Microsoft News
A wasted decade on Windows Mobile threatens Microsoft’s relevance in the future of computing.
Galen Gruman, Infoworld
It appears that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has finally woken up and realized that Microsoft’s laughable mobile position is more than a product failure but a potential loss of relevance in the computing world of the future, where desktop PCs are like TVs and the real action is in mobile devices of all stripes.
This week, the heads of Microsoft’s mobile and entertainment (Windows Mobile, Zune, and Xbox) division announced their pending departures. It’s not a moment too soon, given the widespread doubts that the long-sagging division’s mobile and music fortunes would revive under the status quo. (The Xbox is doing fine.) Unfortunately, Ballmer says the departures had nothing to do with Microsoft’s slide into mobile irrelevance and that business will continue as usual. That’s suicidal.
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With Apple’s huge lead in mobile with the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad; Google’s Android surge in smartphones and perhaps soon in slate-style tablets; and Research in Motion’s seeming lock on messaging devices, people might wonder why Microsoft doesn’t cut its losses and shift more emphasis to the company’s cloud strategy, which Microsoft’s execs hope will be its next-generation platform dominator à la Windows.
Ballmer should know why: Because mobile devices are where the client figure is, and a Microsoft without a strong mobile position means Microsoft loses any hope of owning the emerging technology ecosystem. At worst, Google would own it; at best, it would be a combination of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
Microsoft has wasted a decade — it’s been that long since Windows Mobile (née CE) did anything that mattered to customers — with meaningless updates on an operating system that showed signs of innovation in 2000 but quickly became a confused mess of desktop wannabe functions by 2004. Complacency clearly set in as Palm frittered its future on endless reorganizations and RIM stayed happily in the mud of messaging. Then the iPhone showed up in 2007 and changed the mobile world. Google saw it and after a rough start started to deliver serious alternative. Both now outsell the establishment mobile OS that Windows Mobile had meant to be.
Steve, what did your company do? It wasted several years on the hapless Windows 6.5 and the moronic Kin — talk about throwing good money after bad. Now you have to turn around the mobile gap, and fast. Here’s what you need to do — and you have only the rest of this year to do it.
1. Kill the Crap (And do the Rest Right, or Not at All)
Leaked: Dell’s Upcoming ‘Lightning’ Windows Phone 7 Handset Microsoft produces a lot of mediocre software that it slowly fixes over a half-dozen or more iterations — adding more crap along the way. I’ve never understood this business strategy, but it worked for Windows, so it’s now accepted at Redmond. Practically every product from Office to Dynamics is developed this way.
For Windows Mobile, the crap caught up to it, smothering the operating system in a pile of excrement that as of Windows Mobile 6.5 could not longer be disguised for what it was. The new Kin mobile platform is also full of crap, lacing some interesting ideas around social networking on a badly designed user interface running on crappy hardware. It’s Windows Mobile all over again.
The successor to Windows Mobile — Windows Phone 7 — can’t contain crap. It needs to be a good OS, with a UI that works at all levels. The operating system needs to be elegant, simple, intentional, and consistent — something Microsoft has never been good at.
Instead, Steve, your company’s engineers confuse elegance with decoration, simplicity with obscurity, intentionality with brutishness, and consistency with — well, they don’t know that word. If you provide three ways to do the same thing, clutter up the screen with menus and dialog boxes and radio buttons, badger users with “helpful” alerts and confirmations, rely on multifinger keyboard shortcuts, and change navigation techniques across apps, you’re dead.
Everyone cites Apple as the master of this game, but I don’t believe for a minute that only Apple’s designers can produce such quality. Apple is a standout, but it doesn’t have a lock on good design. Amazon.com, Acer, Renault, and Nike are some top-of-mind examples.
Ironically, Microsoft has occasionally shown itself capable of design excellence: The original Excel was the first application to show that a graphical UI wasn’t just for pretty pictures, and its success is what I believe made Windows possible. Before that, the original Word was a very well-designed application in a sea of ungainly competitors back in the DOS era.
The bottom line: If you can’t do something at a level of excellence, pull it. Add it later, when it’s truly ready, as a free update. Get out of the crapware and shovelware business — you won’t believe the kind of loyalty you’ll get if you deliver quality products without compromises. (Just ask Apple.) I’m not suggesting everything be perfect — often, there’s no such thing — but customers can spot half-assed and rushed a mile away, and you already are too well known for those.
Your new mobile OS needs to run on hardware that oozes quality, fit and finish, and confident capability. You don’t need to clone the iPhone to get that; the HTC Droid Incredible is another example, as are the top-end PCs and laptops from Acer, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell. Don’t add a ton of perpherals and ports; instead, provide just one or two MicroUSB ports, the fewest buttons needed (without making any one button do unrelated things), a really good camera for still photography and videoconferencing (and remember it’s not the megapixels that matter but the CCD quality, despite what the Gizmoids say), an amazing screen with excellent multitouch sensing, a memory card slot, flexible radios (CDMA and GSM 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth not limited to headsets and keyboards, and maybe WiMax), and great audio in/out. A distinctive look that isn’t distracing would be icing on that cake.
Furthermore, you should allow only two models: one with a physical keyboard, and one without. Memory and maybe a couple other noncritical features can vary within each model line, but don’t create confusion. You don’t need 15 different Windows Phone 7 devices of varying quality. You’ve already been burned going down that road. If you can’t bring yourself to having just two models (and thus picking only HTC or Samsung as your hardware partner), enforce very tough requirements on the permissible variability. And don’t let HTC add its own UI overlay; like Windows Mobile before it, Android needed the Sense UI to be usable, which, in essence, means they screwed up the OS. If you don’t need it, you’ve just permitted an inconsistency in your platform’s core.
Along these lines, don’t confuse listening to the customer with delivering what you heard the customers say. Apple succeeds because Steve Jobs and the company’s other key leaders have a strong vision, and they deliver it time and time again. Despite their outward arrogance, they do listen to customers, but make their own decisions. That results in cohesive products that more often than not move the ball forward. After all, it is a truism in market research that customers don’t know what new features they want, just the ones they know they don’t have. You have to invent the future the customers didn’t know they wanted until you showed it to them.
Microsoft makes a lot of noise about listening to its customers, but that often leads to muddled products like Vista, whose aspirations of “everything but the kitchen sink OS” couldn’t be put together despite the years of efforts and $6 billion or so of investment. Instead, try out novel concepts with users and see how they react; that’s more likely to result in positive innovation and identify areas of confusion than trying to please or accommodate everything you hear.
2. Get the Basics Right
The underlying capabilities in your new mobile platform must be what’s needed. Don’t do the usual Microsoft thing and skimp. Apple got away with inferior business capabilities around security and manageability in its early iPhones and only in the last year has made serious headway to correct that. You don’t have that luxury. Though I believe it harbors a deep desire for the iPhone to be the corporate standard, Apple doesn’t pretend to be a business-oriented company; thus, it could ignore that audience and play to its entertainment strengths honed with the iPod and its creative strengths honed with the Mac. Microsoft has no such waves of passion to carry it past key omissions or compromises.
Don’t think Windows Mobile’s business strengths — the security and management capabilities where it did lead — will cut you any slack for the corporate audience. More than half of people who use smartphones in business buy their own, so those IT fond memories don’t carry the weight they used to. In business, you’re competing with both the iPhone and the BlackBerry. For individuals, you’re competing with the iPhone and Android. You can’t underperform in any core capabilities.
We all know what those core expectations are today, so if Windows Phone 7’s multithreading doesn’t deliver the experience users typically associate with multitasking, don’t pretend it does and ship it anyhow. If Zune is locked into Windows PCs, don’t include it; media management needs to be universal. The UI paradigm can’t change because the app does its own thing; the gesture language needs to be universal, and human interface guidelines need to be rigorously enforced. You get the idea.
3. Decide Who You Are
A major challenge is to figure out what Microsoft mobile is all about — that is, what kind of mobile platform you are. The Windows Phone 7 demos thus far focus on a social networking metaphor. Palm had a similar marketing pitch but didn’t really make it the organizing primciple of its WebOS.
I get the attraction: 20-somethings spend much more time texting and tweeting and Facebooking than they do emailing or making voice calls. If you believe that behavior will carry over into their 30s, you want adopt their behavior to become their preferred platform and displace Apple and Google as the young generation ages.
If that’s the case, be explicit about it. If owning the 20-somethings is your strategy but you pretend to be all things to all people, you’ll peeve a lot of users, including most in business. You can’t afford that lack of trust. Better to say who you are aimed at so that the rest of us don’t feel misled.
Conversely, if you want the new mobile platform to be multigenerational and appealing to both personal and business uses — which your Windows Mobile 7 team has suggested — you’d better stop the social networking fixation as your operating system’s organizing principle. It won’t work for most of us.
Instead, make great social networking apps that you provide with the OS, but don’t impose the social betworking style of constant interruption and fractional, reactive thinking on the operating system as a whole. Likewise, don’t market it as a social networking device but really deliver a multipurpose device; you’ll tee off the 20-somethings that way, perhaps forever.
In other words, figure out what kind of OS you are and deliver — no apologies, no fudges.
4. Drop the Windows Name
You should not call the operating system “Windows” anything. It’s not Windows. That advice doesn’t mean that Windows is bad; it means that the mobile OS is not a version of Windows but is instead its own thing. There’s a reason Apple doesn’t call the iPhone “mobile Mac OS X,” even though it’s based on Mac OS X. Along the same lines, Google was smart enough not to rename the Android OS it acquired to Chrome OS, the name of its forthcoming Web-device OS. Be as smart as they are.
While you’re at it, drop any Windows dependencies. That’s hard for Microsoft, given its historic desire to make Windows the basis of everything, but it’s a mistake. If Apple can learn to embrace Windows for its broad services like iTunes and MobileMe, and actively support Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync email protocol, so can you make Zune and Studio platform-neutral. After all, you want everyone to embrace your mobile platform, right? The Windows/Mac wars are history, as far as mobile users are concerned. Stop fighting that old battle in this new realm.
5. Kill the Kin
The Kin was a really stupid idea. When everyone is wondering if Microsoft can even take part in the mobile game, you come onto the field ready to play Twister when everyone else is limbering up for the baseball championship.
Even more stupid was calling it a Windows Phone — that’s sure to confuse its grab bag of an operating system with the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 OS that is supposed to be your reset moment. The Kin has some interesting ideas around social networking and, with the Kin Studio, social memory, but reviewers agree the Kin device and the OS are dogs.
I can’t believe you think it’s a successful product in the eyes of the market. You’re repeating your Vista blindness here. You need to put those dogs down, so when the real Microsoft mobile OS ships, the Kin is long forgotten. Pull the Kin from the market today, and recommend its team look for jobs at a competitor, where they might do you more food (maybe Nokia?).
If you really think you need a separate social networking phone for 20-somethings, fine. Make that a product line in your new mobile platform — but be sure to have a product line for grownups that isn’t about social networking. Right now, both the Kin and the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 are focused on a social networking approach to mobile. Why are you competing with yourself? At the very least, don’t do so until you can first successfully compete with Apple and Google.
None of This Will be Easy
Most of the advice in this blog post goes against Microsoft’s standard operating procedure. Steve, most of the mistakes I’ve highlighted have occurred under your watch as CEO and so are your responsibility — Windows 6.5 and Kin for darned sure.
Getting rid of the leadership that has failed you is a good step, and it served you well when you finally owned up to the debacle that was Vista, clearing the path for the cleaned-up version known as Windows 7. But your challenge here is actually greater than fixing Vista.
Windows 7 is essentially a retooling of Vista; your next mobile OS is a new mobile OS, not a retooling of Windows Mobile. Starting over should be freeing, and what little I’ve seen of Windows Phone 7 indicates there is some truly new thinking involved. But even if it is freeing, starting over is not easy, and if you’re using the same team that got and kept you in this mess, it’s even harder. Replacing the generals is likely not enough.
Plus, fixing the corrosive Microsoft culture of “we’ll get it right enough a few versions out” is an even tougher challenge. Corporate cultures are hard to change, and bad ones are like the Ebola virus: They infect anyone new very fast. You may want to separate this group from Microsoft, as if it were a separate company. Palm essentially had to do a engineering and leadership transplant to end years of destructive management maneuvering before it could create WebOS, but it lost its window of opportunity and came out with something that was a 90 percent solution to what Apple was already offering. You face the same danger.
You really have just this year to get this right. The iPhone is about to get its fourth OS version in the next few weeks, as well as new hardware. Apple has already moved the market past the smartphone to the slate with the iPad, yet Microsoft hasn’t even figured out the smartphone yet. Google now seems to be getting its act together for Android and could have a credible iPhone alternative in place by the holidays. RIM’s BlackBerry wil continue to decline to a core “all we want is email” customer base, but that customer base is as fiercely loyal as an Apple fanboy. There’s little space for Microsoft in all of this.
So, Steve, you need to hit a home run — actually, you need to hit it out of the park — for the Christmas holidays. After that, your only real chance is for Android to implode under the weight of too many variations or for Apple to lose Steve Jobs and thus interrupt the driving force behind its band of killer designers. Counting on someone else’s misfortune is not a likely path to victory.
Good luck — you’ll need that along with good technology and good management.
Don’t forget to be part of the InfoWorld Mobile Patrol: Send in your tips, complaints, news, and ideas to comments@infoworldmobile.com. Thanks!
This article, “What Steve Ballmer needs to do to save Microsoft’s mobile bacon,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Gruman et al.’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile computing at InfoWorld.com.
For more IT analysis and commentary on emerging technologies, visit InfoWorld.com. Story copyright © 2010 InfoWorld Media Group. All rights reserved.
Read More At The Original Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/197418-2/5_ways_steve_ballmer_can_save_microsofts_mobile_bacon.html
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) plans to launch a new software for mobile phones by the end of 2010, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Thursday, while commenting on its entertainment division.
The entertainment division makes Xbox video game consoles, Zune music players and mobile phone software.
“Fantastic things (are) coming with the Xbox to change the landscape between TV and entertainment,” Ballmer told reporters.
The company recently announced plans to reorganize its entertainment division with the division’s president, Robbie Bach, retiring this fall.
Microsoft had announced its overhauled operating system for smartphones, Windows Phone 7, in February.
New devices with the software are expected out this holiday season.
R. JAI KRISHNA, ROMIT GUHA and DHANYA ANN THOPPIL
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer dismissed questions Thursday about the software giant’s loss of the title of most valuable technology company to rival Apple Inc.
Instead, Mr. Ballmer said Microsoft is focused more on launching new products and improving profitability. “We are executing very well, that’s going to lead to great products and great success,” Mr. Ballmer said at a press conference.
Mr. Ballmer’s reassurance comes a day after Microsoft’s market capitalization slipped below Apple’s, prompted by concerns of the European debt crisis spreading into broader markets.
Since Mr. Ballmer took over from Bill Gates as CEO in January 2000, Microsoft’s market value has more than halved from $556 billion to Wednesday’s close of $219 billion. Rival Apple’s market value has surged from $15.6 billion to $221 billion over the same period.
Mr. Ballmer said he remains unfazed despite Apple assuming the position of the technology king. “I will make more profits and certainly there is no technology company in the planet which is as profitable as we are,” he said. “Stock markets will take care of the rest,” he added.
For the January-March period, Microsoft posted a net profit of $4.01 billion on revenue of $14.50 billion. Apple’s net profit was $3.07 billion on revenue of $13.50 billion.
Analysts attribute the value-decline at Microsoft to its inability to capitalize on new technologies such as wireless and digital music at its entertainment division. Apple’s success with its iPod and the iPhone came at the expense of Microsoft’s efforts in those areas.
The company’s entertainment division, formed in 2005, makes Xbox video game consoles, Zune music players and mobile phone software. While the gaming console business was a big hit for the company, both Zune and the mobile phone software business failed to make an impact.
One of the major challenges faced by the division is that despite being an early entrant into mobile devices such as smartphones, with its Windows Mobile operating system for handsets, it is now lagging behind cutting-edge technologies of Apple’s iPhone and Google Inc.’s Android operating system.
In a bid to turn around its entertainment business, the company reorganized the division earlier this week, with two of its veteran executives retiring and Mr. Ballmer taking over the leadership at the segment—something that he usually does when he isn’t satisfied with a unit’s performance.
“I wouldn’t predict any drastic changes” in the future strategy of the division, he said. “We’ll have to accelerate plans,” he added.
With a renewed strategy in place, Mr. Ballmer is optimistic about the launch of the Windows Phone 7 series by the end of this year, after the company overhauled the operating system for smartphones in February. This series will bring together Xbox live games and the Zune music and video experience on mobile phones.
“It is a long game. We have good competitors … we too are very good competitors,” Ballmer said.
According to Google, the Android 2.2 mobile OS update will arrive later this year. Among the highlights described by Google at this week’s Google I/O Conference in San Francisco, here are five that make Android 2.2 shine:
1. Faster Speeds: According to Google, Android 2.2 is as much as five times faster than previous versions. That’s thanks to a Dalvik JIT compiler to boost CPU performance, Google said, and a JavaScript engine.
2. Tethering, Hot-Spot Support: As was heavily rumored in the weeks leading up to Google I/O, Android 2.2 includes built-in support for tethering and the ability to use Android phones as Wi-Fi hot spots. Questions remain about whether carriers of Android phones will charge users for the services, but they’re there for Android.
3. Flash Support: Android 2.2 is the first version of Google Android that can fully support both Adobe Flash and Adobe Air. Adobe is a key relationship for Google, and at Google’s I/O Conference Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra didn’t waste an opportunity to needle Apple and its very public war of words with Adobe.
“It turns out that on the Internet, people use Flash,” he said. “And part of being open means you’re inclusive, rather than exclusive, and that you’re open to innovation.”
4. SD Card, App Backup: Both are space-adders: Users can now install Android apps right on an SD card or using an Android phone’s internal storage. Another new function lets users back up and restore Android apps data.
5. Microsoft Exchange Support And Other Messaging Options: Lost amid a lot of the hype around Android 2.2’s most expected features was another nugget that might make Android phones more appealing to enterprises: support forMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Exchange. What’s more, Android now includes a cloud-to-device messaging feature that lets users more easily move information between Google applications on the Web and their various devices.
On Tuesday, Microsoft filed a federal lawsuit against software-as-a-service company Salesforce.com, claiming that the online CRM software company infringes on nine Microsoft patents.
Redmond claims that it first notified Salesforce.com of its infringement more than a year ago, and Salesforce.com’s January SEC filing warned that the company had been approached by a “large technology company” with allegations that it was infringing on patents.
The nine patents were awarded to Microsoft between 1997 and 2007, and span a range of technology, from “method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display” to “system and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network.”
The complaint seeks temporary and permanent injunctions, and monetary damages. It also asserts that the infringement is willful, a claim that would entitle the company to triple damages.
The suit comes as the two companies are becoming increasingly competitive with each other. Microsoft has its own CRM software, Dynamics, and offers many products, including Dynamics, Exchange, and SharePoint, as online services. This is set to expand further with the Office Web Apps, which provide software-as-a-service versions of the productivity suite. Both companies also offer cloud platforms; Microsoft with Azure, Salesforce.com with Force.com.
The move is an unusual one for Microsoft, a company that more often finds itself on the receiving end of patent lawsuits. Microsoft sued peripheral company Belkin in 2006, mouse maker Primax Electronics in 2008, and GPS company TomTom in 2009.
Each suit resulted in a settlement being reached before the cases made it to trial. Traditionally, the company has sought to create a licensing agreement with those corporations believed to be infringing on its patents in preference to getting the courts involved.
Ellen Rosen
Microsoft Corp., the world’s biggest software maker, agreed to pay VirnetX Holding Corp. $200 million and license technology to communicate privately over the Internet, ending a patent dispute.
“We believe that this successful resolution of our litigation with Microsoft will allow us to focus on the upcoming pilot system” for a virtual private network, Chief Executive Officer Kendall Larsen said yesterday in a statement.
VirnetX, which won a $105.8 million jury verdict in its patent-infringement lawsuit in March, was seeking a court order to block Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft from continuing to use the technology in its Windows operating system and Communications Server. The jury award also could have been tripled by the court’s judge.
Microsoft argued at trial that the patents were valued at no more than $15 million. Investors bet the patents were worth more, driving Scotts Valley, California-based VirnetX’s share price up almost 300 percent in the past 12 months. VirnetX had a market value of $267.9 million, based on the May 14 price.
VirnetX had been public in its desire to be bought to resolve the dispute. The agreement in which it obtained the patents from defense contractor SAIC Inc. included a provision that SAIC would get 10 percent of any proceeds if VirnetX were acquired by Microsoft, according to a company regulatory filing.
The patents relate to use of a domain-name service to set up virtual private networks, through which a website owner can interact with a customer in a secure way or an employee can work at home and access a company’s files. The technology stemmed from work performed for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to develop secure communications, VirnetX said.
After winning the trial, VirnetX filed another lawsuit against Microsoft in the same court, arguing that Windows 7 also infringed the patent.
The Windows 7 case is VirnetX v. Microsoft Corp., 10cv94, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas (Tyler). The older case is VirnetX Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 07cv80, in the same court.
Hyundai Motor Wins Reversal of $34 Million Patent Verdict
Hyundai Motor Co. won its appeal of a $34 million verdict that said South Korea’s largest automaker infringed a Texas company’s patent for computerizing the sale of car parts.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit yesterday said Orion IP LLC’s patent was invalid and vacated the verdict. The opinion was posted on the court’s website.
“There is insufficient evidence to support the jury’s verdict” in Orion’s favor on the question of validity, the three-judge court panel ruled.
Orion, a patent-licensing firm based in Longview, Texas, had sued 20 automakers, claiming infringement of a patent for a way to help a salesperson select auto parts without relying on catalogs or order forms. The other auto companies settled before the 2007 trial in Tyler, Texas.
Hyundai argued that companies other than Orion had come up with the idea of electronic parts catalogs in 1987, and the patented computer-assisted system a year later wasn’t different enough to be considered a new invention. The Federal Circuit agreed.
Following the verdict, U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis ordered Seoul-based Hyundai to pay a 2 percent royalty on parts revenue generated through its website or dealer communication system after June 19, 2007.
The case is Orion IP LLC V. Hyundai Motor America, 2009- 1130, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Washington). The lower court case is Orion IP LLC v. Mercedes- Benz USA LLC, 05cv322, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas (Tyler).
Sanofi-Aventis Wins Patent Case Against Mylan in Delaware Ruling
Mylan Pharmaceutical Inc. extended-release bladder tablets will infringe on asserted claims of a patent held by Sanofi- Aventis known as the 491 patent, according to May 14 decision by a federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.
The May 14 decision concerned Mylan’s proposed 10 mg extended release alfuzosin hydrochloride tablets. The drug is an alpha1-blocker that relaxes the smooth muscle in the lower urinary tract, including bladder neck and prostate, to treat illnesses of the prostate.
The 491 patent was issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office April 28, 1987, to Synthelabo, a predecessor of Sanofi- Aventis, the court wrote in the decision.
Mylan filed its application in 2007. The court found that Sanofi-Aventis showed by weight of the evidence that Mylan “literally infringes” the asserted claims of the 491 patent.
The case is In re Alfuzosin Hydrochloride Patent Litigation, 08-md-1941, U.S. District Court, District of Delaware (Wilmington).
Chrysler Seeks to Block Imports of China’s Jeepzter Knockoff
Chrysler Group, the U.S. automaker run by Fiat Spa, filed a trade complaint to block U.S. imports of the Jeepzter, a car it calls a knockoff of its Jeep off-road vehicle.
Chrysler filed a complaint May 14 with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington against Xingyue Group Co., claiming the Chinese company is making a vehicle that copies a patented design for the Jeep Hurricane. The Hurricane, shown as a concept car by Chrysler at the 2005 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, was never mass produced.
The Jeepzter “is the same or substantially the same to the eye of the ordinary observer as the ornamental design” covered by the patent, Chrysler said in the complaint.
Chrysler, whose U.S. sales plummeted 36 percent last year, is refreshing models including the Jeep Grand Cherokee as part of a turnaround of its Jeep, Dodge and Chrysler brands.
Chrysler also filed a trademark-infringement lawsuit in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on May 11 against three companies selling Jeepzters in the U.S. That case claims the companies are selling vehicles that copy the grille design of the Jeep Wrangler.
Noel Farbman, president of USA Wholesale Scooters in Florida, said he took ads for the Jeepzter off his website as soon as he heard of the lawsuit. He said he sold three of the vehicles before learning of Chrysler’s complaint.
Wade Liu, manager of Excalibur Motor Sports in Chino, California, one of the companies named in the ITC complaint, said he hadn’t yet received any of the Jeepzters and planned to pull ads off his company’s website.
Also named in the ITC case were three other businesses in Tennessee, Texas and North Carolina that advertised the vehicles, as well as importers connected to Xingyue. Efforts to reach Xingyue’s U.S. offices in California were unsuccessful.
The ITC case is In the Matter of Certain Automotive Vehicles and Designs Thereof, 2734. The civil suit is Chrysler Group LLC v. USA Wholesale Scooters Inc., 10cv60774, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida (Fort Lauderdale).
For more patent news, click here: {NI PATENT BN <GO>}
Copyright Coach Reaches Settlement in Suit on Alleged Design Infringement
Coach Inc. said it settled a copyright infringement suit filed against Target Corp. in October. The suit, which also originally named Rosetti Handbags and Accessories Ltd. as a defendant, was filed in federal court in New York. Terms of the settlement are confidential, according to a statement released by New York-based Coach yesterday.
Cable Companies Lose at High Court on Must-Carry Rule
The U.S. Supreme Court, refusing to reconsider a longstanding cable industry complaint, left intact a federal requirement that providers include local broadcast stations in their channel lineups.
The high court yesterday rejected an appeal from New York- area cable provider Cablevision Systems Corp., which objected on free-speech grounds to a requirement that it make a local station available to customers on Long Island.
The appeal sought to overturn 1994 and 1997 Supreme Court decisions that upheld the must-carry rule, which Congress enacted in 1992 to protect the broadcasting industry from the growing power of cable TV networks. Cablevision, backed by Time Warner Cable Inc. and an industry trade group, said the rationale behind the must-carry rule no longer exists, in part because satellite services have captured more of the TV market.
The issue is pitting the cable industry and some program providers against broadcasters and the Obama administration, which is defending the must-carry requirements.
In urging the high court not to hear the case, U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued that cable systems now have far greater channel capacity than they did in the 1990s.
The case is Cablevision Systems v. FCC, 09-901, U.S. Supreme Court (Washington).
Microsoft Corp. will pay $200 million to VirnetX Holding Corp. in a settlement of patent-infringement lawsuits under which Microsoft will take a license of VirnetX’s patents for its products.
Shares of VirnetX, maker of real-time communications security technology, jumped 22% premarket, to $7.49. The stock has more than doubled this year.
Chairman and Chief Executive Kendall Larsen said the “agreement highlights the need for VirnetX’s secure domain-name initiative” and will allow the company to focus on coming pilot systems.
VirnetX had alleged in a February 2007 suit that Microsoft infringed two of its U.S. patents by including virtual private network technology in Microsoft’s Windows and Office communications server products. Microsoft requested a re-examination of the patents in question in December 2009.
In March, a jury recommended that Microsoft pay $105.8 million for infringing on virtual private network technology made by VirnetX. VirnetX filed a new motion against Microsoft on March 17, alleging infringement of the patents in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 products.
Microsoft had a week full of events, including the launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 for business customers, the release of its social-networking-centric Kin phones, and another legal twist in its long-running courtroom battle against small Canadian firm i4i over Microsoft Word. Microsoft hopes that strong sales of Office 2010 will convince the public of the continued viability of desktop-centric productivity software, despite the increased prevalence of cloud-based applications such as Google Apps. The Kin phones, on the other hand, mark the first release in Microsoft’s new mobile strategy.
Microsoft’s week centered on arguably its biggest software unveiling since Windows 7: the final versions of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, released to business customers on May 12. In keeping with Microsoft’s long-running attempts to make every majored software release into an “event,” the company gathered journalists, analysts, and customers on the New York set of “Saturday Night Live” for a talk by Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s Business Division.
“Organizations are adjusting to the new economic realities,” Elop told the audience. “Our customers are responding to a changing face of the workforce: the Millennial Generation, people who communicate in different ways.” Another goal of Office 2010, he added, was to meet its users’ expectations about an increasingly mobile and cloud-based workplace.
“Our employees expect the same technologies at home as in the workplace,” Elop added. “They want all of those technologies to work very well and seamlessly together.”
Microsoft faces two challenges with regard to Office 2010. The first is persuading its customers, particularly businesses with strapped IT budgets in the wake of a global recession, that the newest version of its productivity software is new enough to warrant an upgrade. Unlike Windows 7, seen by many as the antidote to the much-maligned Vista and a necessary upgrade from the stable-but-aging Windows XP, Office 2010 succeeds a relatively recent and well-regarded version—perhaps leaving customers to ask, “Why upgrade?”
Seeking to counter that, Elop spent a portion of his presentation focusing on Office 2010’s supposed ability to “reduce costs” and ignite “significant gains in productivity.”
The other challenge comes from cloud-based productivity software such as Google Apps. Although Google only held 0.09 percent of the productivity-software market by revenue in 2009, according to Gartner, the popular perception is that the growing popularity of the crowd will soon translate into substantial gains for Google Apps and its ilk. In a counterprogramming effort, Microsoft is offering free, stripped-down editions of OneNote, Excel, Word and PowerPoint to Windows Live subscribers via their browser.
Since Microsoft still needs Office to generate revenue, however, many of the top-shelf features of those applications are restricted to the full, desktop-centric version.
Google, recognizing the increased allure of cloud-based productivity, decided that the launch of Office 2010 meant it was time for a little counterprogramming of its own.
“If you’re considering upgrading Office with Office, we’d encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs,” Matthew Glotzbach, Google enterprise product management director, wrote in a May 11 posting on the Official Google Enterprise Blog. “If you choose this path, upgrade means what it’s supposed to mean: effortless, affordable, and delivering on a remarkable increase in employee productivity.”
Google Docs offers a way to “end the endless cycle of upgrades,” Glotzbach added, noting that the supposed cost of upgrading to Google’s offering would only be “a server or two.”
In the longer term, Google Docs and cloud-based productivity applications could represent a more substantial threat to the Office franchise, according to some analysts.
“I think we are likely to see a surprising number of folks look at Docs as the quick and easy way to get to features quickly during the Office 2010 upgrade cycle,” Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, wrote in an e-mail to eWEEK on May 11, “because it will be vastly easier than getting budget approval and vastly faster than waiting for the rollout of Office 2010.”
Microsoft’s other big release of the week, the Kin phones, made their debut through Verizon on May 13. The Kin One and Kin Two, designed to appeal specifically to a younger, social-networking-centric demographic, feature hardware and software leveraged towards delivering a constant stream of updates and other social data.
The Kin One will retail for $49.99 and the Kin Two for $99.99, after a $100 mail-in rebate with a two-year service plan. Talk plans start at $39.99 per month, while e-mail and Web for Smartphone plans start at $29.99 for unlimited monthly access. That price may prove a bit steep for teenagers, especially considering that the devices lack smartphone features such as app downloading; however, Microsoft is reportedly claiming that the Kin platform could eventually merge with its upcoming Windows Phone 7, which would expand the former’s functionality.
Before that potential hurdle can be overcome, though, the Kin has to deal with mixed reviews from a number of blogs and tech sites, which generally praise the phones’ ability to upload content to the cloud but also express reservations about the user interface, slowness to receive new social-networking updates, and a few hardware issues.
Ultimately, as with Office 2010, the marketplace prospects of the Kin will be dependent on a broad range of factors.
“Success will depend on how well Studio and Windows Live support integrate with the phone, and since only Microsoft can deploy a new service to the device, how well it does so is critical,” Jack Gold, principal analyst of J. Gold Associates, wrote in an April 13 research note. “Success will also depend on what types of service plans are available, how they’re priced and how good the service is (i.e., the AT&T/iPhone fiasco would be a killer for Kin). Finally, what specialized services will the carriers offer to try and garner some of the potential cloud revenue?”
Verizon is the exclusive carrier of the Kin in the U.S., while Vodaphone will perform those duties in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom later in 2010.
Sandwiched between those major releases came news of no less import to Microsoft’s fortunes: the company faced another setback in the long-running intellectual property case leveled against it by Canadian firm i4i, with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confirming the validity of a patent allegedly infringed by the software giant.
“This is a very material step in our litigation against Microsoft,” Loudon Owen, chairman of i4i, wrote in a May 11 statement. “Put simply: i4i’s patent is unequivocally valid. Even though Microsoft attacked i4i’s patent claims with its full arsenal, the Patent Office agreed with i4i and confirmed the validity of our ‘449 patent.’”
U.S. Patent 5,787,499 “infuses life into the use of Extensible Mark Up Language (X M L) and dramatically enhances the ability to structure what was previously unstructured data,” Owen continued. “As the magnitude of data grows exponentially, this is a critical technological bridge to controlling and managing this sprawling octopus of data and converting it into useful information.” More germane to i4i, though, is how Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007 allegedly feature coding that violates the patent’s properties with regard to custom X M L.
“We are disappointed,” Kevin Kutz, Microsoft’s director of public affairs, wrote in a May 11 statement, “but there still remain important matters of patent law at stake, and we are considering our options to get them addressed, including a petition to the Supreme Court.”
Jacqueline Emigh
At a posh, invitation-only bash in New York City on Wednesday, Microsoft launched Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. In so doing, the company touted many of the oft-repeated benefits around collaboration, employee productivity, and cost reduction. But more and more, it’s relying on the products’ own users to make its case.
The new Office apps made their premiere at the historic NBC Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center — the home of everyone from Arturo Toscanini conducting Beethoven’s 9th, to Chet and David calling the 1960 election, to Betty White wowing the crowd on Saturday Night Live just last week. To this illustrious roster, Microsoft this week added an ordinary customer — Wolfje Van Dijk of Netherlands-based KPN/Getronics, its lead-off speaker.
Later, during a panel discussion, users from NBC’s (current) parent General Electric, Del Monte Foods, and Australia’s New South Wales Dept. of Education and Training chimed in on attesting to Office and SharePoint 2010’s advantages. Yet even at the start of the event, some users present in the room weren’t entirely convinced over the need to upgrade.
“Under current license agreements, we can continue to use Office 2003 for free,” said Kathleen Gulley, an administrative systems manager at the large New York City-based law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, LLP. “Microsoft would need to make a compelling case for us to upgrade.” Joining me in the audience Wednesday, Gulley told me that although she’d been beta testing some of the new capabilities in Office 2010, she’d signed up to go to the launch just to see if there were more features.
Is there enough change?
Canadian-based IT solutions provider Telus has already proceeded with a company-wide deployment of SharePoint 2010. But a decision to migrate from Office 2007 to Office 2010 hasn’t yet been reached, said Dan Pontefract, Telus’ senior director for learning, during an interview with me at the rollout.
In kicking off the launch party, KPN’s Van Dijk told the assembled customers and journalists that her company will deploy Office 2010 in order to better “invest in our productivity.” With PowerPoint 2010, for instance, KPN has been able to cut the time it takes to produce a presentation to only an hour or two, according to Van Dijk, a strategist at the telecommunications firm.
“Office 2010 is a brilliant innovation. Today is a great moment,” she enthused.
Taking the stage next, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s Business Division, contended that his company’s 2010 lineup of products will suit the needs of a world that’s changed in myriad ways in only the past few years. Elop suggested that the social networking and other collaborative functionality in the 2010 products is prompted in large part by the “arrival of a Millennial generation who communicate quite differently than we do.”
But about 80% of all employees — across all age groups — use social networking tools when they’re not at work, according to Elop: “Employees expect the same technologies in the office as at home.” Meanwhile, particularly in today’s tough economic climate, businesses are looking for “demonstrable return on investment,” Elop maintained.
The leader of the Microsoft division responsible for Office and SharePoint cited the results of a Forrester Research study showing that use of the 2010 releases of Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Microsoft Project, and Visio — all released to general availability this week — will result in an overall return on investment of 301%, with a payback period of just 7.4 months after deployment.
Microsoft will offer the 2010 generation of Office technology both as software and as a cloud-based hosting service, Elop said. But at a press Q&A session later, Chris Capossela, senior VP of Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group, acknowledged that the hosted service won’t be available until the end of this year.
During the launch, Capossela demo’d a number of new capabilities in the Office 2010 family. New features in Outlook, for example, let users convert voice mail to e-mail as well as manage their “conversations” to the point of cleaning out redundant entries in conversation threads and even ridding their mailboxes of any unwanted threads.
Moreover, in an obvious nod to online collaborative apps from Google and Zoho, multiple users can now work on Excel spreadsheets, for instance, collaboratively and simultaneously. In another crowd-pleaser, you can now edit videos for use in presentations from directly within PowerPoint.
Capossela also showed how, through the use of the new Microsoft Office Web Apps, PowerPoint presentations can now be distributed to other users of PowerPoint client software, in addition to Windows Mobile phones and multi-platform browsers, including a Firefox browser running on an Apple Mac. Web Apps is an online companion to Microsoft PowerPoint, Word, Excel and OneNote.
Office 2010 also offers a simpler ribbon interface than Office 2007, along with stronger integration among its various apps, according to Capossela.
As for SharePoint, key enhancements include new blogging capabilities, Facebook-like tagging, presence awareness, the ability to categorize users as experts or novices in particular subject areas, and improved search functionality based on technology obtained through Microsoft’s buyout of Fast Search & Transfer back in 2008.
Some users will upgrade, others not so sure
During the panel discussion that followed, users mentioned a variety of benefits to Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. “Just like [with] any corporation, cost is a concern to us,” said David Glenn, director of enterprise operations at Del Monte Foods.
Glenn predicted that the collaborative functionality in the 2010 products will help speed the company’s “time to market” by accelerating learning among employees. In particular, he cited the new conversation manager in Outlook and the presence awareness capabilities in SharePoint, which can identify which members are presently online.
Mark Mastrianni, GE’s head of global technology acquisition and licensing, cited the more “intuitive” user interface of the 2010 lineup, the availability of a Paintbrush tool in every application, and general improvements in “how [the apps] work together.”
Stephen Wilson, CIO at the New South Wales Dept. of Education and Training, told the audience that, after beta testing, his organization has now decided to build a portal based on SharePoint 2010 which will enable some 1.3 million users to share files and collaborate in other ways. The school system in Australia is standardizing on Microsoft’s 2010 software from its previous “hodgepodge” of different applications, he said.
Telus, too, will use SharePoint 2010 to create a new portal, Pontefract told me later. Pontefract expects the portal to help expand employee learning way beyond the level of class instruction, a movement that’s already begun at Telus. “We will connect people and their talents and skills,” he elaborated.
Whether Telus will also migrate to Office 2010 is a matter that’s up to the company’s CIO, according to Pontefract. But the CIO has given the green light on the upgrade from SharePoint 2007. Already piloted among 1,500 users at Telus, the portal will now be extended company-wide among some 25,000 employees.
Pontefract said that he hadn’t considered collaborative products from Microsoft competitors such as IBM Lotus as alternatives because Telus has long been a Microsoft IT shop.
The factors that may trigger a decision
At the conclusion of Microsoft’s presentation, Gulley, the administrative systems manager at the New York City law firm, told me she was leaving the event more impressed with Office 2010 than when she arrived. Gulley found the video editing capabilities in PowerPoint and the support for Windows Mobile phones to be especially interesting.
“I can’t say that we’d use the mobile capabilities, because we really don’t have many mobile users right now. But we do know that this is the way the world is headed,” she told me.
But while the cross-platform collaboration aspects of the 2010 products did come across clearly at the event, some users will probably continue to wonder whether the benefits will outweigh the cost. A number of questions might spring to mind. Could the learning curve associated with Microsoft’s “ribbon interface” carry a negative impact on ROI for current users of Office 2003, for instance?
During the press Q&A, Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that Forrester’s survey only involved users who had already migrated to Office 2007.
But Capossela maintained that, when queried by Forrester, some Office 2007 users said that the ribbon interface in 2010 is “more intuitive,” and they also thought that Office 2003 users will find Office 2010 easier to learn as a result.
The 35 organizations interviewed by Forrester for the survey ranged in size from about 2,000 employees to around 100,000, Schadler said.
Speaking with me later, Schadler cast doubt on the learning curve as much of a deterrent to implementation anyway. The ribbon interface tends to be an easy “lunch-time learn,” and most users are able to adapt to it within two or three weeks, according to the analyst.
Might it be that some customers will hold off on deploying Office 2010 until the availability of the cloud-based service later this year? If so, which types of customers will wait? Schadler told me that most companies using Microsoft’s cloud-based service will be small- to mid-sized organizations as opposed to big corporations.
RIVA RICHMOND
In the technology world, the battle to win the small-business workplace is about to heat up.
On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. is set to launch Office Web Apps, the long-awaited “cloud” version of its Office suite of software, which includes business mainstays Word and Excel. The move is a nod to growing interest in Web-based applications among companies— and Google Inc.’s success in wooing an increasing number of people, especially small-business users, with its Docs online suite.
Office Web Apps will allow users to store files in Microsoft’s datacenters—or its “cloud”—rather than on their own computers. The approach, popularized by Google and others, allows users to access their files anywhere from any device via an Internet connection.
The cloud service will be included free with the new 2010 versions of Office and SharePoint, Microsoft’s Web-based collaboration software, also due out on Wednesday. A free consumer version, expected out in June, will compete with Google Docs’ free, advertising-supported basic version. Docs also has a paid version with additional business features that costs $50 per user per year.
The energized competition between the two giants will benefit small companies by spurring product innovation, while keeping prices low, says Melissa Webster, content and digital media technologies analyst at research firm IDC. With Google providing free-to-cheap software, Microsoft will be especially motivated “to show the value of its advanced functionality,” she says.
Companies of all sizes have been embracing the new “software as a service” model over traditional software in a box because the applications tend to be easy to use and a boon to worker productivity and collaboration, especially in this era of mobility. Such benefits are especially valuable to small companies, which tend to have minimal technology expertise and cash for servers and other big-ticket equipment.
“A small business typically does not have an IT staff, so the last thing they want to do is stand up [install] an email server or some other kind of server” —or patch computers or worry about data security and backup, says Rajen Sheth, senior product manger for Google Apps. “They would much rather get down to business and let the IT take care of itself.”
But when it comes to basic office software, most small businesses have so far only dabbled with cloud services. This is partly because Office, which is widely used in 97% of organizations, according to IDC, retains a powerful grip on workplaces. But it also reflects the fact that cloud offerings, primarily because of limitations the Web has imposed, have not been as feature-rich as users accustomed to desktop software need or expect.
Luckily, faster connections, advances in browser technology and the lubricant of competition are changing that. Office Web Apps will closely mimic the look, feel and functionality of Office desktop software and work seamlessly with it, Microsoft says.
The company expects many customers will want to use both the desktop and cloud versions. “We’re really focused on choice and flexibility,” says Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s U.S. Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partners Group. “We want to give our customers the option, based on how they work,” to use whichever product they prefer.
The approach could also help Microsoft preserve Office’s hold on company PCs by giving businesses the productivity and cost benefits of the cloud, as well as encouragement to keep, and indeed upgrade, their desktop products. That’s key to Microsoft, since Office is its No. 2 cash generator after Windows.
And it could provide a bulwark against steady encroachment by Google Docs. More than 2 million businesses work entirely on Docs, and 3,000 more are switching every day, Google says. And millions more use it on an ad-hoc basis to share individual files online, including Office documents.
Of course, Google isn’t standing still. It continues to add features to make Docs richer and more akin to desktop software, even as it tries to retain a fast-loading, lightweight “design for the primarily online world, sometimes offline world,” Mr. Sheth says. Docs added 60 new bits of functionality in 2008 and 100 in 2009, and the development pace is accelerating, he says. This year, his team made a number of improvements designed to give Office users more of the functionality and look and feel they expect and more tools for real-time collaboration on documents. And it will soon make it possible for users of Office 2003 and 2007 to integrate Docs into their old desktop software using a plug-in made by DocVerse, which it acquired in March.
With these changes, he says, many more small companies can comfortably skip Office upgrades and “move to Google Docs for their primary platform.”
With Google, IBM and Microsoft suddenly racing to deliver Software-as-a-Service to small businesses, Marc Benioff, outspoken co-founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, couldn’t be more tickled.
Benioff has been championing the service as disruptive technology for more than a decade. Technology Live caught up with Benioff shortly after he delivered this keynote presentation at a Google event promoting Google Apps Marketplace. Excerpts of that interview:
TL: So what do you make of all of these clever, discrete hosted services suddenly becoming available to small business?
Benioff: No one has to buy software anymore. The software has gone online. That’s where the software lives. It’s not anything more than that.
TL: So what’s driving this?
Benioff: Users are just completely frustrated with the lack of innovation that has occurred in traditional business software. You look at products like Microsoft SharePoint or IBM’s Lotus Notes and they’re designed for systems whose days are gone by.
TL: Why are you such an enthusiastic backer of Google Apps Marketplace?
Benioff: Google Apps Marketplace is kind of like Apple’s iPhone apps store, except it’s for business software. The idea is that customers can choose from a lot of different vendors and technologies and easily integrate them. That’s where the power is. There are a lot of different ways you can integrate these services together.
TL: Surely you’re not ruling out Microsoft and IBM in this emerging space?
Benioff: No. I’m not ruling out Microsoft and IBM, but they have done a terrible job over the last decade. That’s just material fact. Certainly their investors have paid the price for their inability to innovate and their attempts to try to hold on to the old paradigms instead of innovating aggressively in the Internet. It’s not about Microsoft or IBM; they’re just trying to figure out how they can tactically catch up.
TL: Where do you see this going in the next year or two?
Benioff: We are entering the second generation of cloud computing, call it Cloud 2.0. It’s about enabling a whole new level of capabilities for business users delivered on the next generation of BlackBerries, iPhones and iPads. It’s about all these cloud services providing a greater level of collaboration, social computing, communication, entertainment and information management.
TL: Do you see cloud computing emerging as an X-factor; can it help small business boost the economic recovery?
Benioff: Yes, this is fantastic for small business because it gives them the power of big business. We have large customers and we have small customers. Cisco has 50,000 users with us, Dell has 80,000 users. But we have lots of customers with five users, 10 users and 30 users. They’re all running the exact same code from the exact same servers. It used to be small business lined up over here to buy this software, medium business lined up over here and large business lined up over here. Cloud computing blurs those lines. All businesses are now able to get this kind of capability with a level of equality that’s never been possible before. It makes it a more democratic world.
The latest version promises different features based on how people use it on the PC, in a browser, and on a smartphone.
Office 2010, which goes on sale to businesses this week, shows Microsoft for the first time putting serious sweat into making the suite work better on the Web and smartphones. Microsoft still pushes the feature-packed, client-based interface, but there are notable features focused on keeping Office relevant beyond the desktop screen.
For example, the browser-based versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have “embed” tags to let a person embed a PowerPoint slide or Excel chart in a blog post. The PowerPoint would reside in a company’s SharePoint system (for a company blog) or Microsoft’s public SkyDrive (for a public blog), so when the content is updated, the embedded content in the blog stays up to date. The client versions don’t have that.
On the mobile app, Office’s OneNote digital notepad has a “take a photo” button to capture photos alongside notes out in the field. The client and browser versions don’t have that. This reflects Microsoft’s thinking that Office 2010 needs unique features based on the different screens a person might use. “We have taken an approach of ‘What does productivity mean when you’re in the browser?” as opposed to on the phone,” says Chris Capossela, Microsoft senior VP of information worker products.
So why buy the client-based Office? For one thing, Microsoft is likely to charge the same license no matter if you use Office on the PC, browser, or phone. (It hasn’t disclosed Web apps-only pricing for businesses yet.) Microsoft also touts high-end features that work only on a client, like editing rich video in PowerPoint. It expects most people will want to use all three interfaces, at different times for different purposes.
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Anywhere, anytime mobile connections can bring rising costs and pressing security concerns
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While Office 2010 brings different features to each interface, Microsoft also touts “fidelity” for Office documents. So while you need the rich-client Word to create watermarks, you don’t lose them by looking at a document on a phone or browser. “That seamlessness is critical,” says Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft business division.
But how many of us use watermarks? That’s the knock on Office–it’s feature-packed beyond what most people will ever use. There’s one rich-client feature, however, that Microsoft thinks most everyone wants: offline access. For now, rival Google Docs doesn’t offer that. Microsoft is racing to exploit this advantage while it lasts.
Pricey Verizon data plans and features that are just so-so could mean limited demand for the new devices.
The early reviews are in for Microsoft’s new KIN phones—and pundits, for the most part, aren’t overly impressed with Redmond’s attempt at a mobile device geared primarily toward social-networkers.
“The KIN One offers young people a different and fun social networking experience, but its lack of certain basic features and required monthly data plan will limit its appeal,” declared Cnet.
As for the KIN Two, Cnet said it “offers some upgrade features over the KIN One, but you can get far more for less with a number of Verizon’s other smartphones.”
Both devices in the family—KIN One and the more feature-rich KIN Two—emphasize touch-based social networking above all else, including other features, like built-in cameras, slide out QWERTY keyboards, and voice calling, that are standard on both models.
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Anywhere, anytime mobile connections can bring rising costs and pressing security concerns
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KIN One is the lite version. It’s got a smaller keyboard, a 5 megapixel camera, and 4 GB of storage. KIN Two’s keyboard is meant for two-handed texting, and it includes an 8 megapixel camera and 8 GB of storage. Both feature a built-in media player powered by Microsoft’s Zune software.
Bloggers at Gadgetell lamented the fact that both phones automatically update feeds from social networking sites only every 15 minutes. “For teens and others on the go, how is this acceptable,” said the blog.
The widely read tech blog Engadget was also unimpressed. “It’s clear to us from conversations we’ve had with Microsoft that there are people at the company with good ideas about what phones should and shouldn’t do, but we don’t feel the KIN is representative of those ideas,” said Engadget.
“The execution (or lack thereof) on these products makes us legitimately concerned about what the company will do with Windows Phone 7,” Engadget concluded.
Not everyone hates KIN, however. The Wall Street Journal’s Katherine Boehret said she liked KIN One’s overall look and feel.
“Though Microsoft’s KIN One has some polishing to do on its camera and on its social-networking tools, it’s a uniquely attractive device that’s a pleasure to use. I only wish all mobile devices had worry-free backup websites like the KIN Studio,” wrote Boehret.
KIN phones, manufactured by Sharp, debut in the U.S. this week on Verizon Wireless. KIN One is priced at $49.99 while KIN Two is $99.99. Pricing for both is based on a two-year contract and $100 mail-in rebate.
Microsoft also recommends that KIN users subscribe to a Verizon Wireless Nationwide Talk plan, which starts at $39.99 per month, and a Verizon Wireless Email and Web for smartphone plan, which starts at $29.99 per month.
The phones’ main interface, the KIN Loop, offers feeds and status updates from Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft’s own Wonder Wall, and other Web 2.0 sites. To share an item with a group of friends, users just drag it into a small circle called the KIN Spot. Graphically, the item then disappears down the circle like Alice through the rabbit hole—and it’s shared.
KIN’s primary emphasis on socializing means it’s unlikely to appeal to professionals, who will likely wait until Microsoft rolls out Windows Phone 7 devices later this year if they want a work-savvy mobile experience based on Windows technology.
On Tuesday at the Web 2.0 conference, Microsoft took the wraps off of what it called the “Impossible Project”: a Web site, spindex.me, that will serve as a sort of personal Web aggregator.
Spindex.me is live, but Microsoft is requiring users to sign up and be approved. A Windows Live account is also required.
Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs, characterized Spindex as “one-size-fits-all search for everyone on the planet”.
“Today we have one index for everyone in the world,” Cheng said. “If you want to delete something you can’t; if you want to mark something up it’s really difficult.”
Spindex appears to be an aggregation of RSS and Twitter feeds and other social networks, something akin to, well, most sites with social aspirations.
In the ten minutes that Cheng was allotted, she quickly ran through one feature she thought to be significant: trending subtopics. “One of the problems that I have with trending topics is that they seem to trend over and over every single day,” she said, noting the frequency of terms like “iPad”.
Spindex appears to have the ability to curate and pull out other terms underlying the general search term, based on what your social contacts might be saying: breaking down “iPad” into “keyboards,” or “best apps,” for example. Unfortunately, a webcast of Cheng’s speech was just frustratingly blurry enough to avoid being able to pull specific details, but hopefully it won’t be “impossible” to obtain some clearer screenshots in the near future.
Microsoft released a second “platform preview” version of Internet Explorer 9 on Wednesday with faster JavaScript and better Web standards compliance–plus an argument for how future Web technology should develop.
Central to the second IE9 preview is progress toward matching rivals in SunSpider, a speed test of Web-based JavaScript programs, and Acid3, a test of adherence to some Web technologies. On the first, Microsoft improved from 590 to 473 milliseconds; on the second, from 55 to 68 out of a possible 100. But there’s more to the story than benchmarks.
The new platform preview, arriving seven weeks after the first version of IE9 that programmers could try, embodies Microsoft’s ambition to remake its browser and restore an IE reputation tarnished by years of relative stasis and of indifference to Web standards. During those years, Mozilla’s Firefox rose to claim about a quarter of Web usage and Google’s Chrome burst on the scene with the mission to make the Web faster. Those organizations, along with Apple and Opera, are also working on a host of new technologies to make the Web into a more powerful foundation for Web applications, and this is where Microsoft’s role is evolving.
Microsoft’s IE9 progress is notable, given how IE critics long have offered both those tests as evidence of IE’s shortcomings. At the same time that Microsoft has come onto the playing field set up by its foes, though, it’s also trying to steer the browser debate in its own direction, with two words: “same markup.”
That’s shorthand for avoiding new technologies in earlier stages of maturity and browser support. Earlier IE9 attention has focused on hardware-accelerated graphics and text, said Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch, but “I think it’s same markup’s turn.”
Standards issue
Here’s why the “same markup” push is important: it turns on its head one of Microsoft’s biggest weaknesses, IE’s historic lack of support for Web standards. Instead of neglecting Web standards, the company is trying to define them.
In so doing, it’s trying to steer the Web in the directions it prefers. At the same, it’s putting its weight behind only one of two primary standards bodies in charge of HTML5, the next version of Hypertext Markup Language: the World Wide Web Consortium.
“The W3C is the HTML5 standards body,” Hachamovitch said.
But, it turns out, not the only one. Here’s some history.
The W3C did indeed oversee the creation of HTML. But the most recent version with its imprimatur is 4.01, released in November 1999. A decade is a long time in Web years.
What happened in the intervening period? Two things. First, the W3C worked for years on the ultimately fruitless effort to create XHTML 2.0, a more formal Web standard but one that wasn’t compatible with the existing–and thriving–Web. Second, beginning in 2004, browser makers Opera, Mozilla, and Apple formed a less formal group called WHATWG, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group.
WHATWG worked on what ultimately would become HTML5. The W3C, meanwhile, restarted its HTML work and abandoned the XHTML 2.0 effort.
Microsoft’s position notwithstanding, WHATWG retains clout. It’s most formally called out in the W3C’s HTML5 draft, which states, “The contents of this specification are also part of a specification published by the WHATWG,” and includes a link to the WHATWG mailing list where active HTML discussion still takes place.
This dual-organization approach certainly can be awkward, even though many of the same participating individuals are involved in both. But to some extent it reflects differences in approach.
There is a certain amount of spaghetti thrown against the wall with the WHATWG’s style–new technologies can arrive in browsers at different times and in incompatible ways. But standards bodies face a constant tension between a utopian vision and the messy real world. For every problem caused by chaotic development, there’s a matching problem caused by formality.
Standards bodies don’t capture the full reality of the computing industry, either. Hachamovitch won’t call WHATWG a standards body, and nor does Wikipedia, but it’s got many of the same means and ends in mind as the W3C. There are de facto standards, too. The Windows operating system, for example, is entrenched enough that a vast ecosystem of products exists above and below it.
Of markups and hiccups
And there’s the Khronos Group, which along with Mozilla is working to standardize a 3D Web technology called WebGL that’s making its way into Chrome, Firefox, and the WebKit browser engine that underlies Safari. Note that Microsoft’s Direct3D technology competes directly with Khronos Group’s OpenGL, which is used in Mac OS X and Linux, iPhone and Android phones, and WebGL.
Standard or not, Hachamovitch has no love for WebGL.
“I think it’s different markup,” he said. “You’re telling developers, ‘Go write something else.’”
Another data point is support for SVG, a W3C standard called Scalable Vector Graphics. It’s a prominent feature in IE9, but one that Microsoft spurned for years. To take advantage of SVG, Web developers will have to learn new technology. Those with an edge, though, are the programmers who cut their SVG teeth using the other browsers that already support it.
While Microsoft might benefit from a more stately pace of standard development, though, and one in which it has a louder voice, don’t view the company’s stance as merely self-serving.
Hachamovitch has a point when he makes note of Mozilla’s decision to stay on the Web Sockets sidelines for now. Chrome includes an older version of the Web Sockets feature to improve communications between Web servers and Web browsers, and until the specification settles down, Mozilla isn’t adding support. That means Web developers thinking about building services using WebSockets must worry about which browser is using that service.
And this all comes around to one of the characteristics of the Web: It’s fluid and organic. A thriving ecosystem can be a strength, but the attendant chaos also can be a weakness.
Internet Explorer’s market share dipped again in April 2010, falling below 60 percent as Chrome and Firefox gained.
(Credit: Net Applications)
“Developers have the power to make the Web great. If they’re spending all their time doing a little bit of special markup for this browser, another little bit of special markup for that browser, it’s diluting (their work), Hachamovitch said. “Developers pay with their time.”
Microsoft has good reason to re-engage with the Web technology realm. The Web is getting steadily more important, dot-com bubble and recent economic shocks notwithstanding, and Microsoft can’t afford to be left behind.
IE’s share of usage has steadily dwindled in recent years, losing out chiefly to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. In April, IE share sunk below 60 percent from 76 percent in May 2008, according to browser research from Net Applications. This vote of dwindling confidence is a long-term trend Microsoft needs to worry about.
But there’s more to the IE share situation than meets the eye. Drilling a little deeper into the statistics shows that IE8 rose from 27.01 percent to 28.05 percent from March to April (including IE8 emulating earlier IE versions and derivatives such as Maxthon). That 1.04 percentage point increase is greater than the 0.6 percentage-point total gain of Chrome from 6.13 percent 6.73 percent from March to April.
Chrome usage is growing relatively quickly, to be sure, but the gains by IE8 show that IE’s tremendous installed base of users, though they upgrade slowly, is a powerful asset. Rival browser makers collectively continue to draw users away from Microsoft, but that could get harder as the competition becomes IE8 and IE9 rather than the reviled, comparatively ancient, and now finally fading IE6.
One thing is certain amid the changing landscape, though: with IE9 and its participation in multibrowser standards work, Microsoft has an increasingly important place at the Web technology table.
Jared Newman
The first reviews of Microsoft’s Kin phones are in, and while critics don’t agree on whether the phones are a success, they do agree on one thing: the price of Verizon Wireless’ data plans could doom the phones to obscurity.
Microsoft headed off the beaten path with Kin, designing phones that emphasize text messages, status updates and e-mails packed with photo and video, in a free flowing interface that combines your entire universe into one feed. After reading Kin reviews from PCWorld, Engadget, Gizmodo, All Things D and PCMag, I’ve concluded that the Kin One and Two are deeply flawed phones with some ideas that work. The dealbreaker is Verizon’s mandatory $30-per-month smartphone data plan, appalling given the Kin’s limitations.
Flawed Hardware
The Kin’s hardware seems respectable, at least in terms of specs. Nvidia’s Tegra APX2600 powers the phone, and while storage is tight at 4 GB for the Kin One and 8 GB for the Kin Two, most of your data gets backed up to the cloud (more on that below). Both phones have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1.
In practice, the gripes with Kin’s hardware pile up. Gizmodo says the main user interface is sluggish, and PCWorld noticed lag even when typing. PCMag had qualms with the Kin One in particular, blasting its weak speakerphone and tiny display. Several reviewers noted that 5-megapixel and 8-megapixel cameras on the Kin One and Two, supposedly a central feature, create dim or blurry photos in low light and washed out photos when flash is involved. Engadget noted that the positioning of the camera buttons on both phones tend to make your hand block the lens. PCWorld is the dissenting opinion, praising photos as sharp, with powerful flash to boot.
Limiting Software
Classifying the Kin as a smartphone is questionable given the things you can’t do with it, no matter what Verizon says. You can’t watch Web video, you can’t send photos or video on Twitter, the Web browser doesn’t support tabs, there’s no native calendar or ability to sync other calendars, and there’s no native GPS for accomplishing the very social function of meeting up with friends in real life. All of these limitations make the $30-per-month data plan requirement hard to swallow.
So, what can the Kin do? Its essence is the “The Loop,” a running feed of e-mails, text messages, status updates, and RSS feeds from your favorite Web sites. Complementing this ticker is “The Spot,” a dot at the bottom of the screen that lets you pull in photos, video and Web links. Once your media is gathered, you can send it out to the world by text, e-mail or social network. Gizmodo liked the idea. Engadget hated it. To say it’s a matter of preference is probably a safe bet.
One Beautiful Feature
The one thing that drew unanimous praise from critics is Kin Studio, which actually has little to do with the phone itself. This desktop app automatically pulls photo, video, text messages, contacts, and news feeds into the cloud. Phone gets lost? Friend grabbed your phone and deleted the more unflattering photos? No problem, everything’s stored away with no effort from the user. Windows Phone 7 needs this feature.
Pre-orders for both the Kin One and Two start on May 5 for $50 and $100 respectively, with a two-year contract with Verizon Wireless. The phones will be available online starting May 6, and will reach Verizon stores on May 13.
Daniel Ionescu
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser market share has dipped to a historic all-time-low in April, at under 60 percent, according the latest NetApplications statistics. Internet Explorer’s losses are at the expense of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome browser which continue to grow more popular.
For the first time since Internet Explorer 4 won over Netscape over 10 years ago, Microsoft’s browser has dropped in usage to 59.95 per cent market share in April this year. Internet Explorer had an 80 percent market share less than two years ago.
NetApplications browser market share statistics for April 2010.
According to the NetApplications statistics, Mozilla’s Firefox browser now has nearly 25 percent market share, and has been stationery for the last two months at around a quarter of the market. Firefox is still the largest threat to Internet Explorer’s dominance.
Lower down in the NetApplication rankings was Google’s Chrome (6.7 percent), leading the WebKit-powered browsers, ahead of Apple’s Safari (4.7 percent). Chrome’s surge in use is impressive, considering it had zero percent share prior to 2009.
Opera, which has been recently in the news with their new Opera Mini browser for iPhone, commands only 2.3 percent of the market in the NetApplications statistics.
NetApplciation’s numbers are not too far off from StatCounter data either, which says that Internet Explorer has 56.5 percent of the market share, followed by Firefox with 31.3 per cent, then by Chrome and Safari with 5.3 and 3.6 percent respectively. StatCounter measures Opera at 2.2 percent.
Nielsen data on the other hand, via a BBC report, suggest that Internet Explorer has not lost much ground against its fellow rival browsers, and still commands 70 per cent of the market, while Mozilla has only 18 percent.
Jack Phillips
Courier, a tablet project that was being developed by Microsoft to potentially compete with Apple’s iPad was sidelined, according to an official Microsoft blog post on Thursday.
Though it was never officially announced that the Courier tablet was being developed, speculators thought the device could give the iPad a run for its money, and lower the iPad’s cost due to competition.
Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Communications Frank Shaw posted the bombshell on a blog after there had been a “ton of speculation” about the device.
“At any given time, we’re looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them. It’s in our DNA to develop new form factors and natural user interfaces to foster productivity and creativity,” said Shaw.
The prototype had two seven-inch folding screens, WiFi, a camera, and had both a touch and pen interface, according to Gizmodo.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Courier tablet was being developed by Alchemy Ventures, a new technologies lab at Microsoft. Microsoft told the lab to halt development.
“[Courier] will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time,” said Shaw in the statement.
On Friday, the new 3G version of the iPad was released in the U.S.
Denise Dubie
Microsoft confirmed it has canceled further development and production on its tablet project, codenamed Courier, which industry watchers speculated could help drive down costs of Apple’s popular iPad.
“At any given time, across any of our business groups, there are new ideas being investigated, tested, and incubated. It’s in Microsoft’s DNA to continually develop and incubate new technologies to foster productivity and creativity,” said Frank Shaw, corporate vice president of communications at Microsoft, in a statement. “The ‘Courier’ project is an example of this type of effort and its technologies will be evaluated for use in future Microsoft offerings.”
According to published reports from Gizmodo, Microsoft stopped production its planned double-screen tablet that had some industry watchers excited about its potential to increase competition in the tablet market. Courier, along with the HP Slate running Windows 7, the Dell Streak running Google’s Android OS and Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1, had industry watchers projecting that competitive offerings would bring down the cost of Apple’s iPad.
Expected in the second half of this year, Courier was reportedly formatted in the shape of a book with two 7-inch screens, a built-in camera and Wi-Fi, according to published reports. The device also was said to support a variety of user inputs such as touching, handwriting and drawing.
Tony Bradley
Microsoft announced a licensing agreement with smartphone manufacturer HTC this week. While the overt message is that Microsoft is going after Android, it seems like Microsoft may be coming to the defense of HTC and firing a warning shot across Apple’s bow.
Neither Microsoft nor HTC is sharing details regarding the specific patents being licensed or the financial terms of the arrangement, but the implication is that Microsoft feels that smartphones based on Google’s Android OS–like the Nexus One and Incredible handsets from HTC– infringe on some of its intellectual property rights.
Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft explained via e-mail “Microsoft has a decades-long record of investment in software platforms. As a result, we have built a significant patent portfolio in this field, and we have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to ensure that competitors do not free ride on our innovations. We have also consistently taken a proactive approach to licensing to resolve IP infringement by other companies, and have been talking with several device manufacturers to address our concerns relative to the Android mobile platform.”
Gutierrez also stated in a recent blog post commenting on Apple’s patent infringement lawsuits against HTC “The smartphone market is still in a nascent state; much innovation still lies ahead in this field. In all nascent technology markets, there is a period early where IP rights will be sorted out. This is particularly true in a market, such as smartphones, in which a number of different technologies previously offered on a standalone basis now converge into a single device.”
“Indeed, smartphones are a product of the ‘open innovation’ paradigm–device manufacturers do not do all of their development in-house, but add their own innovations to those of others to create a product that users want. Open innovation is only possible through the licensing of third party IP rights, which ensures that those who develop the building blocks that make a new technology possible are properly compensated for their investments in research and development. After all, technology just doesn’t appear, fully-developed, from Zeus’s head. It requires lots of hard work and resources to create,” continued Guiterrez.
I respect Gutierrez’ authority as an expert in intellectual property rights, and he makes valid points. Where it gets a little foggy for me is the fact that Microsoft and HTC have a long-standing relationship, and at face value the technology underlying the Nexus One or Incredible doesn’t seem that much different than the technology behind the Windows Mobile-based handsets from HTC such as the Touch Pro-2.
So, why now? While HTC has embraced the Android platform, it has a history with Microsoft. The reality is that HTC is almost single-handedly responsible for whatever success Windows Mobile has experienced up to now. As capable as the Windows Mobile operating system has been, HTC provided innovative customizations, and a unique experience that made it better.
Granted, Microsoft is not a friend of Google, and I have no doubt that Microsoft would aggressively pursue defending its intellectual property rights against the Android operating system. It appears to be doing so, and other Android-based smartphone manufacturers are probably either already engaged in talks with Microsoft for a similar licensing agreement, or waiting for the phone to ring to get the conversation started.
But, the pre-existing relationship between Microsoft and HTC, and the sort of overlap and redundancy apparent in many of these smartphone technology patents suggests that Microsoft is sending a message to Apple at the same time: “If you want to challenge HTC, you’re going to have to deal with Microsoft as well.” The patented technologies are probably similar, and HTC can defend its position against Apple by pointing out that it is using legally-licensed technologies from Microsoft.
I agree with Gutierrez assertion that the technologies that make up the backbone and framework of smartphones and that there is some negotiation that has to go on between the various parties to ensure intellectual property rights are respected. However, it seems like it would be beneficial for the parties involved, as well as the smartphone and mobile markets and their customers, if the various entities could work out arrangements as Microsoft and HTC have, and leave the courts and the International Trade Commission out of it.
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