Microsoft's Eastern Front: the iPad and mobility

For those who study European Wars the decision to invade Russia consistently stands as one of the dumbest that any individual can attempt. Not because Russia as an army was consistently brilliant or strong but because the Russian country is just too big and the winters too harsh to defeat via an invasion.

For years this has been the challenge of those taking on Microsoft, they've attacked the desktop market. Created products to compete with the profit factories that are Windows and Office, even giving them away in the case of Open Office, but the end result was the same... Microsoft remained the massively dominant player. Even when Linux looked like winning on Netbooks the shear size and power of the Microsoft marketplace ensured that there would be no desktop victories. Sure Apple has leveraged the iPod and iPhone to drive some more Mac sales but the dent has been minor.

From one perspective Microsoft has also been the biggest investor on another front, the front of mobile and mobility, billions upon billions have been poured into the various incarnations of Windows on Mobile devices, from Tablets and WindowsCE to the new Windows 7 Mobile it has consistently been a massive set of money for a very, very small slice of the pie. This disappointed people who invested in Microsoft but as long as the profit factories were safe then all was fine.

I think however that this failure is about to really hurt Microsoft. Today I'm sitting in a train carriage (treating myself by going First, on my own cost) and there are now 7 iPads open and 2 laptops (of which one is mine), I'm using my Laptop as I'm creating PPTs but if I wasn't I'd be on the iPad too.

The fact that I'm on a Mac is irrelevant, the key fact is that after Neil Ward-Dutton asked if the stats were good I took a walk down the carriages and found that a 3:1 iPad/slab to laptop continued through-out first class and dropped to 1:1 in standard class. So in the "best" case scenario you had 50% of people using and working on iPads (or equivalents) and in the management section is was at 75% iPad domination.

These people are emailing, browsing, creating documents and generally getting on with mobility working. That is a massive shift in 2 years. 2 years ago it would have been laptops out and people using 3G cards or working offline, now its all about mobility working. This represents a whole new attack on Microsoft's profit factories and one from a completely different direction than they are used to. With rumours saying that Windows 8 for slabs not being available until late 2012 or even early 2013 this means that a full desktop/laptop refresh cycle will have gone through before Microsoft can hope to start competing in this space.

I'm normally asked a couple of times on this 5 hour train journey about my ZAGGmate keyboard for iPad and where I got it from with people saying "that is really good, I could ditch my laptop with that". This concept of mobility extends to how you use things like email. Sure Outlook is a nice rich Email client, but the client on the iPad is pretty good and has the advantage that you don't have to VPN into a corporate environment but just use the mobile Exchange (an MS product) connection so mobile signal quality doesn't impact you as much. As an example, on this trip I've had to re-authenticate on VPN about 12 times, normally with the iPad I of course don't have to do it once.

Its hard to not feel that while MS has invested billions in eastern front of mobility that in reality its left with no actual defences, a Maginot Line if you will which has now been roundly avoided by a whole new set of technologies which are not competing with Microsoft in the way they expected.

How long can the profit factories be considered safe? With 1% of all browsing traffic already from the iPad and mobility being the new normal its a brave person who feels that another 12 or 18 months won't deliver long term damage to Microsoft's core profits.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Windows 7 - more proof on why iPhone is better

A while back I posted why Phone adverts tell you that the phone is rubbish

Well lets compare

Windows 7 Mobile


Apple FaceTime


The difference remains. Apple have the confidence to show you people actually using their phone, Microsoft have the confidence to not show you people actually using the phone but doing other stuff to pretend that their phone is cool

If people can't even fake an advert to make a phone look useable, what does that say about the devices themselves?

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Bold and old predictions from Microsoft

Remember all those Bill G predictions that turned out to be not so visionary?... well It appears that this ability isn't limited to the top of the company, BillG has managed to instill this through out the organisation.

While flying to Amsterdam the other day (a very nice walking city) on business I was reading through the British Airways in flight magazine "High-life". On pages 125 and 126 was a double page advert from Microsoft entitled

"Everything My Computer Science Teacher Taught Me Was Wrong"

Its an article by Andrew Herbert who is one of their R&D leads. Its basically trying to say how technology is rapidly changing and what that means and it makes 5 predictions for major change in IT, which refers back to the CS teacher being wrong.

The first one is The Single Threaded Program in which he says this is a "20th century idea that has become obsolete", now I have a bit of an issue here because I'm sitting in my home office right now and looking behind me I can see one of my University text books "Communicating Sequential Processes" which was published in 1985. Now I don't know what they were teaching at Cambridge in the 20th Century, but certainly up at York it was assumed that multi-threaded was the way to go. So this is certainly an old prediction as its predicting that the past will happen. Its a good point to stress however that single threaded applications are very limiting but I hope that Mr Herbert isn't right when he says "it's going to change the way we teach programming" as I'd hope that all good universities had been teaching multi-threading for decades.

Next up is an even less bold statement when Andrew predicts the end of "Low-level programming languages", which contains the cracking line (this is 2007 remember) "Once considered an extravagant use of memory, compilers are now essential tools", this is even less of a prediction than the multi-threading one. The debate on assembler v compiler was pretty much answered in the 1970s and by the 1980s it was a question of how high level the programming language was rather than assembler v C/Ada/Smalltalk/LISP etc. This area finishes up with an amazingly bold prediction however "We are moving towards designing yet higher level languages with greater levels of automation and self-checking that eliminate programming mistakes"... hang on did I get that right

moving towards [...] higher level languages [...] that eliminate programming mistakes

Yes I did read it right.... Oh boy, moving from the old to the practically and mathematically impossible, apart from issues like the Halting Problem and Busy Beaver there is the basic challenge that nothing can eliminate wilful stupidity. Reduce yes... eliminate no.

The next one is the first real prediction as Andrew predicts then end to "Screens on Desks" basically saying that future displays will just be "there" as part of the wall or surface by either projection or direct integration. Now here I'm with him. The ability to not have this monitor and use all of the wall space in front of me would be cracking when I'm working. Its not overly bold as some of this technology exists today, but its a pretty good prediction that can be measured in a reasonable (10 year or less) time frame and you can see the business case for it.

"Virtual Memory" or Disk swapping of memory to disk is the next thing that is going to die as memory is ceasing to become an issue. Fair enough really again as its a solid prediction that can be measurable, for instance by the next version of Windows after Vista not having Virtual Memory support. What are the odds on that though?

In the last paragraph for Virtual Memory is another sub-prediction (like the programming languages one) that boldly predicts two things "Within a few years we will probably be able to carry a terabyte of personal storage, enough to hold all the audio and video you'd want to use in a lifetime". So its a "few years" (lets say 5) to get 1TB. This seems fair enough as you can get 1TB USB drives these days and the iPod is already at 80Gb, with other players significantly higher. So 1TB in 5 years seem a rock solid prediction that can be measured by having 1TB personal players available in that time. The 2nd part though is whether 1TB is enough, and here I'd have to say that I've already passed the 1TB level and I'm hopefully years away from being dead. I've taken 30+ hours of video, and lets assume that in future everyone will do this in HD (or more) which means a (post compression) bit rate of around 750KBs, which means I've already created over 1TB in video alone. So the question is whether I've watched over 30 hours of video/film/TV in my lifetime... and the answer clearly has to be yes. So its a prediction but its definitely not a valid one. 1TB is a lot, but its not all you will ever need.

The final prediction is the death of "Hierarchical File Systems" By which he means the OS storing stuff in that sort of format and users accessing it like that. His prediction, again measurable by the next version of Windows (and Linux), is that this will be replaced by "Modern Database technology" which is where it puts his predictions at odds with Google who seem fine with just leaving stuff around and letting the search find it. And isn't this what BeOS sort of did?

Its always brave when people predict the future, so good on Andrew Herbert for doing that. But to describe these things as "top five obsolete software ideas" says much more about the mindset of an organisation that thought they were valid approachs in the late 20th century than it does about a radical shift happening today. Out of the 5 predictions, two are already mainstream and have been for over 20 years, and 2 are predictions for the future but about hardware (screens & Virtual Memory) and the other one is about operating system specifics that has already been released in a product in the 20th Century, and which was originally meant to be in Windows Vista.

But remember folks "1TB of storage is all you will ever need" can now be added to the list of foolish predictions.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft

Vista and Firing 2.0

Many moons ago I did a presentation on the futures of user interfaces where I talk about why true immersive 3D environments (not like LookingGlass but true 3D) were unlikely to be useful for standard corporate users and why voice as a command mechanism is a bad idea. I had a slide back then with a cartoon on it, that unfortunately I cannot now find.

Basically the scenario is this, you fire someone, they are upset. All of your systems can be operated via voice commands... so what happens...


Yup the person runs down the corridor formatting all the hard drives that they can. Now back then I worked in a unix shop so the command was "rm -rf /" but I think format c: works just as well. My point was that voice commands are quite inefficient for lots of users and are also subject to office noise interference, the example was just a silly way to show what I meant when I talked about people wandering up to your desk and asking "did I send the email to you?" and the computer sending the email you hadn't finished.

Now it seems that Windows Vista might have made the silly a reality.

Welcome to Firing 2.0, like Firing 1.0 but with sound effects.

(with apologies to the excellent XKCD)

Technorati Tags: Vista, Voice

Have Microsoft got serious about Enterprise Software?

Reading over on infoq I came across this interesting article about one of the most senior, if not the most senior, person from IBM Software leaving to join Microsoft. Don Ferguson is pretty central to lots of things that IBM have done and is extremely important in the overall picture at IBM. From his old IBM blog

Don chairs the SWG Architecture Board, which oversees the architecture and integration of WebSphere, DB2, Lotus, Tivoli and Rational products. Don was the original Chief Architect for the WebSphere family of products.

Which sort of scopes out the sort of calibre that Microsoft have got themselves here. I've been concerned in the last few years that Microsoft just don't appear to be focused on the enterprise market. It was clearly going to take a pretty heavy hitter to move them forwards and most importantly give them the clarity they need to build a full enterprise ready stack of products.

With Longhorn Server and the revision of most of the enterprise stack that it requires being scheduled (according to rumour) for next year this gives Don only a short time to implement the complete overhaul of how they work. As a champion of SCA at IBM it will be interesting how ideas like that are either used, or replicated, in side of Microsoft. It will be interesting how much of the current Vista and .NET 3.0 pieces make it into the enterprise stack or whether Don will decide that something better is required.

From the post I referenced above I said that Microsoft need to Buy BEA, or get a vision for SOA that allows the enterprise to evolve at a different pace to the operating system. at least now they've hired someone with a good track record in proper enterprise software. Maybe there might be competition from Redmond after all.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture