Short Takes: Touching on Microsoft's plans
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By SD Times News Team
June 15, 2008 —
I’m not “touched”
At the Wall Street Journal's sixth D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif. on May 27, outgoing Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer showed off a new touch-screen interface that they said would make its debut in Windows 7. Microsoft intends to deliver the technology in Windows notebooks, in all-in-one PCs and in external monitors.
Windows 7’s “multi-touch” capabilities are derived from Microsoft’s Surface prototype—a tabletop interface that is best suited for kiosks and bars. Portable devices like the iPhone doubtlessly benefit from “touch,” but would a desktop PC? Call me a curmudgeon, I’m not convinced that Microsoft is not just overreaching again (think Tablet PC).
I hope that, for its sake, that Windows 7 has more viable selling points. Here is a video of the D6 demonstration.
David Worthington
The Implicit Internet
Today, iTunes knows your favorite music, TiVo your favorite shows and OpenTable your favorite restaurants. When are all these services going to get together and give you the kind of Internet that you, and only you, like?
The idea of an “Implicit Internet” was one of the technology trends debated by venture capitalists at a Churchill Club forum on May 14 in San Jose. Josh Kopelman, managing partner at First Round Capital, argued that “the silos are coming down” and that sharing the information accumulated by iTunes, TiVo or Google would sharpen preferences for Web users and enhance the advertising model for the Web.
Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners, warned that the security issues are “profound” and that a privacy breach would discredit the advertising model and “reset the Internet economy.” But Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures scoffed at the security worries. He needs an assistant to sort his e-mail, and he said that the “data reduction” benefit of an Internet that knows what he wants would be worth any privacy trade-off.
Robert Mullins
Let’s get serious about the cloud
The Google I/O developer conference, held at the end of May in San Francisco, was medium-interesting. There were solid technical classes on App Engine and neat demonstrations of the Android mobile-phone software stack. There were lots of discussions about social networks and the virtuous cycle between compelling new applications, new users and advertising, which in turn funds new applications.
What was missing from Google I/O was a compelling vision beyond “more of the same.” I came away informed, but not inspired, by Google’s three-fold mission: to make the cloud more accessible, keep connectivity pervasive and make the client more powerful. In all of these, Google is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
That’s not to discount the impact that Google’s entry into cloud computing will have. At the conference, Google unleashed the tiger, making its App Engine generally available to its customers. The pricing model—free for up to about 5 million page views per month—is compelling for those wanting to try out ideas. The technology appears solid. The APIs are very approachable. And as with Amazon’s programmable platform, anyone can use the applications that you build. (Salesforce.com’s hosting model is geared at providing third-party applications for their paying CRM customers.)
Google’s App Engine is going to get traffic; of that there’s no doubt. That is going to be a catalyst for seriously considering the cloud as a deployment platform for enterprise applications of all kinds. Even when a company has a full-featured Internet data center, some apps may lend themselves better to Google’s hosted platform. Thanks to Amazon and Google, the cloud is now a genuine platform that bears serious consideration for new projects.
Alan Zeichick
Where mobile development goes from here
It’s becoming clear that the phone-as-a-platform model is taking off, with word from Google that Android-based phones could be out by the end of this year. It may well be that in a couple of years, the market for mobile devices becomes pretty much a three-way horserace, with Apple’s iPhone duking it out with Android and Windows Mobile holding its own. The big losers are likely to be those firms and customers that have placed their hopes in Symbian, which lacks the “instant community” that a platform backed by Apple or Google seems to attract by virtue of mere existence. Even adopting Linux as a core platform may not be enough to save the day for the likes of Motorola and Palm.
P.J. Connolly
Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, mobile development, Windows, Microsoft
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