The psychology of engineering user experiences on the web can be difficult. How much rich content can you place up on a page before the load time drives away your visitors? Get the answer wrong, and you can end up with a ghost town; get it right and you're a star. Eric Schurman knows this well, since he is responsible for just those kind of trade-off decisions on some of Microsoft's highest traffic pages. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference in June, and he recently talked with us about how Microsoft tests different user experiences on small groups of visitors.
All of the vendors in the cloud space have paid lip service to the idea of Openness in the cloud; and most everyone believes that being "Open" is a "good thing". In an environment in which few people agree on the specifics of defining the term "cloud computing", what exactly does it mean to have an Open Cloud?
The jets and sharks, Hatfields and McCoys, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants, Adobe and Microsoft. Now several years in the making, the Adobe - Microsoft rivalry is gearing up. Especially with the anticipated new release of Silverlight 3 and Flex 4. As any seasoned Flex veteran will tell you, Adobe is the defacto standard for Rich Internet Applications. When asked about interest in Silverlight, the response may vary, but usually ends in “I haven’t actually spent a lot of time [or tried] it.” A product of Microsoft, Silverlight is. But as professionals in the RIA industry it is a good thing to be open minded. After all, as hard as it is to admit, Flash isn’t always the best tool for the job.
This week's roundup include discussion of the Sun/IBM rumors, the future of newspapers, Microsoft and Science Commons teaming up, and the weekly podcast quiz....
John Wilbanks, VP of Science for Creative Commons, gave O'Reilly Media an exclusive sneak preview of a joint announcement that they will be making with Microsoft later today at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
According to John, who talked to us shortly after getting off a plane from Brazil, Microsoft will be releasing, under an open source license, Word plugins that will allow scientists to mark up their papers with scientific entities directly.
How do you make programming fun? How do you make it fun enough for kids to want to spend hours learning how to make loops and if/then statements? Simple you give them simple visual commands that let them control robots on the Xbox -- or at least this is the thesis of Microsoft Research's Kodu. Kodu (formerly Boku) made a splash at Techfest two years ago and gave a demo at Ignite Seattle. Since that time the levels and characters have gotten much sexier and the controls simpler, but more powerful.
This week's podcast includes a roundtable discussion by the editors of Microsoft's new retail initiative, excerpts of an interview with Andrew "bunnie" Huang about product design in China, as well as the weekly podquiz, your chance to score a free O'Reilly Book.
The importance of the differences among web application platforms like .NET, JSP, PHP, etc. drops dramatically under the cloud computing paradigm. Which architecture you choose really comes down to one question: what kind of programming and support resources do you have? If the answer is "Microsoft technologies", however, you should be aware of the Microsoft cloud tax.
James Hamilton is one of the smartest and most accomplished engineers I know. He now leads Microsoft's Data Center Futures Team, and has been pushing the opportunities in data center efficiency and internet scale services both inside & outside Microsoft. His most recent post explores misconceptions about the Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers: I’m not sure how many...
Microsoft spent the money, and in relatively short order had a product that was just as good as any of their competitors (not significantly better or revolutionary, just competitive). They built a large team. They spent a lot on marketing. But the people never came.
What went wrong?
I met recently with Vic Gundotra, formerly Microsoft's head of platform evangelism, and now VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for all their mobile efforts outside of Android. We were talking about Google's mobile strategy and the insanely cool new voice-activated Google search in the Google Mobile Application for iPhone. But what I really want to share is Vic's story...
In this article, I want put forth a case study to demonstrate how capturing feelings on the social web can allow companies to measure the reputation of their brand.
Can Microsoft's idea of "document archetypes" and "interoperable templates" be ramped up to provide a fresh new approach to both better document interoperability and better descriptive markup?
On Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly gas said that the Company will release a new version of its Windows operating system as part of a new cloud computing platform in a matter of weeks. Call it "Windows Cloud" for now, but how seriously should we take his words?
Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what...
The opening of Microsoft Research's latest facility was celebrated
today with a free one-day symposium here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I think the symposium succeeded in its goals of showing that the
research facility is an independent entity that plays by the rules of
open scientific debate and funds basic research of value to society.
While the advertising deal between Google and Yahoo! does not announce a formal "merger" of the two companies, it nonetheless signals a profound shift in the online search world, and certainly increases the likelihood that the two companies will begin a more active partnership across a broad front of activities, to the significant detriment of the company that needed a partnership most desperately with Yahoo! ... Microsoft.
Microsoft's Sam Ramji promised to answer the tough questions about his company's open source efforts. Here's the big one: will Microsoft fix its open source patent license?
A long and contentious struggle came to an end this week as ECMA Technical Committee 39, responsible for the development and maintenance of ECMAScript (known universally everywhere else as JavaScript), voted to establish ECMAScript 3.1 as the next "trunk" branch for the venerable web browser language, rather than the more ambitious (and contentious ECMAScript 4.0). While the breaking of the deadlock is a momentous achievement, not everyone is happy with it.
