Archive for the 'Microsoft' Category

Ad supported Office in the works?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/5/2007
in Microsoft and advertising
. 1 Comment

I see Microsoft are following Google into the Advertising business with their announced purchase of aQuantive for $6bn.

Advertising definitely seems to be where the money is at right now - as Michael Arrington put it earlier on TechCrunch:

Google bought Doubleclick for $3.1 billion in April. Later that same month, Yahoo acquired competitor RightMedia for $680 million. Just yesterday, WPP Group acquired yet another company in this space, 24/7 Real Media, for $649 million.

Just as an indicator of how seriously Microsoft is taking advertising as a revenue stream, this is Microsoft’s largest acquisition to-date. Look to Microsoft to start generating more and more income from advertising and less and less from the traditional software licencing model.

I suspect that we will see an online version of Office, developed in Silverlight, free to use and ad supported in the next 12 months.

Lot of travel coming up!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/5/2007
in Microsoft, cix, social media and speaking
. 4 Comments

In the next few weeks I am flying to Bilbao where I have been selected to be on the prestigious jury forStartup 2.0 - an international competition judging startup companies.

Then I am off to Copenhagen for Reboot 2.0 where my suggestion for a talk about the energy efficiencies in the CIX data centre has been moved to the official program! I’m really stoked about that. It is an incredible honour because the quality of speakers and delegates at Reboot is stratospheric.

And finally I’m off to Remix 07 in Madrid (yes, Spain again - is it my imagination or are the Spanish becoming really active in the web space lately?) to give a couple of talks on social media.

I’m looking forward to the events but dreading the travel. I used to love travel the the mindless security theatre we are now put through makes flying a complete PITA.

Does Silverlight kill Internet connectivity on Macs?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/5/2007
in Mac and Microsoft
. 7 Comments

I had a problem with my MacBookPro the other day. It lost Internet connectivity. It couldn’t get an IP address from the DSL router. Restarting the router didn’t help. Nor did stopping and starting Airport or using a wired connection.

At first I figured the router was fried. But then, I restarted the Mac and lo! connectivity came back.

I wrote it off as a once off and didn’t think any more of it.

Then over the next few days I had problems with Firefox freezing. Uninstalling plugins didn’t help. What did fix it was closing all the tabs which contained Silverlight content.

Then the problem with the Mac losing Internet connectivity recurred. Several times. Both at the home office and outside of it.

I finally had an Aha! moment. I searched the hard drive for all occurrences of Silverlight, found the Silverlight plugin, deleted it and re-started the Mac.

I haven’t lost Internet connectivity since!

Has anyone else had this happen to them?

Sun’s answer to the Microsoft litigation threat

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 15/5/2007
in Microsoft and Open Source
. 1 Comment

Microsoft’s announcement yesterday that they are going to charge open source companies and users for patent infringement is largely being seen as

  1. an act of desperation
  2. a scare tactic to get enterprise open source users to pony up more money to Microsoft (or buy Microsoft software) in lieu of litigation and
  3. a great way to, once again, succeed in annoying the majority of people on the planet

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, has a great post on his blog today in response to the threat by Microsoft.

In his post Jonathan outlines how when beset by difficulties, Sun chose to open source their products instead of litigating!

He concludes his post by saying:

no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach.

That’s not a genie any litigator I know can put back in a bottle.

Microsoft: “You are going to have to pay us for NOT using our products too!”

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 14/5/2007
in Microsoft and Open Source
. 4 Comments

Microsoft have an image problem. You know they have. They know they have. Almost every time you see a Microsoft employee get up to speak they invariably start by meekly, almost apologetically, admitting they are from Microsoft.

Why do they have an image problem? It dates back to the browser wars of the 90s when they used their market dominance to squash competitors. They were bully’s.

Over the last number of years they have been fighting hard to combat that image. They have tried to appear all warm and fuzzy. They have made clever hires like Jon Udell and even contracted Hugh MacLeod to help improve their brand.

Then what does Microsoft go and do? In an article in Fortune

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users.

Update: Wow, this one is really exploding on Techmeme
Good God, are they really serious? Many people use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) precisely because they don’t want to be giving money to Microsoft and now Microsoft are saying “You know all that Free and open Source Software you are using, yeah well, you are going to have to pay us for using that now too, thanks!”

It really is quite an incredible situation. What if the oil industry started saying, “All you solar energy, wind energy and renewable energy users will have to pay us for not using our products”

Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

As Simon Hibbs said:

It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that so many Microsoft products are based on patentable innovations contributed freely. I’m thinking of Kerberos and LDAP that are the guts of Active Directory. Where would we all be if Tim Berners-Lee had patented key elements of HTTP, or if the TCP/IP stack were proprietary? Microsoft has done very well embracing and extending the innovations of others.

Silverlight

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 1/5/2007
in Microsoft and Silverlight
. 15 Comments

Microsoft launched Silverlight yesterday in a blaze of stunning demos at the MIX07 keynote yesterday. The demos were not done by Microsoft but by partner companies who were given access to Expression Studio (the Silverlight development tools) a couple of weeks ago.

Everyone I have talked to at MIX was blown away.

To my mind the most impressive demo was by Beau Ambur of Metaliq. Beau demo’d a video editing app which was extremely easy to use, very powerful and browser based. Yes, you read that correctly, browser-based! It took me a while for that to sink in with me too. I was watching Beau’s demo, thinking, wow, that’s cool when it suddenly dawned on me that there was an address bar at the top of the screen! Hang on a sec, he’s doing this in a browser? You can do this in a browser? Wow!

Even more impressive was that the demo (called Top Banana) had a 50k footprint!

What is did Microsoft announce? It breaks down into:

Silverlight, and its development tools have changed radically how video will be created, published and consumed on the web. The guys in Joost must be watching this with interest!

[Disclosure - Microsoft paid most of my travel, conference entry and accommodation expenses for the MIX07 conference]

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