Here’s Niv surveying last year’s visitors:

See you there!

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If you like the scrolling functionality as implemented in the iPhone (and Zune etc.) you’ll be happy to know its part of the Windows 7 operating system and implemented for anything with a scrollbar.

More Windows 7 goodies on Rafael Rivera’s blog…

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Microsoft announced today its rollout plans for the 3rd wave of Windows Live services.

The goal of this latest release wave, according to company officials, is to simplify the use of the offered services and unify the user’s entire online experience into the Windows Live interface.
Microsoft is planning to rollout the new services, currently in beta, to the public within the 1-2 months timeframe.

Windows Live Goes Social

One of Microsoft’s main emphasis with the current wave of services is on social networking between users using its services.

Microsoft finally figured out that its Live Messenger with about 268 million users worldwide, is by far the most popular instant messaging software in the world, is actually a social networks. With the new release, your Live Messenger contacts are now your Friends and you can see aggregated information about their activities on the net.

Very much like Plaxo, FriendFeed etc. Microsoft allows users to bring into their profile content they create in all sorts of services on the web (Live Services, Flickr, LinkedIn, blogs and RSS feeds, …) and share it with their friends and colleagues.
When users add photos, write reviews, and update their profiles directly on Live.com, that content will be put into their activity stream as well.
This activity stream is exposed in all sort of ways throughout Microsoft’s services interface.

For example, Microsoft’s new Live Home portal shows the latest events in your social network. When emailing a friend or chatting on Messenger you’re also able to interact with that friend’s activity stream and more…

Not just for private consumers…

I’ve been told that all these new service updates will not skip Windows Live Domains used by universities and organizations to create a personalized version of Microsoft’s services.
If that really the case, having all these new social capabilities as part of its domain offering can be amazing for collaboration and communication inside the organization.
While Google doesn’t seem to care about its Google Applications for Your Domains customers its good to see that Microsoft is going forward with Live Domains.
This latest update may just be the final straw I need to make the switch to Live Domains…

Where’s Live Mesh?!

It will be really interested to see where Live Mesh comes into the picture in regards to all of these Live services.
Live Mesh should be the glue bridging between Microsoft’s online services and its offline applications and devices (S+S) allowing users to sync all their content- contacts, photos, events, favorites, etc. - across devices and services.
Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer for that…

During the launch we’ve only heard about Live Sync allowing users to sync photos across computers. Some sources say its an incarnation of FolderShare and in any case it doesn’t seem to be based on Live Mesh technology.
With Live Mesh being one of Microsoft’s core platform offering its really hard to understand why we need to have Live Sync too…

Other notes…

• All the services are released simultaneously in all countries and in 48 (!) languages.
• Windows Live Skydrive size limit has changed from 5GB to 25GB
• Windows Live Hotmail looks and feels a lot better to use.
• I’ve uploaded all the screenshots of the new services to my SkyDrive:
  

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This year’s Microsoft Profesional Developers Conference is full of announcements and surprises. The next big announcement besides Windows Azure (and Windows 7?) is the new “Office Web Applications” live service. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Here are some of the demo screenshots available:

The applications will be offered in both a simple HTML/AJAX version and a rich-client Silverlight version.
Office Web Applications are not planned to replace Microsoft’s traditional desktop offering but rather complete it, together with Mobile Office for mobile devices, allowing users to seamlessly work on their documents across all environments.

Providing such a reach collaboration environment isn’t a simple task as you can see in the following interview of Antoine Leblond, Senior VP of Office Productivity Apps and Chris Bryant, General Program Manager:

Although its not meant to replace its Desktop Office offering, one of Microsoft’s biggest cash cows, one has got to wonder about the risk these new services to cannibalize their big desktop brother’s profits. Windows and Office, which are Microsoft’s core business, are likely to stay its core moneymakers for at least the next 2-3 years, maybe even longer.
This move clearly shows that Microsoft is starting to think beyond that and along with its other platform announcements (Azure, Live Mesh…) we can clearly see a trend away from desktop software to rich clients installed from the web….

Office Web Applications will be released to a limited set of partners and customers at the end of this year. The release date will closely align with Office 14 and Windows 7 which will be sometime in late 2009 or early 2010.
Microsoft plans to make Office Web Applications available as a service through its Live platform supporting both an ad-funded and a paid-subscription models.
Business users that require an on-premise will be able to do so through Sharepoint via its traditional volume licensing program.

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Windows Live™Microsoft’s Windows Live ID team just announced their support for OpenID calling it a “de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication.”

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

What does it means for users?

OpenID allows users to maintain their identity information (Name, E-Mail, address, etc.) on a single provider and use that information to register and login to any website that supports OpenID. This relieves the user from having to fill out registration form and maintaining multiple different user names and passwords and profiles on different sites add provides a simplified online experience while increasing security.

Over 400 million LiveID users will soon be able to use their LiveID to do just that – login and provide identity information to any site supporting OpenID without the hassles of filling out registration forms and saving user\password information and with the user experience common to all OpenId sites (or, maybe even common to their familiar LiveID user interface?)

The wide adoption of OpenID led by Yahoo and Microsoft provides the required push for site owners to support OpenID providing the same simple and familiar login interface everywhere…

What does it mean for web developers?

With a simple integration effort that shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, site owners can relieve themselves from taking care of authentication and registration process while providing their users with a simple familiar interface for signing up and using their services.
OpenID provides an easy and secure mechanism for authenticating and registering users, and with additional online services (like JanRain’s RPX) site owners can handover the entire care of handling their user information to the cloud – cheaper, faster, more secure.

For now, the LiveID team is testing their system’s OpenID Provider which is at a CTP (Community Technology Preview) stage. Widespread support is planned for “sometime in 2009″.

[Update: Screencast Overview]

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Google released its Chrome browser to the world about a month ago. It made a lot of PR noise, a comic book, and squeezed some outrageously favorable remarks from critics.

“When combined with Gears, which allows for offline access, Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows. “

Michael Arrington in “Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer” (TechCrunch)

A month later, is Google Chrome even close to the the expectations set on its launch?
Read about it Cloud Avenue…

Update October 21th, 2008:

Be sure to read the discussion on the comments section at CloudAve and Krishnan’s response post…

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(You can read the full details  here and here)

The discussion then moved to Twitter where it deteriorated pretty fast:

Regardless of the topic and which side is wrong or right, discussion should reach this kind of level…

While Dare’s blog may have an impact on Microsoft’s brand, its no question that whatever Michael does impacts the TechCrunch brand. The above discussion doesn’t do well to TechCrunch…

The of the story? Never (ever!) write when you’re upset.
Or to be more exact, take the night to sleep it off before you publish it. If you still think your text is ok on the next morning, then by all means publish it.

Remember that text (e-mail, blog post, twit, etc.) is a terrible medium for communicating emotion. The reader can’t see your facial expression or hear your vocal intonation. Therefore, any negative emotion that is expressed in the text is probably going to be perceived several times stronger – much more than intended – probably just causing damage instead of getting your point across.

When I was at SAP it wasn’t uncommon for me to get really upset and write long, angry emails through the night. Most of these never saw their way outside of my drafts folder. I would wake up the day after and figure out that things aren’t that bad, that there’s a better way of handling it, or simply that I have to pick my battles and that there’s more important stuff to spend my time on…

I’m sure Michael’s reactions are just a result of frustration and the heat of the moment. In fact, Michael edited the post and removed the controversial paragraph the day after.
Everything’s brighter on the morning after…

(P.S., if you just can’t hold it until the next morning, at least take a moment and listen to yourself. You’ll get a different perspective doing a second reading. I used to have a rule in my Outlook to elay delivery on any email I send by 2 minutes. It helps….)

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The location is yet undecided (depends on you people) and you can RSVP at the event’s Facebook page.
Go on and spread the word…

Here are a couple of links to help you remember:

• Microsoft Outlook
• Windows Live Calendar
• Apple iCal
• Yahoo! Calendar
• Google Calendar

See you there!

* Yes I stole the picture from Scott’s blog…
** http://events.live.com is actually useful! Kudos to Microsoft….

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I guess they’re to blame in the housing led recession and over leveraged financials led by bank managers…

Oh well…

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Instead of being quite so blatant, Microsoft has taken a quieter back route to achieving the same ends via two related technologies:

1. Baking SharePoint reliance into more and more of its products
2. Requiring users to buy pricey client-access licenses (CALs) in order to use Microsoft’s servers

Microsoft has been basing a growing number of its products on SharePoint technologies to provide basic common services like storage, pub/sub, identity/security infrastructure, communications and collaboration functionalities.

With SharePoint’s BDC catalog and search server it is apparent that Microsoft is targeting SharePoint to serve as an integration layer on top of services and LOB applications in the organization.

…

Read the complete post at Cloud Avenue.
(Oh, and while at it, you may want to grab the CloudAve feed. Thank you.)Similar Posts:

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Jeff Barr from