IT Spot

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As happens every year or so, some juicy Microsoft e-mails have surfaced as part of litigation that the software maker is party to.

In this case, Microsoft is being sued over a program in 2006 that labeled some PCs as Windows Vista Capable ahead of the products mainstream release in January 2007. As part of the discovery process, a number of e-mails have emerged with Microsoft executives discussing various problems with Vista as it came to market.

In one e-mail, Steven Sinofsky writes to Steve Ballmer that three factors were to blame for early Vista challenges.

First off, he said, “No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn’t start the work until very late in 2006.” He added that his Brother home printer didn’t have drivers until after Vista’s commercial launch.

Secondly, he said, major changes to the way Vista handles audio and video caused headaches, particularly for those upgrading from XP. Finally, he said, many Windows XP drivers didn’t really work under Vista. “This is across the board for printers, scanners, wan, accessories (fingerprint readers, smartcards, tv tuners), and so on,” Sinofsky wrote. “This category is due to the fact that many of the associated applets don’t run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.”

Sinofsky noted that Microsoft executive Orlando Ayala had stuck with XP because there was no Vista driver for his Verizon mobile wireless card. “The Vista Ready logo program required drivers available on (January 30). I think we had had reasonable coverage, but quality was uneven as I experienced,” he wrote.

News.com colleague Tom Krazit is looking into this issue in more detail, but the e-mail also notes pressure that Microsoft faced from Intel to list certain integrated chipsets as Vista capable even though their Vista readiness was limited.

“The ‘915′ chipset which is not Aero capable is in a huge number of laptops and was tagged as ‘Vista Capable’ but not Vista Premium (ready),” he wrote. “I don’t know if this was a good call.”

Sinofsky expressed surprise that Microsoft didn’t get more complaints to its support lines, but said that he did not take that as a sign of satisfaction.

“I think we have a lot of new PCs, which helps and the hobbyist people who bought (packaged copies of Windows) just know what to do and aren’t calling, but I know they are struggling,” he said.

I’ll be pouring through more of the documents and should have more details soon.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

newsmaker For a man who just got fined more than a billion dollars for antitrust violations, Steve Ballmer is feeling plenty of competitive heat.

In an interview, the Microsoft CEO pointed to tough competitors in every part of the business. Longtime foes like Oracle and IBM remain, but Google, Apple, and Linux all loom large.

Against that backdrop, Microsoft is locked in a protracted battle to acquire Yahoo. Ballmer spoke to CNET News.com shortly after the launch of new server software in Los Angeles.

Q: Microsoft announced a broad set of interoperability moves last week. When you guys made the announcement, did you know that the EU was planning to levy further fines against Microsoft?

Ballmer: We knew it was pending, we didn’t know it was this week, but we knew it was coming at some point. This is not news today. We are in compliance, they agreed we are in compliance. This is a fine for activities that predate the compliance activities that Ms. Kroes talked about last fall. So this is not new news in terms of compliance. It says there was a past transgression and they assessed a fine for that past transgression.

So are you fairly confident that your EU regulatory hurdles are behind you?
Ballmer: I think as a company with a big market footprint, we will constantly be looked at by regulators in all parts of the world. That’s part of what we do, and that’s kind of our world.

Do you expect Europe to be the biggest regulatory hurdle if the proposed Yahoo acquisition happens?
Ballmer: Oh, I don’t know. I have nothing interesting to say about that. I think regulators will look at that in all appropriate jurisdictions and I’m sure they’ll give us a fair shake in all appropriate jurisdictions.

Bill Gates said about a week or so ago that Microsoft isn’t looking to unilaterally up its bid for Yahoo. What’s the next step? Is it nominating your own board of directors? Where do you go from here?
Ballmer: In this process, you’ve never been through one until you’ve been through one. Everybody prepares you and tells you about all the different stuff that goes on. If there’s news, I’m sure you guys will be the first to know.

Are you surprised that it’s taken this long?

Ballmer: No. Many acquisitions take this long.

Apple said today that they’re going to have some iPhone stuff, including some more enterprise connections. I’m curious, are they partnering with you guys at all to bring Exchange connectivity?

Ballmer: We continue to, under our new interoperability principles, license both the trade secret information and the patent information that anybody needs to interface with either Outlook or Exchange. So Apple–we don’t comment specifically about whether they’re a licensee, but certainly it would be consistent with our interoperability principles to enable Apple to do that work.

What’s the biggest benefit to Microsoft from Windows Server 2008? Is it improved competitive position versus Linux? Better virtualization software? Something else?

Ballmer: Yes (laughter). What is virtualization all about? It’s really about management, superior management. We get to bring what we’ve already done with System Center in high-quality management tools together with great underlying support for Windows Server, virtualization support, interoperable virtualization. So we can run Linux, we can run Windows.

I think in a virtualization-slash-management perspective, we take a little different perspective on that. We don’t think virtualization is an island–maybe VMware does, at least that’s their current strategy. We think it’s a big step forward.

In terms of the workloads, if you look and say where in the server market are we weaker, we’d be certainly weaker in Web applications than we are in most other (areas, like) Web and high-performance computing with IIS-7, with the improvements in Visual Studio, with the hardening we’ve done in server core that makes it easier to put up our rugged Windows Server. We think we’ve done a lot of work that’s going to help us drive share against Linux particularly in the Web work load (area).

A lot has been made about the consumer side of Web services, but Microsoft’s enterprise business is undergoing a pretty radical transformation as well with a move to support a mix of Web-based services and on-premise software. On the enterprise side of things, do you see the services world being as good a business, as profitable as the on-premise-only world was?

Ballmer: I think it’s better. I mean, if you do it right, it’s better. If we do it right, it should be better. My basic thesis, and what I tell our folks–and it’s got to be proven in the market–is if we add more value for our customers, it ought to allow us to make at least as much, if not more money, as we make today.

We can have service-based offerings that essentially line up with our information worker infrastructure products–Exchange and SharePoint, Office Communications Server–if we have instances that sort of line up to what people do, development and deployment applications, database applications, etc. That is more value. We can help people reduce management costs, deployment costs, operations costs, data center costs…Somehow if we can help our customers avoid cost and complexity that they have and give them all the value we give them today, there ought to be a trade in there where we get to make a little bit more money and our customers get a lot more value.

How quickly is that transition happening? Are there specific areas where people are really clamoring for a high-services component, and are there some you can point to where it’s going to remain on-premise as far as the eye can see?
Ballmer: Well, in the enterprise, I think the stuff that we might expect to see actually move most quickly is probably some aspects of the desktop infrastructure, for lack of a better term. We’ve announced some customers–I don’t know who’s public and who’s not public, though. But we’ve announced some customers for our Microsoft online offerings for Exchange, for Office Communications Server, for SharePoint, and I certainly show a
lot of demand there. That’s probably where the offer is clearest and the demand is highest.

Somebody might say, well, what about CRM? You see some (CRM), but you see it more in pockets. You see it more departmentally. It’s not quite the same, enterprise-driven demand that we’re seeing for some of the information worker productivity infrastructure.

Any that you see just pure on-premise as far as you can see?
Ballmer: No. No. (Though) some I think will take longer. You know, when will trading applications–proprietary trading applications on Wall Street–run on the Internet cloud? Probably not tomorrow. Might take a little bit longer than some of the other things we’re talking about.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Also: Jooce’d in developing nations. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.

When writing earlier this week about Adobe’s sponsoring of the SQLite project, I ran into a complicated issue: is software released into the public domain also open-source software?

I have an editor who hates headlines with question marks, but I’m afraid this time it’s appropriate, because even experts disagree.

For background, software or other material in the public domain simply means that it’s not copyrighted. Requirements to meet the official Open Source Definition are listed by the Open Source Initiative. Two programmers, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens, founded the OSI about 10 years ago to formalize and codify the open-source idea as it branched off the free software movement Richard Stallman founded in the 1980s, and OSI lists 68 compliant licenses.

Richard Hipp, who founded the SQLite database project in 2000 as a public-domain project, believes it does qualify as open-source software.

“I’ve had a number of conversations on this topic with corporate lawyers for companies that are actively using SQLite. The consensus there seems to be that ‘public domain’ is valid and is a proper subset of ‘open source’–except in France and Germany where the concept of ‘public domain’ is not recognized,” he told me in an e-mail discussion prompted by the Adobe story.

But not so fast. Take the view of Mark Radcliffe, the intellectual property attorney who’s general counsel to the Open Source Initiative.

When I asked Radcliffe if public domain software was open-source, he was clear: “No. Truly public domain software is no longer protected by copyright, thus it cannot have a license which would impose the terms necessary to comply with any of the open source licenses,” he said.

Agreeing with him is Louis Rosen, an attorney with Rosenlaw and Einschlag who previously led OSI’s legal work and who still is involved. He directed me to an older but still relevant piece he wrote about why the public domain isn’t a license

“‘Public domain’ will never be a license. It actually means ‘No license required,’” Rosen said. “Software that is ‘dedicated to the public’ or ‘to the public domain’ is pretty safe. I just worry a bit when people or companies give software away in such an amateurish way, without understanding that licenses or covenants are far more efficient and effective.”

While “public domain” isn’t a license on OSI’s official list of open-source licenses, Perens said it’s not far off: “Software that has been formally dedicated to the public domain through some sort of written statement meets the requirements of the Open Source definition only if the source code is available. Surprisingly, ‘public-domain’ binary-only software exists in some odd corners of the Net.”

And Raymond added, “Public-domain software qualifies…The users are guaranteed all the redistribution and reuse rights that the Open Source Definition seeks to secure by the fact that there is no owner to enforce restrictions.”

Moving from the theoretical realm into the practical, though, the SQLite project appears more open-source than not. The project’s source code is available without restriction, and programmers who contribute code it to it must explicitly declare their contribution is given to the public domain for perpetuity, which appears to satisfy Perens’ opinions.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

The head of Microsoft’s Live Platform Services group, Dave Treadwell, on Thursday gave an early description of services and tools Microsoft will release at next week’s Mix08 Web conference.

Treadwell is part of a team assembled by chief software architect Ray Ozzie chartered with building a development platform for writing Web applications that tap into data on Microsoft services.

Tafiti is an application that combines Silverlight with Windows Search.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft executives have said that its overall goal is to create a common development model that spans its online services, such as Virtual Earth and search, and its Windows and server products.

Ozzie last year described the cloud computing infrastructure that Microsoft is constructing to deliver services, which touch everything from user identification to applications like Windows Live Messenger.

Treadwell said that its updated Live development platform has expanded application programming interfaces (APIs), including an API for getting contact information from a social networking site.

He also said Microsoft is boosting support for the Atom Publishing Protocol by providing Atom interfaces to some of its hosted services.

Finally, Treadwell said that Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live, a hosted services for delivering video to Web sites launched last year at Mix, is now in beta and includes 10 gigabytes of free storage.

For a thorough summary, check out LiveSide.net and Programmable Web.

More businesses across the globe are stepping up their IT governance efforts, with North America and Europe leading the way, according to a study.

The “IT Governance Global Status Report 2008″ claims that 34 percent of respondents, compared to 19 percent in 2005, are implementing practices that address IT governance–an organization’s management, from the boardroom on down, of the performance and security of its IT system. Commissioned by the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) and conducted every two years, the study surveyed about 750 C-level executives from 23 countries between July and October last year.

The survey also determined that 24 percent of companies are considering plans to introduce IT governance practices, compared to 22 percent in 2005 and 18 percent in 2003. In addition, only 20 percent said their organisations were not considering implementing such practices, compared to 36 percent in 2005 and 42 percent in 2003.

By region, North America and Europe have the highest adoption of IT governance initiatives globally, with 50 percent of respondents from each of these two regions indicating that they have already implemented, or are in the process of implementing, such processes and practices. Forty-four percent of executives from Asia and 27 percent of South American respondents reported similar plans.

“The bottom line is that many organizations around the world are needlessly sacrificing money, productivity, and competitive advantage by not implementing effective IT governance,” said Lynn Lawton, international president of ITGI. “Well-governed enterprises have been shown to provide better returns to stakeholders, and the same goes for governance over information technology.”

“Executives need to direct their IT for optimal advantage, manage IT-related risks, and measure the value provided by IT,” Lawton added.

The survey also found that the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), with the ISO 20000 standard, is used by 24 percent of organizations polled and is the preferred framework associated with IT governance. The ISO 20000 covers the IT service management aspects under Itil.

The ITGI-developed “Control objectives for information and related technology” framework, on the other hand, has doubled its user base. In addition, over 50 percent of respondents indicated they were aware of the framework, compared to 27 percent two years ago.

With regards to leading IT governance projects, the chief information officer was identified as the ideal champion by the majority of respondents (40 percent). Some 25 percent said the chief executive should be in charge, while the next-most-frequently cited roles for heading IT governance were the chief financial officer and IT manager.

Compared to the 2005 survey, more respondents were able to identify organizations which can help their companies implement IT governance. Large IT services providers or consultancy companies were the most frequently cited, followed by audit firms and smaller, niche IT players.

Vivian Yeo of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

The launch of Google Sites is like the opening of a movie or play. The critics (including myself) feast on it, churning out copy and opinions as to whether Google Sites is a Microsoft SharePoint killer or merely the McDonald’s of wikis, with more nutritional value than the venerable fast food burger and no cost.

Dennis Howlett wasn’t impressed. On his ZDNet blog he wrote:

After 16 months at Google developer’s hands, the outcome is substandard. This is such a pity. In its JotSpot incarnation, it was far from perfect but that didn’t matter because JotSpot was shedding light on a new way of collaborating. Since passing into Google’s hands, the guts have been ripped out and then re-assembled with as much Google ’stuff’ as they could cram in but rushed to completion.

At the very least, Google should get rid of the gadgets addition facility and rework it. Otherwise, I sense the SMBs at which it is aimed will find the service a turn off.

I’m don’t think the guts were ripped out, but JotSpot was given the Google makeover, which is rooted in the way founders Brin and Page think about Web applications. Like Google search, the interface is extremely simple. No boiling the ocean with features no one can comprehend. Dennis pointed to slowness in integrating Google gadgets in Sites and a lack of business-oriented widgets. Maybe Google should have added “beta” to the Sites label. Gmail is still in beta after several years of gestation.

Zoli Erdos sums it up well:

Google now has a pretty good and easy web-page creator with some wiki features made user-friendly, and a half-hearted attempt at integrating the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release.

More on Techmeme

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

In October 2006, Google acquired JotSpot, a hosted wiki platform for building collaborative Web sites. Sixteen months later, which is like 10 years in Web time, Google is launching a revamped JotSpot as Google Sites.

Rafe Needleman at CNET Webware has a more in-depth post on how Google Sites works.

Google Sites is basically another element in the growing Google Apps suite. Like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Sites is aimed at companies or individuals who need to collaborate, such as for managing projects or classroom activities.

(Credit: Source: Google)

“This is a key last hole in the Google Apps suite,” Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise told me. “It is the nucleus for other pieces to fit into for online collaboration.”

He also said that Google Apps was a “healthy, growing, and profitable” business for Google, but didn’t share the profit numbers. It may be profitable but it is an almost invisible blip on the revenue screen.

The term “wiki” has been banished from Googlespeak as the company tries to mainstream its collaborative applications. “There shouldn’t be a distinction between wikis and sites,” said product manager Scott Johnston. He hopes that the “edit button” becomes pervasive as the collaborative Web takes hold.

Google Apps has some traction–about 500,000 companies are using the suite–but the non-tech-savvy knowledge worker may not by aware of Google Docs, according to Glotzbach. Google is relying on word of mouth to stimulate small business usage and more direct selling into larger enterprises.

Google is also fighting the stigma of lightweight applications, the notion that they are unable to do everything that a Microsoft SharePoint, SocialText, and other more full-featured business solutions. And, Google has significant distribution advantages over closer competitors such as Zoho.

“The so-called lightweight cloud application isn’t for the non-power user,” Glotzbach said. “It’s actually for the power user. Today’s power users aren’t writing macros. They are ‘power collaborators,’ grabbing content from six different places in the cloud and putting on a site and sharing it.”

The concept of the power collaborator and creating the applications without high cost and involving IT resources is compelling, and will push the incumbents to lighten up.

For example, companies could create employee directories with profiles pages that can include documents, videos, gadgets or other kinds of content without any heavy lifting. And, at some point, Google Sites will have social-networking capabilities baked in, using the OpenSocial APIs and the Social Graph API, Johnston said but didn’t offer a timetable. A socially enabled Google Site would be more similar to what Ning is doing with its social Web platform, allowing users to build their own social networks.

I asked Johnston what took Google so long to relaunch JotSpot. “We looked at what assets we could use, and we didn’t want to release a product where we had to change the wheels while we were driving. We have access to infrastructure that scales nearly infinitely and Google search as an underlying technology, so we can take content and make it instantly relevant and searchable,” he said. “We also have a best-of-breed online calendar.”

In addition, the entire front end to JotSpot was rewritten to adopt the foundation elements, such as the document editor, used in the Google Apps suite, as well as the look and feel. “The core of what we brought was the essence of the wiki and storing versions of the content,” Johnston said. “Also, when you created a page in JotSpot you could choose from different kinds of pages.” Google Sites supports five pages types and will add more in the future, he said.

In the future, Google Apps will add more capabilities for sharing video, a la YouTube, with group and voice capabilities, Glotzbach said. At this point Google doesn’t plan to create a marketplace for creators of Google Site templates and themes, but it will take advantage of the iGoogle gadgets and APIs that allow developers to embed objects with the service.

Google Sites is a key piece of functionality for Google Apps. It gives the suite a way to integrate all kinds of components in support of accomplishing a particular task. Adding social capabilities and a database to the suite will turn up the heat on Microsoft to show what it has waiting in the wings to go beyond the prodigious Microsoft Office.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Tough as nails Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s head antitrust cop, issued a stern warning to any company planning to blow off the regulatory agency and European antitrust laws.

“If you flee the rules, you will be caught. And it will cost you dearly,” warned Kroes during in press conference Wednesday, following the European Commission’s announcement it was slapping a $1.35 billion fine against Microsoft for failure to comply with earlier March 2004 antitrust sanctions.

Kroes further noted: “Talk is cheap. Flee the rules and it will be expensive. We don’t want talk and promises. We want compliance (with regulations).”

For Microsoft, its fine was calculated based on the 488 days it was out of compliance, Kroes said. And while Kroes characterized the fine as “substantial,” she noted it represented 60 percent of the total assessment the Commission could have levied on Microsoft.

Meanwhile, readers who participated in a News.com poll were roughly split 60-40 on whether the Commission’s fine was too low, or too high, respectively.

Kroes, however, maintained the size of the fine was reasonable, given the length of time that Microsoft was out of compliance with the historic March 2004 order and number of people, companies and government agencies affected.

“Microsoft continued to stifle innovation by charging other companies prohibitive royalty rates for the essential information they needed to offer software products to computer users around the world,” Kroes said. “The high rates made the rendering of (interoperability) information pointless.”

To comply with the March 2004 order, Microsoft was supposed to offer rivals complete and accurate interoperability information so that their products would work with Microsoft’s dominant operating system, as well as offer the information at a reasonable price.

Any company looking to avoid a clash with Kroes needs to keep one thing in mind. Says the woman herself: “Our approach is to ensure companies and people have a right to choose…then the markets will deliver so much more.”
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Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech