Tag Archives: microsoft

microsoft, professional, software development, windows

Windows on ARM fixes much that is wrong with Windows, but lack of apps makes it Microsoft’s big risk

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Vendors who create new platforms work hard to attract developers, because high availability of apps is seen as essential for success. This is why, for example, RIM is offering free PlayBooks to developers who submit apps to BlackBerry App World.

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Why then would Microsoft deliberately and consciously choose to release a new family of Windows machines on which existing Windows applications cannot run, even when recompiled? This is what is happening with Windows on ARM (WOA), as Windows President Steven Sinofsky makes clear in his lengthy post on the subject:

Developers wanting to reach WOA with existing apps have two options. Many apps will be best served by building new Metro style front ends for existing data sources or applications, and communicating through a web services API … Other existing applications will be well served by reusing large amounts of engine or runtime code, and surrounding that with a Metro style experience.

This restriction means that WOA cannot benefit from what what might otherwise be its biggest advantage versus the competition: huge numbers of apps that could easily be ported.

Microsoft’s reasoning is that the existing Windows software deployment model is broken so badly that it cannot be fixed:

If we enabled the broad porting of existing code we would fail to deliver on our commitment to longer battery life, predictable performance, and especially a reliable experience over time. The conventions used by today’s Windows apps do not necessarily provide this, whether it is background processes, polling loops, timers, system hooks, startup programs, registry changes, kernel mode code, admin rights, unsigned drivers, add-ins, or a host of other common techniques. By avoiding these constructs, WOA can deliver on a new level of customer satisfaction: your WOA PC will continue to perform well over time as apps are isolated from the system and each other, and you will remain in control of what additional software is running on your behalf, all while letting the capabilities of diverse hardware shine through.

says Sinofsky. It is a view that has merit, particularly when you consider how badly Windows has been damaged by poor quality OEM software.

Note that he is even promising an end to Windows “cruft”, as memorably described by Verity Stob in State of Decay:

Cruft Force 7. Wounded. Description: No longer able to logon using original account as the system freezes, so must logon as "Verity2" or similar

and the like. “Your WOA PC will continue to perform well over time,” Sinofsky promises.

Another reason to like this approach is that the Windows Runtime (WinRT), the platform for which third-parties are allowed to develop, is in my view a great piece of work. The WinRT apps in the Windows 8 Developer Preview perform well, even though they are simple things put together quickly, many of them by students as I recall. The insistence on asynchronous calls for any system API that might be slow to return should ensure responsive applications.

At the BUILD conference last September we were told that the Windows team sat down to create a new platform that avoids the mistakes of the past and while it introduce frustrations of its own, some of which we know about and some of which developers will discover, it does appear to be well thought-through.

Microsoft Office itself is not the best performing of software, particularly Outlook which is prone to long hangs. Fortunately, Outlook is missing from the version of Office 15 which will ship for WOA, and journalist Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reports positively on a recent glimpse at the software.

The big risk

A sure-fire success then? No, because the downside of WOA is that right now there are no apps for it, beyond what we have seen in the developer preview. It is a brand new platform; and the history of personal computing is littered with good products that failed because they could not achieve sufficient momentum.

I am just back from RIM’s BlackBerry conference in Amsterdam, impressed by what I have seen of the PlayBook and forthcoming BlackBerry 10 platform and its tools for developers, but thinking, is this enough to persuade a customer to buy a BlackBerry tablet instead of the safe choices of Apple iOS or Google Android?

Microsoft has the market presence to make this work, you may think; but the Windows Phone 7 story so far shows that this is not enough. The new phone OS has only a tiny market share after a year, and if it recovers, it will be more to do with Nokia than with Microsoft.

WOA also has interesting competition in the form of Windows 8 on x86, which will also have WinRT, but without the restrictions on desktop apps. If partners focus on Intel Windows 8, as the “full” version, it could be hard for WOA to find its market.

There are problems with Windows 8 on x86 too. Most of existing Windows apps will need a keyboard and mouse to work properly, and expect to find large amounts of storage, not the 16 or 32 GB in a typical tablet. Windows 8 Intel devices may end up like the Samsung tablet given to attendees at BUILD: powerful, but heavy, expensive, with short battery life, and complete with the clutter of a separate keyboard. Such devices have their place, but they are not an answer to the iPad.

It is WOA, not Windows 8 x86, that has to win market share from Apple.

Microsoft is choosing to do WOA right, rather than opening it up to the kinds of problems which have afflicted Windows in the past. That does makes sense, because it is those problems which have made users gladly move away from Windows now that compelling alternatives are available.

I also believe that OS vendors work too hard to pump up the app numbers, and not hard enough to ensure quality, resulting in app stores full of poor to indifferent apps. This is why schemes like the BlackBerry effort mentioned above do as much harm as good, enticing developers to submit rubbish in order to win a new gadget. An app store with 10 great apps is better for users than one with a thousand poor ones.

It is nevertheless true that apps make or break a platform. BUILD attendees and those who have downloaded the Windows 8 developer preview have had the tools to make WinRT apps for a few months now, but my impression is that most are waiting to see how it progresses before investing seriously in WinRT development. Another problem is that Windows 8 developer preview works nicely on a real tablet, but not so well in a virtual machine or on a PC without a touch screen.

I still think WOA may work.

  • If Microsoft does a good job with WOA Office, giving it an unique selling point against the competition.
  • If the WOA devices are competitively priced.
  • If the battery life is good.
  • If there are at least a handful of truly worthwhile third-party apps at launch.
  • If there is not some obvious problem with stability, or an annoyance that spoils the experience, like the one I found on the PlayBook when the virtual keyboard failed to pop up when trying to author a tweet in the web browser.

That is a lot of ifs though, and the progress of WOA will be a fascinating tech story throughout 2012.

mobile, nokia, software development, symbian, trolltech

Will Nokia’s Qt come to Windows Phone?

When Nokia acquired Trolltech back in 2008, it made perfect sense as a way of supporting development on Symbian, its smartphone operating system, and nudging the Qt project, which provides a cross-platform framework for native applications, more towards mobile rather than just desktop application support. It also made sense as Nokia worked on Maemo and then Meego, its Linux for mobile project.

Then came February 2011 and CEO Stephen Elop’s announcement that Nokia would partner with Microsoft and make Windows Phone its primary smartphone operating system. Windows Phone 7 does not support native code development, other than by operators, manufacturers, and of course Microsoft itself. What future for Qt at Nokia now?

Here at Blackberry Devcon Europe, Nokia’s Lars Knoll, Qt Chief Maintainer, has been introducing Qt to Blackberry developers. Qt forms a critical part of RIM’s Blackberry 10 (BBX) platform, based on the PlayBook tablet OS and set to come to Blackberry phones later this year. The Cascades UI framework, for hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D rendering on BBX, uses Qt core and an adaption of QML (Qt Modeling Language). You can use Qt with or without Cascades on BBX.

Lars Knol, Nokia

Given that Nokia makes mobile devices which are in competition with RIM’s devices, it may seem odd that Nokia is supporting Qt on Blackberry. I asked Knoll about the status of Qt within Nokia following the move to Windows Phone.

There’s not too much I can say right now. The only thing I can repeat is that we’re still investing in Qt. We’re actually hiring more people to work on Qt. Qt is an essential part of the strategy for the next billion. That’s all I can say right now, but stay tuned, in time you’ll hear more.

He added later that Nokia is in business to make money; in other words, there are strong business reasons for Nokia to continue with Qt. The “next billion” reference refers to Nokia’s stated intention to bring apps to the next billion.

One possibility is that Qt will in fact support a future version of Windows Phone. It is already clear that Windows Phone 8 will use the same kernel as Windows 8 and we can expect a unified development platform build on the Windows Runtime (WinRT), which does support native code development.

It is not too much of a stretch then to expect a future Qt framework that will target Windows Phone and Windows 8 tablets. Nokia’s Elop has also hinted that it is interested in Windows tablets as well as phones in future.

internet, mobile, Web

Telcos have a dying business model – APIs and cloud services are the future says Alcatel-Lucent’s Laura Merling

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Laura Merling from Alcatel-Lucent spoke at the Monki Gras conference in London earlier this week, saying in effect that telecommunication companies have a dying business model.

She gave a two-minute summary of Telco history.  “First it was all about voice,” she said. “Then the intertubes happened. Now you had data … then it went back to voice, the big push for wireless. Then of course wireless moved, so it’s not about voice any more, it’s about the data.”

She expects the next step to be “connected devices … the phone goes away, everything you do both data and voice happens on other devices.”

What does this mean for telcos? They have become commoditised, she said, suppliers of data plans. “It is a big commoditised business that has no real innovation.”

“In the future, the data plans dies,”, Merling says. “Think about it. How many devices have you got? Think about connecting all of those. You probably want the same data plan. But why pay for a data plan? How will telcos make money? You can’t just keep increasing the data plan.”

Instead, the money is going to come from the APIs and accessing the services.

Enter Twilio, a virtual telco. “I think of twilio as a craft telco”, said Merling, tying in with the beer theme that flowed through Monki Gras. “Do they sell hardware? No. They have software and APIs.” She says the Twilio business model scares the industry: it is based on transactions, not data plans. She also noted how old established vendors are buying up software-based providers, such as BT acquiring Ribbit and Microsoft acquiring Skype.

Tomorrow’s telco, says Merling, is a based on a software stack. “Antennas and towers are not going to go away, but the infrastructure becomes all software based … combining network services with cloud infrastructure.

“At Alcatel-Lucent we sell hardware. We sell big giant boxes. But this is where it is going.” She says the telcos are now aware of this, hence the title of her session “How telcos got API religion.”

Her final prediction? “Jeff Lawson becomes the CEO of AT&T. Why? Because the model has to change.”

It was a thought-provoking talk, though the unspoken question was whether in fact the telcos will successfully transition or whether they will simply become less important, continuing to maintain the pipes while others profit from what flows through them.

I interviewed Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson in October last year.

development, microsoft, mobile, sharepoint, windows

What would you like to see in Microsoft Office 15?

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Today brings the news that Microsoft Office 15 is now in Technical Preview (also known as private beta).

There is little news about what is in it other than this:

With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio.

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So what would you like to see in Office 15? Here are a few things on my wish list:

  1. Properly integrate SharePoint (and therefore Office 365) with Windows so that you can use it easily without ever opening a web browser. That might mean fixing SharePoint WorkSpace or doing something better, like Explorer integration without the various hassles associated with WebDAV.
  2. Fix Outlook, or better still replace it. I hear many complaints about Outlook, either concerning its performance, or else one of its many annoyances such as how hard it is to reply to an email while quoting sections of the original message – astonishing, when you consider the maturity of the product.
  3. Improve cross-platform support. Office on the Mac is poor compared to the Windows version, particularly in terms of performance. It is also time Microsoft came out with apps for iOS and Android for touch-friendly document editing.
  4. Update the user interface for touch control as far as possible. This will be critical for Windows 8 tablets, especially on ARM.
  5. Improve structured document editing in Word. Styles are hard to use, so are bullets and numbering. I tend not to use the paragraph numbering in Word because it is so fiddly and annoying.

The problem is that Office is a huge and intricate bag of legacy. The work Microsoft did in replacing the menus with ribbon toolbars was admirable in its way, and potentially more touch-friendly, but if you scratch the surface much is unchanged underneath. All the old commands remain.

exchange, microsoft, windows

Fixing a Small Business Server 2008 broken by updates

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I had a call last night from a small business whose email no longer worked. They had applied updates to the server but Exchange had failed to restart.

Looking at the services it was easy to see why. All the Exchange services and certain others including the IIS web server were set to disabled:

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The likely culprit was Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3 (KB 2602324) – or rather, the mechanism which applies the patch, since this seems to be an issue that others have run into as far back as 2008 with other Exchange patches, though it is rare:

I installed the Update Rollup 4 and did a reboot of my Exchange Server 2007. But since then, all my services are disabled. Is this a known issue?

My guess is that the patch disables the services in order to update the binaries and then, for some unknown reason not fixed by Microsoft over these last four years, fails to re-enable them.

It seems that no harm was done other than that the services were disabled, but how can you know which services are meant to be running, which should be set to manual, and which should stay disabled?

I contemplated doing a quick test install of SBS 2008 on a VM just  to see how it is set out of the box, but fortunately found this post by Susan Bradley which shows default SBS 2008 running services.

There were a few other things wrong.  SharePoint Services was raising event 5586:

Unknown SQL Exception 33002 occured. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below. Access to table dbo.Versions is blocked because the signature is not valid.

and there was the related event 33002 from the internal SQL Server used by SharePoint. The cause of this was SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 3. When you apply a major update to SharePoint Services, you have to re-run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. This is by design, though it seems odd to me that you apply an update and it silently breaks the product it is updating until you run a further manual process. Of course the error itself does not give you much clue about what is really wrong.

The third major issue was a JRNL_WRAP_ERROR from the NTFrs File Replication Service. You have to be careful with this one, since the advised fix in the event log presumes the presence of a good replica elsewhere, which in the case of SBS is unlikely. See this article for details. With SBS which it is the sole domain controller you should set the BurFlags registry key to D4. Further comment on ServerFault here.

The incident reminds me of how prickly SBS can be. It is great value for what it does, but has all the complexity of Microsoft’s server stack plus the further disadvantage of being crammed onto one machine. I prefer a pseudo multi-server approach, even for small businesses, with at least two physical servers and separate VMs for Exchange, SharePoint, domain controller, backup DC on the other physical machine, and so on. Of course this has complexity of its own.

I would guess that when upgrade time comes around, companies like this will be looking carefully at Office 365. Or Google Apps; but the advantage of Office 365 is that you can make the transition from SBS with relatively little impact on users: just migrate the Active Directory, Exchange and SharePoint. You lose flexibility and some local performance, but hand over the maintenance issues to Microsoft.

apple, microsoft, mobile, silverlight, software development

Nokia results: hope for Windows Phone?

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It is almost one year since Nokia’s dramatic announcement that it would transition its smartphone range to Windows Phone. Today the company released its results for the fourth quarter and for the full year 2011, the first since the release of the the Lumia range of Windows Phone devices. How it is doing?

This is one you can spin either way. The negative view: Nokia is losing money. Sales are down 21% year on year for the quarter and 9% for the full year, and the company reported an operating loss of just over a billion Euro for the year, most of which was in the last quarter.

If you look at the quarter on quarter device sales, they are down in both smart devices and mobile phones. The Symbian business has not held up as well as the company hoped:

changing market conditions are putting increased pressure on Symbian. In certain markets, there has been an acceleration of the anticipated trend towards lower-priced smartphones with specifications that are different from Symbian’s traditional strengths. As a result of the changing market conditions, combined with our increased focus on Lumia, we now believe that we will sell fewer Symbian devices than we previously anticipated.

says the press release. As for Windows Phone and Lumia, CEO Stephen Elop says that “well over 1 million Lumia devices” have been sold: a start, but still tiny relative to Apple iOS and Google Android. Elop cleverly calls it a “beachhead”, but given the energy Nokia put into the launch I suspect it is disappointed with the numbers.

Put this in context though and there are reasons for hope. First, Nokia’s speed of execution is impressive, from announcement to the first Windows Phones in nine months or so. Further, the Lumia (judging by the Lumia 800 I have been using) does not feel like a device rushed to market. The design is excellent, and within the small world of Windows Phone 7 hardware Nokia has established itself as the brand of first choice.

Second, despite the dismal sales for Windows Phone 7 since its launch, there are signs that Microsoft may yet emerge from the wreckage inflicted on the market by iOS and Android in better shape than others. WebOS has all-but gone. RIM has yet to convince us that it has a viable recovery strategy. Intel Tizen is just getting started. If Microsoft has a successful launch for Windows 8, Elop’s “third ecosystem” idea may yet come to fruition.

Third, Nokia has already shown that it is better able to market Windows Phone 7 than Microsoft itself, or its other mobile partners. Lumia made a good splash at CES in January, and the platform may gain some market share in the influential US market.

Nokia is not just Windows Phone though, and even if its smartphone strategy starts to work it has those falling Symbian sales to contend with. It will not be easy, even taking an optimistic view.

Nor will it be easy for Windows 8 to succeed in a tablet market owned by Apple at the high end and by Amazon/Android at the low end.

.net, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Why Microsoft is scrapping the MIX conference

Microsoft is scrapping its MIX conference, according to General Manager Tim O’Brien:

we have decided to merge MIX, our spring web conference for developers and designers, into our next major developer conference, which we will host sometime in the coming year. I know a number of folks were wondering about MIX, given the time of year, so we wanted to make sure there’s no ambiguity, and be very clear… there will be no MIX 2012.

O’Brien says that MIX started in the aftermath of the 2005 PDC because:

there was a lot of discussion around our engagement with the web community, and how we needed a more focused effort around our upcoming plans for Internet Explorer, the roadmap for our web platform, the work we were starting on web standards (we were shipping IE6 at the time), and so on.

That is not quite how I recall it. PDC 2005 was the pre-Vista PDC, no, not the “three pillars of Longhorn” in PDC 2003, but the diluted version of Longhorn that was actually delivered as Windows Vista. One thing Microsoft really did get around this time was that design mattered. Apple had cool design, Adobe had cool design (and a strong grip on the designer community), but Microsoft did not.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was intended to win designers to the Windows platform, with its graphically-rich and multimedia-friendly API. In order to do this, the company needed to win designers over to the idea of using Expression Blend rather than Adobe Flash and Photoshop.

This was doubly true when Microsoft decided to bring WPF to the browser in the form of Silverlight, a decision that was announced at PDC 2005 and expanded on at the first MIX in 2006.

One of the things I recall at the first and second MIX events were groups of bemused Flash designers who had been bussed in by Microsoft to enjoy the lights of Vegas and learn about Blend.

General web authoring was a factor as well, as Microsoft sought to bring Internet Explorer back on track and to persuade web designers of the virtues of Microsoft’s web platform.

I enjoyed the MIX events. They were small enough that you could easily get to speak both to attendees and to the Microsoft folk there, and once you allow for the fact that Vegas is Vegas, the atmosphere was good.

As an attempt to appeal to designers though, MIX was a failure. It was all too forced; many of the people attending were developers anyway; and Microsoft itself included more and more developer content in ensuing MIX events.

The 2010 MIX was hijacked by Windows Phone 7, an interesting topic but drifting far from the original intentions.

It comes as no surprise to hear than MIX is no more. It is associated with WPF and Silverlight, neither of which are now strategic for Microsoft in these days of Windows 8 and the Windows Runtime (WinRT).

That said, Microsoft still has difficulty appealing to designers.

What next then? O’Brien says:

we look ahead to 2012 and beyond, the goal is to ensure that global Microsoft developer events are of the caliber that many of you experienced at BUILD last September, in addition to the thousands of online and local developer events we host around the world to support communities and connect directly with developers. We will share more details of our next developer event later this year.

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.net, microsoft, professional, sql

Microsoft LocalDB: another option for local databases

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Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2012 on  March 7th 2012. In Microsoft’s world “launches” do not always coincide with the availability of release code, which may come before or after, but they are usually not far apart.

The big news in SQL Server 2012 is in new BI (Business Intelligence) features and the ability to import and export from the open source Hadoop framework. Microsoft is also supporting Hadoop on Windows Server and Windows Azure. Robert Sheldon has an excellent article on TechTarget which describes the Hadoop integration.

At the other end of the scale though there is a new approach to local databases, which interests me as this is the kind of thing an application developer might use for local applications. SQL Express LocalDB uses the full SQL Server Express engine but does not require a SQL Server service to be running or even installed. In summary:

  • The LocalDB binaries can be installed with a separate installer or as part of the SQL Server Express.
  • LocalDB instances are isolated to the user.
  • The LocalDB system databases are buried deep in AppData in the user profile. The default location for user databases is the root of the user profile.
  • The old SQL Server User Instances are now deprecated

A driver for LocalDB has to know how to fire up the SQL Server binaries if they are not running, which means that old drivers will not work. Microsoft has patched System.Data.SqlClient in .NET 4 to work with LocalDB.

LocalDB Pros and cons

The advantage of LocalDB over the cut-down Compact Edition is that you get full access to SQL Server features including transactions, stored procedures, geographical data types and so on. It is meant to improve on the old user instances by simplifying matters for the user: no need to run a service, and management of SQL Server completely hidden.

The disadvantage is that your app still has the overhead of SQL Server running in a separate process. A SQL Server LocalDB install also takes around 140MB, which bumps up the download size if your app is distributed on the web.

If you need a local database, it seems to me that Microsoft still has nothing that quite matches SQLite, which runs in-process, is lightning fast, and which does not require any hidden system databases.

On the other hand, it might make sense to use SQL Server if you want to integrate with a server database, or if you are familiar with coding for SQL Server.

I would like to see Windows ship with a local database engine documented as something developers can rely on being there, as with Core Data on the Mac. It would also help if the SQL Server team got together with the Office team and worked out how to get Access and SQL Server Express to use the same database engine – yes, I know Access can use SQL Server data, but it still defaults to its own .ACCDB format and JET database engine.

microsoft, windows, xbox

Microsoft financials: Windows under stress, Server and Office making up

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If we are really in the post-PC era, then one of two things will happen. Either Microsoft will make a big success of non-PC products, or it will start delivering shocking financial results. Neither is yet true. Here are the results just announced, broken down into a simple table.

Quarter ending December 31st 2011 vs quarter ending December 31st 2010, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Profit Change
Client (Windows + Live) 4736 -320 2850 -64
Server and Tools 4772 +484 1996 +285
Online 784 +71 -458 +101
Business (Office) 6279 +169 4152 +65
Entertainment and devices 4237 +539 528 -138

A few observations. Server revenue (though not profit) exceeded client revenue; I am not sure if this is the first time it has done so, but it is unusual. The Office division enjoyed a remarkable quarter, and the press release mentions 10% growth in Exchange and SharePoint, and 30% growth (from a smaller base) in Lync and Dynamics CRM. Azure? Not mentioned so I presume revenue is small.

Where is Office 365? Somewhere in the Office figures I would guess; and once again, since it is not mentioned, I think we can assume it is not delivering a large amount of revenue yet. I would like to know more though.

What Microsoft calls Online is formed of Bing search and services and advertising income. Another hefty loss, but revenue is up, loss somewhat reduced, and Microsoft claims that  “Bing-powered US market share, including Yahoo! properties, was approximately 27%”. Not bad.

This is the big quarter for gaming and Xbox delivered accordingly. The faltering Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 are somewhere lost in those Xbox numbers, and again its revenue is not mentioned in the press release.

microsoft, windows

Meet Resilient File System (ReFS), a new file system for Windows

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Microsoft has announced the Resilient File System (ReFS), a replacement for the NTFS file system which has been used since the first release of Windows NT in 1993.

The new file system increases limits in NTFS as follows:

  NTFS ReFS
Max file size 2^64 -1 2^64-1 bytes
Max volume size 2^40 bytes 2^78 bytes
Max files in a directory 2^32 –1 (per volume) 2^64
Max file name length 32K unicode (255 unicode) 32K unicode
Max path length 32K 32K

I have done my best to set out the NTFS limits but it is complicated, and there are limitations in the Windows API as well as in NTFS. See this article for more on NTFS limits; and this article for an explanation of file name and path length limits in the Windows API.

Microsoft’s announcement focuses on two things. One is resilience, with claims that ReFS is better at preserving data in the event of power failure or other calamity. Another is how ReFS is designed to work alongside Storage Spaces, about which I posted earlier this month.

Of the two, Storage Spaces will be more visible to users. In addition, it sounds as if ReFS will not be the default in Windows 8 client:

…we will implement ReFS in a staged evolution of the feature: first as a storage system for Windows Server, then as storage for clients, and then ultimately as a boot volume. This is the same approach we have used with new file systems in the past.

Note that there are losses as well as gains in ReFS. Short file names are gone, so are quotas, so is compression:

The NTFS features we have chosen to not support in ReFS are: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas.

Overall ReFS strikes me as a conservative rather than radical upgrade. This is not the return of WinFS, an abandoned project which was to bring relational file storage to Windows. It will not help, in itself, with the biggest problem client users have with their file system: finding their stuff. Nor does it have built-in deduplication, which can make storage substantially more efficient. Microsoft says the file system is pluggable (as is NTFS) so that features like deduplication can added by other providers or by Microsoft with other products.