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…
Tags: Kinetic Scrolling, Microsoft, Multi-Touch, Panning, Windows 7
(Cross posted from CloudAve)
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.
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…
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…
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…
Tags: Google, Live Mesh, Microsoft, SkyDrive, social networks, Windows Live
(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)
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.
Tags: Cloud Avenue, Desktop Office, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Mobile Office, Office, Office 14, Office Live, Office Productivity Apps, Office Suites, Office Web Applications, PDC 2008, Web Applications, Windows, Windows 7
(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)
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!
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…
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]
Tags: Cloud Avenue, Federated Identity, LiveID, Microsoft, OpenID, Security, Windows Live, Yahoo
Reading Mary Jo Foley’s Microsoft 2.0
Instead of being quite so blatant, Microsoft has taken a quieter back route to achieving the same ends via two related technologies:
- Baking SharePoint reliance into more and more of its products
- 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.)
Tags: Cloud Avenue, Microsoft, MOSS, SharePoint, SharePoint technologies, Windows Cloud OS
![2586687783_bc3cafd4db[1]](http://storage.developerzen.com//2008/10/2586687783-bc3cafd4db1.jpg "2586687783_bc3cafd4db[1]")
Nokia recently announced its new 5800 Xpress Music, or Tube, as an “iPhone Killer”. Reviewers, however, disagree, mainly on hardware spec grounds – no touchscreen, S60 software issues.
What most reviewers seem to ignore is that even if Nokia (or Google, Sony, LG etc.) do come up with a device that matches the iPhone’s technical abilities (and I’m sure they have the required resources to do so) they’re still going to have a tough time competing with it.
Why? They way they sell and support their devices is very different than Apple.
When you buy an iPhone you have one company that control’s your entire experience with the device. From purchasing to ongoing operations and services its all ran by Apple that controls the entire product experience etc.
Apple bundles its iPhone with a set of services (AppStore, iTunes, Music Store…) that are tightly integrated with the device allowing easy consumption by customers which eventually is what’s driving Apple’s business.
Nokia, Sony, LG etc., on the other hand, sell the device through partnerships with different communication companies such as Orange Partner, which in turn, works with local sub-diaries. They rely on these partners for supporting their device and providing services to customers which often results in poor (sometime broken) customer experience.
Speaking at an Israeli GarageGeeks meeting, Steve Glagow, VP of Marketing Operations at Orange Partner VP mentioned that due to the fact they have to work with many regional and local partners, it takes more than 3 clicks and several screens for a user to install an application. Although he said their application installation rate is high (percentage of users who reach the application marketplace and end up installing an application) its a misleading measurement as most users will give up and never even reach the marketplace – only users determined to install an application will go through that effort.
Bundling your device with services is a winning strategy, not just for cellphones. Microsoft’s Xbox Live! platform is another great example on how bundling a device with online services helps increasing its value and perception.
Killing the iPhone will require more than just cool new hardware…
Related readings:
Tags: 5800, Apple, Google, iPhone, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Steve Glagow, Xpress Music, XpressMusic
"We need to connect with real people," Seinfeld says and reminds Gates that "you and I are a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic."
The new ad explains that Bill and Jerry are on a quest to reconnect with real people, pretty much like what Microsoft is trying to do with this new campaign.
It’s definitely better than the first ad as there are some funny scenes and a clear message that actually makes sense - Windows need to appeal to the needs of real people.
However, the Mac vs. PC took just one add to get you hooked and the message across. Microsoft can’t seem to compete with that…
Lets just wait and see what the 3rd ad will be like…
Tags: Bill Gates, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, MSFT, Vista
It seems like Google is making comic books these days. Its also announcing a new browser - Chrome - which we haven’t and know nothing about except the fact that it’s (obviously, an antitrust waiting to happen?) bundled with Google Gears. This of course, does not prevent Michael Arrington from TechCrunch of making outrageous claims calling it a “Windows Killer”:
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.
I’ve heard about Google’s Window-Killing abilities before…. where was that? ah! right! scrolling all the way back to August 2005 where a new Google App is just about to revolutionize the way we communicate, the world, and the very fabric of the universe:
keith.teare: “It’s almost as if Google is implementing the features Microsoft has announced for Longhorn - Sidebar; voice calls inside IM, RSS integration - but doing it ahead of Microsoft, by about 12 months.
A Google layer between Users and the OS.
Rendering the OS a commodity
GTalk… remember GTalk? Google killed Vista with GTalk and will now kill Microsoft entirety thanks to coupling Google Gears to a JavaScript engine (not just any engine… an optimized one!)
And on a more serious note - Google’s business is all about AdSense.
It’s entire products line revolves around AdSense and anything that doesn’t help its business grow - dies. Even Android, under all the open-source and Apple hating PR, it about serving ads to mobiles.
Having said that, I wonder where Chrome fits in…
Tags: Android, Chrome, GOOG, Google, Michael Arrington, Microsoft, operating system, Vista, Windows
Microsoft’s new R&D Center in Israel (ILDC) is going through a lot of recruiting and PR effort. It’s latest PR stunt - The Microsoft Friends Club which is open for “all students, studying for any certified degree in computer science, software engineering, communication engineering or electrical engineering in any academic institution”.
To launch this club, Microsoft announced on a series of free rock concerts - for students studying the above mentioned fields and their friends…
Now, I’m not a PR or a recruiting expert, but it seems to me like Microsoft is shooting in the dark with this campaign:
It’s sad that Microsoft’s ILDC chose to ignore successful events and case studies done abroad for this purpose and chose to promote itself as if it was a cellphone company…
If anyone over there at ILDC is reading this post, if you really want an effective campaign for recruiting students just learn from the two examples below. Both target a very specific audience which is exactly the type you’d want to recruit as a company, and by sponsoring such event you’re getting the right message across: “We’re a cool company that values and sponsors new technology and innovation and the people who create it”.
The Microsoft Imagine Cup is a worldwide competition for students, held by Microsoft, encouraging students to submit new and innovative projects and compete with other students locally and worldwide. As summarized in the case study:
What: The world’s premier student
technology competition, in which
teams and individuals submit their
projects online or in person for a
chance to compete at the global
finals—like the Olympics of technology—
held in a different country each
year.Why: To inspire young people
to conceive and build innovative
technology solutions to real-world
challenges.Who: More than 100,000 university
and high school students from 111
countries are registered for the 2007
Imagine Cup.How: Teams and individuals can
enter nine categories that include
software design, embedded development,
Web development, short film,
photography, IT, algorithms, and a
programming battle called Project
Hoshimi.Where: The worldwide finals of the
2007 Imagine Cup will take place in
Seoul, South Korea, in August.More info:
http://www.imaginecup.com
ILDC can encourage such activity via its campus activities. Sponsor a local Israeli cup, and more…
The Google Summer of Code is an annual program, in which Google awards stipends to hundreds of students who successfully complete a requested free software/open-source coding project during the summer.
The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post applications that detail the software-coding project they wish to perform. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organization. Every participating organization must provide mentors for each of the project ideas received, if the organization is of the opinion that the project would benefit them. The mentors then rank the applications and submit the ranked list to Google. Google then decides how many projects each organization gets, and selects the top-n applications for that organization, where n is the number of projects assigned to them.
In the event of a single student being present in the top-n of more than one organization, Google mediates between all the involved organizations and decides who “gets” that student. The slots freed up on the other mentoring organization are passed to the next-best ranked application in that pile.
Dare has written a post that claims there’s an exodus from Google to Microsoft. The post is driven by his own observations and a post entitled Back to Microsoft from Sergey Solanik detailing his departure to Microsoft.
Sergey’s post contains some very interesting observations:
So why did I leave?
There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here because they are immaterial. I did not leave because of them. No company has achieved the status of the perfect workplace, and no one ever will.
I left because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me.
First, I love multiple aspects of the software development process. I like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less. I can’t write code for the sake of the technology alone - I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work.
Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!
Google software business is divided between producing the “eye candy” - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them.
And some observations of Google’s culture (bolding was done by me):
…
On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there’s just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it’s a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.
This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.
The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values “coolness” tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.
Since I’ve been an infrastructure person for most of my life, I value reliability far, far more than “coolness”, so I could never really learn to love the technical work I was doing at Google.
Dare also quotes Svetlin Nakov that also have some interesting things to say about the Google culture:
“Google interview were not professional. It was like Olympiad in Informatics. Google asked me only about algorithms and data structures, nothing about software technologies and software engineering. It was obvious that they do not care that I had 12 years software engineering experience. They just ignored this. The only think Google wants to know about their candidates are their algorithms and analytical thinking skills. Nothing about technology, nothing about engineering.”
“Google employ everybody as junior developer, ignoring the existing experience. It is nice to work in Google if it is your first job, really nice, but if you have 12 years of experience with lots of languages, technologies and platforms, at lots of senior positions, you should expect higher position in Google, right?“
This just demonstrates another cultural problem - Google doesn’t hire the right people for the job.
Granted, young, enthusiastic developers, with string academic background (and probably several degrees) can do some cool innovative stuff. These are exactly the type of guys you would want in your R&D department.
But it also the type that tends to loose interest when the research phase ends and the projects has goes to scaling and maintenance phases where you have to deal with stuff like support, maintenance (Google doesn’t even provide a roadmap for its products), localization, scalability, …
The bottom line is, as Dare concluded, is that Google isn’t a small startup anymore but it still thinks and acts like it is - in its hiring policies, internal processes and culture.
When measuring it up against other software giants it simply seems to lack…
As Fortune sums it up:
Think about that. Google recently made headlines by bidding almost $5 billion in a government auction of wireless spectrum, even though the company had no plan for using it. Some of its more peculiar products include Google Sky, Google Mars, and Google Ride Finder. It has become a significant investor in alternative-energy projects. Yes, alternative energy. And its founders fret that its risk-taking days are over? Then again, Google’s biggest risk may be recreating the magic it enjoyed as a startup- that intangible quality that makes Silicon Valley tick. Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer who is on to his second startup now, recalls what he loved about Google’s early days. “I was always so excited at Google, because I didn’t know what would happen next,” he says. “Then I knew what would happen next.” Predictability is a virtue in the world of big business. It’s just not particularly Googley.
Maybe some of us in the industry were writing off Microsoft and crowning Google a little bit too soon…
There’s a new video testimonial at www.duet.com about Duet implementation in Auckland Regional Council.
Check it out at http://www.duet.com/MediaLibrary/Videos/ARCCustomerTestimonialFlash/tabid/257/Default.aspx
(Unfortunately, no embed option. SAP still has something to learn how to let go…)
Tags: Auckland Regional Council, Duet, Microsoft, MSFT, Office, SAP
I put some pictures from the Microsoft Israel R&D Labs launch event yesterday on Flickr…
A detailed even summary and notes will soon follow…
Tags: ILDC, Innovation, Israeli Startups, Microsoft, MSFT, Steve Ballmer
It seems like Microsoft and Yahoo! are talking again to such an extent that is was either required, or in Microsoft’s interest to release the following statement:
Microsoft Issues Statement Regarding Yahoo!
Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business.
REDMOND, Wash. — May 18, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today issued the following statement:
“In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo! Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties.
“There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.”
This comes just a day after Carl Icahn proposed to replace the Yahoo! board in an attempt to revive the Microsoft acquisition deal…
The current guess is that Microsoft will try to buy just Yahoo’s search business in an effort to prevent a Yahoo-Google deal that’ll make Google take over Yahoo’s paid search business.
I guess there will be more to come on that…
Microsoft Research’s WorldWide Telescope, otherwise known as “the thing that made Robert Scoble cry” has been publicly launched today.
WorldWide telescope is a desktop application that essentially turns your computer into a virtual telescope, allowing you to browse the universe. You can roam the universe freely or choose from a growing number of guided tours by astronomers and educators. You can also join communities of stargazers, connect your own telescope to your computer and control using the application.
Another cool option allows you to gain a different perspective on what you’re seeing by switching between imagery sources.
The interface is pretty complex right now but everything works quite smoothly once you get the hang of it. I guess Microsoft will have to simplify it to allow wide adoption
I don’t know about you but I’m going to take some time and travel the universe…
Tags: Innocation, Microsoft, MSFT, Research, WoldWide Telescope
Windows Live FolderShare, one of my favorite online services that let me sync certain folders across all my machines, launched a new team blog along with a brand new FolderShare version that includes a better performance and user experience.
They’ve also remodeled their web presence to match the rest of the Live Services look and feel so their new site looks pretty much like SkyDrive’s.
Another cool feature added is the ability to define Shared Library folders - A library that you have been invited to or a library that you have invited others to. Files in a shared library are used by more than one person and multiple people can access them. An owner must invite others to use the library in order for others to have permission to access it.
Now all I have to ask for is integration between FolderShare and SkyDrive and I’ll have a perfect file synchronization solution.
Kudos to the team at Microsoft!
Tags: FolderShare, Live Services, Microsoft, MSFT
