Category: Microsoft

An insiders view of Microsoft from the bottom looking up

The Age of Information or Isolation?

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I was sitting in a room on the Microsoft campus watching the Harvard debate team take on Northwest University, the topic was “The Internet:  Does it dumb us down or enlighten us?”  It really could have been called is that glass half full or half empty. When I was first starting in the industry we discussed and promoted the idea of the information age.  It is interesting in that this was before the advent of the modern internet.  The information age at the time was purely defined within the context of the Personal Computer, the possibilities seemed limitless with a PC.  By todays standards that seems rather drab.  We now have access to information at the push of a button, when we want it, when we need it, wherever we may be.  We receive news updates at near real-time pushed to us at the time the actual event has occurred or even occurring.  Are we better off by these developments in technology or are we more isolated than we have ever been? I read the news every day and every minute a controversial issue is taken and expanded into something bigger than historically it ever would have been before the advent of the information age.  As we sit there glued to out monitor seeing the history of the globe unfold before us from the confines of our dark little office.  Internalizing it all while experiencing nothing.

Are their benefits to all this technological innovation?  You bet.  Drive down a freeway and you may see an Amber Alert letting you know a child has been kidnapped.  Getting this information out quickly and to as many people as possible saves lives. The ability to connect with anyone at anytime has been enhanced with mobility – voice, text messaging, email, Facebook etc..With mapping we can now find our way around any major city regardless of if we have ever been there before (though I will add there is a certain excitement in being lost in a foreign place).  You’re in home living room experience has greatly been enhanced with the convergence of everything to digital – from television to voice and it’s all wireless.  Your TV screens are flat and 60 inches.  We are one the verge and experiencing major revolutions in health care, communications, commerce, mobility, etc..it’s a long list that touches everything we know. It’s a fast-moving train that will, and is, hitting super-sonic speeds.

Yet with all this rapid change, things at times seem darker than ever.  Looking back at the horrific shooting  in Tuscon or the massacre at Virginia Tech a few years ago there is an air of fear among us all.   There will always be individuals or groups that do not fit into the general society, they are not all as bad as what happened in Tuscon or Blacksburg,  but they may be misguided. The age of information has a way of providing a steady diet of what they need to justify their views and to cement some very extreme beliefs. When the two fore mentioned events happened, what is one of the first places investigators look?  They want to see where the individuals hung out on the web and get insight into their day-to-day lives.  A lot of extremism can be found on in the internet and sometimes it is brutal in its content.   In fact it is a place that allows these hateful viewpoints to organically grow. Whatever your anger is, it can find a home in the information age.  Our media seems intent on feeding us a steady diet of fear and technology enables that to reach us wherever we may be.  That filters down the individuals, who given the right skill scan mass market themselves as somehow more enlightened than the rest of society.  There are no lack of individuals throughout history who claimed to “know”.  Their “enlightenment” has led to some of the gravest travesties of human kind.

One big issue with all this information is it allows people to gravitate to places where they only hear the views they want to hear, not listening, but dictating.  We see it in television.  We hear it on the radio.  We gravitate to it on the internet.  All the time dragging us farther to the  left or harder to the right.  We soak in what we want and tune out we don’t want to hear.  Not even trying to understand the validity of an opposing point of view.  Searching only for statements to belittle the opposition.  In the process only fueling anger and rage.  It seems dialog is being lost between individuals and replaced with anger and a series of screaming contortions that reflect the mood of society

The silver lining in all this is that we as a just society can do better.  We can listen to all the information and act upon it in a positive manner.  At a time when we can live healthier based on all the great information we receive,  obesity is a growing concern and continues to rise, increasing our health care costs along the way.  We can confront extremism with generosity and compassion.  In a society where we are always connected we are yet more alone then we ever were. In the end we are creating a society that is  becoming increasingly withdrawn.  Afraid to walk out our front door.  Beyond what we know lurks out in the world something far worse lurks, what we don’t know.  Though we may be communicating more we are doing less face to face communications.    If we are becoming isolated and withdrawn from day-to-day society are we listening?  Are we learning?  Or are we just interpreting what we read? The internet should be about inclusion, but more importantly society should be about inclusion.  That becomes a challenge when we do not physically or mentally confront what ills us by tying ourselves to the monitor.  We are informed as our eyes are glued to the abyss, tuning out all that is around us.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann May 23, 2011

Google I/O 2011

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I followed with a lot of interest the Google I/O  conference for developers online this last week. The I/O conference was held in San Francisco and there were a lot of interesting announcements and observations.  For starters it’s always interesting to see the charismatic Vic Gudotra present. Prior to his role at Google, Vic was the right hand man for the former Microsoft VP of development evangelism at Microsoft Sanjay Parsatharathay,  Sanjay was a lousy speaker, where as Vic was quite comfortable in front of an audience.  It always seemed Vic was the voice and face for developers at Microsoft, so it was a coup when Google stole him. He now is leading the development programs at Google.  Many people at Microsoft say he has adopted the Microsoft play book at Google.  I would say he has updated it and improved it.  For this event however he was the host so his role was minimized as developers never want entertainment they just want to get into the guts of the technology and how it will improve their productivity and generate new opportunities.  I am going to take the high road to summarize my impressions

Day one at the conference was all about Android.  Google started by highlighting all the success Android has had with developers world-wide.  When you look at the number of developers and the number of applications that have been built its pretty easy to have a successful opening to a developer conference.  Android has 100 million activated devices worldwide.  Any business today getting into the mobile space will only talk about two things Apple iOS and Android. So what were the cool announcements?  Improvement to the AppMarket for Android and some new tools for Eclipse (an open source development tool that has a huge following, not sexy but very important)) I found Android@home  the most interesting announcement and comical hysterical announcement at the same time.  The idea being Android on any device anywhere.  Think beyond what you know today and think of home appliance running Android tomorrow, it could be your oven, your washer, pretty much anything that could benefit from software. This is not a new idea, Novell and Microsoft toyed with this idea over fifteen years ago.  Interestingly Microsoft’s initiative was called…@home.  I think the difference now is where Novell and Microsoft were ahead of the curve, it seems like we are at the dawn of where this idea will become reality.  Coming up with big ideas is not that hard, timing it however is the trick to success.

Day two was about Chrome.  Chrome today is really a browser.  If you look at browser market share Chrome is between 10% and 12% (NetMarket Share Data).  Which is impressive but still a long way off from catching Firefox or Internet Explorer.  Chrome however is about the future of web development and browser-based hardware devices.  Recently we have seen the first Chromebooks hit the market and the conference had several more announcements about Chromebooks.  The idea of an always connected browser-based device without all the overhead if a traditional operating system has some merit.  The problem at east for now is we are not always connected and sometimes we do not want to be.  Still I agree with most that this is the start of the next generation device, where connectivity will be ubiquitous and cloud services will be everywhere.  Google also announced the expansion of the Chrome Store.  This is  all fine and dandy that it no is available in 41 countries, but we do seem to have a lot of companies out there with a lot of online stores…how many do we need?

Finally across both days there were a couple of horizontal technologies that went across both Android and Chrome. One was cloud based services.  The idea beyond a marketing term is that the days where certain things could only be done on the desktop are coming to an end.  Sure there may be certain apps that leverage the capabilities of the desktop OS or hardware, but they will have limited market value.  The idea that a word processor needs to be tied to the PC is rapidly changing as apps like Google Docs increase in functionality.  Are they at parity with Microsoft Office?  Not even close today, but the ability to make up ground and create new cloud based scenarios is causing disruption in the landscape and will continue t do so (that is not to say Microsoft could not be the drivers of this change).  The other theme was every demo it seemed was Angry Birds.  I gotta be honest I don’t know these birds and I am not sure why they are angry, but my kids do.   It got to the point it was annoying.  Hey wait…it’s on my iPhone.  I need to talk with my children.

What impressed me about Google I/O was the clarity of what developers should be looking to do to create value today (Android) and to start thinking about tomorrow (Chrome).   There is a lot to be said to keep it simple.  In many ways that is what Google has done.  Provide the building blocks and let the developer community be innovative and creative. We are still along way from the full promise of what the web can and will deliver but the pieces are coming together to make it accessible  to a very large audience.  As I have written before to be successful in technology you must have a clear vision  of the future and be able to articulate that vision to a large and broad audience.  Did Google I/O answer all the questions?  No.  I am still a little confused as to why we have to have two different platforms, why not just make it all Android?  But the long-term vision of the role the web will play in our lives and where Google will fit in that ecosystem is clear.  There was a time it was all about a PC in every home, now it’s..to the cloud.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann May 19th 2011

You need to be Cool to be Tech

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Kevin Turner, Microsoft COO, would often get asked by internal employees, “Why can’t Microsoft be cool like Apple?”.  He would always reply, “I would rather have 90% market share than be cool”.  I think the question actually made him upset. I found his dismissive attitude towards Apple rather naive and offensive.  All I can say is its dangerous to use the past to justify the future.  It has been a interesting twist of events to get to this point and by all accounts great product execution by the people at Apple.  With the latest earning release, Apple continues to be operating on all cylinders, forging ahead full throttle.  Their Apple iPhone now has 5% global market share, an increase over last quarter of 115%.  It is now more profitable than Microsoft.  No small feet given they make hardware, which naturally has higher COGS.  How does something like this happen?  It’s an interesting journey.

I think you have to take a step back before you move forward.  When technology  was first thrust upon us in the late eighties/early nineties it was new and foreign.  You needed a grease monkey to help with running it.  Grease monkey being men who had not showered in a week and slept under their desk.  Not a pretty site.  Speaking of pretty sites the technology we were given was not pretty either.  It was big, clunky and beige.  You needed to hide it in a home office as it did not make for pretty home decor.  But the people behind these new innovations were proud of what they had created, like they had unlocked the mysteries of the universe.  The early phase of technology was exciting but very intimidating, as many of the people who were the first to use at home and at work started their word processing experience on a typewriter.  If you made a mistake you used something called white-out.  Some of my readers of middle age will be laughing now, while my younger audience is clueless as to what I am writing about.  This new computer based word processing was intimidating and frustrating.  Auto-save did not always exist.  If your computer crashed after working two hours on a midterm, late at night, you lost everything.  No joke, I know from experience.

Along the way though something else was happening.  A generation if kids were growing up with this technology.  They were used to interacting with technology.  They had higher standards.  They had lives.  Kids today have no fear of technology.  Give them a device and they naturally start poking around trying to figure out what cool things it can do.  There is no intimidation about technology.  It is just something they are accustomed to.  Their natural curiosity just takes over and takes them away.  You see it in school with 2nd and 3rd graders walking around with a iTouch.  The presentations they do on the Mac at school is better than most presentations I give at work (supposedly I am a pro) – they are more lively and more colorful.  It is most amazing how seamless the whole experience seems to the younger generation.  They are not intimidated, they do not need to learn, they just know.

Thirdly there is digital convergence.  The lines between PC’s, Television, phones, music, etc..were all being blurred as everything is going digital.   The debate today of is a Tablet a PC or not highlights this for me.  Who cares except for a bunch of marketing and industry analyst folks.  At the end of the day consumers are buying what they desire and if a Tablet can perform all the tasks they need, great.  They will forgo the purchase of a Netbook or Laptop, but they are still interacting with a whole host of offerings that they used to do on a laptop (or not).  It could be streaming Netflix.  Browsing the web for a great deal on sports attire.  Listening to  music.  With everything going digital how we view and interact with technology is about to explode well beyond where we are today.  Flat screens will be on and in everything we buy or utilize.  Our home appliances,, our transportation (private or public).  All the lines are becoming blurred and in doing so things are becoming much more interesting as a wave of new devices become available and better yet they are all mobile,  They are thin, sleek and in color.

For technology companies to be successful, in particular in the consumer space, they must pay heed to this fact.  If they want to be successful if they want to take market share, they have to get the “cool” factor going.  They need to pay attention to design.  Those consumer behavior studies that discuss things like emotional response are relevant.  They should be scrutinized and thoroughly studied, not in a effort to disprove them but to learn from them in intricate detail.  Most people in the world are not engineers or software designers.  It’s Bobby Joe who is a mechanic. Terri who is a nurse.  Jack the insurance salesman.  They may seem drab to some but they are a large part of the economy and they want and use technology, is it wrong for them to want a sleek silver mobile device with cool apps?  Do not dismiss their opions as irrelevant. Respect them or lose them.  And if you lose them watch all you have worked for wash away with the tide.

We are numb to technology.  It has become pervasive and we are seldom wowed by what we see or experience. What will catch our eye is how it makes us feel. How it makes us look.  It is all in our basic human emotion.  So deep yet so shallow.  When I see the latest iPad are people wowed by the operating system?  I honestly doubt anyone really thinks about that.  The fact is technology is becoming more and more an extension of the human experience, it is becoming an ingrained part of that experience.  In some instance blurring the lines of fiction and reality.  Those lines will only become more blurred moving forward as technology accelerates, we accelerate.  But one thing is for certain we want to feel good about where technology takes us and we want to look good doing it.  We want to be cool.  It may be shallow but it’s who we are.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann May 2, 2011

Proprietary vs Open Source – who cares? Consumers don’t.

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In technical circles we love to have these propeller head debates.  Should code be shared?  What about the right to make a fortune off of ones intellectual property? Then there are patents to be protected.  How do I license my open source code?  How should I license my code?  Which governing technical bodies should I listen to?  It is like a love fest for lawyers  I will try and break this down into layman’s terms and then explain to everyone why you should not care.  As consumers do not treat technical folks like a deity.

Proprietary:  This is where the company owns everything soup to nuts and has control on what developers, engineers can access in terms of source code.  The most proprietary is Apple as they literally own everything from hardware design to the software.  Microsoft often is called closed but one of the reasons for it’s success in the early days of the PC industry was licensing it’s operating system to every hardware maker who was building a personal computer. Developers got access to part’s of Windows not the whole thing.  This is what made Open Source advocates so hateful towards Microsft as they want access to all the source code.  The advantage of these proprietary models is if you look at the balance sheets of these two companies today financial clout is not an issue.  These companies will be around for along time to provide high levels of supports to their respective communities.  Despite calls by some to make their trades secrets free to everyone cash is king.

Open Source:  Really the brain child of a Finnish engineer named Linus Torvald’s and his Linux operating system.  There are others but for now we will focus on Mr Torvalds’s community model.The code is posted on the internet and anyway can make additions or changes to the underlying source code.  Provided Linus approves it.  I find it ironic that this so called democracy is run like a dictatorship.  The advantage of Open Source in is you can tap into the talents of thousands of software engineers.  It creates an abundance of innovation and their is nothing better to get a software developer motivated then a technical challenge, which there is an abundance of in open source forums.  It’s free and easy to get access to what you need, which to me is why open source has really appealed to the aspiring developers on the planet.

Now that we have that brief explanation behind us, should you Mr or Mrs consumer care?  Absolutely not.  Let those techno losers go have their fun in tweetle dee and tweetle dumb land.  All you want is technology that works for you.  If Product A (let’s say a iPhone) is better than Product B (A Windows Mobile 6.5 Phone) or Product C (one of those Motorola Linux Phones) you will gladly pay more for Product A.  Why not?  It’s your choice.  I really highly doubt the source code model factored into the purchase.  To those who say sales and marketing do not matter I think they are misguided individuals.  Great Technology and great Sales and Marketing go hand in hand.  Apple in my opinion has done a great job in creating very accessible technology while conveying the message that the technology is colorful and fun and a part of an individuals lifestyle.  The Android folks have gone a bit more technical in their approach but still have been able to partner with companies to make cool consumer devices while providing a  dynamic ecosystem.

Throughout my career I have seen and listened to numerous propeller heads go through their wiz bang demos. Everyone seemed to have a higher purpose.  Sometimes I would look on in amazement as some technical wizard would show me a mobile demo (pre iPhone) and say how cool it is they could look up and find a cool bar on their phone while on the golf course.  It sure was cool to watch that person click ten times and after each click wait 30-45 seconds for the page to load.  In the end the demo took 5-6 minutes.  Time in my life that I will never get back but the memory of the useless mobile app lingers.  We tend to use the term “main street” America too much and too loosely these days.  But I think if we were to start trying to create a definition we could probably agree that the person that represents main street America is not a technologist.

At the end of the day people want items that add value to their lives.  Sometimes that value can be concrete like a automotive vehicle.  It gets me from point A to B in a manor that is useful to me.  That same item though can be purchased on emotional appeal.  I want the Ferrari for what it says about my importance in society.  The latter is hard to quantify and even harder to program for.  But one thing is clear in either scenario no one cares how it is made, it just needs to work.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann April 25, 2011

The Death of the Operating System Revisited

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Part of the joy of writing a technology focused blog is seeing where you are and are your predictions on the path to reality, or at least bits and pieces.  Which brings me to a piece I wrote  9 months ago titled “Death of the Operating System“. We could probably tie this also to my last post on the Tablet as they seem mutually inter-twined.  It is amazing what has happened in that short amount of time, but I see no reason to alter my previous projection, which is the desktop OS as we know it will is slowly dying unless the folks in Redmond make some radical change in direction.  Three things in my view continue to drive this monumental change: The Cloud (web), mobility and interactivity.

Not a day goes by where we do not hear something about thee cloud.  Either directly or indirectly.  Some services are designed for the cloud and though the desktop is still useful the cloud is where all the action is.  There are enterprise apps where you have a browser interface and access content stored,  only god knows where on the planet.   An example would be SalesForce.Com which is fast becoming the premier Customer Relationship management system (CRM).  All data resides in the cloud, nothing is loaded on your desktop.   There are also plenty of consumer based applications, some you might say “I did not know that was a cloud application”, but Facebook and Twitter certainly fall in that category.  Try finding your friends profile on your desktop…not there.  it is somewhere on the planet just not in your house or office.

Then there is mobility.  We all want to be free to be productive where we want and when we want,  We do not want to lug a heavy laptop around that we need to sit down, flip open the monitor, press a bunch of keys and that is just to boot up (wait 3 minutes).  We want the device to be in in an instant so we can start doing whatever it is we need to do.  We want longer battery life as we may not be near a power outlet for sometime.  We may want to pass around our device and have it be user friendly for our friends.  We want to be connected, just not by a cord.  We are a society on the go, moving at an ever increasing pace.  The beauty of mobility is it allows us to live.

Finally there is interacting with our devices.  The idea of sitting down at a desk and using a mouse is just not that attractive anymore.  The tablets we have today in the market are all touch screen driven.  Most phones today are touch screen (thank you…Apple).  People are flicking their fingers as fast as they can rather than struggling to find where their mouse pointer is on the screen.Next up I can foresee better voice interaction with our devices. It has been around for a while, it just has not been very good.  How we interact seems to be more and more an extension of our physical presence.

In the end it is not so much about what is the “best” OS, but what enables life’s experience.  It’s not that the operating system is dead, but we need to think of it differently.  There will be no “Windows 95” moment.  That is dated and will not happen again.  There are some who keep waiting for it, but they will be left shuddering in the cold rain, what hey wait for is something called nostalgia  There are going to be lots of breakthroughs in technology in the near future, but as I highlighted they will be in the cloud, in mobility and in the end user’s satisfactory experience, they will enable freedom and they will be fun!!

In titling this “The Death of the Operating Systems” I may be misleading the reader a bit.  I am not saying that you will no longer need an operating systems, but maybe more accurately you don’t care about the operating system.  Though an integral part of enabling the experience no one spends time in their “operating system”.  People spend time on Facebook or writing lengthy blogs that millions of people read (or maybe 10 people read).  Technology has become a great form of self expression.  What the desktop provides is a window to the web or the network (remember the network is the computer?).  To the Facebook, Twitter or whatever experience you want.  The desktop enables these end user experiences but in the end it is not the final result.  There would be those that it would be wise to understand this current phenom or perish in its every increasing velocity.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann April 11, 2011