Let me begin by saying this first, I am blown away. What got announced in the Keynote today morning by Steven Sinofsky, makes it absolutely clear that Windows8 is a big bold step by Microsoft and as been repeated many times it is an OS that is definitely “reimagined”. You can download the Developer Preview bits of Windows 8 and SDK for free from here.
Steven Sinofsky in his keynote mentioned some interesting facts about Windows 7:
Approaching 450 million copies of Windows 7 sold
Windows7 consumer usage greater than Windows XP
1502 non security product changes delivered since Windows 7 shipped
542 Million people signing into Windows Live services every month
Everything that runs in Windows 7 runs on Windows 8. Sinofsky demoed a 3 year old Atom Netbook running Windows 8 just fine, same machine actually used less CPU, Memory and Number of processor than Windows 7. Windows 8 now has great Multi Monitor support (finally) even when you are remoting, Task Manager Application improvement, Windows Explorer improvement (long due).
In the keynote he demoed several apps built for Metro UI. Interestingly these were build by college interns. There were 17 groups of them, 2-3 people in each team and worked over 10 weeks time.Quite impressive considering most of them were new to Windows and were working on moving builds of Windows8.
Steven Sinofsky pulled a good one on competition (Google Chrome) when he said “Chrome”less content when he was showing off that Metro apps are full screen with no Titlebar or Windows. Obviously he didn’t say “Window”less that would have minimized Window brand.
There are lot of great stuff shown here, instead of repeating everything I will just cover few highlights:
Metro UI, the new UI in Windows8 is fresh, innovative & futuristic. I liked the Semantic Zoom feature (that shows a reduced view of tiles when you pinch in) that makes it easy to quickly navigate the start screens. Windows8 touch language is certainly a new thinking brought by Microsoft into this space, shows they are not simply copying from others. By being late to the game Microsoft has benefitted from preceding works and learning from them.
Windows 8 has a new App Model that is restrictive (Windows Store distribution only, no app side loading) but one that ensures security for users preventing rogue apps. What I liked in the Windows Store it supports trial mode. Store manages (as now common with iTunes, Android App store and so on) all the security, authentication, payment, delivery, rating and so on. Current Windows Apps (Win32, .NET) say like Quicken you can still list them in Store, but it will only show a link to your website, you will not get any of the features of Store for that app.
Windows 8 has a new Runtime called WinRT (common runtime available for C++, C# or VB, JavaScript) that is a sibling to aging Win32. This is not a layer on top of Win32, but a first class native runtime
Metro Style Windows Live applications like Mail & Photo Gallery are all in development and not made available now but was previewed. What I liked was the Skydrive powered access to drives & folders in remote PCs, a super cool feature through which you can get the files in your office/home PC remotely from any Windows8 PC without syncing or anything.
As a side note I couldn’t help noticing a difference between Apple’s Launch Keynotes (yes I know, Steve Jobs is a legend here) & Microsoft’s launches. Apple focus on lifestyle & experience and technology takes an important but back stage, but Microsoft keynotes are more about technology. Though Windows8 is about touch and new form factors there was no mention on Music, Movies, Games (except one demo) and communication.
I am here this week in Anaheim, CA for Build Windows conference. Weather is just fine and Disneyland near-by but I am here doing this post .
Last few years Microsoft has been criticized for not doing enough in embracing “touch” and modern OS concepts pioneered by likes of Mac OS/iOS and Android. There is lot of anticipation on Windows8 leading up to Build Conference today.
I am an ardent user of Microsoft’s free command line utility “Robocopy” for copying folders between drives or perform a manual backup of my documents to an external drive. I have been using this for more than a decade now. Over the years the folders that I want to be excluded while copying has increased and I have never bothered to check the parameters. Today I realized I have been inadvertently copying few system folders and a folder named “Microsoft” containing all Tech-Ed & Mix event videos, this happened due to wrong parameters. After few minutes of debugging with /L switch in Robocopy, I realized Robocopy doesn’t like the trailing slash (\) after each folder path that you want to be excluded, remove the trailing slash and everything works fine. I am giving the command that worked for me as an example, needless to say I have changed the drive names to protect my PC’s privacy.
Microsoft has been offering its Dreamspark program for various universities around the world & in India for some time. The program which is signed between the University & Microsoft, enables the students of that University to have access to a wide range of Microsoft Software, Training Materials and expertise – all free of cost. Today I was happy to see Microsoft has signed an MoU with Anna University which allows about 5.7 Lakh Students studying under various colleges affiliated to Anna University to benefit on. I hope the students take best of use of these to enhance their skills.
Following are some of the software that is available under this program:
In my firm Vishwak Solutions we conduct periodic programs on various topics for self-improvement, health, technology & productivity. Last month we began a pilot program called “Vishwak360” the objective of which is to expose everyone in the organization to every department & its function – to give a 360 view of what’s happenings. I delivered the first talk and I spoke on Software Licensing – probably the driest subject, when selecting the topic I decided if I can get the audience interested through this then all the subsequent talks are going to be lively & enjoyable.
Over the years software licensing has become very complex and it need not be so. To navigate this jungle you need to understand why it originated, what is IPR (Intellectual Property Rights), different forms of IPR (Trademark, Copyright, Patent), Enforcement & finally different types of software licensing.
Microsoft has been rather quiet on the next version of Windows till this week. This week in D9 conference Steven Sinofsky previewed for the first time Windows 8 UI. From PDC 2009 where Microsoft showed touch in Windows 7 I have been hoping they will come out with a great touch experience but with the ability to run existing Windows Apps. Think of it, Apple iOS claims about 300,000 or so apps, but Windows has like Millions of apps out there. The challenge for Microsoft has been the Hardware, which they don’t control; but in Apple’s case they design and control to produce great experience like in iPad2.
The video below shows Microsoft’s Director of PM (Windows User Experience) Jensen Harris showcasing the new Windows8 Touch UI. For me, I am super excited on this new UI, the concept of tiles and display of information quickly is cool. I liked this “Metro” UI when it was first shown in WindowsPhone7, but it is unfortunate it didn’t take off that well. May be the Nokia-Microsoft deal will revive the fortune of both the companies & adoption of this UI.
Only time will tell whether in this round with Windows8 will Microsoft be able to get their Hardware partners to design cool hardware with better battery life than iPad. But they have already started working with partners as this partner preview of new devices in Taipei, Taiwan shows.
Recently we upgraded one Web Application for a client from a server running Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2, 32GB RAM. Because the new server was x64 we had to move the web application running in the server from 32-bit to 64-bit. The ASP.NET, .NET apps moved fine as expected, but few COM Components that were being used didn’t run on the new x64 environment. These were third party COM components which were only available as 32-bit binaries and no new versions from the original vendor(s). After few failed attempts to wrap the component with 64-bit wrappers, we found an easier solution.
The solution was to use the Advanced Settings in Application Pools in IIS 7.5, configure a setting there called “Enable 32-Bit Applications” to True. This causes the App Pool to run in WOW64 as a 32-bit process. So the application inside the pool including the COM Component executes in 32-bit mode. The downside will be the memory that is available for the process, this was not a problem in the current web app which was light-load to service.
Today in my Yoga class my Yoga teacher approached me with a problem. He is writing some Sanskrit slogas with Latin Characters in MS Word and he is not able to get the diacritic marks, like the apostrophe or dashes on top of a English letter or below a letter. An example is below of what he is trying from an old Yoga textbook:
Coming home I contacted my good friend Murasu Muthu Nedumaran, an expert calligrapher who instantly pointed me to the answer. The trick is to use what are called as Combining Marks in Unicode. Below are the options on how to do it.
Option 1: In MS Word first type the base character you want say “A’” then select the Insert Symbol dialog. Select font as say Arial and then in the Subset drop-down Combining Diacritical Marks. Choose the mark you are interested in, you can also use the Shortcut Key to assign key shortcuts for faster input everytime.
Option 2: If you want to input the diacritic marks in applications other than MS Word, you can use the input “Character Map” applet in Windows 7 (Vista or XP). Just type Character map in Start->Run to run the applet. In the applet, select Advanced View, Character set as Unicode. Then scroll down near U+0320 location and you will find the combining marks.
Option 3: If you want to input only Accents, MS Word has in-built shortcuts like Ctrl + ~, then Shift+A to get À. A full table of these shortcuts are here.
Two weeks back Google announced a product called “Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office” with the below video. This free product helps Microsoft Office (Windows application) users to collaborate (share, backup, simultaneously edit Word, Excel & PowerPoint).
Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office
Last week Microsoft has replied back in kind with the below video. Microsoft has been offering its own collaboration using its on-premise offering of Microsoft SharePoint Server or on the cloud with Office Live Workspaces (or SkyDrive) or SharePoint Online.
Microsoft’s response to Google Cloud Connect
There have been many discussions on the Blogosphere why is Microsoft doing this, are they threatened or they are feeling comfortable to come out in open. Whichever is true I find this to be a renewed interest on improving the basic office productivity suite after a long time. It is going to be a good time for consumers like you & me.
I am half-way through reading the book Googled when it struck me the thought that has become this post. Reading the book you are awe-stuck on Google’s initial years, the story of how the founders acted, their extraordinary vision & brilliance, their boldness touching arrogance are all unbelievable. Though many of us who were over 20s when Google was founded has lived through their growth, still when you read it chronicled we realize that this is a company that was so disruptive, so unconventional, so transformational in the first years of its life itself. Then suddenly when I started thinking about Google in the present term (2011), I felt not so cool or exciting about them.
The thoughts that go through my mind as I now think of Google are:
FaceBook is the new darling of the Silicon Valley. You have read stories about the Google struggling to retain their brightest people and fresh A-Grade talent are choosing FaceBook over Google.
Google’s strength always has been the amount of information it has – about People their interest, what they search, when they search, what advertisements works and so on. Now FaceBook seems to be doing one-up in this, FB knows more about individuals – they know who my friends are, what they like and they know that in real-time from my updates. And people spend good part of their day in FaceBook, where as in Google they visit & immediately leave Google.
After their initial wave of product releases (or acquisitions) including Adwords, AdSense, GMail, Google News, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, Google Books, Google Maps, Google Chrome which were innovative & in rapid succession, you are finding things have become slow. (Let us look into new innovations in later points). The last major release I remember of Picasa, YouTube, Google News or GMail were years ago. Blogger is certainly aging and crying for an update whereas WordPress is shining with new features all the time. Google Docs is evolving ever more slower. There has been incremental updates like Microsoft has been doing for last 2 decades with Windows & MS Office, but nothing that’s disruptive like Apple is able to come out with each release.
After the initial lead I am not finding Google Apps to be offering any compelling value over competition. Microsoft has been successful in stemming migration to Google Docs, infact Microsoft has grown its revenues from MS Office pretty well over the last few years much more than expected. When it comes to cloud you hear Amazon AWS, Windows Azure & SalesForce more often than Google App Engine.
Apple which was basically a Hardware/OS firm is now the biggest media retailer (Music, Movies) and is one of the the biggest Online Services firm from new markets that it created from nowhere (Books, Apps) – where as Google is nowhere in any of these. I have used Android Marketplace and it pales in comparison even to Microsoft Zune/Windows Phone Marketplace and certainly not in the same league as Apple App Store in terms of technology, user experience & developer experience. Android is also plagued with the problem of heavy fragmentation and so far no plans from Google to address it for benefit of developers & users.
When a company like Google which has grown exponentially every year for last ten years in terms of revenues and resources (people & infrastructure) it is natural to be having big expectations and innovations coming out every year. In recent years, Google has come up only with Android which has become a hit. Google Wave was a disaster, Chrome OS is having release delays & predictions from IT pundits of being born dead, Orkut is an also run, Open Social a failed show of strength and PayPal clone Google Checkout has had few takers. Many of the recent announcements from Google have not got the same WorldWide PR attention like in the earlier days. The next wave of growth in Tech World is undoubtedly the Social & Cloud – Google is not the leader in any of this.
It is not surprising to hear bad things about Google especially from Steve Ballmer and then from Carol Bartz – who both have called Google a “One Trick Pony” at various times, but I find it to be more true than ever. Google has been very successful in defending its turf on Search for almost 10 years now, it has been constantly improving it, it has got releases in quick successions and almost always the product turned out to be superior in technology than the competition. Bing! is catching up (due to Yahoo! acquisition & fairly good product) but still Google is able to maintain its lead comfortably. The entry barrier in this field is phenomenal for any entrant here.
So what will the next ten years of Google will be – that’s the billion(s) dollar question. One thing we can be certain is that the road ahead for the incoming CEO Larry Page from April 1st is not going to be smooth. All the best for Mr.Page
The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. In addition, my thoughts and opinions often change, and as a weblog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time snapshot you should not consider out of date posts to reflect my current thoughts and opinions.
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