Microsoft

Lessons from Nokia's CEO: ignore your product & your customers

Samat Jain — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 03:39:56 +0000

So, Nokia’s paper-launched their newest flagship phone, the N9.

The N9 is based (well, sort-of, anyway—something many media outlets have gotten wrong) on Nokia’s Linux-based operating system MeeGo, which they’ve been developing in-house for several years. However, in 2010, Nokia decided to switch their flagship mobile phone OS from MeeGo to Windows Phone 7—effectively aborting all long-term plans and products in the pipeline.

This has universally been regarded as a bad move.

The N9 was apparently far enough down the pipeline, and new products based on Windows Phone 7 so far, that Nokia released the device anyway. So far, the N9 is a hit.

The move to the new OS is considered the handiwork of recently-appointed Nokia CEO Stephen Elop. However, an article in the Helsingin Sanomat paraphrases Elop:

In Elop’s words, there is no returning to MeeGo, even if the N9 turns out to be a hit.

So, it doesn’t matter if Nokia’s own products are successful? The business deal made with Microsoft is more important?

I read:

I have taken part in the conversations with the teleoperators and I have been part of the consumer test groups. The feedback has been extremely positive and I am sure that the Windows Phone system will be a great success

And think: teleoperators and consumer test groups are one thing, but what about your own customers and developers?

Lessons learned here: ignore your product, and ignore your customers, and you too can be part of a company as successful as Nokia. Maybe, as CEO, you’ll get your own social media hashtag too.

Topic:

Play WebM in Internet Explorer 9

Samat Jain — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:51:39 +0000

Update: Google now offers a WebM plugin for Internet Explorer 9, much easier than what I’ve detailed below.

Google’s recent announcement deprecating H.264 for Chrome (see my thoughts on it) means it’s likely that WebM will become the defacto standard for the HTML5 video tag, supported by Internet Explorer 9. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 9 does not (yet) ship with WebM, despite a lot of misleading PR indicating some kind of “compatibility”.

So, how do you play WebM with Internet Explorer 9?

The easiest way is to use the DirectShow filter pack from Xiph.org. Download and install the installer, available for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and not only will you be able to play WebM/VP8, but also Ogg/Theora, Vorbis, Speex, and FLAC. It’s an royalty-free, open-source standards smörgåsbord!

What do you do next? Of course, submit feedback! Click Send Feedback under Internet Explorer’s Tools menu, and simply ask Microsoft: please support WebM!

Clarification: Don’t install the Support for HTML <video> tag option. It installs an ActiveX control, which requires some extra markup (see the release notes).

Note: Internet Explorer 9 is a beta, as well as Xiph’s DirectShow filters. IE9 doesn’t support a lot of <video> tag features, so many demos out there on the Internet don’t work.

Topic:

Microsoft

Web 2.0

Web Video

Microsoft's Hyper-V contribution is not outside their agenda

Samat Jain — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:26:05 +0000

If you pay attention to Linux-related news, you may have heard that Microsoft has contributed code adding Hyper-V acceleration to the Linux kernel. This event is not something that falls outside of their corporate agenda (whether it falls out of their strategy, I’ll let Steve Balmer voice).

Hyper-V is Microsoft’s hypervisor, included with the server editions of Windows (somewhat similar to VMware Workstation or Sun’s VirtualBox). It lets you run other guest operating systems within the currently running one (called the host OS). Typically, virtualizing guest OSes is slow. To improve performance, rather than virtualizing everything, special drivers and software can be installed into the guest OS to make certain things faster (such as graphics, disk I/O, etc).

The popular Linux hypervisors (Xen, KVM, etc) don’t have special drivers like these for Windows, so they won’t be able to run Windows particularly quickly. With Microsoft’s contribution, Linux now will ship with built-in acceleration for Microsoft’s hypervisor, making Linux run that much faster. If you were an IT shop that simultaneously needed to maximize performance and run both Linux and Windows, would you:

Run an open-source Linux hypervisor, and virtualize Windows (slow)
Run Microsoft’s hypervisor, included with expensive Windows Server licenses, and virtualize Linux (fast)

The answer’s clear. Microsoft’s kernel contribution brings them good PR and satisfies real-world customer demands, while continuing to promote their agenda to make running Windows seem like the best choice. Smart move!

Topic:

Linux

Corporations

Microsoft

jQuery: the new defacto Javascript web framework

Samat Jain — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:38:47 +0000

News from a couple days ago: both Microsoft and Nokia are now including the jQuery Javascript framework as part of their development kits. That is: jQuery will be part of Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX framework and be available for use in applications written for ASP.NET; and jQuery will also be distributed on millions of Nokia phones.

Defacto standards, I believe, are a good way to inform the development of real standards. Standards developed the other way around, at least in the tech industry, have had a habit of taking a very long time to reach end consumers… for example, how many decades has it taken for your average web user to gain access to a fully CSS2-compliant web browser? How many more decades will it take for OASIS’s OpenDocument format to supplant Microsoft Word and its *.doc files?

Hopefully, this is the beginning of a path that will lead to jQuery’s inclusion into the Javascript language, as well as initiatives that will improve jQuery’s performance.

I like the fact that Microsoft and Nokia are not trying to reinvent the wheel, and roll their own Javascript frameworks. Sun did this with Java Server Faces. A frequent lament with JSF is that it’s nearly impossible to customize any of the widgets. There is too much complex, custom Javascript, and the adoption of the frameworks used makes figuring out how to work with them difficult.

Also, as others have noted, this is the first time Microsoft itself is distributing an open-source project with one of their products. A sign of things to come?

Topic:

Why office machines and gadgets hate me (and why I hate them back)

Samat Jain — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:56:55 +0000

I consider myself a luddite when it comes to most forms of technology, particularly with those devices that are said to “just work.” This includes photocopiers, fax machines, complex phones (e.g. multi-line phone systems, cell phones), printers, home theater systems, and other unholy bastard combinations of these devices. Somehow, they don’t “just work” for me.

Microsoft is very rare at “getting it right,” but on some things they have: one of the goals of Microsoft’s Office 2007 was to help its users more easily and quickly create good looking documents. Doing it quickly makes the user feel smart; having it look good makes the user look smart too.

When I’m fumbling around with inane office equipment and devices, trying to figure out what some flashing LED with meaningless icon is trying to convey, or trying to figure out what combinations of buttons must be pushed in what order to make some device perform some magic function, I don’t feel very smart. When I cannot get these devices to work the way I want them to, it makes me feel stupid and don’t want to use the device again, and become bitter about it (as if I wasn’t bitter enough already).

This is probably the basis for the luddite attitude of many people, for both gadgets and technology as well as computers.

I don’t think this is our fault…

Besides many manufacturers’ complete ineptitude in usability and market testing, many, many manufacturers cut corners and have electrical and hardware engineers write software and design interfaces, instead of hiring dedicated software engineers and usability experts. Just because an electrical/hardware engineer knows how to program, it does not mean they can produce good software, or even know what they are doing.

Topic:

Microsoft

Life

Microsoft Windows Vista and the end of the computer hardware industry

Samat Jain — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 04:35:35 +0000

Peter Gutmann, a cryptography expert at the University of Auckland, has written a Cost Analysis of Windows Vista, where he discusses how the “content protection” and trusted platform features described in the Microsoft Windows Vista “security” specification will destroy reliability and innovation in the computer hardware industry, as well as make life miserable for us, the users.

Doomsday scenarios like this were brought up when Microsoft Windows XP was about to be released, and though it was enough to make me switch away from Windows to Linux, most of the concerns did not materialize. I don’t know if Vista will be any different of a situation, but if the notion that they definitely want this kind of control (irrespective of whether they can actually do it, or whether the market will let them) doesn’t make anyone who enjoys using their computer want to switch, I don’t know what will.

Topic:

Microsoft

Amazon A9's siteinfo.xml: almost a repeat of favicon.ico

Samat Jain — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 11:47:42 +0000

Recently, I’ve received a few error 404s on a request for “siteinfo.xml.” siteinfo.xml is a file used by Amazon’s A9 search engine’s browser toolbar SiteInfo, and is automatically fetched for every website a user visits.

This sounds pretty similar to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s infamous favorites icons feature. For every site a user visited with Internet Explorer, the browser would automatically request a file called favicon.ico, to be displayed in the browser’s location bar and bookmarks. A lot of people were not happy–all of the sudden web servers would begin to get swamped for requests for this mysterious favicon.ico that did not exist. These requests polluted many web server logs, and were very annoying.

On some sites, especially dynamic ones, 404 errors are very expensive. Unfortunately this is true of most Drupal-powered sites, including mine. When using Drupal’s “pretty URLs” which uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to, well, make URLs pretty, all requests that the web server does not process (including errors) will go through Drupal. Going through Drupal means a long boot-strapping process to initialize Drupal and load all its modules, and at least one database request to find out a URL does not exist and to return an error 404. Too many requests for a non-existent file can basically become a DoS attack.

It seems Amazon’s A9 developers didn’t get the memo people don’t like tools that request files that don’t exist.

Granted, it’s not too bad: I don’t think this toolbar has much market penetration, so it’s not as if millions of people are killing my site. The siteinfo.xml specification page also mentions that the file is fetched through A9 and cached, so the file will not be requested for every user that visits, but only for the first one.

Kudos for Amazon’s programmers being a bit brighter than Microsoft’s, but eh, I can’t say how much more bright for designing a system that is a bit too similar to the favicon.ico debacle.

Topic:

Drupal

Microsoft

Web 2.0

Google sues Microsoft over default search engine in Internet Explorer 7

Samat Jain — Thu, 04 May 2006 05:17:31 +0000

Google sues Microsoft. Google claims that Microsoft is a monopoly, and by setting the default search engine in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 to Microsoft-owned MSN Search, they are abusing their power as a monopoly.

I do not see Google making a good case here… MSN Search is a Microsoft product, as is Internet Explorer 7 and Windows. Microsoft has the right to promote its own products, and so far there is no evidence that Microsoft prevents or impairs use of Google or any other search engine.

Microsoft does not appear to care that Google is the default search engine for America Online’s client software, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari. It can be difficult to add MSN Search to these browsers as well: in Firefox, it took as many as 6-clicks and skimming through several pages to add MSN Search (it is now down to 2 clicks, with more simple pages).

Before you compare this to the Netscape versus Microsoft antitrust lawsuit back in the 1990s, understand it is a bit different. The case did not get traction till the issue of Internet Explorer using secret Windows APIs came up. Microsoft could use these secret APIs to make its browser faster; since they were secret no other 3rd party would be able to use them. It gives the Microsoft product a distinct, unfair advantage: it’s an abuse of power as a monopoly.

So far, there is no evidence of Microsoft doing anything like this in Google’s lawsuit.

I think it’s pretty clear Microsoft and Google are at war. And because everyone and their grandmother uses Windows, Microsoft will win. Of course, this will change if Google decides to introduce their own operating system, and can market it well enough so that a significant amount of people switch to it. Things are going to get interesting…

Topic:

Corporations

Microsoft

Embrace and... embrace some more?

Samat Jain — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 05:16:21 +0000

Microsoft’s infamous Windows Genuine Advantage program is an attempt at combating piracy of Windows, and it is supposedly working quite well.

Microsoft has had a past of “embracing and extending” various technologies, but apparently here’s an instance of them just embracing: if you visit Microsoft’s download center with an alternate browser such as Mozilla Firefox. Instead of being told to switch to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, they offer a plugin that can perform the Windows Genuine Validation within Firefox and other Netscape-compatible browsers.

I’m impressed. Go Microsoft.

Topic:

Microsoft

Microsoft Windows

The next Microsoft Office... even uglier

Samat Jain — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:20:00 +0000

When I first saw Microsoft Office 2003, I thought it was fairly ugly. It looked like some kind of ugly KDE theme.

And now, apparently Office 12 looks even uglier.

Topic:

Software

Microsoft

Microsoft Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat's web-plugin, and Apache's mod_deflate

Samat Jain — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 04:45:00 +0000

For the past year this has been a problem with the server this website has been hosted on; it was the strangest thing ever that I could not understand. If you tried to view a PDF file you placed on the web server with Microsoft Internet Explorer with Adobe’s Acrobat web plugin on Windows (a very common configuration), you would get an error about the PDF being corrupt and that it could not be opened.

It worked everywhere else: Mozilla Firefox and the Adobe Acrobat web plugin on Windows, with zero problems with any combination of browser and PDF viewer on Linux and OS X.

Apache 2.0’s documentation on mod_deflate suggests to compress everything except image files:

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

The problem with this: there are many filetypes left out that don’t compress well, and can cause problems–like PDFs combined with Internet Explorer and Adobe’s Acrobat plugin.

The solution, add the rule:

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:pdf)$ no-gzip dont-vary

This prevents PDF files from being compressed with mod_deflate. It’s also useful to add such files as MP3s, zips, and rars.

Topic:

Software

Microsoft