General Microsoft news

Microsoft loves Twitter; Windows developers aren’t as fawning

If HTML had an <IMHO> tag, I’d use it right about now: but I can’t help thinking as I read various articles about Microsoft bidding to power Twitter search that it’s a lot more enamored of Twitter than are many of its third-party developers.

</IMHO>

If you’ve been to a Microsoft conference recently, you may have noticed the Twitter notification screens it puts up before keynote speeches. They basically consist of differently shaped boxes, each containing a Tweet with the event’s hashtag, falling like Tetris pieces. (In case you’re wondering, the app that powered that was Flotzam.)

But at a DevCon I attended here in Boston not long ago, the Microsoft emcee kicked off the keynote by asking for a show of hands of Twitters in the crowd. Only a handful of hands showed.

I only recently jumped aboard the Twitter bandwagon (follow me @WinDevelopment), but it seems to me, anecdotally, that Windows developers are a bit behind — or some may say skeptical of — the Twitter trend. It’s clear Microsoft is trying to push them toward it, but many of them don’t seem impressed. That’s not to say that Microsoft shouldn’t try to power Twitter’s search engine: Twitter has decently strong consumer support, and that’s something Microsoft wants regardless.

But I do wonder why Windows developers, who are on the whole a fairly tech-savvy bunch to say the least, haven’t embraced this latest child of Web 2.0. One of our in house Twitterati, Alex Howard, has an interesting observation that may explain it: Microsoft’s Twitter account has zero updates and isn’t branded, meaning it’s likely being Twittersquatted. Amazon, by contrast, has 93 updates, and Google has 152; the three companies have 67, 1,128 and 362,550 followers, respectively.

To be fair, Microsoft has other accounts that are more active, like MicrosoftVSTS. But without a unified front on Twitter, how can the company expect its developers to see the site as serious business and not just the latest Web toy?

Worst Microsoft product name

On a lighter note…

PC World published a fun little piece yesterday in which they listed the 10 worst product names ever to come from Redmond. There were some interesting picks, but they missed the first thing that came to my mind. This one’s not really Microsoft’s fault — they’re just using a popular acronym that happens to have been poorly thought out.  But still, I humbly submit as the 11^th worst Microsoft product name ever: Microsoft Dynamics POS.

As in: “Hey Bob, did you get a chance to install that new POS from Microsoft yet?”

Microsoft’s open source projects may help it sell software

If you’re linking to outside JavaScript code in your Web pages, you’re probably (hopefully!) aware that there are certain security risks. Microsoft’s Scott Isaacs talked about the problem at a session at PDC 2008 and said there are essentially two ways most sites handle this threat: some ignore it and hope for the best, while others bring in IFrames — which have their own problems, like clickjacking.

The problem remains unsolved, but one approach Microsoft is trying is a new technology called Web Sandbox, which it announced at PDC. The Web Sandbox is a server-side program that retrieves outside scripts, transforms them to make them secure and embeds them directly to the HTML. You can see Isaccs’ complete talk explaining how to use Web Sandbox on Channel 9.

Which brings us to today’s news: Web Sandbox is now being released as open source, under the Apache License 2.0. What’s interesting here isn’t just that Microsoft is continuing its overtures into OSS, but that it’s continuing to do so primarily on the Web front. Two of its other major flirtations with open source have been its support of jQuery and its release of the code for its business-oriented Silverlight controls.

I don’t think anybody is accusing Microsoft of being altruistic, so I won’t bother making the case that this is an obvious example of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” But it seems to me that Microsoft’s open source strategy hinges on being open on the Web and sticking with proprietary software everywhere else. Pricing for Windows 7 hasn’t been released yet, but I’m guessing it’ll cost more than Ubuntu.

That two-pronged approach makes a lot of sense. The Internet has always been free to use, and if people aren’t going to pay for your software, you may as well give away the source. Desktops and enterprise apps, on the other hand, still provide major sources of income for software vendors.

For Microsoft to stay relevant as a software company, it has to continue to attract top developers, both to itself and to the ISVs who develop for Windows. Playing nice with OSS on the Web may help Microsoft keep up with the cool new upstarts so that it can continue to make money where there’s money to be made.

Obama’s inauguration will be streamed with Silverlight

When millions of eyes tune in to see president-elect-but-about-to-be-President Obama’s inauguration at noon on Tuesday, Microsoft will be working behind the scenes. The Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) will be streaming the Obama inauguration live using Silverlight, Microsoft announced today. The stream will be available at the PIC’s website.

The inauguration will be the biggest event that we know of to be broadcast using Silverlight 2 since it came out of beta in October. This announcement is good news for Microsoft, given that MLB announced in November that it would be switching from Silverlight back to Adobe Flash.

Microsoft executives have donated heavily to the inauguration: Bill Gates and Steve Balmer each gave $50,000 for the event, and other executives also donated five-figure sums. Microsoft also donated to the Obama campaign heavily during the election, giving it $2,124,186 — over twice what it gave to the McCain campaign, according to opensecrets.org. Most of that money came from individuals, so it doesn’t look like the company overtly bought what will likely turn out to be a huge surge in Silverlight downloads. But with Adobe not even appearing on opensecrets.org’s “heavy hitters” list, I can’t help but wonder if Microsoft’s generosity helped it get this event.

Microsoft extends Windows XP availability, but layoffs on the horizon

Here’s what we’ve been seeing around the Web…

Microsoft extended Windows XP’s lifespan for OEMs who want to put it on low-end machines. Manufacturers have until the end of January to put in their orders, which can get them XP licenses through May. The move seems to support Windows-based netbooks, low-end laptops primarily designed for browsing the Internet, by letting those computers use the less resource-hungry XP.

But higher-end computers got to see a better glimpse of the future when a beta of Windows 7 was leaked. Torrents of Windows 7 started spreading late last week, but the leak may be good news for Microsoft: early reports say that Windows 7’s development is farther along than that of previous betas of its Windows line.

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Microsoft patches critical IE bug, warms up to open source software

Here’s what we’ve been seeing around the Web…

Microsoft was hit hard by a zero-day Internet Explorer bug late last week. The bug affected IE versions 5 - 8 and let hackers run code remotely. Microsoft’s initial advice was to change security settings to “High,” thus disabling scripting. The company issued a patch for IE on Wednesday, prompting discussions about whether IE’s auto-upgrade feature is less robust than other browsers’.That was in addition to another critical bug that targeted WordPad’s handling of Word 97 files. That bug made it possible to hijack systems if Word 97 files are opened in WordPad, as might happen on systems that don’t have Microsoft Word or other office suites installed.

Microsoft also continued its slow-but-steady warming to open source. The company hired an open source liaison, although Microsoft senior director Robert Duffner also said that the Microsoft isn’t trying to promote OSS to its customers.

And a Russian entrepreneur tried to get a monopoly on snark when he trademarked the winky emoticon, ;-). Close derivations, like noseless winkies, may also be covered.

Happy holidays and new year!

News Roundup: Release dates announced for Vista SP2 beta and Win7 beta

Here’s the Microsoft news we’ve been seeing around the Web….

The big headliners this week were release dates for two Windows OSs from Microsoft, both betas. The first, Vista SP2, came out yesterday; even before it came out, sites were writing about Vista SP2 beta’s new features. The release is expected to go RTM in April 2009.

Separately, the first beta release for Windows 7, the operating system’s major release, was rumored to be set for January 13. That came from a blog comment by Microsoft employee Keith Combs.

But those two news items came with a damper: market share for Windows dropped below 90% for the first time, and Internet Explorer’s market share dropped below 70% as Firefox grabbed a record high of over 20%, according to Net Applications.

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News roundup: Ballmer to testify in “Vista capable” case

Here’s the Microsoft news we’ve been seeing around the Web….

Thanksgiving week is usually slow for news, but that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill. A lot of the talk has been around what Steve Ballmer might say in a lawsuit which alleges that Microsoft let manufacturers label computers as “Vista capable” when they weren’t fully so. A Seattle judge ruled last Friday that Ballmer has to testify in the case within 30 days. Some speculated that rather than put Ballmer on trial, Microsoft should settle the case out of court.

There was much speculation over whether Windows Live Search would be relaunched as Kumo. Microsoft bought the domain, which was one of the names being batted around for the search portal’s rebranding. But the word means both “spider” and “cloud” in Japanese, leading some to wonder whether Microsoft is wants for a search portal or a homepage for Azure, Microsoft’s newly announced cloud OS.

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News roundup: Microsoft will not buy Yahoo!, MLB won’t use Silverlight

Here’s the Microsoft news we’ve been seeing around the Web….

Steve Ballmer emphasized on Wednesday that talks of Microsoft buying Yahoo! are “finished” after speculation started bubbling up again following Yang’s resignation from Yahoo!. But the software giant also lured an executive away from the struggling search company. Meanwhile, Microsoft may sell bonds for the first time ever.

Silverlight suffered a blow on Monday when MLB said it would move back to Flash, according to Adobe. That could be especially damaging, since Microsoft’s case for the rich internet application (RIA) framework relies heavily on its video capabilities and adoption by major players like NBC.

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Microsoft PDC: First keynote focuses on Microsoft’s Cloud OS, Windows Azure

LOS ANGELES — In unveiling its Web-based development platform today at PDC, Microsoft has fired a salvo at Amazon EC2, the company’s hosted development platform.  Microsoft’s version of the cloud computing platform, dubbed Windows Azure, is essentially a hosted version of its server-side .NET platform. Developers can write ASP.NET code, complete with hookups to a hosted version of SQLServer, and run it on virtual machines hosted by Microsoft.

Windows Azure is meant to be another tier of computing, addressing Web development in the same respect that Vista and Windows Server address client-side and server-side development, said Ray Ozzie, the company’s chief software architect.

For now, Windows Azure is in very early beta. Its functionalities are fairly limited, and the company has not rolled it out to the public at large yet; for now, only developers at PDC will get activation codes. Ozzie warned that when the service reaches a commercial release — at a yet-unnamed time — it will likely be very different, and possibly incompatible, with  the current version.

Developers looking for client-side news were out of luck today; the whole keynote focused on Azure, with plenty of demos to show what the cloud OS can do so far (though not a whole lot on how that’s different from what standard client-server apps already do). Tomorrow’s keynote will focus on client-side Windows development; check here for more updates.