Microsoft makes an excellent digital music player (the Zune HD), a well-crafted networked storage and backup solution (Windows Home Server), a strong DVR/digital entertainment hub (Windows Media Center) and perhaps the industry leading gaming console (Xbox 360), which itself has a growing number of digital media capabilities. But can they all get along?
That was my question almost a year ago, when I returned from the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, which was riddled with a variety of incompatible, proprietary Network Attached Storage/TV set-top box combos, from a variety of vendors. The irony was that Microsoft's own server and set-top option had a, shall we say, stealthy presence at the show.
This weekend, I took the plunge and upgraded my dedicated home theater PC from Vista Media Center to Windows 7 Media Center. Last weekend, I applied an Xbox Live update to on of my Xbox 360 consoles, and a bit before that, my Windows Home Server updated itself to Power Pack 3 of that platform's core software.
The result? (1) Media Center can now archive TV recordings to Home Server, (2) I can view the status of my Windows Home Server rig from my Media Center PC, using the remote control, and can do likewise from either of my Xbox consoles, and (3) I can configure Windows Home Server to transcode my TV recordings to a lower bit rate, suitable for transfer to, and viewing on, a Zune device, Granted, I don't own a Zune, but the feature is intriguing nonetheless.
So there is now, in an ancillary fashion, a linkage between Xbox, Media Center, Home Server and Zune. Finally, the pieces of Microsoft's consumer media and electronics puzzle are fitting together. But sometimes the jigsaw cuts puzzle pieces imprecisely and the fit between them requires some brute force to realize.
Xbox just added really nice native support for Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm. Xbox consoles can also act as Media Center extender devices. But the Media Center and native UIs on the Xbox are separate and Media Center offers no built-in support for these Web 2.0 services. Want to use Last.fm on your Xbox? Then exit out of the Media Center UI. Want to use Netflix "Watch Instantly" services on your console? Once again, you'll need to get to the native Xbox user interface. Want to watch Netflix on your Media PC itself? You can, but you must do so with a native Media Center add-in, which does not run on an extender.
Twitter using Media Center? Nope; that's Xbox only. Catch podcasts on your Home Server? Not with software form Microsoft, but you can stream video podcasts on Media Center using the Internet TV feature. You can get podcasts on your Zune as well, but that uses different technology. Backup my Xbox hard drive and Zune storage to my Home Server? Forget it.
How can so many products form just one company work in such a detached fashion? How can the Xbox offer mutually exclusive features in its Media Center extender and native modes? How come Windows mobile is almost totally out of the picture? Microsoft will tell you that lack of interoperability is due to the separate development teams for each product. And they'd be right.
But that begs a question: why are the teams so separate? What if there were a single podcast/blog/RSS feed consumption technology and all the products used it? What if Home server could host CableCARD devices and record TV that Media Center or Xbox simply presented through their unique UIs? What if both XBox and Media Center could provide front-end interfaces to both the Zune Pass subscription service and the media stored locally on a Zune connected via USB (or even WiFi)? And perhaps my backups could go to Azure storage once a week.
If all of these potentially common technologies had their own dev teams and those teams had mandates to work with various device and platform product groups to make sure those products shipped with native support, then Microsoft's consumer device business would make more sense. Moreover, the personnel behind the technologies would would be motivated to achieve the most prolific and most consistent adoption across other Microsoft products.
If Microsoft did that, they'd have perhaps the best digital home entertainment suite on the market. As I've said before, this is one area where Apple hasn't done well and so this an area where Microsoft could score an important victory over Cupertino. That, in turn, could give Zune a fighting chance against iPod, seal the victory over Playstation 3 and Wii and maybe, one day, give rise to a compelling mobile phone play.
Maybe when I return to Las Vegas next month, for the 2010 CES, I'll see some glimmer of hope on this front. Maybe I'll see a great "better together" strategy in this space that works as effectively as it does with Windows Server, SQL Server and SharePoint.
Or maybe not. Maybe Microsoft would prefer I buy my PC from one of their OEMs, but get my phone/music player from Apple, my game console from Sony, my network storage from Netgear and my cloud storage from Amazon. If that's the goal, then they are executing perfectly. But if greater customer adoption, through reduced overhead and greater consistency of devices (across product lines and form factors) is what Microsoft seeks, then they need to change their game.
Posted on 12/07/20095 comments
A week ago I got a new phone. This was planned, and yet not planned. Getting a new phone working is disruptive and I didn't want that disruption on Thanksgiving week. However, Verizon somehow de-provisioned my old phone from its data network and told me it would take 5 days to fix the problem. That meant being without mobile email access, likely for a week, so I reasoned that getting a new phone would be actually less disruptive than fixing the old one. So I deactivated my Moto Q9m Windows Mobile 6.0 (Standard Edition) handset and replaced it with a spanking new Motorola Droid.
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Posted on 12/01/20099 comments
What a difference a day makes…at least to some. While the Day 1 keynote at PDC seemed mostly like a news update on last year's announcements, and a somewhat dry one at that, Day 2 gave developers some real "red meat." It began with a presentation by Steven Sinofsky on Windows 7's progress since its launch last month, including demos of the diverse array of hardware on which it now runs. Sinofsky then offered the ultimate crowd pleaser: he described the specs for a multi-touch, Microsoft-designed laptop manufactured by Acer, and then explained that all attendees would be receiving one for free. That greased the wheels for sure, and was followed up with a glimpse of IE9.
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Posted on 11/20/20090 comments
The first day of Microsoft's 2009 Professional Developer Conference kicked off with a 2-hour keynote address led by Ray Ozzie. Ozzie enumerated various new features and launch dates for the Windows Azure Platform, including project "Dallas," a platform for open data feeds based on OData, an opened flavor of ADO.NET Data Services/Astoria. Ozzie also brought on customers and partners, including Automatic/WordPress, Kelley Blue Book, Seesmic and even US Federal CIO Vivek Kundra (via video link) to discuss interesting applications of Azure technologies. We also heard how Windows Azure's open source development support will include not just vanilla PHP, but also the Zend Framework and even MySQL and Memcached. That's a big deal. And this is not an exhaustive list of the announcements.
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Posted on 11/18/20090 comments
Until recently, Microsoft's policy toward its Professional Developers Conference (PDC), was that it should be held only once every two or three years, and should focus on Redmond's technology "futures." This meant that currently- or imminently-shipping products were not to merit much coverage; instead, emerging technologies that were at least 18 months away (or thereabouts) from shipping would get the spotlight.
Last year, that was mostly true. We got a pre-beta release of Windows 7, saw glimpses of what was then called the Azure Services Platform (a name that was introduced at the show), got demos of the Office Web Applications, were briefed on what would be forthcoming in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, and heard great things about a project code-named "Oslo."
I guess Microsoft broke its own policy last year, because now, only a year later, Windows 7 has already shipped. Fair enough, but this year, the policy changes completely. We get our second PDC in as many years at which we'll witness the official launch of Azure. And much of the breakout coverage will focus on products and technologies covered last year, many of them shipping in 8 months or less: VS 2010, .NET 4.0, Office Web, multi-touch development for various Windows platforms and SQL Server Modeling (formerly Oslo -- still a ways off from shipping.
Will we see any true futures this year? Will we get any news about Windows Mobile 7? Microsoft's rumored tablet device? The next wave of cloud and services offerings? A clearer vision of Microsoft's move toward applications in the browser? Cool new stuff about Bing? Some more news about Xbox's project Natal?
I don't know, but I sure hope so. And I'll do what I can to pass on the news. On Monday, I will be presenting an all-day, pre-conference workshop at PDC, so I'll likely take that day away from the blogosphere and Twitterdom. But starting Tuesday, I'll be tweeting the keynotes in real-time (as the hashtag in this post's title suggests -- just follow me @andrewbrust) and I'll be posting daily blog reports on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at brustblog.com as well as RedDevNews.com and VisualStudioMagazine.com. Please post comments on any of the three sites and I'll do my best to respond. Likewise, I'll work to be interactive on Twitter and always appreciate a RT if you feel the tweet is deserving.
Posted on 11/16/20091 comments
I like it when Microsoft bridges its technologies to other platforms. I like the
PHP Driver for SQL Server
and the samples in the
PHP On Windows Training Kit
so much that I did a whole session on them at VSLive! last month. The ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) bridges for PHP and Java are very exciting to me. The Silverlight plug-in for Eclipse, the Azure SDK for Java, and the Windows 7 support for Eclipse are all good stuff.
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Posted on 11/13/20090 comments
The tech influencers' Twitter streams have been all aflutter this weekend, with talk of the Motorola Droid. Verizon Wireless launched its version this phone on Friday, and the techies are swooning. They love the screen, the Google Maps-based turn-by-turn navigation and the thinness of the phone, which still manages to sport a physical, slide-out keyboard. Most of all they love the Verizon network, which offers resilient service and ubiquitous 3G coverage.
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Posted on 11/09/20094 comments
I grew up in New York and I've grown up with the Cuomo family. I liked Mario Cuomo and thought he was a good governor. He was one of those guys in the 1980s that I characterized as a Macho Liberal: someone with compassionate beliefs and a street-tough approach to pursuing them. A Macho Liberal wasn't a wimp, nor was he a bully. He was someone ready to fight and hold his ground while trying to do good.
Sound naive? Hey, give me a break: I was a teenager and an idealist. And I was living under a Republican president who had been in office since the very moment I had become politically aware. I was proud to be from a state with a leader who thought differently and didn't apologize for it, and I liked the idea that he might run for President himself.
But it was Bill Clinton who won the Whitehouse and he named Andrew Cuomo as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development. I was hopeful for the new Cuomo, who would be fighting for urban concerns in the Federal government. But I soon became disillusioned. I really felt Andrew was trying to fill his dad's shoes, and I think that very motivation thwarted his progress.
Now the younger Mr. Cuomo is my state Attorney General and he's trying to fill not one set of shoes, but two. In addition to achieving the home-state, Cuomo-recognition that is uniquely his, Andrew Cuomo is also trying to live up to the image of Elliot Spitzer's Attorney General persona and record. Despite Spitzer's infamous, scandal-ridden gubernatorial stint, as AG he made a name for himself as the man who took on Wall Street and won. And despite Spitzer's resignation in disgrace as Governor, he still defined a standard as AG that, clearly, Cuomo believes his own record must meet.
And I fear this explains much of Cuomo's motivation in suing Intel for anti-trust violations. Maybe I'm being naive again, but I find no other explanation possible. While it's tempting to believe that Intel strong-armed large OEMs, like Dell, HP and IBM, into using Intel CPUs exclusively, the accusation seems a bit wild to me. Are all three of those companies truly bully-able? And, even if you answer yes, would you agree with Cuomo that Intel stifled innovation in the CPU market and caused customers to pay more for computers?
By my own observation, PCs have continued to fall in price. Compare today's entry level machines with those of a few years ago. Or compare mid-range or high-end units. Today's machines are more powerful and cheaper than their predecessors. While Intel's Itanium chips (whose architecture actually originated at HP) were less than impressive compared to AMD's offerings at the time, that competition from forced Intel to come up with rock-solid, 64-bit Core 2 chips that were consistent with its x86 architecture, and to introduce an innovative, low-end product like the Atom line, which powers most netbooks. The Atom is so cheap that it cannibalizes sales of conventional CPUs. And it yields less profit. Would a monopolist introduce such a product?
Another issue Cuomo raises is that of rebates paid by Intel to OEMs in exchange for exclusivity or near-exclusivity. Cuomo likens these rebates to bribes and it all does sound kind of sinister at first blush. But, in many industries, fees paid for exclusivity are not uncommon and would thus appear legal, or at least openly accepted by regulators. It would seem then that the best way to prevent the practice would be through broadly applied regulatory processes, or influencing industry-wide agreement. Meanwhile, accusing a single company of creating harm through its use of rebates, and asking it to abstain from the practice, while implicitly allowing competitors to use it, seems unfair, unwise and by definition imposes a double-standard. Given the cover provided by Asian and European regulators who have been pursuing similar action against Intel, Cuomo's entire motivation seems political. Such opportunism is not exclusive to one party: Cuomo's lawsuit mirrors similar politically-motivated actions taken against Microsoft, by then Republican NY State AG Dennis Vacco, in the late 1990s.
The fact is that government regulation of industries can have at least a short-term negative impact on efficiency and usually a long-term negative impact on innovation. Government oversight slows industries down and can create the very dysfunction Cuomo purports to be fighting.
That doesn't mean all oversight is wrong. We know from the financial crisis that such oversight was lacking on Wall Street and we'd likely all be better off had it been more vigilant. But it does mean accusations of monopolistic behavior, and any application of penalties, need to be used sparingly, prudently and not politically. It's hard to fix anything by disrupting it, and it's absurd to try doing so with something that's not really broken.
Macho Liberal is one thing. Aggressive bullying is something quite different.
Posted on 11/06/20090 comments
There are a lot of things to like about the new version Virtual PC. Compared to its predecessor, it has added support for USB devices; allows individual applications to be run from a virtual machine yet project on the host desktop; has terrific shell integration; and much better awareness of the host's power management, allowing users to hibernate their physical PC even while a virtual image is activated. When you add to that the new ability of Windows 7 to mount VHD files as physical drives and even boot from VHDs, the world of Windows virtualization really starts to look like an awesome party.
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Posted on 11/02/20093 comments
PowerPivot is the newly announced name for Microsoft's (not yet released) self-service analytics product, formerly code-named "Gemini." PowerPivot brings the power of OLAP analytics to end-users, by allowing them to create their own data models, drawing from conventional data warehouses as well as flat files, spreadsheets and even data feeds and reports. It then allows for sophisticated drill-down analysis in Excel 2010 itself, which will feature a new "Slicer" element in its user interface, essentially allowing for easy dimensional filtering.
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Posted on 10/30/20090 comments
Windows Vista is the OS everyone loved to hate. Its replacement by Windows 7 is welcomed by just about everyone, and the initial reviews are excellent. Thank goodness. But let's not let this go unanalyzed. The OS formerly known as "Beasta" is dead, but a post mortem is necessary.
Let's be factual about matters: when run on a decent PC (by late-2006 standards), that was designed for it, with the OS and all drivers pre-installed, Vista ran just fine, especially the 64-bit version. Yes, Vista used a lot of memory and CPU. Yes, file copy operations were slow before SP2. User Account Control prompts were burdensome and annoying (and sometimes there was a longish pause between screen blackout and prompt pop-up). And I never enjoyed the game of Windows Explorer roulette, wherein the particular view an Explorer window might display when opened was unknown. Especially since the odds of winning seemed to heavily favor the house. Vista had its flakey factor; no question.
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Posted on 10/27/200914 comments
I attended the Windows 7 launch today, and the success of the product really hit close to home. I mean that literally, as the launch event itself was held in a NYC loft space that was walking distance from my home. But I mean it figuratively as well, because I think this version of Microsoft's client operating system, and the company's confidence and pride around it, harkens back to a time, toward the beginning of my career, when Windows really excited people and created a buzz.
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Posted on 10/23/20090 comments
Day 2 of the
SharePoint Conference 2009
has just about come and gone, and I've shifted my focus from
yesterday's pure developer angle
to topics of data and business intelligence. And there has been a lot to see. I'm sitting in the last session of the day, attending the "Business Intelligence Power Hour" and began the day with an in-depth look at SharePoint's Business Connectivity Services (BCS, formerly known as the Business Data Catalog, or BDC).
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Posted on 10/21/20090 comments
As I write this, Day 1 of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 is almost over. The conference is impressive. There are over 7400 people in attendance, a number that represents 92% growth over last year and which tops this year's Tech*Ed and MIX attendance combined. All this in a year when most events' attendance is way down.
That should tell you something about SharePoint, and should explain why Steve Ballmer, in his keynote at the conference this morning, said (1) he wasn't going to start this keynote by talking about the economy and (2) that SharePoint is a product he loves to talk about. It's obvious SharePoint is one of those things in Microsoft's product portfolio, and in the industry in general, that's doing really, really well. And there's not too many of those just now.
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Posted on 10/20/20090 comments