October 7th, 2008

Microsoft PDC: Will the real cloud platform please stand up?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:05 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Live Mesh, Mix '08, Oslo, PDC 2008, SQL Server, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Web 2.0

Tags: Platform, Zurich, Microsoft Corp., Mesh Platform, Research & Development, Business Operations, Mary Jo Foley

At the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, “platform” will be the watchword of the day. I’m going to be interested to see which cloud platform of the many that Microsoft is expected to unveil will get top billing.

It’s no secret that the Softies are going to highlight the Live Mesh platform at the late October confab. At its Mix conference in April, Microsoft took the wraps off the Live Mesh “user experiences” and focused on the device synchronization and collaboration capabilities of Mesh. Microsoft developers did discuss at a high level the Mesh developer platform at that time, as well, but only at a high level. At the PDC, the Mesh platform is going to get the royal (beta) rollout treatment.

The Mesh platform consists of several different layers. At the lowest level, there are programming interfaces and frameworks that will allow developers to write software and services that bridge the software/services development divide. On top of those frameworks will be a set of infrastructure services, like storage, identity/security, pub/sub, communications and remote device management.

Microsoft is expected to emphasize the ability of the Mesh platform to help developers push their applications to users on multiple devices. The goal? To make applications and services more easily findable, installable and shareable virally.

Live Mesh may be Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s pet project, but it isn’t the only platform that the Softies will be touting at the conference. Red Dog, a k a Microsoft’s “cloud OS” is another. From what I’ve heard, Red Dog is going to be a set of operating- system-level components that comprise the foundation of Microsoft’s hosted platform for developers. Think of it as Microsoft’s equivalent to Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

Then there’s the elusive “Zurich,” which Microsoft continues to refuse to acknowledge, even though — at one point — the company acknowledged publicly on its own Web site that Zurich was “extending Microsoft’s .NET application development technologies to the Internet ‘cloud.’” I’ve heard from some folks that Zurich is Microsoft’s uber-services platform, something like Amazon Web Services (of which EC2 is a part). If the Amazon analogy holds, Red Dog, SQL Services Development Services (SSDS) , BizTalk Services and other existing and forthcoming cloud-related technologies might all be part of Zurich.

Is the Mesh platform a subset of Zurich? Is Red Dog part of the Mesh platform?

Read the rest of this entry »

July 16th, 2008

Microsoft opens up Live Mesh to more testers

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:05 am

Categories: Apple, Corporate strategy, Mix '08, Web 2.0, Windows Live

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Tester, Microsoft Windows, Web 2.0, Apple Mac OS X, Operating Systems, Software, Internet, Apple Mac OS, Mary Jo Foley

If you were closed out of Microsoft’s Live Mesh preview for lack of an invite, you now can get in you’re now more likely to get in.

Microsoft has opened up availability of its Live Mesh Software + Service sync/collaboration platform to any more U.S.-based testers with a Windows Live ID. (Those outside the U.S. also can get access to the test build as long as they have a Live ID and are willing to change their Windows operating system region and language setting to EN-US.)

Update: Looks like Microsof changed its mind. LiveSide has a copy of the original Microsoft Forum wording on its site, claiming that

“Live Mesh is now openly available to anyone in the U.S.

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No sign up needed to participate!”

But when I checked back at 1 p.m. EST on July 16, Microsoft had changed its wording, narrowing the number of testers who will get access from “anyone” to “more.” The new wording:

“Signing up for Live Mesh now!

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that we have simplified the signup process for our US customers. We are doubling the upper limit of our technology preview program. Our technology preview is still limited to ensure great performance and experience for our customers. You can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No waiting list at this time!“

Microsoft officials acknowledged the opening up of the Live Mesh preview via the Live Mesh Forum on July 15, as first reported by the LiveSide.Net site.

Microsoft announced its Live Mesh technology and strategy in April at the Web 2.0 conference. At that time, Microsoft said that it would make the preview release of Live Mesh available to 10,000 testers.

Microsoft is expected to unveil a full-fledged beta of Live Mesh later this year, and is expected to provide a Live Mesh software development kit (SDK) at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in late October.

Microsoft has been providing new features and functionality for Live Mesh as part of periodic updates to the product/service. Microsoft has said it will add support for Mac OSX clients to its Live Mesh scheme, but so far has yet to make this available to testers outside the company.

May 7th, 2008

Microsoft Live Mesh to get more competition -- from Sun

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:15 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Mix '08, Utility/cloud computing, Web 2.0, Windows Live, Windows Mobile

Tags: Developer, Sun Microsystems Inc., Microsoft Corp., Hydrazine, Productivity, Mary Jo Foley

At the opening day of JavaOne on May 6, Sun officials began laying out their vision for a future cloud-computing platform, code-named Hydrazine, that Sun plans to field against competitive offerings from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others.

Robert Brewin, Sun Chief Technology Officer and Distinguished Engineer, described Hydrazine to me as a combination of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud, Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Google Analytics all rolled into one. It’s a platform that Sun is building on top of JavaFX, which is Sun’s rough equivalent to Adobe AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight. Sun announced JavaFX a year ago.

(Hydrazine, by the way, is a “toxic and volatile rocket fuel.”)

The architectural diagrams Sun showed looked very similar to the ones Microsoft showed off a couple of weeks ago when rolling out its Live Mesh vision. Live Mesh (formerly known as “Horizon”) is Microsoft’s synchronization and collaboration platform.

Like Microsoft is doing with Mesh, Sun is building a set of common services — discovery, personalization, deployment, location, content delivery and developer — which developers will be able to take advantage of when building Java EE and SE applications. On top of these lower-level services will be other common building blocks: Advertising, market place, developer hosting and repository services, according to Sun.

Hydrazine also is about “content developers (being able to) collaborate and share with Java developers,” Brewin said during a keynote presentation at JavaOne on Tuesday.

Brewin mentioned JavaFX Transformer, plug-ins that the company is building to allow designers to use their favorite tools, like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, to traditional development tools. Sun also is working on JavaFX Script, a new scripting language that will do for Java developers what  FlexBuilder and Expression Blend are for Adobe and Microsoft developers, respectively.

Microsoft, for its part, has said relatively little so far about the tools and services that it is going to provide for developers interested in building Live Mesh applications. Microsoft still hasn’t delivered its expected Live Mesh software development kit (SDK), which will allow third-party products to use Live Mesh member services, build on top of the Live Desktop and plug into the Live Mesh news feed system to generate notifications about activities.

Microsoft also is said to be building its own equivalent to Elastic Cloud and Google’s App Engine services. One component of Microsoft’s hosted developer platform is SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), which the company unveiled earlier this year at Microsoft Mix ‘08. But Microsoft has other pieces of a hosted developer service up its sleeve, as part of a still-unannounced hosted developer platform that is code-named “Zurich,” sources have told me.

Hydrazine, like Microsoft’s Live Mesh, is more vision than reality at this point. Microsoft did deliver an early technology preview of Live Mesh last month, which is currently being tested by thousands inside and outside the company to synchronize their Windows PC files. The cross-platform, cross-device capabilities Microsoft is promising to deliver as part of Live Mesh are still at least a couple of months away. And the Live Mesh SDK isn’t expected to debut much before October, at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference.

April 7th, 2008

Microsoft to deliver first Live Mesh beta in late April

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:36 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Mix '08, Utility/cloud computing, Web 2.0, Windows Live

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Beta, FolderShare, Web 2.0, Microsoft Windows, Internet, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

After dangling some vague promises about its plans to create seamless social and device “meshes,” Microsoft is set to deliver more details about its mesh-syncrhonization strategy — and deliver its first Live Mesh beta to external testers — later this month.

In a Web 2.0 Expo keynote on April 23 entitled “Get Mesh!,” Amit Mital, who is identified as “General Manager of Live Mesh product at Microsoft,” is set to unveil more of Microsoft’s vision. There are no further details on the Web 2.0 site about Mital’s slated 10-minute appearance, other than the fact that Mital was previously General Manager of Microsoft’s Live Meeting Web conferencing service, as well as BizTalk Server, Microsoft’s integration server.

Microsoft is planning to make available to a private group of external testers a first beta of Live Mesh by the end of this month, according to sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft’s plans. Attendees of Microsoft’s Mix ‘08 conference are expected to be among those invited into the closed beta.

Microsoft officials refused to comment beyond the information that is available on the Web 2.0 site.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie presented a high-level overview of Microsoft’s mesh thinking at the Mix ‘08 conference in early March. Other company officials put more meat on the Microsoft mesh bones at that event, explaining that Microsoft’s Synchronization Framework, due to go to manufacturing in the third quarter of this year, would be one of the primary technological underpinnings of Microsoft’s mesh service.

As LiveSide.Net discovered recently, there’s already a “Live Mesh” logo and internal dogfood-testing program for Live Mesh in place.

Right now, the best way to understand where Microsoft is going with mesh is via what it’s doing with Windows Live FolderShare. FolderShare, which is based on technology Microsoft acquired when it bought FolderShare from ByteTaxi in 2005, is designed to allow users to keep their files in sync across their computers, share folders with associates and access files from any computer (or, ultimately, device).

Recently, Tom Kleinpeter, one of the founders of FolderShare — as well as one of the Live Mesh team members — left Microsoft. Kleinpeter didn’t respond to an e-mail I sent to him, asking him in search of more information on how FolderShare fits in with Microsoft’s mesh strategy.

After months of silence, Microsoft released an updated FolderShare beta in early March. A number of testers complained about compatibility problems following the beta release. Some testers also reported frustration over the failure of FolderShare to use Microsoft’s Windows Live ID authentication scheme, as well as the fact that FolderShare is not synchronized with Windows Live SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud-storage service, which also is in beta.

According to sources, Windows Live Mesh will be an amalgamation of FolderShare and SkyDrive and possibly unify those two services, which would provide users with a way to keep their local and cloud-based data in sync.

March 19th, 2008

Whatever happened to Microsoft's 'other' mesh projects?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:33 am

Categories: Advertising, Corporate strategy, Mix '08, Research, Speech, Telecommunications, VOIP, Web 2.0, Windows Live, Windows Mobile

Tags: Network, Microsoft Corp., ShareNETS, Mesh Networking, Networking, Wi-Fi, Wireless, Mary Jo Foley

“Mesh” is the hot new buzzword in Microsoft land, thanks to remarks about Microsoft’s future direction made by Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie earlier this month. But there is more than one “mesh” in Redmond.

Ozzie outlined his vision for future device and social-networking meshes. But Ozzie didn’t mention the traditional “mesh network” — a way of routing data, voice and instructions between nodes. That doesn’t mean Microsoft has neglected that data/voice mesh world. In fact, Microsoft researchers have been working on a handful of mesh-networking projects, at least two of which are likely to be productized soon, I hear.

Mesh networking has been a hot-button for Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates for most of this decade. The Redmond, Cambridge UK and Silicon Valley Microsoft Research labs all have been working on various pieces of the mesh-networking puzzle, deploying testbed mesh networks at work and in local apartment complexes. Microsoft Research also made available for download and licensing a couple of years ago a piece of its mesh-network code, the mesh connectivity layer (MCL) driver. Microsoft described MCL as a driver that implements a virtual network adapter in a way that makes the rest of the network appear as a virtual link.

One of Microsoft’s near-term mesh-networking projects that could soon become a product was known as the “Venice Project.” (And no, not the “Project Venice” that ultimately became Joost.) The Venice Project (most references to which seem to have been scrubbed from the Microsoft Research site) is/was an initiative to develop wireless mesh networks that will provide both neighborhood-wide and city-wide connectivity in rural and urban environments.

Elements of the Venice Project infrastructure included a multiple radio hardware platform, a 900 MHz 802.11-like RF transceiver and dual-frequency mesh connectivity. Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices seem to be target devices.

The Venice Project could debut first as one of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential projects, aimed at users in developing nations.

Another wireless-related Microsoft Research project that is likely to turn commercial sooner rather than later is known as “WiFi Ads.” WiFi ads are location-sensitive ads that can be pushed to users who are in the vicinity of a wireless network. Given Microsoft management’s all-consuming focus these days on online advertising, it’s not hard to see why they’d be interested in fidning a way to deliver ads to users who may not be connected to the Internet and/or who aren’t proactively sharing their information via GPS systems via a technique known as “beacon-stuffing.”

There’s one more mesh-network-related Microsoft Research project I found interesting. It’s called ShareNETS. From the description on the Microsoft Research site:

“We envision that wireless technologies will facilitate communications for users by providing pervasive connections among wireless-enabled devices. In this project, we focus on end-system based wireless networking in which devices adaptively and cooperatively form a self-organized heterogeneous multi-hop wireless network. ShareNETS extends and enhances existing infrastructure-based networks in many ways and can enable convenient services even when a network infrastructure is unavailable. ShareNETS is applicable to many attractive scenarios including community/office mesh, mobile ad hoc networks, proximity networking, etc.”

Do these myriad Microsoft Research mesh projects have anything to do with Microsoft’s forthcoming www.mesh.com (in whatever form that ultimately emerges)? I think they are two different “meshes” — though both quite interesting in their own right. What do you think?

March 12th, 2008

Will IE 8 break the Web?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:46 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, Mix '08

Tags: Developer, Web, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Standards, Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

There’s been one nagging question about Internet Explorer (IE) 8 about which I can’t stop wondering: Once it finally ships, will it break the Web?

It’s not just because I’m an unabashed Microsoft skeptic that I am puzzling over this. It’s also because right up until Microsoft decided to go whole-hog and — as many developers and customers wanted — by making “super-standards” mode the IE 8 default, Microsoft officials claimed that going the full-fledged standards route would “break the Web.” What, if anything, changed, making Microsoft willing to assume that risk?

After all, just a month before announcing it was going to make super-standards mode the IE 8 default, IE Platform Architect Chris Wilson blogged:

“We started from a simple statement of ‘enable (and encourage) interoperable web development, but don’t force IE to break pages that work properly in IE today.’ I think we all want to converge to a world where a web developer doesn’t have to spend much time at all testing and recoding their site for different browsers. At the same time, we can’t break the web experience on current sites for users like my mom, even for as good a reason as improving standards compliance. With all the great styling and layout changes we’re working on in our new engine for IE8 to be much more standards compliant, that’s a lot of potential breakage.”

Did Microsoft cut some of the IE 8 features to make it less likely to break sites, pages and applications that adhered to IE-7-specific rules? Or were Microsoft execs guilty of crying wolf, knowing full-well that moving to standards mode wouldn’t really wreak the havoc they claimed?

I put this question to Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the IE team, last week in Las Vegas at the Microsoft Mix ‘08 conference. Hachamovitch said neither of my theories was correct.

“In the past with IE 7, developers weren’t as proactive (about adhering to standards) as they could have been,” Hachamovitch said. “We took that as a strong data point, regarding how quickly devs will respond to anything that we change in IE.”

He continued: “But this time, the community seems to have shifted. They say they will be more responsive. We are giving developers a much easier way to choose their own timeline (for moving to the fully-standardized IE 8)…. Long term, we know this is the right thing for the Web.”

My interpretation: Microsoft is giving developers more leeway regarding how, when and if they will use the full standards mode in IE 8, but isn’t overly worried about compatibility issues arising because it expects the majority of developers to give super-standards mode more lip service than rapid support.

Hachamovitch also noted that Microsoft was going out on a limb, to an extent, by promising IE 8 would adhere to a number of Web standards that are still evolving, like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1 and HTML 5. He said that Microsoft was not going to wait for the set-in-stone final versions of these standards, if the standardization process dragged on. Hachamovitch said if the standards changed substantially after Microsoft ships IE 8, the company would have to come up with a plan to deal with that fact.

“We will ship when we are ready to ship,” Hachamovitch said, noting that Microsoft cares more about the “installed base of Web sites,” than the “installed base of browsers” when figuring out how and if it would need to revise IE 8 if it ended up not being compliant with certain, currently unfinished Web standards.

So I’m back to square one. I think Microsoft’s official stance is that it’s done the “right thing” by making standards mode the default for IE 8, but it doesn’t expect many developers to actually rush out and redo their applications and pages to take advantage of this new mode.

What’s your take? Even though Microsoft is getting love for going the standards route now, whenver IE 8 is finally released (Beta 2 is due this summer), do you think the Redmondians will end up roundly criticized for “breaking the Web”?

March 11th, 2008

New Silverlight 2 extension adds support for dynamic languages

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:34 am

Categories: .Net Framework, App Compatibility, Apple, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Linux, MIX07, Mix '08, Silverlight (wpf/e)

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., Silverlight 2 Extension, DSL, Scripting Languages, Broadband Internet, Network Technology, Programming Languages, Development Tools, Telecommunications

At Mix ‘07, Microsoft promised it would add dynamic-language support to Silverlight. As of this year’s Mix ‘08 conference, it has done so.

The way Microsoft is delivering support for Ruby, Python and other dynamic languages with its Adobe-Flash competitor is via a Silverlight add-on called Dynamic Silverlight (DSL). (Yep — yet another meaning for the DSL acronym.)

According to a blog posting by Jon Lam, Program Manager on the Dynamic Language Runtime team, the DSL includes a runtime and a software-development kit component. Lam explained:

“The runtime consists of two assemblies: Microsoft.Scripting.dll, and Microsoft.Scripting.Silverlight.dll. You’ll also need the language assemblies, which are IronRuby.dll and IronRuby.Libraries.dll for Ruby and IronPython.dll and IronPython.Modules.dll for Python. The runtime component is a small additional download. Today, the IronRuby Silverlight runtime is just a 712KB download, which takes less than 5 seconds to download over modern broadband.”

Microsoft is making available for download the binaries and sources to Ruby, Python (its IronPython implementation), the dynamic language runtime (DLR), the dynamic language and Silverlight integration, and “Chiron,” a dynamic Silverlight development utility, all in once package, blogged Jimmy Schmenti, a Program Manager on the Dynamic Languages team.

Schementi noted that Microsoft is making the DSL, in all its glory, available under the Microsoft Public License (MSPL) — a full-fledged open-source license — “so feel free to extend it, fork it, etc.”

Microsoft officials have said they want to insure that developers can use any language of their choice running on a variety of browsers (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer) and platforms (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) to write Silverlight 2 applications. Does Microsoft’s addition of support for dynamic languages with Silverlight make you any more interested in writing Silverlight apps/content?

March 10th, 2008

Untangling the Microsoft mesh

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:31 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Mix '08, Research, SQL Server, Web 2.0, Windows Live

Tags: WinFS, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp., Sync Famework, Microsoft Horizon, Microsoft Windows, RSS, Operating Systems, Software, Internet

“Mesh” was Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s word of the day last week at Microsoft’s Mix ‘08 conference. Ozzie waxed prolific on “social mesh,” “device mesh,” “seamless mesh” and more.

But what are the technological underpinnings that will allow users and developers to bring everything together into “your own personal device mesh with the Web”? How will the unified device management that “will enable your devices to report into a common service for status, for help, to report their location,” in Ozzie’s words, come into being?

Here are a few of the keys to the Microsoft mesh kingdom:

Microsoft Sync Framework (the technology formerly codenamed Harmony, and later, Ibiza): This is a software layer enabling data roaming and online-offline synchronization. Microsoft just release Community Technology Preview (CTP) 2 of the Sync Framework last week. There also is a toolkit in the works that will allow various applications, services and devices to take advantage of this online/offline synchronization.

Microsoft FeedSync: Feedsync a set of extensions to RSS and ATOM. It allows any sync engine to work in multimaster P2P environment. The Sync Famework has built in support for generating and consuming Feedsync feeds.

Microsoft Horizon: If you go to the www.mesh.com address owned by Microsoft, you are redirected to MSHorizon. Microsoft officials up and down the food chain are refusing to talk about Horizon. But if you understand what Microsoft’s FolderShare does on the desktop and SkyDrive does in the cloud, think of Horizon as a combination of the two. Horizon is one component of Windows Live Core (another set of cloud-infrastructure technologies that Microsoft won’t discuss yet.

At the crux of all of Microsoft’s pie-in-the-sky cloud/utility/mesh computing talk is the Sync Framework, which is due to go to manufacturing in the third quarter of this year for both PCs and Windows Mobile systems. Microsoft is offering licensing arrangements to other vendors interested in making the framework available on non-Microsoft platforms.

During a session at the Microsoft’s Mix ‘08 conference last week, Neil Padgett, a program manager for the Sync Framework, described the Sync Framework as a way to ” keep local cache of data in sync with a remote endpoint.”

Padgett noted that there are many conflicts, interruptions and other factors that make online-offline synchronization challenging.

“Correct sync algorithms are nontrivial. The devil is so much in the details with sync,” Padgett said.

Padgett explained that Microsoft’s Sync Framework can support arbitrary data stores and data types. Via various sync providers, developers can expose their endpoints to the sync framework. Programmers can build providers for a service (like web storage); a desktop app (like Outlook) or a device (dig camera, dig music player), he explained. There will be relational providers, an “Astoria” (ADO.Net data services framework) Offline provider, a FeedSync (RSS Simple Sharing Extensions) provider and various third-party providers, Padgett said.

I’ve unearthed a couple of interesting footnotes that may help shed more light on Microsoft’s mesh/synchronization strategies.

First, Padgett is a former member of the WinFS (Windows File System) team. (He was the program manager in charge of the WinFS Synchronization application programming interfaces). WinFS was the uber-data/storage-management system cut from Longhorn a couple years back. Here’s a description of the defunct WinFS:

“You can synchronize between multiple computers running WinFS, and also between different users, while granting access to only those you want to synchronize your data with. WinFS has the ability to synchronize any of your data (Contacts, Email, Documents, Photos etc) regardless of which application created it. Rave (a sample app for WinFS) allows you to select your data using Windows Explorer, and set it up for synchronization. You can then invite your friends and colleagues who have also installed WinFS to synchronize your data. Thus, you can share out your photos, contacts, and documents easily and have changes to them automatically replicated to others.”

So the Sync Framework and all this multi-master-mesh madness is, in many ways, WinFS revitalized.

Another clue: At the Microsoft Financial Analyst last summer Ozzie outlined some of the layers of Microsoft’s evolving service strategy. One layer is “cloud infrastructure services.” Ozzie described this as the “utility computing fabric on which all of our online services run. Ozzie said the cloud infrastructure layer includes application frameworks for “horizontal scaling” and the storage, file systems, databases, and searchable storage.

Codename Horizon = horizontal scaling?

Microsoft is promising it will fill in the blanks in its mesh/synchronization strategy by the time it holds its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this October. In the interim, all educated guesses and guidance are welcome.

March 9th, 2008

Microsoft DeepZoom + PhotoZoom = Another Software+Service combination

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:56 am

Categories: Code names, Corporate strategy, Mix '08, Research, Windows Live

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Microsoft DeepZoom, PhotoZoom, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Channel Management, Digital Cameras, Microsoft Windows, Digital Photography, Internet

Microsoft is continuing to roll out more Software+Service (S+S) combinations, the latest being the DeepZoom-PhotoZoom combination.

DeepZoom is a feature of Silverlight 2, Microsoft’s next release of its Flash competitor which is due out this fall. DeepZoom “allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads,” as Microsoft explains on its Web site. DeepZoom is based on the SeaDragon technology that Microsoft acquired in 2006.

PhotoZoom, meanwhile, “is a web site where anyone can upload their photos and turn them into zoom-able, pan-able albums, using the Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight 2 Beta 1.” (Microsoft released Beta 1 of Silverlight 2 to testers last week at Mix.) Microsoft did not talk about PhotoZoom at all at Mix — at least not in any of the talks or sessions I attended; the LiveSide guys unearthed PhotoZoom last week.

Softie Matt Augustine cautioned that PhotoZoom is not an officially supported Microsoft service at this point. Augustine blogged:

“PhotoZoom is an experimental project developed by a small group of Microsoft developers, and it is definitely not an official, supported Microsoft product. Also, I cannot make any guarantees that it will be operational at all times, that it will support a large number of users, etc. This is not an official Microsoft press release and I am not a spokesperson. I can’t make any suggestions about future Microsoft product releases related to this technology or concept. In other words, I hope people will have fun with it, but please set your expectations accordingly.”

Both DeepZoom and PhotoZoom are Microsoft Live Labs projects. (Live Labs is the mash-up of Microsoft researchers and Windows Live team members working on experimental technologies that Microsoft believes need to be fast-tracked into commercial products.)

March 6th, 2008

Ballmer: It's all about Web developers

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 2:56 pm

Categories: Development tools, Expression Studio, Mix '08, Silverlight (wpf/e)

Tags: Web Developer, Developer, Web, Steve Ballmer, Plain Old Developer, Channel Management, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley

Plain old developers are so passe. Now it’s all about “Web developers, Web developers, Web developers!”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, at the prodding of an audience member of Mix ‘08, updated his famous “developers, developers, developers” chant.

(Istartedsomething’s Long Zheng is hosting a clip of Ballmer’s latest “monkey boy” dance on his Web site.)

In a wide-ranging Q&A with former Apple marketing kingpin Guy Kawasaki, Ballmer fielded questions about everything from the rationale behind Microsoft’s plans to buy Yahoo, to when and whether Microsoft would port Silverlight to the iPhone.

Among the Ballmerisms evoked by Kawasaki’s good-natured ribbing:

• Ballmer reiterated that Microsoft wants Yahoo because “search is the next killer app for advertising.” When Kawasaki asked what the latest was on Microsoft’s pending take-over, Ballmer said “We made an offer. It’s out there, baby!”
• When will Microsoft port Silverlight to the iPhone? Ballmer remained noncommittal, but also said that Apple was planning to charge software vendors “30 percent on any runtime for apps running on the iPhone.” Microsoft officials at Mix this week hinted that when and whether Microsoft would put its Flash competitor on the iPhone depended on whether Apple planned a “DoCoMo”-like lock-down on its cellphone platform.
• “What’s the deal with Vista?” Kawasaki prodded Ballmer. Ballmer reiterated that Microsoft had initial compatibility problems with drivers and apps for Vista but that the “second most popular operating system” (after Windows XP) was on track now.

(Photo: Ballmer about to launch into his “Web developers” rallying cry, courtesy of istartedsomething.)