not notice the difference. For those that do, it really matters.

The other is the web applications. Although the obvious spin on this is that Microsoft is taking on the likes of Google, Zoho and Adobe Acrobat.com, it is important not to miss the other angle, which is that SharePoint is now firmly in the centre of Office. The web applications are built on SharePoint, and for the first time you can do your work equipped with nothing more than a browser.

Office Groove is now called SharePoint Workspace and lets you synchronize a SharePoint site to your local PC or laptop.

Presuming this works satisfactorily, it makes SharePoint both more usable and more compelling. I know plenty of small businesses who have looked at SharePoint in Small Business Server but never been able to make sense of it; these new approaches may well make the difference.

A side effect, which I am sure has not gone unnoticed by the folk at Redmond, is that shifting away from SharePoint to OpenOffice is harder then shifting from Office to OpenOffice. Lock-in is alive and well.

Another snag with SharePoint is that it gets very expensive once you start trying to use all its features. However, this is what I was told about licensing the web applications:

The Web apps will be licensed along with the Office client apps, so when a business purchases Office through their volume licensing agreement, they get the license to run Web apps on their own servers.  For customers of Microsoft Online Services (SharePoint and Exchange hosted by Microsoft) customers will be able to subscribe to the Web apps.

It doesn’t sound too bad; and the hosted option is important to note as well. Further, there will be some kind of free option:

400 million Windows Live consumers will have access to Office Web applications at no cost.

One day, Microsoft should start taking stuff out of Office, rather than putting it in. Who would not want a leaner Outlook? Maybe the new web applications built with Silverlight are the beginning of just such a new generation. 

I’ve posted some screenshots and further comments here.

.net, microsoft, mono, visual studio, windows

Is Mono safe to use?

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Microsoft has promised not to sue those who develop implementations of its C# language and Common Language Infrastructure – the heart of .NET.

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.

adobe, apple, eclipse, microsoft, mobile, nokia, open source, software development, symbian

Symbian appeals to Traveling Geeks: develop for our platform

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I attended a Traveling Geeks event in London last night, a party sponsored mainly by Symbian and NESTA. I returned with a large pile of business cards from folk involved in a diverse range of initiatives. Kate Arkless Gray told me about Save our Sounds, a BBC World Service project to archive and map interesting and endangered sounds from around the world; while Sarah Blow sought to convince me that I don’t just need Twitter, I need Tweetmeme to track what is happening on the world’s most public short message service.

Digitrad wants me to sign up for yes.tel, which means registering a .tel domain with its service and using it as a public home page, email address and voicemail box. It’s not clear to me what advantage it has over all the other third-parties who want to own my digital identity, except that Digitrad is smaller and therefore less threatening than Google or Facebook. I’m happy with conventional registrars.

From my perspective, Symbian managed to dominate the event with engaging images around the walls and numerous representatives to talk up its mobile platform. The Symbian story is an interesting one. Originally developed by Psion, it was spun off in 1998 into an independent company co-owned by the giants of mobile at the time: Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion itself. Nokia proceeded to acquire more and more of Symbian, achieving greater control but also – it seemed to me – reducing the chance it once had of becoming an industry standard. Other vendors became wary of depending on an operating system controlled by a competitor. Linux had greater appeal – as seen in both the Palm Pre and Google Android – while Apple did its own thing with OS X on the iPhone, and Microsoft ploughed on with Windows Mobile.

Last year Nokia responded to the pressure by announcing plans to acquire Symbian in its entirety and then to give it to a new Symbian Foundation, an open source, collaborative project along the same lines as Eclipse. Developers can sign up to get the tools for programming Symbian applications in C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Adobe Flash, C# or HTML/JavaScript. I was told that Symbian intends to be even more open than Android. It restores Symbian’s cross-industry potential though there is now more competition.

Should you develop for Symbian? The Symbian Foundation is a great move, but in the App Store era I suspect deployment issues are even more critical than the quality of the OS or its development tools. Developers will go where they can find customers. Apple is reaping the rewards of controlling the entire platform and marginalizing the mobile operators.

Still, as long as Apple is content for the iPhone to be punishingly expensive, it leaves space for others. The appeal of Symbian will depend not only on its success among device manufacturers, but also on how easy it is for users to find, purchase and install applications.

There is also the matter of reliable, fast and affordable internet access, the lack of which has so far spoilt every mobile device I have owned.

microsoft, software development, windows

Clipboard.Clear … oops

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Bob Warfield is upset because he lost some work. He copied some text in Live Writer, deleted it, then opened Word and tried to paste. No go .. clipboard empty.

Frustrating, but is he right to call his post Microsoft: Bad User Experience Is Cultural, on the grounds that Word is designed to clear the clipboard every time it opens?

Here’s a bit more information. First, Word does not do that here. Second, if it weren’t that I do equally silly things I’d suggest that it is always risky to entrust the clipboard with your work without a backup.

That said, I can understand why Word might appear to clear the clipboard on start-up. It could be a bug, or it could be an add-in of some kind. The thing is, it is really easy to clear the clipboard in code. Just call EmptyClipboard and you’re done. There are ways to do it in VBA too, via a DataObject, or in .NET via Clipboard.Clear.

As Warfield’s case shows, clearing the clipboard in code can be deeply user-hostile. Should Windows prevent it? Difficult, because if your application or add-in implements clipboard functionality, it is the correct thing to do when the user selects Cut, Copy or Paste.

Lessons? A warning, I guess, not to use the clipboard for any purpose other than a user-initiated clipboard action – though I guess it can be tempting if you are hacking some sort of inter-process data exchange.

Second, when Windows lets you down it is not necessarily Microsoft culture to blame. There is an argument though … applications that don’t conform to Windows guidelines are a big problem and without them things like User Account Control might not need to exist; and that is Microsoft’s fault in a way, because of the history of Windows, its changing guidelines, and the inability of even Microsoft to stick to them in the past. Maybe Microsoft is partly to blame for the wild culture of third-party Windows apps.

This is a blog entry rather than a comment because Warfield’s blog needs registration to comment, and I am allergic.

adobe, google, microsoft, software development, web authoring

Mozilla takes aim at Flash and Silverlight with Firefox 3.5

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I reviewed Firefox 3.5 for The Register. I found the new features unexciting from a user perspective, but not so for developers. The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, improvements to the Canvas element, JavaScript threading and various bits of HTML 5.0 make this a more powerful platform for web applications – provided that you workaround the problem of users with Internet Explorer. The arrival of video and audio elements is also worth highlighting:

Another new feature is SVG effects for HTML, including masking, filtering and clipping. The point I made in the review is that this is a shot at Adobe as well as Microsoft. Although it is a long way from a viable alternative to Flash for now, the direction is clear.

That does not mean it will succeed. On the other hand, if Apple, Google and Mozilla pull together in making browser standards rich enough not to need plug-ins for most of the scenarios where Flash is used today, this could disrupt Flash momentum.

What about IE? That’s the big question. Here’s a few questions:

1. Will Microsoft implement these standards or hold back, arguing that Silverlight makes them unnecessary?

2. Will IE retain its market dominance – still over 65% last time I looked, even though it is losing among developers and influencers?

3. Could IE add-ons along the lines of Screaming Monkey for JavaScript and the Mozilla Canvas plug-in that has been discussed pull IE along anyway?

This article by Ryan Paul from last year discusses the issue. He says, why shouldn’t Adobe embrace HTML 5.0 rather than fighting it:

Although Canvas arguably competes with Adobe’s Flash plugin in a certain set of use cases, it’s worth noting that Adobe doesn’t generate revenue from the Flash plugin itself. Adobe cashes in on Flash by selling its powerful authoring tools, which the company could easily extend to support standards-based web technologies.

It’s a fair point; but given the commercial advantages of owning the platform, as opposed to being just another tools vendor, I doubt Adobe would make this shift unless it saw no realistic alternative. Even fully open-sourcing the Flash runtime would be less risky.

You can find Firefox here, and the developer features are described here.

eclipse, ibm, internet, java, microsoft, open source, oracle, software, software development, visual studio, windows

Eclipse survey shows Windows decline

In May 2009 the open source Eclipse project surveyed its users. Visitors to the Eclipse site were asked to complete a survey, and 1365 did so. That’s out of around 1 million visitors, which shows how much we all hate surveys. Anyway, this report [pdf] was the result. A similar survey [pdf] was carried out in 2007, potentially making a valuable comparison, though the earlier survey has different questions making direct comparisons difficult in most cases, which is a shame. I especially missed the detail on which Eclipse projects are used most which is well covered in the 2007 report.

Here is what I found interesting. First, there’s a shift towards Linux and Apple Mac in the desktops developers use for Eclipse. In 2007 it was 73.8% Windows, 20% Linux and 3.5% Mac. In 2009 it is 64% Windows, 26.9% Linux and 6.9% Mac.

This is echoed in deployment platforms too (client and server). In 2007 it was 46.5% Windows, 36.6% Linux, 1% Mac; today it is 40.5% Windows, 42.7% Linux, 3% Mac.

Those surveyed were asked what other IDEs they used. I noticed that Microsoft Visual Studio and NetBeans feature fairly strongly; I also noticed that Embarcadero’s JBuilder is hardly a blip on the chart – intriguing, given how popular this used to be in the pre-Eclipse era.

The most popular code management tool is Subversion (57.5%) followed by CVS (20%). For build tools, Ant (33.4%) and Maven (18%).

Here’s an intriguing one: I often hear that Java is only successful on the server. That presumption is not supported by this survey. 23.4% said that desktop client apps are the primary type of software they are developing, compared to 30.2% server, and 24.7% web or RIA apps.

The preferred app server is Apache Tomcat (34.8%) followed by JBoss (12.7%) and Websphere (6.9%).

The most popular database manager is MySQL (27.7%) followed by Oracle (27.3%). That’s 55% for Sun+Oracle, of course, though bear in mind that many of the MySQL users are likely attracted by its free licence.

Before drawing too many conclusions, bear in mind that it is a small sample self-selected by people willing to take the survey; apparently it was also featured by a German technology site which resulted in a larger response from German visitors.

Although it suggests a declining use of Windows – which is especially plausible given the trend towards web applications – it does not prove it beyond the Eclipse community.

And next time – how about using the same questions, which would make it possible to identify trends?

I’ve also written about Eclipse here: The Eclipse Conundrum: can it grow without hurting its contributors?