Google to demo Chrome OS; Detail launch plans

Google will give a technical update on its Chrome OS.

The company is holding an event at its Mountain View campus. The event will be “a technical announcement,” but Google will be showing a few demos as well as detailing its launch plans for this year.

The Chrome OS is in its infancy, but there has been a lot of buzz around a potential launch. At the event, Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management, and Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS, will be talking up reporters.

Garett Rogers has wondered if launching a bare bones preview of the Chrome OS is a concern. He noted:

The initial release of Chrome OS will likely be very bare-bones, bordering on useless — but depending on what kind of feedback they get, it may grow rapidly. The “release early and often” mantra adopted by many software companies that use agile practices can be extremely dangerous, however.

What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform?

In the past year, customers and developers testing Windows Azure have been running primarily brand-new (and largely Web 2.0 style) apps on Microsoft’s cloud operating system. But when will Azure be tuned to handle host legacy enterprise apps? And when and how will users be able to take advantage of some of the Azure technologies inside of their own “private clouds”?

Microsoft officials didn’t share dates for its next phases of the Windows Azure platform. But they did talk about some of their plans for their next steps with Microsoft’s cloud platform during meetings and sessions at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on November 17.

Microsoft said the Windows Azure platform — which is the Windows Azure operating system and the SQL Azure database — is feature-complete as of today. (Officials said a few weeks ago that Microsoft wouldn’t begin charging customers to use the platform until February 1, 2010.)

“Our initial focus on the platform was on enabling Web 2.0 customers to develop and run their apps on it,” said Amitabh Srivastava, Senior Vice President in charge of Windows Azure. These kinds of applications are Xcopy-deployable, while older, legacy apps typically are not, Srivastava said.

Microsoft’s next Azure steps — which it will be executing largely in parallel — will be to get existing, and typically more complex, line-of-business apps to run on the platform and to make it possible for customers to implement Azure technologies in their own data centers (a k a, to be able to create private clouds).

To enable existing apps to run on Azure, Microsoft is planning to make virtual machines (VMs) available to developers, which they will be able to customize and run their legacy apps inside them. Srivastava wouldn’t provide a timetable or more details as to how or when Microsoft will do this. Apps running in VMs won’t be able to take full advantage of the elasticity, multitenancy, and other cloud functionality, but they still will derive some benefits, such as automatic cloud backup for apps running on the Azure platform. (The name of this VM capability will be “Windows Server Virtual Machine Roles on Windows Azure,” Microsoft execs later told me.)

On the private cloud front, Microsoft didn’t have much new to say at the PDC. Microsoft officials have said in the past that Microsoft won’t allow customers to run the Azure operating system in their own datacenters. Microsoft’s main focus here continues to be to provide customers with software like Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc., for them to run in their own datacenters. That said, Microsoft isn’t simply leaving the delivery of a private cloud solution to Amazon and other cloud competitors.

“Lots of the technologies we have in the cloud are things people want to run in their datacenters,” Srivastava
acknowledged.(He cited as an example the ability to run a scalable cloud-storage appliance on premises.)

Microsoft is working on a longer-term solution that would allow the company to offer datacenter containers that can be dedicated to individual customers, Srivastava said. That way, clouds can be customized for individual users and users will be able to manage these containers themselves. Again, Srivastava wasn’t ready to talk about deployment specifics or timetables for this. That said, “Project Sydney” (Microsoft’s newly announced connectivity offering for private datacenters and public clouds) shows the general direction where we are going,” Srivastava said.

Microsoft officials made a vague reference in this morning’s keynote to System Center in the cloud. I asked Srivastava if this meant Microsoft was looking to offer System Center as a Microsoft-hosted service, the way that it is offering Exchange and Office Communications Server as Microsoft-hosted offerings. That isn’t the case, he said; instead, Microsoft has opened up the Windows Azure management programming interfaces so that System Center — as well as third-party management products like HP OpenView — can manage Azure-hosted applications.

Not everything about what’s next for Azure is a longer-term direction. In sessions on November 17, Microsoft officials outlined some of the nearer term deliverables for Microsoft’s cloud platform. The recently introduced content-delivery-network (CDN) support for blobs in Windows Azure’s storage system is one of those deliverables. Another is a capability Microsoft is calling “Windows Azure Drive” (also known as Xdrive) which allows Azure developers to create a drive inside their virtual machines, providing them with an automatic back up capability. Microsoft plans to officially “turn on” Xdrive support in January, officials said.

Windows kicks Linux to the curb

Gosh, that didn’t take long!Last July Linux had a huge opportunity to beat Windows in the red-hot netbook market (see Linux for housewives. XP for geeks. ). But faster than I’d expected Microsoft has kicked Linux to the curb, claiming an 80% attach rate for netbooks.
Windows 7 is the final nail in the desktop Linux market’s coffin. Unless Microsoft gets stupid on pricing, it is game over for Linux netbook market share.
Linux, we hardly knew ye - on the desktop, anyway.
It is tough to compete with “free”Not that Microsoft got off easy. Their 5,000 man layoff is a direct result of the cost of competing with Linux - their client business revenue slid $335 million.
Ballmer’s layoffs mean this is no one-time blip. Linux has changed the competitive landscape in a way Apple never could - after all Mac OS costs twice as much as Windows. And this is just a taste: the economics going forward are brutal.
The birth of free Windows?Windows 7 will run fine on netbooks - a smart move. But how to price it?
Linux is free, and as Moore’s Law drives down netbook prices, any difference will become more obvious. For the several billion people in the developing world, even $20 for Windows 7 may be too much.
If the Window’s netbook share drops below 70%, Microsoft will have no choice but to offer it for free to netbook OEMs. Sure, some nominal dollar figure will attach, but after marketing and developer support costs are figured in, it will be a wash.
This is as it should be: operating systems are becoming commodities, like a cell phone OS. The real innovation will be in netbook pricing models and new applications.
The Storage Bits takeLinux has lost the fight for netbook dominance, but it has inflicted significant pain on Windows. Microsoft faces a do-or-die defense of the Windows monopoly which will no doubt be successful.
The important fact is that for the first time in decades, Microsoft is playing defense, not offense. This is good for everyone, as even a 10% Linux share is enough for a future Linux breakout if Microsoft fails to stay current or raises prices.
Apple gets to watch Linux and Windows fight. If and when Apple offers a netbook, the OS will be an integral part of the package, not a choice. And they won’t be competing on price.

Desktop Unix: MacOS X and SUSE Linux

As regular readers know my general preference in making IT decisions is to keep the hardware and software as simple as possible while putting the real focus on empowering the people using it. In general, therefore, I see “the right way” as one that centralizes processing for simplicity while decentralizing control for empowerment - but sometimes there’s no sensible way to meet user needs without giving them laptops and the question then is, which ones you should get?

All three of the main OS candidates: MacOS X, Novell’s “Sousa Linicks” and Microsoft’s Windows Vista run on pretty much the same hardware and run broadly comparable applications suites, so the decision must ultimately come down to which one best balances cost versus productivity in your applications area.

Two of these are Unix desktop implementations - as are both outlier options: Solaris and OpenBSD - making Windows Vista the odd man out from an OS technology perspective.

Put them side by side and I think you’ll notice some consequential differences too: MacOS X and Linux (specifically Novell’s latest “enterprise desktop”) have a very different feel to them than Vista does.

In the ideal experiment to see this, you get three OS advocates to put their favorites on similar Apple hardware and then watch as they load email from a common server, find and watch a video from my favorite hot air site and bring three working documents up in separate, side by side, windows.

That’s ideal, but of course most people don’t just happen to have three identical x86 Macs laying around - so try the next best thing: recruit two friends favoring whichever two desktops you don’t, and go do as much of the trial as you can get away with at your favorite local x86 shop: Office Depot, BestBuy, whatever.

It’s worth doing, particularly if you’re a Windows advocate, because it’s absolutely eye-opening. By itself Windows Vista (or XP) looks decent enough: you click, it does - something; the fonts work, the colors look nice, and IE comes up. But, put it right between the two Unix versions and you’ll see that the two Unix desktops, although very different, share a responsiveness, a directness of focus, and a simplicity of operation, that are completely missing in the Windows products - showing Windows Vista as a kind of click hungry hippopotamus in a tutu that simply doesn’t belong on stage with the other two.

Windows 7 will, at least according to the Microsoft press, fix this: recapturing XP’s place in the competition - although even two minutes with the latest Linux desktop should convince you that if Microsoft were showing that to their focus groups as their Next Generation product they wouldn’t have to fake the enthusiasm. Back on planet earth, however, it’s hard to think of an argument for buying a Microsoft desktop that doesn’t start and end with: “because we already have Microsoft…”

If you’re halfway objective about it, that leaves you to choose between the latest Linux desktop and MacOS X for your users - a choice most people will, I think, find to be an absolute no brainer.

For those who put a premium on cost savings, Linux is the no brainer option: it runs on cheaper hardware and you get it for free or nearly free and with, or without, paid support.

For those who put a premium on user productivity, MacOS X is the no brainer option: it’s more matter of fact than Novell’s new GUI skin and packaging, and mostly just stays out of the way of knowledgeable users. In fact, for many it meets the IT ideal: it works so well, they don’t know it’s there or doing anything to help them - they just click and expect it to work; because, well, it just does.

That’s a different horses for different courses situation: my own bottom line is that a few hundred bucks per laptop is meaningless when set against even a small improvement in user productivity - so I’m picking the Mac. You, on the other hand, may have higher volume, lower complexity, requirements for which cost becomes the decisive criterion - and so pick Linux.

It’s that choice, I think, that forms the real bottom line here: they’re both good choices, and they’re genuinely different - offering different values to different people.

And it’s been awhile since we’ve had a real choice, so how great is that?

Demo exploits posted for unpatched MS Word vulnerability

A security researcher has released demo exploits for what appears to be a critical – unpatched — memory corruption vulnerability affecting the ubiquitous Microsoft Word software program.
The proof-of-concept exploits accompany a warning that the flaw affects Microsoft Office 2000 and Microsoft Office 2003. In addition to the rigged .docs, there are two videos demonstrating an attack scenario that crashes the program.
From the advisory:
An attacker could exploit this issue by enticing a victim to open and interact with malicious Word files.
Successfully exploiting this issue will corrupt memory and crash the application. Given the nature of this issue, attackers may also be able to execute arbitrary code in the context of the currently logged-in user.
Here are the proof-of-concept documents (download and run at your own risk!):

crash-word-1.doc
crash-word-2.doc
crash-word-3.doc
crash-word-4.doc
[ ALSO SEE: Free Sourcefire tool pinpoints hostile MS Office files ]
The SANS Institute issued a warning in its @Risk newsletter, noting that the issue occurs in the way Microsoft Word handles unordered (bulleted) lists.
Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that, on recent versions of Microsoft Office, Word documents are not opened upon receipt without first prompting the user.
I’ve asked Microsoft for confirmation of this issue and will update this post when I hear from them.
UPDATE: Microsoft e-mailed the following statement on this issue:
Microsoft is investigating new public claims of a possible vulnerability in Microsoft Office. We’re currently unaware of any attacks trying to use the claimed vulnerability or of customer impact. We will take steps to determine how customers can protect themselves should we confirm the vulnerability.
Once we’re done investigating, we will take appropriate action to help protect customers. This may include providing a security update through the monthly release process, an out-of-cycle update or additional guidance to help customers protect themselves.

Run, don’t walk, and pick up a REDFLY Mobile Companion for $199.95

I wrote up my first thoughts of the Celio Corp REDFLY Mobile Companion back in March, then I bought my own in May and then the price dropped from US$499 to US$399.95 in August. Well, now you can pick this device up for only US$199.95 and IMHO that is a steal for anyone with a Windows Mobile device looking to be productive on the go. I understand this is a “seeding” price that is only good until 31 October and I guess the intent must be to get the device out there and have people talk it up.
Celio keeps working on and releasing device drivers so development is continuing with the REDFLY and I sure hope this major price drop is not any indication of trouble in the near future. I like using my REDFLY on my commute and on business trips and want to see driver support continue for years, along with expanded drivers for S60 and maybe even the Android OS.
I think this is a perfect enterprise device since you can send employees out on the road with it and their phone to give presentations and work on Office documents without worrying about security issues or even damage to the device.
I keep reading this price and am just amazed it dropped down this far. I was happy to pay what I paid for mine and really hope this lower price takes price out of the equation for potential buyers as I want to see continued development of drivers and support for this excellent product. I think at just under US$200 the purchase is a “no brainer” for any Windows Mobile enthusiast or enterprise user.

(I refers to matthew miller)

Windows Mobile 7 phones coming in Q1 2009?

Windows Mobile 7 may be closer than many think.

According to a report from at least one major handset maker, Microsoft is planning to make available the final bits of its next mobile operating-system release in time for them to start selling Windows Mobile 7 phones in the first quarter of 2009. If true, that would seem to imply that Microsoft will release the final Windows Mobile 7 by the end of 2008, in order to give phone makers time to test and preload.

As is the case with Windows 7, Windows Mobile 7 is a forbidden topic. Microsoft won’t talk about planned features, beta dates or how/when/if Windows Mobile phones will become more head-to-head competitors with the iPhone.

(I am wondering whether Microsoft might finally share some Windows Mobile 7 info at its Worldwide Partner Conference in early July, given that Andy Lees, the newly appointed Senior VP of Microsoft’s Mobile Communications business is on the keynote line-up. If Microsoft really is going to deliver the final Windows Mobile 7 bits later this year, one would think it needs to be evangelizing about it now.)

There have been a few leaks about what Microsoft is planning for Windows Mobile 7 and Windows Mobile 8. Not too surprisingly, multi-touch and gesture-recognition support are on the docket. The user interface for Windows Mobile phones is slated to get an overhaul, making it more consumer friendly. And, at some point, consumer-focused services beyond Windows Live — things like music and photo-management, will find their way onto Windows Mobile devices via Microsoft’s Project Pink and Danger acquisition.

Until now, the only target date for Windows Mobile 7 I had seen leak was “some time in 2009.” But the Phone Report earlier this week quoted an official with HTC saying the company planned to deliver a Windows Mobile 7 phone in Q1 2009, and an Android-based HTC phone in Q4 2008, by the way.

From recent executive remarks, it sounds like Microsoft is trying to get Windows and Windows Mobile to be more in sync. Might this mean with Windows Mobile 8 — which Microsoft has told certain folks will be built from scratch — Microsoft might make Windows Mobile a “real” version of Windows, with the same core as Windows client?

Samsung announces the OMNIA Windows Mobile device with 5 megapixel camera

It is great to see so many new and innovative Windows Mobile devices being announced and launched from the likes of HTC, Sony Ericsson, and now Samsung. Samsung announced the Samsung OMNIA (SGH-i900) on Monday and my buddy, Arne Hess, already had a chance to put his hands on an early protype and provides some more photos, including photos with the HTC Touch Diamond and Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1.

The Samsung OMNIA is a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional (touch screen) device with a xx MHz processor, 8GB or 16GB flash drive plus an additional microSD expansion slot, 3.2 inch WXVGA (240×400) display, 5 megapixel camera (top of the line for Windows Mobile), FM radio with RDS, integrated GPS receiver, quad-band GSM and HSDPA support, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, TV out capability, and a 1440 mAh battery. The device has haptic feedback on the display so you feel a vibration when the display is touched.

The photos of it look impressive and it has a real iPhone-like look to the UI, but with the power of Windows Mobile behind it. Samsung calls its new interface, TouchWiz, that allows you to customize and personalize their “widgets” on your device. It is interesting to read that it has out-of-the box multicode support for DivX, Xvid, and other video formats so multimedia fans may love this device with the large high resolution display.

It will be available in Southeast Asia starting next week and in Europe in July. There was no announcement of a U.S. release so this may be one to look for from a U.S. importer. Again, like the HTC Touch Diamond I think it is great to see manufacturers pushing the limits and taking Windows Mobile to the next level.

Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle.

Scaling the cloud, deflating the price of software

i=Phil Wainewright.
Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.


After a week of intensive usage last December getting his company’s application to run against Amazon’s SimpleDB cloud database, DreamFactory founder and CTO Bill Appleton wondered how big a bill he’d run up. To his amazement, what had seemed like a week’s heavy usage had cost just a few cents. The discovery was an epiphany both for Appleton and for CEO Eric Rubin. They had stumbled upon what seemed to be a new economic reality for cloud-based application software.

I learnt of all this back in January, and I’ve since been biding my time until last week’s launch of the Amazon-hosted product [disclosure: for which, as a paid engagement, I’ve written a white paper (PDF)]. I’ve been eager to write about it because the story highlights two separate but complementary phenomena that in combination seem to radically undermine traditional on-demand pricing models.

First of all, as Appleton told me in January, “Usage-based pricing is as disruptive to on-demand as on-demand was to enterprise software.” On-demand pricing of anywhere between $30 and $300 per user per month has challenged the high implementation and maintenance costs of conventional on-premise software. But now there’s a new threat to the traditional monthly per-user subscription pricing model for on-demand applications, in which every user has typically paid the same flat (or should that be fat?) all-inclusive price, irrespective of usage.

Appleton’s words were still ringing in my head in April when Bungee Labs [disclosure: which paid me to record a podcast] switched to usage-based pricing for its cloud-hosted application development and deployment platform, resulting in monthly per-user pricing as low as $3.60 for intensive use and anything from $0.48 down to a mere $0.02 for occasional use. That’s at least a tenth — and at the extremes as much as a ten-thousandth — of the traditional all-inclusive monthly per-user fee for on-demand software.

Monthly pricing for DreamFactory’s DreamTeam Suite is $12.95 per account, plus Amazon usage fees per user, which DreamFactory says “per month should be no more than cup of coffee.” Per enterprise — with unlimited administrators, projects and users, private training and live support, is $89.95 plus Amazon usage fees per user. What DreamFactory has done is split off its software licence fee — at either $13 or $90 per account depending on complexity — from the Amazon-supplied computing cost. The outcome is a truly commodity price per user.

Of course this is only applicable for forms-plus-database applications like DreamTeam project management, as opposed to the more complex transaction capability that Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform offers these days (and which vendors such as CODA are tapping at a monthly per-user price well below $20). But for applications like DreamTeam it makes no sense to stay at the $20 per user level of Apex and AppExchange when they can be hosted at Amazon Web Services for a fraction of that monthly cost. DreamFactory is also working on a version for Google App Engine, whose database costs are said to be a further ten times less than Amazon SimpleDB.

The challenge for software vendors is that a lot of these pricing differentials are purely due to how they decide to price their assets. Salesforce has to charge the highest price because it pays Oracle for a commercial database license. Amazon runs an open-source database so can charge much less. Google thinks of its database as more as a file system so sets its charges lower still. Is there a quantitive difference between any of these three infrastructure alternatives?

The second element of DreamFactory’s secret sauce is that its local client architecture means that it has to maintain minimal infrastructure of its own. “We’re using other people’s servers and our customers’ clients and it drives the cost into the ground compared to enterprise applications,” Appleton told me back in January. Others are starting to grok what Appleton has long known — consider this recent post by Dion Almaer (which I discovered via the always-perceptive Dare Obasanjo):

“Gears is so much more than offline, and it is really exciting to see ‘Speed Up!’ as a link instead of ‘Go Offline?’ … With an embedded database, local server storage, worker pool execution, desktop APIs, and other exciting modules such as notifications, resumable HTTP being talked about in the community … I think we can all get excited.”

What’s really exciting about Gears, DreamFactory, AIR and Silverlight is the ability to use the client’s processing resources instead of exclusively overloading the server side of the infrastructure (the architectural failing that has made Twitter suffer so much of late).

Appleton believes that DreamFactory has struck this balance perfectly, keeping the vendor’s own infrastructure overhead predictably low while at the same time leveraging client resources to extract maximum value (at minimum cost) from whichever on-demand server resources offer the best fit for DreamFactory’s applications.

DreamTeam currently works with Salesforce.com AppExchange, Intuit QuickBase, Amazon Web Services (including SimpleDB) and WebEx Connect, with Google App Engine support in the pipeline, and every intention of connecting to Microsoft’s Live Mesh and any other useful cloud resource that emerges. This notion of a cloud-neutral client that ports functionality to wherever it offers most value is intriguing and different from everything else that’s out there (though Gears is perhaps the closest in spirit). I believe it has huge potential — especially in driving forward the commoditization and price deflation of on-demand functionality.