Category Archives: microsoft

cloud computing, google, microsoft, windows

The cloud in education: Google Apps vs Live@Edu

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I’ve been researching the use of cloud apps in education for a talk I am giving next week. I’m normally more business-focused, and it’s been interesting to uncover another area where Microsoft and Google are in hot competition. Both companies are happy to give educational institutions free cloud email and collaboration services; and the offer is being snapped up by colleges and universities hard-pressed for money and tired of fighting spam-clogged inboxes. 

Microsoft has first mover advantage here: Live@Edu has been around since March 2005 as a service based on hotmail, though its evolution into a fuller collaboration system is more recent, whereas Google Apps for Education did not appear until October 2006. They are both generous schemes – of course the providers want to get students hooked on their stuff – and as far as I can tell both are well liked.

What is interesting is to look at the points of differentiation, which show the contrasting approach of these two companies. Microsoft is pursuing its “software plus services” strategy, which means desktop applications still play an important role. The email is Exchange-based, so you can use other email clients, but only Outlook on Windows will deliver full features. Document collaboration is based primarily on cloud storage rather then editing, though when Office Web Apps appear next year users will have some lightweight editing tools.

Google on the other hand is primarily web based, with desktop support as an add-on. Google has the lead when it comes to online document editing, since it has had Google Docs for some time, whereas Office Web Apps are still in beta. Google has no bias towards Windows and Office. With Google, a document’s primary existence is in the cloud, although you can export and import with possible loss of data or formatting.

Something else I noticed is that Google has big plans for integration with mobile devices, whereas Microsoft seems mainly concerned with Exchange synchronisation.

Microsoft’s pitch is that if you live in Windows anyway, with Exchange and SharePoint on the server, and Windows and Office on the client, then its cloud service integrates nicely. Google on the other hand is more revolutionary, not caring about what you run as long as you can connect to its services.

Although the software plus services idea has attractions, it sounds more like a transitional strategy than one for the long term. Over time, as the web platform gets more powerful, and as rich internet applications take over from pure desktop applications, the services part will grow absolutely dominant.

Google is a cooler brand than Microsoft, which helps its case when students are asked which platform they prefer.

Has anyone tried both platforms? Or even just one of them? I’d be interested in hearing your comments.

microsoft, windows

Windows activation annoyances – not one but two

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I set aside today for doing a Small Business Server 2008 installation. We had the new HP box, the new HP Small Business Server 2008 Premium pack, a stack of CALs. All legal, decent and honest.

Problem number one: the Microsoft-supplied Certificate of Authenticity has an unreadable product key. There is some kind of printing error; two of the letters are actually missing, and three more are partially obscured. It is, in other words, useless.

After making a number of calls, I’ve discovered that it is hard to get anyone to take an interest in an unreadable COA. The whole system is built on the theory that you get one COA with the product keys, and one only, and if you lose it, that is that. That said my supplier is helpful and I’m sure will sort it out, probably by treating the entire pack as faulty … of course that means a delay while a replacement is arranged. You would think there might be a database somewhere, where you can key in the serial number of the COA (which is fine) and read out the product keys; but apparently not.

In the meantime, I made a start by installing Server 2008 Standard (the 2nd server in SBS Premium) without a key, as a supposedly 60-day trial. The 60 days didn’t last long; it is already telling me I must activate “today”, probably because I fitted more RAM.

However, it did throw up another little issue. The HP version of SBS is meant to be locked to HP machines. That’s fine; I have an HP box, I have HP software. However, I want to install SBS as a virtual machine hosted on the 2nd server – a fully supported configuration. How can the BIOS-locked installation tell the difference between a virtual machine hosted on an HP box, and a virtual machine hosted on any other box?

The answer: it can’t. My perfectly legitimate installation throws up the error: This system is not supported platform [sic].

For this one, I have found a solution. What you do is to download the trial and install from that, entering your HP product key when requested (this one I do have).

I am not sure which is more silly, the fact that the legal media will not install, or the fact that the trial media bypasses it so easily.

All these are hassles which only the honest have to suffer.

I understand Microsoft’s need to protect its intellectual property; but frankly the user experience when encountering this kind of issue is appalling, and one soon tires of endless recorded messages that do not address your issue. It doesn’t help that Google searches bring back mostly information on piracy, or exhortations not to be a pirate.

Linux anyone?

Update: Here’s an interesting tech note from HP about a similar Hyper-V issue for HP-branded Server 2008. Looking on the SBS media, the exact files referenced there are not present, but there is one in the same location called HPActive.cmd which adds a registry entry to the host and does some funky licensing stuff. That said, it also seems to replace the product key which is odd. Could running this fix the issue? No promises, and at your own risk.

.net, adobe, iphone, microsoft, mono, open source, silverlight, software development, windows

Miguel de Icaza on eight years of Mono, its future, and the Silverlight desktop

Mono founder Miguel de Icaza spoke at the Monospace conference – 250 enthusiasts in Austin, Texas – on the past and future of the project. I wasn’t there but enjoyed listening to the keynote as posted by Redmonk’s Michael Coté.

“Never ask for permission, ask for forgiveness – that’s how we’ve done a lot of things in the Mono world,” said de Icaza, who also remarked that in the beginning “we thought it would be a walk in the park, we thought it would up and running in 6 months.” His motivation: “We think that .net is a fantastic development platform – we were envious when Microsoft came out with it.”

Eight years on and the Mono team is now around 35 people at Novell, plus 30-70 external contributors. “We don’t dictate the direction of mono, it’s mandated by the direction of the community,” says de Icaza. He talks about MonoDevelop, the Mono IDE, which is now licensed under LGPL allowing commercial plug-ins; about MonoTouch which lets you develop for Apple’s iPhone and “will expand towards Android”; and about XNATouch, a Mono game framework for iPhone.

The task of keeping up with Microsoft – insofar as Mono succeeds – has become easier thanks to open source. “In the last couple of years Microsoft has become very open-source friendly in some areas,” says de Icaza. “For example ASP.NET MVC, we don’t have to do anything, it just runs on our ASP.NET implementation.”

Someone asked about Mono’s plans for WPF, which is becoming more important on Windows, and this led to some intriguing comments on Moonlight/Silverlight and its future. “I think Silverlight has more potential than WPF has, because it runs on the Mac, it runs on Linux, it runs on Windows, and Silverlight is easier to learn than WPF is. We like the Silverlight model but we don’t like that it is limited to a sandbox on the browser,” he said.

“Moonlight can be used in two modes. One of them is moonlight in the plug-in, like you do with Microsoft, and you can out-of-browser if you want, but you are still restricted by the sandbox. We also offer the same graphical engine that we use for Silverlight [Moonlight] but with the .NET 4.0 APIs. You have full access to .NET 4.0 with the Silverlight UI. Isn’t that awesome?”

“WPF is interesting but a lot of work, and we don’t have the bandwidth and the resources. Our best possible option is to use Silverlight with the .NET 4.0 APIs. Our wish is to bring this expanded Silverlight to Windows and Mac OS. Maybe we’ll gently push Microsoft in that direction.”

One of his team is working on “the whole desktop rendered by Silverlight.”

In general I agree that Silverlight is more significant than WPF, particularly if Microsoft keeps up its current energetic level of development. I will be surprised if we don’t hear from Microsoft about an enhanced desktop Silverlight at the forthcoming PDC and Mix conferences.

There is another side to this though: if you can do your cross-platform .NET development in Microsoft Silverlight, do you still need Mono? Particularly if official ports to Linux start appearing?

Of course there is more to Mono than Moonlight. Running ASP.NET on Linux web servers is an attractive proposition, though historically its performance and reliability hasn’t matched that of Microsoft .NET – not surprising given its relatively small resources. Eight years on, and Mono has done more than just survived, yet has not quite tipped over into a platform popular enough to attract the level of contributions it needs.

cloud computing, exchange, google, microsoft

Los Angeles chooses Google over Exchange for email – who will follow?

When the city council of Los Angeles needed to replace its Novell email system, it looked at two main options. One was Microsoft Exchange, the other Google Apps; and Google won the deal.

There is one, fascinating, caveat. According to David Sarno at LA Times:

The contract was approved pending an amendment that would require Google to compensate the city in the event that the Google system was breached and city data exposed or stolen. No such clause existed in the contract.

Compensation sounds like something more substantial than the fee refund offered by a typical SLA (Service Level Agreement) – and this is about security, not interruption of service.

I would be intrigued to know whether Microsoft pitched a traditional on-premise solution (most likely); or whether it sought to do like-for-like with Google with a hosted Exchange offering.

It’s been a good month or so for Google Apps. I’ve heard of deals with Rentokil Initial (up to 35,000 users worldwide) and Jaguar Land Rover (15,000 worldwide). Deals like this put Google on the map for many more organisations.

Could 2010 be the year of the cloud?

exchange, microsoft, open source

Microsoft will document the Outlook file format; users would rather it just worked better

Microsoft’s Paul Lorimer, Group Manager for Microsoft Office Interoperability, has announced that the .pst file format will be published:

In order to facilitate interoperability and enable customers and vendors to access the data in .pst files on a variety of platforms, we will be releasing documentation for the .pst file format. This will allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice.

The initials .pst stand, I believe, for “Personal store”. This is the format used by standalone Outlook, for users without Exchange. You can also have Exchange deliver email to a .pst, though more normally Exchange mail is stored in an .ost (“Offline store”) which replicates the mailbox on the server. The .pst format is still used for archiving in this scenario. I’m not sure how different .pst and .ost are internally, or whether Microsoft intends to document both.

Any move towards open formats is welcome, though I’m not sure how important this one is; further, Outlook is frail enough as it is, so I’m nervous about third-party software modifying a .pst and perhaps getting it slightly wrong and causing problems. Programmatic access to Outlook data has long been available, via the ancient MAPI or via Outlook’s COM API.

In just slightly related news, my help post on the error message Cannot open the Outlook window is the most viewed post on this site this month and the fourth most viewed last month; it has 129 comments.

I suspect most users would prefer a faster and more robust Outlook over and above a published file format; unlike Office document formats, a .pst is not generally shared with others.

.net, cloud computing, microsoft, silverlight, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 – a simply huge release

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I’ve been exercising the new beta 2 of Visual 2010. It is hard to encapsulate in a few words because this is a simply huge release. OK, so I did download the Ultimate version; but the changes at every level seem greater than in Visual Studio 2008. One of the reasons is that this is the first full update to the .NET Framework since version 2.0 in late 2005. Versions  3.0 and 3.5 extended 2.0 but did not replace it. Another factor is that Visual Studio 2010 has a new editor built with Windows Presentation Foundation, and has a different look and feel than its predecessor. In addition, there is a new language, Visual F#, though I don’t hear much buzz about it; I think elevating IronRuby or IronPython to this status would have attracted more interest – but they are dynamic languages, whereas Visual F# is a functional language. 

When you are assessing Visual Studio you are in part assessing Microsoft’s platform, and as that platform has sprawled, so too has the tool. It is now so large that it is difficult to have in-depth knowledge of the entire thing. I also notice this when speaking to Microsoft folk about the product.

So what is new?

If you need to acclimatise, I suggest you start with What’s new in .NET Framework 4.0. This is a large topic in itself. Some of the things to look out for are What’s new in the Base Class Library, including Complex numbers, Location API, IObservable<T> for observable collections, and other tweaks and enhancements.

Then there are things like in-process side-by-side execution – the ability to run two versions of the Framework at once in the same process, which is remarkable.

Parallel programming with PLINQ and the Task Parallel Library is another major topic.

COM interop is changing; you no longer need to deploy Primary Interop Assemblies, because the compiler can include only the types you need in your application.

Next, take a look at what’s new in specific frameworks, such as WPF version 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2.

After that, you might be ready to look at new stuff in specific languages: including the dynamic keyword in C#, implicit line continuation in VB, lambda expressions in VC++, the concurrency runtime, and the arrival of Visual F#.

With that sorted, check out the new tools in the Visual Studio IDE. I’m thinking of the new code editor, the updated WPF visual designer, the new visual designer for Silverlight, and the Tools for SharePoint development; and not forgetting the updated modelling and application lifecycle management tools.

But isn’t this the era of cloud computing? That’s another part of the problem; the Windows-oriented tools seem less important if you are immersed in the latest cloud news. That said, don’t forget Windows Azure, though I was disappointed to find that the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio are a separate download, and not done yet.

I’m impressed that Microsoft seems to be pulling all this together successfully; it is a significant integration task. And as ever I’d be interested in what developers think – was the new code editor really necessary? Is Microsoft addressing the right areas? Has Microsoft done enough to support new Windows 7 features? And is performance OK in this version (it was a problem in beta 1)?

cloud computing, microsoft, windows, windows 7, xbox

Microsoft quarterly results: server and tools shine, overall decline

Microsoft has reported its results for the quarter ending 30th Sept 2009. I’ve got into the habit of making a small table to help make sense of the figures:

Quarter ending Sept 30th 2009 vs quarter ending Sept 30th 2008, $millions

Segment Revenue % change Profit % change
Client (Windows) 2620 -38.8 1463 -52.17
Server and Tools 3434 0.50 1283 22.89
Online 490 –5.80 -480 -49.53
Business (Office) 4404 -11.1 2863 -11.37
Entertainment and devices 1891 -0.11 312 96.22

A quick glance tells you that Windows suffered a sharp decline, though Microsoft says this is because it has deferred $1.47 billion of Windows 7 upgrade revenue, and that adding this back would reduce the decline to 4% year on year.

Note that even with the deferral, Windows is highly profitable.

The star here is server and tools, growing in the downturn and delivering strongly increased profits. I doubt tools counts for much of this; I’m guessing it reflects the positive reception for Server 2008.

Online is as dismal as ever. Clearly the Live properties are still not performing. Presuming Azure is in this category, it’s possible that this will start to turn this round; that is more likely I guess than an improvement in the fortunes of existing products such as Bing.

Office strikes me as pretty good bearing in mind the weak economy and that Microsoft is now talking about Office 2010. Entertainment and devices ticking along but nothing special.

I’m guessing Windows 7 will deliver Microsoft a great next quarter no matter what; but when if ever will it be profitable online?

Disclaimer: I am not a financial analyst, and hold no shares in companies about which I write. Please do not misconstrue this as investment advice; I know nothing about the subject.

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microsoft, windows 7

A year of writing about Windows 7

I’ve written quite a bit about Windows 7 over the last 12 months. Some of it is practical how-to stuff, some review, some comment. I started trying to round it all up then realised there is too much, believe it or not what follows is not complete.

Why so much? The reason is the level of interest. Although Microsoft is the company we love to hate, many of us use its stuff day-in, day-out and want to track what it is up to.

Windows 7 early promise- Passes the Vista test October 28 2008 in The Register

Windows 7 may be less than a year away 29 October 2008 good prophecy on ITJOBLOG

Windows 7 preview, October 30 2008 in The Guardian. “this release promises to be one users will actually enjoy.”

Should you wait for Windows 7 before buying a new PC? 8 Jan 2009 “Yes, you should – even though the suggestion will dismay PC manufacturers and retailers who would prefer that you buy something now to help their sales.”

How good is Windows 7? I argue that, well, it is still Windows. On ITJOBLOG

First Windows 7 beta puts fresh face on Vista The Register 8 Jan 2009

Apple Dock vs Windows 7 taskbar 12 January 2009

Review of Beta 1 in The Guardian, 15 Jan 2009

New in Windows 7 RC- Windows XP Mode, Remote Media Streaming 25 April 2009

Windows 7’s XP Mode — Virtually worth the effort The Register 1 May 2009

Windows 7 XP Mode dialogs confuse virtual with real 4 May 2009

Windows 7- why you should keep User Account Control at the highest level 5 May 2009 still good advice

Review of RC1 in The Guardian 7 May 2009

One thing that is not better in Windows 7- Movie Maker 12 May 2009 Live Movie Maker is now much improved but some still miss the Vista one

EU responds to questions on Microsoft’s plans for Windows 7 25 June 2009 my dialog with the EU on browser bundling

Microsoft’s limited Windows 7 offer a lesson in how to annoy customers- 23 July 2009 bet there are folk wishing they’d snapped up Microsoft’s £49.99 offer back in July

Microsoft’s new EU Windows 7 proposal – will IE now be the default- 24 July 2009. We’ve not yet seen this for real.

Windows 7: the challenge for developers July 27 2009. On ITJOBLOG

No more Windows E – Europe will get full Windows 7 plus upgrade editions 1st August 2009 sighs of relief all round

In-place upgrade adventures with Windows 7 8 August 2009 – the in-place upgrades worked so well I’ve left them alone since

Windows 7 tip- use Group by to merge and manage library views 10 August 2009, could be helpful for those puzzling over this strange UI

It got boring saying nice things all the time so

Hands on Windows 7 multi-touch – will Apple get this right before Microsoft- August 17 2009

Getting picky about the Windows 7 Taskbar – real-world flaws- 21 Aug 2009. Ed Bott disagreed!

Windows 7- Microsoft’s three missed opportunities The Register 25 Aug 2009

Hope for old PCs with Windows 7 26 Aug 2009 about surprisingly good results on old PCs

and the inevitable Windows 7 vs Mac comparison

Windows 7 vs Snow Leopard – The Poison taste test The Register 2nd September – the fun bit about this one is in the comments

Windows 95 to Windows 7- How Microsoft lost its vision The Register 22 October – I argue that Microsoft has gotten conservative with Windows, some of the comments misunderstand but at least it sparked a discussion

A Year with Windows 7 – my launch day piece. Today. Although I’ve cooled towards some ideas, like the hiding of notification icons, my overall feeling about the OS hasn’t changed radically over the year. I’m not sure if that is good or bad, but at least it is consistent.

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microsoft, windows 7

A year with Windows 7

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It’s nearly a year since Microsoft unveiled Windows 7 at PDC 2008 – to be precise it was 26th October 2008 when I attended the pre-briefing a tried it out for myself on a loaned laptop. I’ve been using it since on numerous PCs, and used little else – well, aside from the Mac and a little Ubuntu – since it went gold in July. What’s my long-term view?

Well, the pre-brief was impressive, and guided by Steven Sinofsky the team has delivered what it promised. I guess Microsoft should do this sort of thing in its sleep; but the fact that it did not do for Vista, and that other departments such as that for Windows Mobile seem to move with glacial pace, makes the achievement impressive. Even the suggestion that Windows 7 would work fine on older hardware has proven true. I’ve installed it on a seven-year old Pentium 4 and it is perfectly usable; I never dared to put Vista on that machine.

So it works, but do I like it? Generally, yes. The souped-up taskbar is now where I usually launch applications. I don’t bother putting icons on the desktop as they are usually hidden behind applications. I like Aero Peek. I think the Jump List and ability to have controls in thumbnail preview windows will be neat features when more applications come out that properly utilise them. Most important, Windows 7 hasn’t got in my way and most of the time I don’t think about it – which is as it should be.

I’m delighted with Libraries. I find them very useful. They enable me to think less about where a document is stored; it’s something that the user should not have to worry about at all. The UI for grouping and merging is not quite right and will trip up some users; but libraries work, which is what I care about more.

I have a few quibbles. The light shading applied to taskbar icons when the applications is running is too subtle; I’d like some more obvious indication. The taskbar behaves badly when full, as I’ve noted before, and the “small icon” option is terrible.

I think the decision to hide notification icons by default is a bad one. It is detrimental to usability, especially for apps that rely on that icon as the normal point of interaction. I don’t think it will help that much with making Windows “quieter”, as vendors will find other means to intrude if they insist on doing so.

I’ve noticed that the upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 makes Office invisible. I’ve had users complain that they cannot find their email because of this. It is purely a matter of moving icons back onto the taskbar or top-level Start menu, but this could be better.

These are minor gripes. My main further complaint is that by Windows 7 Microsoft really should be further along with creating an advanced client operating system in the Internet era. The main reason I reckon is the technical problems and loss of confidence that ensued after the original plans for Longhorn fell apart, and I’ve written further about this in a piece to be published shortly. Another factor is time wasted on semi-failures like Tablet PC; much was right about it, but it took Apple and the iPhone to show us how a touch (not stylus) UI should work.

I still think Windows 7 deserves to be a huge success, just as I did twelve months ago.

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.net, adobe, microsoft, software development, web authoring, windows

Blast from the past: how Adobe praised XAML at PDC 2003

I’ve been trawling back through material from Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference in 2003 for a piece that will be posted shortly. I believe that the vision that was presented at PDC 2003, and how it fell apart, sheds a lot of light on why Windows is as it is today.

In doing so I came across this snippet about Adobe’s participation in the PDC keynote. It’s still online in Microsoft’s PDC press release:

Adobe Systems, a leading developer of software for consumers, creative professionals and enterprises, demonstrated the possibilities for ISVs created by integrating the new "Avalon" presentation technology and declarative programming techniques for Windows. Using these technologies, a prototype version of Adobe After Effects showed how developers could unify documents, cutting-edge graphics and media. For example, developers would now be able to build animated charts and graphs that are linked to back-end data sources to produce a smart solution that displays stock prices, sales and other information within a high-end professionally designed format.

"Many developers have not taken the visual design of their applications seriously enough, with the most innovative work restricted to creative professional software and games," said Greg Gilley, vice president of Graphics Applications Development at Adobe. "Longhorns new Avalon technology brings the designer and developer closer, so they can truly collaborate on creating software applications that are as beautiful as they are functional."

The odd thing is, this quote could come from the Adobe MAX 2009 conference from which I have just returned. “Animated charts and graphs … linked to back-end data sources” is what we saw in applications build with Mosaic, Adobe’s new framework for LiveCycle ES2 clients.

The difference: Adobe is doing all this with Flex and MXML, not XAML, and the client platform is the Flash runtime, not Avalon running on Windows.

Gilley of course was speaking before Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia (and Flash and MXML) in 2005. Furthermore, nobody at PDC in 2003 could have guessed how long it would take Microsoft to deliver XAML.

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