The excellent Mary Jo Foley has a key quote from Microsoft’s Steve Berkowitz, VP of online services, speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York yesterday:

Basically, we’re moving the server from your office to cloud,” Berkowitz said

This is the right strategy; but I have not heard it before from Microsoft. At one briefing a year or so ago I asked how Microsoft was positioning its Live products versus its Small Business Server (SBS) offerings, and got no kind of answer worth reporting. The problem is that those SBS customers are exactly the ones who will be moving first to cloud-based services, yet they also form an important and highly successful market for old-style Windows servers. Microsoft cannot create a new market without cannibalising its old one. Another factor is that when a business adopts SBS, they are hooked into Microsoft Office as well; SBS includes Sharepoint and Exchange, both of which link directly to Office applications on the clients. Disrupting this cosy cash-cow is dangerous; yet it is being disrupted anyway, by the likes of Google and Saleforce.com, so in reality Microsoft has no choice.

The opportunity for Microsoft is offer its lan-based customers a smooth transition to on-demand services, maintaining features that work best with Microsoft Office without losing the benefits of zero maintenance and anywhere access to data.

Has it got the vision and courage to pursue such as strategy? Is its Live technology even up to the job? Or will it continue to focus on servers for your LAN and watch its business slowly but surely erode?

I spoke to Steve Glagow at Orange, Director of Orange Partner Programme, in advance of the Orange Partner Camp at Cape Canaveral next week. I asked him about what trends he is seeing in development for mobile devices. He was guarded, saying that Orange is seeing growth in all three of the core platforms it supports: Symbian Series 60, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Linux. He says that “Linux is dramatically increasing”, but of course it it is doing so from a small base in this context; Symbian is the largest platform for Orange in absolute terms, and Java the most prominent language. Palm’s adoption of Windows Mobile has given Microsoft a boost, especially in the US. What about Flash, which is less widely deployed on mobile devices than it is on the desktop. Will Orange be pre-installing the Flash runtime? “The reason I won’t answer that is that we’ve been looking at Flash for some time now, and we’ve not made a formal decision,” he told me.

It’s an intriguing answer. Many us think that Flash/Flex/Apollo (all of which use the Flash runtime) is set to grow substantially as a rich client platform, supported by XML web services or Flex Data Services on the server. Extending this to mobile devices makes sense, but only if the runtime is deployed. Adobe needs to break into this Java-dominated space. The Apple iPhone could also be an influence here: as far as I’m aware, it is not initially going to include either runtime, but I have the impression that Steve Jobs is warmer towards Flash than towards Java, which he called “this big heavyweight ball and chain.”

My prediction: Flash will get out there eventually. As fast data connections become more common, the Flash runtime will be increasingly desirable.

Some interesting posts recently about the connected client wars:

Ray Ozzie interview from Knowledge@Wharton.

Commentary from Ryan Stewart – subscribe to his blog if this stuff interests you, and it should.

Commentary from David Berlind

Why a new client runtime? It’s because of certain desirables:

1. Designer freedom – think multimedia, effects, custom controls.
2. Zero deployment – It Just Works, not ardous setup routines with weird error messages.
3. Web storage – most data belongs in the cloud, it’s safer there.
4. Local storage – for offline use and performance.
5. Cross-platform – for all sorts of reasons: Apple resurgence, Linux desktop improving, inherent client agnosticism of the Web. Windows-only doesn’t cut it.

I’d add, and this is a techie point, an XML UI. XML makes huge sense for defining a user interface. Think of the history here: in the beginning we had text (DOS etc). Then we got pixels (Windows API), supplemented by arcane ideas like dialog units to make it vaguely scaleable. Then we got layout managers – Java’s AWT and Swing. Fundamentally right but awkward to code. Now we combine XML and layout managers – easier to code, better for visual designers. The best yet.

I dont care as much about the language. Java, C#, JavaScript (ECMAScript 4.0, ActionScript 3.0) are all workable. Just-in-time compilation is important; but all of these have that.

Of course the new client runtime is an old client runtime. Flash, transmuted with Flex and Apollow. Microsoft .NET, transmuted with WPF and given some belated cross-platform appeal with WPF/E. And not forgetting Mozilla XUL, which ticks most of the boxes but lacks the marketing effort and tools that are making waves for Adobe and Microsoft.

In some ways this looks like a battle that is Adobe’s to lose. It has designer hearts and minds, runtime deployment, cross-platform all sewn up. That said, I really like WPF; it has been mostly lost in the Vista fog but will emerge; maybe Mix07 will help (now sold out, apparently). Good WPF apps are amazing; and Microsoft has armies of .NET developers out there, and a great tool in Visual Studio – but stumbles on (5) above.

Watch this space.

Martin Fowler and Dan North from ThoughtWorks gave a keynote at QCon entitled The yawning crevasse of doom; this refers to the tendency of those who develop software not to communicate with the beneficiaries of the software – users, business people etc. This was a recurrent theme at QCon; addressing this problem strikes me as a primary characteristic of agile methods such as Scrum. It helped me to understand that most software failures are caused not by technical issues but rather by communication problems. Of course communication failures can occur within the development team as well as between developers and other stakeholders; Kevlin Henney and James Coplien mentioned the perils of “throwing architecture over the wall” in their session on Agile Architecture is not Fragile Architecture. If architecture is divorced from coding it is likely to fail. It further follows that improving the software development process is more to do with improving how teams function than it is about tools or even procedures.

I find this a healthy corrective to the reams of PR I receive from vendors implying that their tools can prevent project failures. They love to quote figures from the Standish Group which allege that most software projects fail. This is the cue for a marketing pitch explaining the benefits of their application lifecycle tools. I am not against application lifecycle tools; one of their purposes is to enable better communication. However, it’s unlikely that landing new tools on dysfunctional teams will bring about improvement. It’s better to fix the team, which is a management issue, and only then to resource it with the right tools.

What is the team? In reality, the team is everyone with an interest in the outcome of the project, not just developers.

The snag is that it is much easier to buy new tools, or indulge in other forms of deckchair rearrangement, than it is to address the real issues that are preventing the team from functioning – maybe issues of personality, geography, or inappropriate management structures.

Today IT Week has my piece on the lack of any business model in Yahoo Pipes, a thought underlined by an unusual press release which popped into my inbox. It is from John Earley of MyWebAlert, a company set up to monitor web site availability. Press releases are not usually so dejected:

Following a series of reports (copies available) that proved website availability is miserable in both the public and private sectors, we had thought folks would pay a paltry sum for monitoring and management services. This has proved not to be the case. Having sunk the investment in the software and architecture, we have abandoned hope of a business plan and are now making the service available free-of-charge.

Intrigued, I took a look at the site. The About page confirms this gravity-defying business endeavour, but looks forward to a bright tomorrow “somehow”:

There is no fancy business model, the Company can exist without revenues. It is managed in the belief that somehow, the momentum that it creates, will bring about a means for expanding the range of services that it offers.

It appears that the strategy is working, at least in terms of expanding the business. That’s presuming that site overload is the reason for what happened when I tried to sign up:

One presumes the outage will be short-lived, bearing in mind the company’s raison d’etre.

Incidentally Web site monitoring is also available from Netcraft and no doubt others. For a fee.

Novell’s Miguel de Icaza has an important and unusual perspective on Microsoft technology. Unlike many open source advocates, he is deeply familiar with the Microsoft platform because of his work on Mono, the open source implementation of the .NET Framework. I therefore read with interest his comments on the war against Microsoft Open Office XML now being waged by the sponsors of the rival Open Document Format. 

As de Icaza observes, it is “hard to articulate” the difference between OOXML and ODF. They are XML schemas, inpenetrable to non-technical folk. Both appear to do the same thing, yet in detail they have little in common. Here’s a key comment:

The high-level comparisons so far have focused on tiny details (encoding, model used for the XML). There is nothing fundamentally better or worse in those standards like there is between XML Schema and Relax NG. ODF grew out of OpenOffice.org and is influenced by its internal design. OOXML grew out of Microsoft Office and it is influenced by its internal design. No real surprises there.

I agree. But isn’t the OOXML specification too bulky and verbose, as its opposition claims?

If Microsoft had produced 760 pages (the size of ODF) as the documentation for the “.doc”, “.xls” and “.ppt” that lacked for example the formula specification, wouldn’t people justly complain that the specification was incomplete and was useless?

Quite possibly. And I am unimpressed by the efforts of Rob Weir and others at IBM in taking pot shots at flaws in OOXML rather than being constructive in helping Microsoft transition from proprietary binary document formats to XML formats with a standardised specification.

That said, OOXML and ODF do have different aims, something which Weir does not recognize. He writes in his response to de Icaza:

OOXML, on the other hand, matches to an inane degree the internals of a single vendor’s legacy application, with no concessions to platform-neutrality.

The point Weir misses is that (as I understand it) the rationale behind OOXML is to be able to represent all the world’s immense archive of Microsoft Office documents in an XML format with a published specification and without loss of information. In that sense, its goals are less lofty than those of ODF, which wants to be the one true office document specification for the world.

That means OOXML has a huge legacy burden to carry. It also implies that much of the cruft in OOXML is not there to be used by new applications, but rather to document what has to be done to support old stuff in Office.

My background is in software development, and I’ve explored the intricacies of RTF (Rich Text Format), the non-XML specification for Word documents and pretty much what you had to use prior to OOXML. I found the documentation inadequate, too closely tied to versions of Word, and difficult to work with. OOXML is delightful in comparison. The ability to generate and consume Office documents in XML substantially benefits developer productivity.

Another benefit is in working with Office documents on the server. Ugly solutions like automating Office applications on a server in order to create or process documents are no longer necessary.

I therefore disagree that OOXML has no value.

A single Office XML format for the world would have been nice. If the ODF folk had got Microsoft on board in the early days of the specification that might have been possible, though the scenario was politically implausible. What we have instead is two formats; but at least they are both XML and therefore amenable to programmatic manipulation and conversion. I think that’s progress, though it falls short of the ideal. Furthermore, it likely would not have happened without the existence of Open Office and ODF. They have won the argument for open document formats; no need to spoil it by obstructing the standardisation process for which they fought.

Intel’s production graphics driver for the 945GM chipset on Windows Vista has some bugs. I thought I should report this to Intel. Trouble is, you can’t. At least, the “Contact support” options here don’t tell you how, not unless you are signed up as an Intel reseller or partner. Nor does the general contact information page give any clues. Intel would like my pre-sales questions, or my website feedback, or any number of non-technical enquiries, but bugs? Forget it.

Can it really be that Intel gives you no way to report a bug? I dialed the support number. Note: I am now paying for this call. I explained to the support person that I wanted to report a bug in the Vista driver for the 945GM chipset. He said he was sorry, but the support line was only for Intel boxed product. Even though I had downloaded the driver from Intel’s site, my bug report should go to Toshiba.

Clearly I could report it to Toshiba – perhaps I will – but will the feedback ever thread its way back to Intel? Who knows.

By the way, I get the same bug with the slightly older driver on offer on Toshiba’s site for this laptop. Further, the same hardware is stable in Windows XP, which suggests that the problem lies with Intel’s driver, or conceivably in Vista, rather than than in the hardware.

Bottom line: there is no way for an end user to report a bug to Intel. I think that’s silly.

Update

Toshiba won’t accept the bug report either. Reason: the driver was downloaded from Intel’s site. Nor will they accept the bug report on the older driver downloaded from Toshiba. Reason: it is a US site and my machine is UK. Maybe if I would care to wait until I can download the same driver from the UK site, it might take some interest. Frustrating.

Further update

Ah, there is a way (sort-of). You go to this page, and complete the form. The only link I can find to the form is via the form for website feedback. So you complete the form, and the bot emails you a bunch of links to articles. At the bottom of the email is an “escalate” button which claims to “escalate your question to a technical support representative.” I’ll keep you posted…

If you have the tiniest shred of affection for old-fashioned vinyl records, you have to love the 12″ singles created by New Order in the 80s. They have Peter Saville’s beautiful, minimalist designs, they sound superb, and the songs themselves still pack a punch. Yesterday I played Blue Monday followed by both versions of Ceremony … stunning. I don’t believe that vinyl has any magic properties; yet I have never heard CDs that sound as good.

Back in November I blogged about the slow performance of Outlook 2007 (the comments are worth reading too), following up with another post about how it seemed to slow down the whole system.

I’ve now got more evidence of this:

Note that this is on Vista, which has proved substantially better for Outlook 2007 than XP. You might think there is nothing very exceptional about Outlook.exe grabbing nearly 40% of the CPU time, but consider the context:

I took this screenshot while troubleshooting another problem. Interesting point: I had not opened Outlook since the last reboot. Msconfig does not show it as a startup app either. Maybe this is some Office pre-loading trickery; or more likely it has been started by Vista’s desktop search engine. Yet this is meant not to interfere with your work.

RSS sync in Outlook is turned off.

Outlook isn’t grabbing this CPU all the time, but in regular brief bursts.

I’d like to know what it is doing.

My install of XNA on Vista is up and running; here is the demo game I did for PCW Hands On:

In this exciting game, the magazine logo swings back and forth. Your task is to hammer the space bar at exactly the moment the logo is over the up arrow. Your score varies from 0 to 20 depending on how close the logo is to the up arrow.

Before you laugh uncontrollably at this hopelessly crude example, listen to my apologia. I set out to write a short printed article that showed how to create a working game in XNA. The XNA install comes with an example game called Spacewar, but even spacewar is too long and complex for a short article. My example has all the code in one file, the Game1.cs which is created by the project wizard. It is a real game, with a moving sprite, keyboard handler and scoring mechanism. The idea is that once you grasp how Stop the Logo works, you can easily move on to greater things.

The simplicity was a little spoilt by a silly problem: displaying the help text and score. There is no easy way in XNA to write text to the screen; at least, there wasn’t in the beta, and on a quick look there isn’t in the final release either. I used Gary Kacmarcik’s BitmapFont class; I notice he has posted some more resources since the beta so check out his blog.