I'm writing this post from Bulgaria, where the annual DevReach conference is taking place. A number of well-known American and Canadian speakers from the Microsoft-focused conference world are here with me. The combination of speakers who have known each other for a while and an unusual location for their gathering typically makes for camaraderie, and a lot of discussion. Before long, that discussion usually turns into an industry analysis bull session. And just two days ago, we had such a bull session, focusing on Ray Ozzie.
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Posted on 10/19/20102 comments
For companies that are Microsoft partners, there has been change in the wind for some time. Ever since last year's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in New Orleans, Microsoft has made it clear it thinks that it has too many partners and that those partners are too small.
Since WPC '09, the Enterprise and Partner Group (EPG) has focused strongly on Global Systems Integrators (SIs) like HP and CapGemini, and much less on smaller or regional SIs. From WPC '09 onwards, Microsoft said smaller partners would need to be credentialed in specific competencies, with much more stringent requirements than before.
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Posted on 10/05/20103 comments
I returned just last night from a short trip to Redmond. While I was there, I learned some news that I wanted to share, but I wasn't permitted to. But today
the news was made public
: Oslo, once destined to be a full-fledged wave of Microsoft technologies that would facilitate and promote model driven-development, is dead. The Oslo name summons Shakespearean images of King Hamlet slaying his Norwegian foe. But even without such literary context, the fall of Oslo is quite dramatic. And it's important to consider what happened,
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Posted on 09/24/20100 comments
For those who haven't come across it, PowerPivot is Microsoft's Excel- and SharePoint-based self-service BI tool. Essentially, it allows power users to build their own SQL Server Analysis Services cubes, except that they don't need to be familiar with cube concepts and they won't even notice that SSAS is involved. The other exception from the Microsoft BI norm is that these cubes use a new columnar, in-memory storage engine, called VertiPaq, rather than Analysis Services' traditional MOLAP (Multidimensional OnLine Analytical Processing) storage scheme.
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Posted on 09/09/20102 comments
Windows Live has had many lives. It started as a single page at
www.live.com
, where you could set up various widgets in a tiled configuration. The widgets mostly consumed RSS feeds and the idea was that you could have a home page where the content updated dynamically; i.e. where the content was "live." I remember when the service was still in Beta and called Start.com; Robert Scoble, then a Microsoft employee, was hawking it pretty hard. It was kind of cool for its time, but it petered out, as did Scoble's stint at Microsoft a year later.
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Posted on 09/07/20102 comments
Long ago, in the mid and late-90s, the mobile device market was a bit different from today's. Palm led the PDA category, with monochrome devices that operated offline, until the Palm VII and its ultra-slow Internet service came out. The Palm VII was all the rage amongst early-adopters... I even bought the erstwhile publisher of Visual Studio Magazine's predecessor one and shipped it to him, because they were available in New York, but not in the Bay Area, where he was.
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Posted on 08/31/20100 comments
At
VSLive
today, I had the pleasure of introducing Microsoft Corporate VP Jason Zander. And he had the pleasure of
introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch
. Pleasure is a theme here, because the product, to me at least, looks great.
LightSwitch is a .NET based environment, hosted in Visual Studio, that allows developers to build business apps. Quickly. It harkens back, with pride, to tools of old, like VB6 and FoxPro, that made data, and data maintenance UIs, first class citizens. These tools also treated line-of-business developers as VIPs, not as the great unwashed.
LightSwitch builds Silverlight applications. They can run locally (in or out of the browser) and they can also run on Windows Azure. They can work with any database, but the development environment makes it very easy to create SQL Server databases, and can then deploy them to SQL Azure. The stock UIs look very Microsoft Office-like, but third parties can build alternative skins/themes that plug right into the environment. Infragistics already has a prototype. Microsoft showed it on stage today. And it did look really nice.
Data validations are built in. Search is built in. Business data types (rather than simple database or .NET data types) are built in. LightSwitch takes away the burden of creating a bunch of plumbing for corporate apps. Plumbing that you either have to write every time, or else use some framework that, by definition, won’t be very standard.
Tools in the 1990s did this too. Then the 2000s came and many of those tools largely went away. Now one has come back, and it targets the modern Microsoft stack, including Silverlight and Azure and the Entity Framework and WCF RIA Services. With considerably less working in the weeds to use these technologies than has been required until now. And, yes, LightSwitch lets you write .NET code when you need to.
I watched the tweets fly by during the keynote. Many expressed curiosity and excitement. Others expressed dismay. Dismay that “lesser” developers will have access to the modern stack. Dismay that they’ll build the apps quickly. And dismay that Microsoft wants to enable them. The dismay was often uttered under the cover of concern for stability, scalability and maintainability.
To the dismayed, I must say: get over it, and stop worrying. \There’s room for productivity developers. There’s room for enterprise developers. They don’t have to be at odds. This is not a zero sum game.
We need productivity programmers to be accommodated on the Microsoft stack. If they are not, they will go to other stacks. In fact, they already have. We have to try and get them back. They create opportunities for enterprise devs, and they create opportunities for their customers. I hope LightSwitch appeals to them. I hope it brings them back to the Microsoft ecosystem. I don’t know if it will, but even if it doesn’t, that doesn’t make it a bad idea. Celebrating difficulty and demonizing productive ease? To me, that’s the bad idea.
Posted on 08/03/201011 comments
This week, Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft's Developer Division, announced,
via blog post
, the early Beta release of a new tool called WebMatrix. WebMatrix is a free developer tool that enables Web development geared toward what I might call Markup-and-Script developers (more on that in a minute). And although WebMatrix draws upon technologies already, or soon to be, present in the fuller ASP.NET Web development platform and the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), it is a radical departure from what those technologies have evolved into. Some review of Microsoft developer tool history might bring this into perspective.
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Posted on 07/12/20108 comments
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that their short-lived social networking-oriented phone, Kin, was being discontinued. I’m glad. In a post I wrote over a month ago, I implored Steve Ballmer to kill the product. I didn’t just do that because Kin 1 and 2 received terrible reviews; I had other reasons to distrust this product’s efficacy.
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Posted on 07/02/20101 comments
This past Monday, June 21st, the New York City Council Committee on Technology in Government held a hearing on its proposed legislation, known as
Introduction 029-2010
, that would require all City agencies to publish their data online, in "raw" form. The data would be available to private citizens who wished to analyze it, hobbyist developers who wished to work with it, and commercial entities looking to utilize it internally or create products that use and add value to it.
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Posted on 06/24/20101 comments
Three days ago I participated in a special outreach campaign. Specifically, I was part of an effort to mentor various members of the U.S, Congress (in both the House and Senate) in issues concerning technology companies. I took part in a full day of meetings on Capitol Hill, organized by the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), an organization with which I have been associated for more than 10 years and on whose board I now sit.
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Posted on 06/21/20103 comments
I tried writing a post for this blog last night, while at the this year's
Microsoft Tech Ed
and
Business Intelligence
conferences in New Orleans. But I literally fell asleep while writing it. That's probably a sign that my readers might have done the same while reading it.
Why the writer's block? This was a very good show for me, but I think I was having trouble figuring out exactly why. Now that I'm on the flight home, I'm starting to piece it together.
One reason, for sure, was that I've spent years in both the developer and the BI worlds, and a show that combined the two was really enjoyable for me. Typically, the subject matter, the attendees, the Microsoft execs and managers, and even the social circles have been separate. This year's Tech Ed facilitated a fusion of each of these previously segregated groups.
That was good for me as a speaker; for example, I facilitated a Birds of a Feather session on PowerPivot (Microsoft's new self-service BI offering) that was well-attended, and by a large number of non-BI pros no less. The fusion was good for me as an attendee too, as Microsoft BI, in the form of a new Pivot Viewer control, made it into the Day 1 keynote, demoed by Microsoft's key BI champion, Amir Netz. And it was good for me socially, as I was able to meet with peers in both camps, and at one location.
Speaking of meeting with industry colleagues, I did a lot of that at this show. Probably for the first time ever, I carefully scheduled and conducted a series of meetings with friends and business acquaintances in the developer tools, data visualization, utilities, publishing and training areas of the Microsoft ecosystem. Beside the time efficiencies in conducting so many meetings, I discovered another benefit. I got a real handle on the tech industry's economic health.
The news here is good. First of all, 2010 has been a great year for just about everyone I spoke to. The mood is positive, energy is high, and people are working really hard. This is, of course, refreshing to see, and it's a huge relief. Add to that the fact that this year's Tech Ed was about 2.5 times larger in headcount than last year's (based on numbers from unofficial, but reliable, sources), and the economic prognosis seems excellent. But there's more to it than that.
Here's the thing: everyone I talked to seems to be working, and succeeding, at changing their business models to adapt to changes in the industry. Whether it's the Internet's impact on publishing and training, the increased importance of the developer audience in South Asia, the shift of affordable developer and business talent to unfamiliar locales abroad, or even lapses in Microsoft's performance in the market, partner companies aren't just rolling with the punches; they're welcoming the changes and working them to their advantage.
No one seemed downtrodden, or even fatigued. Even for businesses who have seen core revenue streams become commoditized, everyone seems to be changing their market strategy and winning. Even Microsoft, of whom I have been critical recently, showed signs of successful hard work and playbook change, in the maturing of their cloud strategy, their commitment to it and their excitement around it. And the embedded, managed, self-service BI strategy that Microsoft has been touting looks like it's already being embraced by customers, even though PowerPivot, and other new Microsoft BI products, were released only recently.
The collective optimism I have witnessed, and that I have felt, tells me good things about this industry and the economy. The stock market had huge mood swings during my stay, and that may yet subdue the industry recovery I have seen this week. Nonetheless, I am convinced that a strong foundation of hard work, innovative thinking and, if I may, true renaissance is underlying this industry's success.
That kind of strength will generate a strong recovery, I am certain, whether now or once we're past another round of choppy weather in the broader economy. The fundamentals are good.
Posted on 06/11/20102 comments