Tag Archives: microsoft

microsoft

Kin questions as Microsoft pulls the plug

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So Microsoft has stopped work on its Kin phone and cancelled plans for a European launch:

We have made the decision to focus on our Windows Phone 7 launch and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.

The Kin went on sale in May in the US, on Verizon. I’ve never seen a Kin device; but there were several obvious problems:

  • The phones were not that good, according to reports. In perhaps the most competitive technology market that exists, a device has to be exceptional to succeed; and even then it might not. Palm webOS phones are great devices and still not really winners.
  • The Verizon plan was too expensive at $70 per month – a bewildering price for the youth market which was the supposed target.
  • Even if the phones and service had been good, the launch was puzzling in the context of the build-up to Windows Phone 7 later this year.

My initial reaction to Kin was “Whose fault is it?” and there has been no reason to change it.

The whole thing is a tragi-comedy, and joins projects like the Ultra Mobile PC, or Origami, whose failure was baked into the launch – Origami was also too expensive for its market as well as flawed in its design.

Killing the Kin after just a few weeks is embarrassing, but the right decision.

The key question though: what does the costly development, launch, and scrapping of Kin say about Microsoft’s management? If I were a shareholder I’d like to know the answer to that one.

I might also ask why Microsoft is spending big on an advertising campaign to persuade us to become “new busy” when we are already busy enough, for an online service that is mostly not yet launched? I wonder how many potential users took a look at the new Hotmail, observed that it was the same as the old one, and will never come back?

In the case of Kin the company has at least recognized its mistake; but the deeper problem is an accident-prone culture that is damaging Microsoft’s prospects.

business intelligence, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development

PivotViewer comes to SilverLight – data as visual collections

Microsoft has released a PivotViewer control for Silverlight. Data visualisation is a key business reason to use Silverlight or Flash rather than HTML and JavaScript for an application, so it is a significant release. But what does it do?

PivotViewer is the latest tool to come out of the Microsoft Live Labs Pivot project. Pivot is based on collections, which are sets of data where each item has an associated image. A pivot item has attributes, similar to properties, called facets; and facets have facet categories. Facet categories are used to filter and sort the data.

More complex Pivot data sets have several linked collections, or dynamic collections which are generated at runtime as a query result. This is necessary if the size of the data set is very large or even unbounded. You could create a web search, for example, that returned a pivot collection.

Once you have created and hosted your Pivot collections, most of the work of displaying them is done by the Pivot client. There is a desktop Pivot client, which is Windows-only; but the Silverlight PivotViewer is more useful since it allows a Pivot collection to be viewed in a web page. The client (or control) does most of the work of displaying, filtering and sorting your data, including a user-friendly filter panel.

PivotViewer also makes use of Deep Zoom, also known as Seadragon, which lets you view vast images over the internet while downloading only what is needed for the small section or thumbnail preview you are viewing.

The result is that a developer like Azure Technical Strategist Steve Marx was able to create a PivotViewer for Netflix with only about around 500 lines of code. This kind of product selection is a natural fit for Pivot.

I was quickly able to find the highest-rated music movies in the Netflix Instant Watch collection.

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Starting with the full set, I checked Music and Musicals and then set Rating to 4 or over.

 

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It seems to me that the strength of Pivot is not so much that it offers previously unavailable ways to visualise data, but more that it transforms a complex programming task into something that any developer can accomplish. Microsoft at its best; though of course it will only work on platforms where Silverlight runs.

apple, microsoft, professional, windows, windows 7

Windows 8: detailed plans leaked, show Microsoft cycle of invent, fail, copy

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No doubt crisis meetings in Redmond as plans for Windows 8, shared apparently with OEM partners, leak to the web. Of course it may all be an elaborate hoax, and even if not, the slides all state:

Disclaimer – Windows 8 discussion, this is not a plan of record

Still, it looks plausible. So what’s new?

In some ways, Windows 7 was low-hanging fruit. Simply fix what was broken in Windows Vista, make Windows faster, more reliable and more pleasant to use. Windows 8 needs to take a step forward, and according to these slides this is what is planned:

1. Elevation of the Slate as a key form factor. The slides refer to three basic form factors: Slate for web and media consumption, laptop for productivity and all-in-one touch control desktop for both.

2. 3D content display along with “HTML 5 video” and DRM, focus on DLNA.

3. Instant On, always connected. Hang on, wasn’t this promised for 7? And Vista? The docs do refer to a “New Off state” called Logoff + Hibernate, with optimised hibernate plus a “Boot/Shutdown look and feel”. The idea is that this becomes the norm for a switch off.

4. Log on with face recognition. One of the few pieces of real innovation on offer here.

5. Proximity based sleep and wake.

6. Another go at the Windows App Store. This time Microsoft is serious. Approval process. Dashboard for developers with telemetry. Auto update. Software license roams with the user, as do settings – a great idea. Partner co-branding, ho hum.

7. Reinstall or “reset” Windows while keeping apps, docs and settings. A bit like the old repair install, though the difference here seems to be that this is a genuine wipe and reinstall, with apps reinstalled from the App Store. 

8. Windows accounts “could be connected to the cloud”. I would think they must be, if the app store stuff with roaming software licenses is to work. Hooking your Windows login to a Passport ID is not new though; I’m guessing it will just be more prominent and important.

Needless to say, this is not the whole Windows 8 story, even if genuine. What do we learn though? Mainly that Microsoft is taking its lead from Apple and accepts that the App Store concept is central to our future computing experience; the Slate also seems influenced by iPad.

We are also seeing the return of Passport. Most of what was in the controversial .NET My Services from 2001 is now accepted as normal, after Google and Facebook have softened us up for the concepts.

There’s a pattern here. Microsoft gets bright idea – Tablet, Windows Marketplace, Passport. Does half-baked implementation which flops. Apple or Google works out how to do it right. Microsoft copies them.

When do we get Windows 8? You can try and puzzle out the slide on “Windows 8 product cycle” if you like; but I’d bet that it will be around three years from the release of Windows 7: mid to late 2012.

.net, microsoft, mono, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows, windows 7

Why we love to hate Microsoft

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Mary Branscombe has an excellent ZDNet post on Why do we (love to) hate Microsoft, and asks:

What would Microsoft need to do and say to you for you to be happy to call yourself a fan?

In part she’s reacting to Frank Shaw’s Microsoft by the Numbers in which he highlights the success of Windows 7, and makes the point that Windows netbooks will likely outsell Apple iPads by 7 or 8 times in 2010, that Linux has not ousted Windows either on the desktop or the server, and that Nokia smartphones will likely outsell iPhones by 2.5 times in 2010.

That last one is interesting. Why is Shaw puffing Nokia, when he is VP corporate communications for Microsoft? Well, the enemy of my enemy applies; it’s a jibe at Apple.

Unfortunately for Shaw, Nokia itself admits that Apple iPhone and Google Android are hurting its market share, or at least that is how I interpret this remark:

Nokia now expects its mobile device value market share to be slightly lower in 2010, compared to 2009. This update is primarily due to the competitive situation at the high-end of the market and shifts in product mix.

Nokia is being driven down-market. The same thing has happened to Microsoft in the laptop market, with the high-end going to Apple. This is a worry for both companies, since if a company becomes known as “the best” in a particular sector, it may well extend its market share simply by lowering prices or introducing cheaper product variants. This happened to some extent in the portable music player market – only to some extent, because Apple is still more expensive than most of its competitors, but its market share is now huge.

I digress. Here are a few observations on the ZDNet post. First, has Microsoft really changed as stated?

Microsoft is still paying for the bad old days of arrogance and dubious business practices. I think they’re the bad old days – I spend a lot of time talking to Microsoft insiders, partners and competitors and the attitudes I see have changed, inside and out.

The trouble is, Microsoft is so large and complex that it is hard to generalise. I think of it more as a set of united (or disunited) states than as a single corporate entity. This has always been the case – at least, as long as I can remember, and I don’t go back to the very early days.

I can believe that regulation has mitigated the worst practices of the past. But why on earth is Microsoft suing Salesforce.com (and getting itself counter-sued)? It’s terrible PR; it looks as if Microsoft wants to compete in the courts and not on product quality. If it wins and hurts Salesforce.com, what is the benefit to the industry? I realise Microsoft is not a charity, but we are talking business ethics here.

More broadly, there are two separate topics that need to be addressed. One is about the quality and prospects for Microsoft’s products and services, and the other is about how it is perceived and why.

I’ll take these in reverse order. Microsoft has history, as Mary Branscombe says, and more history than just Clippy. It’s the perceptions of the web community that are most visible to many of us, and the piece of history that counts for most is over the web browser. Microsoft beat off the competition, then froze development, an evil act that is particularly hard to forgive because of its cost in terms of devising workarounds for web pages. Yes, that’s changed now, and we have had IE7, IE8, and the promising IE9; but has Microsoft convinced the community that it would not do the same again if it had the opportunity?

There are other things I can think of. The whole Office Open XML (OOXML) saga, and hints that Microsoft is not following through on its promises. The BlueJ incident.

There is also the question of pricing, especially for business users. When I reviewed a Toshiba Netbook recently I figured that installing Windows Pro (to join a domain) and Office would cost more than the hardware. I suppose you cannot blame a company for charging what the market will bear; but when the commodity software costs more than the commodity hardware, you have to wonder whether monopolistic pricing is still present.

OK, what about product quality? I tend to agree that Microsoft often does better than it is given credit for. Windows 7 is good; Visual Studio 2010 is great; Silverlight 4 was a bit rushed but still impressive, to mention three offerings about which I know a good deal.

Nevertheless, Microsoft still had deep-rooted problems that I’ve not yet seen addressed. I’ll mention a couple.

First Microsoft still has an OEM problem. Going back to that Toshiba Netbook: it was nearly wrecked by poor OEM software additions and the user experience of a new Windows machine often remains poor. Many users do minimal customisation and as a result get a worse experience of Windows than they should. Apple will carry on winning if this is not addressed.

Second, Microsoft is conflicted, caught between the need to preserve its profits from Windows and Office, and the need to keep up with the new Cloud + Device model of computing. It is drifting towards the cloud; and developments like Office Web Apps and other one about which I am not allowed to tell you yet are encouraging (wait until next month). This issue will not go away though.

Third, mainly as a result of the above, Microsoft still does not convince when it comes to cross-platform. Silverlight is cross-platform, sure; except on the Mac you don’t have the COM integration or any equivalent, sorry, and on Linux, well there’s Moonlight or maybe we’ll work something out with Intel. It is the Windows company. Having said that, I put the Live Messenger app on the iPhone 4 I’ve been trying and it’s great; so yes, it sometimes gets it.

What can Microsoft do in order to be better liked? The key to it is this: ensure that our interactions with the company and its products are more often pleasurable than painful. Windows Phone 7 will be an interesting launch to watch, a product where Microsoft has made its best effort to break with past and deliver something users will love. We’ll see.

adobe, flash, internet, microsoft, professional, software development, web authoring

Big browser and RIA news: Canvas comes to Internet Explorer 9

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I’ve just installed the third Internet Explorer Platform Preview (on a virtual machine just in case) and run through a few of the demos. One of the most impressive is Canvas Pad, which demonstrates the HTML 5 Canvas element.

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Canvas is particularly interesting, since it provides a surface to which you can draw anything you like. Canvas support was not announced at Mix earlier this year, when IE9 was unveiled, and some of us speculated that Microsoft would omit it in order to preserve the value of its Silverlight plugin – though in doing so it would also help Adobe Flash. Well, apparently the IE9 team decided to risk it. Not only is canvas supported; it is also hardware-accelerated:

Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. Hardware accelerated canvas support in IE9 illustrates the power of native HTML5 in a browser.

Is there still value in Silverlight and Flash? There is, for several reasons. A plug-in presents a predictable runtime, insulating the application from browser variations. A plugin will work on browsers that do not yet support Canvas. Further, Silverlight includes the .NET Framework with its rich library, and supports the .NET languages, whereas for HTML5 you have to use JavaScript – though don’t forget Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java to JavaScript, and other similar projects.

Even so, once you have hardware-accelerated Canvas there will be few occasions when you absolutely have to use Flash, Silverlight or Java.

Microsoft is doing the right thing. Crippling IE for the sake of Silverlight would only push users to other browsers, so it would not achieve its goal.

A full list of what is new in IE9 is here. It is shaping up to be the most interesting new IE since version 4.0 back in 1997.

microsoft, open source, oracle, Sun

Novell’s Michael Meeks downbeat on OpenOffice.org project

There is a fascinating interview over on The H with Michael Meeks, who works at Novell on OpenOffice.org development. It would be wrong to call OpenOffice.org unsuccessful: it is a solid product that forms a viable alternative to Microsoft Office in many scenarios. Nevertheless, it has not disrupted the Microsoft Office market as much as perhaps could have been expected; and Meeks explains what may be the reasons – tight control by Sun (now Oracle) and a bureaucratic approach to project management that has stifled the enthusiasm of the open source community.

Contributors to OpenOffice.org are required to sign over copyright, which is a big ask if you are giving it freely. While Meeks does not say that the trust of contributors has been abused, he does say that that there is a lack of transparency and reassurance, specifically concerning IBM’s Symphony which is based on OpenOffice.org:

In some places they do feed stuff back. We see their changes, but parts of Symphony are not open source, and we don’t have the code for them, and interestingly, there is no source code available so far as I am aware of the version of OO.o that IBM is shipping inside their product, so clearly they’re not shipping this under the LGPLv3. IBM have a fairly public antipathy towards the GPL unfortunately, and as a consequence you have to wonder what terms are they shipping OpenOffice under – and as there is a lot of my code in there, not only my code but Novell’s code and a lot of other people’s code, you have to wonder ‘What were the terms and what was the deal? That’s a shame, and would really help improve the transparency and confidence in Sun’s stewardship around these things. The code was assigned to Sun, and I have no doubt there is no legal problem at all, but a lot of people have assigned their code to Sun in good faith, believing them to be good stewards. Maybe they are but its impossible to tell without knowing the terms under which third parties are shipping the code.

Meeks says that the Oracle takeover is an opportunity for things to get better. Even if you like Microsoft Office you should hope that it does, since a strong OpenOffice puts pressure on the competition to keep prices down and product development up. Further, Microsoft has no plans for Office on Linux that I know of – unless you count Office Web Apps.

adobe, flash, mobile

Flash and AIR for Windows Phone 7 by mid 2011?

I’m at an Adobe partner conference in Amsterdam – not for the partner sessions, but to be one of the judges for tomorrow’s application showcase. However, I’ve been chatting to Michael Chaize, a Flash Platform evangelist based in Paris, and picked up a few updates on the progress of Flash and AIR on mobile devices. AIR is a runtime which uses the Flash player for applications that are not hosted in the browser.

It’s well known that AIR for Android is ready to preview, though it is not quite public yet. Which platforms will come next? According to Chaize, AIR for Palm webOS is well advanced, though a little disrupted by the coming HP takeover, and Blackberry is also progressing fast. He added that Windows Phone 7 will not be long delayed, which intrigued me since that platform itself is not yet done. Although Microsoft and Adobe have said that Flash will not be in the initial release, Chaize says that it will come “within months” afterwards, where “months” implies less than a year – maybe six months or so.

We also talked about the constraints of a mobile platform and how that affects development. Currently developers will need to use the standard Flex components, but Chaize said that a forthcoming Flash Mobile Framework will be optimized for devices. Of course, the more you tailor your app for mobile, the less code you can share with your desktop version.

The Apple question also came up, as you would expect. Chaize pointed out that Adobe’s enterprise customers may still use the abandoned Flash Packager, which compiles Flash code to a native iPhone app, since internal apps do not need App Store approval. That said, I suspect that even internal developers have to agree the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, with its notorious clause 3.3.1 that forbids use of an “intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool”. Even if that is the case, I doubt that Apple would pursue the developers of private, custom applications.

adobe, microsoft, silverlight, software development

Native code interop in Adobe AIR vs Microsoft Silverlight

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The latest versions of Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight both allow access to native code, but with limitations. The two platforms take a different approach though – here is a quick comparison.

Native code access in AIR

The new version 2.0 of Adobe AIR is just about done. The runtime is available now (as is Flash Player 10.1), but we have to wait until June 15 for the final version of the SDK.

AIR lets you create cross-platform desktop applications that use the Flash runtime. Supported operating systems include Mac, Windows and Linux, and coming soon, Android. Sadly, supported operating systems do not include Apple’s iPhone or iPad.

One of the big new features in AIR 2.0 is access to native code. Of course this breaks cross-platform, unless you create identical native code extensions for all the platforms that AIR supports. Still, the ability to extend AIR without limit using native code is significant. So how do you use it, can you call a DLL or a dynamic shared library? What about COM on Windows, for automating Microsoft Office?

The answer is that you can do all these things, but not easily. There are actually three obvious ways to communicate with native applications in AIR 2.0:

1. Open a document using the default file handler. This is done using the new openWithDefaultApplication function. This is a handy way to open a PDF or Microsoft Office document, but you as the developer have little control over what happens. You do not know which application will open, and cannot control it once it does open.

2. Socket support. Your AIR application can send and receive data over a TCP socket. If you write a native code socket server and install it, you can get access to the local operating system APIs that way.

3. Native process support. This one looks promising. The new NativeProcess class lets you launch a native application and communicate with it via STDIN and STDOUT. Your native application could do anything, of course, such as calling a DLL or using COM, but it must use STDIN and STDOUT to communicate with AIR.

Another limitation is that AIR applications which use this function must be installed with a native installer, rather than by downloading an .AIR file. A further limitation is that auto-update does not work for these applications. You will have to write your own code to check for updates and download an updated installer if necessary.

Native code access in Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight 4.0 also has the ability to run on the desktop and to call native code – but the native code part only works on Windows, and is restricted to applications that are “Trusted”, which means the user has approved the installation. A trusted Silverlight 4.0 desktop application can call COM via AutomationFactory.CreateObject. Presuming it is successful, your application can call methods on the returned object. If what you really want is to call a DLL, for example, you would have to write a COM DLL (or an application with a COM API) that calls the native DLL.

In addition, Silverlight 4.0 trusted applications have socket support, so that would be another possible approach. However, unlike Adobe AIR 2.0, you cannot simply open a document using the default file handler for its type. That said, it would be trivial to do so using COM and the WScript object, for example. You can also use the browser to do this – see here for an interesting case study from Beat Kiener, who does this with remote documents.

The main limitation of native code access in Silverlight is that it only works on Windows. Even if it does go cross-platform at some point, you would not use COM on Mac or Linux, so some other mechanism will be necessary.

Comparing the two

First, let’s acknowledge that native code interop is not something to use lightly in a cross-platform runtime. If you have to use native code, maybe AIR or Silverlight is not the right choice.

Opening files using the default file handler is a different case, as you can do this without any platform-specific code.

Still, if you can do almost everything in AIR or Silverlight, but need to call a native API for just one or two important features, it may be a reasonable approach.

My immediate observation is that native code interop is easier in Silverlight, though wrecked by being restricted to Windows only. The packaging and updating limitations in AIR, plus being restricted to STDIN and STDOUT, is more arduous than using COM in Silverlight.

Further, it is a shame that neither platform lets you simply call a dynamic library. It would then be relatively easy to write some conditional code to load the appropriate library on different platforms, and many tasks could be accomplished without needing to build and deploy your own native code executable for each platform.

Will you be using native code interop in either AIR or Silverlight? I’d be interested in hearing of examples, and how well it is working for you.

microsoft

Microsoft TechEd 2010 wrap-up: cloud benefits, cloud sceptics

Microsoft TechEd in New Orleans continues today, but I’m back in the UK; unfortunately I was not able to stay for the whole event.

So aside from discovering that walking the streets of New Orleans in June is like taking a Turkish bath, what did I learn? The biggest takeaway for me is that Microsoft is now serious about cloud computing, at least on the server and tools side represented here. As I put it in my report for The Register, the body language has changed: instead of “we do cloud if you must”, Microsoft is now pushing hard to promote Windows Azure and BPOS – hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Live Meeting – while still emphasising that Windows continues to give you a choice of on-premise servers.

That does not mean Microsoft is winning in the cloud, of course. There is a question in my mind about whether Microsoft is merely exporting the complexity of on-premise to serve it over the Internet, rather than developing low-touch cloud systems. I think there is a bit of both. Windows InTune is an interesting case. This is a sort of cloud version of system center, for managing laptops and desktop PCs.On the one hand, I was impressed with its ease of use in the demos we saw. On the other hand, what does managing the intricacies of desktop PCs have to do with cloud computing? Not much, perhaps, except that it is a task that still needs to be done, and if the cloud can make it easier then I’m all in favour.

Although Microsoft was talking up the cloud at TechEd, many of the attendees I spoke to were less enthusiastic. One telling point: I spoke to a training company in the vast exhibition and asked what were the most popular courses. Among other things, he said he was doing a lot of Silverlight, a little WPF, and that there was little interest in Windows Azure.

I also attended an “expert panel” on cloud security, which proved an entertaining affair. The lively Laura Chappell said the whole thing was a nightmare, and none of the other experts dared to disagree. I chatted to her afterwards about some of the issues. Here is a sample:

One of the things is ediscovery. You have something on your computer that indicates someone is planning something against the president of the united states. With the Patriot Act, they can immediately go to that service provider, and they don’t care if it’s virtualised across 10 different systems, they are going to shut them down, and they do not care who else’s stuff is on there, the Patriot Act gives them the power to do that. You went out of business, so did 7 other companies, and they don’t have a timeline, with the patriot act, for them to bring their servers back up.

If anyone sceptical of the benefits of cloud went along, they would not have come away reassured.

Finally, there was a ton of good stuff announced at TechEd. I attended a press briefing the day before, with sessions on Server 2008 RS SP1, InTune, and other topics. The most interesting part of the day was a session which I am not allowed to talk about; but I will say mysteriously that Microsoft’s strategy for the product was not too far removed from one that I proposed on this blog, though I am sure there is no connection.

The other announcements were public. If you have not checked out the new Azure Tools, don’t hesitate; they are much improved. Unfortunately I hardly dare to use Azure, because although I have some free hours from MSDN I’m worried about leaving some app running by mistake and ending up with a big credit card bill. Microsoft needs to make Azure more friendly for developers experimenting.

Windows AppFabric is now released and pretty interesting, though it was not prominent at TechEd. Given that many business processes are essentially workflows, and that this in combination with Visual Studio 2010 makes building and deploying a workflow app much easier, I am surprised it does not get more attention.

microsoft, mobile, windows

Windows Phone 7: is it really consumer?

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Here at TechEd in New Orleans we’ve seen some further demos of Windows Phone 7. Two features that have been highlighted are the ability to have more then one Exchange account, and a mobile version of SharePoint Workspace for easy access to SharePoint documents and an option to keep an offline copy.

Neither of these strike me as consumer features, which is intriguing given that at the Mix conference in March we were told that the first release of Windows Phone 7 is firmly targeted at consumers rather than businesses.

I also saw a report in the New York Times this morning noting that Apple is working to stave off the threat to iPhone from Google. No mention of Windows Phone 7, which I suspect has been almost written off as irrelevant by the general public. In the rarefied atmosphere of Microsoft TechEd, though, where most people I talk to seem to be solidly Microsoft platform – Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server and so on – having a mobile phone that integrates nicely makes a lot of sense.

There’s also the application aspect. Windows Phone 7 runs Silverlight, which means .NET code, so for developers who already use Visual Studio it is a mobile platform that fits with their work.

In fact, it is easy to see why Windows Phone 7 will appeal to these business users, whereas in the consumer space it is up against tough competition.

I will be interested to see what Microsoft says about business use of Windows Phone 7 as we get closer to launch.