Expert Texture
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
May 4, 2008 at 8:11 am · Filed under Web 2.0
I had to drop off the emergency Gillmor Gang last night before I had a chance to give my thoughts on the Microsoft / Yahoo deal. Not only did Steve call an emergency Gang, but it looks like the blogosphere did as well. Anyway, here is what I think:
All bad for Yahoo
- Yahoo fought the deal, lost a bunch of key employees, increased “golden parachutes” for employees, etc. While Yahoo didn’t ask for a takeover bid, it was pretty clear Ballmer was going to go after Yahoo again. Jerry Yang should have been ready, but wasn’t. His response was to take measures which make it harder for the company to do business as an independent.
- Yahoo’s stock price is about to plummet. My guess is well below its price before this all started.
- And, investor lawsuits.
Mixed for Microsoft
- Ballmer spent a lot of time and money on this and came up short. Unless he had the secondary goal of sabotaging Yahoo this was just a waste of time and money. Clearly he thought he could get it done, but he didn’t, and he failed there.
- Merging the companies together would have been very difficult culturally — and I think a long hard slog for everybody involved. Good thing this is avoided.
- Microsoft still needs to jumpstart their advertising revenues. It really isn’t clear how they do this. Live Mesh is a longer term play for building a stick and highly compelling services platform. This will convert to ad revenue, but not very quickly.
The real issue for Microsoft is how to convert the (still strong) Office / Windows revenues into a sustainable and growing advertising platform.
What I think Microsoft needs to do now:
- Robert Scoble says that Live is a damaged brand. Building cool services won’t fix this on its own. Microsoft needs to fix this by defining Live in a way that is clear. Live can’t be all things to all people! Define it.
- Windows Vista is a damaged brand. While this is slightly off the topic of a services platform, it is dead center on the Microsoft definition of S+S. They need to fix this. The whole “Vista Ready” fiasco really informs what Microsoft did wrong here. Number one priority for Microsoft on Vista should be to make it as performant and stable as XP.
- Wait. Keep building out their very cool services and dev platform. Get a Silverlight Office out. Keep an eye on Yahoo. Maybe after Yahoo gets hammered, the economics will make sense.
Microsoft clearly has had a two-pronged strategy here: build and buy. Buy is out for now — as it isn’t clear what other acquisitions get Microsoft what they need — but build is going like crazy. The problem with build alone is that it only works accompanied with brand. So I think the real question is:
How will Microsoft fix their brand woes?
Tags: Ballmer, GillmorGang, Microsoft, Scoble, Silverlight, Yahoo, Yang
April 28, 2008 at 1:00 pm · Filed under .NET
David Treadwell was on the latest Gillmor Gang talking about the recent Live Mesh announcement. David’s title is Corporate Vice President, Live Platform Services and has been described as Ray Ozzie’s point man on the Mesh.
It was a pleasure talking with him — and thanks to David for the LiveMesh invitations.
The synchronization capability in this preview is a big deal not in what it provides, but for what it promises.
That is why it is a little disappointing that there is such a heavy emphasis on Windows and Windows Mobile. I discount the coming Macintosh support because support for non-Windows mobile devices is really the issue. If iPhones and Blackberrys are out of the equation, then the synchronization story isn’t so compelling.
Nobody should be surprised about Microsoft promoting Windows. And I certainly am not, but Microsoft’s new openness had me hoping for a different alignment of Microsoft strategy. One in which their S+S play would de-couple the Windows, Office, Windows Mobile, and Live businesses. I saw this happening through the Silverlight runtime everywhere. I hoped that the mobile Live Mesh synchronization client would be written on top of Silverlight. I hoped that the next Office Mobile would be too. Then Live services could serve any device running Silverlight. And so on. I’ve written about this previously, so I’ll leave it at that.
Instead, Microsoft is approaching Live Mesh as a set of open protocols that anyone can implement. So, an iPhone version could be written by a 3rd party using the Apple SDK. Just implement the protocols — of which FeedSync seems to be the major part — and you are all set. That is very good and much better than requiring the use of a Microsoft runtime to make it happen.
But, in addition to the open protocols, I would still have preferred a vision where the Silverlight runtime lies underneath the Microsoft implementations of the Live Mesh client. That way, when the next big feature set for Live Mesh is released, the new client code could conceivably run everywhere.
I want to make one thing clear: I’m not saying that Silverlight in its current form could support this at all. And I know Silverlight’s (nee WPF/E) genesis emphasized presentation, but at the end of the day, it is a .NET runtime.
As David says (from the Gillmor Gang transcript on TechCrunch):
Treadwell: I really view mesh and Silverlight as orthogonal and complementary technologies. Essentially what the mesh client does, it’s the runtime for doing synchronization and collaboration those kinds of things. I view Silverlight as a runtime that does the presentation engine. Mesh doesn’t really have anything for presentation, Silverlight doesn’t really have anything for synchronization and mobile communications. Working together I think you have a very good thought there about the combination of these and how they’ll come together. We’re working actively on that but we don’t have all the I’s dotted and t’s crossed.
Yes. They are orthogonal if Microsoft says they are. And Live Mesh and Silverlight will somehow come together though this appears to mean in terms of presentation. Fair enough.
And more than a little cool.
Tags: .NET, FeedSync, GillmorGang, Live Mesh, Silverlight, Treadwell
March 19, 2008 at 8:21 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
Now that we have the Adobe CEO saying, We’re bringing Flash to the iPhone.
How many more days until we hear Microsoft publicly commit to Silverlight on the iPhone? I bet we hear it within two weeks.
Why do I care? It validates some of my earlier arguments. Here and here.
Scott Guthrie? What do you say?
Update: Adobe clarifies CEO’s iPhone Flash comments. Maybe Apple will fight to keep their platform closed after all.
Tags: Adobe, Apple, Flash, iPhone, Microsoft, Silverlight
March 7, 2008 at 12:20 pm · Filed under .NET
A little late, but here are my notes on the Steve Ballmer keynote at MIX08.
The Q & A format was certainly better than having Steve Ballmer just talk for an hour, though I got a little tired of Guy Kawasaki’s cracks at Ballmer — about his wealth and method of travel, how Microsoft “should have hired” him. It got better when he stopped that.
I thought the best questions were from the Audience:
On .NET being baked into IE
Why isn’t IE built on .NET.
This has been a common theme, that is, the lack of .NET adoption for some major Microsoft products. Part of that is dog-fooding, but a bigger part is that the developer stories for these products are harder for lack of deep .NET support. For example, Office and IE are not based on .NET. Connecting between their unmanaged, COM, BHO worlds and the managed .NET world is more than a little painful.
Anyway, his response was that .NET wasn’t expected to be as proven and as far along by the time Vista shipped. Fair enough, but I would have been happier if the delays in Vista were related to a real WinFx in the OS than the reasons given.
The iPhone
What about Silverlight for the iPhone?
Steve Ballmer responded (paraphrased) . . .
Would love to get it on everything;
Can’t say we’ve been having talks about it; and
Licensing model not so good.
Right. The licensing model is not so good.
Maybe Microsoft can pay Apple a bunch of money so Silverlight can run on the iPhone. Then developers can build the apps for free?
Sounds good to me.
Tags: .NET, IE, IE8, iPhone, Longhorn, Microsoft, Silverlight, Vista
March 6, 2008 at 11:11 am · Filed under .NET
Onstage during his keynote at MIX08 yesterday, Scott Guthrie said they’ll be bringing Silverlight to “everything with an SDK”. Yesterday, I suggested this was a dig at the iPhone with its lack of an SDK.
Of course, that was yesterday and today we expected an announcement from Apple on the new SDK. I also surmised that the SDK wouldn’t be deep enough for Silverlight, but reports are that I was wrong.
So, my guess is that Scott was hinting at Silverlight for the iPhone.
Cool.
So, Scott, when we’ll we see it?
And Ray Ozzie, please get the Office Team onto .NET, specifically the Office Mobile Team onto Silverlight.
Tags: .NET, iPhone, Microsoft, MIX08, office, Office Mobile, Ozzie, ScottGu, Silverlight
March 5, 2008 at 1:55 pm · Filed under .NET
This is the third of three posts on the MIX08 keynotes. This is like live blogging without the live, since I’m writing this in Oakland. You can follow my comments at http://twitter.com/rwandering.
Scott Guthrie et al.
Most of the discussion was on Silverlight 2. This is the coolest thing Microsoft is doing in the Internet space and it is (happily) pervading a lot of their strategy.
Media
- Silverlight 2, adaptive streaming very cool.
- Advertising templates for Visual Studio. Struck me as odd, but it looks good, and advertising is the corner stone of free. I won’t be running out to try this one.
- Double-click and Silverlight. To keep “gold standard of reporting”, they support Silverlight for instream ad delivery. Makes sense.
Silverlight 2
- Silverlight 2 supports many languages (including JavaScript). This is such a benefit to the .NET strategy that blows the doors off of Air and Java.
- Silverlight 2 built-in controls will truly accelerate Silverlight adoption. New controls open-source with unit tests. Very cool.
The Silverlight demos did not disappoint
- Hard Rock International demo was really cool. They showed deep zooming to incredible detail and zooming way out to see the entire collection, tiled. Lots of Beatles stuff in there too. Yay.
- Aston Martin site cool too. The number of options that a user can select.
- Cirque de Soleil Human Resources system. Custom built HR system. This kind of application shows how IT can’t ever really be dead. That is, one-size-fits-all HR systems don’t work where a company sees competitive advantage or reduced costs in custom systems.
WPF Enhancements
- Performance.
- Better controls.
- Write custom effect that can be pushed down to the GPU.
Silverlight Mobile
Windows Mobile and Non-Windows Mobile, but what does that mean? Nokia Symbian, of course, but what else? Scott says more and more devices. In fact, he said,
Everything with an SDK.
Is that a dig at the iPhone? I wonder if the iPhone SDK when released will be deep enough to allow Silverlight. My guess is no.
Anyway, good job Scott. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The Microsoft .NET strategy really rocks.
Tags: .NET, iPhone, Microsoft, MIX08, Nokia, ScottGu, Silverlight, Symbian
March 5, 2008 at 11:22 am · Filed under .NET
This is the second of three posts on the MIX08 keynotes. This is like live blogging without the live, since I’m writing this in Oakland. You can follow my comments at http://twitter.com/rwandering.
IE8, Dean Hachamovitch, GM IE
Focus on standards compliance. This will be a great productivity boost for web-site developers.
1. CSS 2.1.
2. CSS cert.
- Funny that Microsoft is claiming that ambiguities in the specs make it hard to prove correctness. They are correct, but it sounds a little like whining. It also reminds me of the Server 2008 test.
- Test cases from Microsoft, good.
- IE 8 transition might be painful. For users.
3. Performance.
4. HTML 5.
- Back button can work with AJAX. This is a very big deal for improving the consistency of the browser user experience.
- Connection events in HTML 5 / DOM storage, re-connect, “make content available” later. Cool.
5. new dev tools
- Cool script debugger in IE8. Looks like the developer toolbar has gotten much better.
6. Activities
- User activities added to browser by users (kind of like smart links).
- Activities are defined in XML. Kind of cool, though I can see the browser becoming hard to use as a user adds a bunch of activities; however, that is up to them to manage.
- This format is the OpenService Format Specification. Share/Share-alike spec.
7. WebSlices
- Users can subscribe to parts of web-pages (driven by sites providing this as a service).
- This is the WebSlice Format Specification. Public domain spec.
8. IE8, Beta 1 for developers
- Released today. Cool. I will be checking this out. At first in a VM. I hope IE7 can live along side IE8. Since they didn’t mention this, my guess is no.
Tags: IE, IE7, IE8, Microsoft, MIX08, Silverlight
March 5, 2008 at 10:55 am · Filed under .NET
This is the first of three posts on the MIX08 keynotes. This is like live blogging without the live, since I’m writing this in Oakland.
You can follow my comments at http://twitter.com/rwandering.
Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie opened the MIX08 conference keynotes talking about the overall Microsoft strategy. He said all the right things about the transition to the cloud. Talked about three principles (social device mesh, business, fabric of small pieces). No surprises here.
In the context of the world of connected systems, he said (paraphrased) . . .
Magic of software to bring them all together into . . .a mesh
I love the expression “the magic of software”. Of course, we developers are not magicians, but when things are done right there is a real feeling of magic. This is especially true when disparate systems begin working together through elegant and open standards.
He spent most of his time talking about 5 scenarios . . . here are some thoughts.
1. Connected devices
His vision of bringing your different devices together reminds me of the Blackberry Enterprise Server, but for consumer devices.
2. Connected entertainment
License media / collections (playlists) / subscriptions once, use any device for playback. This is kind of a holy grail, I think. If this is managed through a SilverLight runtime we may have a hope that it is across devices.
3. Connected productivity
Office PC, Office Mobile, Office Live — seamlessly allow users to work across devices, using the right tool at the right time. No info on licensing costs, or on the details of Office Mobile. If the Mobile story requires Windows Mobile, then this isn’t so compelling.
4. Connected Business
Exchange in cloud. Other services too. Good. Very good.
5. Connected Development
Of course, .NET + Silverlight, Expression, . . . Good stuff.
Tags: Microsoft, MIX08, office, Ozzie, Silverlight
May 26, 2007 at 8:15 pm · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
Robert Scoble had a great post on the PDC and what is going on at Microsoft. I liked it so much I included most of it here with my comments.
The PDC stands for “Professional Developer’s Conference.” It happens only when Microsoft knows it’ll have a major new platform to announce. Usually a new version of Windows or a new Internet strategy.
So, this means a couple of things: no new Windows and no major new Internet strategy this year.
I agree there is no new strategy this year and that is disappointing; however, Silverlight is huge and this year, and if not an Internet strategy it is an Internet developer strategy.
Cleary Mix07 was the place to be — I would have made sure I went if I had known that PDC was going to be cancelled.
Some other things I’m hearing about the next version of Windows? There still is a ban on .NET code in core parts of Windows. They aren’t getting enough performance yet from .NET to include code written in it inside major parts of Windows. This is a bummer, because .NET is a lot easier to write than C++ and letting Microsoft’s developers write .NET code for Windows would unleash a bunch of innovation.
I fully agree with you here — a definite bummer. Yet I don’t agree about the performance of .NET. Certainly there are parts of Windows that need to be unmanaged code; but Digipede has a slew of customers using .NET for computation and getting terrific performance from it. Face it, this “not performant yet” argument is used by people at Microsoft from kernel / device authors (OK) to the Office team (what?). It is hard to separate the good arguments here from just plain bias and inertia.
The person who told me this (who works at Microsoft) told me .NET still takes too long to startup and load into memory and because Windows is now being compared to OSX they can’t afford to ship components that would slow down Windows.
What? If this were baked into the OS, couldn’t they do a better job of sharing this startup cost (i.e., doing it once with reuse)?
This gets right back to my posts about how the Windows .NET API is actually dead (see these: WinFx).
It also means that Ray Ozzie’s team probably doesn’t have anything dramatic to announce yet and they aren’t willing to have live within the bounds of a forcing function like the PDC (PDC forces teams to get their acts together and finish off stuff enough to at least get some good demos together).
This is the “no Internet strategy this year” part. Yup. Definite bummer.
Some other things I’m hearing from the Windows team? That they are still planning out the next version of Windows. So, I don’t expect to see a beta until 2008 (probably second half of the year, if we see one at all) and I don’t expect to see a major new version of Windows to ship until 2009.
Microsoft says it won’t be as long between releases of the OS now. I think, though, we won’t see a major new version released until Windows till 2010.
Anyway, this is sad cause I was hoping to see Microsoft make an all out push for developers this year.
Well, I think they have. Their developer story is getting better and better every quarter. I think they should have had the PDC anyway and continued to flog the .NET 3.0 and new .NET 3.5 stuff particularly Silverlight.
What do you think it all means? Am I reading too much in between the lines?
Maybe you are. I think the timing for the PDC was definitely wrong for Microsoft. The Microsoft Internet strategy we are really waiting for has to do with Office / other applications and Internet services. When this is unveiled, I think it will have less to do with developers than warranted at a PDC. Ironically that should have been announced at Mix, but will have to wait for the next one.
Will Microsoft unveil a new Internet strategy at Mix08? I bet.
Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, .NET3.5, Digipede, Microsoft, MIX07, PDC, Scoble, Silverlight, WinFx
May 2, 2007 at 8:18 pm · Filed under .NET
I’m glad to see that the CLR story for Silverlight (aka WPF/E) has made it out. There was much discussion about this at the recent Microsoft ISV CTO Summit. Scott Guthrie let us know at the time that there would be announcements at MIX07 as there have been.
Silverlight really is a game changer. It pushes the very compelling managed code and XAML stories into the browser.
At the Summit someone asked how Ajax (and ASP.NET AJAX Extensions) fits in with the WPF/E strategy. The answer (from the ASP.NET AJAX guy) was something to the effect of “they are solutions to two different problems”.
Certainly this is true. I put it a little differently:
- Silverlight is a new way of deploying apps on the Web while leveraging the existing .NET tooling and languages. It is an entire development platform and strategy for building rich applications in a browser. It provides an OS and browser independent story (albeit limited on day one).
- Ajax is a set of techniques to create dynamic HTML. Basically this is to force dynamic Web applications into the browser. Ajax (and HTML/XHTML/CSS for that matter) is notoriously browser dependent. Much Ajax work is made more painful because of browser-specific hacks. In addition, building extensible and maintainable Ajax is extremeley difficult.
So, one is a new way of building web apps with killer toolking.
The other is a way of building web apps with killer hacks.
Which would you rather build, deploy, support, and maintain?
Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, ajax, Microsoft, Silverlight, WPF, WPF/E
Main feed
Email subscriptions
