Category: Microsoft

John Montgomery writes about Microsoft’s Popfly service for mashups:

# It’s easy to get. All you really need is Firefox 2 or IE 6 or 7. Oh, and Silverlight, but that’s pretty easy to get.
# It’s easy to use. People have talked about wanting programming to be like connecting Lego blocks; Popfly gets pretty close.
# You can create mashups with it. This is kind of its purpose, but it’s neat nonetheless.
# You can create web pages with it. We “borrowed” the Office Live team’s page editor technology.
# You can use it with Visual Studio. If you’re a VS user, you can get Popfly Explorer and start to share projects with your friends on Popfly.

Kara Swisher provides the context:

1. Spending by big advertisers online lags well behind what many call audience engagement. In other words, time spent on the Web has obviously been growing and taking share away from traditional media.
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2. The time to act, then, is now, to lock up any and all available assets in this space, especially ones that give the buyer a big market share and critical mass. The three biggest online ad players, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, have snapped up the three biggest independent online ad agencies.

3. As more ad spending shifts online, the ability to have expertise and to innovate quickly will become critical. What all these companies are buyingbesides stronger relationships with advertising clientsare people and experience.

4. Most of all, there was no way Microsoft was not going to answer Google after it bought DoubleClick, especially if it wants (and it does) to stay competitive with the search giant in the online ad market.

Henry Blodget writes about the differences:

One reason Microsoft has struggled for twelve years with its Internet business is that it has always managed the business with an eye to protecting and/or augmenting its core desktop monopoly. Microsoft’s competitors, meanwhile, have approached the Internet business with an eye to doing whatever is best for the Internet business, desktop monopoly be damned. And now that it is clear that the Internet business is going to compete with the desktop business, Microsoft finds itself in an even stickier situation: How can it do what it needs to do to win in the Internet without hastening the demise (or at least slowing the growth of) the desktop cash cow?

GE can compete in dozens of different businesses because it is a true conglomerate: Each division is free to do whatever it needs to do to win (and the divisions also aren’t that competitive with one another). At Microsoft, meanwhile, all the sideline divisions exist to protect or augment the major businesses, and Microsoft’s Internet team has to work within this system. For Microsoft’s Internet business to have a real chance to win, it has to be able to launch wholesale attacks on Microsoft’s core business. And it’s hard to see that happening within the Redmond corporate structure as currently defined.

Om Malik writes:

Windows Mobile, which is one of the two future platforms of growth for the company. (Xbox is the other.)
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While it is unlikely that I would switch to Windows Mobile anytime soon, I have seen how some friends of mine like the platform. In fast growing mobile societies like India and China, Windows Mobile devices are popular despite their high price tag. Many use Windows Mobile (and other phones) for what we view as computing tasks in the US. It is their computer.

Microsoft has to work hard with device makers to bring the prices down to $100-a-pop range, and see its market share zoom. Microsofts relevance (and more importantly future profits) in these new mobile societies are going to come from mobiles, not PCs.

TechCrunch writes about Microsoft’s newest launch:

When Silverlight was first announced two weeks ago, it was all about a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web – in short, a competitor to Flash. Today, only 14 days from the original announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that Silverlight will also contain a compact CLR, allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages.
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Silverlight is excellent technology and those asking why developers and application providers wont just stick to flash only need to look at XAML, the runtime speed and size and the flexible options with programming languages combined with very strong multimedia support to start to see the answer. Microsoft have a battle on their hands to convince the developer and designer communities that their platform is the best platform, but most of this convincing wont be a technical showdown but rather the establishment of trust between users and Microsoft as the vendor of this new platform. That being said, Microsoft do have the largest developer community and the excitement from that community at the conference here today was very evident – so the question wont be if there will be a killer Silverlight app but rather when, as Microsoft have given not just traditional Microsoft .NET developers but also many others a new playground in which to build very cool new apps.

News.com writes: ” The software maker will offer the $3 Student Innovation Suite to governments that agree to directly purchase PCs for students to use in their schoolwork and at home. Gates plans to announce the program at a company-sponsored forum for government leaders. The collection of software, which will start shipping in the second half of this year, includes Windows XP Starter Edition, Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live Mail Desktop and several educational products…Microsoft is hoping this program and others will help the company reach more of the 5 billion people who have yet to benefit from the PC revolution.”

Paul Graham writes in an essay entitled “Microsoft is Dead’:

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

The most obvious is Google. There can only be one big man in town, and they’re clearly it. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. Microsoft can at best limp along afterward.
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[Ajax] was the second cause of Microsoft’s death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the webnot just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.
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The third cause of Microsoft’s death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.
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The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology.
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Knowledge@Wharton talked to Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: “Computation is improving dramatically; we now have multi-core processors and soon we’re going to have many-core processors. Storage improvements continue unabated. Broadband is becoming increasingly pervasive — I want to say that respectfully to people in rural areas and others who don’t necessarily enjoy the benefits of high bandwidth. But the fact that so many people have high bandwidth [lets] us figure out how to balance what part of an application should be in a data center — somewhere “in the cloud” — and what piece of that solution should be on a desktop or on a mobile device. The right balance varies based on the application…But that balance is far different moving forward than it has been in the past. When you have a very thin straw to a service, you tend to balance things differently than when it’s a higher bandwidth pipe.”

Ed Sim provides an overview of the day’s action:

must say that I came away quite impressed by Microsoft’s progress in its cloud and Windows Live strategy. Last year, all of the Windows Live talk seemed quite rushed, disjointed and forced and seemed it was more of a response to the market saying that Microsoft did not get the SAAS thing. This year the strategy seemed much clearer and well defined and the executives knew how the Internet and cloud fit into all of the various business units. In the end, Microsoft has made some huge strides and will certainly be worth watching over the next year.
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The consumer mobile breakout session was one of the more informative discussions that I attended. Basically as the world moves to three dominant operating systems for wireless (Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux), Microsoft will look to increase its penetration by leveraging an extensive development platform to allow third party partners to develop new consumer services which can be easily deployed via its worldwide carrier partners.

Paul Kedrosky points to a post by Roger Ehrenberg: “We may be witnessing an historic changing of the guard, which takes place in every generation. Remember IBM? They were invincible. How could they be beat? By a couple of geeks in a dorm room, that’s how. Microsoft rises. And then another snot-nosed kid with a great idea and a dorm room made it happen in the box business, enter Dell. Then others got wise and squeezed their efficiency-based margins to nothing. Apple rose like a phoenix, crashed and rose once again, by virtue of innovation and a customer-centric ethos. Sony was like IBM. Now they’ve been bloodied by the customer-centric and community-oriented Nintendo. And now there’s Google, the poster-child for the democratization of the Internet and the ever-flattening, increasingly frictionless world. When put in this context Microsoft just seems so big and slow and old, hidebound by 30 years of culture and organizational silos that seem impregnable. And it appears that Vista – the product, the PR, the marketing approach – is the result of such an organization. At times brilliant, very heavy, complicated and expensive. This is not a product for today. This is a product for an era when the desktop ruled. And that era is long gone. ”