Category: Software

After former VP Dick Brass publicly excoriated Microsoft’s management and philosophy in an NYT Op-Ed this morning, the company had three good options: fully discredit his claims, let it pass, or admit shortcomings. Or, I guess, none of the above.

Microsoft’s response came in the form of a blog post from the company’s VP of Communications. It moves through Dick’s piece point by point, sort of, so we’ll move through his post point by point, sort of.

Dick Brass accused Microsoft of stifling innovation, and stretching even small projects—like the implementation of ClearType, a font antialiasing feature for Windows—into years-long fiascos. Their response?

For the record, ClearType now ships with every copy of Windows we make, and is installed on around a billion PCs around the world. This is a great example of innovation with impact: innovation at scale.

Now, you could argue that this should have happened faster. And sometimes it does. But for a company whose products touch vast numbers of people, what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed.

The thing is, all Brass was doing was arguing that this should have happened faster. To say that scale is all that matters is to imply that lots of people potentially using ClearType was what slowed its implementation, which doesn’t really make sense. Scale is obviously—and rightly—important to Microsoft, but I think Brass’s point is that scale and speed don’t have to be perfectly inverse.

Brass also claimed that elements in the Office team were so resistant to the idea of tablets that they refused to make a touch-specific interface for the suite. Microsoft’s response?

I’ll simply point to this product called OneNote that was essentially created for the Tablet and is a key part of Office today.

OneNote is a notetaking application. You can draw in it, and it excels at recording stylus input in various ways. It’s a good app! What it doesn’t do, though, is make using any of the other Office apps any easier to use with a tablet. The first generation of Windows tablet PCs needed a touch Office suite, not a single new app.

One point where Shaw nails it, though, is on gaming. For Brass to say that the Xbox 360 is “at best an equal contender in the game console business” doesn’t ring true:

Fact is, Xbox 360 was the first high-definition console. It was the first to digitally deliver games, music, TV shows and movies in 1080p high definition. The first to bring Facebook and Twitter to the living room. And with Project Natal for Xbox 360 launching this year, it will be the first to deliver controller-free experiences that anyone can enjoy-a magical experience for everyone that Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Time magazine each named one of the top inventions of 2009.

The 360 is as close to a vindication of Microsoft’s broader philosophy as there is: it was borne of the original Xbox project, which was a response to Microsoft finally identifying gaming consoles as a thing they wanted to do, with a scale that was worth it to them. In the long term, it paid off. That said, the success of the Xbox 360 depended hugely on Microsoft’s incredible patience, which doesn’t do much to shake the perception that the company moves too slowly, which is Brass’ main concern anyway.

And that’s the core problem here: While you can quibble about anecdotes and details, stories like this morning’s are just illustrations of a problem that’s painfully obvious to anyone who’s been watching. For a company with so much money and talent to be so late on so many things—a worthy followup to Windows XP, a competitive mobile OS, a portable media player that isn’t a punchline—makes it plenty clear what Microsoft’s problem is. Brass just gave it some texture. [Microsoft]

Microsoft is slowly lifting the veil on their Windows Mobile plans, and in this VisitMix blog announcement finally revealed that there will be 12 MIX 10 Windows Mobile sessions.

One of them will be hosted my Microsoft UI heavyweight Joe Belfiore, who will be delivering the keynote.

Corporate Vice President of Windows Mobile Program Management at Microsoft, Joe Belfiore, will be speaking at MIX in March.  Belfiore is responsible for the overall design and product definition of the software that powers Windows Phones.  A huge consumer advocate, Belfiore has led the design and development of some of Microsoft’s more consumer-friendly products, including Zune, Windows Media Center, and the user experience for Windows itself.  Along with Belfiore’s keynote, eleven new Windows Phone sessions have just been added to the MIX10 agenda.

The sessions remain place holders however, and no information regarding the content has been revealed yet.

Thanks Adam for the tip.

Good news for fans of Slacker, the service that streams music to both computers and handsets. The software is officially supported on webOS and available in the Palm App Catalog for Pre and Pixi devices. The webOS version joins Android, BlackBerry and iPhone handsets. Although I got a sneak peek at CES, here’s a feature list in case you missed it.

• Music library featuring millions of songs
• High-quality stereo playback from any available wireless connection
• Create custom artist stations based on artists or songs
• Over 120 professionally programmed and customizable genre stations
• View artist biographies and photos
• View album art and read reviews
• “Peek Ahead” artist and album preview
• Rate songs as favorites
• Ban songs and artists from stations

I’d provide my own impressions since Slacker is now installed on my Palm Pre, except for one small, but key detail — I don’t have my Palm Pre. I loaned it to Dave Zatz for a few weeks and he gave Slacker the old once over.

“Of course Slacker rocks. And the app functions much like you’d expect it to. Although, as a webOS n00b, I’ve had to get used to finger swiping in lieu of tapping a back button. Otherwise, it’s quite comparable to their other mobile apps – a wide variety of “radio” stations and the option of upgrading to a paid subscription (~$50/yr) to display song lyrics, provide unlimited skips, and do away with all advertising.”

I’d don’t see any mention of offline song caching in either the press release or in Dave’s overview, so that’s something I’d like to see added in a future release. Last I heard, that functionality — which originally was specific to BlackBerry devices — is now in the iPhone and Android apps. Since I’m a “turn off the juice when not in use” kind of guy, I’m all for some Airplane Mode with Slacker tunes.

Admit it. As confusing and impractical of a concept that the Gesture Cube may be, If Apple had announced this instead of the iPad, the world would have gone freaking nuts. [Gesture Cube via CrunchGear]

If there is one positive fall out from the spat between Adobe and Apple regarding Flash on the iPhone and iPad, it is that it concentrates Adobe’s mind on delivering the software for competing platforms.

I a long diatribe against Apple they do reveal that the technology, set to come at the end of last year, is still on its way to our smartphones.

We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers. This includes Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs. Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will enable their customers to browse the whole Web. This is being accomplished via the Open Screen Project, where we are working with over 50 partners to make this a reality across a wide array of devices.

Hopefully we will all be watching not just Youtube but Vimeo and Yahoo video on our Windows Mobile smartphones in the next few months.

Via Allaboutphones.nl

Last year, Dropbox introduced an iPhone app to the masses for easy access to stored data in the cloud. With the software, you can snap pics with an iPhone and have the images shot up online to your Dropbox web account. In turn, that automatically synchronizes any other computers you have running Dropbox, so the pics are available there too. And that’s just one example of the software functionality — you can also share file links, download files for offline access and sync videos as well.

Dropbox recently tipped their hand about an application for Android and BlackBerry handsets, although I missed the memo. The guys at Geek.com received the news as did other Dropbox users. Although there’s no firm date on when these two mobile platforms will see the application, Dropbox say that “more mobile magic is coming soon.”

I wonder if the Dropbox team is attending Mobile World Congress, which kicks off on February 15? That would set the stage for a nice Android and BlackBerry coming out party, no? Of course, if the Dropbox is team is still looking for feature requests, I’d love to see the new application support music playback of files stored online. I use that functionality in the ZumoDrive application, which offers a similar service to Dropbox.

Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Forget Synching, Let’s Put Music in the Cloud!

Google just beefed up their mobile synchronization functionality for the enterprise and education markets, which removes one long-standing complaint about the service. Up to now, you couldn’t remotely wipe your handset data using Google’s tool set. This feature is a must in today’s business world and it has long been a staple of Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync platform. Google licenses Exchange ActiveSync technology and uses it with their Google Sync service. You can use it for push email and synchronization of calendar events and contacts for your phone.

And now Google is remote data wipe features with Google Sync — lose your phone and you can wipe your personal data to protect it. Google Apps administrators can do even more, however. They can set devices to lock after configurable period of inactivity, require passwords and even ensure that those passwords are strong.

The new Google Sync administration features work with the iPhone, Nokia E series handsets and Windows Mobile devices as well. There’s no mention of Android, but then again, Google Sync is for non-Android devices due to the native synchronization that Google builds into their mobile platform. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to hear that these same functions become supported natively in a future Android update soon. Has Google has just made it a wee bit easier for enterprises to switch from Microsoft Exchange to the far less costly suite of Google Apps?

By the way, if you’re an iPhone and Exchange 2007 user in the enterprise and don’t use Google Sync, The Apple Blog has a how-to that might interest you. They have a step-by-step tutorial showing how to remotely wipe an iPhone using Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access service.

Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Ding, ding. What’s that sound? It’s Isilon Systems ringing the NASDAQ market closing bell at 4 pm ET this afternoon.

The Seattle data storage company (NASDAQ: ISLN) is celebrating its first quarterly profit in its nine-year history. I caught up with CEO and founder Sujal Patel by phone from New York this morning after the company’s earnings call.

Isilon’s revenue for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $37.5 million, up 23 percent from $30.5 million in the previous quarter and up 18 percent from $31.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2008. That translated into a small quarterly profit of $140,000, as compared with a net loss of $4.9 million in the third quarter of 2009. The company’s revenue for all of 2009 was $123.9 million, up 8 percent from $114.4 million in 2008.

“It is a small profit, but it’s an important milestone for the company,” Patel says. “It provides validation for the business model.” That model includes an increasingly successful global channel strategy that targets sales in the $500,000 to $1 million range, he says.

The foundation for Isilon’s comeback was laid in the past two years, as I detailed in October. The company, which had come crashing back to earth after a high-flying IPO in late 2006, had a bit of a restart the following year, when Patel was renamed CEO. (He had previously been chief executive for Isilon’s first three years). Patel led the charge to reinvest in R&D, established a more cost-effective product distribution strategy, and brought in a more experienced senior management team.

But its technology has always been the company’s main advantage. Isilon’s network-attached storage system helps companies deal with huge amounts of unstructured data in a relatively cheap and easy way. (It also has products in virtualization, archiving, and cluster computing.) The company’s big customers include Sony, XM Radio, LexisNexis, Facebook, MySpace, Kodak, Adobe, and major movie studios and TV networks. But Isilon has also expanded a lot from its original focus on media and entertainment companies. Patel says in the last quarter, media made up only 32 percent of its business, while other sectors like online services (11 percent), government (10 percent), and biomedical research (16 percent) have become quite significant.

I asked whether we should expect to see Isilon go for higher profits this year. “This will be a growth year for us, and we will expand our operating margin,” Patel says. “We are a growth company, and we may make a tradeoff for further profitability and go for further growth.”

He says the big challenge for Isilon is that “there are far more opportunities out there” than it can successfully reach for. “We’re focused on building a scalable go-to-market strategy and a scalable partner model,” he says. He adds that he feels “very confident” in the company’s level of innovation, product roadmap, customer strategy, and especially its culture of customer focus and drive.

Now Isilon is looking to settle into its role as one of the few successful mid-size public companies in the Seattle tech community. It currently has about 360 employees and is actively hiring, with “a lot of jobs open,” Patel says.

Comments | Reprints | Share:  

 
 
 

All the recent talk about Apple and their iPad tablet brought out the loyal Tablet PC fans. A “real” tablet, some would content, must offer inking capabilities, not to mention handwriting recognition. For those that need the feature, it’s a fair point. And as a long-time Microsoft Windows Tablet PC user, I get it. But such a feature sadly hasn’t attracted a massive audience just yet. There’s actually a few inking applications available for Apple’s iPhone and there’s even a stylus available that works with the handset’s capacitive display. You don’t need a stylus, though. All you need is $0.99 and the FastFinga application for iPhone or iPod Touch which uses the entire screen as a notepad.

One of our readers, Jezlyn, offers up a fantastic overview of the application, which she may use for some short ink blog style posts. After using FastFinga, she says:

“The UI is really intuitive, much more so than Note Taker. And as you can see, my handwriting is recognizable.  This app feels most natural to me. It’s so good that I may start ink blogging more regularly from the iPhone.”

I highly recommend reading her continued thoughts because she offers some excellent background into the research she’s done. And if you need to see the app in use, this video will help.

You’ll note that after writing each word, you have to “send” it to the application, but surely the small screen of an iPhone is part of the constraint here. And that has me looking into the future for a minute — Apple’s iPad can remove that constraint due to its larger display. Might we see a FastFinga update to expand the inking functionality for a bigger screen? Sure, it’s just a note-taker now, but there’s potential here for so much more.

While you consider that, I’ll point out a few other features of the current iteration. Inked notes can be sent by email as an image attachment, which is handy. FastFinga can also automatically send your handwriting to the note with a configurable delay time, so you don’t have to hit a button to send it. You can swipe a word, or several words, and then use the iPhone’s cut, copy, paste feature. There doesn’t appear to be any handwriting recognition — hey, the app is only a buck — but I see Evernote integration in the app. You could gain some word recognition and indexing that way.

Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right Notes

AT&T announced Thursday that it would allow the SlingPlayer Mobile application for the iPhone to stream video over the wireless providers nationwide 3G network.Sling Medias SlingPlayer allows users to watch video recorded at home from anywhere on the go. Previously, the SlingPlayer Mobile application for the iPhone was limited to Wi-Fi-only access to streaming video, due to bandwidth concerns on the 3G network.

via AppleInsider | AT&T, Sling Media partner to allow 3G access on iPhone SlingPlayer.

Don’t shy away at the sound of that “S” word. I’ve got some reassuring news for anyone who’s ever thrown their N95 across the room in horror. Starting today, Symbian^2 will be offered as a free open source download for anyone wanting to tinker with it. The details are a bit thin on the ground so far, but at least it shows Symbian is finally starting to view Android as a threat.

Once Symbian^3 is launched later this year, it won’t be quite as attractive fooling around with Symbian^2 behind its back, so best to start early and get in a few months of quality time together before the jealousy sets in. [Wired]

After trying out the 5001 Amazing Facts app from XiMad I was looking forward to review some of their other app and we got the chance too look at 3001 Wisdom Quotes today. Read the full review to see if the UI is as impressive as their previous app…

Read more at BestWindowsMobileApps.com

Swype has published this tutorial to show how to work their innovative keyboard, currently shipping on the Samsung Omnia 2 . The video gives a good idea of the actions involved, and despite the apparent complexity of its use, user reports are surprisingly good, both on the Windows Mobile and Android handsets where the software has found a home.

If you want to give it a try and do not have an Omnia 2, this Google search may be useful.

For more tips and tricks on its use, read Swype’s page here.

Now that Firefox Mobile v.1 is out the door for Maemo devices, what’s next on the mobile front for the Mozilla team? Firefox on Windows Mobile has long been in the alpha state, so it’s possible that Microsoft’s platform gets some additional attention. But then there’s that on-again, off-again buzz about Firefox on Android. And with some pegging Windows Mobile growth relatively stagnant as compared to Android’s increased adoption, might it make more sense to devote resources to Android?

Anything’s possible of course, but today’s screenshot of Firefox on Android might be a tip off. I’m not exactly surprised by seeing an early browser version ported to Android, but I didn’t expect to see that version be a desktop version. And yet, that’s exactly what Android Central caught a glimpse of — that familiar-looking, multitab interface of the Firefox you know and love on the desktop.

Vladimir Vukićević, a developer working on the effort, posted the screen cap on his own blog and it clearly shows a very desktop looking affair, complete with the traditional menu bar of commands. Getting a home page to load was the first step, and it doesn’t sound like there major snafus so far:

“Mouse events sort of work, toplevel windows sort of work, keyboard doesn’t work yet but shouldn’t be hard to hook up. This is running in an emulator at the moment for ease of debugging, but it’s working just fine on physical hardware as well.

You’ll note that this is the full Firefox interface, and not the Fennec/Firefox Mobile UI; we’re testing with the full interface because it’s significantly more complex than the mobile UI and stresses Gecko much more. So, if the full UI works, then Fennec should work fine as well. Given the interest in Android on netbook and tablet devices, an updated version of the full Firefox UI might find a home on some of these. Android has been pretty great to work with so far; it’s a bit unusual platform for us due to its Java core, but with the NDK we’re able to bridge things together without many problems.”

Again, it’s way to early in the process to glean much about timeframes or browser capabilities, but it’s an exciting start — even if it is just a default home page. If you’re into following along on the progress, Vladimir and others on the team are posting the status of Android porting right here while Mozilla has an official Android wiki page too.

As I saw in my first look at Firefox Mobile for Maemo, the Mozilla team is definitely trying to bridge the gab between the web on a desktop and the web on a handheld — you can sync your passwords, bookmarks and history using Weave, for example. Even better is the ability to walk from the desktop and have the same opened tabs appear on your mobile. That’s the seamless nature where this is all headed.

But I’m not counting Google out just yet on their native browser. Many have overlooked similar synchronization features in the recent Nexus One firmware update. Multitouch support might have stolen the show, but search history and starred map items from the desktop carry over to Android now as well. Whichever “side” you pick in this browser war, I say we all win due to better choices that compete by adding usability and new features.

Related Research: “What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?“

In 1994, Steve Jobs was not on top of the world. Which is why he was willing to let Rolling Stone probe him at great length in this classic, must-read interview. The insights—into Steve and the industry—are astounding.

This quote is actually more true today than it was in 1994 when Steve Jobs said it:

“The problem is, in hardware you can’t build a computer that’s twice as good as anyone else’s anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You’re lucky if you can do one that’s one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it’s only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software.”

Today, everybody uses the same guts, whether it’s in big computers or little ones. The same chips from Intel power Windows PCs and Macs, which didn’t used to be the case. iPhones and Palms Pres and Android phones and basically every other damn phone uses ARM-designed processors. What separates them all now? Software.

Steve takes a few stabby stabs at Microsoft too. Referring to the stagnancy of Macintosh in 1984, he sneers, “It’s amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. ” And says that the reason consumers often don’t see the benefits of a technology before businesses is because “unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.”

Like I said, a must-read interview. [Rolling Stone via Marco Arment]