February 9th, 2010

Microsoft on Google Buzz: Been there, done that

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:41 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, SharePoint Server, Web 2.0, Windows Live

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Social Networking, Groupware, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Enterprise Software, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Google Buzz, which sounds like the slightly less confusing successor to Google’s “future of e-mail” Wave product, is coming in both consumer and enterprise flavors, according to Google. Are the Softies quaking in their boots?

Not exactly. I asked Microsoft officials for comment on Google Buzz, which Google unveiled on February 9.

I received a response attributable to Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live:

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

(Not sure I’d call that statement a “slam,” like TechCrunch did… Felt to me more like attempted buzzzzzzkill.)

Microsoft also has been working to integrate social networks from third parties not just into its Web-mail product, but also into its Outlook mail client, via the Outlook Social Connector that the company unveiled at the Professional Developers Conference in 2009.

Microsoft is integrating the Social Connector into the Outlook 2010 product which is due out in the first half of this year. Microsoft’s Social Connector is designed to do a lot of what Buzz does, except with more of a business-centric focus.When Microsoft announced the Connector, there weren’t major providers on board (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but company officials did say Windows Live integration, unsurprisingly, would be happening in 2010.

Microsoft’s Social Connector also provides regularly updated “activity feeds” for those in a user’s social connector via a connection with SharePoint 2010.

(My ZDNet blogging colleague Larry Dignan blogged today that Google’s real target with Buzz was Microsoft SharePoint, not Twitter or FriendFeed. With the Social Connector front end taken into account, I wouldn’t say he’s far off the mark.)

In the longer term, Microsoft is working on infusing a lot of its products with more social networking capabilities. That’s a key piece of the mission of the recently created FUSE Labs at Microsoft, headed by Lili Cheng. Cheng, as Microsoft watchers may recall, has been working on the Social Desktop concept for a few years now….

Is Google actually chasing Microsoft’s taillights with Buzz — despite the lack of mentions of competitive offerings from Redmond by the majority of the press/bloggers covering today’s Buzz launch? What’s your take?

February 2nd, 2010

Office 2010: RTM's getting closer

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:33 pm

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, Google, Office, Office 2010/Office 14

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Yes, Microsoft officials have been saying Office 2010, the next version of the company’s desktop productivity suite, will be available by June 2010. But you know those under-promise/over-deliver-focused Office guys always like to beat their own deadlines. I’m expecting they’ll do it again this time around … and by more than a few months.

Microsoft is confirming this week that it has provided its Technology Adoption Program (TAP) members with the near-final Release Candidate of Office 2010. The company isn’t planning to provide any more public test releases of Office 2010, however. A spokesperson sent the following update:

“Microsoft made a release candidate available to members in the technology adoption program (TAP). This is one of Microsoft’s planned milestones in the engineering process; however they do not have plans to make this new code set available broadly.”

Distributor Ingram Micro also has begun inviting select reseller partners to a March 1 “launch event” for Office 2010 at a Microsoft office in Canada. A “launch” can mean a lot of things in Microsoft’s world. Sometimes the company launches products and later ships them; sometimes it uses “launch” to refer to the kick-off of marketing and training activities. But given various reports of possible Office 2010 escrow builds in the wild, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Office 2010 be released to manufacturing sooner rather than later.

From the Ingram invitation (a copy of which one reader shared with me):

“Now easier to sell, Microsoft Office 2010 helps you grow your revenue, increase profitability, and meet evolving customer demands.  With a streamlined product line and easier sales process, Office 2010 helps save you time, effort, and money by reducing complexity and shortening sales cycles for the world’s most popular productivity suite.”

I’d be interested to hear what tricks Microsoft has up its sleeve to shorten the Office 2010 sales cycles, at a time when competition is up, and economic pressures are preventing many businesses from upgrading… I’d expect Office Web Apps, the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, to play a big part in the campaign. (Speaking of OWA, check out this nifty chart I found on one Microsoft blogger’s site, which compares what Office 2010’s locally installed Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will provide, feature-wise, vs. Office Web Apps.)

Microsoft officials aren’t changing their public Office 2010 timing guidance. They are continuing to say that Office 2010 will be available by June 2010.

In related news, was I the only one who thought it odd that almost none of the recent reports about Google possibly launching an apps store for third-party products that will work with Google Apps mentioned Microsoft?

Microsoft already offers free add-ons and templates to Office from third-party vendors via the Office Online site. That same site also features a marketplace of paid third-party apps and services that complement Office. Microsoft and Intuit recently announced a deal via which users will be able to access hosted small-business productivity apps via Intuit’s App Center marketplace.

February 1st, 2010

Microsoft's Azure cloud is officially open for business

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 4:38 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Channel, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Google, Management tools, Multicore/distributed computing, Open source, Red Dog, SQL Server, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows server

Tags: Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Programming Languages, Databases, Enterprise Software, Operating Systems, Software, Software Development, Software/Web Development

As of February 1, Microsoft officially jumps into the cloud-computing frey and now is charging customers for developing and running apps in its Azure cloud.

(Update: Microsoft’s Azure team said charges actually won’t commence until Tuesday February 2,  in order to sync up billing across time zones. “Microsoft will begin charging for Windows Azure and SQL Azure starting at 12:00 AM February 2, 2010 GMT to ensure that customers and partners are not charged for their free usage in the month of January,” said the team in a February 1 posting annoucing Azure general availability.)

Microsoft has been working on Azure for more than three years; beta testers have been kicking its tires for more than a year. With Azure, Microsoft is attempting to recreate its Windows ecosystem in the form of a utility. Today, developers and customers can develop and deploy on the Windows Azure operating system and make use of the SQL Azure hosted database. In the coming months, Microsoft will make available to developers its Azure AppFabric Web-service utilities. And as 2010 progresses, Microsoft is slated to make available to developers and customers more of the on-premises “private cloud” complements to Azure.

While many (including yours truly), describe Azure as Microsoft’s “cloud,” Microsoft actually has many different public and private clouds. Very few Microsoft properties are currently hosted on Azure. Those that are include Live Mesh, Microsoft’s HealthVault service and its energy-monitoring Hohm service. Mega-scale services like Windows Hotmail and Xbox Live don’t run on Azure. Neither does Microsoft’s hosted Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, CRM Online, its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) or its Danger services for mobile devices. Microsoft hasn’t provided a timetable as to when (or definitively if) it will move these services to Azure.

Microsoft officials say that there already are “tens of thousands” of apps and services running on Azure, a total which includes everything from pilot “hobbyist” apps, to full-fledged commercial ones. (February 1 is the cut-off date, by the way, for those with Azure Community Technology Preview accounts to decide wehther they are going to upgrade to paying account ; Microsoft is advising userswho don’t want to subscribe  to export their data pronto so it won’t be deleted.)

But is Azure really ready for prime-time, as Microsoft flips the commercial switch?

Cloud expert and author of Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform (Wrox, 2009) Roger Jennings says yes. He’s been running a Windows Azure Table Sample Project he created and has been seeing a majority of 100 percent uptime weeks.

“I’ve been happy with the capabilities and performance of the SQL Azure Database, as well as the free supporting applications for it, such as George Huey’s SQL Server Migration Wizard and the Sync Framework Team’s SQL Azure Data Sync tool. Both tools export schemas and data from on-premises SQL Server databases to SQL Azure in the cloud.”

Early Azure customers have tended to use Azure for “cloudbursting,” notes Directions on Microsoft analyst Rob Sanfilippo, via which Microsoft’s datacenters provide overflow capacity to add to what customers currently have available on-prmises, so as to be able to handle peak demands without having to make permanent infrastructure investments.

Azure is still “a fledgling platform,” Sanfilippo says, “and it will take large deployments and time to prove its scalability, stability, and security. It doesn’t yet offer administrator control of a Windows Server virtual machine like Amazon currently does, but this has been promised for later in 2010 with an upcoming ‘virtual machine roles’ feature. Advanced features of SQL Server such as reporting and analytics are not yet available with SQL Azure (again, promised for later), and the previously promised Workflow and Live Services components have been delayed. Improvements could also be made by providing more online administration tools and closer parity with Microsoft’s on-premises products (yes, these are promised too).”

Developers have a number of tools for not only migrating existing apps to Azure, as Jennings points out, but also for developing new apps from scratch. Microsoft has been working with a variety of partners to make open-source tools available for Azure — everything from Eclipse, to PHP. Silverlight can be used for SQL Azure clients, “but most Windows Azure devs probably will stick with ASP.NET Web roles for now, move to MVC with Visual Studio 2010, and Silverlight as they come up to speed with it next year,” Jennings says.

Microsoft faces some big competitors in the cloud, ranging from Amazon, to Google, to Salesforce, to IBM. It also already is facing pricing pressures, with developers pushing the Redmondians to offer a lower-end, hosting-centric pricing to compete with ISPs (as opposed to the full-fledged operating-system-centric infrastructure that Azure currently is). Microsoft still has yet to articulate exactly how it and when it plans to mirror its public-cloud Azure environment for customers who want and need to keep their data in-house. (Microsoft has said it plans to offer a public-to-private cloud. And it still has a lot of behind-the-scenes work to do to get its reseller partners onboard with Azure.

MIcrosoft is counting on developers and customers wanting more, not less, in the cloud. Microsoft is banking on coders wanting a (mostly) familiar operating environment, middleware and development infrastructure whether they are writing apps that can run on-premises, in the cloud or both.  Now that the meter is running, we’ll see whether devs and users agree….

January 26th, 2010

No. 1 Azure request: Make it cheaper for smaller apps and services

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:44 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Google, Linux, Red Dog, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Microsoft Azure, Developer, Microsoft Corp., Pricing Strategy, Pricing, Marketing Research, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is taking votes via a new Azure forum (”My Great Windows Azure Idea”) as to what kinds of new features and functionality developers and users would like to see in Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform.

The No. 1 suggestion so far: “Make it less expensive to run my very small service on Windows Azure.” The No. 2 suggestion, in terms of votes, is also pricing related; It’s continue to offer Azure free to developers. (Microsoft is going to begin charging customers and developers for Azure starting February 1, 2010.)

Microsoft has been emphasizing the savings developers and customers can achieve by using Microsoft servers and infrastructure to run their apps and services. That said, not every app or service could or should be cloud-hostable. Certain legacy applications may be too costly to move to the cloud. Others include data that customers deem as too sensitive or compliancy-laden to be moved there.

Microsoft outlined its pricing plans for Azure in July 2009. Compute time is priced at 12 cents/hour, storage at 15 cents per GB stored and storage transactions at 1 cent per 10K. Azure isn’t just a hosting service, however; it was built to be more of a full-fledged development and deployment environment and includes database, middleware and management components, unlike ISP hosting platforms. Many of those additional components, like SQL Azure and AppFabric elements, come at an additional cost.

A number of the posters on the new Azure voting forum said they’d be more interested in trying Azure if Microsoft offered a pricing tier for those interested in experimenting with the technology.

Poster Daniel Chambers was in this camp. He commented:

“(W)hen I saw that Compute Time is measured not in CPU time but the time your site is running (ie real time!) I realised that Azure is ridiculously and prohibitively expensive when compared to shared hosting.

“This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, considering the spirit that Azure seems to be in: pay for what you use. My website would use next to no resources (CPU, data space, bandwidth), so I would have expected that it would cost me very little to host, yet the pricing means that I would have to pay through nose for it!”

Tech writer Tim Anderson recently made the same point: Azure is too expensive for small apps. Anderson (and others) have noted that it’s hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison between Microsoft’s Azure pricing and that of its cloud competitors or other hosting providers because each vendor’s pricing scheme emphasizes different deliverables. But Anderson went on to say:

“A cheap Windows plan with a commodity ISP will cost less than either Amazon EC2 or Azure, but it is worth less, because you don’t get a complete VM as with Amazon, or a managed platform as with Azure, or the scalability of either platform. The point though is that by cutting out smaller businesses, and making small apps excessively expensive for customers of any size – even enterprises run small apps – Azure is creating a significant deterrent to adoption and will lose out to its rivals\.”

One commentor on the Azure forum suggested Microsoft add some new pricing tiers and offerings to its line-up. Jouni Heikniemi offered a detailed proposal for a “Mini-Azure” that would offer developers fewer capabilities for a lower price. Heikniemi explained in a blog post:

“The current (Azure) $0.12/hour pricing model (~$86/month) is too expensive for small sites. Hosted LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL/PHP) stack offerings are available at a few bucks a month, and that’s a hard price tag to beat.”

Heikniemi came up with some interesting new Azure SKUs he said he’d like to see, including a Windows Azure Express bundle for $10 per month and a Windows Azure Compute Small Business Edition, which would allow a processing core to be shared among several sites.

January 22nd, 2010

Microsoft: Developing Windows Phone apps and games on the Mix 2010 agenda

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:57 am

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, Google, Legal, Mobile services ("Pink"/"Rouge"), Search, Silverlight (wpf/e), Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Xbox, Yahoo

Tags: Game, Phone, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Mobile, Microsoft Corp., Experience Pack, EC, Microsoft Windows, Mobile Operating Systems, Operating Systems

Windows Mobile news and rumors dominated a lot of the Microsoft headlines this week, but that wasn’t all that was happening in Redmond-related circles. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the stories that I didn’t get to:

Mobile dev is back on the Mix agenda: The folks running the Microsoft Mix 2010 conference decided after pulling a placeholder note announcing that Windows Mobile content would be on the show agenda, to reinstate the placeholder. They also added a new tidbit to it, claiming that Microsoft officials would be discussing both app and game development for next-generation Windows Phones at the show. Interesting they didn’t say Windows Mobile 6.6 or 7.0 (or Pink)…

That leaves the door open for a variety of potential topics, including how Microsoft plans to add mobile-dev support to Visual Studio 2010 (the Softies removed mobile-dev support from the VS 2010 betas, as I noted previously), as well as exactly what Silverlight on Windows Mobile 7 will enable developers to do.

Windows Mobile devs complain about not getting paid: As Ars Technica reported, some Windows Mobile developers are none too happy that they aren’t getting their expected 70 percent cut of sales from Windows Marketplace for Mobile apps. Microsoft officials are attributing some of the complaints to lack of clarity about when and how developers will get paid. Still, Microsoft doesn’t need any more Windows Mobile black eyes, especially with the Mobile World Congress show right around the corner.

Microsoft releases a Windows Experience Pack: This isn’t another Ultimate Extra kind of thing (although if there were a Windows 7 Ultimate Extra program — not that I’m advocating for one — the new Experience Pack freebies would likely be in it. The Experience Pack is a free add-on for Windows 7 and Windows Live Essentials that allows users to customize avatars and backgrounds.

EU antitrust regulators are seeking comments on the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership: Reuters reporters have seen a 38-question document that the EC is circulating in Europe that is asks “Will the merger make Microsoft a better competitor to Google?” To be clear: The Microsoft-Yahoo arrangement is not a merger; it’s a partnership unveiled in the summer of 2009, via which Bing becomes Yahoo’s primary search engine across various properties and Yahoo execs sell ads on Microsoft sites. The EC is accepting feedback through January 29, and has given itself a deadline of February 19 to clear or bar the deal. (That date can be extended, however.)

Microsoft is suing Tivo (on behalf of AT&T): The issue is DVR patents that may or may not infringe on technology used by  Microsoft in its Mediaroom IPTV offering. The show-down results from a lawsuit filed by TiVo against AT&T last year in federal court in Texas over the telecom company’s U-Verse system, an IPTV service built on top of Microsoft’s Mediaroom technology, according to TechFlash, which has the posted the full text of the lawsuit.

Bing: Now indexing more recipe sites near you. Microsoft’s search engine is indexing more food/cooking sites and making queries about what to make with particular ingredients more easily discoverable and clearly displayed. Now, if you enter ingredients, such as “scallops” or “dried cherries” into the Bing engine, one of the results categories on the left pane is a collection of recipes using those ingredients.

January 21st, 2010

The consumerization of IT -- and of Microsoft

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:22 am

Categories: Apple, Channel, Corporate strategy, Exchange Server, Facebook, Google, SharePoint Server, Web 2.0, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows client, Xbox, Zune

Tags: Deck, Information Technology, Microsoft Corp., Tool, Productivity, Content Management, Enterprise Software, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is spending an awful lot of money these days on projects at which company officials might have scoffed not so long ago. Training in the form of collecting Facebook-based achievement awards? Twitter-update clients for your media player? A BorgVille equivalent of FarmVille? (OK. I made that last one up. But if/when it happens, — like Windows 7 –it was my idea.)

Microsoft has established its reputation as an enterprise software/services vendor. It’s trying to be a consumer one, too, and is spending money on retail ads, brick-and-mortar stores and viral marketing campaigns to try to gain more mind share there.

Not everyone thinks Microsoft should be so focused on the gadget and Web 2.0 space. More than a few industry watchers, customers, partners and Microsoft employees themselves believe Microsoft is spreading itself too thin and should stick to its enterprise knitting.

With that in mind, I read with interest a recently posted PowerPoint presentation deck that Microsoft is offering its partners to explain Microsoft’s official views on the “consumerization of IT.” The deck is designed for partners to use with their business customers when trying to position (justify?) Microsoft’s growing investments in more consumer-focused markets and technologies.

Microsoft’s definition of the consumerization of IT is “the increasing influence that our technology experiences as consumers -— both hardware and applications -— have on the technology that we expect to use at work,” according to the deck. More:

“The reality is that many of us have powerful computer systems at home, and social computing tools like MySpace, Twitter, blogs, etc. are a part of our everyday lives. As technology plays an increasingly important role in our personal lives and we become accustomed to the power, convenience, flexibility, and connectedness of consumer technology experiences, we want those same capabilities to help us at work. However, in most cases we aren’t being given the tools.”

Enter, Microsoft. It has the tools and the technologies that will help get these kinds of socially friendly deliverables into business users hands, the deck says.

Using virtualization (desktop, application or user state, where appropriate), user settings can be centralized, synchronized and safeguarded. “People search,” like what’s being built into SharePoint, can help users find answers to questions faster by calling on established experts. Content feeds, podcasts, shared documents, Wikis — all available as part of SharePoint — also can help with quicker information discovery and sharing, the deck notes. (It’s no coincidence that Microsoft plans to push the built-in social-networking tools as one of the big selling points of SharePoint 2010 this year.) And don’t forget about corporate instant messaging, presence capabilities, built-in VOIP and other unified communication features in Exchange, Office Communications Server, and other Microsoft software/services.

Even if you yourself aren’t a social-networking believer, there’s evidence your next-generation workforce will be, the deck points out. The “millennial generation” are avid social networking/social computing tool users

“They love their devices and stay at the forefront of what technology can do. And this generation expects to be able to use these same tools at work,” Microsoft warns in the deck.

What’s your take? Do you think Microsoft is right in obsessing so much about Apple and Google? Or do you agree with one Microsoft shareholder, who recently said: “I don’t expect (Microsoft) to be Apple, I don’t want them to be Apple. They need to be really good at being 50, an elder statesman”?

Update: Right after I hit publish, I noticed IDC has just published a new Social Business Survey. The study “confirmed that consumer social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn continue to dominate business use, although the gap between consumer and corporate-sponsored social networks has narrowed in the past nine months. This survey also showed that the use of social media has penetrated deeper into U.S. organizations, with executive managers and IT leveraging these tools for business as well as line-of-business workers.”

January 21st, 2010

Microsoft set to release critical IE patch today

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:53 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Internet Explorer, Security

Tags: Vulnerability, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Attack, Web Browsers, Blogging, Security, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is issuing on January 21 an out-of-band (meaning, not tied to a regular Patch Tuesday) fix for the Internet Explorer security breach that affected Google and other companies in China. Microsoft plans to make the fix, designated as “critical,” available as close to 10 a.m. PST as possible, officials said.

Update (9 a.m. PT): The patch is out. Steven Bink of Bink.nu fame, has links to all the various versions available for download.

While Microsoft officials say the “only successful attacks” have been against customers running IE6, the fix also applies to IE7 and IE8.

Here’s the official word, via a Microsoft spokesperson:

“(W)e will be releasing MS10-002  (on) January 21, 2010. We are planning to release the update as close to 10:00 a.m. PST as possible. This is a standard cumulative update, accelerated from our regularly scheduled February release, for Internet Explorer with an aggregate severity rating of Critical. It addresses the vulnerability related to recent attacks against Google and a small subset of corporations, as well as several other vulnerabilities. Once applied, customers are protected against the known attacks that have been widely publicized. We recommend that customers install the update as soon as it is available. For customers using automatic updates, this update will automatically be applied once it is released.”

Microsoft also updated Security Advisory 979352 to include information about additional products that may be affected by this vulnerability and guidance related to reports of proof of concept (POC) code that bypasses Data Encryption Protection (DEP), the spokesperson said.

My blogging colleagues Ed Bott and Ryan Naraine have been covering this issue in more depth over the past few days, for those who want more information and background.

January 19th, 2010

Five Windows Mobile 7 questions and five speculative answers

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 2:25 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, App Compatibility, Apple, Channel, Code names, Corporate strategy, Google, Mobile services ("Pink"/"Rouge"), Speech, Telecommunications, VOIP, Windows CE, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Zune

Tags: Phone, Microsoft Windows CE, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Mobile, Microsoft Zune, Microsoft Corp., Readers, Pink, Microsoft Windows, Mobile Operating Systems

Readers are sending me URLs for so many Windows Mobile 7 rumors that my head is reeling.  (Keep ‘em coming!)

Microsoft isn’t commenting, and many of the “usual” mobile analysts we bloggers/journalists would ask are under non-disclosure agreements because they attended an early Windows Mobile briefing at Microsoft headquarters last November… So the rest of us are left speculating and wondering and guessing…

I’ve decided to go back and re-examine not just the new claims, but also some older links for clues. Here’s are my five most pressing questions regarding Windows Mobile 7 at this point — and the way I’m leaning on these various issues (again, with no information from Microsoft).

1. What is the underlying core of Windows Mobile 7? Previous releases of Windows Mobile have built on top of Microsoft’s embedded Windows CE operating system. I’ve seen rumors claiming Windows Mobile 7 won’t be based on CE (it instead will be built on top of Silverlight and .Net, one claimed). I’ve also seen reports claiming it will be built on top of Windows CE 6.0 R3 — the latest version of Windows Embedded Compact that was released to manufacturing in September 2009. (CE 6.0 R3 was codenamed “Cashmere.”) If Windows Mobile 7 is based on Cashmere, that’s significant and interesting because the Cashmere release includes support for IE7 and Silverlight, among other features.

While there has been talk that Microsoft is moving toward basing Windows and Windows Mobile on the same core operating system base, I’m guessing Windows Mobile 7 is still based on some version of CE, possibly CE 6.0 R3.

2. Are there two versions of Windows Mobile 7, a “business” version and a “consumer/entertainment” version? I have zero insider information about this, but I can’t help but wonder whether the business and consumer “versions” are simply different sets of specs with which Windows Phone makers are being asked to comply. I ran a spec list for “Windows Mobile 7 Chassis 1″ last year. At the time, I was told this was the set of specs for Pink phones. But maybe that list was one of two sets of chassis specs (either the business or consumer set)? Or maybe what the “two versions” rumor actually reflects is there will be more Windows Mobile 6.X phones coming from various vendors with all the usual vendor customization, and another set of Windows Mobile 7 phones which limit those customizations?

Because Microsoft keeps banging the convergence drum, claiming users don’t want a business phone and a consumer phone, but instead a single phone that can be used for both kinds of tasks, I’m thinking there is only one Windows Mobile 7 but at least two sets of chassis specs.

3. Will Windows Mobile 7 be backward-compatible with Windows Mobile 6.x? Will many folks, other than those with custom Windows Mobile apps and developers who took a chance and backed the Windows Mobile 6.x platform, really care? More on that in my earlier post on Microsoft’s compatibility conundrum today.

4. Is there a “Zune phone,” after all — in spite of repeated Microsoft claims to the contrary? I’m betting no on this one. Microsoft officials did split the Zune team up a year ago, sending the hardware side of the Zune unit to Windows Mobile and the software side to the IPTV/MediaRoom side of the house. The Zune HD was said by some to be a showcase of some of the user-interface, video marketplace, music subscription/playback and other elements which would show up, at some point, on Windows Phones. Zune music and video are probably among the premium mobile services that the Danger/Pink team has been developing. But does that mean Windows Mobile 7 phones + Zune services = Zune phones? Not exactly.

5. So what the heck is Pink? I’ve been wavering as to whether Microsoft is going to deliver a Pink phone. The reason for my uncertainty? First I heard Pink was just a set of premium mobile services. Then I heard from my sources that Pink was the services plus a Microsoft-branded phone. Then Microsoft officials began to criticize Google for competing with its partners by releasing a Google phone. Did that mean Microsoft had decided to kill the phone component of Pink? I thought so… but then Pink phone rumors resurfaced, the latest of which are claiming Pink phones could debut this calendar quarter.

I’m starting to think Pink phones may be nothing more than Windows Mobile 6.x-based phones built by a Microsoft partner (or two) to spec. They may be the first Windows Phones to offer the Pink premium mobile services. But otherwise, it’s looking more and more like they won’t end up carrying a Microsoft logo.

What other Windows Mobile 7 questions — beyond the obvious pricing, timing and availability ones — are you most interested in having answered?

January 19th, 2010

Microsoft's compatibility conundrum: When is it wrong to do the 'right' thing?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:54 am

Categories: App Compatibility, Apple, Channel, Code names, Corporate strategy, Google, Internet Explorer, Mobile services ("Pink"/"Rouge"), Multicore/distributed computing, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows client, Zune

Tags: Microsoft Windows Mobile, Mobile, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., WM7, Midori Team, Microsoft Windows, Web Browsers, Mobile Operating Systems

Over the past couple of days, on a couple of different fronts, Microsoft watchers have been musing about compatibility — or, to be more precise, backward compatibility.

In the case of Windows Mobile (WM) — where rumors about WM7 are ramping up at an almost iSlate-like pace — folks are wondering about reports that WM7 might not be backward-compatible with Windows Mobile 6.X. Meanwhile, on the Internet Explorer side of the house, , an exploit in IE 6 that affected Google in China has led a number of company watchers to wonder why Microsoft is continuing to support IE 6. Why not drop backward compatibility so as to force IE stalwarts to move to IE7 or IE8?

On the WM front, the issue of backward compatibility is less pressing than it is on the IE/Windows one. Microsoft has broken compatibility in the past when releasing new WM versions running on phones with different processors. While there is some indeterminate number of custom Windows Mobile apps out there which may have been written for WM6.X, there still aren’t more than a few hundred commercial WM apps in the Microsoft Marketplace for Mobile store. And you can be sure Microsoft will be prompt in getting its own apps (Office Mobile 2010, Silverlight, Windows Live, Bing, Zune, etc.) out for WM7.

The stakes are higher in Windows than Windows Mobile. Microsoft officials have insisted over the years that one of Microsoft’s biggest strengths is its commitment to providing backward compatibility. With more than 1 billion Windows users out there, Microsoft officials haven’t been willing (so far, at least) to create a new, smaller, less convoluted version of an operating system without thinking about how to continue to support the majority of existing apps and customers.

That “strength” also has become a great weakness for Microsoft, however.

Remember this August 2009 blog post from IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch, where he explained why Microsoft wasn’t dropping IE6 support? Even though doing so would make life a lot simpler for developers who are tired of having to create different versions of their apps/services not just for browsers from different vendors, but for different versions of IE, Microsoft was not going to do it. Hachamovitch attributed the decision to a number of factors, including the fact that some IT departments are lacking the money to shell out for the latest hardware/software, as well as the existence of custom internal apps that require IE6.

(It’s still unclear exactly what the IE6/XP connection to Google is/was. Google hasn’t explained how it was hacked, though there are plenty of rumors about that, too.)

Microsoft officials know IE6 running on older versions of Windows is a security nightmare. But they still decided to stand by the company’s commitment to support IE6 on XP for the full lifecycle of those products. (In the case of IE6 on XP, I *think* that means Microsoft’s support will continue until support for XP SP3 ends, which seems to look like some time in 2010. If anyone has any better luck deciphering the many support caveats and can come up with a more accurate date, let me know.)

Update: Here’s the good news/bad news (depending on how you look at it): Microsoft officials say support doesn’t end for IE 6 on XP SP3 until April 8, 2014. So this IE6 backward-compat debate is going to drag on for quite a while….

Back to Microsoft’s conundrum. At some point, in order to truly advance IE and make it more standards-compliant, I’d assume Microsoft is going to have to drop IE6 compatibility. And in order to make any real changes in Windows, in terms of size, performance and complexity, wouldn’t the Softies also have to cut the cord and deliver an operating system with a new kernel? Midori, the so-called “successor to Windows,” is supposedly based to some degree on the Microsoft-Research-developed Singularity microkernel. The Midori team has been known to be debating how and if Midori will be backward-compatible with Windows.

One way around backward compatibility headaches is to use virtualization. But, as one of my readers recently noted, not all apps work well in a virtual machine running virtualized drivers. So maybe a preferable solution is to support two OSes simultaneously: Both WM 6.x and WM7. Both Windows and Midori (or whatever Microsoft’s next-generation OS ends up being). But what about proprietary IE and more standards-based IE? Should Microsoft continue along that dual path here, as well?

Speaking of WM7, I don’t have much new to contribute regarding all the new rumors showing up on various blogs and Wall Street missives. I can’t help but wonder whether talk of two versions of WM7 is simply confusion over WM7 and “Pink” phones/services. As I’ve noted before, Pink was supposed to be a set of consumer services (including a Zune music service) plus a phone or phones custom-made for the teen/20-something set which would carry Microsoft branding…. So your guess is as good as mine (or any of the others out there) as to what Microsoft will share about WM7 and/or Pink in a few more weeks at the Mobile World Congress.

January 15th, 2010

ComScore: Bing market share continues to creep upward

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:13 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Internet Explorer, Search, Security

Tags: ComScore Networks Inc., Microsoft Corp., Hacking, Security, Web Browsers, Search, Viruses And Worms, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

The comScore December market share numbers for U.S. search share are out, and Bing is continuing its slow, upward spiral.

Bing’s share is now at 10.7 percent, up from 10.3 percent in November, comScore said. Yahoo is down — to 17.3 percent in December, from 17.5 percent in November. And Google is holding its own, at 65.7 percent in December, compared to 65.6 in November.

Microsoft is continuing its push to use whatever means necessary to grow its search share. In January, company officials announced a deal with Microsoft via which HP will be making Bing the default search engine on most of its PCs. Microsoft struck a similar default-engine deal with Verizon recently, as well, also for an unspecified amount.

In search-related news this week, Microsoft officials said the company won’t be pulling out of China, unlike rival Google, which is threatening to do so because of cyberattacks. (Those attacks have been linked to  a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, but didn’t affect Microsoft, officials said earlier this week.)

There’s still been no regulatory clearance on the Microsoft-Yahoo plan via which Microsoft will end up providing search results for many of Yahoo’s Web properties. If and when that clearance happens, Microsoft’s share will see a more significant upward bump, but with Bing’s current gains coming as a result of Yahoo’s losses, maybe less of a bump than Microsoft originally hoped.