I attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to follow and cover Microsoft, both in terms of its announcements at the show, and those of its competitors. From that standpoint, and since Microsoft announced that this year’s CES would be its last, I attended again this year and I think it was the best CES Microsoft’s had since I started attending. But the reasons for that are unexpected and surprising. Let me give you a little more context and explain why.
Microsoft has, since 1998, delivered the kickoff keynote for the entire CES conference, and has typically used it to make important announcements. For example, when I attended my first CES in 2009, Microsoft used the keynote to announce the the Windows 7 beta. The company has also used past keynotes to show off Project Natal (which became Kinect) and at last year’s kickoff, Microsoft announced Windows on ARM.
So over the fall, I expected big things from this year’s keynote, like the Windows 8 beta announcement and/or something around the "Tango" or “Apollo” releases of Windows Phone. But in the run up to the show, we learned that the Windows 8 beta wouldn’t be out until February, we got fairly clear indications that Windows Phone technology announcements wouldn’t be on the agenda and then Microsoft announced that 2012 would be its last year at CES.
Correspondingly, I expected very little out of the Microsoft keynote. And in terms of news, very little is what we got. I mean, sure, Ryan Seacrest anchored the event, and there was a roster of smaller announcements (if you want, you can read about them in my special Redmond Roundup @ CES dispatch). But the keynote’s Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Xbox/Kinect demos were basically encore presentations from the Windows Phone 7.5 launch, //build/ and E3.
But somehow, things seemed to come together for Microsoft at this CES. To begin with, Nokia announced its Lumia 900 Windows Phone handset, for release this Spring on AT&T. It did so at its own, somewhat low-key press conference downstairs from, and a few hours before, Microsoft’s keynote. The phone looked great and response was very positive. Nokia also made official the immediate availability of the Lumia 710 on T-Mobile USA for $49.99. Steve Ballmer joined Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop on stage for part of this press conference, and I think it was pivotal for Microsoft.
I didn’t really appreciate that fully until during the show. Nokia’s booth was very busy, and its Windows Phone handsets were everywhere. Even at the displays where Nokia was showing its mobile audio accessories, the sound sources were 710 and 800 handsets. It’s as if the company were changing its name from Nokia to Lumia.
Lumia represents much more than robust support for the platform by an OEM. When I went by the booth and watched a few demos, I realized that Nokia’s Lumia 800 and 900 phones don’t just run Windows Phone, they transform it. The software doesn’t change, mind you, but the context has changed completely. Those handsets are so elegant, and Nokia is so unequivocally committed to Windows Phone, that suddenly it shines. Pride replaces caveats, beauty replaces clunky-ness, excitement replaces postponed hope and, for the attendees of CES, interest replaced cynicism and condescension.
With Android receding to hum-drum, commodity status at this CES and the iOS ecosystem devices seeming less prominent as well, Windows Phone seemed to have the “it” status. No wonder Joe Belfiore, Brandon Watson and others from the Windows Phone team looked so happy at the keynote.
And perhaps most interesting, that Windows Phone buzz seemed to have created anticipation around Windows 8. It’s long been my suspicion that, when released, Windows 8 will lend gravitas and momentum to Windows Phone. But I never really considered that this booster effect could work in both directions. Add-in the “Ultrabook” laptops displayed by a number of vendors at CES, and things are looking surprisingly positive for Microsoft. And all this during its final, understated year at the show.
Microsoft’s CES keynote did do one thing quite boldly: it presented Metro as the company’s key value proposition. That makes a lot of sense. Metro is non-derivative; it builds on Microsoft’s versatility across contexts (work at the office, gaming/entertainment in the living room and a combination of the two while mobile); and with the right partners having the right focus, execution can be elegant, compelling and open.
Redmond still has a huge fight on its hands, but it seems to be finding a certain peace with itself, building good technology, letting its partners do the talking, providing value to the enterprise and proving its mettle at a consumer event. Now it needs to sustain this momentum, and continue to be patient.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 01/12/2012 at 6:40 PM8 comments
The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary. IT interests intentionally live in the past. On the other hand, developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech's future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it. Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder and musings along the lines of "it takes all kinds." Different subcultures have different tendencies. So be it.
Microsoft, with its Windows operating system (OS), can't take such a laissez-faire view of the world. Redmond relies on IT to deploy Windows and (at the very least) influence its procurement, but it also relies on developers to build software for Windows, especially software that has a dependency on features in new versions of the OS. It must indulge and nourish developers' fetish for an early birthing of the next generation of software, even as it acknowledges the IT reality that the next wave will arrive on-schedule in Redmond and will travel very slowly to end users.
With the move to Windows 8, and the corresponding shift in application development models, this paradox is certainly in place. On the one hand, the next version of Windows is widely expected sometime in 2012, and its full-scale deployment will likely push into 2014 or even later. Meanwhile, there's a technology that runs on today's Windows 7, will continue to run in the desktop mode of Windows 8 (the next version's codename), and provides absolutely the best architectural bridge to the Windows 8 Metro-style application development stack. That technology is Silverlight. And given what we now know about Windows 8, one might think, as I do, that Microsoft ecosystem developers should be flocking to it.
But because developers are trying to get a jump on the future, and since many of them believe the impending v5.0 release of Silverlight will be the technology's last, not everyone is flocking to it; in fact, some are fleeing from it. Is this sensible? Is it not unprecedented? What options does it lead to? What's the right way to think about the situation?
Is v5.0 really the last major version of the technology called Silverlight? We don't know. But Scott Guthrie, the "father" and champion of the technology, left the Developer Division of Microsoft months ago to work on the Windows Azure team, and he took his people with him. John Papa, who was a very influential Redmond-based evangelist for Silverlight (and is a Visual Studio Magazine author), left Microsoft completely. About a year ago, when initial suspicion of Silverlight's demise reached significant magnitude, Papa interviewed Guthrie on video and their discussion served to dispel developers' fears; but now they've moved on.
So read into that what you will and let's suppose, for the sake of argument, speculation that Silverlight's days of major revision and iteration are over now is correct. Let's assume the shine and glimmer has dimmed. Let's assume that any Silverlight application written today, and that therefore any investment of financial and human resources made in Silverlight development today, is destined for rework and extra investment in a few years, if the application's platform needs to stay current.
Is this really so different from any technology investment we make? Every framework, language, runtime and operating system is subject to change, to improvement, to flux and, yes, to obsolescence. What differs from project to project is how near-term that obsolescence is and how disruptive the change will be. The shift from .NET 1.1. to 2.0 was incremental. Some of the further changes were, too. But the switch from Windows Forms to WPF was major, and the change from ASP.NET Web Services (asmx) to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was downright fundamental.
Meanwhile, the transition to the .NET development model for Windows 8 Metro-style applications is actually quite gentle. The finer points of this subject are covered nicely in Magenic's excellent white paper, "Assessing the Windows 8 Development Platform." As the authors of that paper (including Rocky Lhotka) point out, Silverlight code won't just "port" to Windows 8. And, no, Silverlight user interfaces won't either; Metro always supports XAML, but that relationship is not commutative. But the concepts, the syntax, the architecture and developers' skills map from Silverlight to Windows 8 Metro and the Windows Runtime (WinRT) very nicely. That's not a coincidence. It's not an accident. This is a protected transition. It's not a slap in the face.
There are few things that are unnerving about this transition, which make it seem markedly different from others:
- The assumed end of the road for Silverlight is something many think they can see. Instead of being ignorant of the technology's expiration date, we believe we know it. If ignorance is bliss, it would seem our situation lacks it.
- The new technology involving WinRT and Metro involves a name change from Silverlight.
- .NET, which underlies both Silverlight and the XAML approach to WinRT development, has just about reached 10 years of age. That's equivalent to 80 in human years, or so many fear.
My take is that the combination of these three factors has contributed to what for many is a psychologically compelling case that Silverlight should be abandoned today and HTML 5 (the agnostic kind, not the Windows RT variety) should be embraced in its stead. I understand the logic behind that. I appreciate the preemptive, proactive, vigilant conscientiousness involved in its calculus. But for a great many scenarios, I don't agree with it.
HTML 5 clients, no matter how impressive their interactivity and the emulation of native application interfaces they present may be, are still second-class clients. They are getting better, especially when hardware acceleration and fast processors are involved. But they still lag. They still feel like they're emulating something, like they're prototypes, like they're not comfortable in their own skins. They're based on compromise, and they feel compromised too.
HTML 5/JavaScript development tools are getting better, and will get better still, but aren't as productive as tools for other environments, like Flash, like Silverlight or even more primitive tooling for iOS or Android. HTML's roots as a document markup language, rather than an application interface, create a disconnect that impedes productivity. I don't necessarily think that problem is insurmountable, but it's here today.
If you're building line-of-business applications, you need a first-class client and you need productivity. Lack of productivity increases your costs and worsens your backlog. A second-class client will erode user satisfaction, which is never good. Worse yet, this erosion will be inconspicuous, rather than easily identified and diagnosed, because the inferiority of an HTML 5 client over a native one is hard to identify and, notably, doing so at this juncture in the industry is unpopular. Why would you fault a technology that everyone believes is revolutionary? Instead, user disenchantment will remain latent and yet will add to the malaise caused by slower development.
If you're an ISV and you're coveting the reach of running multi-platform, it's a different story. You've likely wanted to move to HTML 5 already, and the uncertainty around Silverlight may be the only remaining momentum or pretext you need to make the shift. You're deploying many more copies of your application than a line-of-business developer is anyway; this makes the economic hit from lower productivity less impactful, and the wider potential installed base might even make it profitable.
But no matter who you are, it's important to take stock of the situation and do it accurately. Continued, but merely incremental changes in a development model lead to conservatism and general lack of innovation in the underlying platform. Periods of stability and equilibrium are necessary, but permanence in that equilibrium leads to loss of platform relevance, market share and utility. Arguably, that's already happened to Windows. The change Windows 8 brings is necessary and overdue. The marked changes in using .NET if we're to build applications for the new OS are inevitable. We will ultimately benefit from the change, and what we can reasonably hope for in the interim is a migration path for our code and skills that is navigable, logical and conceptually comfortable.
That path takes us to a place called WinRT, rather than a place called Silverlight. But considering everything that is changing for the good, the number of disruptive changes is impressively minimal. The name may be changing, and there may even be some significance to that in terms of Microsoft's internal management of products and technologies. But as the consumer, you should care about the ingredients, not the name. Turkish coffee and Greek coffee are much the same. Although you'll find plenty of interested parties who will find the names significant, drinkers of the beverage should enjoy either one. It's all coffee, it's all sweet, and you can tell your fortune from the grounds that are left at the end. Back on the software side, it's all XAML, and C# or VB .NET, and you can make your fortune from the product that comes out at the end. Coffee drinkers wouldn't switch to tea. Why should XAML developers switch to HTML?
Posted on 11/28/2011 at 9:37 AM28 comments
The much ballyhooed release of Nokia’s first Windows Phone handsets finally took place Wednesday at the Nokia World event in London. There had been a lot of anticipation building up to this “reveal,” and it is genuinely a watershed moment for the Windows Phone platform. That’s because Nokia’s adoption of Windows Phone brings several firsts:
- For the first time, a major mobile phone player has standardized on Windows Phone as its exclusive smartphone platform.
- For the first time (apparently) an OEM will be working actively with carriers to see to it that Windows Phone will be well-promoted and featured prominently at retail points of sale
- For the first time, a Windows Phone OEM has within its comfort zone the ability to push products out to numerous global markets (not just North America, Asia and Western Europe) and to manufacture handsets at price points that can work in those markets
- For the first time, a major mobile hardware company has a self-interest, if not its self-preservation, at stake in the success of Windows Phone.
Now that the first two Nokia Windows Phone handsets, the Lumia 800 and 710, have come out, Windows Phone can stop waiting. But it also has to stop merely hoping, and start actually achieving. This is a big deal, but this is not the finish line. And make no mistake, the odds are still stacked against Windows Phone. The challenges are not insurmountable, but they are numerous and they are formidable. Among them:
- Windows Phone needs to be an express stop for app developers; right now it's a local station open during limited hours. Although there are now more than 35,000 apps for Windows Phone -– a very impressive number for a phone that's a bit less than a year old –- there are numerous major or important apps that aren't on the platform. Even apps on Windows Phone have more token representation than on iOS or Android. Compare the lone ESPN Score Center on Windows Phone to ESPN's app presence on the iTunes App Store, or try searching for "ESPN" on the Android Market and see what comes up.
Likewise, Windows Phone has Angry Birds, but only one version of it, as opposed to the three versions on the other two major smartphone platforms. Will this situation improve? Will Windows Phone become a mandatory chennel for apps developers? Or will we keep looking forward to better app availability tomorrow? - Windows Phone doesn't have a carrier champion. Apple may not have needed one, given its own retail network, but it had one nonetheless in AT&T. Android had a champion in Verizon. An OEM champion is good, but carriers may be even more important worldwide, and they definitely are in the United States. Will Nokia make this better, especially in the United States, where it has so little influence?
- The Smartphone landscape is no longer a green field, and even in "the Enterprise," preferences and prejudices are in evidence. IT may have a disincentive in deploying Windows Phone handsets to employees, because those employees may have a strong preference for something else. That wasn't true for Blackberry/RIM in the last decade, and it's not true for iOS in this one. It may or may not be true for Android. Microsoft has an uphill battle even in allegedly friendly territory. It has no home field advantage. Anywhere.
- Windows Phone hardware has been lackluster. What we've seen so far is mostly repurposed Android chassis with three haptic buttons on the bottom instead of four. What Nokia showed today is better; at least stylistically, in the case of the Lumia 800 (pun intended), but features are still inferior with no front-facing camera and limited on-board memory. Today was a good start. Will the next phones be even better, or will the momentum slow?
- Marketing of Windows Phone by Microsoft has been weak, and inconsistent. There was a media blast last year, when the phones were launched, and then things petered out. AT&T stores had a Windows Phone section early on, but that seems to have been withdrawn, too. Without strong, sustained marketing, Windows Phone needs to rely on grassroots popularity and word of mouth for growth. I'm skeptical that such viral popularity will spontaneously appear and build. Will Nokia fill the void? I think so, at least in Europe -- but will that build momentum for the Windows Phone platform overall?
Windows Phone has many hurdles ahead. It would be easy for any one of them to foil Microsoft (and Nokia) in the smartphone market. But I (a Windows Phone user) am not sure that it would be so hard to climb these hurdles, and even transcend them.
Microsoft and Nokia can seed the Marketplace with more major, high-quality apps. Nokia can come out with a second wave of handsets that could kick some butt, in looks and in technology. Microsoft can now (finally) integrate Skype into the Windows Phone OS to create consumer appeal and help "bring your own device" Enterprise employees save on their calling plan minutes. Microsoft could decide tomorrow to market and advertise Windows Phone aggressively, and hire the right agency to do this in a hip way, and hopefully in coordination with Nokia. And with that combination of positive changes, a carrier could finally become interested. One example is Verizon (rumored to have had employees onsite in London today) and its 45 percent London-based owner, Vodafone.
Would such a turnaround take perfect alignment of the stars to pull off? Maybe. But determination to win would make this outcome most likely.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 10/27/2011 at 12:44 PM4 comments
Last week, at the PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Summit in Seattle, Microsoft held a coming out party, not only for SQL Server 2012 (formerly “Denali”), but also for the company’s “Big Data” initiative. Microsoft’s banner headline announcement: it is developing of a version of Apache Hadoop that will run on Windows Server and Windows Azure. Hadoop is the open source implementation of Google’s proprietary MapReduce parallel computation engine and environment, and it's used (quite widely now) in the processing of streams of data that go well beyond even the largest enterprise data sets in size. Whether it’s sensor, clickstream, social media, location-based or other data that is generated and collected in large gobs, Hadoop is often on the scene in the service of processing and analyzing it.
Microsoft’s Hadoop release will be a bona fide contribution to the venerable open source project. It will be built in conjunction with Hortonworks, a company with an appropriately elephant-themed name (“Hadoop” was the name the toy elephant of its inventor’s son) and strong Yahoo-Hadoop pedigree. Even before PASS, Microsoft had announced Hadoop connectors for its SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse Edition (SQL PDW) appliance. But last week Microsoft announced things that would make Hadoop its own – in more ways than one.
Yes, Hadoop will run natively on Windows and integrate with PDW. But Microsoft will also make available an ODBC driver for Hive, the data warehousing front-end for Hadoop developed by FaceBook. What’s the big deal about an ODBC driver? The combination of that driver and Hive will allow PowerPivot and SQL Server Analysis Services (in its new “Tabular mode”) to connect to Hadoop and query it freely. And that, in turn, will allow any Analysis Services front end, including PowerView (until last week known by its “Crescent” code name), to perform enterprise-quality analysis and data visualization on Hadoop data. Not only is that useful, but it’s even a bit radical.
As powerful as Hadoop is, it’s more of a computer scientist’s or academically-trained analyst’s tool than it is an enterprise analytics product. Hadoop tends to deal in data that is less formally schematized than an enterprise’s transactional data, and Hadoop itself is controlled through programming code rather than anything that looks like it was designed for business unit personnel. Hadoop data is often more “raw” and “wild” than data typically fed to data warehouse and OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) systems. Likewise, Hadoop practitioners have had to be a bit wild too, producing analytical output perhaps a bit more raw than what business users are accustomed to.
But assuming Microsoft makes good on its announcements (and I have pretty specific knowledge that indicates it will), then business users will be able to get at big data, on-premise and in-cloud, and will be able to do so using Excel, PowerPivot, and other tools that they already know, like and with which they are productive.
Microsoft’s Big Data announcements show that Redmond’s BI (Business Intelligence) team keeps on moving. They’re building great products, and they’re doing so in a way that makes powerful technology accessible by a wide commercial audience. For the last seven years, SQL Server’s biggest innovations have been on the BI side of the product. This shows no sign of stopping any time soon, especially since Microsoft saw fit to promote Amir Netz, the engineering brain trust behind Microsoft BI since its inception, to Technical Fellow. This distinction is well-deserved by Mr. Netz and its bestowal is a move well-played by Microsoft.
Last week’s announcements aren’t about just Big Data; they’re about Big BI, now open for Big Business.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 10/17/2011 at 6:37 AM0 comments
As I write this post, Microsoft’s Windows 8-focused //build/ conference has just ended. The apprehension so many developers had around the show is now dissipated, the developer platform and tools have been detailed, and we have all been able to work with the operating system, and develop apps for it, on a touch device, for about 72 hours now. Most people, myself included, like what they saw. The OS is touch-friendly without being an iOS copycat; our developer skill set investments are nicely protected; a new generation of developers trained on the HTML/CSS/JavaScript stack of Web technologies can join the party, and Windows will continue to run on a greatly diverse set of machines.
In working with Windows 8, I have felt an odd combination of excitement and concern. Each time I feel anticipation for something in Windows 8 that looks really neat, I keep feeling a counterweight, an amorphous tug of caution, pulling me back. For about 2 days, I couldn’t put my finger on what was causing this Newton’s Third Law of Windows within me. And then I figured it out. Microsoft itself faces mutual, opposing market forces. And Windows 8 reflects the company’s admirable efforts at, and daunting task of, addressing them.
There’s touch, and there’s the keyboard and mouse; there are tablets, and there are laptops and desktops; there’s ARM and Intel; there’s Metro and the desktop, there’s WinRT and the .NET CLR. And of course, there’s the consumer and the Enterprise. Microsoft’s challenge is that it must appeal to new market segments and new trends, but it must also serve – and leverage – the Enterprise, and consumers who prefer classic Windows.
Booting Windows is almost an allegory for this attempt at mutual coexistence. Windows 8 takes users right to the new Metro-style Start screen but enables them to call up desktop mode applications directly. The Metro version of Internet Explorer can take you right to “desktop view.” The Metro version of Control Panel has a “More settings” option that takes you to the standard desktop version of that same applet. The operating system seems well at home on a tablet, but you can absolutely install it on a conventional laptop or desktop and use it as an upgrade. Or perhaps that would be better deemed a retrofit.
No other software company has to do this. Oracle, IBM and SAP focus on the Enterprise. Apple focuses on the consumer. Even hardware companies tend to divide into camps: Samsung and Sony and Acer look to the consumer and, I would argue, Dell looks mostly to the Enterprise. HP tried to serve both demographics, but it seems close to focusing on businesses more exclusively.
But Microsoft is in a special place. It can neither abandon the old nor deny the new. It must serve both masters. It must mediate, it must reconcile, it must negotiate coexistence. It must cross a chasm, and that is hard. But it then must bridge that divide, and that is harder still. To do so seems foolhardy, and yet it is necessary. It seems almost irrational, and yet it is oddly logical.
Enmeshing such different worlds might appear doomed to failure. And yet the sleeping giant that so many think Microsoft is, this company that started out making BASIC compilers for microcomputers in the 1970s, is taking on the challenge anyway. Because it knows it must.
This week at //build/, many started to believe that it can.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 09/19/2011 at 7:13 AM7 comments
There are plenty of posts and articles out there that provide retrospectives of, and pay homage to, Steve Jobs’ tenure as Apple CEO. I’m not an expert on Apple or Jobs, and this is not one of those posts.
But Steve Jobs’ resignation from the CEO post does mark the end of a related era I know something about. It’s the era that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs defined together. And now that both of them have ended their CEO runs and receded to roles as Chairmen of the Board, it’s important to consider just how much these two men did together to pioneer the industry we now all work in and define ourselves by.
Yes, I identify the era with both men, despite many seeing them as perennial adversaries who led companies that approach computing very differently. The fact is that the two men, and the two companies, have a long and storied shared heritage. It dates back to 1977 when 8-bit computing became hot and when Microsoft BASIC ran on each leading machine of that time. I started working with computers a year later, at the age 12. I didn’t own an Apple II, but I used one at school, and remember distinctly the presence of Microsoft BASIC on that machine, albeit branded "AppleSoft BASIC." It’s a fitting name, and drives home an underpinning to this industry that many don’t realize or have chosen to forget.
I could pontificate some more on that, but it’s more effective for people to hear it in context. With that in mind, I recommend to all as required viewing a 2007 interview of Jobs and Gates by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at that year’s All Things D conference. Here’s a link to the video:
http://t.co/c0aclsd
It doesn't want to play full-screen, but your browser's zoom function should mitigate this problem.
Watch the full length interview video if you can; it’s really quite stunning. It shows how much more these two companies have in common than they do anything in conflict, and how much the two men share in career history and mutual respect. There are also humbling ironies here, including numerous references to how much bigger Microsoft is than Apple, and Jobs talking about how Apple gets excited if its market share increases by 1 point. (Another irony is that it's a Flash video and won't play on an iPad.)
Best of all though, if you advance to the 37:00 mark, you will hear Bill Gates speak (with Jobs politely listening) of a future where people will have multiple devices, including a tablet (which they will use extensively), a phone ("the device that fits in your pocket") as well a more conventional machine with a screen and keyboard. Then Jobs adds commentary on how resilient the PC is and how its death has been exaggerated.
Jobs continues by discussing post-PC devices, illuminating a difference in the two men’s outlooks that is not insignificant. But by and large, it's as if they are of one philosophy. In highlighting that broad unity, the interview kicks the whole polarized industry paradigm and leaves it on its behind. I look at that as just one more valuable contribution to our field.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 08/25/2011 at 12:54 PM3 comments
I'm on vacation this week, and I didn't intend to write a blog post. But after the sea changes in the mobile computing industry and, ironically, my extra time to ponder it, I really couldn't stay silent.
In the space of four days, Google may have effectively taken Android "private" and HP seems to have euthanized webOS in public. It's really hard to believe all of this is happening. But we can at least have a go at understanding what it means and what might, or might not, come next for Microsoft as a result.
Hello Moto
On Monday, Google announced its intention to acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, the "baby Moto" that makes mobile handsets, tablets and even set top boxes. Google apparently did this to bulk up its patent portfolio, and thus a credible deterrent against companies suing manufacturers of Android devices for patent infringement.
All by itself, this move is astonishing. Because in an apparent move to protect and support Android licensees, Google is acquiring one of the biggest of them and in doing so has almost certainly spooked the others. More fundamentally, Google is acquiring a company that makes hardware, even though its whole pedigree, and forte, is in monetizing digital assets. The notion that Google bought a company that makes and sells physical goods, and is happy about that, seems farfetched at best.
Why did Google do the deal? Well, for one thing, It appears Microsoft was in talks with Motorola too. If Google was behind Microsoft in the patent arms race before, imagine where it would have been – and where Android would have been – if MS got Moto. Moto would have gone WP7 (their CEO had just last week announced he was open to the idea) and HTC, Samsung and LG might have been paying Microsoft more in license fees on Android than they would have had to pay to license WP7 directly. To avoid this, Google has agreed to drop a cool $12.5 billion on a company that I bet it didn't even want.
Google was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place... or at least it was scared into thinking so. Fear isn't something we see much of from Google, and I don't think fear-based decisions tend to be good ones. Case in point: now HTC and Samsung, who are already WP7 OEMs, may feel the need to hedge their bets, by putting more chips on live tiles than little green robots.
HP: webOS Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Three days later, albeit after the market closed, HP announced that it's pulling the webOS-based TouchPad tablet off the market, and likewise webOS-based phones. That was fast! As I write this, I am still not certain which was on the market longer: HP's TouchPad or Microsoft's KIN. But whereas Redmond killed KIN to make a better play in the smartphone market by focusing on WP7, HP is killing webOS to retreat and withdraw from from that market.
HP seems to have decided to cut its losses and forfeit the whole race to Apple and Google. There is the chance that HP will try and license webOS to the Android OEMs who feel jilted by Google, and are looking for a port in the storm. But if you were one of those OEMs, would you license webOS? And would you be ready to provide the marketing it so badly needs?
Microsoft in the Catbird Seat?
For Microsoft, the timing of all this is incredible. In the next 2-3 months, Microsoft will release the "Mango" update to Windows Phone and Nokia will release its first Windows Phone handsets, running that very version of the OS. Meanwhile, in less than four weeks, Microsoft will finally unveil its Windows 8 tablet strategy, at the //build/ conference in Anaheim.
Right now, Microsoft has a smartphone OS that, in terms of features and capabilities, is comeptitive. What Microsoft needs is kick-butt tablet technology with a strategy to match, and more apps and enthusiastic OEMs for its smartphone. The //build// conference may very well give them the tablet piece. Google and HP may have just handed them the phone piece that completes the puzzle.
It's Microsoft's To Lose. But Will it Win?
Microsoft really couldn't have asked for more. The situation and timing are ideal. But that doesn't mean Microsoft will keep from tripping over its own feet. Windows Phone has horrible retail presence and uneven, underpowered marketing. Members of the Windows Phone team, foremost among them Charlie Kindle, have left the company. And while Windows 8 could be a great tablet OS, Microsoft will also need great tablet hardware out there for it to run on.
PC OEMs have not shown themselves competitive to Apple in hardware design, and one of the biggest of those OEMs, HP, has even announced that it may spin off its PC division. Microsoft has seemingly never managed, or heavily influenced, the designs its hardware partners pursue. That will need to change. At the very least, Microsoft will need to impose hardware standards for Windows tablets in the same manner as it did for Windows Phones.
Even if that happens, there's still a lot that could go wrong for Microsoft on the phone and tablet front. But after the competitor events this week, Microsoft has only itself to blame if things don't go right.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 08/19/2011 at 11:05 AM1 comments
I've written about Visual Studio LightSwitch several times in this blog and in my Redmond Review column, including this month's piece, LightSwitch: The Answer to the Right Question. All throughout, I've been pretty clear in my support of the product.
A little over two weeks ago LightSwitch shipped, and I think it's off to a very good start. To help it along, I wrote a series of five whitepapers on LightSwitch for the product team, and they were just published by Microsoft. You can find them all by looking around the product's site, but here are direct links to the PDFs for each paper:
The first paper's a bit of a wonkish piece on what makes LightSwitch different and why it's needed in the market. After that formal opening, the papers get less "white" and instead walk through the product in detail, with an abundance of screenshots. If you're curious about the product, this is an easy way to get a good look at it without having to install it or watch a video from beginning to end. I hope that even skeptics will start to see validity in the point I make several times over: while LightSwitch does a lot for you, it also gets out of your way and lets you do a bunch on your own. That's a balance that I don't think a lot of business application productivity tools attain.
The fifth paper covers LightSwitch extensions, which is a topic so late-breaking that I finished the paper less than a week ago. LightSwitch already has extensions offered by Infragistics, DevExpress, ComponentOne, RSSBus, and First Floor Software. Telerik has on its Web site a host of hands-on labs demonstrating how to use its Silverlight components in LightSwitch applications. Extensions from the community are already starting to pop up on the Visual Studio Gallery too. Together these offerings represent rather robust support for a fledgling product, and I expect the them, and the degree of integration in extensions, to continually improve.
Take a look at LightSwitch and keep a lookout for its progress and success. The best way to really get the product is to learn the tooling quickly, then think of a database and application you need to build out and see how fast you can get it running using the product. You may be surprised, not only by how quickly you finish, but by how sturdy and extensible the application you built actually is.
There are no guarantees, but I think LightSwitch could really catch on.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 08/12/2011 at 6:41 AM10 comments
I just got back from Microsoft's 15,000 attendee-strong Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Los Angeles, and I have to say, the company and its partners are pumped. How can this be, given the number of people who have written Microsoft's eulogy of late? If Amazon owns the cloud, if Apple owns the consumer, if Google owns search, if Cisco owns unified communications (UC), if EMC/VMWare owns virtualization, if Oracle and SAP own ERP and if Oracle/Siebel and Salesforce.com own CRM, how can Microsoft be ambulatory, let alone doing jumping jacks and running races?
The WPC keynotes shed some light on this. Jon Roskill, Microsoft's corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group, emceed the keynotes. On Day 2, he called out the confidence/dismissal disconnect by saying, "It is my opinion that Microsoft and our partners are being massively underestimated right now." And in the individual executives' keynotes that followed, the reasons for partners' elevated confidence were born out. But on Wednesday, Kevin Turner, Microsoft's COO and "chief compete officer" really made Microsoft's case, point by point. Among the very useful points of information in his address:
- With a $9 billion research and development program, Microsoft now invests more in R&D than any company in any industry in the world (that's almost a direct quote)
- Winning in the mobile phone space, and running Windows on ARM (key to a competitive Windows tablet) are two of Microsoft's big bets
- Microsoft converted 4.5 million seats of Lotus Notes to Exchange last year
- Office 365 (ostensibly including BPOS) has over 5 million licensed users and 2.8 million users deployed
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online (i.e. not counting on-prem) has 30,000 customers and over 2 million licensed users
- Azure users and applications are doubling in number every quarter
- Hyper-V is growing market share at almost 2x the rate as VMWare
- A vast number of Oracle customers are dissatisfied with service, pricing or both
- Microsoft believes it can bring Windows Phone units sold to 100 million per annum, from the Nokia deal alone
- In a Goldman Sachs survey asking, "Who do you view as your top 3 strategic IT vendors today?" Microsoft was selected more than any other vendor.
So even though Microsoft's been pronounced the loser in so many product categories, it seems in reality to have been beefing up its offerings just as its competitors are beginning to suffer from the vulnerability of hubris. Why the misalignment between the punditry and apparent circumstances? Let's go back to Turner for guidance. In his keynote he said, "Too many customers in the world define Microsoft and define our partners by old versions of Windows and old versions of Office." Perhaps that's why, to re-quote Roskill, "Microsoft and our partners are being massively underestimated right now."
Roskill and Turner make fair points. Microsoft's a dark horse, but it can win in UC with Lync and Skype, it can win in virtualization with Hyper-V and other technologies, and it can win in the cloud with Azure, Office 365 and even with a little help from Windows Live and MSN. It can make further inroads in search and advertising with Bing and adCenter, it can gain share in CRM, it can stage at least some comeback in consumer devices, be it in the phone form factor or the tablet with Windows Phone and Windows 8, and can maintain continuous strength in gaming and TV with Xbox and Kinect.
It's OK for the press and blogosphere to keep bashing Microsoft; the company seems to like adversity and do well when it encounters it. But if you want the real story, look past the headlines. Microsoft is steadfast in its competitive will and tenacity. To get a real sense of that, talk to Microsoft's partners and ask them why they're so bullish. If Microsoft fails, then so do they. If they're happy, then there are likely several good reasons.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 07/18/2011 at 5:33 AM3 comments
Microsoft has revealed some things about Windows 8, and revealed a part of the developer story for new Windows 8 "tailored," "immersive" applications. In retrospect, very little was shared. The bit that
was revealed to us is that those applications can be developed using a combination of HTML5 and JavaScript. Not much else was said, except that additional details would be revealed at Microsoft's
//Build/ conference in Anaheim, California in September.
This has left a lot of people in suspense, and it seems that suspended state is going to last all summer. The problem, of course, is that in the absence of hard information, people fill the void with Speculation, Rumor and Gloom. That's a bit like Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, except that it's self-imposed by the Microsoft community and not planted by Microsoft's competitors.
This is a less-than-perfect situation. Not only is it causing developers to worry about the value of their skill sets, but I am already hearing from consulting shops that customers are getting nervous too and, in extreme cases, opting for non-Microsoft tools for their projects as a result. I'm also hearing from dev tool ISVs that sales have suffered as a result. It's quite possible that the customers moving off .NET wanted to do so anyway and it's also possible that dev tool ISVs are suffering slower sales this year due a slowed rate of economic recovery.
Without hard information, people tend to interpret things negatively. Actually, that's the major point in all of this. While there is a multitude of opinions about what the Windows 8 development platform will look like once fully revealed, there is an emerging consensus around one thing: it sure would help if Microsoft revealed more of its strategy... just enough to quash absurd rumors, stabilize the .NET ecosystem and get people to stay calm.
We've had some reassurances thus far: there will be a Windows desktop mode; we'll still have Windows Explorer, we'll still run Office, we'll still have a task bar, and all the skills and tools we use now will still work there. But with reassurances like that... people still feel insecure. Because telling us that Windows 8 will have what is essentially a "classic" mode sure makes it sound like today's skill sets will soon be "classic" too. And then maybe they'll just become obsolete.
Humans find change scary; it's natural. And when left alone with their fears -- because no one is saying anything to dispel them -- people can go from frightened to paranoid, and can start to view things in a downright conspiratorial light. It would be great if Microsoft stepped into the void now and told us what is coming -- especially because whatever they tell us is bound to be at least a little better than what people think they are going to hear.
I don't know what the announcements will be, but I do have it on authority, from a number of sources, that Microsoft isn't going to talk until //Build/. That means no news until September 13th. Nothing until after Labor Day. You get zippo until after the Back-to-School sales are done.
What to do? Try not to let the dark voices of gloom and doom fill your head. Even in the absence of answers, we still have some important facts:
- The .NET developer community is huge.
- Microsoft's customers have major investments in .NET, and in .NET skills.
- Political infighting in Redmond might make for irrational decisions, but ultimately public companies can't just alienate their advocates and piss off their customers. Spite doesn't trump fiduciary responsibility.
- The computing device markets are changing, software is changing, software business models are changing and developers are changing. Microsoft has to keep up.
- The HTML + JavaScript community is huge too, and it includes many of the "changed" developers.
- Public companies can't ignore new markets nor the popular standards that can help them enter those new markets. Loyalty doesn't trump fiduciary responsibility either.
- If Microsoft can appeal to new developers, then it should.
- If Microsoft can keep catering to its existing developers and customers -- not just through legacy support, but also through empowering futures -- then it probably will.
You don't have to shove your old friends out into the rain to make room for new ones; you can bring those new constituents in under a bigger tent. I hope Microsoft will enlarge the tent, and I have trouble imagining why it would not.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 06/23/2011 at 9:19 AM18 comments
Yesterday, at the Wall Street Journal’s "All Things D" conference, Microsoft’s President of Windows and Windows Live, Steven Sinofsky, showed the world a preview of Windows 8 (officially, that’s the code name). And in a YouTube
video, Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for Windows User Experience, provides his own detailed Windows 8 demo that you can check out right now. What both men showed us was an early preview of a next version of Windows that looks a lot like Windows Phone 7, complete with Live Tiles and a superior touch UI. What this new version of Windows
also does is run honest-to-goodness Windows applications. So we can work as well as play, on desktop PCs, laptops, or "slates," supporting both keyboard-and-mouse and touch as input mechanisms. This comes pretty close to the model I hoped for in my Redmond Review column "
Tablet Toast or Slate Salvation" back in February.
The model seems really compelling to me, and I think it’s the right way to go. On the other hand, the apparent HTML 5 + JavaScript development environment for Windows 8 apps, and the way in which conventional Windows apps are hosted, invokes a number of questions. I find myself alternating between being excited and feeling concerned. Sometimes the best way through that is to just talk it out. So let’s deconstruct what we’ve seen of Windows 8 and try to get to some provisional conclusions.
What I like best about the Windows 8 approach is that the Windows team took the "Windows Phone vs. Windows" question and changed it from confrontation to unification. Lots of smart people in the industry have talked about the iPad as having appeal for casual consumption but having a weaker story around content creation and actual work. This forces people into a fragmented world of having separate devices for each mode (consumption and creation). And this has forced me to go back to my laptop for lots of things, using my iPad less with each passing month. I think we need an OS, and devices, that can work in both modes, that can be versatile without being compromised. What we saw yesterday’s demo proves that Microsoft is attuned to precisely this goal and that, in terms of delivering on it, we can certainly say "so far, so good."
The Metro UI definitely seems to be the star of the show now; Joe Belfiore has championed it on the Windows Phone platform, and it seems to have influenced Sinofsky’s vision of Windows proper. And what’s interesting there is that Joe Belfiore used to head up the effort around Windows Media Center Edition, where Metro first achieved some prominence. Media Center was in many ways brilliant, but the fact that it was a mere shell on top of Windows was a big drawback. That message seems to have been received in Redmond, and it came up explicitly in the All Things D interview with Sinofsky: the new Live Tile UI is not a mere shell. It is Windows. When Microsoft listens to the market’s critique and then builds new technology that is sensitive to it, the company is at its best. This is one such case.
I do have some concerns and questions though. For example, in the Sinofsky and Harris demos, when Excel is shown running as a conventional app, what actually seems to be shown is Windows 7 running in its own window (albeit borderless), and I have a sneaking suspicion (though no knowledge) that’s it in a virtual machine. Within that window, the Start button, task bar, and everything else that is part of the standard Windows environment shows up. It doesn’t really seem integrated at all... it’s as if we’re running a terminal emulation window but we’re looking at the Windows 7 UI instead of the IBM 3270. I have to believe this is going to evolve and get better though. Using a VM and sharing drives with the host is not integration; it’s side-by-side execution.
What about the HTML 5 and JavaScript bit? My pedigree is one of a .NET developer, after all, so this one makes me woozy. Well, from what I can tell, HTML 5 or not, the Windows 8 environment isn’t really the "Web." It’s Windows. But it’s Windows with an interface that allows HTML 5 markup, as a syntax, to be used to design screens, and JS to be used to script the apps. So it’s HTML 5 and JavaScript, but it’s not a browser. It’s not the old Active Desktop. It’s really a lot like Windows Phone 7 but with us using HTML 5 instead of XAML as the syntactic sugar. And, yeah, we’re using JavaScript, but so did version 1.0 of Silverlight, and then managed code made its way in there. Maybe the same will happen here. A guy can hope, can’t he?
Honestly, I am not really sure what will happen there, and that starts to push me into a downward spiral emotionally. But then I see an important, positive side: having HTML5 and JavaScript as a first-class syntax option (wisely) puts out a welcome mat to a new generation of developers who can start building apps for Windows 8 with their existing skill set. And this all may be a way to flip Google on the wrestling mat and pin them down: yes, HTML as a syntax wins, but no, HTML pages on the Web that your engine can crawl and index, and insert ads into, does not win. It loses. Microsoft will use your languages, but it will combat your Web-centrism.
Ironically, Apple proved people want native apps, and they created a nice commerce model for small developers to sell them. Google paved the way for HTML 5 and JS to serve as a more dev-friendly programming model than Objective C (for crying out loud). Now Microsoft seems ready to take the App Store model, HTML 5, JavaScript and touch back to the Windows environment, where most people are still sitting today anyway.
I may not be comfortable with each thing I’ve seen of Windows 8, but I am very encouraged by the totality of what I have seen. Microsoft is playing to win. And while victory is far from assured, it sure is nice to see Redmond aiming high
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 06/02/2011 at 11:45 AM11 comments
For Microsoft these days, great things are happening at the macro level, and yet there's fits-and-starts progress down below. This year's Tech-Ed North America conference represented, in event-form, that very duality.
On the one hand, this was the largest Tech-Ed in my memory, with 10,000 attendees. But the customary Microsoft 2-day, all-morning keynote format was shortened to a Day 1, 90-minute talk on Cloud and Visual Studio. Microsoft's cloud push reached an almost fever pitch; but various new Azure features, like the VM Role and Azure Connect, are still in Beta, with no production release date announced. The keynote featured a cameo by Amir Netz, showing off the hyper-cool data visualization and ad hoc analysis tool, code-named "Crescent;" but we still don’t have a public Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server "Denali" that includes it. And the hands-on lab (HoL) for Crescent showed up on the HoL workstations as "cancelled."
The bring-me-up-bring-me-down phenomenon of Tech Ed 2011 doesn’t end there. For example, the keynote was full of references to the "public and private cloud," but all the private cloud talk was about Hyper-V virtualization and we still have no new info on the Azure Appliance. We got a glimpse of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) advances coming in Visual Studio "vNext" (yes, they are actually, officially, calling it that), but not much detail on when that will ship. Meanwhile, Microsoft featured ample breakout content on the "Juneau" SQL Server relational database tooling that will ship with Denali. But that won't be out for a while yet and, when it is, it will seemingly reside inside of Visual Studio 2010.
The one breaking news item that coincided with Tech-Ed was the Verizon Wireless announcement that it will be offering the HTC Trophy, running Windows Phone 7, to online customers next week. Finally! Too bad that phone has a smallish, non-AMOLED screen, no 4G LTE support, and is generally viewed as the "budget" WP7 handset. (I guess the trophy is for "most frugal.") I’ll buy this phone, since it’s the only VZW WP7 option, but I'd really like to hear that Microsoft will embed Skype into Windows Phone and let me buy a Nokia-made, carrier-free handset, before the 2-year commitment I make to the Trophy runs out. Too bad Microsoft had nothing to say at Tech-Ed about the Skype deal.
So Tech-Ed showed us that Microsoft has some good overall momentum, but it still leaves us wanting more. That's reflective of Microsoft's situation today. Windows 7 is good, but we want to know about the Windows 8 tablet story. We like what Silverlight has become, but we expect an undisclosed HTML 5 plan may change our strategy there. The Nokia partnership is great, but we don't know when we’ll see a handset. The Azure story is rounding out, but we still pine for more pieces of the on-premise stack to go to the Azure Platform as a Service. (And we'd like a more robust Azure Infrastructure as a Service story to tide us over.) Office 365 looks neat, but we're still using BPOS, and suffering its occasional hiccups. Kinect is cool, but what are the plans around a next-gen Xbox console?
And so it goes. Tech-Ed was in Atlanta this year, but it's headed back to its default location of Orlando in 2012. That's a pity. We'd like Microsoft to leave its comfort zone, rapidly explore new territory and be successful as it does so. Now's no time to be timid. We want a one-two punch, not three steps forward, and two steps back.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 05/19/2011 at 2:36 PM1 comments
After several months of research, review and revision, a white paper I wrote for the SQL Azure team, "NoSQL and the Windows Azure Platform", has been published by Microsoft. If you go to
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/whitepapers and do a find within the page for "NoSQL" you'll see a link for it. If you'd rather download the PDF directly, you can do so by
clicking here. The 25-page (not including cover and TOC) paper provides an introduction to NoSQL database technology, and its major subcategories, for those new to the subject; an examination of NoSQL technologies available in the cloud using Windows Azure and SQL Azure; and a critical discussion of the NoSQL and relational database approaches, including the suitability of each to line-of-business application development.
As I conducted my research for the paper, and read material written by members of the NoSQL community, I found a consistent sentiment toward, and desire for, cleaning the database technology slate. NoSQL involves returning to a basic data storage and retrieval approach. Many NoSQL databases, including even Microsoft's Azure Table Storage, are premised on basic key-value storage technology -- in effect, the same data structure used in collections, associative arrays and cache products.
I couldn't help thinking that the recent popularity of NoSQL is symptomatic of a generational and cyclical phenomenon in computing. As product categories (relational databases in this case) mature, products within them load up on features and create a barrier to entry for new, younger developers. The latter group may prefer to start over with a fresh approach to the category, rather than learn the wise old ways of products whose market presence predates their careers -- sometimes by a couple of decades.
The new generation may do this even at the risk of regression in functionality. In the case of NoSQL databases, that regression may include loss of "ACID" (transactional) guarantees; declarative query (as opposed to imperative inspection of collections of rows); comprehensive tooling; and wide availability of trained and experienced professionals. Existing technologies have evolved in response to the requirements, stress tests, bug reports, and user suggestions accumulated over time. And sometimes old technologies can even be used in ways equivalent to the new ones. Two cases in point: the old SQL Server Data Services was a NoSQL store, and its underlying implementation used SQL Server. Even the developer fabric version of Azure Table Storage is implemented using SQL Server Express Edition's XML columns.
So if older technologies are proven technologies, and if they can be repurposed to function like some of the newer ones, what causes such discomfort with them? Is it mere folly of younger developers? Are older developers building up barriers of vocabulary, APIs and accumulated, sometimes seldom used, features in their products, to keep their club an exclusive one?
In other engineering disciplines, evolution in technology is embraced, built upon, made beneficial to consumers, and contributory to overall progress. But the computing disciplines maintain a certain folk heroism in rejecting prior progress as misguided. For some reason, we see new implementations of established solutions as elegant and laudable. And virtually every player in the industry is guilty of this. I haven't figured out why this phenomenon exists, but I think it's bad for the industry. It allows indulgence to masquerade as enlightenment, and it holds the whole field back.
Programming has an artistic element to it; it's not mere rote science. That's why many talented practitioners are attracted to the field, and removing that creative aspect of software work would therefore be counter-productive. But we owe it to our colleagues, and to our customers, to conquer fundamentally new problems, rather than provide so many alternative solutions to the old ones. There's plenty of creativity involved in breaking new ground too, and I dare say it brings more benefit to the industry, even to society.
NoSQL is interesting technology and its challenge to established ways of thinking about data does have merit and benefit. Nevertheless, I hope the next disruptive technology to come along says yes to conquering new territory. At the very least, I hope it doesn't start with "No."
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 04/25/2011 at 6:40 AM9 comments
The term "going native" can be a terribly derogatory phrase, connoting the prejudiced outlook of colonists toward the peoples on whom they've imposed themselves. But it can also be playful or empathetic, summoning images of intrepid travelers who get out of their hotels and try to meet people in the countries they visit, and maybe even eat their local delicacies and learn a few words of their language.
Are platforms like people? Are operating systems like countries? Is Silverlight a colonizer? Is HTML, especially HTML 5, an empathetic visitor to foreign lands? Or is it the conqueror, of Silverlight, of Flash, and even of the Windows API?
Talk about overloaded terms! After two days of MIX keynotes, the word "native" has been bandied about a lot. In the day 1 keynote, we heard a lot about the "native" support for HTML 5 in Internet Explorer 9/Windows 7 today and the greater support coming in IE10 and Windows v. Next sometime soon. In the day 2 keynote, we even saw how the "Mango" update to Windows Phone 7 will bring the same kind of integration between that operating system and its own implementation of IE 9. These operating systems will natively support HTML, making Windows the HTML place to be. Go where the natives go.
So native is a good thing, right? Not so fast. Because native can also refer to an application written specifically for the operating system's own application stack. Like a Win32 app, or a .NET Windows Forms or WPF app. And as much as native is a good thing when it comes to HTML support, it seems like native apps, in the non-HTML sense of the word, were on Redmond's naughty list at MIX this week. In fact, in the day 2 keynote, the only truly native apps we saw were ones that Microsoft Corporate Vice President Joe Belfiore and others showed running on Windows Phone 7 devices, or else they were demos of the Kinect SDK.
So maybe native is good, or maybe native is bad. Or maybe non-native things are bad, which means native is good. Because when something is native, there's something it's not: a plug-in. And in the day 1 keynote, Microsoft Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky, and Corporate Vice President for Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch, in talking about IE9 and IE10, were clear that the hallmark of these two browsers is that they have rid of us on our dependency on pesky plug-ins.
Which is noteworthy, because the very centerpiece of every MIX event up until this one was Silverlight, and Silverlight is, of course, a plug-in. The centerpiece has become an adornment, editorially, this year, at least. Draw your own conclusions. But make sure you learn at least some of the native markup language, because not everyone speaks XAML.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 04/14/2011 at 6:52 AM3 comments
In the run up to Microsoft's MIX conference, next week in Las Vegas,
a new post on the Silverlight Team Blog from Microsoft Developer Division VPs Walid Abu-Hadba, Scott Guthrie and Soma Somasegar provides new clarification of Microsoft's position on Silverlight and HTML 5. Read the post and interpret it for yourself. My take is this: given the current landscape of Smartphone and tablet OSes, only HTML 5 can let you reasonably target all of them, so Microsoft's going to bring you greatly improved dev tools for that platform. If your app needs to run only on Windows, Mac OS and/or Windows Phone 7, then Silverlight provides a richer, more optimized experience and greater developer productivity, so Microsoft's going to continue to invest there too.
I recently gave a talk on the Mobile Market at an exec briefing outside of Boston. In conducting my research for that talk, I discovered than an emerging strategy for mobile development is the creation of native apps that are merely thin shells around an embedded HTML 5 browser. The combination of there being five or six major mobile OS platforms (WP7, Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian and webOS) and the fact that WebKit browsers show up on most of them (with IE9 and HTML 5 coming soon on WP7) means that a cross-device approach is the only one that's economically feasible for many developers, and HTML 5 is the cross-device approach that works.
With all that in mind, I think the position Abu-Hadba, Guthrie and Somasegar have outlined is the only one that's reasonable. The pledge Microsoft has made to support developers with strong HTML 5 tooling (and its gracious admission of the deficit that exists there right now) is a big deal, and I think it will be genuinely welcomed and appreciated by the developer audience.
Microsoft offers a strong Web and cloud platform that provides a superior environment for serving virtually any device (via HTML 5). It also has a highly evolved rich client platform in Silverlight that works beautifully on Windows, Mac and Windows Phone. So the emerging rule of thumb is to use Silverlight if the device targets support it; use ASP.NET and HTML 5 if not, or use a combination of Silverlight on supported devices and HTML 5 on all others. I think this is an ideal protocol given the far-from-ideal fragmentation we have in the client market.
There's the adage that when developing an application you can pick any two of the following three attributes: good, fast and cheap. Maybe we have a corollary to that now for cross-device development: pick any two of: rich, broad-reach and cheap. If that's the landscape, and I think it is, then Microsoft is giving us the best possible approach and toolset to work within it.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 04/05/2011 at 5:53 AM18 comments