All posts by onlyconnect

cloud computing, microsoft

Microsoft financials Jan-March 2015

Microsoft has released figures for its third quarter, ending March 31st 2015. Here is my simple summary of the figures showing the segment breakdown:

Quarter ending  March 31st 2015 vs quarter ending March 31st 2014, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Gross margin Change
Devices and Consumer Licensing 3476 -1121 3210 -807
Computing and Gaming Hardware 1800 -72 414 +156
Phone Hardware 1397 N/A -4 N/A
Devices and Consumer Other 2280 +456 566 +175
Commercial Licensing 10036 -299 9975 -157
Commercial Other 2760 +858 1144 +669

The figures form a familiar pattern: Windows and shrink-wrap (non-subscription) Office is down, reflecting weak PC sales and the advent of free Windows at the low end, but subscription sales are up and cloud is booming. See the foot of this post for an explanation of Microsoft’s confusing segment breakdown.

Microsoft says that Surface Pro 3 is doing well (revenue of $713 million) and this is reflected in the Devices figures. Commercial cloud (Office 365, Azure and Dynamics) is up 106% year on year.

Cloud aside, it is impressive that server products reported a 12% year on year increase in revenue. This is the kind of business that you would expect to be hit by cloud migration, though I am not sure how Microsoft accounts for things like SQL Server licenses deployed on Azure.

Xbox One is disappointing, bearing in mind the success of the Xbox 360. Microsoft managed to lose out to Sony’s PlayStation 4 with its botched launch and market share will be hard to claw back.

Microsoft reports 8.6 million Lumias sold, the majority being low-end devices. Not too bad for a platform many dismiss, but still treading water and miles behind iOS and Android.

The company remains a huge money-making machine though, and Office 365 is doing well. A few years ago it looked as if cloud and mobile could destroy Microsoft, but so far that is not the case at all, though its business is changing.

Microsoft’s segments summarised

Devices and Consumer Licensing: non-volume and non-subscription licensing of Windows, Office, Windows Phone, and “ related patent licensing; and certain other patent licensing revenue” – all those Android royalties?

Computing and Gaming Hardware: the Xbox One and 360, Xbox Live subscriptions, Surface, and Microsoft PC accessories.

Devices and Consumer Other: Resale, including Windows Store, Xbox Live transactions (other than subscriptions), Windows Phone Marketplace; search advertising; display advertising; Office 365 Home Premium subscriptions; Microsoft Studios (games), retail stores.

Commercial Licensing: server products, including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and Windows Embedded; volume licensing of Windows, Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync; Microsoft Dynamics business solutions, excluding Dynamics CRM Online; Skype.

Commercial Other: Enterprise Services, including support and consulting; Office 365 (excluding Office 365 Home Premium), other Microsoft Office online offerings, and Dynamics CRM Online; Windows Azure.

Box, cloud computing

Reflections on BoxDEV: keeping ahead of SharePoint, Changing Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt on Surveillance

Earlier this week I attended BoxDEV in San Francisco, along with around 1500 developers and some illustrious guests: Eric Schmidt from Google and Marc Benioff from Salesforce.

Schmidt was interviewed by Box CEO Aaron Levie. “Randomly watching and surveilling what’s going over the internet and invading the privacy of American citizens is not OK.” said Schmidt; but he was not talking about Google, rather about the NSA. “Encryption is the solution” he said. It was all rather bizarre, as the king of data gatherers promised to protect our privacy, but he also made some fun comments about how most enterprise IT spend (90-95%) goes on legacy systems that will be replaced by cloud and mobile. A future in which two or three companies run all the world’s IT? Some more quotes on the Reg here.

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What of Box though? Most people (individuals that is) probably think of Box as a cloud storage competitor and an alternative to DropBox, OneDrive or Google Drive. So it is; but the company sees itself as an enterprise collaboration platform rather than a commodity storage provider. Levie expressed the company’s intended differentiation neatly in the closing Q&A:

We build enterprise software with consumer grade experiences. There is not a lot of competition.

Box is working hard at ticking compliance boxes (sorry) and providing a service with which enterprises are comfortable.

This wasn’t a big event for announcements, but the company did present Box Developer Edition; a confusing name in my opinion as it sounds like a Box account for test and development but it is not; it is a new type of Box application where you can provision your own users. The system creates shadow Box users under the covers, but it gives the illusion of a fully custom Box platform.

There are also new mobile SDKs. Box has split its SDK into modules, covering Content (the core), Browse, Share and Preview. The latter three include UI components as well as a non-visual wrapper for what is ultimately a REST API into its system. The Content and Browse SDKs support Windows Phone as well as iOS and Android, but Share and Preview are iOS/Android only. Microsoft is a Box partner though (and a sponsor of the event); it would not surprise me to see a Universal App SDK from Box in due course.

The Box View API is particularly interesting since it lets you render the content of numerous file formats as HTML. Getting this sort of stuff to work correctly is a challenge and it does add a lot of value to content-oriented applications. There are limitations. For example, if you have a PowerPoint document with an embedded video, the video will not render. There is some impressive technology here though, and Box is focusing on further improving it with acquisitions like that of Verold last week, which brings interactive 3D viewing to the platform.

I had a chat with Senior VP of Engineering Sam Schillace – he was one of the founders of Writely, a web-based word processor which was acquired by Google, and ported from C# to become the basis for an important part of Google Docs. Schillace is intimately familiar with the challenges of working with Microsoft Office formats and I’ve written up some of his remarks for the Register in a piece which will appear shortly.

I was also interested to note how many of the features of Box are also in SharePoint and Office 365. Again, I’ve covered this for the Register, but will say that it is just as well for Box that parts of SharePoint remain problematic, particularly the desktop sync aspect. The complexity of SharePoint is another issue. Box does less than SharePoint in many respects (there is no equivalent to the Office Web Apps, for example, which let you edit in the browser) but if Box does less, but more reliably and with a better user experience, it can still succeed. On the other hand, if Microsoft manages to get SharePoint working really sweetly, particularly in its Office 365 guise, it will be tough for Box to compete, especially as Microsoft builds features like Office Delve which does intelligent search in SharePoint online and hooks into Office 365/Azure Active Directory groups and “social signals” from other parts of Office 365 such as Yammer.

This is a young, smart company though and capable of keeping ahead if it remains nimble.

Finally I must mention the closing Q&A with Levie. There were plenty of daft questions, one of which was “Did Microsoft sponsor BoxDEV so that you couldn’t make fun of them this year?”

“Satya Nadella isn’t as funny as Steve Ballmer,” says Levie, but added, “we have changed how we talk about Microsoft because Microsoft has changed as a company.”

A though-provoking remark on the eve of Build, which is on next week here in San Francisco.

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microsoft

Inside Microsoft: Ex design lead gives perspective on Metro, Office, iOS and Android battles

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Here is a must-read for Microsoft watchers. Two days ago a former design lead on the Office on Windows Phone team turned up on Reddit and said I designed the new version of Office for Windows Phone. Ask me anything.

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The overall theme is that Microsoft did not get the design of Windows Phone quite right and is changing it; that Windows 8 was even worse; and that Windows 10 just might begin to pull it all together at last, though the company is also consciously moving away from a Windows-centric view. The Windows, Windows Phone and Office teams are now working together for the first time, we are told:

Windows didn’t believe in working well with others, certainly not that dumb upstart Windows Phone team.

Office believed it was the greatest software on earth, and didn’t get along with Windows.

Windows Phone was pretty proud of itself despite its middling marketshare. Too proud.

So now when these three teams got together to do something for the good of Microsoft, and the good of customers, there was a ton of ego in the way. Windows believed in the Windows way. Windows Phone believed their way. Office was like "fuck all y’all, we’re Office."

The new situation at the company is way better. People actually do care about working together in a way I hadn’t historically seen in my short time there. (or read about in many MS history books)

So I wouldn’t say Windows Phone caused the shift. You know what did? Sinofsky leaving, Windows 8 being a failure, Windows Phone failing to gain significant traction, and then Ballmer leaving.

They basically had to start working together. And it’s cool to see.

Here are a few more things that caught my eye. There are long discussions about the “hamburger” menu, three lines appearing at top left of many new apps where it is hard to reach if you are using the phone with one hand:

Don’t get me wrong, this is clearly a tradeoff. Frequently used things have to be reachable, even one-handed. But hamburgers are not frequently used, and one-handed use is not ironclad. Combine those two factors together and you see why the industry has settled on this standard. It wasn’t random.

From a developer perspective, the key insight here is that hamburgers are not frequently used. In other words, do not design your app so that users will have to reach constantly for the hamburger menu. Reserve it for stuff that is only needed occasionally.

Why is Microsoft appearing to prioritise iOS and Android over Windows, for example with Office?

When Ballmer saw the iPad version of Office, he reportedly said something like "you’re killing me." It was so fucking good. Way better than anything on any other platform. It leveraged a bunch of iOS stuff in a really good way, but it was still "unmistakably Office," as they say.

Ballmer knew it was good. And he knew the company’s other efforts were years and years out. And he iced it. Because his mentality, and what I’d call dogma, was that Windows had to be first. At all costs.

Good riddance. It was an outdated philosophy.

… The way Microsoft wins the long term war is to remind people where they’re strong. And no, it’s not through withholding Office on iOS. Not anymore. The ship sailed on Ballmer’s watch

I would love to know the date when Ballmer “iced” Office for iPad.

What was wrong with the design of Window Phone?

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he said he was going to save the company by reminding people of Apple’s sex appeal. He described colored plastics and technology as fashion. And the board thought "uh-oh, this guy is going to drive us into a ditch."

But from "Bondi Blue iMacs" and "OS X has an interface you just want to lick" you’ll notice their design went more and more subdued over the last 15-20 years. It’s because you need to shock people at first, then you get back to being more practical.

Metro had to shock people. It had to look like its own thing. And it did that really well. Pivots, panos, big text, black everywhere, it looked like art. And more than that it looked different. Something to witness. Steve Jobs even gave kudos to the Windows Phone design team! He said something like "I mean, it’s still clearly a v1, but it’s really beautiful." And he was right.

So what would I change?

Well. The interaction models, honestly. The pivots and the panoramas are a nightmare in day to day use. They’re as distinct as a Flower Power iMac, but it painted the interaction models into a corner.

In another post, there is a discussion of the difficulty with the back button. “when back is good, it’s good. But when it’s bad (from a user experience standpoint) it’s really bad.”

Here is another insight:

The stark look of Windows Phone seemed to turn off more people than fell in love with it. I know here in this forum we’re all fans but in the mainstream marketing was only one problem. Apps was another. But the biggest one was lack of relevance. People didn’t understand why they should care. A lot of people said it looked like a nice phone, but it wasn’t for them.

Despite the criticisms, the ex-Microsoft designer (who now works for Twitter) is optimistic, saying “I do have a lot of hope for Universal apps. It’s not a magic bullet, but given enough time for the system to mature, and the business support, and new initiatives, I see rosy days ahead.”

Microsoft may be well positioned for “the next big shift”:

Look beyond just Windows. Just make amazing software. Get back some relevance that was lost. 2) Of course keep competitive with hardware, and keep improving WP. 3) Then, a few years out, when the market experiences another big shift (it’s not a matter of if but when) I suspect MS’s strength as a multi-OS developer + cloud leader will help Windows regain a ton of relevance

Fascinating stuff, though note the disclaimer:

I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m one designer and I don’t work at MS anymore.

amazon, microsoft

AWS Summit London: cloud growth, understanding Lambda, Machine Learning

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I attended the Amazon Web Services (AWS) London Summit. Not much news there, since the big announcements were the week before in San Francisco, but a chance to drill into some of the AWS services and keep up to date with the platform.

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The keynote by CTO Werner Vogels was a bit too much relentless promotion for my taste, but I am interested in the idea he put forward that cloud computing will gradually take over from on-premises and that more and more organisations will go “all in” on Amazon’s cloud. He instanced some examples (Netflix, Intuit, Tibco, Splunk) though I am not quite clear whether these companies have 100% of their internal IT systems on AWS, or merely that they run the entirety of their services (their product) on AWS. The general argument is compelling, especially when you consider the number of services now on offer from AWS and the difficulty of replicating them on-premises (I wrote this up briefly on the Reg). I don’t swallow it wholesale though; you have to look at the costs carefully, but even more than security, the loss of control when you base your IT infrastructure on a public cloud provider is a negative factor.

As it happens, the ticket systems for my train into London were down that morning, which meant that purchasers of advance tickets online could not collect their tickets.

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The consequences of this outage were not too serious, in that the trains still ran, but of course there were plenty of people travelling without tickets (I was one of them) and ticket checking was much reduced. I am not suggesting that this service runs on AWS (I have no idea) but it did get me thinking about the impact on business when applications fail; and that led me to the question: what are the long-term implications of our IT systems and even our economy becoming increasingly dependent on a (very) small number of companies for their health? It seems to me that the risks are difficult to assess, no matter how much respect we have for the AWS engineers.

I enjoyed the technical sessions more than the keynote. I attended Dean Bryen’s session on AWS Lambda, “Event-driven code in the cloud”, where I discovered that the scope of Lambda is greater than I had previously realised. Lambda lets you write code that runs in response to events, but what is also interesting is that it is a platform as a service offering, where you simply supply the code and AWS runs it for you:

AWS Lambda runs your custom code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and administers all of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code, and security patches.

This is a different model than running applications in EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) VMs or even in Docker containers, which are also VM based. Of course we know that Lambda ultimately runs in VMs as well, but these details are abstracted away and scaling is automatic, which arguably is a better model for cloud computing. Azure Cloud Services or Heroku apps are somewhat like this, but neither is very pure; with Azure Cloud Services you still have to worry about how many VMs you are using, and with Heroku you have to think about dynos (app containers). Google App Engine is another example and autoscales, though you are charged by application instance count so you still have to think in those terms. With Lambda you are charged based on the number of requests, the duration of your code, and the amount of memory allocated, making it perhaps the best abstracted of all these PaaS examples.

But Lambda is just for event-handing, right? Not quite; it now supports synchronous as well as asynchronous event handling and you could create large applications on the service if you chose. It is well suited to services for mobile applications, for example. Java support is on the way, as an alternative to the existing Node.js support. I will be interested to see how this evolves.

I also went along to Carlos Conde’s session on Amazon Machine Learning (one instance in which AWS has trailed Microsoft Azure, which already has a machine learning service). Machine learning is not that easy to explain in simple terms, but I thought Conde did a great job. He showed us a spreadsheet which was a simple database of contacts with fields for age, income, location, job and so on. There was also a Boolean field for whether they had purchased a certain financial product after it had been offered to them. The idea was to feed this spreadsheet to the machine learning service, and then to upload a similar table but of different contacts and without the last field. The job of the service was to predict whether or not each contact listed would purchase the product. The service returned results with this field populated along with a confidence indicator. A simple example with obvious practical benefit, presuming of course that the prediction has reasonable accuracy.

.net, microsoft

Why Windows Server is going Nano: think automation, Cloud OS

Yesterday Microsoft announced Windows Nano Server which is essentially an installation option that is even more stripped-down than Server Core. Server Core, introduced with Windows Server 2008, removed the GUI in order to make the OS lighter weight and more secure. It is particularly suitable for installations that do nothing more than run Hyper-V to host VMs. You want your Hyper-V host to be rock-solid and removing unnecessary clutter makes sense.

There was more to the strategy than that though, and it was at last week’s ChefConf in Santa Clara (attended by both Windows Server architect Jeffrey Snover and Azure CTO Mark Russinovich) that the pieces fell into place for me. Here are two key areas which Snover has worked on over the last 16 years or so (he joined Microsoft in 1999):

  • PowerShell, first announced as “Monad” in August 2002 and presented at the PDC conference in September 2003. Originally presented as a scripting platform, it is now described as an “automation engine”, though it is still pretty good for scripting.
  • Windows Server componentisation, that is, the ability to configure Windows Server by adding and removing components. Server Core was a sign of progress here, especially in the Server 2012 version where you can move seamlessly between Core and full Windows Server by adding or removing the various pieces. It is still not perfect, mainly because of dependencies that make you drag in more than you might really want when enabling a specific feature.
  • PowerShell Desired State Configuration, introduced in Server 2012 R2, which puts these together by letting you define the state of a server in a declarative configuration file and apply it to an OS instance.

I am not sure how much of this strategy was in Snover’s mind when he came up with PowerShell, but today it looks far-sighted. The role of a server OS has changed since Windows first entered this market, with Windows NT in 1993. Today, when most server instances are virtual, the focus is on efficiency (making maximum use of the hardware) and agility (quick configuration and on-demand scaling). How is that achieved? Two things:

1. For efficiency, you want an OS that runs only what is necessary to run the applications it is hosting, and on the hypervisor side, the ability to load the right number of VMs to make maximum use of the hardware.

2. For agility, you want fully automated server deployment and configuration. We take this for granted in cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Azure, in that you can run up a new server instance in a few minutes. However, there is still manual configuration on the server once launched. Azure web apps (formerly web sites) are better: you just upload your application. Better still, you can scale it by adding or removing instances with a script or through the web-based management portal. Web apps are limited though and for more complex applications you may need full access to the server. Greater ability to automate the server means that the web app experience can become the norm for a wider range of applications.

Nano Server is more efficient. Look at these stats (compared to full Server):

  • 93 percent lower VHD size
  • 92 percent fewer critical bulletins
  • 80 percent fewer reboots

Microsoft has removed not only the GUI, but also 32-bit support and MSI (I presume the Windows Installer services). Nano Server is designed to work well both sides of the hypervisor, either hosting Hyper-V or itself running in a VM.

Microsoft has also improved automation:

All management is performed remotely via WMI and PowerShell. We are also adding Windows Server Roles and Features using Features on Demand and DISM. We are improving remote manageability via PowerShell with Desired State Configuration as well as remote file transfer, remote script authoring and remote debugging.

Returning for a moment to ChefConf, the DevOps concept is that you define the configuration of your application infrastructure in code, as well as that for the application itself. Deployment can then be automated. Or you could use the container concept to build your application as a deployable package that has no dependencies other than a suitable host – this is where Microsoft’s other announcement from yesterday comes in, Hyper-V Containers which provide a high level of isolation without quite being a full VM. Or the already-announced Windows Server Containers which are similar but a bit less isolated.

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This is the right direction for Windows Server though the detail to be revealed at the Build and Ignite conferences in a few weeks time will no doubt show limitations.

A bigger issue though is whether the Windows Server ecosystem is ready to adapt. I spoke to an attendee at ChefConf who told me his Windows servers were more troublesome than Linux,. Do you use Server Core I asked? No he said, we like to be able to log on to the GUI. It is hard to change the culture so that running a GUI on the server is no longer the norm. The same applies to third-party applications: what will be the requirements if you want to install on Nano Server (no MSI)? Even if Microsoft has this right, it will take a while for its users to catch up.

microsoft, software development

StackOverflow developer survey shows decline in C#, Windows

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StackOverflow, a popular (and the best) site for programming queries, has published its annual developer survey. Respondents included:

26,086 people from 157 countries participated in our 45-question survey. 6,800 identified as full-stack developers, 1,900 as mobile developers, 1,200 as front-end developers, 2 as farmers, and 12,000 as something else.

That is a decent sample size, though not necessarily representative of the entire developer community.

What is notable? Here are a few things that stood out for me:

Developers are young. The largest group is 25-29 and the average age 28.9 years old.

92.1% of respondents are male. Ouch.

Software is still a good bet for a career even if you have no qualifications. 41.8% declared themselves self-taught. That said, it is not clear to me what proportion of respondents do programming as their main job. Presumably not the two farmers?

If you look at the “Most popular technologies”, there is a striking decline in C# over the last three years:

2013: 44.7%

2014: 37.6%

2015: 31.6%

That’s a shame because C# is an excellent language. The reason? It’s speculation, but probably means less Windows development, whether server or desktop.

Swift is top of the “most loved” list, meaning a language that developers intend to continue with. Salesforce tops the “most dreaded”, meaning a platform that developers cannot wait to abandon, followed by Visual Basic.

What OS do developers use on the desktop? Here, Windows remains the biggest, but is declining:

2013: 60.4%

2014: 57.9%

2015: 54.5%

Windows XP has declined dramatically, down from 10.8% in 2013 to 1.0% today.

Where have developers gone, if they no longer use Windows? Mac is up over the period, but only by 2.8% share. 3.5% are using “Other”, interesting (Chromebook?).

I’ll stop there; I don’t want to spoil the survey.

Conclusions? This puts some data (albeit imperfect) on the theory that Microsoft is losing its grip on the developer community – though note that Microsoft’s technology in general remains popular, just less so than before.

Postscript: Several on Twitter have observed that most languages have declined over the period, not just C#. Here’s the difference in share from 2013 to 2015 for some of them:

JavaScript: –2.2%

SQL: –11.6%

Java: –5.1%

C#: –13.1%

PHP: –5.1%

In other words, all of the top 5 have declined, though C# has declined the most.

What does this mean? Since the numbers sum to more than 100%, it might imply more specialisation. Or it might just say something about how the StackOverflow community has evolved, since that is the source of the data. Still, it seems to me that you cannot spin this as good news for Microsoft, though it might be less bad than it first appears.

android, embarcadero, Internet of things, ios, microsoft, software development

Delphi and RAD Studio 2015 roadmap: no Universal Apps?

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Embarcadero has posted a roadmap for RAD Studio 2015, its suite of tools for building apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Note that the company says the (sketchy) plans outlined are “not a promise, or a contract”.

I will be interested to see if the company intends to support the Windows 10 Universal App Platform (UAP), which Microsoft is pushing as the future of Windows client app development. UAP apps run on the Windows Runtime, a sandboxed environment introduced in Windows 8. In Windows 10, UAP apps are integrated with the Windows desktop, and run on Windows Phone and Xbox as well as on PCs and tablets.

When Window 8 came out, Embarcadero came up with a project type called “Metropolis”, which simulated the Windows 8 Metro environment but with a Win32 executable. It was neither one thing nor the other, and mostly ignored as far as I can tell. That said, lack of support for Windows 8 Store apps proved to be no big deal, because of the low take-up for the platform in general. At this stage, nobody knows whether the UAP may be similarly unsuccessful, though it seems to me that it has a better chance thanks to its broader scope and changes that have been made.

The roadmap promises “Integration with new Windows 10 platform technologies” but does not promise support for the Windows Runtime or UAP, so my assumption for the moment is that Embarcadero is steering clear for the time being. There may also be technical challenges.

Not much new is promised for the venerable VCL (Windows-only apps), and only a little more for the cross-platform FireMonkey: new mobile components including Maps, a WebBrowser component for desktop apps, and more iOS platform (real native) controls.

A new iOS 64-bit compiler is promised, as well as moving the Win32 compiler to an LLVM-based toolchain, as is already the case for 64-bit Windows.

There is an Internet of Things slide which promises “mobile proximity integration” and components for connecting to different devices. Exactly what is new compared to the IoT support described here for XE7 is not clear to me.

Under consideration, Embarcadero says, is Linux server-side support for its middle-tier technologies like DataSnap, support for Intel Android, and a 64-bit toolchain for Mac OS X.

Since it is on SlideShare, I can embed the whole thing here:

This is some help I guess; though I recall much past angst expressed on the Embarcadero forums about these roadmaps, or the lack/lateness of them. The problem, I guess, is that roadmaps are of little benefit to the tools vendors, since they have potential to fuel discontent, set expectations that may later prove unrealistic, and give away plans to competitors.

This may explain why this one has so little content. Embarcadero could work a bit harder on the presentation as well; this really does not have the look of being the exciting next generation of a powerful cross-platform toolkit.

android, mobile, open source, Uncategorized

Mobile World Congress 2015 round-up: MediaTek Helio, Samsung Galaxy S6, Boyd smell sensor, Jolla Sailfish 2.0, Alcatel OneTouch devices, ZTE eye scanning, and Ford’s electric bike

Finding time to write everything up is a struggle, so rather than risk not doing so at all, here is a quick-fire reflection on the event.

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Microsoft’s Windows 10 was part of it of course; I’ve covered this in a separate post.

I attended MediaTek’s press event. This Taiwan SoC company announced the Helio X10 64-bit 8-core chip and had some neat imaging demos. Helio is its new brand name. I was impressed with the company’s presentation; it seems to be moving quickly and delivering high-performance chips.

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Alcatel OneTouch showed me its latest range. The IDOL 3 smartphone includes a music mixing app which is good fun.

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There is also a watch of course:

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Despite using Android for its smartphones, Alcatel OneTouch says Android Wear is too heavyweight for its watches.

The Alcatel OneTouch range looks good value but availability in the UK is patchy. I was told in Barcelona that the company will address this with direct sales through its own ecommerce site, though currently this only sells accessories, and trying to get more retail presence as opposed to relying on carrier deals.

I attended Samsung’s launch of the Galaxy S6. Samsung is a special case at MWC. It has the largest exhibits and the biggest press launch (many partners attend too). It is not just about mobile devices but has a significant enterprise pitch with its Knox security piece.

So to the launch, which took place in the huge Centre de Convencions Internacional, unfortunately the other side of Barcelona from most of the other events.

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The S5 was launched at the same venue last year, and while it was not exactly a flop, sales disappointed. Will the S6 fare better?

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It’s a lovely phone, though there are a few things missing compared to the S5: no microSD slot, battery not replaceable, not water resistance. However the S6 is more powerful with its 8-core processor and 1440×2560 screen, vs quad-core and 1920×1080 in the S5. Samsung has also gone for a metal case with tough Gorilla Glass front and back, versus the plastic and glass construction of the S5, and most observers feel this gives a more premium feel to the newer smartphone.

I suspect that these details are unimportant relative to other factors. Samsung wants to compete with the iPhone, but it is hardly possible to do so, given the lock which the Apple brand and ecosystem holds on its customers. Samsung’s problem is that the cost of an excellent smartphone has come down and the perceived added value of a device at over £500 or $650 versus one for half the price is less than it was a couple of years ago. Although these prices get hidden to some extent in carrier deals, they still have an impact.

Of particular note at MWC were the signs that Samsung is falling out with Google. Evidence includes the fact that Samsung Knox, which Google and Samsung announced last year would be rolled into Android, is not in fact part of Android at Work, to the puzzlement of Samsung folk I talked to on the stand. More evidence is that Samsung is bundling Microsoft’s Office 365 with Knox, not what Google wants to see when it is promoting Google Apps.

Google owns Android and intends it to pull users towards its own services; the tension between the company and its largest OEM partner will be interesting to watch.

At MWC I also met with Imagination, which I’ve covered here.

Jolla showed its crowd-sourced tablet running Sailfish OS 2.0, which is based on the abandoned Nokia/Intel project called MeeGo. Most of its 128 employees are ex-Nokia.

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Jolla’s purpose is not so much to sell a tablet and phone, as to kick-start Sailfish which the company hopes will become a “leading digital content and m-commerce platform”. It is targeting government officials, businesses and “privacy-aware consumers”  with what it calls a “security strengthened mobile solution”. Its business model is not based on data collection, says the Jolla presentation, taking a swipe at Google, and it is both independent and European. Sailfish can run many Android apps thanks to Myriad’s Alien Dalvik runtime.

The tablet looks great and the project has merit, but what chance of success? The evidence, as far as I can tell, is that most users do not much object to their data being collected; or put another way, if they do care, it does not much affect their buying or app-using decisions. That means Sailfish will have a hard task winning customers.

China based ZTE is differentiating its smartphones with eye-scanning technology. The Grand S3 smartphone lets you unlock the device with Eyeprint ID, based on a biometric solution from EyeVerify.

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Senior Director Waiman Lam showed me the device. “It uses the retina characteristic of your eyes for authentication,” he said. “We believe eye-scanning technology is one of the most secure biometric ways. There are ways to get around fingerprint. It’s very very secure.”

Talking of sensors, I must also mention San Francisco based Boyd Sense, a startup, which has a smell sensor. I met with CEO Bruno Thuillier. “The idea we have is to bring gas technology to the mobile phone,” he said. Boyd Sense is using technology developed by partner Alpha MOS.

The image below shows a demo in which a prototype sensor is placed into a jar smelling of orange, which is detected and shown on the connected smartphone.

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What is the use of a smell sensor? What we think of as smell is actually the ability to detect tiny quantities of chemicals, so a smell sensor is a gas analyser. “You can measure your environment,” says Thuillier. “Think about air quality. You can measure food safety. You can measure beverage safety. You can also measure your breath and some types of medical condition. There are a lot of applications.”

Not all of these ideas will be implemented immediately. Measuring gas accurately is difficult, and vulnerable to the general environment. “The result depends on humidity, temperature, speed of diffusion, and many other things,” Thuillier told me.

Of course the first thing that comes to mind is testing your breath the morning after a heavy night out, to see if you are safe to drive. “This is not complicated, it is one gas which is ethanol,” says Thuillier. “This I can do easily”.

Analysing multiple gasses is more complex, but necessary for advanced features like detecting medical conditions. Thuillier says more work needs to be done to make this work in a cheap mobile device, rather than the equipment available in a laboratory.

I had always assumed that sampling blood is the best way to get insight into what is happening in your body, but apparently some believe breathe is as good or better, as well as being easier to get at.

For this to succeed, Boyd Sense needs to get the cost of the sensor low enough to appeal to smartphone vendors, and small enough not to spoil the design, as well as working on the analysis software.

It is an interesting idea though, and more innovative than most of what I saw on the MWC floor. Thuillier is hoping to bring something to the consumer market next year.

Finally, one of my favourite items at MWC this year was Ford’s electric bikes.

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Ford showed two powered bicycles at the show, both prototypes and the outcome of an internal competition. The idea, I was told, is that bikes are ideal for the last part of a journey, especially in today’s urban environments where parking is difficult. You can put your destination into an app, get directions to the car park nearest your destination, and then dock your phone to the bike for the handlebar by handlebar directions.

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I also saw a prototype delivery van with three bikes in the back. Aimed at delivery companies, this would let the driver park at a convenient spot for the next three deliveries, and have bikers zip off to drop the parcels.

development, imagination, Internet of things

Imagination at Mobile World Congress 2015: what is the strategy?

At MWC earlier this month I met with Imagination, best known for its PowerVR video design but also now the owner of the MIPS CPU. Apple is a shareholder and uses Imagination video technology in the iPhone and iPad. This market is highly competitive though, especially since ARM has its own Mali GPU. “You need complete platforms, you need a processor,” Tony King-Smith, executive VP of Technology Marketing, told me. “All the markets that matter to us are integrating towards a single chip. For a single chip you need some mix of central processing, communications, and multimedia.”

MIPS is a supported CPU for Android 2.3 or higher but most Android devices run ARM or Intel CPUs. Why no MIPS devices at MWC?

“There is one and a half to two years between a licensee picking up the IP, and delivering silicon based on it,” an Imagination’s spokesperson said. “We are engaged with customers but until something shows up we cannot disclose any names. Next year we are going to see some progress and potentially something I can show you.” Watch this space then.

What is Imagination’s strategy overall? King-Smith told me that the company is well placed to satisfy the need for optimisation and differentiation in an increasingly mature mobile market. It is also eyeing the IoT (Internet of things) space with interest. “Wearables need completely new architectures,” said King-Smith. “Not just tweaking a mobile chip. That’s where we’re going.”    

I was also interested to see a real demo of Vulkan, the successor to OpenGL, on the Imagination stand, based on the preliminary specification. “It will enable people to make more use of our platform”, said King-Smith, because of the lower level access it offers to the GPU.

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For more on Vulkan see this piece on the Reg.

What about the Creator board which Imagination has released, a low-priced starter kit along the lines of Raspberry Pi but of course with MIPS and more powerful graphics? It is an effort to build the ecosystem, said King-Smith. “It is a means for us to deliver our IP and make it easier for developers to engage with us. We also want to enable start-ups and new solutions.” It is primarily for developing and testing ideas, then, but if you want to go into production with it, that is fine too. “That board has been designed to ramp in volume,” King-Smith told me.

microsoft, mobile, software development, visual studio, windows

Windows 10 at Mobile World Congress 2015: a quick reflection

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I attended Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week – with 93,000 attendees and 2,100 exhibitors according to the latest figures.

It was a big event for Microsoft’s new Windows. It started for me on the Saturday before, when Acer unveiled a low-end Windows Phone (write-up on the Reg). Next was Microsoft’s press conference; Stephen Elop was on stage, presenting two new mid-range Lumias as if nothing had changed since last year when he announced the now-defunct Nokia X:

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The Lumia 640 looks good value, especially in its XL guise: 5.7” 1280 x 720 display, 8GB storage plus microSD slot, 13MP camera, 4G LTE, quad-core 1.2GHz CPU, €189 ex VAT. The smaller Lumia 640 is now on presale at £169.99; we were told €139 ex VAT at MWC, so I guess the real price of the 640XL may be something like £230, though there will be deals.

These phones will ship with Windows Phone 8.1 but get Windows 10 when available.

The big Windows 10 event was elsewhere though, and not mentioned at the press conference. This was the developer event, where General Manager Todd Brix, Director of Program Management Kevin Gallo and others presented the developer story behind the new Universal App Platform (not the same as the old Universal App Platform, as I explain here).

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This was the real deal, with lots of code. There was even a hands-on session where we built our own Universal Apps in Visual Studio 2015. Note that the Visual Studio build we used featured an additional application type for Windows 10; this is not the same as a Store app in Windows 8, though both use the Windows Runtime.

As someone with hands-on experience of developing a Store app, I am optimistic that the new platform will achieve more success. It is a second attempt with a bit more maturity, and much greater effort to integrate with the Windows desktop, whereas the first iteration went out of its way not to integrate.

Much of the focus was on the Adaptive UX, creating layouts that resize intelligently on different devices. The cross-platform UI concept is controversial, with strong arguments that you only get an excellent UI if you design specifically for a device, rather than trying to make one that runs everywhere. The Universal App Platform is a bit different though, since it is all Windows Runtime. Microsoft’s pitch is that by writing to the UAP you can target desktop, Windows Phone, tablet and Xbox One, with a single code base; and without a cross-device UI this pitch would lose much of its force. Windows 7 legacy is a problem of course; but if we see Windows 10 adopted as rapidly as Windows 7 (following the Vista hiccup) this may not be a deal-breaker.

The official account of the MWC event is in Gallo’s blog post which went out on the same day. There was much more detail at the event, but Microsoft is holding this back, perhaps for its Build conference at the end of April. So in this case you had to be there.

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Aside: if you look at the publicity Microsoft got from MWC, you will note that it is mostly based on the press conference and the launch of two mid-range Lumias, hardly ground-breaking. The fact that a ton of new stuff got presented at the developer event got far less attention, though of course sharp eyes like those of Mary Jo Foley was onto it. I have a bias towards developer content; but even so, it strikes me that a session of new content that is critical to the future of Windows counts for more than a couple of new Lumias. This demonstrates the extent to which the big vendors control the news that is written about them – most of the time.