Posts tagged Microsoft
Microsoft Makes Venue Maps More Visible On Bing
Apr 17th
Microsoft has introduced a number of improvements to Bing Maps, chief among which is making “venue maps” more obvious. Microsoft says there are roughly 900 venue/interior maps on Bing focused primarily on “malls, airports, casinos and shopping districts.” Google has a…
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Microsoft Spins Off Open Source, Hopes to “Build Bridges”
Apr 13th
Microsoft is spinning off its open source unit into Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., and promoting open source veteran [Jean Paoli](http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jean-paoli/0/5b8/68) to the role of president of the wholly owned subsidiary. The move gives the new company a measure of open source credibility and is likely to give Paoli more latitude in determining Microsoft’s open source policy.
Paoli helped create XML, cementing his reputation among developers, and in 2007, he pledged his company’s support for multiple document formats so long as the other format did not restrict customers’ free choice. The masterstroke of diplomacy calmed a brewing rebellion among champions of the existing ISO standards format, OpenDocument, who claimed competing standards (specifically, Microsoft’s Open Office XML) would sow confusion.
Building a Bridge
In an interview with ReadWriteWeb this afternoon, Paoli characterized the creation of the new Microsoft subsidiary not so much as a reorganization but a confirmation of the evolving role of open source development at Microsoft. Some will continue to regard “Microsoft” and “open source” as opposite sides of a coin. But Paoli described his new subsidiary as a liaison between Microsoft’s corporate entities and the open source community, and more than the masked voice of a commercial developer.
“The business case is literally around enabling scenarios for our customers that bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies,” the new president told RWW. “That’s basically the business goal.”
One example Paoli cited was MongoDB, the open source NoSQL database system. While MongoDB is already effectively promoting the database, Microsoft Open Technologies is positioned to promote the use of MongoDB in conjunction with Microsoft technologies, especially the Windows Azure cloud service.
“That’s an example of a non-Microsoft technology that originated with a brilliant open source community who understands a lot about big data, and we’re very interested to start working with them to see how MongoDB can work on Windows Azure,” Paoli said. “It’s always going to be a bridge between a Microsoft technology and a non-Microsoft technology. Those are the use cases that we will really be working on.”
Microsoft Can Now Speak With Two Voices
In many cases, Microsoft will have interests as both a commercial developer and an open source participant. The creation of the spinoff gives it a little wiggle room with respect to its open source positions. Microsoft Open Technologies can effectively stand for public and open standards if it so wishes, while Microsoft corporate continues to be the actual liaison for standards.
“Let me be frank: There are a number of differences between the process of developing proprietary software and the processes of the open source community,” explained Paoli. “So in some cases, it is important to keep those processes separate. And in other cases, there is really room for great collaboration, interaction. Sometimes we want to keep things separate, and sometimes we need to have greater collaboration. This needs to be properly managed.”
He cited a circumstance where a new community is developing around an open source product or technology – one with a deep technical brain trust and mixture of talents. Microsoft needs to be able to volunteer its participation, including helping to fix bugs and add features. “We need to be able to have it turn over very quickly, in the next 24 hours.”
But as Paoli’s response implies, the liaison with the community must not appear bound to corporate interests. That, too, will help expedite simple fixes and feature additions, and help Microsoft become perceived as an equal player in the open source community.
“All our customers expect the software they use will work in a heterogeneous environment. Customers expect their phone to connect to any cloud device; if you cannot receive your email on your phone, well, that’s not good, irrespective of which phone or which cloud or which operating system they are connected to,” Paoli said. “We live in a mixed IT world, and the goal is to provide customers with even more choice to bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, because that’s what customers expect.”
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Microsoft Updates Excel Add-On For Keyword Research And Optimization
Apr 13th
Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (MAI), the Excel add-on for keyword research and optimization, is getting an upgrade — jumping all the way from version 5.6 to version 8. The company says the new version brings in more finely-tuned data from the Yahoo-Bing network on a wider range of…
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Microsoft Buys AOL Patents for $1 Billion
Apr 9th
AOL is selling more than 800 patents to Microsoft for $1.056 billion in cash. AOL will retain patents related to advertising, search, social networking, content generation/management, mapping and others, and Microsoft will license 300 more patents.
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How Apple, Microsoft & Wikipedia Fight Google’s “Best-Loved Service”
Apr 6th
In his update from the CEO yesterday, Google’s Larry Page calls Google Maps “one of our best-loved services.” But all the big Google Maps news lately is about major customers quitting. Just as Page was publishing his letter, Wikipedia announced it would be the latest big service to drop Google Maps for OpenStreetMap.
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The Evolution of Google Maps
There’s a growing disconnect between users and service providers over this. Google Maps provides the navigation for the vast majority of users. Around 71% of people who view maps online use Google. It keeps adding killer features like “typical traffic” that make it by far the handiest map app for consumers.
It’s free, but it’s monetized with little sponsored links, and it ties into Google’s quest to lock up the business of location search. But the big business move for Google Maps was to start charging for API access after turning the service into a burgeoning platform. That’s where the trouble started.
Big Companies Starting to Bail
Because Google Maps was so ubiquitous, users had a fairly consistent experience, even while using other third-party applications built on top of it. But due to the growing business differences between Google and its high-profile developers, that’s starting to crack. Foursquare started to bail in February, and now Wikipedia’s mobile apps are going to OpenStreetMap as well.
Apple is another significant case. iOS still uses Google Maps as its out-of-the-box provider. But Apple recently launched iPhoto for iOS, an application it’s using to push forward into uncharted waters of user experience. That app is the first piece of Apple software to ditch Google, and don’t expect it to be the last.
Apple has all kinds of reasons to push Google off its home screens, and it has been buying up its own mapping companies for years. Whether or not its eventual solution uses open-source map data, you can bet Apple is building its own experience.
But for now, iPhoto uses OpenStreetMap, just like Foursquare and Wikipedia have begun to do. Providers like MapBox Streets offer lovely and distinctive skins for OpenStreetMap data, so it’s immediately apparent in these apps that you’re not in Google Maps anymore, Toto.
Open & Closed
Though Google’s decision to charge for Maps API access has forced some businesses to change course, it’s actually better for the ecosystem to require bootstrapping developers to come up with sustainable business models. But for the really big players, the equation is different. Google Maps is a successful platform, and the likes of Apple, Foursquare and Wikipedia have competing interests.
And it’s no secret that Microsoft is a huge patron of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Bing is Google’s most direct, across-the-board competitor. Instead of trying to build an in-house, proprietary competitor to Google Maps, which would be a tall order, Microsoft has decided to help fund and develop the open-source alternative. It’s a weird future no one ten years ago could have predicted.
If enough location-based services start intermingling with OpenStreetMap, there will be a significant divide between those and the ones built on Google’s proprietary service – and Microsoft and Bing will be on the open side. But Apple will be the most interesting company to watch here. Its ultimate decision about open versus proprietary map data will have big ripple effects for app developers.
Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Google, Microsoft Pitch HTTP Overhaul Options for Speedier Web
Apr 3rd
IETF engineers are currently discussing steps to overhaul Hypertext Transfer Protocol in an effort to modernize and speed up the 1990s technology. SPDY by Google and HTTP Speed+ Mobility by Microsoft are among the proposals for HTTP 2.0.
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Will Yahoo Torch its Search Deal With Microsoft, Outsource Search to Google?
Apr 2nd
Yahoo will layoff thousands of employees starting this week as part of a major company restructuring. A report indicates Yahoo is also looking at possibly getting out of search altogether. Is the Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance on life support?
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Getting Started With Microsoft Advertiser Intelligence
Mar 30th
Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (MAI) is one of the SEM tools most Advertisers don’t even know they wish they had. MAI provides API access to keyword extraction and generation, and historical and forecast metrics, all wrapped in a softward add-in that integrates with Excel. It is in some…
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Is Microsoft Challenging Google on HTTP 2.0 with WebSocket?
Mar 28th
Back in 2009, Google began an industry discussion about a prospective upgrade to HTTP protocol – the application that enables the Web over the Internet. The concept is called SPDY, and to date, conventional wisdom held that while some are skeptical of Google’s motives, as a concept, SPDY was running unopposed.
Maybe not any more. This week, Microsoft is embarking on a curious strategy that sounds a lot like its old “embrace + extend” approach to world domination. Advancing just the introductory paragraphs of an IETF technical proposal that has yet to be released, Microsoft is calling for the next version of HTTP to include multiplexing for multiple components (like SPDY) and full-time encryption of the session layer (like SPDY, but without relying solely on SSL or TLS). The “extend” part comes by way of an allusion to WebSocket (which has recently been considered a part of HTML5) – a provision for full-duplex communications critical to the next generation of Web apps.
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Does the Web Need “S+M?”
The introductory paragraphs include the following: “HTTP at its core is a simple request-response protocol. The [IETF Network] working group has clearly stated that it is a goal to preserve the semantics of HTTP. Thus, we believe that the request-response nature of the HTTP protocol must be preserved. The core HTTP 2.0 protocol should focus on optimizing these HTTP semantics, while improving the transport via a new session layer. Additional capabilities that introduce new communication models like unrequested responses must be treated as an extension to the core protocol, and explored separately from the core protocol.”
Employing both multiplexing and encryption on the session layer would, nearly all reasonable Internet engineers agree, dramatically improve the integrity of Web interactions and radically reduce traffic generated by pages that pull their content from multiple sources (which pretty much encompasses the majority of pages). There isn’t much to dispute about Google’s SPDY proposal, except perhaps the use of SSL (depicted in the Google diagram at right) for the encryption – in the wake of vast improvements on the part of TLS.
So if WebSocket is something the Web browser community has been working to implement anyway, what exactly is Microsoft’s motive for attaching WebSocket (or at least, a reference to WebSocket, depicted below) to its counter-proposal for HTTP 2.0 to the Internet Engineering Task Force? Normally a look at the technical breakdown of the draft would yield clues. But as of now, that section of the public part of Microsoft’s draft remains blank.
“The HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal starts from both the Google SPDY protocol (a separate submission to the IETF for this discussion) and the work the industry has done around WebSockets,” states Jean Paoli, Microsoft’s much respected interoperability manager, in a blog post earlier this week. “SPDY has done a great job raising awareness of Web performance and taking a ‘clean slate’ approach to improving HTTP to make the Web faster. The main departures from SPDY are to address the needs of mobile devices and applications.”
That’s the “Mobility” part of Microsoft’s version of HTTP 2.0, and it’s the part that gives the proposal the unfortunate abbreviation “HTTP S+M.” ReadWriteWeb has contacted Microsoft with questions about its intent for the Mobility part, and was told a final response may be forthcoming.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
Other parts of the public portion of Microsoft’s draft proposal read like an argument than a specification. For example: “There is no ‘one size fits all’ deployment of HTTP. For example, at times it may not be optimal to use compression in certain environments. For constrained sensors from the ‘Internet of things’ scenario, CPU resources may be at a premium. Having a high performance but flexible HTTP 2.0 solution will enable interoperability for a wider variety of scenarios. There also may be aspects of security that are not appropriate for all implementations. Encryption must be optional to allow HTTP 2.0 to meet certain scenarios and regulations.”
One of the long-time problems with Web session encryption is that it tends to be used only in important transactions. Thus the very fact that a session is encrypted generally tells you it should be. Encrypting everything would make it impossible for a sniffer to judge, just from the nature of the stream, what traffic is likely to contain important data.
Here, Microsoft appears to suggest that such a feature may optionally be turned off, perhaps to reduce power and time consumption on smaller devices, and perhaps to enable more “Internet of Things” scenarios. But some would argue that HTTP is an inappropriate protocol for inter-device communication anyway – that an IoT would not necessarily be a Web-of-Things.
Then there is the issue of client/server style communication. As you might imagine, one of the companies making inroads with WebSocket (singular or plural, depending upon whom you ask) is Microsoft itself. But by bringing up a W3C application-layer protocol – one which is likely to be fully adopted anyway – in the context of an IETF transport layer technology, is Microsoft’s goal really to expedite this discussion or to slow it down… like it did once before?
HTTP 1.0′s deficiencies and omissions are legendary, and its usefulness in the modern realm of Web applications has come only with substantive effort. The need to replace HTTP 1.0 was recognized by cooperating members of the IETF from the time the Web began.
But the first, best chance at upgrading HTTP with an object-oriented protocol geared toward apps came and went in 1999. HTTP-NG, as it was called at the time, ceased to be discussed not long after some of its creators were hired into Microsoft Research. A technology that would have enabled Web applications a full decade-and-a-half before the form factors for such apps were even fleshed out, stalled for lack of momentum – all in the interest of “open discussion.” There’s a danger here that Microsoft’s move could cause the latest incarnation of HTTP 2.0 to suffer the same fate.
Stock image by Shutterstock
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Revenge of the DevOps: Microsoft Targets Next Visual Studio for Admins Too
Mar 27th
You’ve heard this from ReadWriteWeb for the past several months: The exodus to the cloud for enterprise services and resources is moving control of everyday work away from the IT department. So what happens with all those displaced IT workers and administrators who are no longer managing applications and services day-to-day?
Well, if you ask the folks producing the next edition of Visual Studio for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8, they become developers.
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“One of the things that we think about is like, hey, there is a world of development and there is a world of operations. In some sense, those worlds have been far apart in the past. [With] Visual Studio 11, we are taking the next big steps in terms of providing a tight workflow between the dev world and the ops world – we call it the ‘DevOps loop.’” This from S. Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for the Developer Division, during the recent rollout of the first public beta of VS 11 – historically its principal developers’ suite.
Not Those Two Worlds Over There, But These Two Over Here
Over the last five years, Microsoft has operated under the notion that there are two separate classes of developers, which it once called “Web developers” and “apps developers.” The former group has been addressed with a product line called Expression Studio, which was originally geared toward the Web designer that Microsoft described as hailing from the world of graphic design – someone more experienced using Photoshop than Eclipse. Now, with the Windows 8 design motif hinging upon Web apps that it wants its mainline developers to embrace – the workers who know C# and Visual Basic – it can’t exactly afford to treat Web apps developers as sous-chefs.
So it did not go unnoticed that the latest VS 11 beta not only has extensive support for JavaScript app developers, but also contains the Expression Blend component – the tool from Expression Studio for devs to design CSS stylesheets. If Microsoft still has two audiences, two worlds, in mind for its developer product lines, their characteristics are evidently both in flux. Coming into focus ever so gradually is a concept called DevOps – essentially, the admin or system operator who either dabbles in development, or has already taken the dive and who Microsoft is only now discovering.
“We’re looking very heavily in bringing in another role, as part of the software development team: That’s the operations professional,” said Corporate VP Jason Zander during the VS 11 rollout event. “DevOps is a good example of that. We have the developer in the operations cycle – sometimes it’s the same person, sometimes it’s different departments… We recognize especially as we all start going out and building really advanced services and sticking those out in the cloud, it’s necessary for us to really get that loop working very tightly.”
Windows 8 will ship with two worlds of its own: one which encompasses the new and emerging world of touch-capable apps, and one which most Windows applications will run on today. Microsoft doesn’t want these two models to align with separate developer classes – and that’s a smart decision. If the “Expression” realm aligned itself with Metro-style Web apps and the “Visual Studio” realm with Desktop-style .NET applications, Windows itself would split into two competing ecosystems.
So think of this latest product cycle as “open-ecosystem surgery” – a route to cross-pollinate Microsoft’s existing dev groups, with the result (hopefully) being that a new pair of groups emerges along a different dividing line. Planting some new seeds in this reconfigured garden, Microsoft will be offering an express version of its premium Visual Studio tier. The SKU that used to be marketed to large teams will now get an Express version, hosted within the Windows Azure cloud, for smaller teams.
Worth noting is this new TFS project dashboard, which is supplied by the cloud-based team server. It’s not just that it incorporates Microsoft’s corporate-wide layout – it borrows its on-screen gadget concept from the upcoming Server Manager tool for the next Windows Server “8.”
“The Team Foundation Server Express product uses a lot of the core technologies from the full-fledged [TFS] product that a lot of our developer customers love and use today,” remarked Somasegar. “As a result, you get a lot of the core functionality like work item tracking, source control, [issue] management tracking… being able to have task boards that allow you to follow agile practices.” Like the developer division’s other Express tools, the new TFS Express will be free; but unlike the others, it will support teams of up to five.
In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, Jason Zander tells us to expect some, though not all, DevOps-oriented features from the existing Team Foundation Server to become incorporated into the Express edition. But routing work items between two roles – for example, starting with a developer role and delegating to an operator role – will be enabled within TFS Express.
A Broader Mix of Both Worlds
Microsoft will be taking further steps than we had been told last September to bring the existing .NET developer base into the Metro-style world. Although it’s already an accepted fact that Silverlight development is at a dead end, Microsoft is building additions to the .NET Framework that will enable C# and Visual Basic developers to build what Microsoft will officially call “Metro-style apps.” This is important because when we were introduced to the Metro concept last September, it was characterized as the style of apps you create using the WinRT runtime library. WinRT is not .NET; and at that time, there were elements of Metro-looking layout that you could incorporate into a .NET app, but it might not be something that runs in a tile on the Start screen.
That has changed: With these new additions to .NET Framework 4.5, including .NET for Metro-style apps, C# and Visual Basic apps can be created using VS 11.
Jason Zander tells us more: “The core subsystems that you want to rely on for a Metro-style application are provided by the Windows Runtime. It’s the same one that’s sourced up, whether using C++, JavaScript, C#, or VB. There is still the Common Language Runtime [from .NET] in there, and there’s still some of the core base class libraries that I need to write code… but one key difference, just to demonstrate this point, is that there’s already a communications stack in WinRT, and we just use that one.”
For now, Zander says, this will not mean that Metro-style apps will be available to the entire multitude of .NET languages, though he does not discount the possibility that other contributors could change that in the future. The Metro-style additions will be exclusively for C# and Visual Basic.
“To the extent that you’re a JavaScript developer and you’re writing a Metro-style application, then of course you can just use JavaScript. We do enable the ability for that application… to call out to C++ or .NET assemblies,” Zander explains. One example he offers would be a physics library written in C++, which may then be called from JavaScript code in the Metro app. “That’s kind of a hybrid application that has both components in it,” he says.
“If I’m a Silverlight developer today, and I’d like to author a Metro-style application, probably one of the most direct routes to being able to do that is to target XAML and C#, for example, as a Metro-style app there. And then taking a Silverlight app with the XAML, using some of the code that you have, and being able to retarget that inside of the new Metro project that you write. We do not have tools that will automatically convert those assets over,” Zander warns. “And because you are targeting the Windows Runtime, there are some differences.” There are new markup items for using XAML with touch and hover gestures, for instance. Windows Phone 7 apps will face a similar transition to Metro and C#, he adds.
But if the developer wants to transition his skill set from Silverlight to JavaScript/HTML, “in that case, you’re rebuilding the application. We’re not going to try to automatically map anything over. My experience with those types of tools is, they generally have a hard time giving you the fidelity that you’d expect. Sometimes the apps kinda work; and if you’re targeting a new medium, like from Silverlight to JavaScript/HTML, those are different enough that I feel you’d actually be more productive as a developer to use [the Silverlight base] more as inspiration than as core assets.”
It’ll be a difficult set of bridges to build, but in this particular department, Microsoft does have one factor squarely in its favor: It does not have much competition for building Windows apps. Right now, the competition is from the cross-platform development realm, but that realm will not have a leg up on WinRT and the new .NET Framework additions. Microsoft has juggled the order of elements in the universe before. For the converging worlds of apps developers and system operators, don’t count it out yet.
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