Microsoft tries to get open source

Here are some addition thoughts on Microsoft’s Technology Summit (MTS07). I wanted to jot down some thoughts, what I learned, and what the role of Microsoft will be in the coming years for the evolution of the Web and open source. (This essay was also posted to Techweb here.)

Microsoft still has this love/hate relationship with the Mac. Some of the presenters deliberately brought Macs, including one who ran Vista under Parallels. Yet when someone asked if anyone had tested interop of Vista with Mac OS X, it was clear that this wasn’t a focus. (And for those of us that have both, a continuing frustration.) For Microsoft to succeed, the Mac has to move from being a poster child OS, a necessary evil and some annoying relative to be tolerated to an actual strategic direction and integral to the company’s success. The people that have moved to Mac desktops are canaries in the coal mine. They aren’t happy with Windows for very real reasons (blue screen and security sinkholes come to mind). It continues to be a platform that is used by many developers.

There is a growing emphasis on interoperability at Microsoft, and they are clearly spending a lot of resources on projects (such as Windows and other OSs, new versions of Windows networking protocols, and new programming languages with older ones) but there is still room for improvement. You can never do too much interop testing. Interop is getting more attention, but still isn’t infused into the core culture yet.

Microsoft is a company of coders, and they respond best to an audience full of coders too. Coders are the heart and soul of what drives this place. They have always understood what developers do and think and eat and drink. Speaking of which, during one of the presentations, an Outlook reminder popped up on screen that listed as overdue the items “eat dinner” and “go home.” That resonated amongst the geeks in attendance.

But let’s face it — in the past several years, developers have moved away from writing code for single-PC applications and Microsoft still doesn’t quite get this whole Internet thing. “We didn’t understand open source and didn’t use the correct words back in 2005,” said Bill Hilf, one of their head open source advocates. During the meetings, the audience took them to task about lack of enthusiasm for various open source projects. I found it interesting that most – not all, but most — of the presenters still were viewing open source as competing with some Microsoft product offering. They need to realize that people are going to use both, and want not only choice but also the ability to freely code in both MS and open source projects. Don Box, one of the developer evangelists, semi-seriously said, “I humbly apologize on behalf of the 70,000 owner operators of Microsoft for the statements our CEO makes to scare all the open source people.” But there was an element of truth of course behind it.

The more that Microsoft can make this ambidexterity possible and successful, the more software they will sell. Some of the presenters clearly understood this, but others still characterize things as “us” versus “them”. Because Microsoft is a big company, it is hard sometimes to identify when or how a particular program or project will ultimately drive bottom-line revenue. Is getting more people to write .Net code going to bring in more bucks than getting more people to buy more Windows servers? Is getting Windows better at running PHP going to drive more revenue than getting Windows to become a more secure Internet-facing OS? I dare say that these aren’t easy or simple decisions, and sometimes they don’t get it right the first time.

What is clear is that Microsoft “is the most fanatically self-critical company that I have ever worked for,” says Hilf. They spend time even examining other people’s code, just so they can learn from their mistakes, at least according to Michael Howard, their security czar. “But I don’t want you to love me, I just want you to buy more of my software, ” says Hilf. Note in that statement is the assumption that we are already buying their stuff. But not enough: “We have failed to convey the power of our platform with the elite,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, the uber-evalengist and programming manager.

They are trying to regain Web thought leadership with IE7 and IIS7, but the open source group (or at least the group that was assembled) has moved on to Firefox and LAMP. “Seventy percent of the Web sites are scripted with PHP and under 20% of those are deployed on IIS,” says Sam Ramji, the director of their open source labs. “We are losing these developers and doing something wrong.” Many of the attendees that I spoke to had a “nothing to see, let’s move along” attitude about IE and IIS: they haven’t used the new versions, didn’t really care, and weren’t interested. I surprisingly learned that a full copy of IIS7 has been shipping in Vista – did I miss that memo? Gotta wonder with all the stuff that I read (and wrote) about Vista, why this key factoid eluded me until now.

Part of the problem (for Microsoft) with Web development today is that it is too pluralistic. Microsoft thrives best when it can focus on a single competitor – Don Box mentioned how they are laser focused on Google, made even more ironic by a developer who works for Google sitting right next to me. “We are a lot of little companies inside here and one of them will figure out a way to crush Google. Still, they are the best thing that happened to us, and are going to make us better.” But focusing on Google isn’t the only answer, and the problem with open source is that a thousand flowers are growing out there, and maybe ten or a hundred of them will bloom and blossom into something useful. It is getting harder to keep track.

A corollary to this is that the c2007 world of programming is all about being able to teach new programmers how to learn new languages. This is somewhat of a challenge for the compsci departments of today, who are trying to find a new curriculum and state of purpose for their students. No one knows this better than Microsoft. Kevin Schofield, who runs Microsoft Research, called Microsoft “the world’s largest compsci department.” They have published almost a paper a day for the past 15 years.

It was quite a learning experience this week. I apologize if these are more like notes than a coherent essay, but I am still digesting what I heard, and reading the various blogs of the attendees and presenters. I have posted links to all of these discussions (Ben and Travis have the most complete coverage of the MTS meetings) on my strominator.com blog here:
http://tinyurl.com/267muy

Using network discovery tools

VARs looking to increase their security street cred should take a look at network discovery. While not new, it is a growing area for their clients who need to know what they actually have on their network. People are starting to look at network discovery as a practice area and specialize in the collection of tools and skills to deliver competency here.

The article in eWeek’s channel edition is called Finding gold by using network discovery tools.

TechPR War Stories Podcast #2

Paul Gillin and I have begun a series of podcasts for tech PR types. I talk this week about a Microsoft developer’s conference. Some attendees are complaining about how Microsoft treats them, and they’re blogging openly about it. Paul and David discuss the issue of openness and the emerging PR paradigm of embracing the bad with the good. What’s important is the conversation, they agree, not controlling the message. In Cheers & Jeers, David has no problem with Amanda Congdon’s promotional video for DuPont, while Paul grimaces at the memory of a CEO’s PowerPoint from hell.

Download the podcast here, 13:17 (right click to save)

Real time from the Microsoft Technology Summit (MTS07)

It isn’t often that I get to spend several days listening to the people that are creating the software products at Microsoft. In the past, when I have been to Redmond it was usually on a press junket with colleagues from mainstream IT and business media, listening to spin doctors and marcom folks who were trying to get “coverage”. This week I am in the company of people who write code, and have a deep knowledge of the tools, software, and applications, as part of the company’s Technology Summit.

It is an interesting mix of both attendees and speakers. They come from all corners of the world, and from various parts of our industry: corporate IT development group managers who have dozens of coders working for them, consultants that also develop their own applications, academics who run compsci departments, and so forth.

To give you an idea, I am posting links to many of their blogs, many of whom are so multi-tasking that they are coding while they are listening (or half-listening) to the presentations, and posting to their blogs in near real-time. So we have this new phenomenon, where everyone is typing at their tabletops. The speakers are also posting to their own blogs too and reading the attendee blog postings. The ones who have yet to give their speech can thereby self-correct their presentations, or refute what the audience has posted. It is so introspective and self-absorbed, all part of the new world of social media.

(Click here for a podcast commentary on MTS.)

Attendees

Travis' blog: http://www.travisswicegood.com/

Dianne's blog: http://www.srtsolutions.com/public/blog/60881

Michael Wise http://blogs.omnieffect.com

Bryan Hansen http://ldsarchitect.org/    

Scott Preston http://codegin.com/blog/

Ben Galbraith http://galbraiths.org/blog

Dion  Almaer http://www.almaer.com/blog/

Channy Yun, Korea Crunch http://koreacrunch.com

Microsoft presentor blogs

Michael Howard, security http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard

Sam Ramji, open source labs

Don Box http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/dbox/

John Lam http://www.iunknown.com

Joe Stagner http://www.joeon.net 

Bill Staples (IIS) http://blogs.iis.net/bills/default.aspx

The growing need for personal firewalls

The days of running a Windows desktop without some sort of firewall are pretty much over. As more users roam with laptops in and out of corporate networks, it is easy for them to get infected when they are off campus when they don’t have the benefit of corporate security measures protecting them from the continual attacks that rage across the Internet.

In this article for Techweb, I talk about the various options that are available for enterprises to deploy these products.

MediaGate MG-350HD: An inexpensive networked video server

The growing antagonism between Google/You Tube and the creators who “involuntarily supply” their video content has shown that the PC is becoming the place to go to watch videos. So wouldn’t it be nice if you could stash all of your huge video and music files someplace other than your own computer’s hard drive? And if such a place could be easily connected to your living room TV and stereo system, so you could view the videos and listen to music without having to integrate a PC into your living room stack of gear? And wouldn’t it be nice if could you use a wireless connection to move these files from your PCs too, since you can’t or won’t wire your living room with Ethernet?

These aren’t empty questions, but the idea behind the $275 MediaGate MG-350HD. It is the size of a hardback book with lots of cables and connectors to hook up to your TV and hifi. It sorta works.
http://www.Mediagateusa.com

The box has your choice of component, composite, S-Video or DVI video connectors and coax, optical or twin RCA audio connectors. Among that selection should be some combination that can hook it up to what you have in your living room. Unlike having a Media Center PC, it is quiet and doesn’t generate much heat.

You can connect it to your PC via either a regular USB connector, or use either the wired Ethernet or wireless networking ports. It doesn’t come with any hard disk – you’ll need to buy an older model 3.5 inch IDE drive. (It would have been nicer if they included a SATA interface, especially since those drives are pretty cheap now.) After taking off four cover screws, you can quickly connect the IDE drive inside the box and then close it back up, power up and format the drive. There are instructions that are written in badly translated English for various versions of Windows on how to do this.

The good news is that the box has just enough intelligence to handle all sorts of video files that I stored on it. I asked my 20-something stepson to give me a sample of video downloads to try out. One came with German subtitles, one was a version of Babel without any subtitles (which is tough because a lot of dialogs isn’t in English), and one came more or less like the theatrical version. None of these files could immediately play on an ordinary Windows PC without installing further audio or video encoders, such as Divx. They all ran as is just fine on the MediaGate.

The bad news is that the wireless and networking support will take some effort to get working. To use the MediaGate as a network storage device, you need to install a special driver on your Windows PC. It was easier to plug in the USB cable and move the files over to its hard drive, which somewhat defeats the idea behind a network storage box. I have WEP configured on my home network, and I couldn’t get the appropriate key to work with the MediaGate, despite its supposed support for this encryption level.

The unit comes with a small remote control that is used mainly for setup tasks, and for scrolling through the various files to play them. And scroll you will do – the interface is similar to Windows Media Center, showing you folders and file names on screen in large fonts that mean just a few listings per screen. If you have hundreds of files, it will take some effort to find them. Another cool feature is that you can store video and audio files on ordinary USB key drives and then plug them into the unit and play them.

Both audio and video quality seemed acceptable. You have your choice of 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios of the video. Overall, the device does a decent job. If you aren’t a fan of Windows Media Center, this might be a good alternative. Apple’s iTV is comparably priced when you factor into the fact that it includes the hard drive but not the cables. But iTV doesn’t do 4:3 and you need to use iTunes to manage how the content gets moved over to the box.

SMB Security Primer

Computer security is one of those things that you don’t know what you don’t know, just because there are so many different areas of specialization. In this primer for ITsecurity.com, I’ve put together a series of checklists of the most important things that a small-to-medium business owner should be aware of, and focus on simple and inexpensive things that anyone with a moderate amount of skill can accomplish to keep one’s computers secure. While it is true that true computer security is something for the skillful and more of a black art, there are many things that the average computer-literate person can do on their own by making use of free or nearly-so services and products that can beef up their protection. (registration required)

Enterprise IM Strategies

Enterprises are coming to terms with Instant Messaging (IM), finding that it has become the best way to accelerate new forms of collaboration and communication among their distributed workforces and stay productive as email inboxes swell with spam. For some companies, email has become the new snail mail. But before you bite the IM bullet, here are some questions to answer to formulate your potential IM strategy for your corporation.

Read the complete story in Computerworld here.

Newspapers Will Never Get IT Right

Today’s essay is written by David Hakala, a long-time tech journalist turned itinerant agitator and billiards martial artist. Email him: zencueist at gmail

My son got his first job at age 14, selling subscriptions to the Rocky Mountain News door to door. The commission plan amazed me: $25 per $120 annual sign-up, plus CEO-quality bonuses for making as few as five sales per week. Some teenagers were hauling down $750 a week according to the crew supervisor, a 38 year-old high school dropout with tattooed knuckles.

Normally, such any-child-can-do-it wealth generation secrets don’t air on TV until after their target audience goes to sleep. I held my peace and let my enthusiastic offspring learn the old-fashioned way.

Six 50-hour weeks later, my boy was the team star and had earned a bit over $1,200. That was the end of his newspaper career. I confess that when he begged me to buy a subscription so he could make his weekly bonus, I said no. It’s been over eight years since I bought a single copy of a newspaper, let alone a closet-full of them. I feed my news monkey online, of course.

It’s no news that print news is in deep yogurt and sinking faster than ever. Average weekly paid circulation declined 2.6 percent for the six months ending September, 2006, following a 1.9 percent drop during the previous six months, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Sunday circulation, the advertising honey pot, shrank about 50 percent more than weekday readership. To cut costs, articles are getting shorter and fonts smaller. The years-long death by a thousand column-inch cuts is accelerating, to no one’s surprise.

Newspapers’ online editions aren’t faring much better. Today’s trend is called “crowdsourcing”, the latest euphemism for selling reader-generated content back to the readers themselves. Drew Curtis at Fark was a master of that ingenious paradigm long before it occurred to Gannett, and USA Today’s make over still doesn’t quite get this whole comment-and-recommendation thing.

The trouble with the online newspaper sites is simple. They can’t build Web sites properly. They can’t keep them running. They just don’t get IT and don’t get the Web.

Examine any aspect of any newspaper’s online edition and you will find it botched. Fixed table widths that assume everyone has a 26-inch monitor set to 1024 x 768 resolution; check. Page design that loads images, Flash animations, and other slowpokes before the text that people came to read; check. Background links to external servers, such as weather services, that prevent viewable content from loading if the remote servers are unresponsive; check. Reader forums and blogs that stall for 96 seconds every time a comment is submitted; check. Search engines that don’t understand “exact phrase in quotes”; check. Default font size set to 6 points; check.

The HTML sins just go on and on. It is sad when you realize that the average MySpace page is better designed than your average newspaper site.

And let’s not even get into the issues I have with trying to get through the gates to their sites, or why they need to collect demographic information anyway. (News flash: the hallowed New York Times is removing its gate on “Times Select” for those customers lucky enough to have an .edu address.)

Most of us know that people don’t put in accurate information anyway. When was the last time you did? When I did buy newspapers, no vendor or vending machine dared to ask me for my address, phone number, or tax bracket. The enormous popularity of BugMeNot.com should be sufficient clue for newspaper Web editors. But a growing number of these highly-qualified professionals are sabotaging BugMeNot registrations instead of dropping the doomed idea. Better to lose ad views than to give free content to strangers.

Newspaper operators would be better off shutting down their presses and their Web servers. The only unique value proposition that they have – and often do right – is local news reporting. Take the money wasted on content delivery and invest it in content creation (the opposite of what newspapers are doing now). Then sell that content to the handful of delivery services, such as Google News, that know what they’re doing. If the news is not online, no search engine can leech it. That’s the only way local newspapers are going to survive.

Real-World Best Practices for Endpoint Security Podcast

Preparation is important when securing a remote office or branch office, but there’s nothing like the skills and experience gained from actually undergoing the experience. What are some of the lessons learned by those who have secured extensive branch office networks? In this podcast for Techtarget’s SearchSecurity.com, I  talk with David O’Berry, an IT manager with the State of South Carolina, about what is involved in setting up remote office and branch office endpoint security experiences.