Category Archives: microsoft

microsoft

Microsoft Financials

Microsoft has released figures for its second quarter, ending December 31st 2014. Here is my simple summary of the figures showing the segment breakdown:

Quarter ending  December 31st 2014 vs quarter ending December 31st 2013, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Gross margin Change
Devices and Consumer Licensing 4167 -1377 3876 -1105
Computing and Gaming Hardware 3997 -473 460 +49
Phone Hardware 2284 N/A 331 N/A
Devices and Consumer Other 2436 +562 550 +163
Commercial Licensing 10679 -227 9926 -154
Commercial Other 2593 +813 900 +485

There are a couple of blotches of red in the figures, reflecting weak PC sales in the consumer market and decline in non-subscription Office products. This is offset by strong growth in cloud and subscription. Microsoft says in the accompanying press release that revenue from Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM online grew 114%. SQL Server and System Center grew revenue yet again, with server products up 9% overall. Microsoft also notes that this quarter revenue from Surface exceeded $1 billion for the first time, thanks to the success of Surface 3. Note though that margins are relatively poor on hardware.

Nadella talked up both cloud and integration in the earnings call. On cloud, he said that new Office 365 features like Sway, Delve and Video are “completely new scenarios”; I am personally not yet convinced by Sway but both Delve (a search service) and video look compelling. On integration he referenced unifying Xbox Live across PC, tablet, phones and Xbox, streaming Xbox games to Windows 10, and the unified app store and platform with Windows 10 phones, tablets and PCs.

A lot rests on Windows 10; following the rocky reception for Windows 8, Microsoft cannot afford to get this one wrong.

android, microsoft, mobile, rants, smartphones, windows

Why Microsoft is hard to love

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated last week that “We want to move from people needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows. That is our bold goal with Windows.”

It is an understandable goal. Many users have discovered a better experience using a Mac than with Windows, for example, and they are reluctant to go back. I will not go into all the reasons; personally I find little difference in usability between Mac and Windows, but I do not question the evidence. There are numerous factors, including the damage done by OEMs bundling unwanted software with Windows, countless attacks from malware and adware, badly written applications, low quality hardware sold on price, and yes, problems with Windows itself that cause frustration.

There is more though. What about the interaction customers have with the company, which makes a difference to the emotional response to which Nadella refers? Again, Apple has an advantage here, since high margins enable exceptional customer service, but any company is capable of treating its customers with respect and consideration; it is just that not all of them do.

Now I will point Nadella to this huge thread on Microsoft’s own community forums.  The discussion dates from September 10 2014 and the contributors are customers who own Windows Phone devices such as the Lumia 1020. They discovered that after updating their devices to Windows 8.1 they experienced intermittent freezes, where the phone stops responding and has to be cold booted by pressing an emergency button combination (volume down plus power). These, note, are critical customers for Microsoft since they are in the minority that have chosen Windows Phone and potentially form a group that can evangelise this so far moribund platform to others.

The thread starts with a huge effort by one user (“ArkEngel”) to document the problem and possible fixes. Users understand that these problems can be complex and that a fix may take some time. It seems clear that while not all devices are affected, there are a substantial number which worked fine with Windows Phone 8, but are now unreliable with Windows Phone 8.1. A system freeze is particularly problematic in a phone, since you may not realise it has happened, and until you do, no calls are received, no alerts or reminders fire, and so on, so these customers are anxious to find a solution.

Following the initial complaint, more users report similar issues. Nobody from Microsoft comments. When customers go through normal support channels, they often find that the phone is reset to factory defaults, but this does not fix the problem, leading to multiple returns.

Still no official comment. Then there is an intervention … by Microsoft’s Brian Harry on the developer side. He is nothing to do with the phone team, but on 27 October receives this comment on his official blog:

Brian, sorry to hijack you blog again, but you are the only person in MS who seems to care about customers. Can you please advise whoever in MS is responsible for WP8.1 and make them aware of the “freeze” bug that MANY users are reporting (31 pages on the forum below). There has been NO feedback from MS whatsoever in the months that this has been ongoing and it is obviously affecting many users (myself included). If “cloud first, mobile first” is to be a success, you better make the bl00dy OS work properly. Thanks

Harry promises to raise the issue internally. On 12 Nov still nothing, but a reminder is posted on Harry’s blog and he says:

Nag mail sent.  Sorry for no update.

This (I assume) prompts a post from Microsoft’s Kevin Lee – his only forum post ever according to his profile:

I’m sorry we’ve been dark – I work closely with the Lumia engineering team that’s working directly on this. Trying to shed a little light on this…

Beginning in early September we started to receive an increased number of customer feedback regarding Microsoft Lumia 1020 and 925 device freezes. During the last two months we have been reaching out for more and more data and devices to systematically reproduce and narrow down the root cause. It turned out to be a power regulator logic failure where in combination with multiple reasons the device fails to power up the CPU and peripherals after idling into a deep sleep state.

I am pleased to pass on that we have a fix candidate under validation which we expect to push out the soon with the next SW update!

Appreciate your patience.

OK, so Microsoft knows about the problem, has sat back saying nothing while users try this thing and that, but now after two months says it has a “fix candidate”. This is greeted warmly as good news, but guess what? Phones keep freezing, no fix appears, and in addition, there is lack of clarity about how exactly the fix is being “pushed out”.

Two months later, user Shubhan NeO says:

And I broke my Lumia 1020. Not going back to Windows Phone ever ! Switching back to Android ! Here is sneak peek of my phone !

image

It is not quite clear whether he broke the phone deliberately in a fit of frustration, but perhaps he did as he comments further:

Works ? Seriously ? It hangs 2-3 a day, has stupid support for official apps. So many issue.

I’m done.

Here is another:

I paid the extra £ for a better phone; with a better ’41-megapixel camera’… now to find out that people with cheaper models have not had any freeze problems. Despite peoples comments about this being an aged device, and probably the reason for lack of support, I must add that I only purchased my 1020 ‘NEW’ in July 2014 (which is only 6 months ago). For 3 of those months it has been very unreliable … I am extremely disappointed in how I and everyone else here has been treated by Microsoft.

Read the thread for more stories of frustration and decisions never to buy another Windows Phone.

What are the real problems here? The hardest thing to accept is not the fact of the fault occurring, or even the time taken to fix it, but the apparent lack of concern by the company for the plight of its customers. If Mr Lee, or others from the team, had posted regularly about what the problem is, how they are addressing it, possible workarounds and likely time scales, it would easier for users to understand.

As it is, it seems that this part of the company does not care; a particular shame, as Nokia had a good reputation for customer service.

I post this then as feedback to Nadella and suggest that a cultural shift in some areas of Microsoft is necessary in order to make possible the kind of emotional transition he seeks.

microsoft, Web, web authoring, windows

The Windows 10 web browser story: it’s complex

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Microsoft’s Jason Weber has posted details of the web browser story in Windows 10.

There will be two browsers and two rendering engines in Windows 10:

  • Project Spartan is the “universal app” version of the browser, the successor to Metro IE.
  • Internet Explorer will remain.

The two rendering engines are EdgeHTML (new) and MSHTML (old). Both engines can be used in either browser, so even the “Project Spartan” browser has a compatibility mode. Both browsers default to the new rendering engine.

image

However, only Internet Explorer supports features such as ActiveX controls and Browser Helper Objects, so some legacy web sites and applications will only work properly in IE.

For details of what EdgeHTML supports, see the status page.

Microsoft has been plagued by the “coded for IE” problem, where sites deliver inferior content if IE is detected – even where IE is fully capable of rendering the up-to-date content. Hence this comment:

Edge mode introduces an interoperable UA string designed to get today’s modern Web content, and to avoid old IE-only content. We’ve also spent a lot of time ensuring that the IE platform behaves like modern Web content expects.

It is unfortunate that Windows 10 will still have two web browsers, since this is a point of confusion for users. A lot will depend on presentation and defaults; if Microsoft can hide desktop IE so it is only used by those organisations that know they need it, that would be a good thing – presuming that Project Spartan offers a decent experience when used on the desktop.

There is a debate in the comments to Weber’s post about whether Microsoft should cease developing its own browser:

This looks like chrome. Please contribute to chrome if you want to make the web browser better. All this does is increase development costs by having to support another browser. Enough damage has been done by IE. Please stop development.

and the counter:

No, sane developers don’t want a single engine.

People want different engines that pushes each other forward, make things in a standard way (not like Chrome) and allows to check if the problem is their code or a bug in the browser.

My perspective on this is that Google already dominates web search and if Microsoft were to adopt its browser engine, there would be increased risk of Google dictating whatever standards suit its own purpose – just as Microsoft did in the dark days of stagnant IE development. Microsoft’s energetic development of IE is actually good for Google and for the rest of us.

microsoft, software development, windows

Windows 10 and HoloLens: quick thoughts and questions following the January reveal

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Microsoft is revealing its Windows 10 plans in stages, presumably in part to build up expectation and get feedback, and in part because some pieces are ready to show before others.

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Today in Redmond Microsoft shared a number of new features. In quick summary:

Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for all Windows 7 and 8.x users, at least for the first year.

Comment: this is necessary since the refusal of Microsoft’s user base to upgrade from Windows 7 is a strategic roadblock. For example, Windows 7 users cannot use Store apps, reducing the market for those apps. It is more important to persuade users to upgrade than to get upgrade revenue. Windows 10, of course, will have to be compelling as well as free for this initiative to work, as well as providing a smooth upgrade process (never a trivial task).

Windows to evolve to become a service Executive VP Terry Myerson says this in this post:

Once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device – at no additional charge. With Windows 10, the experience will evolve and get even better over time. We’ll deliver new features when they’re ready, not waiting for the next major release. We think of Windows as a Service – in fact, one could reasonably think of Windows in the next couple of years as one of the largest Internet services on the planet.

And just like any Internet service, the idea of asking “What version are you on?” will cease to make sense – which is great news for our Windows developers.

Comment: What does this mean exactly, beyond what we already have via Windows Update? What does Myerson mean by “the supported lifetime of the device”? What are the implications for the typical three-year Windows release cycle? I hope to discover more detail soon, though when I enquired whether there will be, for example, a “Windows 11” I was told, “We aren’t commenting beyond what’s stated in post that you reference.”

Project Spartan (a code name) is a new browser developed as a universal app – this means an app built for the Windows Runtime (“Metro”) environment, though in Windows 10 these also run in a window on the desktop, blurring the sharp distinction you see in Windows 8. Project Spartan features, according to Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, a new rendering engine along with features includes the ability to annotate web pages with keyboard or touch/stylus, and the ability to save pages for reading offline. There will also be “enterprise mode compatibility for existing web apps”, which means that old IE will live on.

image

Comment: Creating a new browser is a bold step though it may be as much for marketing reasons as anything else, since IE has a tarnished reputation. The advantages of the new rendering engine, and the way compatibility will be handled, are not yet clear. Another point of interest is compatibility issues caused not only by the new engine, but also by running in sandboxed universal app environment. Looking forward to more detail on this.

Windows 10 across PC, tablet and mobile: the OS will have the same name on all three, universal apps (like a new mobile Office) will run on all three, and there are new efforts to synchronize content. For example, notifications will sync across phone and PC/Tablet.

Comment: Sounds good, but there are a few downsides. One is that Windows Phone is tied to the same release cycle as full Windows, which is rather slow. Currently Windows Phone is falling back as it waits for Windows 10 in respect of both operating system upgrade and also the universal app version of Office – which is already available for iOS and Android. CEO Satya Nadella said today that there will be new “flagship” Windows phone devices, which is good news for what is currently a neglected platform, but it will be hard for the platform to thrive if it is constantly waiting for the next big Windows update. Update: if “Windows as a service” means no more monolithic upgrades but constant incremental improvement, perhaps this will not be the case. Watch this space.

Cortana coming to Windows PC and tablet: we saw Microsoft’s digital assistant, powered by Bing search, demonstrated on full Windows.

Comment: Cortana is impressive and fun, but I am not sure how much the feature enhances the platform. On the phone I do not use it much; the problem is that speaking to your phone “what meetings to I have today” and getting a spoken response is a great demo, but in practice it is easier to glance at the calendar, especially as voice control only works in quiet scenarios. The other aspect of Cortana is the personalisation it brings to things like web search or reminders; more data about our preferences and activities can bring some magic. This is Google Now territory, and while Microsoft’s approach to privacy may be preferable, Google will be hard to match in respect of the amount of data it can draw upon.

DirectX 12: Microsoft showed a demo of its latest DirectX graphics API, claiming up to 50% better performance and up to 50% less power consumption.

Comment: this is solid good news. If games run best on Windows 10 a significant enthusiast community will want to upgrade right away. Further, DirectX is not just for games.

Xbox One integration: Microsoft showed how Xbox Live team or competitive games can work across Xbox One and PC, and how games can be streamed from XboxOne so that the console becomes a kind of games server for your Windows 10 tablets and PCs. Xbox One will also run universal apps.

Comment: Better integration between Windows devices and Xbox is long overdue and can help to promote both. Xbox One though has a bit of a Windows 7 problem of its own, with Xbox 360 remaining popular simply because of the huge numbers of games that have not been ported. If only Microsoft could introduce backwards compatibility …

Surface Hub: this is a giant 84”, 4K display wall-hanging PC which you can use as an interactive whiteboard for meetings and so on. It seems to be the next innovation from the Perceptive Pixel folk who also developed the table-top Surface device.

image

Comment: Looks cool, but it will be expensive. May help to encourage businesses to keep faith with the Windows client.

Microsoft HoloLens: this was the big reveal, a secret project that, we were told, has been developed in the basement of the Microsoft Visitor Center on its Redmond campus.

image

HoloLens is a headset which enables 3D augmented reality: projected images are seen like holographic images in the space around you, and you can interact by gesture detected by cameras and motion sensors in the headset. Look carefully at the following image:

image

In this example, the demonstrator is assembling a quad copter using a palette of 3D components in Holo Studio, an application which uses the technology. However, note that you only see the quad copter through the HoloLens headset, the image from which in this case is merged with a view of the demonstrator herself using a custom camera:

image

If you had been in the room, you would see the quad copter only on the screen, not in the room itself. Therefore I suspect this is more accurately described as augmented reality than holography, though the scene does look holographic if you are wearing the headset.

In a final flourish, Microsoft a 3D printed version of the quad copter which duly flew up and down; I am sure the motor and so on was NOT 3D printed, but it made a lovely demo.

Apparently NASA loves the technology and will be using it with Mars Rover in July in a project called OnSight – read the NASA release.

image

Bringing it down to earth, Microsoft also stated that all universal apps will have access to the HoloLens APIs.

Comment: This looks amazing and must have potential for all sorts of scenarios: architects, planners, marketing, games and more. The tough question I suppose is how much it has to do with Windows 10 as experienced by most users.

In closing

Microsoft surprised us today and deserves kudos for that. Nobody can accuse the company of lack of innovation; then again, Windows 8 and the original Surface were innovative too, and proved to be a disaster. I do not think Windows 10 will be a disaster; we have already seen in the preview how it is an easier transition for Windows 7 users.

A key thing to note from a developer and technical perspective is that universal apps are right at the centre of the Windows 10 story. That is a good thing in many respects, since we get Store deployment, sandbox security, and a degree of compatibility across phone, PC, tablet and Xbox One. But is the Store app / Universal app platform mature enough to deliver a good experience for both developers and users, bearing in mind that in Windows 8.x it is really not good enough?

Look to Microsoft Build at the end of April, which Myerson said is the culmination of the Windows 10 reveal, to answer that question.

microsoft, mobile, smartphones

Microsoft’s Lumia 400, the cheapest Windows Phones yet, but what is the brand becoming?

Microsoft has announced the Lumia 435, the first 400-series Lumia and the cheapest Windows Phone yet. The Lumia 532, also just announced, is an upgrade to the Lumia 530 and also pitched at a low-end market.

image
Lumia 432

The 435 has a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor, 1GB RAM and 8GB storage, front-facing camera, back-facing 2MP camera, micro SD slot. 4″ 800 x 480 pixel screen. GPS, wi-fi and Bluetooth. Replaceable battery. Dual-SIM is available.

The 532 has a quad-core 1.2 GHz Snapdragon processor, 1GB RAM and 8GB storage, 5.0MP main camera, front-facing camera, micro SD slot. 4″ 800 x 480 pixel screen. GPS, wi-fi and Bluetooth. Replaceable battery. Dual-SIM is available.

The phones are expected to go on the market in February at a price of around €69 (£53.50) for the Lumia 435 and €79 (61.50) for the Lumia 532.

I like the Windows Phone OS, and these devices look like great value. That said, the last aspirational Windows Phone was the Lumia 1020 in Summer 2013, with its fantastic camera. You would be forgiven for concluding that Microsoft has given up on high-end Windows Phone devices, which is unfortunate for developers since those are the devices likely to deliver more app sales.

If the Lumia brand has become strongly associated with cheap phones it will be hard for the company to convince customers that a high-end device is worth their attention in future.

We may get some phone news soon, linked to the launch of Windows 10; we may hear more at the event on January 21 in New York.

More details here.

azure, cloud computing, microsoft

Reserved IPs and other Microsoft Azure annoyances

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I have been doing a little work with Microsoft’s Azure platform recently. A common requirement is that you want a VM which is internet-accessible with a custom domain, for which the best solution is to create a A record in your DNS pointing to the IP number of the VM. In order to do this reliably, you need to reserve an IP number for the VM; otherwise Azure may assign a different IP number if you shut it down and later restart it. If you keep it running you can keep the IP number, but this also means you are have to pay for the VM continuously.

Azure now offers reserved IP numbers. Useful; but note that you can only link a VM with a reserved IP number when it is created, and to do this you have to create the VM with PowerShell.

What if you want to assign a reserved IP number to an existing VM? One suggestion is that you can capture an image from the VM, and then create a new VM from the image, complete with reserved IP. I went partially down this route but came unstuck because Azure for some reason captured the image into a different region (West Europe) than the region where the VM used to be (North Europe). When I ran the magic PowerShell script, it complained that the image was in the wrong region. I then found a post explaining how to move images between regions, which I did, but the metadata of the moved image was not quite the same and creating a new VM from the image did not work. At this point I realised that it would  be easier to recreate the VM from scratch.

Note that when reserved IP number were announced in May 2014, program manager Mahesh Thiagarajan said:

The platform doesn’t support reserving the IP address of the existing Cloud Services or Virtual machines. We expect to announce support for this in the near future.

You can debate what is meant by “near future” and whether Microsoft has already failed this expectation.

There is another wrinkle here that I am not clear about. Some Azure VMs have special pricing, such as those with SQL Server pre-installed. The special pricing is substantial, often forming the largest part of the price, since it includes licensing fees. What happens to the special pricing if you fiddle with cloning VMs, creating new VMs with existing VHDs, moving VMs between regions, or the like? If the special pricing is somehow lost, how do you restore it so SQL Server (for example) is still properly licensed? I imagine this would mean a call to support. I have not seen any documentation relating to this in posts like this about moving a virtual machine into a virtual network.

And there’s another thing. If you want your VM to be in a virtual network, you have to do that when you create it as well; it is a similar problem.

While I am in complaining mode, here is another. Creating a VM with PowerShell is easy enough, but you do need to know the image name you are using. This is not shown in the friendly portal GUI:

image

In order to get the image names, I ran a PowerShell script that exports the available images to a file. I was surprised how many there are: the resulting output has around 13,500 lines and finding what you want is tedious.

Azure is mostly very good in my experience, but I would like to see these annoyances fixed. I would be interested to hear of other things that make the cloud admin or developer’s life harder than it should be.

.net, amazon, cloud computing, development, microsoft, mobile, windows

So that was 2014: Samsung stumbles, all change for Microsoft, Sony hack, more cloud, more mobile

What happened in 2014? One thing I did not predict is that Samsung lost its momentum. Here are Gartner’s figures for global smartphone sales by vendor, for the third quarter of 2014:

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Samsung is still huge, of course. But in 2013, Samsung seemed to be in such control of its premium brand that it could shape Android as it wished, rather than being merely an OEM for Google’s operating system. In the enterprise, Samsung KNOX held promise as a way to bring security and manageability to Android, but only in Samsung’s flavour. Today, that seems less likely. Market share is declining, and much of KNOX has been rolled into Android Lollipop. What is going wrong? The difficulty for Samsung is how to differentiate its products sufficiently, to avoid bleeding market share to keenly priced competition from vendors such as Xiaomi and Huawei. This is difficult if you do not control the operating system.

What of the overall mobile OS wars? 2013 brought few surprises: the Apple/Android duopoly continued, Blackberry further diminished its share, and Windows Phone struggles on, though it was not looking good for Microsoft’s OS as 2013 closed; the Nokia acquisition may have been fumbled.

All change at Microsoft

That brings me to Microsoft, a company I watch closely. 2014 saw Satya Nadella appointed as CEO and several strategic changes, though the extent to which Nadella introduced those changes is uncertain. What changes?

Office is going truly cross-platform, with first-class support for iOS and Android. I covered this recently on the Register; the summary is that there will be mobile versions of Office for iOS, Android and Windows (this last a Store app) with similar features, and that more and more of the functionality of desktop Office will turn up in the mobile versions. I learned from my interview with Technical Product Manager Kaberi Chowdhury that ODF (Open Document) support is planned, as is some level of programmability.

The plans for Office are a clue to the company’s wider strategy, which is focused on cloud and server. Key products include Office 365, Windows Azure, Active Directory (and Azure Active Directory), SQL Server, SharePoint, and System Center as a management tool for hybrid cloud.

The Windows client strategy is to bring back users who disliked Windows 8 with a renewed focus on the desktop in the forthcoming Windows 10, while retaining the Store app model for apps that are secure, touch-friendly, and easily deployed. It is still not clear what Windows 10 phones and tablets will look like, but we can expect convergence; no more Windows RT, but perhaps tablets running Windows Phone OS that are in effect the next generation of Windows RT without a desktop personality.

The company will also hedge its bets with full app support for Office and its cloud services on iOS and Android, and in doing so will make its Windows mobile offerings less compelling.

Microsoft’s developer tools are changing in line with this strategy. The next generation of .NET is open source and cross-platform on the server side, for Windows, Mac and Linux. Xamarin plugs the gap for .NET on iOS and Android, while Microsoft is also adding native support (not .NET based) for cross-platform mobile in the next Visual Studio.

These are big changes to the developer stack, and Microsoft is forking .NET between the continuing Windows-only .NET Framework, and the new cross-platform .NET Core. Developers have many questions about this; see this interview on the Register for what I could glean about the current plans. Watch our for the Build conference at the end of April when the company will attempt to put it all together into a coherent whole for developers targeting either Windows 10, or cloud apps, or cloud services with cross-platform mobile clients.

This entire strategy is a logical progression from the company’s failure in mobile. Can it now succeed with client apps running on platforms controlled by its competitors? Alternatively, is there hope that Windows 10 can keep businesses hooked on Windows clients? Maybe 2015 will bring some answers, though with Windows 10 not expected until towards the end of the year there will be a long wait while iOS, Android and even Chrome OS (the operating system of Chromebook) continue to build.

A side effect is that C# now has a better chance of building a cross-platform user base, rather than being a Windows language. This has already happened in game development, thanks to the use of Mono and C# in the popular Unity game engine. Could it also happen with ASP.NET, deployed to Linux servers, now that this will be officially supported? Or is there little room for it alongside Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js and the rest? 

The puzzle with Microsoft is that there is still too much mediocrity and complacency that damages the company’s offerings. How can it expect to succeed in the crowded wearable market with a band that is uncomfortable to wear? There is still an attitude in some parts of the company that the world will be happy to put up with problems that might be fixed in a future version after some long interval. Then again, the Azure team is doing great things and Windows server continues to impress. Win or lose, there will be plenty of Microsoft news this year.

A theme for 2015: cloud optimization

Late last year I attended Amazon’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas; I wrote this up here. The key announcement for me was Amazon Aurora, a MySQL clone, not so much because of its merits as a cloud database server, but more because it represents a new breed of applications that are designed for the cloud. If you design database storage with the knowledge that it will only ever run on a huge cloud-scale infrastructure, you can make optimizations that cannot be replicated on smaller systems. I tried to summarize what this means in another Register piece here. The fact that this type of technology can be rented by any of us at commodity prices increases the advantage of public cloud, despite reservations that many still have concerning security and control. It also poses a challenge for companies like Oracle and Microsoft whose technology is designed for on-premises as well as cloud deployment; they cannot achieve the same advantage unless they fork their products, creating cloud variants that use different architecture.

The Sony hack

The cyber invasion of Sony Pictures in late November was not just another hack; it was a comprehensive takedown in which (as far as I can tell) the company’s entire IT systems were entirely compromised and significantly damaged.

According to this report:

Mountains of documents had been stolen, internal data centers had been wiped clean, and 75 percent of the servers had been destroyed.

Most IT admins worry about disaster recovery (what to do after catastrophic system failure such as a fire in your data center) as well as about security (what to do if hackers gain access to sensitive information). In this case, both seemed to happen simultaneously. Further, as producing movies is in effect a digital business, the business suffered loss of some of its actual products, such as the unreleased “Annie”.

The incident is fascinating in itself, especially as we do not know the identity of the hackers or their purpose, but what interests me more are the implications.

Specifically, how many companies are equally at risk? It seems clear that Sony’s security was towards the weak end of the scale, but there is plenty of weak security out there, especially but not exclusively in smaller businesses.

With the outcome of the Sony hack so spectacular, it is likely that there will be similar efforts in 2015, as well as many businesses looking nervously at their own practices and wondering what they can do to protect themselves.

Cloud may be part of the answer though even if the cloud provider does security right, that is no guarantee that their customers do the same.   

Looking back on looking back

Here is what I wrote a year or so ago, Reflecting on 2013- the year of not the PC, no privacy, and the Internet of Things. Most of it still applies. I have not achieved any of the three goals I set for myself though. Maybe this year…

.net, azure, cloud computing, microsoft, windows

SSD storage has come to Azure VMs, along with faster Azure SQL

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Microsoft has introduced SSD storage for Azure VMs. This is a catch-up with Amazon which has been offering this at least since June 2014. It is an important feature though, and now in preview. The SSDs are part of the Azure storage service but can only be used for disks attached to VMs, not for general-purpose block files. There are three virtual disks available:

  P10 P20 P30
Disk size 128GB 512GB 1TB
IOPS 500 2300 5000
Throughput 100 MB/s 150 MB/s 200 MB/s

Price is $6.90 per 100GB per month, which if I am reading this right is less than Amazon’s $0.10 per GB per month ($10 per 100GB) as shown here.

One obvious use case is for SQL Server running on a VM. This generally performs better than Microsoft’s Azure SQL database service. That said, Microsoft is also previewing an improved Azure SQL which supports most of the features of SQL Server 2014, including .NET stored procedures and in-memory columnstore queries. Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie says performance is better:

Our internal benchmark tests (using over 600 million rows of data) show query performance improvements of around 5x with today’s preview relative to our existing Premium Tier SQL Database offering and up to 100x performance improvements when using the new In-memory columnstore technology.

If you can make it work, Azure SQL is better sense than running SQL Server in a VM with all the hassles of server patching and of course Microsoft’s licensing fees; but the performance has to be there. Another factor which drives users to the VM option is that SQL Reporting Service is not available in Azure SQL.

microsoft, mobile, windows

Windows Phone wobbles: why users are losing heart

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When Microsoft acquired Nokia in April this year, there was always a risk that the Windows Phone platform would lose momentum (yes there was some momentum).

Nokia was better at marketing, better at hardware innovation, and better at the all-important operator relations than Microsoft itself.

I consider the launch of Windows Phone 7 in October 2010 to be one of Microsoft’s great disasters, not because of the operating system which is very good, but because the company failed to get all the pieces in place at the right time. When the phone was first released in the UK, you could not buy it at all in my local town centre, and even if you could find it, the hardware was indifferent, just slightly tweaked Android handsets from the likes of HTC and Samsung.

The underlying problem was that Microsoft was late to market and the iOS/Android duopoly was already dominant; but even so, the company could have done better.

Nokia’s adoption of Windows Phone in February 2011 (first devices came in October 2011) made a striking difference. Distinctive hardware and better visibility in the high street gave the platform a better chance of success. Nokia Drive for turn-by-turn navigation was a great feature, along with other Nokia apps and services like Mix Radio. Admittedly the Lumia 800 (the launch model) had some issues, especially with battery life and charging problems, but better devices followed.

Nokia also started making cheaper Windows Phones, delivering some of the best value smartphones on any platform.

The Nokia Lumia 1020, released in late summer 2013, brought the best camera in any smartphone to market, thanks to the company’s PureView research along with a high-quality though slightly protruding lens.

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Nokia Lumia 1020

That was something of a high point for Windows Phone. Nokia, perhaps, started to panic as Windows Phone sales still failed to take off as quickly as had been hoped. At Mobile World Congress in February 2014, it announced Nokia X, a version of Android without Google services. This made no sense to me at the time; but indicated that Nokia had diverted its focus away from improving Windows Phone to chase an alternative (and doomed) platform.

There was also a period of hiatus between Sept 2013 when Microsoft’s acquisition was announced, and April 2014 when it completed. During this time Nokia operated independently, but with the knowledge that the businesses would be merged in due course; not a good scenario for long-term planning.

The problem today is that even those few who have adopted Windows Phone are losing heart. This is not only to do with market dynamics and the app problems over which Microsoft has no control. Check out this monster thread on Microsoft’s forums. There is a hardware issue with some Lumia models (including the 1020) such that the 8.1 update causes the phone to freeze at random intervals; not good if, for example, you have an alarm set or are waiting for a call. What you will see is that users started complaining on September 10th. Nobody from Microsoft bothered to comment on the thread or help users with mitigation suggestions until November 22nd, when Kevin Lee at Microsoft made an appearance:

Beginning in early September we started to receive an increased number of customer feedback regarding Microsoft Lumia 1020 and 925 device freezes. During the last two months we have been reaching out for more and more data and devices to systematically reproduce and narrow down the root cause. It turned out to be a power regulator logic failure where in combination with multiple reasons the device fails to power up the CPU and peripherals after idling into a deep sleep state.

I am pleased to pass on that we have a fix candidate under validation which we expect to push out the soon with the next SW update!

Which update? When? Mr Lee has made no further comment, and phones are still freezing. It is frustrating for users who return phones for repair, have the software reset, and then still suffer the problem, because it is incorrectly diagnosed by the repair engineers (read the thread for many such tales).

While the specific issue affects only a subset of Windows Phone users, this is not only indicative of poor quality control before the 8.1 release was pushed out, but also poor communication with users of the high-end Windows Phone devices; the market where Microsoft is weakest.

More seriously, the 1020 which is now coming up to 18 months old is still in some ways top of the range, certainly for the camera; note that in the Lumia range you have 8x, 9x, and 10x prefixes, and there has been no advance on 1020 in the 10x series.

Another issue for Windows Phone is that Microsoft is putting out Office for iOS and Android while seeming to neglect its own platform. The forthcoming Visual Studio 2015 includes a new set of tools for both native and HTML-based development for iOS and Android. It is beginning to look as if Microsoft itself is now treating the platform as second-class.

Unlike Ed Bott and Tom Warren I still use a 1020 as my main phone. I like the platform and I like not taking a separate camera with me. It was great for taking snaps on holiday in Norway. But I cannot survive professionally with just Windows Phone. It seems now that a majority of gadgets I review come with a supporting app … for iOS or Android.

Microsoft is capable of making sense of Windows Phone, particularly in business, whether it can integrate with Office 365, Active Directory and Azure Active Directory. On the consumer side there is more that could be done to tie with Windows and Xbox. Microsoft is a software company and could do some great first party apps for the platform (where are they?).

The signs today though are not good. Since the acquisition we have had some mid-range device launches but little to excite. The sense now is that we are waiting for Windows 10 and Universal Apps (single projects that target both phone and full Windows) to bring it together. Windows 10 though: launch in the second half of 2015 is a long time to wait. If Windows Phone market share diminishes between then and now, there may not be much left to revive.

.net, microsoft

What is .NET Core, “the foundation of all future .NET platforms”?

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I have been looking at .NET Core, an official Microsoft open source project which you can find on github and which is at the heart of Microsoft’s plans to open source most of its .NET technology.

Currently there are three Microsoft repositories for the .NET Core platform. There are the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”), ASP.NET 5, and the .NET Core Framework. Note that these are all v.Next versions of the .NET Framework. ASP.NET 5 and the .NET Core Framework are on github, but Roslyn is on CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source repository site. There is also a github repository for Entity Framework 7, currently part of ASP.NET though I am not sure that it belongs there. The current version of EF is 6.11 but the code for this is on CodePlex. The KRuntime, which is the implementation of the parts of the .NET Runtime needed to host an ASP.NET application, is also in the ASP.NET repository. Its full name is the K Runtime Environment (KRE); I am not sure what K stands for. Note that Microsoft has only promised to open source the .NET server stack, not desktop frameworks like Windows Presentation Foundation.

I had a look at the .NET Core Framework. This is the key set of libraries for .NET applications. The easiest way to build the core libraries is from the command line. Open a Visual Studio 2013 Developer Command Prompt (which sets up the path and environment for command line builds), go to your clone of the github repository and type build.

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Cool. But what is in it? Not that much: System.Collections, Parallel Linq, Vectors and XML libraries.

“More is coming soon. Stay tuned!” say the docs. And in this blog post by Microsoft’s Immo Landwerth:

Consider the subset we have today a down-payment on what is to come. Our goal is to open source the entire .NET Core library stack by Build 2015.

Landwerth says that Microsoft is “currently figuring out the plan for open sourcing the runtime”; this is the native code that creates the .NET Virtual Machine which executes .NET code.

Of course there is also Mono, the old open source implementation of .NET which is from an independent code base.

This is exciting stuff for .NET developers, especially since official runtimes for Linux and Mac are also promised, but also somewhat confusing. What is .NET Core versus what we have known as the .NET Framework?

Here is a diagram from Landwerth’s blog:

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I presume that the top left box (.NET Framework) has not been promised as open source, but the other two boxes have. Note that ASP.NET 5 will run on either .NET Core or the full .NET Framework; and that .NET Native – the project to compile a .NET application as true native code – sits as part of .NET Core.

Store apps (also known as Windows Runtime apps, or Metro apps) are not covered in the above diagram, but since .NET Native currently only works for Store apps, maybe .NET Core is also the .NET runtime for Store apps. Landwerth says:

.NET Core is a modular development stack that is the foundation of all future .NET platforms. It’s already used by ASP.NET 5 and .NET Native.

There are also some clues about .NET Core in the home page for the github repository:

.NET Core and the .NET Framework have (for the most part) a subset-superset relationship. .NET Core is named "Core" since it contains the core features from the .NET Framework, for both the runtime and framework libraries. For example, .NET Core and the .NET Framework share the GC, the JIT and types such as String and List<T>. We’ll continue improving these components for both .NET Core and .NET Framework.

.NET Core was created so that .NET could be open source, cross platform and be used in more resource-constrained environments. We have also published a subset of the .NET Reference Source under the MIT license, so that you and the community can port additional .NET Framework features to .NET Core.

The second paragraph is intriguing. Microsoft has posted parts of the source for the .NET Framework library so that the community can port some of it to .NET Core. What this means I think is not that this code should be part of .NET Core (otherwise it becomes more than just core) but rather that it would run on .NET Core.

It seems, contrary to what you might have thought, that the full .NET Framework is not a superset of .NET Core, although it is intended to be close to that. This has interesting implications for future compatibility. If .NET Core is intended to be more agile and to evolve more rapidly than the .NET Framework, since it is somewhat free of backwards compatibility constraints, we will soon find that there are features in .NET Core that do not exist in the .NET Framework as well as vice versa, in other words, two incompatible stacks. That could be a problem.

Despite Microsoft’s impressive openness in publishing much of its .NET work and forming the .NET Foundation, I for one would appreciate a clearer presentation of the plans for .NET Core and .NET Framework and the extent to which .NET Framework should now be considered a legacy or Windows desktop only technology. I suspect the answer for the moment is “wait for Build.”