Posts tagged Preview
Select Testers Get First Office 15 Preview, New Cloud Services Emphasized
Jan 30th
Whether Windows 8′s radically re-imagined usage model catches on with tablet and PC users will depend in large part upon the role Microsoft Office apps will play. If it looks too much like Office 2010, then having Windows 8 relegate Office to the “Desktop” side while mobile-style apps take over the “Metro” side, won’t make much sense.
This morning, Microsoft gave out the first signal of how the shift will happen. The first technical preview of The Software Probably Known as “Office 2013″ has made its way to select testers, in advance of a public beta now scheduled for this summer.
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With the Windows 8 public beta scheduled to begin next month, Microsoft will need some window of visibility for Office on Windows 8 in order for customers to evaluate whether the migration will be worth it. In a carefully crafted blog post this morning, the company’s Corporate Vice President for Office, P. J. Hough, listed four categories of distribution vehicles for Office-branded services, with #1 on that list being “cloud services.”
“With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio,” Hough wrote. “Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.”
Listing “cloud services” first implies that “Office 15″ (its temporary code name, although there was never an “Office 13″) will be more centered around functionality delivered from the cloud. Theoretically, this could be done by delivering “Metro-style” versions of Office apps that are optimized for Windows 8, and that are licensed to customers of Office 365 for use anywhere. This while the “classic” Office apps continue to be maintained and licensed as part of the same package.
Still, judging from the company’s long prior history with Office beta programs, a late January milestone for the Technical Preview implies that general availability may not yet be feasible until at least Q1 2013. With tremendous importance being placed on Windows 8′s ability to show up in time for the 2012 holiday season – if not for back-to-school – then the company may need to consider making the Office 15 public beta available for pre-installation on new tablets and ultrabook PCs (Intel’s new, thinner form factor) directly through retail outlets.
We’ve asked Microsoft for further comment on the news, which may yet be forthcoming.
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Greatest Super Bowl Commercials Ever & 2012 Ad Preview
Jan 29th
Unruly Media has just unveiled a new viral video chart of the greatest Super Bowl commercials of all time. The social video advertising experts at Unruly have also created a second viral video chart of top Super Bowl ads of 2012.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
The Big Preview Post: Search Engine Land’s SMX West 2012 Search Marketing Conference Comes To San Jose
Jan 16th
Our next Search Engine Land conference, SMX West 2012, comes to San Jose from February 28-March 1. This is my preview of what we’ve got on the agenda, over 50 sessions covering all aspects of search marketing. Consider it a personal invite of why you should come. SMX: All Search, All The Time…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Windows Azure Adds Node.js Support, Hadoop Preview
Dec 13th
When Windows Azure was launched in 2008, it was with the intention, Microsoft said, of running .NET Framework applications from the cloud. What ended up happening was that the PaaS market matured much faster than anyone in 2008 could have anticipated, so any cloud apps platform that needs to stay competitive must run with the languages the development world is using.
Hosted JavaScript certainly was in Microsoft’s original plans, but JavaScript that runs as a host, was not. For a company that has historically been incapable of turning on a dime, though, it’s executing a pretty impressive course change with Azure. Last June, the company helped the Joyent open source team to port its Node.js stand-alone JavaScript server to Windows. And yesterday, Microsoft announced it has competed its addition of Node.js support to Azure, meaning that any developer can launch a server-based JavaScript app from Microsoft’s cloud in minutes.
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Node.js is designed to be almost instantaneous, with its contributors demonstrating fully functional app deployments in mere minutes. One of the facilitators of this rapid time-to-deployment is a set of frameworks called Express, which make the deployment of a Node.js server almost turnkey in nature. It lets you generate the principal framework in just seconds, and from there build public functions that get resolved as RESTful API calls via HTTP.
Though Azure has its own, “wizard-like” way of deploying apps that’s more familiar to long-time Windows developers, that’s a new dance entirely for folks in the open source realm. So yesterday, Microsoft published a set tutorials featuring two methods to deploy a Node.js application in Azure, the second of which features the tools and frameworks with which Node.js devs are already familiar, including Express.
Both deployment methods utilize the new Node Package Manager (npm) for Windows, which is designed to be installed using Microsoft’s command-line tool of choice (at last), PowerShell. This tool was released yesterday, along with Microsoft’s complete SDK for Node.js on Azure, not on CodePlex – which is the company’s own distribution source for open source software – but instead through GitHub, which is more widely embraced by the OSS community.
That little concession, along with the fact that Microsoft’s demos did not involve a single branded, commercial development tool (outside of Windows itself, of course) suggests that the company is learning that the way to invite open source devs into their house is to accept their invitations into their own.
Yesterday’s Node.js news was coupled with Microsoft’s simultaneous release of its limited technology preview of Apache Hadoop for Azure and Windows Server. This in keeping with the company’s Hortonworks partnership announcement last October. The warning posted to the Microsoft Connect distribution point for this CTP made it very clear that this particular build was not ready for prime time.
It was never actually impossible for folks to deploy Hadoop to Azure, as this blog post last May by Microsoft’s Mario Kosmiskas. For now, the company continues to point to this post as its official instructions for installing and deploying Hadoop to Azure, although it’s clear that this could probably change in the coming months.
When Azure was first conceived, it was with the idea that enterprise-class applications would relocate to the cloud and, in so doing, adopt the .NET Framework. In a statement to RWW this morning, IDC’s program director for applications development software Al Hilwa said he believes something else is happening instead, and that it’s a good thing after all for Microsoft and everyone involved.
“Microsoft realizes that we are still in the early stage for cloud application platforms adoption, and a pragmatic approach to appeal to a wider chunk of the developer community is important,” remarks Hilwa. “Azure is an innovative platform which takes a fresh approach towards programming models from the traditional on-premise model. But this very exact innovation has made it hard for existing enterprise workloads to take advantage to Azure. Instead, PaaS platforms from other vendors are battling for new workloads that are the back-ends of new-age mobile, social, content and gaming apps, which are being driven by a much broader ecosystem of developers and ISVs than Microsoft’s traditional base of developers. The new capabilities in Azure, such as Node.js and Hadoop support, are designed to appeal to this new audience, as well as cash in on a more immediate opportunity, rather than wait for the pie in the sky migration of enterprise apps – which will take a lot longer.”
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Three Levels of ‘Intelligence:’ Windows v.Next to Preview in Q1
Nov 14th
People paid to be analysts have told me the key distinguishing factor between Linux and Windows architecture is that Linux is small enough to be implanted in a device, while Windows is almost too big to be a consumer operating system. This has actually never been true, so I rarely talk with these particular analysts more than once.
But if Windows truly is to become implantable, if you will, anywhere and on any device, it must be more modular, and those modules must easily scale. These are the goals which Microsoft is working to address with its latest round of changes to its Windows Embedded platform. Today, Barb Edson, senior director of Microsoft’s Windows Embedded marketing group, told RWW that developers will be able to begin testing the first embeddable kernels based on the forthcoming Windows 8 platform in the first quarter of 2012.
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It will be the first version of Windows to use the “v.Next” monitor, and it will be geared for devices that require rich controls, such as customer-facing kiosks and point-of-sale systems. But it will not look like any version of Windows you’ve ever seen before. That’s because what it looks like, Edson tells us, will not be up to Microsoft.
“Embedded strength in the market is about continuing to allow our OEMs and ecosystem to differentiate its platform,” says Edson. “So as we think about the focuses of the Windows Embedded products for v.Next, we’ll be focused the differentiators for embedded-specific scenarios. [OEMs] want the power of Windows but they still want a unique experience that’s differentiated to their brand as an OEM, and to their specific business scenario.”
The differentiator in this case is not the same as for the consumer edition of Windows 8. That’s interesting from a technical perspective, because the consumer side of Microsoft presents Win8 as being repurposed around HTML5. None of that repurposing is present in the forthcoming Enterprise and Standard versions of v.Next, which use the same kernel, because the services are different – even though you might think a point-of-sale system could benefit from an HTML5-based front-end.
“Our focus is really around providing enterprise-ready devices. So whereas Windows 8 on a slate will be very consumer-focused, we’re offering the opportunity for OEMs to provide very specific industry scenarios. Think less about the look-and-feel when you think about re-imagining the experience on an embedded device, but more about connectivity, security, enterprise-readiness, so they can do more robust business capabilities – more about the leverage across platforms, and going deeper into areas like power management, touch capability, things that allow them to do things they couldn’t before.”
Or, condensed into a single word, touch. From a marketing perspective, one of the key drivers distinguishing whether a device feels intelligent to its user is the degree to which the user may feel the device. Touch somehow implies a level of smartness in the underlying system, which is why mall customers, for example, seem more at ease interacting with multitouch kiosks than with screens connected to keyboards or keypads.
Touch may also be the factor that will help Microsoft eke out an advantage for its brand, especially among the ARM-based device world that Windows is entering for the first time. If there is no trademark for the Microsoft experience on v.Next that you can see, perhaps there may be something you can feel.
As the company hinted two months ago, there will be three SKUs in the Windows Embedded product line. Today we've confirmed that the Embedded Enterprise and Embedded Standard SKUs (the latter of which being the modularized edition rather than all-in-one) will be based on the Win8 kernel. General availability of the v.Next SKUs will be relative to Windows 8's general release, which has yet to be announced. Enterprise will be released first, one quarter following Win8, followed in about six months by Standard. A solid guess-timate would place v.Next Enterprise availability in the window of Q1 2013, though Microsoft of course will not confirm.
Meanwhile, Windows Embedded Compact 7, released last March, will follow its own release track. An update due in H2 2012 will add the first, long awaited support for Visual Studio 2010. As it stands now, CE developers (as they still refer to themselves) remain tethered to VS 2008.
Although Microsoft touts the evolutionary advantages of moving to a Win8-based kernel, the company is also sticking with its promise to keep Windows XP Professional for Embedded Systems available through the end of 2016.
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Google Ups Pricing as App Engine Leaves Preview: Bait and Switch?
Sep 1st
When have customers ever been happy about a price increase? Right. So it should come as little shock that there’s a bit of grumbling about Google App Engine (GAE) prices going up as it leaves preview. It’s not just the pricing increase, though, Google is also changing the way it calculates the bill.
To mollify customers a bit, Google is extending a one-time credit of $50 through October 31st. Given the feedback so far that may not be enough.
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Google’s new pricing model does away with billing by CPU time, and now charges by on-demand frontend instances. Google (fairly) says that it’s made the change because CPU time is just one aspect of resources used by App Engine. “When App Engine runs your code, it creates an instance with a maximum amount of CPU and memory that can be used for running a set of your code. Even if the CPU is not currently working due to waiting for responses, the instance is still resident and considered “in use”.
While it’s undoubtedly true that there’s more than CPU to consider, the change in pricing seems to be leaving GAE users with sticker shock. Comparing pricing from one PaaS or cloud service provider to another’s has never been easy. But comparing Google’s old and new pricing is no easy matter either. Bandwidth prices have remained the same, but the switch from CPU time to instances makes it difficult to do the conversion. One response over on Hacker News indicates that the expected bill will go from $9 a month to $270 a month.
This has raised charges that Google is bait and switching its users. Google App Engine has been in preview for more than three years. It launched in April of 2008, and was one of the first Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) plays. It launched in closed beta to about 10,000 developers getting early access to free (but limited) resources. Since then it introduced pricing that seems to have been found reasonable by quite a few developers and organizations.
Google has had three years to figure out its pricing, so this seems like a pretty drastic change. And GAE customers may be in a worse position when it comes to moving – its APIs and software stack are unique, so just picking up and moving to another service is not an easy option. One user makes the point that while Google may not raise the price often, it might be safer to go with providers with more standardized software stacks. “That way I can take advantage of future competition of providers.”
In fairness, Google has also added a few perks as the service is leaving preview. For instance, the company is now adding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to the Paid and Premium levels of GAE, and operational support to Premium accounts. Only Google knows for sure whether the pricing model is necessary to make GAE a sustainable service on their end.
But the switch has the potential to hit current GAE users in the pocketbook, perhaps hard. Is Google gouging its GAE customers, or just making necessary adjustments? Let us know what you think, and if you’re being affected by the change.
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iOS5 SDK for Branded Short Links from Bit.ly Available Now for Preview
Aug 24th
Bit.ly, the URL shortener and analytics service from New York incubator Betaworks, has developed a software developers kit that leverages the forthcoming deep Twitter integration in iOS5 to enable app developers to automatically share links on Twitter using branded URLs. ReadWriteWeb, for example, shares short links on Twitter automatically using rww.to – using the new Bit.ly SDK our iPhone app will automatically do the same with the new Twitter iOS features.
The SDK is only available to developers who have signed an NDA with Apple, but it’s available to check out on request. It’s enough to make a person wonder what other kinds of APIs and SDKs will be built on top of the new Twitter features in iOS5. Twitter is a great platform, but there’s no reason to believe that multiple layers of platforms will be placed on top of iOS, Twitter, location data, URL shorteners and more.
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Couchbase Releases Developer Preview for CouchDB/Membase Combination
Jul 30th
When Membase and CouchOne merged earlier this year to form Couchbase, the newly formed company promised to release a merged version of the NoSQL database servers the company sponsors: Apache CouchDB and Membase.
Today Couchbase made good on that promise with the release of the first developer preview for Couchbase Server 2.0, which combines the elasticity of Membase with CouchDB’s distributed indexing, bidirectional replication and JavaScript-based map-reduce querying.
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The first version of Couchbase Server, released earlier this year, didn’t incorporate features from Membase – instead it rolled up various CouchDB components into a single install. Version 2.0 what we’ve been waiting for since the merger.
Couchbase Server 2.0 also incorporates Memcached, which provides in-memory caching of data for increased speed of both reads and writes. Couchbase Server 2.0 is able to sync with other CouchDB-based servers, including Mobile Couchbase, which runs on Android and iOS.
The combined features include:
- JavaScript-based map-reduce
- Geospatial indexing
- JSON data structures
- Memory caching
- Zero downtime topology changes
- Data distribution across clusters
For more on CouchDB, see our interviews with J. Chris Anderson and Max Ogden.
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The Preview Post: Search Engine Land’s SMX East 2011 Comes To NYC & Why You Should Go
Jul 26th
Search Engine Land’s SMX East search engine marketing conference is headed back to New York City from Sept. 13-15. We’ve got a great agenda. This is my semi-traditional preview for our readers of what we’ve got planned. You should go! Here’s why. Why Everyone Should Come!…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
