Microsoft's Chicago data center offers a merge of old and new techniques. The ground floor features sealed containers with tightly packed racks of servers, while the second floor houses more traditional server rooms.
(Credit: Microsoft)CHICAGO--On most days it takes the right access badge and a biometric scan to make it inside the doors of Microsoft's massive data center. But on Wednesday, the company allowed a group of reporters, customers, and partners to tour the 700,000 square foot facility.
The data center, along with another just-opened facility in Dublin, Ireland and existing centers in San Antonio and Quincy, Wash., serve as the guts behind Microsoft's online ambitions, from Bing to Hotmail to Windows Azure.
But, for all its strategic import, the ground floor of the Chicago plant looks more like a truck parking lot than a traditional data center. In each parking spot, though, Microsoft can drop off a container packed with up to 2,000 servers.
Right now, only about a dozen of the 56 container spots are filled, but Microsoft executives said they expect that to change quickly. The software maker expects to eventually spend up to $500 million filling up the Chicago site with gear.
The site was originally slated to open months earlier, but Microsoft delayed things due to the economy. Eventually, though, it decided to move forward.
"Investing in these uncertain economic times is always a tough choice," said Arne Josefsberg, general manager of infrastructure services Microsoft's data center operations. But, he added, "We take a very long-term approach to the business.
The data center itself is housed in an unmarked warehouse in one of the Chicago area's many industrial districts. (The software maker didn't want the exact location disclosed.)
Microsoft picked the spot because of its convenient spot close to cheap and abundant power as well as the fact it sits atop a major Internet connection point that houses major east-west and north-south fiber routes.
"It's a lot about location, location, location," Josefsberg said.
I'll have a ton more to say in a follow-up post, including a bunch more pictures and some video interviews, but I wanted to share a few initial thoughts before hopping a plane to the Seattle area, where I will be working for the rest of the week.
Microsoft said on Friday that it plans next month to end support for a test version of its Live Framework, which was essentially the developer side of its Live Mesh service.
The idea of Live Framework is to give developers of Web-based applications the ability to add desktop components, while those writing traditional applications could use the Live Framework to add synchronizing and other online capabilities.
In a blog posting, Microsoft said it plans to integrate many of the concepts behind the Live Framework into the next version of Windows Live. In the mean time, though, developers will lose access to the test version of the Live Framework as of September 8.
"The Live Framework will be integrated into the next release of Windows Live. Stay tuned to Dev.live.com for more details in the future," Microsoft said in its blog. "If you are a Live Framework technology preview user, we ask you to please download any data and/or code from the service prior to September 8th as well as remove your devices from the service."
Developers can expect to hear more about where Microsoft plans to go with Live Framework at this November's Professional Developer Conference.
Microsoft rolled out the Live Framework as a community technology preview at last year's Professional Developer Conference, though its launch was somewhat overshadowed by the debut of Windows Azure. At the time, Microsoft said it was supporting both platforms, with Azure being a more basic set of building blocks and the Live Framework a collection of more finished services.
Microsoft's consumer-facing Live Mesh application is not affected by the move, Microsoft said.
Organizationally, Microsoft moved the Live Mesh effort into the Windows Live unit at the beginning of the year.
Many people think that the browser is starting to replace the operating system as the center of the personal computer.
Naturally, the view that Windows is on a path to irrelevance is not one generally espoused by Microsoft. That said, at least some inside Redmond's walls argue that the Web browser needs to start acting more like an operating system.
Helen Wang
(Credit: Microsoft)"Some of today's browser policies are not very safe," says Microsoft researcher Helen Wang.
Wang, who has been at Microsoft since getting her doctorate from University of California at Berkeley in 2001, argues that the Web browser should act as more than just a file clerk that rubber-stamps each request that comes its way. Rather, it should act more like a traffic cop, keeping things moving smoothly and ensuring that the computer's resources are fairly allocated.
In short, Wang says, the browser needs to act more like Windows does--making sure that different Web applications are protected from one another--even those running within the same site. So Wang and her team came up with a prototype, called Gazelle, that does just that.
Microsoft first outlined Gazelle earlier this year, but has only recently started to detail its thinking. Wang plans to present a paper on Gazelle at the Usenix security conference next month, and last week Microsoft posted an article on its Web site explaining more about Gazelle.
Wang isn't trying to suggest Windows is going away. Indeed, she says, Gazelle depends on Windows, acting merely as the middleman for Web pages seeking to access a computer's resources.
"We're really trying to leverage the decades of operating system experience and apply that in the Web and browser setting," Wang said.
Microsoft is also trying to be clear that Gazelle is not the immediate replacement for Internet Explorer, which has been losing share to rivals, including Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari. The company has yet to commit to commercializing Gazelle in any way, meaning it remains just one of scores of projects incubating inside the company's research labs.
Many outside Redmond, though, see the browser finally starting to take on the preeminence that many had assumed it might back in the early days of Netscape. Google's decision to offer Chrome, some think, was more about having an engine for running its Web applications than it was offering an alternative means for serving up traditional Web pages.
Modern browsers, Wang said, have taken a step in the right direction by isolating different browser tabs so that if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn't get taken with it. Wang said that Chrome and Microsoft's IE 8 take steps toward increasing the reliability of Web browsing, but she argues far more drastic steps are needed.
"I think Gazelle marks a significant departure from all previous browsers, including Chrome and IE 8," Wang said.
For now, Gazelle is very much a prototype. It borrows much of its actual rendering technology from Internet Explorer itself. And although it can display 19 of Alexa's top 20 Web sites, there are still plenty of things it can't do. It also runs more slowly than Internet Explorer, particularly when opening new Web sites.
But Wang said it offers Microsoft--and the industry--a road map for how the Browser should evolve.
"I think this is the right way to go and I think this can be practical," Wang said. "It will also take a lot of work."
Microsoft has been testing different search bars to see which ones drive the most traffic to Bing. Shown here is the one that appeared on the MSN site on Friday.
(Credit: CNET)The planned fall revamp of MSN isn't just about giving the butterfly a fresh coat of paint. Microsoft also hopes to drive more people to its search engine.
The company has been toying with different search box designs to see which ones lead to the most queries. As it stands, the MSN portal already accounts for half of Microsoft's search engine traffic. Comparatively few people typed in queries straight from Microsoft's Live.com address (now Bing.com)
"A big part of my job is figuring out how I pull the Bing experience into MSN in a way that makes sense," Microsoft vice president Erik Jorgensen said in an interview this week.
One way of banking on MSN, he said, is by posting features on the site that tie in to the company's search engine. The company has talked about ways it can write features that push folks to Microsoft's local, shopping, and travel search engines--each among the most profitable parts of the search business and the areas in which Microsoft has focused.
The software maker is also looking at ways it can tie MSN features to the strongest areas of Bing--local, shopping, and travel search.
(Credit: Microsoft)To make that work, Microsoft needs to ensure that it is less visually jarring when one moves back and forth between MSN and Bing.
"Frankly, that's one I think we haven't done well," Jorgensen said. "I think in the fall that's something we've got to tackle."
In its first two weeks, Bing has managed to pick up some market share, but the key will be sustaining those gains in the coming weeks and months.
Beyond driving traffic from MSN, Microsoft is also counting on deals with PC makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell to get more people to give Bing a try.
The company has said it wants to pick up at least a couple points of market share in the first year, although it will need well more than that to truly compete economically with Google. Hence the company's never-ending talks with Yahoo, which is No. 2 in the search market with about 20 percent of the business.
Microsoft is testing a revamped version of its MSN home page in France that features fewer channels, more video, and a direct connection to a user's Hotmail in-box.
(Credit: Microsoft)Although most of the discussion of Microsoft's online business has been around Bing, its new search engine, Microsoft is also working on a fall revamp for MSN, its decade-old portal site.
Though often overlooked by Microsoft watchers, the MSN portal remains critically important to Microsoft's online business. Its home page is the crown jewel of its display ad business and MSN is also responsible for about half of the company's Internet search traffic. And, despite the notion that portals are passe, Microsoft says its research shows that 37 percent of Internet users still rely on a portal as an important source of information.
"It's not for everyone, but for a good chunk of the market, it's a way people can make sense of the Internet," MSN Vice President Erik Jorgensen said in an interview this week.
To stay relevant, Microsoft is working on overhauling MSN in a few key ways. In particular, the company is trying to add a limited amount of personalization as well as more social media features. Microsoft is also trying to downplay the myriad of channels that date back to the days when its portal, like Yahoo and AOL, aimed to be a directory of the Internet.
But, as it rethinks the MSN site, Microsoft must also tread lightly, mindful of its experience a few years back when it tried to radically alter its Hotmail service. The changes, intended to enable the service to compete with Gmail and Yahoo, proved too jarring for many of its users.
Indeed, the MSN home page, which dates back to 1998 when Microsoft grouped its bevy of Web properties under the MSN name, has changed remarkably little in recent years.
On a number of occasions over the years, Microsoft has tried to freshen up the image of the portal. Back in 2000, Microsoft added the butterfly logo amid a big ad campaign.
In 2006, the company lured MSNBC's John Nicol out of retirement in its most recent major effort to revitalize the site.
Much of that effort centered on bolstering the site's video content. Microsoft dipped its toe into original programming and also brought some key events to MSN, including the Live Earth concert and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Under his tenure, Microsoft also announced Soapbox, an effort to compete in the user generated content space with YouTube.
Soapbox, however, proved less than successful and Jorgensen said this week that Microsoft plans to scale back the site, possibly eliminating the ability of users to post their own videos directly to the site.
Getting personal
One of the areas that Microsoft continues to tinker with is just how much to personalize the site. This has been a tricky balance for Microsoft. It has offered products such as its Start.com (and later Live.com) page, which began as a blank canvas onto which users could plug all kinds of content modules. However, that proved to have only niche appeal.
"There is a limit to how many people are interested in putting in that level of work," said Jorgensen, who assumed the top MSN spot last year after Nicol left the post. Jorgensen also continues to run Microsoft's local and mobile search efforts.
This time around, MSN is relying on Microsoft's software algorithms and machine learning to do "clustering" of content based on a user's demographics.
Microsoft is also trying to use software, rather than humans, to help choose which stories get placed where on MSN. Instead of having its editors update the pages four times a day, the revamped MSN will see things shifting nearly constantly based on the data the company is getting back on which stories are clicking with users.
At the end of the day, Jorgensen hopes to create a site that has more software know-how than Yahoo and is more human than Google.
Some of the MSN changes are already being tested in various parts of the world. In France, for example, the software maker is testing the new user interface with fewer channels and more prominent video (see image at top of post). In Brazil, a far more radical remake of MSN features a social media bar where people can drag videos to share them with their circle of friends (see image at bottom of post).
Microsoft is still figuring out how drastic to make the changes and how gradually it needs to roll them out.
The software maker is also toying with how much to segment its audience. For example, the company has an MSN Today screen it shows users as they log into Windows Live Messenger. For the past three months, Microsoft has been showing four different screens depending on whether a user is male or female and whether he or she is over or under 25.
In the U.S., the company also offered some users a choice of viewing the standard MSN home page when they go to the main portal or if they would instead prefer an entertainment-only version.
"It can't be one size fits all," Jorgensen said.
In Brazil, Microsoft is testing a more radical overhaul of the MSN site, featuring a social media bar that users can use to share video with their social circle.
(Credit: Microsoft)It's still awfully early in the game, but Microsoft's Bing had a second good week, according to market share numbers released Wednesday by ComScore.
The search engine is up about 3 percentage points from where Microsoft was at pre-Bing in terms of both number of searchers and total query share. That represents another nearly 1 percentage point of share gain in both categories compared to its first week.
(Credit:
ComScore)
For the week of June 8 to 12, Microsoft's search engines were used by 16.7 percent of those doing searches and accounted for 12.1 percent of all queries, both up 3 percentage points from where Microsoft was at before Bing's launch.
"It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week," ComScore Senior VP Mike Hurt said in a statement. "These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch."
Microsoft launched Bing at the beginning of the month, after a lengthy development period and months of internal testing.
For its part, Microsoft seems to recognize it is still very early. The software maker has declined to comment on the market share gains.
Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that it is looking into an issue in which users of Internet Explorer 6 are forced into having Bing as their default search engine.
"We are aware of the issue with Bing on machines running IE6 and are investigating a solution," Microsoft said in a statement. "This issue is not impacting IE7 and IE8 users."
Although it is only affecting its older browser, many people still use IE6 and Microsoft has faced a lot of over how default search preferences are set and changed within Internet Explorer.
The issue crops up just as Microsoft plans to formally launch Bing. Among its planned promotions is a huge ad campaign as well as an event Tuesday night at Seattle's Space Needle.
The IE6 issue was noted earlier on Tuesday by Search Engine Land.
Ray Ozzie is a big believer in the cloud. But he knows that large businesses don't yet share his confidence.
"Enterprises will not really trust the cloud until they get some experience with it," Ozzie said, during a speech at a J.P. Morgan investment conference in Boston on Wednesday. He said that large businesses are more likely to start by going with an online version of a familiar product like Microsoft Exchange than they are today to move a major piece of their business into the cloud. A Webcast of his speech is available on Microsoft's investor relations page.
In October, Microsoft announced Windows Azure, a set of tools that is somewhat akin to a Web-based operating system that developers can use to build software that can then run in Microsoft's data centers. The software is now in testing, with large businesses mostly just kicking the tires at this point.
"In the next year or two I believe that the biggest impact of cloud computing is going to be in things like Exchange and SharePoint for us or those comparable offerings from our competitors," Ozzie said. Using one of those services allows a company to know how much bandwidth they need to communicate with the cloud, understand how cloud services can be managed, as well as just build up a certain comfort level.
"It will work its way into other parts of the enterprise IT environment over time as they get their comfort level," he said.
Ozzie
(Credit: Microsoft)One of the lighter moments came when Ozzie was asked what were the lessons Microsoft learned from Windows Vista.
"How much time do you have?" Ozzie quipped.
Ozzie then went on to discuss some of the problems with Vista, including the false starts that he said resulted from "overcommitment."
"We had a vision that was larger than what we could achieve within the period of time that we needed to bring (the product) to market," Ozzie said.
And by changing its timing and feature set, Ozzie noted that Microsoft's partners were both too early and too late when it came to deciding when to spend time on Vista.
"If we don't give very clear predictable signals to those partners...about dates," Ozzie said, "they don't know when to invest and when not to invest."
The result, he said, was that drivers weren't ready, leaving PC makers in a tough position and ultimately creating a less-than-satisfactory experience for consumers and businesses. Many of those issues, he said, were taken to heart when it came to planning and communicating around Windows 7, he said.
Some of Ozzie's more intriguing comments came when he talked about the need for partnership over time as Microsoft builds out its cloud. So far, Microsoft has built its own data centers, but they have largely been in the U.S. Because of varying regulations in different countries, though, Ozzie talked about the need for data centers "everywhere on earth."
"Every country will have data centers," he said, but added that Microsoft itself doesn't have the resources to build a cloud in each country. "We have to have partners."
The Remote Media Streaming feature in Windows 7 lets a user on the go access music, photos and video from their home PC. However, the feature has a variety of constraints and requirements that limit its usefulness, says CNET's Ina Fried
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)
With many versions of Windows, Microsoft chops features as it gets closer to release.
With Windows 7, Microsoft has actually added a few features as it has gotten closer to launch. One of the most intriguing is a feature that debuted with the most recent release candidate (download) allows a user to stream media from one PC to another over the Internet, a la the Slingbox.
There are some noteworthy limitations. The streaming feature works with unprotected video and music files, so one can't watch video from iTunes or other copy-protected content.
Also the remote media streaming, as the feature is known, requires both computers to be running Windows 7 and requires some setup work. That said, the feature is nice for the scenarios and locations from which it works. It seems particularly well suited to a Netbook or laptop user that wants to listen to some music or view some photos that they don't have on their on-the-go machine.
To get a better sense of the product, I decided to put it through its paces. The feature didn't seem to work when one of the PCs was attached to CNET's corporate network, but worked fine when I went to a coffee house and streamed the media off of a Windows PC at home. (The remote media streaming requires the PC that houses the content to be part of a home network.)
In addition to music and pictures, Windows 7 also supports video streaming, provided the content is unprotected, such as the HD wildlife clip that ships with Windows 7.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)Set-up is not overly complex, but nor is it elegant by any means. To get the PC ready, you have to turn on Internet streaming in Windows Media Player. The other piece is associating both machines with the same Windows Live ID. (The feature may eventually support other ID providers, but for now it's only Windows Live.)
Getting up and running required downloading a Windows Live ID Assistant from the Internet, which sends you to a browser. Again, this wasn't super-technical, but it would have been nice if it did all that without opening a browser and requiring so many clicks.
Once I thought I had everything set up, I decided to put it to the test. Rather than go too far from home, I headed to Nervous Dog Coffee, my favorite spot for getting caffeinated and trying out new technology.
I started with what I thought was the easiest task--opening a photo. The library showed up quickly but opening the photo was slow. Also unexpected was the fact that instead of just opening that photo, it launched a slideshow of the whole folder.
From there I moved on to music, streaming the Indigo Girls album "All that We Let In." It sounded good, with no noticeable skips, although I could only listen in short bursts as I forgot to bring along headphones.
I then moved onto video, playing a built-in HD clip of wildlife footage that came as part of Windows 7. The clip played with its accompanying audio, though the video was a bit jerky in places.
Satisfied with the results, I packed up the PC and headed into the office. Interestingly, the media-sharing feature didn't appear to work on the same PC once I got into the office. I tried labeling my office network as both a home and an office network, but perhaps a network firewall or something got in the way.
TV shows recorded in Windows Media Center can also be streamed, although the quality and performance seemed to vary.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)Once I switched from a hard-wire connection to CNET's public wireless network, I was once again able to see content stored on the computer at home. I was even able to stream a Sesame Street episode that I had set to start recording after I left the house.
The quality of that viewing experience varied dramatically. In the best cases, the TV showed up in a small but passable window, while in a couple cases it was in a tiny window or took an unacceptably long time to buffer.
Microsoft says a variety of factors go into the size and quality of the video stream, including the characteristics of the content, the available bandwidth, and the processing power of the serving computer.
At its best, the ability to watch recorded TV is handy; it's not quite the live TV option that Slingbox provides, but still could be useful for road warriors stuck in an airport or at the hotel. But sometimes the delay was enough to send me over to Hulu for sure.
Overall, I found the media-streaming feature to be a nice addition, but both the limitations and the somewhat complicated set-up leaves me the feeling that it will be the enthusiast rather than the mainstream user that gets around to trying this out.
Microsoft reportedly plans to spend up to $100 million in an ad push aimed at trying to reposition the company's search efforts.
According to a report in Advertising Age, the company is likely to tap ad giant JWT for the campaign. Microsoft declined to comment on the report.
Having failed to strike a search deal with Yahoo, Microsoft has been working to revamp its own search efforts.
Microsoft has been testing changes to its search under the Kumo brand but still won't say for sure if that's what it will go with.
The software maker clearly needs something. Its share of the search market not only badly trails both Google and Yahoo, but it has been headed in the wrong direction over the past year, losing ground against its bigger rivals.
CEO Steve Ballmer has continued to use public speeches and interviews to mention that Microsoft would be open to a search deal with Yahoo, but Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has appeared less than eager to strike such an arrangement.
