Category Archives: software development

cloud computing, development, microsoft, software development

Skype vulnerability exposes poor security in web application. Who will trust Skype now?

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Today there are reports of a breathtakingly bad vulnerability in Skype, that allows anyone to hijack another person’s account simply by knowing the email.

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Password resets have now been disabled, fixing the problem temporarily, but it remains inexcusable.

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It is basic security practice that ownership of an email address must be validated with a confirming email to that address and a special link. I see this on web forums that discuss trivia – why not on Skype where you can spend real money, and more seriously, see contacts and conversation history?

There must be a second weakness here, in that somehow the new account ends up getting confused (by Skype) with the existing one. It should not be possible to create an account with an email address that is in use on another account. Actually I count three weaknesses:

1. You can create an account with an email address that is not validated.

2. You can create an account with an email address that is already in use on another account.

3. You can reset the password on another account without having access to their email address, by resetting it on a second account with the same email address.

Microsoft acquired Skype in October 2011 but it is not clear when this vulnerability was introduced.

I tested this myself by setting up a new account with an email address that already has a Skype account. It worked though I did not take it to the next stage. Now I have a Skype account, incidentally, which cannot be deleted as Skype does not allow this. However I have now reset the email.

As it happens, I have suffered in the past from people opening accounts with my email address, I believe because of innocent error, such as forgetting to type the number in an account like someoneNN@yahoo.com or the like. One person set up an Apple iTunes account with my email address, complete with credit card details. I complained to Apple who disabled the account, but as with Skype, it cannot be deleted. So if I ever want to use that email address for an Apple account I will have problems.

That was a few years ago. It is astonishing that a company the size of Skype/Microsoft, handling and storing vast amounts of personal information, would have such weaknesses in its security.

Who will trust Skype now?

Update: It also appears that this flaw, or part of it, was reported to Skype back in August. This is a failure of management as well as security.

.net, development, microsoft, software development, windows

Steven Sinofsky leaves Microsoft – but why?

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Microsoft has announced that Windows chief Steven Sinofsky is leaving the company:

Microsoft Corp. today announced that Windows and Windows Live President Steven Sinofsky will be leaving the company and that Julie Larson-Green will be promoted to lead all Windows software and hardware engineering. Tami Reller retains her roles as chief financial officer and chief marketing officer and will assume responsibility for the business of Windows. Both executives will report directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

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Here are some quick thoughts.

One line of thought is that Windows 8 and Surface RT are failing because users do not like the dramatic changes, with the new tiled personality and disappeared Start menu, and therefore its architect is departing.

I do not believe this for several reasons. One is that the promoted Julie Larson-Green is a key creator and proponent of the new design (call it Metro if you like). She worked with Sinofsky on the Office Ribbon way back, a project that has some parallels with Windows 8: take a critically important product and revamp its user interface in ways that customers are not requesting or expecting.

My further guess is that Microsoft was braced for some level of storm on the release of Windows 8. There was plenty of warning that the new tablet-friendly platform would be a hard sell to longstanding Windows users.

The time to judge the success of Windows 8 is not today, but in two or three years time, when we can observe how the platform is faring in the new world of mobile and cloud.

It is my opinion that the remaking of Windows is more brilliant than blunder. Without “reimagining” it was doomed to slow decline. Microsoft now has a tablet operating system, and one that is in the hands of millions thanks to its integration with desktop Windows. The storm will die down and there is at least some chance that the outcome will be an app platform that will keep the company in the tablet game.

That said, it seems to me that Microsoft has had problems in execution. Windows 8 is fairly solid, but there are signs of haste in the building blocks of Metro, as you discover if you write an application, while Surface RT is not the fast, easy to use appliance that it should be. Key apps like Mail and Xbox Music are short of features and too hard to use, while Windows-isms such as update errors have not been expunged as they should. Such issues can be fixed, but the moment to get this right is at launch, not six months or a year later.

You might also ask: why is Microsoft allowing its brand new store to fill with rubbish apps, seemingly with the knowledge and encouragement of employees at the company?

Were these execution problems Sinofsky’s fault then? Again I doubt that. My perception is that Microsoft is a dysfunctional company to some degree, but one in which there are islands of immense talent and teams which deliver. It is huge and bureaucratic though, and getting everyone motivated and energised to deliver top quality is likely impossible without radical reform. Bureaucracy tends to result in employees who work by the letter not from the heart, which results in mediocrity, and there is evidence of that everywhere.

In this context, the fact that Sinofsky delivered twice, once with Office 2007 and again with Windows 7, with judgment on Windows 8 not yet possible, shows his ability.

If failure is not the reason then, why?

Well, another reason for staff to leave suddenly is that there was some sort of internal conflict. Sinofsky achieved by taking a firm line and sticking to it, which made him enemies. I do not have any inside information; but two moves to reflect on would be the move of ASP.NET and Silverlight guy Scott Guthrie to Windows Azure, and deep Windows internals guy Mark Russinovich also to Azure.

Sinofsky was no friend to .NET, which led to some perplexing decisions. A little sign of this I witnessed at Build was why XNA, a .NET wrapper for Direct X hardware acceleration, is not supported in Windows Phone 8. Except it is, as a member of the phone team explained to me, it is just that you have to target Windows Phone 7 in your project, but it will run fine on Phone 8. Why the workaround? Because .NET is now discouraged for games development, for no technical reason.

Still, this war has been going on for a while and Sinofsky has won every battle. Why has he now left?

I have no inside knowledge, but would conjecture that the effort of forcing through Windows 8 and native code versus .NET built up pressure against him, such that there was instability at the top. In this context, even relatively small failures or falling behind projections can be significant, as resources for opponents to use against you.

CEO Steve Ballmer of course is still in place. Did have a change of heart about Sinofsky, or a row with him over what comes next for Windows? That is the kind of thing which is plausible; and the uncertain market reaction to Windows 8, while not unexpected, would make it possible to push him out.

If I were a shareholder though, the departure of this key executive at this moment would worry me. This is the company which has transformed Windows Azure for the better and delivered the fantastic Windows Server 2012; it is also the company which is guilty of the Kin mobile phone debacle, and forgetting its agreement with the EU to offer a browser ballot to Windows 7 users at perhaps substantial financial cost. Evidence, one would judge, that deep change is needed, but not the kind of change that will be achieved by the departure of one of the most capable executives.

Postscript: Mary Jo Foley notes that Sinofsky did not present at the Build keynote right after the Windows 8 launch, raising the possibility that Sinofsky’s departure was already planned, before the Windows 8 launch. That is further evidence that this is not a reaction to poor initial sales (if indeed they are poor).

amazon, cloud computing, software development

Catching up with Amazon’s cloud services

I attended Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) Update in London. This was not a major news event; more a chance to catch up on what is new with Amazon’s cloud services, the dominant force in cloud computing infrastructure.

One thing that caught my interest is the speed which which Amazon is rolling out new features. The pattern seems to be that one or more significant features are rolled out each month. The session in London covered announcements since July 2012, with new stuff including:

  • DKIM signing for the Simple Email Service
  • High I/O EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances
  • Cross-origin resource sharing for S3 (Simple Storage Service), lets web apps interact directly with S3 content
  • Amazon Glacier service for archival storage
  • Binary data support in DynamoDB
  • SQL Server 2012 in RDS (Relational Database Service)
  • Provisioned IOPS (1,000 to 10,000 IOPS) storage for RDS
  • New instance types and price reductions – there are now seventeen types of VM, see the current range here.
  • General availability of Storage Gateway, which lets you attach cloud storage to your local network via iSCSI, with local caching for performance.
  • Ruby support in Elastic Beanstalk
  • Completely rewritten SDK for PHP using modern coding style
  • Consistent BatchGet for DynamoDB
  • Increased Provisioned IOPS for EBS (Elastic Block Storage) to a maximum of 2000 IOPS

What I want to highlight is not so much the features themselves as the pace of development, which is impressive.

There was considerable discussion of Provisioned IOPS which let you purchase fast data traffic between your application and your storage. This can have a dramatic impact. Netflix used it to reduce the instance count and eliminate Memcached caching from their application. Increasing performance is another route to scalability.

Reserved instances are interesting. If you reserve an instance for a period, rather than paying as you go, you save up to 63% but lose the benefit of down-sizing on demand. However Amazon has also created a marketplace where you can sell unused reserved instances. It is all smoke and mirrors for Amazon; a reserved instance is just a billing mechanism. It collects 12% of any resale though.

Elastic Beanstalk also got some attention. I have always thought of this primarily as an auto-scaling feature. However, the discussion focused more on ease of deployment. The two are related, since Elastic Beanstalk has to know how to automatically deploy your application in order to scale it automatically. It is “AWS for the lazy”, we were told.

Amazon is getting high demand for node.js on Elastic Beanstalk – not available yet but watch this space.

There was a session on CloudSearch which left me unexcited. This is in effect another type of cloud database designed for search with relevance ranking, field weighting and so on. However it is not trivial to implement; you will have to work out how to feed CloudSearch with data in its SDF format, matching what you want to search, and how to keep it up to date.

I would have liked to hear more about the DynamoDB NoSQL database manager which is proving a popular service.

If you want to track AWS as it evolves, I recommend following the official blog.

microsoft, software development, windows

Rubbish apps in Windows Store – encouraged by Microsoft?

Someone (and you wonder who) has taken it upon themselves to document rubbish apps in the new Windows Store. The stated reason:

Here we call out all the trash in the hopes that someone at Microsoft is listening and can remove them.

He or she has found plenty of examples – like the developer who submitted 20 trivial conversion apps and a tapping game that does not work; another who has got dozens of identical SDK samples listed as apps with different names; or the memory game listed 28 times complete with spelling errors and images suspected to be lifted from Disney.

Initially the puzzle was why apps which breach Windows Store guidelines are getting listed. But then there is more:

I feel like I’ve uncovered a conspiracy and I have no idea what to do with the information!

I emailed both Kusuma Sruthi and Pavan Kumar asking them why they had felt the need to submit their game multiple times to the Windows 8 store. I wasn’t really expecting a response. Yet both replied, pretty quickly, saying that they were told to do it but would remove the duplicates if I told them to. Was my email written with such authority?

Both claim to have been contacted by POOJA PATIL and told “to upload our apps with DIFFERENT NAMES and with SAME SOURCE CODE”. Whilst Pavan Kumar claimed not to have contact details he did say that she was from Microsoft. Kusuma Sruthi was more forthcoming with both a microsoft.com email address and an Indian mobile number. A brief Googling confirms the existence of a Pooja Patil with this phone number working for Microsoft to organise the Windows 8 Guiness World Record attempt in Bangalore.

Why would someone from Microsoft have told these two developers to submit their game multiple times? Were they really so desperate for apps that they encouraged this cloning? Were they really expecting that no one would notice?

Yesterday the blog author says two similar emails appears from these developers now denying that they were instructed by Patil to submit the apps:

at 6:05am I received 2 emails. Yes, at exactly the same moment. From Pavan and Kusuma. Both would now like to retract their previous comments about Pooja and would like it known that she’s great, and very supportive, and didn’t tell them to submit the same app over and over. It was all just a misunderstanding. Apparently.

Is all this made up? Not entirely, since you can verify that the apps mentioned exist, like these 28 apps by Nikhila Grandhi:

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though it looks to me that some of the apps from Kusuma Sruthi have been removed suggesting that someone at Microsoft has noticed the issue and is trying to clean up.

Microsoft is a large company and although I was assured by Microsoft Store VP Antoine LeBlond that the new Store is not about the numbers, I can believe that some over-enthusiastic employees went too far in obeying some corporate directive to promote Metro-style app development and Store submissions.

That does not explain though why so many guidelines appear to have been ignored.

The company should do the right thing and clean out the rubbish.

Update: see also Drunk Compliance Tester. “The Windows 8 Store will continue to be a horrible experience for everybody if the level of quality doesn’t rise”

.net, professional, software development, windows

Microsoft answers Windows Runtime questions

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I watched the Windows Runtime (WinRT) “Ask the Experts” session from Build 2012; I did not get to attend in person as it conflicted with Herb Sutter’s session on C++. The session was chaired by Martyn Lovell.

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Here is what I thought most significant or interesting.

  • Microsoft knows that certain types of apps cannot be implemented as Windows Store apps. The implication is either that the desktop will never go away, or that some future version of Windows Runtime will have extended capabilities. Kamen Moutafov: “There are certain types of system management, system configuration applications that you cannot write a Windows 8 style app for. The platform is not well suited for this type of application.”
  • The WebView control is a problem. An attendee reported z-order, memory, input, and performance issues. This is not only because it hosts the IE10 engine, but also because the system does not cope well with the runtime layers involved: JavaScript running within XAML in a C# app, for example.
  • Someone asked why WinRT apps cannot span or support multiple monitors. The answer, only half joking, “Jensen Harris said that is how it is supposed to be!” Second answer is that this may change in future, and perhaps was just too hard to do well in version 1.0.
  • There was considerable discussion of usage of asynchronous APIs (typically using Async and Await). Can you use them too much? The answer is that you can, and some apps perform badly as a result. An example of a bad usage would be to iterate through many hundreds of files in a directory and fire off an async call for each of them. Lots of aysnc calls returning together will choke your app. Advice is to try limiting the number you fire off, for example, only processing the first page or two that is visible in the user interface.
  • Someone asked how can WinRT apps communicate with desktop apps? This is meant to be restricted to protocol handlers and file types, so that the user is in control. Microsoft attempted to block all other routes.
  • Someone had an app in the marketplace that worked on x86 Windows 8, but he discovered that it crashes (does not even load) on Surface RT. How did it pass certification? Answer: Microsoft has seen instances where apps do not behave the same. Certification is not an exhaustive test. Even so, disappointing to make available an app that will not even load.
  • Can a WinRT app create UIs on multiple threads? Yes you can create two views on different threads. See CoreApplication.CreateNewView.
  • How can you detect if a file exists without raising an exception? Apparently this can’t be done. It may be addressed in future.
  • If you are creating a component to be used by other apps including JavaScript apps, it is best to create in in C++. JavaScript to C# to WinRT is apparently sub-optimal.

Watch the session yourself here.

cloud computing, microsoft, software development, visual studio, windows

Microsoft Build 2012 is done. Now the market gets to judge Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8

I am just back from Microsoft’s Build conference, at the company’s headquarters near Seattle. This is a company in transition and the event had that feel to it. There was not much that we did not know about before, but this is the moment of full release into the market for some key products, and in some cases – Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 to be specific – you could sense some nervousness about how they might be received.

Attendees were handed Surface RT devices (running Windows on ARM) as well as Nokia 920 Windows Phone 8 phones.

Here are a few quick reflections.

First, Windows 8. I picked up less resistance to the new big bold tiled touch user interface than was the case last year when it was unveiled, though arguments about its merits continue. Personally I am fine with it, though my experiments with developing an app or two have shown me that it is version one and could be made better for developers. I still think there are too many expensive hybrid tablet/laptops being pushed out by Microsoft’s hardware partners, and not enough simple slates.

An encouraging sign for Microsoft was that sessions on line of business apps for the new interface (which still lacks a proper name) were packed and had to be repeated.

What about Windows RT? I am in a minority since I like the concept; most Microsoft-platform folk want their x86. Leaving that aside though, the big issue with Windows RT is performance. Visual C++ expert Herb Sutter said to me that the ARM compiler is version 1.0 and less well optimised than the one for x86, which may account for the disappointing performance of the Surface RT. I cannot help liking the device, which is beautifully made and a lot of fun, but watching an MP4 video on the flight home I had difficulty getting smooth playback. It really should not be hard to play an MP4.

Another puzzle with Surface RT is that Microsoft has not made the best of the simple appliance concept. Windows update errors and crashing apps make you wonder whether Microsoft has learned anything from Apple. There is no excuse when the company has such complete control over hardware and software. Signs of haste I think, and it will get better, but if Surface RT had the potential to show how smooth and easy Windows 8 can be, that opportunity has been missed at the launch.

An uncertain launch for Surface RT then; but Microsoft is on surer ground with Windows Phone 8. I have looked in detail at the SDK and like it better than the Windows Phone 7.x SDK which is Silverlight and XNA only. I have not tried an actual device yet, but my sense is that the platform is all there now, for business as well as consumer. The problem is that the market is contented with iOS and Android and breaking in will not be easy.

Windows Azure had a good Build. In keeping with the client focus, Azure Mobile Services got the most attention, an easy way to create a back-end for mobile clients or Windows Store apps. The new Azure management portal, first seen this summer, gets better and better; and the combination of an admin-friendly portal and a solid infrastructure underneath seems to me a strong one.

Azure specialist Mark Russinovich told us that Azure demand was growing fast, and I can believe it.

What about the organization of Build? Frankly, I am puzzled why Microsoft decided to run the event on its own campus, which is not really suitable for an event of this size. Further, the event sold out quickly which suggests that the company could easily have attracted a bigger attendance. Even as it was though, there were tedious bus journeys between two buildings where the sessions and exhibits were located. It was not helped by the near-constant rain, and as time went on the tents started to leak a little and you had to watch where you sat in case of drips. My suggestion: either go very small, as for PDC 2010, or go back to a proper conference venue as for Build 2011.

Still, there were some excellent sessions about which I have more to write. Some of my favourites:

Scott Guthrie on Windows Azure

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Mark Russinovich again on Azure – excellent insights into what it takes to keep a cloud running (and why it failed with a leap year bug).

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Anders Hejlsberg enthused about TypeScript, a new way to write JavaScript applications.

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Herb Sutter talked about what is coming in C++ and the new Standard C++ Foundation.

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Jeffrey Snover talked about Windows Server 2012 and the Cloud OS (this was a press-only session)

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More on these coming soon.

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

How to test and debug an app on Surface RT in a hotel room

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I wanted to test an app on Surface RT this morning, though I am out of the office with just a Samsung Slate (has Visual Studio), the Surface, and hotel wi-fi.

You can do remote debugging on Surface RT as explained here, however you need a private network.

I set up an ad-hoc network from the Samsung Slate as described here:

Open an elevated command prompt

netsh wlan show drivers

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid="wireless name" key="password"

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

This allowed me to connect the Surface RT to a private network with the Slate.

Next, I needed to download and install the remote debugging tools for ARM from here.

I ran the remote debugger and was able to connect from Visual Studio on the Slate, but ran into a small issue. I needed a developer license for the Surface, but while on the private network it was not on the internet. When the remote debugger prompted to install a developer license, it could not retrieve it.

The solution was to disconnect, connect to the internet, then install the developer license using PowerShell. Run show-windowsdeveloperlicenseregistration from an elevated PowerShell window.

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Then I returned to the private network and was able to launch my beautifully designed test app:

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Note that for the actual test I did not run the app attached to Visual Studio. Rather, I deployed in release mode and then ran separately, to avoid the slowdown from the debugger. Once deployed, the test app remains in the Start screen for launching.

.net, microsoft, software development, visual studio

Investigating Surface RT performance: Counting primes in C# and JavaScript

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How is the performance of Surface RT? Tolerable but rather slow would be my quick summary. Surface RT has a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 chipset.

In order to investigate further, I built a simple app to count primes, using essentially the code here. I ran the code both in JavaScript and in C#. This is a single ad-hoc and naive test that only covers one aspect of performance, but I have still found it an interesting indicator. I then ran the app both on my Intel Core i5 Samsung Slate and on Surface RT (yes it was interesting figuring out how to debug on Surface RT in a hotel room).

Here are the results:

On Intel Core i5:

  • Count primes up to 1,000,000: 1.05 secs (in browser)
  • Count primes up to 1,000,000: 0.88 secs (in embedded webview)
  • Count primes up to 1,000,000: 0.32 secs (C#)
  • Count primes up to 10,000,000: 6.31 secs (C#)

On Surface RT:

  • Count primes up to 1,000,000: 3.49 secs (in browser) Slower by 332%
  • Count primes up to 1,000,000: 3.53 secs (in embedded webview) Slower by 401%
  • Count primes up to 1,000,000: 1.81 secs (C#) Slower by 565%
  • Count primes up to 10,000,000: 49.03 secs (C#) Slower by 777%

The Core i5 is running at 1.6 Ghz. Surface RT has an NVidia Tegra 3 1.3 Ghz chipset.

You could count primes more quickly in both cases by using parallel processing; this is a single-threaded test.

What is notable here?

  • First, Surface RT is slower than I would expect and I hope Microsoft improves performance with future updates.
  • Second, C# is substantially faster than JavaScript in this test, around twice as fast, which makes me question the advice I have heard from some spokespersons that HTML and JavaScript is the preferred approach for apps.
  • Third, the factor by which C# is slower is greater than the factor by which JavaScript is slower. This surprised me; I had expected the reverse for some reason.

Of course, other performance tests will yield different results. When I tried the Sunspider JavaScript test Surface RT was about 5 times slower.

One piece of good news: there was little difference between performance in the embedded or non-embedded browser.

Update: I also tried this test in C++. There was barely any difference. The Core i5 counted primes up to 10,000,000 in 6 seconds. The Surface RT performed the same feat in 46 seconds.

Update 2: A Google Nexus 7, which also has a Tegra 3 chipset, can only manage 76 seconds for the JavaScript test (primes up to 10,000,000).

microsoft, professional, software development, twitter, visual studio, windows

Steve Ballmer shows off Windows 8 in Build keynote

Microsoft’s BUILD conference has kicked off in Redmond with a keynote featuring CEO Steve Ballmer, Developer evangelist Steven Guggenheimer, and Kevin Gallo from the Windows Phone team. There were also a few guest appearances, including Tony Garcia from Unity, a cross-platform games engine.

The company has a lot to talk about, with Windows 8 just launched – four million upgrades sold so far, we were told, which seems to me a middling OK but not great result – and Windows Phone 8 also fully announced for the first time.

The keynote opened with a performance by Jordan Rudess from Dream Theatre, enjoyable and somewhat relevant given that he has helped create two music apps for Windows 8, Morphwiz and Tachyon, which he talked briefly about and played on a Surface RT and Lenovo desktop.

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Then Ballmer came on and gave what I can only describe as a hands-on tutorial in how to use Windows 8 apps. I found this odd but it was well received; my conclusion is that many people have not bothered to look closely at Windows 8, or have been put off by the Start menu issue, and much of what Ballmer showed was new to them. It was not to me, so I was not gripped by this section of the keynote.

I preferred the presentation from Steven Guggenheimer; most of what he presented is also covered here, and included the announcement of forthcoming Windows 8 apps from Disney, ESPN and Dropbox. The Dropbox announcement is particularly significant, since I have heard complaints about its absence from Surface RT, which is unable to run the usual desktop client for Dropbox. Another app that is on the way is from Twitter. Guggenheimer also described a new PayPal API for Windows Store apps.

I do wonder why key services like Dropbox and Twitter are only now announcing Windows 8 apps. Windows 8 has been available in preview versions since last year’s Build event, and has not changed that much as a developer platform.

Gallo introduced some of the new features in Windows Phone 8, and claimed that Microsoft has delivered the majority of developer requests in the new Phone SDK which is available from today. He emphasised the possibility of sharing code between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8, using Visual Studio to ensure compatibility.

Garcia presented Unity for Windows Phone, which is potentially a big deal, since it is widely used. The demo of immersive gaming graphics on Windows Phone 8 was impressive.

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Finally, Nokia’s Richard Kerris came on, mostly to announce a giveaway of the new 920 Windows Phone 8 device for Build attendees.

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This raised a loud cheer as you would expect, though it may be significant that the free phone won an even warmer reception than the earlier announcement of a free Surface RT.

The cost of signing up for a Windows Phone developer account has been reduced to just $8.00 for the next few days; see here for more details.

Did Microsoft do enough in this keynote? Personally I would like to have seen more technical depth, and a more convincing presentation of why the company thinks these new devices have what it takes to take on Apple and Google. Still, this is all about partners, and the arrival of Dropbox and Twitter as Windows 8 apps, and Unity for Windows Phone 8, are all significant events.

hardware, microsoft, mobile, software development

Windows 8 launches: key questions remain, but Surface shines

I am in New York for the launch of Windows 8. This morning was the general launch; the Surface RT launch is to follow this afternoon. Windows chief Steven Sinofsky introduced the event. I was intrigued by how dismissive he was about a key Windows 8 issue: the learning challenge it presents to new users. He gave the impression that a few minutes experimenting will be enough, though he also referred to a guide that may be new; yesterday I picked up a small booklet which I had not seen before, introducing Windows 8.

Next Microsoft’s Julie Larson-Green and Michael Angiulo came on to show off a few details about the Windows 8 user interface, followed by Ballmer who gave what is for him a muted address about how great Windows 8 is going to be. Solid facts were few, but Microsoft did mention that over 1000 devices are certified for Windows 8.

So what is Windows 8 all about? It’s a tablet, it’s a laptop, it’s a PC we were told, in other words, everything. But everything is also nothing, and my sense is that even Microsoft is struggling to articulate its message, or at least, struggling to do so in ways that would not offend key partners.

Personally I like Windows 8, I find it perfectly usable and appreciate the convenience of the tablet format. That said, I look at all these hybrid devices and my heart sinks: these are devices that are neither one thing nor another, and pay for it with complexity and expense. Will they win over users who might otherwise have bought a MacBook? I am doubtful.

Windows RT and Intel Atom devices are more interesting. If Microsoft and its partners can push out Windows 8 devices that inexpensive and work well on tablets without keyboard clutter, that is what has potential to disrupt the market.

That brings me on to Surface. It is all in the body language: the conviction that was missing from the Windows 8 keynote in the morning was present in the Surface keynote in the afternoon. Even the room was better, with stylish Surface fake pavement art in the corridor and smart white seating.

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General Manager Panos Panay showed off little details, like the way the rear camera angles so that it is level when the Surface is set on its kickstand. He talked about Microsoft’s drop tests, claiming that they had tested 72 different ways to drop a Surface and designed it not to break. He demonstrated this by dropping it onto a carpet, which was not too challenging, but the fact that Sinofsky successfully used it as a skateboard was more impressive.

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No doubt then: Microsoft has more enthusiasm for Surface, described by Panay as “the perfect expression of Windows”, than it does for the 1000 certified devices from its partners, though the company would never admit that directly.

What is the significance of Surface? It goes beyond the device itself. It will impact Microsoft’s relationship with its hardware partners. It embodies an Apple-like principle that design excellence means hardware designed for software designed for hardware. It shows that the “OK but nothing special” approach of most Windows hardware vendors is no longer good enough. If Surface is popular, it will also introduce demand for more of the same: a 7” Surface, a Surface phone, and more.

Despite its quality, the success of Surface is not assured. The biggest problem with Windows 8 now is with the lack of outstanding apps. That is not surprising given that the platform is new, and you would think that users would make allowance for that. On the other hand, they may lack patience and opt for better supported platforms instead, in which case building app momentum will be a challenge.