Betanews

10 things about Microsoft's PDC 2009: The good, the bad and the ugly

Joe Wilcox — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0500

Microsoft's 2009 developer conference wrapped up yesterday in Los Angeles. Not since PDC 2003 has Microsoft talked so much and said so little. As I listened to the keynotes and have reviewed the sessions, words "series finale" repeatedly popped into my head -- like a TV show coming to its end after a long run. Good or bad for Microsoft, a computing era is ending. Perhaps PDC 2009 demarcates the transition.

PDC 2003 was memorable for demos that wooed but seemed insubstantial. Within weeks after that developer conference, I began telling my clients (I was a senior analyst for JupiterResearch then) to expect Microsoft to delay Windows Longhorn sometime in early 2004. The delay came, followed by several others, as Microsoft dumped features to get Windows Vista out the door -- late -- missing holiday 2006.

PDC 2009 had a quality that reminds me of the event six years earlier. Much of the big new stuff came off a bit airy, and there are gapping pot holes in the product strategy -- mobile being the biggest -- that Microsoft executives tried to walk around or jump over. Ignoring these holes doesn't make them go away, unless perhaps sticking one's head in them like an ostrich might.

Windows is no longer the satellite around which trendy development projects revolve. Windows gravity remains strong in the enterprise, for which switching costs to competing platforms hold tight the orbit. Increasingly, Web development and the mobile device capture pull developers away from Windows. Microsoft didn't increase enough the gravity to pull them back. For example, Internet Explorer 9 demos were laughable in context of continued and aggressive Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox development. Meanwhile, Microsoft had virtually nothing to say about Windows Mobile/Phone.

With that introduction, I've compiled my thoughts about PDC 2009 -- and related announcements this week, such as the Office 2010 public beta -- into a list of 10 things. The things are in no particular order of importance.

1. Two screens aren't enough for a three-screen strategy. The most baffling Microsoft messaging coming out of PDC 2009 was the continued talk about three screens -- mobile device/phone, PC and TV. But Microsoft only really has one of those screens down, the PC. The TV screen is more about Xbox gaming and entertainment, without enough synchronicity yet with the PC.

The mobile phone strategy is a disaster. Microsoft has got no software or service that can effectively compete with Apple, Google, Nokia or Research in Motion mobile operating systems. Windows Mobile is losing licensees to Google's Android, and Apple's App Store/iPhone/iPod touch platform is a black hole sucking in developers.

Actually, it's embarrassing for Microsoft to pitch three screens when the software and strategy around one of those screens stinks so badly. I actually felt sorry for Microsoft executives trying to make the three-screen pitch. I was embarrassed for them.

2. A laptop isn't a bribe, it's an investment. During the PDC Day 2 keynote, Steven Sinofsky, Windows & Windows Live divisional president, told paying attendees they would each receive a free laptop. Microsoft and Acer designed the thin-and-light laptop, with 11.6-inch touchscreen. The other features seemed quite underwhelming,

But underwhelming really was an overwhelming achievement. Microsoft accomplished two important objectives by giving away the laptops:

Every developer attending the conference now has Windows 7 for creating new applications.
The laptop establishes a baseline for which developers should create their new applications.

The latter is important. Many Windows XP and Vista systems can be upgraded to Windows 7, and they won't have the fastest processors, best graphics capabilities or highest screen resolutions of computers shipping now. Then there are all those underpowered netbooks that businesses and consumers are buying. Microsoft set an appropriate baseline for where the market is and where Microsoft wants the market to go -- touchscreens.

3. A big conference should justify attendees' investment of time and money. PDC 2009 didn't offer any big surprises, aside from the the free laptop. Perhaps that's OK, as Betanews' Scott Fulton expressed yesterday:

The big stories here in Los Angeles this week were more evolutionary than revolutionary. That was actually quite all right with attendees I spoke with this week, most of whom are just fine with one less thing to turn their worlds upside down. It's tough enough for many of these good people to hold onto their jobs every week.

Perhaps some other attendees would like to keep their jobs by justifying the time and expense of attending Microsoft's developer conference. Microsoft should have skipped doing a developer conference this year. It's better to saying nothing if you really have nothing to say.

4. A shipping operating system is better than none. Windows 7 is here. It's real, and it's really much better than either Windows XP or Vista. Windows 7 is fun and productivity boosting. During PDC, Microsoft made a pretty good pitch for why Windows 7. Yesterday, during a Webcast, Google made an operating pitch, too -- for Chrome OS. After months of rumors, Google finally explained what to expect from Chrome OS. The news was everywhere yesterday. But for all the buzz, Chrome OS is, at least for today, vaporware. The software release is a year, maybe even more, away.

But the timing of the announcement felt deliberate, like Google had looked into the Microsoft playbook and copied a few strategies. During the 1990s, Microsoft was notorious for announcing big new -- coming someday in the future -- things about the same time competitors released new products. Some of these forthcoming Microsoft products were real vaporware; they never shipped. But whether real products or not, the announcements gave businesses and consumers reason to wait on the competing thing available in the present for the one that sounded so good in the future. Chrome OS is Google's reason to wait on Windows 7. I say that nothing is no reason to wait on something.

5. Being Amazon is no way to launch Azure. During PDC 2008, Microsoft's Web services pitchman, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, gave a rousing pitch for Azure. He convinced that Azure would be a cloud-based operating system developers would write their applications to. The strategy beamed with innovation. A year later, the pitch came across as something much different. Ozzie still talked about a cloud OS, but the deliverables and new services were about databases.

It seemed as if Microsoft had pulled a Windows Longhorn, dumping features and shifting strategies before reaching the destination. Azure, which won't launch until Jan. 1, 2010, now looks less like a cloud OS and more like an up-and-coming Amazon Web Services. Chasing Amazon is not a winning strategy, even with all the leverage Microsoft commands from existing PC desktop and server software.

Like PDC 2003, where Microsoft employees showed lots of Longhorn facade but not much structure behind it, Azure seemed not only less substantial than PDC 2008 but missing pieces even ahead of the launch. What about Windows Live and important services like Windows Mesh for which there was supposed to be synchronicity with Azure?

6. Silverlight can light Microsoft's way to the Web. Scott Guthrie made a compelling pitch for the new features coming in Silverlight 4.0, which is now in beta. The Microsoft corporate vice president showed that at least with this one product, Microsoft is innovating -- and remarkably fast. New features include Adobe AIR-like capabilities, support for microphones and Webcams, standalone Silverlight containers and better HTML support, including HTTP streaming. There is much for developers to like in Silverlight 4.0.

But Microsoft also is acting like the old Microsoft and not the more open one presented during PDC 2008. Some new features are specific to Windows, which potentially fragments Silverlight functionality across different platforms.

7. People don't want to work more, they want to live more. The most baffling Microsoft marketing messaging of the week had to be for Office Mobile. Tagline: "Take work with you?" Exactly what is aspirational about that? Microsoft expects so-called knowledge workers, whose computing habits already mix professional and personal lives, will want to take even more work with them? The tagline is reason not to use Office Mobile. That is unless the marketing goal is to generate fear: It's better to take more work home than to not work at all, given the increasing chances of otherwise being laid off in this economy. Such approach is perhaps motivational, but certainly not aspirational.

8. Real open-source supporters improve Azure's allure. Ozzie has consistently and persistently pitched Microsoft's Web services strategy as being more open. He made his case during PDC 2009 in a surprising -- and I'd say shocking -- way. He brought out two surprising Azure supporters It was a simply brilliant marketing maneuver. The first: WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg came out on the PDC stage to announce that Automattic would begin using Azure in production ahead of the official service launch. From a marketing perspective, it was a stunning announcement, since Automattic uses open-source tools like Apache and MySQL. The message: Azure isn't just about Microsoft products or development tools.

Additionally, Vivek Kundra, the US government's chief information officer, appeared via satellite link. Many news reports have painted Kundra as a Google hosted apps lover. That buzz has raised questions about how much the Obama Administration might embrace Microsoft software or services. Kundra is on record supporting the use of open development tools for government online services. While the Federal CIO mostly spoke about the government's open-development efforts, his appearance at PDC was good for Microsoft by association. Kundra concluded by saying that he looked forward to the "thousands of applications that are going to be created." But he didn't specifically say with Microsoft development tools or services.

9. SharePoint and Windows Live are not social networks. On Monday, Microsoft released Office 2010 beta, ahead of PDC 2009's official opening. Among the announcements with potential developer appeal: Office Social Connector. Microsoft is attempting to make Outlook 2010 the hub for users' social connections. But right now, the major supported product/service is SharePoint 2010. While Microsoft acts like SharePoint is a social network, it most certainly is not. Meanwhile, Microsoft promises Windows Live support for Office Social Connector sometime next year. Third-party services must support a Microsoft proprietary XML schema to appear in Office Social Connector.

10. Digital natives are looking elsewhere. The biggest tech news of the week was about competitors' vaporware -- the aforementioned Chrome OS and Apple's rumored tablet. How outrageously laughable. Apple's rumored tablet is rumored to be delayed. It was all over the InterWebs during PDC! A product that doesn't exist will ship late. Later than what?

The point: Apple and Google are having much more success appealing to geeks and digital natives than is Microsoft. While Microsoft executives talk big iron -- the kind of blathering heard from IBM a generation ago -- Apple and Google offer products or services meaningful to everyday users, such tools for creating or managing content that matters, like photos and videos, rather than static text documents. Just look at the bazillion of iPhone/iPod touch new App Store application stories that post to the Web in any week.

Apple and Google have got the buzz. By comparative perception, Microsoft makes software for aged computing users and IT stiffshirts. Microsoft did little to change perceptions through PDC 2009.

E-book readers will be in short supply this holiday season

Tim Conneally — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:02:14 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Black Friday is just a week away and the demand for ebook readers looks to already be too great.

Earlier this week, Sony said its 3G-connected Daily Edition Reader may not arrive in time for the holidays. Preorders for the device began on Wednesday, but it will not ship until some time between December 18th and January 7th, and it is not expected to land in stores until after the holidays.

Today, Barnes and Noble said that it has already sold out of its new Nook e-reader, and that the next shipment of devices will not be available until January 4th.

In November 2007 when the Kindle first launched, the device reportedly sold out in six hours and wasn't available again until mid-2008. Then the Kindle DX debuted, and it too was in short supply.

The link between these devices (and nearly every e-reader on the market) is their electrophoretic display, which comes from Massachusetts company E Ink Corporation. Betanews reached out to E Ink Co. today, to find out how its production is holding up in light of the high demand for e-readers, and a reply is pending.

We'll update as soon as the company gets back to us.

Sony looks to finally open a single storefront for downloads

Tim Conneally — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:12:20 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Sony yesterday discussed its plans to open a download shop similar to iTunes or Amazon Digital Downloads.

Reportedly given the tentative name "Sony Online Service," the online store would make the many different types of Sony digital content available in a single place. The company has a number of content portals already, but each is geared toward a related piece of hardware and run by a different business unit of the giant Sony conglomerate.

For example, PlayStation 3 and PSP users can download new games, movies, and TV episodes from the PlayStation Network, but users of the Bravia Internet Link on Sony's HDTVs get content directly from Sony Pictures services such as Crackle. Users of Sony's e-Reader family can get content in The sBook Store from Sony, but users of Sony's Walkman family of portable media players are encouraged to get their music from Sony MusicPass, which was launched to replace the defunct Connect music download shop that closed in 2008. There is also a substantial overlap in content with Sony's mobile phone joint venture Sony Ericsson and itsPlayNow arena..

Kazuo Hirai, Sony's executive vice president for networked products and services, says the service will be modeled after the popular PlayStation Network, which now has more than 33 million registered users. Hirai however, expressed doubt to Businessweek that users of PlayStation Network would actually migrate over to a new service.

Tuning out the tablet: Time to give the endless speculation a rest

Carmi Levy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:42:53 -0500

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

I'm sure I'm not the only one who looks at renderings of Apple's long-rumored tablet - or iTablet, or whatever name the faithful have assigned to it this week - and wishes the FedEx truck would pull up to my door with an early demo in time for the holiday season. I'm sure I'm also not the only one who's ready for the endless speculation to, well, end.

I don't think I've ever seen an unreleased product generate so much discussion without so much as a peep from the vendor of record. I realize the frenzied speculation is as frenzied as it is because we're talking about Apple, and that if this were any other company, we'd collectively yawn our response before moving on to the next big thing. This is a company that seems unique in its ability to generate so much activity around what is, for now at least, vapourware. And while I appreciate the value of healthy exchanges in advance of a major product launch, I can't shake the feeling that the never-ending iTablet fever is just a little much, and that we'd all be doing ourselves a favor by giving it a rest and waiting until Apple actually ships a working product.

Like junk food - great taste, not so healthy

Don't get me wrong: This is all good for Apple. Once again, without spending so much as a dime on advertising, Apple has managed to keep its corporate brand front and center in both tech and mainstream media. It hasn't had to use its PR firm retainers to pre-announce anything because breathless conventional and social media folks have been perfectly willing to share their so-called news on the company's behalf. Any other vendor would sell its first, second and third born offerings to have even a fraction of this kind of market visibility and influence. Decades from now, when media mastery is taught in institutions of higher learning, Apple's ability to time and again conjure a deafening buzz around things that may or may not see the light of day will serve as an iconic case study.

But is any of this good for us? Is it helpful or hurtful for consumers and wannabes alike to spend days on end hovering over blog entries, twittering madly or debating in online forums? These activities in and of themselves are the sign of a healthy community, of course, and are crucial to giving vendors the kind of insight they need to continue to deliver market-relevant products and services. But has the uber-hype that seems to follow Apple around - and that has seemingly impossibly shifted into an even higher gear for the iTablet - finally reached the point of diminishing returns?

Too much of anything isn't good for you

I'm going to argue that the hype has gone well beyond the point at which it adds any value to our collective lives. We're working ourselves into a tizzy over something we know nothing about. We don't know what OS this thing will run, how large it will be, what kind of screen it will have and how much it'll cost. We've seen lots of beautifully rendered images of it and heard a near endless string of confirmed - then scotched - confirmations of imminent component orders and production. And as much fun as it is to bat around possibilities, it hardly seems like a productive way to spend time.

That's because while we're all breathlessly sharing thoughts and opinions - but precious few facts - on a mysterious device that we now won't apparently see until late next year, we continue to be challenged with more mundane needs, like using technology that's available today to keep customers happy, our bank accounts filled and our lights on. I have no issue gazing into the collective crystal ball as a means of informing the kinds of decisions we need to make either today or in the near future. Keeping at least half an eye on what's coming is one way of avoiding nasty surprises and keeping one step ahead of everyone else. But when said crystal ball becomes our sole focus of conversation, I'd like to humbly suggest that we've gone too far. Balance matters here, too, and if we're spending all our time discussing a mythical product that's close to a year from possibly seeing the light of day, we're missing the significance of today.

We're missing the real point

In a way, it's a little disappointing that the enormous halo cast by this not-quite-a-product product eclipses the real issue at hand: that vendors have for the better part of the last decade failed to convince consumers that they should pony up for devices in the empty space between pocketable mobile devices and laptops. UMPCs and later MIDs failed to gain any traction thanks to low value propositions and ridiculous pricing. Netbooks have come close, thanks largely to their just-good-enough-for-the-purpose performance, conveniently portable form factor and recession-friendly price point. Timing has also helped netbooks carve out a niche, as their short range wireless and, increasingly, carrier-supported 3G connectivity gives them mobile capabilities that earlier, less well-connected devices could only dream of. Increasingly Web-centric application models don't hurt, either.

The success of the netbook is giving rise to new forms of devices and revenue models that could - maybe - finally fill in the veritable valley of death that has already claimed so many mid-sized, mid-priced form factors. While it's unclear where Apple's product will ultimately fit, it's hardly a big story until the company actually moves closer to marketing the thing. Until then, every other competing vendor has just gotten a bit of additional breathing room to figure out what resonates with consumers before Apple satisfies the fanboys and finally introduces its tablet. Or whatever it is.

Until then, count me among the cynics who really doesn't care whether or not it has an OLED or a TFT screen, whether it's released as one product or two, or whether it costs $2,000 or half that. Only when we begin to see actual data points will we be able to decide whether it's worth pulling the plastic out or our wallets. For now, even Apple is capable of overstepping the limits of my patience.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.

Five improvements for IT managers in 2010

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:51:32 -0500

By Ed Moyle, TechNewsWorld

Every year around this time, everyone from antimalware companies to analyst firms line up to tell us about the top IT and security trends -- what they are and why we should care. This year, chances are they'll tell us all about cloud computing, virtualization, and social networking, and why these technologies are the new best (or worst) friends for security folks in 2010.

Now if you're sensing a bit of snarkiness here, you're right -- I find these lists a bit frustrating. That's not because of inaccuracies in the lists themselves (to the contrary, many of them are dead-on), but instead because they sometimes inappropriately drive how IT managers make budgeting decisions. Don't get me wrong, keeping abreast of the new areas is always valuable -- and I'm always fully on board with keeping us and our staff up to date and capable of reacting to new types of threats. But it's also important to keep in mind that what's new isn't always what's most critical. Where should you be investing budget dollars? At critical areas, not just what's new and shiny.

To illustrate this, consider a firm that doesn't use AV (antivirus) and also allows users to access social networking sites. The trend predictions are likely to clue us in about why social networking is something we should care about, but they might not mention malware at all (after all, that's been around forever). But if your firm doesn't yet have a cohesive antimalware strategy ... well, you've got bigger fish to fry than how, when, or what your employees tweet. In other words, when it comes time to allocate budget for new projects, you need to consider both the new and the old -- both the upcoming trends that Big Analyst Firm says are emerging, as well as the "tried and true" fundamentals that don't get as much play.

In the field, it's all about the basics. When you stop to think about it, how many of us are really where we need to be when it comes to the fundamentals? Which position would you rather defend: that your firm was hacked because of some newly emerging threat, or that you got hacked because you weren't doing the generally accepted minimum practice?

So in the spirit of keeping one eye on the practical, here's my New Year's list -- or, more accurately, my "reminder list": a highly unscientific breakdown of the top five basics that are often overlooked in enterprise. These are things that you probably should be doing, but might not be -- and things that you could probably do more with, but maybe aren't.

1) Vulnerability Assessment. There are several reasons why you might not be doing as much vulnerability assessment as you could be: It can bring down critical systems, it requires some specialized knowledge to vet false positives, it has a high overhead in terms of care and feedback by staff members. As such, there are quite a few organizations that just don't use it at all -- and for companies that do, it's often inconsistently deployed.

However, aside from this complexity, it's also one of the most valuable areas of feedback that you can get about how your organization performs. Data about the effectiveness of your patch management processes, your password policy, and your system-hardening procedures are all directly and practically observable through the data coming out of vulnerability assessment results. If you haven't deployed it yet, the technology is cheap, mature and commoditized.

2) Asset Inventory. How many of us have a detailed inventory of all the "stuff" on our networks? Organizations tend to grow their IT organically, so many of us are in the situation where going back to inventory what we have fielded is a huge, expensive undertaking. Even when we do have some idea of what's out there, there are very often "gaps" in our understanding of our environments. For example, we may have a pretty clear idea of what desktops are fielded but not have tremendous insight about applications.

If you don't have a clear idea of what you have fielded in your organization, now is the time to put together that inventory you've been putting off. Leverage existing tools like VA reports or business impact analysis documentation to put together a rough "map" of what you have fielded and keep it updated as changes occur. You don't have to have a fancy system to do this. Start small and grow your inventory the same way you grew your network -- organically.

3) Provisioning. We all know the ideal end state of user provisioning: defined roles that govern access to network resources and applications. But in practice, when the topic of provisioning comes up we wind up going down a path that involves deploying complicated systems or that involves significant effort parsing out users based on vague or poorly defined roles. While we wait for the dust to settle, the day to day business of assigning new users to applications moves ever forward -- often with little or no assist from security staff and even less organization.

However, a solid map of roles doesn't have to be complicated. Start by defining roles at the very highest levels, and get more granular over time. Don't have a provisioning system deployed? Delegate responsibility for creating roles to subject matter experts who use the application all the time. Check in with them periodically to make sure they're doing the right thing.

4) Audit and Monitoring. IDS systems are chatty, and the individuals who review alerts are often under significant stress and workload already. At the OS and application levels, staffers are often too overwhelmed to review log and activity reports as much as they should. So who has time to keep up? In many organizations, the day-to-day monitoring of audit and activity logs tends to fall by the wayside -- for folks that even have auditing features enabled.

However, compliance mandates like PCI, HIPAA and others specifically require review of audit logs, so failure to make this happen is not an option. Step up what you review and how often you review it. Institute spot-checks to make sure that staffers are doing their jobs when it comes to reviewing this critical data.

5) Business Continuity Planning. Let's face it, BCP is a lot of work. It involves participation from all areas of the organization -- from subject matter experts to business to management. Because of the number of folks involved, very often we don't have time for formal models, or when we do, very often our analysis goes without updates for long periods of time.

However, planning for contingencies is beyond critical, and all that data you're getting about applications, systems and business processes can be recycled for other purposes within your security program, such as triage during an incident response exercise, risk analysis, and even asset inventory. So maybe now is a good time to do a refresh on this valuable data -- or start doing it if you haven't already.

Now maybe your company has already hit all these topics, and you don't need me to remind you to "eat your vegetables." If so, nice work -- count yourself among the well-positioned minority.

However, if in reading through these items you see areas where you could be doing better, remember that boning up on the basics is just as important as looking for new ground to cover. After all, the basics might be "old hat," but that doesn't mean they're not important.

Originally published on TechNewsWorld

PDC 2009: What have we learned this week?

Scott M. Fulton, III — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:17:47 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It ended up being a somewhat different PDC conference than we had anticipated, and even to a certain extent, than we were led to believe. Maybe this was due in part to a little intentional misdirection to help generate surprise, but in the end, the big stories here in Los Angeles this week were more evolutionary than revolutionary. That was actually quite all right with attendees I spoke with this week, most of whom are just fine with one less thing to turn their worlds upside down. It's tough enough for many of these good people to hold onto their jobs every week.

We'll start our conference wrap-up with a look at the flashpoints (remind me to call Score Productions for a jingle to go with that) we talked about at the beginning of the week, and we'll follow up with the topic that crept in under the radar when we weren't expecting.

Making up for UAC, or, making Windows 7 seem less like Vista. This was absolutely the theme of "Day 0," which featured the day-long workshops. At this point, Windows engineers have absolutely no problem with the notion of disowning Vista, disavowing it, even though it was technically a stairstep toward making Windows 7 possible. But it is now perfectly permissible to acknowledge the performance hardships Vista faced, and let go of the past in order to move forward.

Mark Russinovich leads the way in this department, and the fact that he's appreciated leads others to follow suit. During his annual talk on "Kernel Improvements" -- which he expanded this year to a two-parter -- Russinovich spoke about the way that the timing of Windows' response to user interactions was adjusted to give the user more reassurance that something was happening, rather than the sinking suspicion that nothing was happening.

In an explanation of a user telemetry service he helped get off the ground called PerfTrack, he told attendees, "We went through and found roughly 300 places in the system where you interact with something, and there's a beginning and then an end where you go, 'Okay, that's done,' and optimized the performance of those user-visible interactions. We instrumented those begin-and-ends with data points, which collects timing information and sends that up to a Web service...and for each one of these interactions, we define what's considered 'great' performance, what's considered 'okay' performance, and what's considered Vista -- I mean, uh, 'bad,'" he explained, with a little grin afterward that appeared borrowed from Jay Leno. "And then if we end up in that 'okay' or 'bad,' what we do is, selectively turn on more instrumentation using ETW [Event Tracing for Windows] -- instrumentation of file accesses, Registry activity, context switches, page faults -- and then we collect that information from a sampling of customer machines that are showing that kind of behavior. "We feed that back to the product teams, they go analyze those and figure out, 'Why is their component sluggish in those scenarios?' and optimize that."

One of the results he demonstrated, shown here in this pair of charts, shows the number of user-reported instances of Start menu lag time leaning more toward the quick side than the slow side of the chart, between two builds of the Windows 7 beta.

The fact that performance matters was one of the key themes of PDC 2009, and attendees greeted that message with enthusiasm -- or, maybe more accurately, with appreciation that the company had finally received the message. But there are still lessons to be learned here that can be applied to other product areas, if anybody out there is listening.

Why Windows Azure? The major theme of Day 1 was the ability to scale services up -- scaling local services up to the data center, and data center services up (or down, depending on your application) to Microsoft's cloud provider, Windows Azure.

Last year at this time, Microsoft went to bat with essentially nothing -- no real definition of an Azure application, no clear understanding of who the customers will be, and absolutely no clue as to the business model. But now we know that services will be rendered on a utility basis like Amazon EC2, and we have a much clearer concept of the customer groups Azure will address. One is the small business that has never before considered data center applications; another is the class of customer that needs to plan for exceptional capacity traffic during unusual situations, but can't afford to maintain that high capacity 24/7; and the third is the big customer building a new class of application that has never before been considered on any platform.

Channeling customers to Microsoft's cloud will be "Dallas," its code name for large-capacity data bank services typically open for mining by the general public, which should eventually be given a typically Microsoft-sounding name; and AppFabric, the company's new mix-and-match component applications system built on the IIS 7 platform. But in neither of these cases is Microsoft particularly inventing the wheel; and as I heard from a plurality of attendees this week, Microsoft's entering another crowded field of contenders (including SalesForce.com and IBM) where competition has already been saturated. Success in this venture is by no means assured.

Next: Office takes a backseat...

What will Office Web Apps do? Less than we once thought, apparently. The extent to which you can view "rich content" created with real Office applications, in Office Web Apps, apparently remains strong. But since O Web will be free to everyone (for sensible reasons) the ability to create the same depth of rich content online will be artificially limited.

Since many businesses utilize Excel as a type of database, or as a window into their databases elsewhere, this means the utility of that product online will be most restricted. Word may suffer the least, however, as the need to compose respectable looking correspondence from anywhere one happens to be, is a pressing need that Word Web App can easily fulfill.

Making the case for Office 2010. We expected Microsoft Office to be the star of Wednesday's keynote, with demos of new functionality that, if it wasn't major, would at least have been advertised as fresh and new. It was not to be. Although we did have an opportunity to speak with an Office product manager (more on that in the coming days), the message Microsoft was sending this year was very different.

In the past, folks used to ask why a consumer applications suite was being prominently featured at a conference geared towards developers. The answer from Microsoft typically was, because Office is a platform, and developers build to platforms. The message Microsoft sent this year was that Office was not a platform. And that's a problem, because if that's true, there's no conference for Office. The excuse for the lack of Windows Mobile news was that it was a topic for MIX, the conference for Web developers set for next spring in Las Vegas.

So does Office wait for TechEd? All of a sudden, this major profit center seems homeless.

There was a little buzz devoted to something called the Outlook Social Connector plug-in, a new tool for integrating individuals' social media contacts within Office's communications app. Deals with social network hosts such as LinkedIn were announced. In one respect, that does address consumer concerns; in another, it's a little ironic. Here we have a situation where people take the time to broadcast their identities over multiple social services on purposes as a way to spread out...only to discover the need for a kind of "identity vacuum" to pull them back in again to one cohesive chord.

What we did see from the Office 2010 public beta (released Monday, then released Tuesday, then "launched" Wednesday) let us know that if Microsoft truly is listening to its customers and acting on their telemetry, then the word they're saying most often must be, "Whoa!"

During the Technical Preview phase, Microsoft unveiled its BackStage concept -- a way of organizing all the preparatory content of an application, such as print preview and preferences, in a more dimly-lit, cooler arrangement, making you almost want to whisper when you talk about it. The screenshot above shows BackStage in the Excel 2010 Technical Preview.

This is the same BackStage in Excel 2010 Beta 1. It's more conservative in several obvious regards, including the staging. But notice also something very important: The "Office button," which premiered in Office 2007 and which flattened down to become an icon menu tab in the Tech Preview, has now returned to being the File menu. If customers have been asking, "Where's File/Save?" then you have to wonder when they started asking, and how long they've been at it.

The new flavor of Visual Studio is already the old flavor. When you're dealing with a development platform unto itself, the beta version is often, unofficially but certainly, the working edition for many developers. And VS 2010 is already on Beta 2 now. More than one session presenter this week asked for shows of hands as to how many folks were already using Beta 2 as their development platform -- and in each case, a majority of everyone's hands were raised.

Will virtualization envelop Windows? Hell if I know. One of the hottest topics of prior conferences was something of a dud this year, and that's not good for a company that is actually behind in its ability to virtualize 64-bit platforms on 32-bit systems -- a feature Sun's VirtualBox and VMware already provide. But once the problem of absence of live migration in Hyper-V was kicked, virtualization took something of a breather this year, though it wasn't off the radar altogether.

The push toward online identity. Indeed, this ended up being the wildcard topic of the show. The principal security and architectural problem faced not only by developers but administrators as well, is enabling a secure single sign-on platform for local and remote applications. With multiple vendors supporting even more authentication protocols than there are vendors -- or so it appears -- this goal would seem impossible to achieve.

Microsoft is working to address this in its upcoming Windows Identity Foundation library, which will require the push of Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 -- a way to get AD out there to servers that aren't Windows. But just getting all hosted apps vendors on-board with AD is a colossal task, made more difficult by a "competitive" spirit among application and security vendors that works against the very spirit of communication and federation they need to accomplish the goal of common identity. We will be talking more about this in the coming days, because we learned a lot about this from PDC.

Now, there's something I'm missing. Yes, Scott Guthrie, I know I missed you in my list of headliners...and I'm sorry, it was inadvertent, and I apologize. Though I do know Brian Goldfarb gave you heck about it. But there's something else, let's see, I'm trying to recall...help me out, Brian...

Oh thank you, Scott, much obliged. Silverlight 4. This one should have been on our radar for certain. Silverlight stole the show on Wednesday, and was much of the talk among developers on Thursday. The new version will provide 1080p video, which everyone wanted. And it will provide authenticated access to system services outside the sandbox, which everyone wants.

If Office Web Apps were to run on Silverlight 4, you would get access to the right-click context menu -- a critical feature of regular Office 2007 and Office 2010 that's difficult to make up for with the ribbon alone. S4's access to system devices will make it feasible for developers to craft iTunes-like smartphone applications for devices that are tethered to PCs...and maybe even devices running on smartphones themselves, and not just Windows Phones.

Which reminds me, there was that one Guthrie demo Wednesday that bit the bottom of the bit bucket, with that cool looking phone. Did anyone ever make that work...Brian Goldfarb to the rescue once again. Yes, it is indeed possible to perform adaptive streaming of movies to the iPhone using Silverlight. We talked at length with Goldfarb (more on that too in coming days), and here's a preview of coming attractions:

"We've worked with Apple to create a server-side-based solution with IIS Media Services; and what we're doing is taking content that's encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, 'I want to enable the iPhone.'"

It was certainly more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary tone at this year's PDC, but attendees seemed comfortable with that this time around. Here was one strange phenomenon we've never noticed before: Attendance increased with later days. Wednesday attendance was noticeably higher for sessions and the keynote than for the previous day, and that was despite news of the big laptop giveaway being kept under lock and key. And Thursday -- which has often been a day for "leftovers" -- ended up being packed as well, including with attendees who brought those shiny new Acer multitouch laptops with them.

Now, there's something that hasn't been touched on: Acer. Think about that for a moment. This is the same company that publicly dissed Vista in 2006 for being a non-event for consumers, practically leading the wave for the complaints that were to follow. And here it is lending its name to an event that not only promotes Windows 7, but prototypes its proper use (from Microsoft's perspective) in all computing. Microsoft let Acer show everyone else how quick bootup and clean performance are supposed to be done.

That's the biggest indicator of Lessons Learned we saw all week.

Live report: Will Google Chrome OS change Linux?

Tim Conneally — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:02:59 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Google announced its open source Chrome OS last July and it has been a little more than a mystery to the wondering public since that time. Now, an official first look is mere hours away.

At 10:00 am PST (1:00 pm EST), Google will present a live webcast of Chrome OS, the search giant's attempt to "rethink what operating systems should be." Speakers this afternoon will include Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS.

Besides finally getting to see just how Chrome will be laid out, we will get an overview of the underlying technology and find out about the operating system's 2010 launch schedule.

What we know about Chrome OS already:

It will be free and open source
It is built on the Linux Kernel but has a totally new windowing system.
It will support both x86 and ARM architecture.
It will run Web apps as if they're native desktop apps.
It is not a handset OS like Android, but there will be "overlap" in functionality
Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba have all voiced support for Chrome OS.
Chrome OS Director Matthew Papakipos is director of the HTML 5 Open Web Platform efforts at Google.
The underlying security architecture of "standard" operating systems is being completely redesigned.

Until today, these facts have only raised more questions. Far too many to even list here. Hopefully, once the Webcast gets rolling, we'll be able to finally put the most basic of these questions to rest.

11:23am PT: The Q&A session has ended, and now it's time to go download the source code!

11:20am PT: It currently doesn't support printing, but locally pluggable devices are recognized, and more are being added. (Nobody in the Q&A session is asking about local network presence/file sharing, etc...that's disappointing.)

11:18am PT: "We're trying to make the core boot operating system boot wicked fast...we're really focused on making a lean and mean netbook that runs really fast." --Matthew Papakipos

11:16am PT: Sergey Brin has joined the discussion.

11:13am PT: "If the cloud goes down, you're going to be affected no matter what machine you're on; Chrome OS or not." -Sundar Pichai

11:13am PT: Though most of what is going on in Chrome OS can be accessed simply through any other browser...Verified Boot/malware prevention/fast boot/file system security are all benefits to the OS.

11:10am PT: "It's very hard to build and ship an OS in a year, but that's what we're trying to do." -Sundar Pichai

11:09am PT: Chrome Native Client will run on ARM chips eventually.

11:07am PT: To reiterate, the current plan is to ONLY SUPPORT WEB APPS in Chrome OS, period.

11:06am PT: Will Android Apps run on Chrome OS? Since they're not Web apps...no.

11:05am PT: Media can be cached locally for offline access, and 802.11n is the focus wireless standard for connectivity.

11:03am PT: "We are working very, very, very hard to have a simple code stack." -Sundar Pichai

11:02am PT: Chrome OS-based devices will be in the market by the middle of 2010.

11:00am PT: Working to support plugins. Asked if they're working with Microsoft to develop a Chrome/OS Silverlight plugin, the answer was "no comment."

10:58am PT: Everything that works in Chrome the browser, including Codecs, will also work in Chrome OS...Flash, Codec hardware acceleration, and Chrome native client.

10:57am PT: The archetypal Chrome OS device is going to be a companion device.

10:56am PT: Q: Will there be an application store? A: There are hundreds of millions of web apps, so we're working to solve the problem. Q: What about driver certification? A: Open source drivers whenever possible, but working closely with OEMs...

10:54am PT: With Web standards, many of those are still evolving, and the Device APIs are all still evolving too. Google is "working closely" with the big standards groups.

10:52am PT: Demo model running this build of Chrome OS is an "off the shelf Eee PC" (Asus)

10:51am PT: Q: What's a Chrome OS netbook going to cost? A: It will be up to the OEMs, and it's too early to say.

10:49am PT: Google Chrome will ultimately be a "stateless computer"

10:47am PT: watching this video:

10:43am PT: How Chrome OS is going to go to market: Chrome OS image is being built against hardware profiles rather than generically. No support for HDDs, only Solid state drives. Wireless card support will be announced on a case by case basis. You won't be able to just install Chrome. It's pre-install only. (Kinda like OS X?)

10:40am PT: System is continuously auto-updated. Most of the system is in a writable partition, and that's scary. System settings are stored separately, and user data is always encrypted. One benefit is safety of data; you can be assured that if some bad guy gets your machine with a screwdriver, he'll have a hard time reading those bits.

10:38am PT: In the security model of the conventional application, apps run as you. (Impersonation). This is a big deal because it enables hackers to impersonate you. This makes it hard for users to make decisions.

Chrome OS applications are all Web apps, so you have a different security model. Apps are treated at the system level as fundamentally hostile by default. Web apps can't change files on the hard disk, can't change the power setting. (Evidently something does, but that's not being discussed.)

All apps run in secure namespaces. "Every tab that you run in Chrome OS is run completely separate from other tabs in the OS -- we've protected tabs from other tabs, apps from each other."

10:35am PT: Talking now about the security model, and how the operating system will update itself continually. Components of the operating system must pass a cryptographic signature check before running. Malware protection enables the system to declare certain components of the operating system "wrong," which apparently may be due to either malware or system updates. "We're taking what used to be a painful imaging process, and we've made it transparent, saving your system settings."

10:24am PT: Instead of browser tabs, they have become "application tabs," and the far left tab is a menu of Web apps, there are also dedicated tabs for gmail, Google Docs, etc. "Panels" pop up from the bottom which can lay Web apps on top of one another.

10:21am PT: The UI is meant to feel like a browser, so it looks like the Chrome Browser. (as TechCrunch found out several weeks ago.) Bear in mind, this is a whole year ahead of release, so code is still being checked in right now.

10:19am PT: Chrome OS promises a 7 second cold boot. (though I counted 12 seconds in the demo...)

10:18am PT: Chrome OS is a "better model for personal computing," focused on: speed ("we want it to be blazingly fast, like a TV") simplicity (every application is a web application, nothing to maintain, all data is cloud data...sort of like a dumb terminal without the "dumbness") and security ("we run completely within the browser security model")

10:14am PT: Trends that Google is excited about: Growth of Netbooks, Growth of cloud usage, Convergence of phone and computer functionality.

AOL's spinoff from Time Warner to shed 2,500 jobs

Tim Conneally — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:02:15 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

As Time Warner continues the process of spinning AOL off into a separate, independent company, AOL will lose a third of its workforce. The spinoff is expected to be completed on December 9. In filings with the Securities and Exchange commission earlier this month, Time Warner said the split will cost more than $200 million in restructuring charges.

Today, AOL has reportedly instituted a voluntary layoff program, asking for 2,500 employees to give up their jobs in exchange for severance packages. If this number cannot be reached, AOL will begin laying off people anyway. The soon-to-be spun off company is looking to reduce its operating expenses by $300 million.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong will reportedly be giving up his 2009 bonus, which would have been more than $1.5 million.

"As a member of our team and the person who takes accountability for the results of the company, I am making the decision to forego my 2009 bonus," Armstrong wrote to employees. "That decision is a personal one and is not a sign for the future payout of the overall bonus plan for employees."

PDC 2009: Microsoft cares about Web browser performance

Scott M. Fulton, III — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:21:08 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

I know when I've hurt a man's feelings. In a segment of the technology business that has recently become fiercely competitive, it's difficult to report bad news about a team that tries very hard to build a good Web browser. It was very apparent from our interview today at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles that Microsoft Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch has an emotional and personal investment in the product he's building.

"If I had a script engine that was twice as fast as the one before, the Web should be twice as fast," said Hatchamovitch today. "But if JavaScript is 10 percent of my site, at most, I'll shave 5 percent off; and if the site was 1.8 seconds, yea, I'm not going to be able to tell...Yes, we understand that there's a microscope on JavaScript performance. We've made progress on JavaScript performance -- we're all in the same neighborhood now."

He was referring to the first news of development of Internet Explorer 9, which he confirmed only began weeks ago, but whose early builds -- according to both Hatchamovitch and Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky today -- were producing JavaScript performance numbers that were comparable to its competition for the first time since Mozilla released Firefox 3.5.

"That's just going to re-emphasize that it's the systems that come together. Because as all the JavaScript engines converge on their performance, people are going to notice the other 90 percent [of Web components] a lot more significantly."

Betanews' reporting on Internet Explorer in the past few months has not been kind. The October Patch Tuesday round of fixes included one for all versions of Internet Explorer that addressed a very serious, possibly exploitable issue. While we feel addressing this issue is absolutely necessary, we also noticed that applying the patch resulted in a noticeable slowdown in IE performance. At least, noticeable to us.

The most vocal reader response to our reporting could be grouped into three categories: One group vocalized that it did not care about Internet Explorer performance as a factor in computing, since it's mainly a way to read news articles anyway, and voiced their opinion that we shouldn't care either. Another group of readers took Microsoft to task for, in their opinion, not caring about IE performance, but added that it shouldn't be expected to care because nobody else does (or at least, nobody of importance) and that we should drop the subject for that reason. A third group applauded our efforts to, in their opinion, expose Microsoft for not caring about browser performance.

None of these are groups that anyone at Microsoft would want to appear publicly aligned with. So perhaps part of Dean Hachamovitch was interested in speaking with me today, and another part -- for absolutely understandable reasons -- was dreading the thought.

But bravely, he made his company's case, a valiant effort to split the difference: JavaScript isn't the Web, he asserted, but just one of many subsystems. A multitude of other factors will contribute to users' decisions. "There's performance, there's interoperable standards, and there's graphics," said Hatchamovitch. Each component strikes a different chord with different groups of users, he said. Since the Day 2 keynote's conclusion, he and his press handler had opportunities to ask individuals what they thought of the presentation -- or more specifically, what did they remember from it?

"I asked some folks what they heard, and some just said, 'Yea, you guys are doing a lot of compliance and interop.' 'Did you hear anything else?' 'No, not really.' Talked to someone else, 'So what did you hear?' 'You guys are doing some stuff around making the script engine faster.' 'Huh. Anything else?' 'No, not really.' So what I'm finding is that this is the classic game of Telephone."

What resonates with various attendees is essentially aligned with what they want to hear, Hatchamovitch went on...perhaps to illustrate the point that when he asked me the very same question at the start of our interview, I dove right into the performance aspect.

Rendering is another critical aspect, and we saw demonstrations of the changes IE9 will make in the rendering department. Specifically, the next edition of Microsoft's browser will move away from GDI, the graphics library favored by Windows during the late 1980s, and toward the new Direct2D library which takes fuller advantages of the capabilities of the underlying hardware, including the GPU. In response to my request for a video that showed this performance, Microsoft asked us to include in our story the video you see embedded above, which is as close as the Web can come to approximating the speed and fluidity improvements attainable through Direct2D.

There is absolutely no question that, if IE9's rendering improvements were to simply stay on the same level as they appear from these early demonstrations, through to the end of the product's development, the result will be a perceptible qualitative difference that could be the deciding factor in whether Firefox or Chrome or Safari users switch back to IE -- as important a factor as computational performance.

Hachamovitch showed us up close the map rendering demonstration seen from a distance during the Day 2 keynote. Shifting the same road map across the screen on a small Dell XPS laptop produced typical, perceptible jitters using IE8's GDI graphics methodology, compared to a smooth, even flow using IE9's Direct2D.

Some folks were confused by the meaning of the number in the demo, and why the slower, jittery-er graphic produced the higher value. This represented the number of milliseconds between frames -- a number that plummeted from 130.2 ms as in this photo, or even much higher on occasion, to as low as 8 ms for Direct2D. Actual frames per second rises from around 7 (or lower) for GDI, to about 60 for Direct2D on the same machine.

"Now, that kind of difference -- somebody said, 'Oh, it's like game-level animation!' Yea, you can call it like it's a Pixar movie or an Xbox game. But then they said, 'But what does that have to do with the Web?' It has everything to do with the Web. When you're using Web mail or this mapping site, or you're previewing photos -- imagine going to a photo site, and you want to have 1,000 thumbnails up on the screen. Now we're using the graphics card, so you're not waiting on every piece of graphics that way. That's a huge gain for performance, that's a huge gain for developers because they can use all their old patterns -- they didn't have to rewrite their sites."

So graphics does strike the performance chord with users and developers after all.

During the Day 2 keynote, Sinofsky said the IE9 team has been working for all of three weeks, and we were skeptical. Didn't IE9 development really start after IE8 was released to general availability in March? What was going on all these months?

"There's a lot of work that went into IE8 for sure," Hachamovitch responded. "But realize, on March 19 we released IE8 in a few dozen languages. After March 19, we had several waves of languages for IE8 to get out, because it's worldwide. There's more than a few dozen languages of IE8. Then we had to finish Windows 7, and all the languages of Windows 7. So we're three weeks past the general availability of Windows 7. In some ways, we've all been on call, ready, working through...well, several Patch Tuesdays since March 19."

As Microsoft tries for a valiant comeback attempt for IE in the realm of qualitative measures, expect the company to demonstrate any number of various other aspects where the browser makes gains, and say this, too, is the Web.

And if those gains in one or two departments aren't as significant, expect the message to be, "But that's not all of the Web."

We've asked Dean Hatchamovitch to join us in responding to your comments to this article.

Next: A word about Dean's comments about our performance measurements...

A word about Dean's comments about our performance measurements

It is no secret to the dozens of you who have followed my work over the past few decades that I am a speed fanatic. I give a damn about the performance of my automobile, my coffee maker, my wristwatch, and my Web browser, and my wife knows it doesn't stop there. It might have something to do with why I edit a publication called Betanews.

The other reason I care is that I'm in the business of improvement, and you can't improve until you're ready to accept your own shortcomings. That goes for myself as well as everyone else. It is never fun to be on the losing side of a fair and competitive battle. It may even seem unfair when the reasons have to do with a legitimate effort to address a serious concern.

But as a high school journalism teacher I knew used to tell her students in the sports department covering one of the worst teams ever to take the field, if you can't do the simplest job in the world -- reporting the score -- then you shouldn't be a journalist but a cheerleader. Your heart may want you to change the score; but if you then do it, you've lost more than a game.

Click here for a comprehensive explanation of the Betanews CRPI index version 2.2.

Dean Hachamovitch raised a few concerns about Betanews' testing methodology, and I think they're fair concerns that are worth discussing. First, he contended that it may be confusing to him and others, for us to use Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista as a relativity index. I told him I did not want to do as some readers suggested I do -- use IE8 as the index browser -- because that would be unfair to IE8, disabling its ability to be measured for performance at all. I also could not use any older series of browsers (for example, IE6 or Firefox 2) because they could not even run the tests in our performance battery. I know, I've tried.

He also suggested something else: that we go back to using clean installs of operating systems on virtual machines for our test systems, so long as those VMs were running on the same hardware. I explained to him why I changed to testing on physical platforms, mainly in response to reader requests. But I also explained that during our test of IE8 performance after the October Patch Tuesday fix, to validate the numbers I was seeing, I uninstalled the patch and tested again, and reinstalled it and tested again, to verify the values -- they were spot on after the validation.

Hatchamovitch winced at this. He said that by uninstalling and reapplying the patch, I may have reduced the "signal-to-noise ratio," to use his phrase, for IE7 and IE8 on Vista. In other words, I may have polluted the platform and hindered performance. The test results did not suggest that; but my methodology, he argued, could still produce doubt as to the authenticity of my results. This is a fair argument which I will put to the test myself.

Hatchamovitch also suggested we introduce the factor of variability into the test, a plus-or-minus factor, which is often seen in many other scientific measurements of performance. Of course, that's not a bad idea either; on the other hand, I only want to report numbers that make sense to readers. If I'm "fuzzifying" the meaning of a result, I may not be giving readers data that they can use. It would be like putting a plus-or-minus estimate on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I stand behind my current methodology, but as you've already seen, I'm open to suggestions for improvement, and I have made improvements based on suggestions. But as I told BASIC interpreter vendors during the 1980s, who for years had seen their performance numbers in my tests slammed again and again and again by Microsoft -- which dominated the interpreter market for as long as it was important -- winning is not a relative state. Ask anyone who's improved and come back to win the next round.

The moment IE9 marks a comeback for Microsoft's Web browser in performance, you'll read about it here. Yes, performance isn't the entire Web just as the drivetrain isn't the entire car. Maybe you don't think much about the drivetrain every day, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just try riding in a car without one.

Nokia re-affirms its commitment to Symbian, sort of

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:06:05 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Nokia has always been solid on its dedication to the Symbian platform, but a report from an N900 event yesterday cast some doubt on Symbian's future in certain branches of Nokia's product line, specifically the high-end N-series of smartphones.

I reached out to Nokia to find out exactly what is going on with Maemo and Symbian in the N-series, and received equal parts affirmation and denial.

Nokia's response was nowhere near as strong as the "outright denial" given to the short-lived rumor of an Android-based Nokia device last July, and instead served to paint a picture that's not so black and white.

Nokia North America's Director of Communications Laurie Armstrong told Betanews today, "Any speculation on our 2012 roadmap -- including operating systems and product branding -- are completely speculation."

But Armstrong went on to say that Maemo will have its own place.

"As we have stated earlier, Nokia has multiple platforms to serve different purposes and address different markets," she continued. "Globally, Symbian is more successful than ever in bringing smartphones to the masses. Maemo is our software of choice for devices based on technology that you'd typically find inside a desktop computer. It delivers a different user experience and enables us to widen the market we can address."

Gartner: SMS-based money transfer will be bigger than mobile browsing, search

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:36:41 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Technology market research company Gartner Inc. has released a report which predicts what the top ten mobile applications will be in 2012 based on current activity in the smartphone field, including such factors as consumer and industry interest, potential revenue, and existing business models.

Based upon this information, Gartner predicts the number one "killer app" that everyone will have on their mobile device will be one that is currently uncommon in the United States, but available elsewhere in the world: Money Transfer.

More important than mobile communication or entertainment applications, Gartner predicts that SMS-based money transfer is the next big thing for smartphones. It already exists in a number of other markets, but Gartner says the regulatory kinks need to be worked out before it can truly flourish.

"Because of the fast growth of mobile money transfer, regulators in many markets are piling in to investigate the impact on consumer costs, security, fraud and money laundering," Gartner's announcement today said. "On the operational side, market conditions vary, as do the local resources of service providers, so providers need different market strategies when entering a new territory." The rest of Gartner's list, in descending order, included: Location-based services, mobile search, mobile browsing, mobile health monitoring, mobile payment, near field communication services, mobile advertising, mobile instant messaging, and mobile music.

Items six and seven on Gartner's list (mobile payment and near-field communication services) are issues related to one another and to the transfer of money. These two application classes have been closely linked since NTT DoCoMo debuted near-field "Wallet Phones" in 2004, which turn a user's phone into a sort of Speedpass dongle which can be "charged" with money or credits, and passed in front of a reader for instant transactions.

Gartner says the main difficulty in propagating any of these money-related technologies comes in uniting the mobile carriers with the banks.

"The increasing consumer interest in smartphones, the participation of Internet players in the mobile space, and the emergence of application stores and cross-industry services are reducing the dominance of mobile carriers," Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner said. "Each player will influence how the application is delivered and experienced by consumers, who ultimately vote with their attention and spending power."

Don't forget to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 beta 3 today

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:35:34 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Here's what happens when our beloved Scott M. Fulton, III is away from his test machine while covering PDC 2009: you get a Firefox beta announcement with none of the scores, charts, or metrics you're accustomed to getting. Instead you just a plain old "Go download this!" message from yours truly.

Mozilla pushed out the latest beta last night, just a little over a week after we checked out beta 2. Mozilla says more than 80 changes have taken place since the last version came out, and they include the ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load time, and a feature called "component directory lockdown."

Well, it's not really a feature so much as a loose end that was tied up. Component directory lockdown is an extremely simple concept: third party applications no longer have access to the "components" directory, and can only extend Firefox through traditional add-ons and plug-ins.

Johnathan Nightingale explained "component" extensions in the Mozilla Developer Blog this week, "There are no special abilities that come from doing things this way, but there are some significant disadvantages. For one thing, components installed in this way aren't user-visible, meaning that users can't manage them through the add-ons manager, or disable them if they're encountering difficulties. What's worse, components dropped blindly into Firefox in this way don't carry version information with them, which means that when users upgrade Firefox and these components become incompatible, there's no way to tell Firefox to disable them. This can lead to all kinds of unfortunate behaviour: lost functionality, performance woes, and outright crashing ??" often immediately on startup."

If you are running 3.6 beta 2, you can simply go to Help > Check for Updates... to upgrade to beta 3. It can also be downloaded directly from Mozilla.

PDC 2009 Post-keynote Day 2: What are we learning today?

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:20:43 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The Day 2 keynote is actually still ongoing at the time I'm writing this -- it's run 20 minutes over schedule, and the SharePoint demos are still going on. But here's an assessment of the information we've received thus far today: First of all, the first news on Internet Explorer 9. If you weren't listening closely to Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky, you might have missed this little fact: The team is only three weeks into the project, having just started after the Windows 7 launch. Now, think about that for a bit: The implication here is that the development team cannot work on the operating system and the Web browser at the same time. This from the company that used to argue that the two components were inseparable.

Then there is the whole "three weeks in" news...It's difficult to believe that Microsoft hasn't really been working on a Web browser since last March, and I actually expect Dean Hachamovitch, who leads IE8 design, to contradict that bit of information. He and his team haven't been lying dormant.

But assuming that's true, why should the idea that it has done nothing with IE9 until three weeks ago, not come to the surprise and shock of Steven Sinofsky?

Obviously performance is an issue, and the fact that IE9 is crawling back from the brink is something that developers are taking note of. The proud disclosure that IE9 posted a 32% score on the Acid3 test score, elicited a tremendous groan...a bit like telling the audience that Chris Rock couldn't make it but Carrot Top could.

So the demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 rendering functionality -- specifically, moving the rendering engine from the decades-old GDI over to Direct2D -- ended up falling a little flat. Even though the need for a smoother rendering engine is crystal clear to any user, especially in IE8, to the developers (a.k.a., the PDC audience), they want to be told what they can do to improve the Web user experience. Being told they don't have to do anything to improve the experience is no help to them; it's like telling a professional truck driver he doesn't have to drive a truck. Then how is he going to make his living? Developers want tools so they can be the ones responsible for improving the IE experience, especially since there's an obvious needs assessment that says it needs improving.

The IE9 news made the entire crowd unimpressed, which is why it was perfect (and obviously intentional) timing to take the bad taste out of developers' mouths with the news of the laptop giveaways. It was a palate cleanser ahead of Scott Guthrie and the Silverlight 4 news, all of which was received very positively.

More and more, Silverlight is becoming Microsoft's Web platform -- in effect, replacing Internet Explorer in that regard, at least with respect to the company's product line. Seeing Guthrie's demo of the HTML control being housed inside the Silverlight-based frame (so, for example, a custom Silverlight app could host a Bing search or a Facebook application) made it clear that not only developers outside Microsoft, but the ones inside Microsoft, are paying attention to the possibility of Silverlight becoming the Web apps host of choice as opposed to Internet Explorer.

Just as Betanews readers have been saying, IE is becoming old news. Trouble is, the older that news becomes, the more of it there is.

A long string of interviews is next for us here at the conference, and we'll report on what we've learned from them later tonight and throughout the week.

Spectrum crisis is just a part of the problem for universal broadband, says FCC

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:58:37 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Early in October, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski said there is a wireless spectrum crisis approaching, and that our wireless broadband consumption is growing so explosively that it would take more than 50 years to deliver the necessary spectrum at our current pace.

But an FCC task force has concluded that this is only a single part of the problem if we want to provide America with robust and affordable broadband. Over the last few weeks, the task force has identified critical gaps in policymaking, government programs, and trade practices in all corners of the broadband ecosystem.

Today, the Commission has put forth a list of these gaps, which narrows the main problems down to seven major points.

1.) USF Gap: The Federal Universal Service Fund (USF) does not support broadband deployment and adoption, despite consuming more than $7 billion in annual telecommunications subsidies.

2.) Broadband Adoption Gap: as broadband access increases, those without access (based on geography or income) are at an ever greater disadvantage.

3.) Consumer Information Gap: Users don't know their actual broadband performance, and providers aren't supplying them with that information.

4.) Spectrum Gap: The spectrum crisis Genachowski warned of in October, where wireless demand far outstrips supply.

5.) Deployment Gap: There is an extremely high cost for rural broadband and "middle mile" solutions.

6.) TV Set-top Box Innovation Gap: Most set-top boxes still haven't integrated with IP-based technology even though they present a prime opportunity to deliver broadband to the masses.

7.) Personal Data Gap: Users need to have more control over their own information and greater privacy/security.

Before the Commission can submit its National Broadband Plan to Congress in February, it will work on devising solutions for these gaps.

Microsoft gives free laptops to PDC 2009 attendees

Joe Wilcox — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:01:04 -0500

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Windows 7 took the Professional Developer Conference stage this morning in the guise of Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows & Windows Live division. Sinofsky stood before the crowd of Microsoft developers as a victor. Last month, his team released Windows 7 nearly flawlessly and to generally positive reviews (PDC Day 2 live blog).

Sinofsky did not pitch a three-screen strategy -- PC, TV and mobile device -- as I expected based on statements Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, made during the Day 1 keynote. For PDC, Microsoft is missing one screen. The company doesn't plan to announce its next-generation Windows Phone -- or Windows Live, for that matter -- until next year's MIX conference.

Sinofsky started by talking about Windows 7 development. "It's an incredibly humbling experience," he said. Sinofsky described developing Windows as building a movie theater. The movies are the applications developers create.

Sinofsky's keynote was exceptionally targeted to a developer audience and superbly delivered. He spoke practically about how Microsoft used different feedback mechanisms to improve Windows 7 development.

In a stunning announcement, Sinofsky told the audience that paid PDC attendees would receive a free thin-and-light laptop that Microsoft designed with Acer. Microsoft designed the laptop with features and baseline hardware for which developers should create their applications. Touchscreen is among the capabilities.

Microsoft has given Sinofsky a difficult role: Pitchmen for revitalizing an aging platform, even as developers flock to the cloud and to mobile devices, where Apple's App Store/iPhone/iPod platform is highly visible. About two weeks ago, Apple announced that the number of mobile applications available from App Store topped 100,000.

The Netbook Problem

Microsoft's mobile problem is really twofold: Netbooks and smartphones, and the company appears ill-prepared to deal with either. Netbook sales are surging. For example, netbooks accounted for about 20 percent of all portable PC sales to EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia) in third quarter, according to Gartner. The netbook problem reduces Microsoft's operating system margins; the company makes less money on Windows XP Home or Windows 7 Starter Edition than "premium" versions. Netbooks also tend to be underpowered compared to notebooks or desktops, making them better suited to running some cloud applications and services. I say some, because many cloud apps or services are resource intensive, too.

Microsoft's PDC attendee laptop giveaway is a brilliant response to the netbook problem. The company has talked about thin-and-light laptops as better alternative to netbooks -- and for good reasons. Thin-and-light laptops offer many of the size-and-weight advantages of netbooks but with potentially hardier hardware performance, better customer experience and greater operating system margins for Microsoft.

Sinofsky asked developers to use Windows 7's Device Stage to get applications "out of the boot path." The feature lets users call up software services or applications when they are needed rather than having them run in the background. Applications or services in the boot path can slow down system startup or resume from sleep and degrade overall Windows performance. While Sinfosky didn't specifically mention netbooks, the request would have huge potential performance and customer experience impact on the underpowered portables.

Windows Mobile Declines

Smartphones and other super small devices pose different problems for Microsoft. Smartphones like iPhone, Motorola DROID or Nokia N900 are as much pocket computers as cell phones. Like netbooks, they are designed to connect via 3G networks or WiFi to cloud services. Gartner predicts that smartphone sales will exceed notebooks this year, and that in response major PC manufacturers will develop their own devices, starting in 2010. Dell already is doing so.

Smartphones are tracking to be the next major computing platform. A year ago next month, PEW Internet predicted that "the mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020." A year more of smartphones later and 2015 is looking to be a more realistic date.

According to Gartner, manufacturers sold 41 million smartphones during third quarter, for a 12.8 percent year-over-year increase. Smartphones accounted for about 13 percent of worldwide handset sales. Nokia (39.3 percent), Research in Motion (20.8 percent) and Apple (17.1 percent) are the smartphone market share leaders. None of these leading smartphone manufacturer leaders ships Windows Mobile.

Microsoft's mobile operating system is in decline. During third quarter, Windows Mobile worldwide market share fell to 7.9 percent from 11.1 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner (see chart). Meanwhile, Android, BlackBerry and iPhone operating systems all gained share. Android went from zero shipments in third quarter 2009 to 1.4 million units a year later, for 3.5 percent market share. Android gains are expected to increase. HTC and Sony Ericsson are among the handset manufacturers swapping out Windows Mobile for Android.

Microsoft's inability to articulate a clear mobile OS strategy undermines the overall messaging around Windows 7 development, or three screens. Should developers look to the past platform or to the future one? Perhaps for some of them, a free laptop will answer the question.

Nokia's N900 arrives in U.S., bodes the death of Symbian on N-series phones

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:56:33 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Nokia's intriguing N900 "pocket computer" has officially launched in the United States. The device, a smartphone that evolved out of Nokia's Mobile Internet Device (MID) family, signifies a new era for the Finnish mobile tech leader.

Vice President of Nokia retail sales, Alessandro Lamanna summed it up in a prepared statement today: "Consumers from every segment of the population are looking for more out of their mobile device - more power, more ability, more connectivity." So in order to deliver these results, Nokia paired the 600MHz TI OMAP 3430 chipset with the Linux-based Maemo platform, and locked it up inside a 3G phone with a 3.5" touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard.

According to one report, Nokia said that by 2012, Maemo will have fully replaced Symbian as the operating system powering its top-end N-series devices. The N900, according to this report, marks the beginning of this transition because it is targeted at the enthusiast and developer crowd who will grow the Maemo ecosystem before it starts being marketed to the mainstream consumer. By then, Symbian will then be relegated to the mass market E- and X-Series devices.

We've sent an inquiry to Nokia to find out how true this report actually is, because it could have a significant impact on the smartphone market in the long term as Linux-based platforms are poised to dominate the mobile sector.

And if there was any doubt as to whom the N900 and Maemo appeals to, check out this video:

The Nokia N900 is available for $649 through Nokia's flagship stores in New York and Chicago, and on the Web at nokiausa.com and Amazon.com. It is compatible with AT&T's and T-Mobile's networks in the United States.

PDC 2009: Live from the Day 2 keynote

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:33:12 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Microsoft's Windows division president Steven Sinofsky is the headliner for today's Day 2 keynote at PDC 2009, and Betanews has its usual front-row seat.

11:04am PT: Promise of discussion on Windows Mobile at MIX '10 next March 15-17 in Las Vegas -- notice once again that the number "7" is omitted from the reference to this product. Keynote ends 35 minutes over schedule.

11:00am PT: Outlook Social Connector -- a plug-in involving Microsoft and partners including LinkedIn, enabling information from individuals' social organizations and networks to be displayed in a meaningful context in Outlook. "This is a general SDK," meaning developers will be expected to deploy it.

10:37am PT: Office Mobile Clients for Windows Mobile 6.5 betas available today in Windows Mobile Marketplace.

10:37am PT: Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 public betas go live now...today was apparently the original release date to begin with.

10:23am PT: SharePoint now taking the stage, this is where we'll see the only real Office 2010 information. A lot of talk first about what Microsoft is focused on, which is a little bit of a downer coming off of some very impressive Silverlight 4 demos.

10:18am PT: Final release of S4 shipped first half of next year.

10:17am PT: Sinofsky: How S4 will be shipped: Public beta will include all features demonstrated today, tooling support for VS 2010. Now available for download.

10:15am PT: Multitouch features with basic features, zoom in, zoom out.

10:14am PT: Photos dragged-and-dropped from the outside can be loaded into the application live, then tagged, prior to being sent to Facebook.

Photo of the audience, plugged into the system, app will ask whether to upload the photo to Facebook -- all within about 10 seconds.

10:10am PT: Brian Goldfarb is showing an S4 application that utilizes Facebook, but which uses its own chrome to develop a real, custom app on top of custom Facebook apps. Can also take advantage of COM automation to right-click data from Facebook, then add to the Outlook calendar. Access to the Outlook inbox, with virtual wall on the right "to contextualize who I'm talking to."

10:07am PT: Google Chrome being added to S4's list of supported browsers.

10:05am PT: Window "chrome" of the application can be customized with out-of-sandbox support, cross-site networking, keyboard support in full-screen mode, more hardware device access. Access to any COM automation object installed on the system, using the _dynamic_ keyword in C# to call new methods found on system. For example, Office 2010 calendar can be queried, PivotCharts brought up from Excel.

10:04am PT: S4: Ability to build trusted applications that run outside the sandbox on Windows and the Mac, user consent dialog is provided automatically.

9:48am PT: UDP multicast support enables P2P networking, improvements to support for WCF, including RIA services. Transfer data 600% faster using internal transfer protocols instead of HTTP.

9:47am PT: Brush demo can be used with live video -- a YouTube video can be jigsawed live, while video and sound are playing.

Sinofsky's been rick-rolled...but he gets his revenge! A "rick-roll" video from YouTube is sliced and diced into live jigsaw pieces using Silverlight 4.

Compile in assemblies once, run in both Silverlight and .NET 4 -- compile once, run in both places.

9:45am PT: Text can be dragged and dropped from a browser to the application. Print Preview works, including with custom Print Preview dialogs. S4 will now write directly to the printer, has a print API.

HTML control is hosted within Silverlight app. HTML image can be converted into a brush -- the entire HTML page can be used as a brush, so that the page can be converted into, say, a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which can be juggled around the screen.

9:43am PT: "And _now_ the iPhone works," says Sinofsky.

Rich text control that ships in S4: Arabic, Hebrew, Kanji character sets all within the text editor. Custom context menu after right-click. Can paste and insert text, pictures, and DDE-like controls into a Silverlight app, such as a Data Grid control from Excel. Can cut and paste from Data Grid control back into Excel.

9:41am PT: HTML hosting support is coming, model/view development.

9:40am PT: IIS media tool, new version will enable streaming of media directly to Apple iPhone. Yes, you read that right. Video can be encoded once using smooth streaming, target clients using the iPhone.

Well, that could have gone a lot better. Brian Goldfarb rushed to the stage to give Steven a fourth iPhone. That one would link to the network, but once it accessed the Silverlight-based Vancouver Olympics site, the video would not load.

Demo tried using four different iPhones, the first three of which could not pull up the network using the router. The fourth did pull up the network, but the video from the Olympics Web site would not pull up in the Safari browser. Took several minutes, but Sinofsky refrained from making any silly Apple comment.

"We believe you, Scott!" yelled one attendee.

Printing / rich text / Clipboard access / right-click support for context menus / mouse wheel support are all coming to Silverlight 4.

9:34am PT: Demo of Vancouver Olympics site with Silverlight player, with instant seek.

9:33am PT: Open-source library for barcode reading, can immediately look up the prices of any object scanned from the barcode scanner, pulls up distributors or retail sellers.

9:32am PT: New Silverlight 4 will allow access to webcams and microphones on the user's machine. Demo now: Webcam application that captures live video, can do live effects with bulge, distortion. Integration with Twitter enables the result to be live-integrated into Twitter profile, so a picture just taken becomes the user's Twitter icon.

9:28am PT: Silverlight now installed on an estimated 45% of the world's Internet-connected devices. PDC is about Silverlight 4, first news.

9:25am PT: Corp. VP Scott Guthrie now takes the stage to talk Silverlight, now showing the video of Sketchflow feature in Expression Blend (not a particularly new video for many).

9:22am PT: The test distributions of "Microsoft PDC laptops" will likely come with promises that the users will be communicating telemetry with the company.

9:21am PT: Lot of new APIs in Windows 7, and IE will take advantage of these APIs. Videos of demos will soon be available on Microsoft Channel 9.

9:19am PT: Maps re-rendering will use 60 fps rather than 2 or 3, by moving to Direct2D from GDI.

9:18am PT: CSS selectors test, using CSS3.info -- passed 572 out of 578 (a variation of the SlickSpeed test) for CSS selectors used in rendering.

IE rendering engine will support rounded borders in CSS.

Rendering engine will use hardware-acceleration in DX9 mode (not DX10), using Direct2D. Highly resolved text with much resolved clarity.

Sub-pixel positioned text using DirectWrite. Zooms used to be jittery in GDI, nice and smooth as we move to Direct2D. Smooth realignments -- "changes without you having to do anything different with your site."

9:14am PT: Different Web sites have tremendous differences in how they handle JavaScript, CSS, and HTML parsing. Their profiles make everything different.

IE9 is getting close to Firefox 3.6 performance, not overtaken just yet. "It's getting really close to being a wash."

9:13am PT:

9:13am PT: JavaScript performance. IE9 is up to 32 on the Acid3 test, from 20. Audible groan from the audience.

9:12am PT: We continue to want to be responsible about building Internet Explorer.

First IE9 news: Three weeks into the project, we're focused on these areas:

Standards: Acid3, we're not ahead of that, we need to do a better job. There are new and emerging standards like HTML5, and we want to be responsible about how we support that, we don't want to generate a hype cycle among developers.

9:10am PT: Biggest applause of the day comes from this:

Sinofsky is now talking about a partnership project with Acer where it puts its own team through the process of actually building a laptop computer, just to see how one is built -- what laptop engineers actually go through. In learning the system that Acer goes through, Microsoft built its own limited run of PDC'09 laptops.

They will be giveaways to PDC attendees. About a minute of applause from that. "But please hang around for the rest of the talk," said Sinofsky. "We had a little problem, something like that, about four years ago, so please stay seated."

Folks realize they're being given free laptop computers. Yay. Applause, then what's the catch. No catch so far, so more applause. Then more. One of the longest stretches of applause in PDC keynote history.

9:04am PT: Everybody's jumping on the taskbar bandwagon, says Angiulo, and here again Microsoft gives credit to Mozilla for being quick to integrate previewing features into Firefox 3.6 (Beta 3 was just made available, by the way).

9:03am PT: Dell netbook uses an infrared data center to detect body heat, then powers itself back up when someone walks by.

Earlier, Angiulo demonstrated the differences between DirectX 11 processing power and DX10, mainly by means of offloading much of the computing power from the CPU to the GPU. Demos of moving thousands of "star" objects simultaneously in a simulated galaxy formation, with gravity and physical forces between them, all in a 40+ Gflops operation running on a $400 graphics card rather than a $15,000 computer.

8:58am PT: Windows engineer Michael Angiulo demonstrates how engineers of new small computers, such as netbooks, can do their part to accelerate Windows 7. After reminding everyone of the first generation UMPC (gagh!), he pulls out a pair of Windows 7 netbooks. But one has a bunch of branded background software loaded, and the other (by Sony) does not. The Sony model runs 30% faster, boots faster, and has 50% better battery life, simply by getting all that bloatware junk software out of the boot path.

8:53am PT: Moving now to examples of people trying to align their windows, one user talks about side-by-siding his windows, looking for where the window tiling feature is located...no, it's not that one...

Then another user snaps a window to the side using Aero Snap in Windows 7. "That is _way_ easier."

Aero Peek: "Hey, get all that!" says the user. "I can dig that! Good job, people."

8:50am PT: Discussion now about the UAC usability studies. We saw videos of some of these studies last year, but users are talking about not wanting things popping up in their faces constantly.

User is asked during an Adobe Flash installation what he just clicked on, and he made up a response about where the program is going on the drive. Another user is asked what the UAC prompt that he just received meant, and he answered, "It means that people...are happy with it now." [?]

8:43am PT: Video about how Microsoft programmers are held directly responsible for the errors of their ways, by way of a kind of "agony chair" that shocks, stuns, or stabs the individual developers discovered using the Watson logs to have been responsible for a specific problem.

Uh-huh.

8:40am PT: Anecdote about how Microsoft used to handle reliability problems in the Windows 3.x era using Dr. Watson (hands up if you remember that?), and how engineers pre-Internet developed the Watson system for "testosterone-based bug fixing" -- folks watching the Watson logs coming in over the BBS and responding to the most interesting and serious problems.

The sheer number of telemetry items returned from Windows 7 testers during the beta process.

8:38am PT: The value of the "Send Feedback" button, learning from clients what drivers were loaded, whether the installation of drivers and services were successful.

Software Quality Monitor ("squim") is designed to be opt-in for customers, but Sinofsky admits customers were "opted in automatically" during the preview and beta processes.

8:35am PT: At the moment, Sinofsky is going through a history of the Windows 7 launch, and lessons learned at Microsoft about being responsible about how to disclose information about the product. "You should expect us to have learned that lesson about responsible disclosure, and to continue as we move forward."

Beta of Opera 10 for Windows Mobile available now

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:07:29 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Today, Opera Software has released the beta version of Opera Mobile 10 for Windows Phones, with support for touchscreen- and keypad-driven Windows Mobile 5 (PPC), 6.0, 6.1, and 6.5 devices.

The keywords with this release are: speed, simplicity, and compatibility.

Speed: With the current generation of Opera products, speed has been one of the central talking points. Though we at Betanews have found that Opera's claims of speed boosts tend to be a little hyperbolical in the desktop versions, the company's mobile products tend to be a different story. Using Opera Turbo compression, the company claims this version will be 50% faster than the previous version of Opera Mobile.

Simplicity: Though navigation in each may vary, all of Opera's current browsers share some essential design elements: the "Speed Dial" home screen, browser tabs, and the multi-search engine bar. The navigation buttons in Opera Mobile 10 have gotten a bit simpler than they were in 9.7 and now simply represent Back, Forward, Reload, Tabs, and Tools. Tabs have been turned into easily scrollable thumbnails, and the Tools menu accesses in-page search, bookmarks, browsing history, saved pages, and settings as large, easy-to-identify icons.

Compatibility: "Opera Mobile is the most standards-compliant mobile browser available," the company says. And while all browsers have at least some degree of compatibility trouble, mobile browsers are still extremely limited in the content they can display. Opera Mobile 10, however, uses the same Presto browser engine that desktop Opera 10 uses, so rich applications are more likely to be compatible with your phone. Furthermore, Opera Mobile 10 offers "Mobile View" mode, where Web pages are reformatted into a single column for easier consumption.

PDC 2009: Windows Server's plan to move customers back off the cloud

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:21:47 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Much of the value proposition for Windows Azure -- the star of the show Tuesday at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles -- has been its ability to open up new business avenues for customers who had not been able to envision hosting high-intensity data center operations before. Azure could give these customers a leg up, a new and more affordable way to get off the ground.

But once they're off the ground, the question becomes, why stay up in the air? What's to keep those customers grounded -- to mix metaphors like an old editor of mine -- in the cloud? The surprise answer to that question is coming from a senior product manager for Windows Server, not Azure. Scott Ottaway told Betanews today that provisions are being planned for customers to move their deployed applications back off the Azure cloud, onto on-premises data center servers.

"Our goal is to provide a common application platform, just the way that we support ASP.NET in both places, PHP in both places. We want to supply a common platform so customers don't have to make the hard choice up front about where they're going to run something."

During the October 2008 PDC conference when Windows Azure was first introduced, it wasn't exactly clear who Microsoft was targeting as its customer. Thirteen months later, we have a much clearer picture of cloud services customers comprising three discrete classes: one that is made up of SMB businesses investing in affordable data center architecture for the first time, and building entirely new cloud applications that have never been tried; another made up of applications and services hosts that are simply mirroring their existing apps to the cloud space for affordability and scalability; and a third class in-between comprised of businesses of all sizes, who aren't looking to the cloud as a migration platform, but as a way to backup, complement, or augment their existing customer services as necessary.

The common factor between each of those classes is the need for a bridge -- perhaps now, perhaps later -- between their on-premise and off-premise cloud platforms. That's the reason for Microsoft's latest brand, announced Tuesday morning.

"If you write your code for Windows Server AppFabric, it should run on Windows Azure," said Ottaway, referring to the new mix-and-match composite applications system for the IIS platform. "What we are delivering in 2010 is a CTP [community technology preview] of AppFabric, called Windows Azure AppFabric, where you should be able to take the exact same code that you wrote for Windows Server AppFabric, and with zero or minimal refactoring, be able to put it up on Windows Azure and run it." AppFabric for now appears to include a methodology for customers to rapidly deploy applications and services based on common components. But for many of these components, there will be analogs between the on-Earth and off-Earth versions, if you will, such that all or part of these apps may be translated between locales as necessary.

"Right now, if I have an ASP.NET app running on Windows Azure, and it's using SQL Azure, I can pull that off with minimal refactoring, in most cases, and run it on premises on Windows Server, because Windows Server supports ASP.NET via IIS, and our .NET Framework, and it supports SQL Server," remarked Ottaway. "So I can move a certain class of apps that I have up there, off -- not all." Applications that utilize binary large object (BLOB) storage, and other Azure-specific features, would still require significant refactoring. "But if it's just an ASP.NET app through SQL Azure, you should be able to pull it back on-premises without much effort at all."

Some of the more recently deployed, non-Microsoft language platforms, including PHP and MySQL, will also aid customers in that transition.

"Whether there's a total cost-of-ownership advantage to being off-premises or on-premises, depends on so many factors. Are you highly virtualized? Do you have really good management tools? Do you have affordable staff? Regulatory concerns? Privacy, security concerns?" remarked the Windows Server senior product manager. "There's many, many factors that may indicate to you that...you want to keep it on-premises, or that it's okay to go all the way off-premises. But it's probably going to be more of a non-enterprise decision; it's going to be project by project and app-by-app."

Next: Virtual machines migrate to Azure...

Virtual machines migrate to Azure

One of the distinguishing factors between Microsoft's cloud platform and Amazon's has been the distinction in what's being served. Specifically, Amazon's EC2 gives customers a way to deploy entire server images on its cloud, while Azure provides an active cloud-based .NET runtime for the deployment of applications rather than servers. Still, that distinction will grow fuzzier, first with last week's announcement by Amazon of an SDK for cloud-based applications deployment, more similar to Windows Azure.

Then there's Microsoft's announcement Tuesday -- effectively made by Ottaway during an afternoon press conference -- of a system for deploying Windows Server virtual machines to its cloud.

"What we're announcing is that we will have what we're calling Windows Server Virtual Machine Roles on Windows Azure," Windows Server senior product manager Scott Ottaway told a press gathering Tuesday afternoon at PDC 2009. "What these will be, are pre-configured images of Windows Server -- one might have .NET [Framework] 3.5 on it, the next one might have .NET 4.0 when that's available. And you can bring your existing app, that you're running on-premises now on Windows Server, to Windows Azure, deploy it in this virtual machine image, and there you have existing applications support or migration -- you don't have to necessarily write new apps to take advantage of the Windows Azure service."

Notice the distinction still exists, if lessened a bit: VM Roles will provide Windows Server admins a way to deploy apps in the cloud as though they were being deployed on virtual machines locally. It's still not deploying servers, like the Amazon model, but it's closer. One big reason, Ottaway said: Customers already have applications that they paid for; they don't want them redeveloped.

But the other reason (and here's the basis for Microsoft's new value proposition for Azure) is that it makes less sense for customers to deploy servers in the cloud (including from a licensing perspective) when their goal is really to add scalability to their applications and public-facing services, not to Windows.

"Certain companies out there say everything's going to move off-premises, and everything's going to be a service. But there are two issues here: Network latency, the sweet nectar of having a big pipe and fast response time, is a big inhibitor for a lot of things moving off, that might make a lot of sense. And then, you want Print Server nearby, right? You don't want to send your print requests to Dublin [the Microsoft service, not the country] before it gets to your printer. Then for security servers and your management servers for managing all your clients, you're definitely going to want them to be on-premises."

Ottaway pointed to a compelling demonstration during the Tuesday morning keynote, of an online automobile shopping service provided by Kelley Blue Book using Silverlight. That service was devised to take advantage of a feature called cloudbursting -- using the cloud where necessary, such as in periods of heavy traffic, but not necessarily as a principal deployment platform.

"The scenario they were talking about on there was, in general, most of the time, their application and business presence runs on Windows Server and SQL Server and Silverlight. But currently, they've had to have a large amount of investment in server hardware, for a peak capacity that occurs very rarely across their year. And what they're essentially using Windows Azure for [instead] is for cloudbursting, so when they do have unexpected peak capacity, they can very quickly spin up a bunch of new instances of their Silverlight application and be able to meet the demand that's occurring.

"The key thing that's really interesting here -- and where Microsoft, again, is differentiated from other cloud providers -- is that Kelley Blue Book also wants to be able to scale down, and bring everything back on-premises when that demand isn't as great. It's a hybrid scenario; they're using off-premises Windows Azure to meet their increased capacity demands. That's a unique advantage of having a Microsoft infrastructure on-premises, as well as Windows Azure."

One reporter asked Ottaway today, is there a way for Azure customers to utilize any kind of capacity planning tool -- to estimate what it might cost to cloudburst under varying traffic circumstances? The long answer from Ottaway -- who seemed to take some inspiration from this question -- was no. Online calculators do exist to help customers set caps on their expenditures, and to turn off service once those caps are exceeded to avoid tremendous billing. Azure can also provide customers with warnings in advance of heavy charges. Even with those stopgaps in place, he acknowledged, it may become cheaper for certain customers to keep their applications on-premises.

Customers will need to consider those possibilities and scenarios for the future, Ottaway said. But for now, the templates and policies and best practices -- the "solution accelerator" for the cloud, to borrow a phrase -- is very much in the works.

With YouTube Direct, now users can yank videos from big media

Tim Conneally — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:10:19 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Google today announced YouTube Direct, an open source platform that lets media organizations directly connect with YouTube users to request and rebroadcast their YouTube clips.

The application allows custom YouTube uploaders to be built into another site, so users can submit their videos directly and track the viewing metrics in their own profile. Google highlights the rise of citizen journalism as a major reason for the program.

ABC News, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and more have already picked up on YouTube Direct, and examples can be seen on their respective sites. All involved content remains hosted by YouTube, and the only cost incurred is associated with the media company's Google App Engine account, and is based upon the amount of traffic being served.

"Though we built YouTube Direct to help news organizations expand their coverage and connect directly with their audiences, the application is designed to meet any organization's goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community," Steve Grove of YouTube News and Politics said today. "Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself."

In short, the idea is to pull free content from YouTube and syndicate it on high-traffic sites.

But the most interesting part of this idea is that it puts the shoe on the other foot in terms of content control.

One of big media's problems with YouTube has been that it lets anyone upload copyrighted content, regardless of ownership. As a result, we've seen TV networks, record labels, performing artists, and every type of copyright holder force users to take down content that may have contained copyrighted material.

But in this situation, the bigger media organizations would be looking to syndicate the users' content, and the user retains the right to pull the video whenever he feels like it.

To quote YouTube Direct's FAQ:

"If a user decides to delete a video after he or she has submitted it to your site via YouTube Direct, then this video will be removed from YouTube, and thus will no longer play anywhere on your site that the video has been embedded or linked to. When this happens, there will be a flag visible in the moderation panel indicating that the video is not longer live on YouTube, and any reference to it on your site should also be removed."