Posts tagged Microsoft’s
Microsoft’s Last CES Keynote: The Undiscovered Country
Jan 9th
If you happened to see the movie Star Trek VI (the last one with the original TV cast) when it premiered in theaters in 1991, perhaps there may have been a moment (or a dozen) when something occurred to you: You didn’t have to dislike or even fail to appreciate these actors on-screen to realize, yep, there’s a reason why this is – and should be – their last performance in this venue.
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Although the fellow who runs CES, the CEA’s Gary Shapiro, introduced Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Monday evening by saying that Microsoft would be taking a “pause” from CES keynotes after this year, if you sat through the entire hour and eighteen minutes, you probably felt it even if you’re a Microsoft fan. It really is time. One moment longer would be one too long.
For most of the keynote, Ballmer was seated across a patio table from American Idol host Ryan Seacrest, both trying nervously to generate banter like two cars trying to jump start each other in an Alaska snowstorm. It was clear that Seacrest hadn’t read much about the material before showing up on stage, as he was constantly searching for the location of his cues. TV people expect their cues to come from teleprompters, at eye level; public speakers look down toward monitors showing PowerPoint slides.
“We have a chance in the next year to really raise our game, our product line, to the next level, across phones, PCs, tablets, TV, the Xbox,” opened Ballmer. “And really the heart and soul of that will be our kinda featured attraction tonight, our new Metro user interface.”
Not since 1995 has the layout of an operating system been considered the keynote attraction at an electronics conference. Metro is the overall style of layout being applied to new apps for Windows Phone, Windows 8, and now Xbox 360. “I think people will be kind of impressed at how it lights everything up.”
Seacrest thought that was a cue for something. It wasn’t, so he searched for some sense of direction. Finding none at eye-level, he quickly ad-libbed: “When you said, ‘Metro,’ you looked at me in a strange way… Is it the jacket, the sweater, or the combination?” Ballmer got the joke, and then feigned laughter, which is about the second most painful thing you can witness Ballmer ever doing.
Even for a company that may yet have some irons in the fire, it was hard to watch this company stretch things out for time. There were truly painful moments, reminiscent of sitting through an infomercial for Time-Life Music, with some ’50s legend of the stage now running on fumes, filling an hour reminding you about how excited he was and how great the past used to be.
It’s no secret that stage show producers plant folks in the audience to help applaud at the right moments and generate enthusiasm (I’ve sat next to a few). This year, when the applause came from about eight people in response to the arrival on-stage of the Windows Phone part of the presentation, the groans from the rest of the crowd drowned them out.
Then Seacrest, who truly is a stranger to quiet crowds, tried to jump in and save the day, as though this were a Vegas lounge act and it was bombing. Holding out his hand in their direction as if to invite them to stand, he said, “The design team over here.”
“We definitely took a different approach than everybody else,” Ballmer then explained, “and I think we’ve got a unique and beneficial experience. All these phones these days, they all make calls, they connect to the Internet, they e-mail, social networks, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah,” he added in what has come to be heralded as Ballmer’s typically dismissive attitude toward market categories where his company is not the leader.
“If you take a look at it, the other phones make the sea of icons, the sea of applications, the kind of view of the world. What we’ve really done with Windows Phone, I think, is have a better way by putting your people, the people who are important to you, whether it’s dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions in somebody’s case, I might think,” the CEO added, trying to hand off to Seacrest. There was a train of thought there that would have been oh, so welcome at CES 2009, when Microsoft had a prototype concept but opted instead to hold those cards close to its chest, and tout Windows Mobile instead.
When Ballmer moved to the topic of Windows 8, the old syndrome continued to rear its ugly head: starting a new train of thought, building a metaphor, and then found himself descending into a list of things popping into his head that, impulsively, he could not then ignore.
“Of course, things change – that’s the essence of this industry,” he replied to Seacrest at one point. “In some senses, maybe the only two things that are constant: Number one, things change. And number two, people don’t want to compromise on what they have today. They want the best of what they have and the best of what they want. Nobody wanted to give up anything they had on their desktop, for example, when the world moved to notebooks. It’s a wonderful thing. The Windows PCs evolved – it was a programming machine, it was a productivity machine, a music machine, a video machine, an Internet machine. But we don’t give up anything.”
This evening, we saw the first sign of later builds of Windows 8 running on “Intel-inspired” ultrabooks, than the Developer’s Preview that premiered last fall in Anaheim. The green background tone of the Metro-style Start menu has been muted to more of a teal, and multiple saved bookmarks in IE10 are now multi-colored. Besides these factors, there was not much noticeable difference.
Easily the most painful moment of the evening came, sadly, from a gospel choir that had been hired to improvise wonderful, joyful sounds based on tweets that were being streamed in over the speakers’ monitors below stage. It wasn’t painful for the music; the voices were actually good. Some of the tweets they were singing were selected refrains of excitement from viewers looking forward to the upcoming Xbox-related announcements.
And here they were: The arrival of the Metro-style interface for selecting programming choices (which some Xbox players are already doing). This was followed by a preview of a Metro-style programming guide for Verizon FiOS, which will soon also be tailored for Comcast subscribers (who know they’ll still have to subscribe to Comcast’s HD STBs whether they use Xboxes instead or not).
And a live demonstration of a little girl who was obviously a few years graduated from Sesame Street, using the Kinect tool to toss imaginary coconuts into Grover’s cardboard box.
Not all of these are bad things – certainly I would have seriously considered this Kinect app for my daughter had it been made available a decade earlier. It’s just that the first rule of public speaking is “Know Your Audience,” and this amalgam of software-related events, most of which we’ve already seen, speaks to a vastly different audience than the one assembled here in Las Vegas. The audience is doing the types of things that Ballmer describes as “blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” There was a disconnect this year, a clear sign that Microsoft has moved one way and CES another. Rather than prolong the agony, perhaps it’s best to just say it’s time, and move on.
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Daily Wrap: Microsoft’s Apology for IE and More
Dec 15th
Microsoft says they are sorry for all the time you wasted because updating IE isn’t an automatic process. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.
Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.
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Microsoft to Developers: Sorry About the Whole IE6 Thing, Won’t Happen Again
Over the past few years, you’ve spent hours upon hours making your sites work in all mainstream browsers including, unfortunately, IE 6. The time is near that you may finally be able to stop the madness. From now on, starting with a roll out in Brazil and Australia, IE will automatically update to the most recent version that is compatible with the version of Windows on the machine. It’s not nirvana, but it’s a start.
In response, @temojin said:
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Google Zeitgeist 2011: A Glimpse Into A Weird Year
As the go-to place for finding anything on the Web, Google has unique insight into the spirit of the times. The trending Google searches of the year are a glimpse into what’s on our minds. For the past 10 years, it has published a year-end Zeitgeist report on the major search trends around the world. Zeitgeist 2011 was released today. (more)
Open Source Challenger to Dropbox and Box.net: ownCloud
The file sharing, synchronization market led by Dropbox is a popular target these days. For many companies, it’s a chance to horn in on a growing market and carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. For open source projects, it’s a chance to return control of personal data to the user. For the folks behind ownCloud, it’s both. (more)
Requiem for Silverlight
There are some products that appear to have been doomed to circumstance since birth – that despite the most ambitious goals, the grandest intentions, and often the wildest strokes of luck, still manage to end up on the wrong side of public perception. No more prominent example exists in the history of software than Microsoft Silverlight, a textbook case of a platform that was never, for one moment, given the benefit of a doubt. (more)
The New Delicious UI Updates Make It Look Just Like Pinterest
Ever since its redesign, Delicious has looked increasingly like mainstream social bookmarking site Pinterest. The latest Delicious UI overhaul applies the same visually focused look to the link-saving page, which was operating under the “old” look until just today. The new design is focused on visuals and stacks, whereas the old version was more about tags and recommended tags. Is it bad that Delicious is trying to copy Pinterest’s look? (more)
Storify Compiles 10 Most Quoted Tweets of the Year
Storify has just released its compilation of the top 10 tweets of the year. The number one tweet was Bill Gates’ farewell post to Steve Jobs. Second place was Sohaib Athar’s observation of a helicopter over Abbottabad, Pakistan, which turned out to be the first report of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. (more)
TeleNav Brings GPS Navigation To the Mobile Browser With HTML5
In another move that shows how the browser is the definitive killer app on mobile devices, location-based services company TeleNav is using HTML5 to give developers the ability to implement GPS turn-by-turn directions into Web apps. The service will be completely browser-based and free. No native app platforms needed at add GPS to the browser. (more)
Most Adults Under 35 Own a Smartphone
It hasn’t even been five years since Apple unveiled the first iPhone. The device wasn’t the world’s first smartphone, but was arguably the most capable and well-designed and Apple’s marketing prowess it made it the first must-have gadget of its kind. Soon after came Android, which has powered increasingly impressive devices by a range of manufacturers. (more)
Facebook Timeline Goes Live On Android, Mobile Site But Not iOS App
Today Facebook launched the much anticipated Timeline and Timeline mobile for Android and its HTML5 mobile site m.facebook.com. But Timeline mobile for the Facebook iOS app is nowhere to be found. Timeline on the iPhone will be available in a future update of the Facebook iOS app, a Facebook spokesperson tells us. For now, iPhone and iPad users will have to use Facebook Timeline through the mobile site. (more)
2011 ReadWriteWeb Trivia Challenge: Mobile Edition
It has been a good year here at ReadWriteWeb. We have had some great stories, breaking news, thoughtful diatribes and a ton of brilliant news about innovation. Mobile leads the way. We want to thank our readers this week with a series of trivia contests with fun (and sometimes goofy) prizes. So, we partnered with ThinkGeek and conjured some trivia to put our readers’ brains through the wringer. (more)
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Microsoft’s Answer to Dropbox Comes to the iPhone
Dec 13th
Personal cloud storage is all the rage these days. Dropbox continues to be one of the most buzzed-about startups and its enterprise-focused counterpart Box is making moves toward the consumer market as well. For music files, Google, Amazon and Apple all offer cloud-based storage lockers and iOS allows syncing of other types of content via iCloud.
iPhone owners not satisfied with the available options now have a new one in Microsoft’s SkyDrive, which launched its first iOS app today. The four-year-old service has been available to Windows users on the desktop and Windows Phone platform for some time. Today, it starts to branch out onto other platforms.
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The SkyDrive app is going to be most practical for Windows users, which is not an insignificant potential user base for the app. By bringing it to iOS, Microsoft acknowledges that its own mobile operating system doesn’t have quite the adoption rate that its desktop OS does.
Lots of Windows users are carrying around iPhones, so it only makes sense for Microsoft to let them access their cloud-stored files from the device. Otherwise, most people will instinctively go for a solution like Dropbox. With its 25 GB of free space, SkyDrive is an attractive alternative to Dropbox, who only offers only two. Box’s free account comes with five gigabytes of free storage.
This is just the latest iOS app from Microsoft, who released an application for Bing as well OneNote, which may foreshadow the eventual launch of Microsoft Office for iOS.
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Microsoft’s Yahoo Bid May Have the Right Stuff
Nov 29th
The Silver Lake consortium is one of a number of parties bidding for a minority stake in Yahoo, but their offer has a number of factors that makes them a major contender. The consortium includes Microsoft – that already is working with Yahoo – and…
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More Details on Socl, Microsoft’s Social Discovery Platform
Nov 18th
Details on Microsoft Socl are surfacing. The site will be a content discovery platform with strong social elements and partial integration with Facebook. It is currently in private testing but is nearing an invite-only beta.
Socl has been the su…
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SQL Server 2012: Microsoft’s Quentin Clark on Data You Can Touch
Oct 13th
Of all the software technologies that are least suited to getting a makeover that’s “about the experience,” you’d think databases would rank pretty far down. The database experience, if there is one, is typically about accuracy, reliability, and speed. Certainly Oracle’s frequent measurements (“5x,” “10x,” “20x” and so on) are all about those metrics.
But Microsoft has found an angle with respect to SQL Server 2012, the second round of announcements for which came this morning in Seattle. The new angle starts with multitouch, but then it runs deeper, touching on the larger problem of data getting fragmented and redundantly duplicated as it gets used and visualized.
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On the surface, it would be nicer for businesses to have a more flexible, adaptive system for visualizing large amounts of data and making correlative analyses. At a deeper level, the capability to share and collaborate by way of this visualization system could reduce, if not eliminate altogether, all the unnecessary duplication and versioning that comes from embedding data in e-mails. That’s the two stage goal described today for Microsoft Data Explorer, a touch-sensitive visualization tool that will orbit around the new SQL Server ecosystem.
Perhaps the most commonly used tool for visualizing data in an organization today is Excel. And as Quentin Clark, Microsoft’s own corporate vice president for database systems, tells RWW, that’s not really a good thing. When enterprise users see data from a large database in Excel, they show it to the workforce by cutting and pasting it into an e-mail message. Object Linking and Embedding, one of Microsoft’s oldest Windows technologies, gets cut out of the loop here. Inevitably, recipients save the spreadsheet fragment as an attachment.
Then employees make suggested changes and revisions. Suddenly versioning gets called into play. Fragments of the database abound, none of it in the database. Projections are made based on one or the other fragment. Those projections are loaded back into Excel. Charts are made from those projections, and get pasted into PowerPoint. Tools from PowerPoint and OneNote make further suggested revisions. And none of this involves the use of the original database or its own tools, beyond that initial cut-and-paste job.
“It’s not so much that we don’t want Excel in the loop,” says Clark about a product his team doesn’t manage. “We want to give IT tools to make data sharable, so [people] can stop using Excel as the way data and information gets flowed, over e-mail… [and] ensure that SharePoint can be used as a sharing and collaboration mechanism, as opposed to e-mail.”
Microsoft’s other hope is that Data Explorer will introduce more users to a concept that debuted with SQL Server 2008 R2. It currently goes by the name Managed Self-Service Business Intelligence, which already doesn’t sound like something you’d want to gift-wrap as an anniversary present. But it merges the company’s business intelligence (BI) tools with some of the visualization techniques that emerged from project “Crescent” and then became Data Explorer, with hooks that enable sharing views of the data through SharePoint without duplicating the data.
Does the cloud change the data?
Last week at Oracle OpenWorld, CEO Larry Ellison introduced his audience to several elements of “magic” that he explained could change the texture and behavior of databases as we know them (if they haven’t done so already). One of them involves the use of columnar storage, which twists the order in which the contents of tables are written by 90 degrees.
Imagine in your mind a data table. The fields in tables are always written to a storage device in some sequence. Usually that sequence is record by record (“1,” “David,” “Strom,” “2,” “Joe,” “Brockmeier,” “3,” “Scott, “Fulton…”). Columnar data changes this order (“1,” “2,” “3,” “David,” “Joe,” “Scott,” “Strom,” “Brockmeier,” “Fulton…”). This makes it a bit more difficult for query engines to draw analytical conclusions on the data. But in cases where the objective of a query is to read large quantities of fields in a column, if not the entire column, it expedites the process tremendously.
Depending upon the scale of the database and the types of analysis that need to be performed, the speed gain from changing to columnar could more than offset the speed loss in transaction processing and in write processes. Now, SQL Server 2012 enables a shift to columnar storage for selected tables.
“Instead of compressing things by rows and pages, this [technique] looks at a large set of data,” explains Clark. “Because these data warehousing tables have a lot of repeating data, when you look down columns, you can take advantage of that.” The technology was first introduced for PowerPivot for Excel during SS 2008 R2′s reign, using an alternative storage engine that flipped the contents of very large worksheet tables to one side. Once flipped, it became easier to compress columns with multiple, repeated fields. Imagine a personnel directory, for instance, where there are multiple “Smiths.” It’s much more efficient to compress “Smith,” “Smith,” “Smith…” than a table full of probably unique records adjacent to one another.
“Unlike a lot of our competitors’ columnar accelerators, which are separate products that have to be managed separately, we’re building an index type into the database. So there’s no separate thing to manage… You configure it to be indexed this way, and off you go. It’s a configuration operation, not a development or architectural operation.”
The good kind of fragmentation
Databases are getting larger, in large part (as Microsoft’s Doug Leland explained yesterday) due to the shifting ratio of machine-generated data to human-generated data. The NoSQL movement is grounded on the principle that data structures that make ordinary databases transactional and query-ready serve to stifle scalability.
But Microsoft’s Quentin Clark disagrees with the idea that removing structure from data enables performance increases in all scenarios. As an alternative, Microsoft announced today a sharding technique, where partitions of complete records are divided horizontally (as opposed to by column) and stored in separate regions. The pattern being utilized for programming for “shard-ability” is being called “Federation” (for now), and will apply to SQL Azure-hosted databases.
As Clark explains to us, when databases are designed for the appropriate constructs, they will automatically benefit from sharding in ways that are transparent to the customer. “You’re inherently programming into a partition form, which is what a lot of these new SQL databases do, so you get that scalability and performance built in to help you manage the shards, know where the hotspots are, move them around, split them, and so on.
“It has to do with the programming pattern; it’s not really a performance issue,” Clark continues. “It’s really about how fast you get moving, and how sure you are of scaling once you’ve programmed to a certain pattern.”
Just over the past few years of Microsoft customer briefings in which Clark has taken part, he tells us, the polarity of the cloud discussion has shifted. Whereas he used to have to bring the topic up himself (“Have you thought about the cloud?”), today attendees won’t let him talk as long as ten minutes without forcing the topic on him. “The conversation has shifted with customers,” he remarks. “One of the unique things we bring to the table is our collection of products — whether on-premise, or appliances, or from the cloud — that allows you to have choice… You develop one thing, and then you get deployment freedom from that.”
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Microsoft’s Non-Response to the Secure Boot Problem
Sep 23rd
Microsoft has put up a post about secure boot in response to concerns about its effects on Linux and other operating systems. Microsoft has provided a very detailed explanation of what UEFI secure boot is, and what its benefits are. What Microsoft hasn’t done is to actually respond to concerns raised by Matthew Garrett about its secure boot policies. In short, while Microsoft is requiring secure boot to be enabled, its policies do not require that users be able to turn the feature off. As Garrett says, “end user is no longer in control of their PC.”
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Microsoft’s post is fairly lengthy and most of it is spent discussing the actual nuts and bolts of the secure boot features. I’ve included a few of the diagrams from the post to show how it works, but you should go read it. As a layperson’s overview of UEFI secure boot, it’s great. As an actual response to the issues that Garrett has raised? It almost completely avoids the topic, and certainly does little to address the issue. Microsoft, through its PR firm, has also declined to comment citing the fact that Windows 8 is still in pre-beta.
The issue at hand is this: Will users and businesses have control over their PCs? The answer is a firm sort of if OEMs choose to support it. Microsoft’s Tony Mangefeste says that “the customer is in control of their PC,” but then says “OEMs are free to choose how to enable” turning off secure boot. He also doesn’t address the issue of adding other OSes to secure boot at all.
One major problem is that OEMs may not choose to expose a way to disable secure boot at all. Says Garrett:
The end user is not guaranteed the ability to install extra signing keys in order to securely boot the operating system of their choice. The end user is not guaranteed the ability to disable this functionality. The end user is not guaranteed that their system will include the signing keys that would be required for them to swap their graphics card for one from another vendor, or replace their network card and still be able to netboot, or install a newer SATA controller and have it recognise their hard drive in the firmware. The end user is no longer in control of their PC.
Garrett also notes that the secure boot problem isn’t a recent discovery. “We became aware of this issue in early August. Since then, we at Red Hat have been discussing the problem with other Linux vendors, hardware vendors and BIOS vendors. We’ve been making sure that we understood the ramifications of the policy in order to avoid saying anything that wasn’t backed up by facts.”
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Microsoft’s Plan to Stop Losing Money on Bing
Sep 22nd
At the Microsoft financial analyst meeting held earlier this month, Microsoft’s Qi Lu presented an argument for how Bing would become profitable – over the course of the next several years.
Bringing Bing to the Black
Microsoft&rsqu…
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