MISSION VIEJO, Calif.--On my way to last month's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, I took a small detour to Orange County to check out the recently opened Microsoft Store there.
Although I had heard plenty about Microsoft's nascent retail effort, I wanted to get a firsthand look.
At a glance, it's easy to understand why the store draws so many comparisons to Apple's stores. The outside of the store features an expansive glass window with a stylized Microsoft logo at the top. Inside, products are sorted into themed sections, with a help desk and theater in the rear, and all around are T-shirted enthusiasts ready to answer any and all questions.
From that standpoint, it's nearly a carbon copy. But even as it mimics much of the Apple approach, Microsoft finds ways to customize its message to its different role in the world. When it comes to laptops, for example, Microsoft is eager to lay out dozens of choices to highlight the variety of prices, sizes, and options available to those buying Windows.
The company is starting small--opening just two stores so far, this one and another in Scottsdale, Ariz. The goal, Microsoft said, is to better understand what customers want at retail and, ideally, persuade larger retail chains such as Best Buy and Office Depot to adapt some of the more successful techniques to their stores.
Apple, by contrast, has become its own most significant channel with its online and retail stores, even though its computers and iPods can also be found at places like Best Buy. From a dollars perspective, Apple's online and retail stores accounted for $1.87 billion of the company's $9.87 billion in total revenue during the most recent quarter. Next year alone the company plans to open 40 to 50 stores, with more than half of them overseas.
But if its scale is different than Apple's, its goal is largely the same: to offer the best possible experience when buying its flavor of PCs and accessories, as well as to be, well, cool.
To that end, Microsoft has pulled out every tool in its arsenal, from PCs to phones to the Xbox 360, as well as a huge "video wall" made up of dozens of 42-inch flat screens connected to form a single, though constantly changing, image or video display.
But by far the biggest draw is a product that isn't even for sale--the Surface tabletop computer.
During the several hours I spent at the store, it was that device, more than the laptops, that drew people in and captured their attention.
Josh Griffin stopped in at the store with his three kids, with all four quickly heading to the Surface.
"This is cool," said Griffin, who came into the store to check out Windows 7 among other things. "I've read about Surface before, but never been able to see it. It's actually a little cooler than I thought it would be."
The three kids began carving virtual pumpkins on the Surface while we chatted, but eventually Griffin turned his attention back to the tabletop computer.
"Can I do one?" Griffin asked his kids, trying only somewhat successfully to elbow his way in.
Surface, though, isn't the only thing worth pointing out.
Microsoft has taken an interesting approach to selling PC software--the category it is best known for. Although Microsoft stocks dozens of software products on its back shelves, hundreds more titles are available on-demand. Customers can browse on a touch screen through the various options and once they select a product, it can be burned to disc in the back of the store, complete with a professional-looking disc label, DVD case, and manual.
"We're like legal pirates," said Steven Precious, COO of Tribeka, the company whose system Microsoft uses in its stores. Precious just happened to be checking in on the Mission Viejo store while I was there.
The software maker also uses its position as retailer to influence what software is loaded onto the PCs it sells. While Microsoft the operating-system vendor is required by antitrust decrees to allow computer makers to install whatever software they wish, Microsoft the retailer is allowed far more say.
As a result, PCs sold at the Microsoft Store come with what Microsoft calls its "signature" software collection--a bundle that includes Windows Live products, Zune jukebox, Bing search engine and Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus software.
Having its own stores also allows Microsoft to try to match other areas in which Apple benefits from its direct contact with consumers, such as offering in-store support. Where as Apple has its "genius bar," Microsoft has an "answers desk." Both Apple and Microsoft offer a theater in the back for various trainings.
Microsoft is also trying to match Apple's passionate workforce. The retail store employees are made up of Windows enthusiasts, some of whom moved across the country to work at a Microsoft store. As evidenced by a recent YouTube video, the staff can be accused of many things, but a lack of passion is not one of them.
One of the key questions in my mind, though, is whether business will be brisk enough to allow Microsoft to profitably operate. The software maker has said it intends to run its stores as a business, meaning that to expand well beyond its current two locations, it will need to show an ability to not just look pretty, but also make money.
Microsoft said on Monday that it is looking into reports that its latest security updates are causing some serious problems for certain users.
The problem has been dubbed the "black screen of death" because those affected are left with a black desktop and little else on their screen.
.JPG){kind=logo}
"Microsoft is investigating reports that its latest release of security updates is resulting in system issues for some customers," the software maker said in a statement. "Once we complete our investigation, we will provide detailed guidance on how to prevent or address these issues. "
The issue was noted by British security firm Prevx on its blog on Friday, with that company also offering a suggested fix for the problem.
"The symptoms are very distinctive and troublesome," Prevx said. "After logging on there is no desktop, task bar, system tray or sidebar. Instead you are left with a totally black screen and a single My Computer Explorer window."
Prevx suggested that the black screen issue can occur on a wide range of Windows machines from Windows NT through Windows 7. In its blog, Prevx said there appear to be many causes of the black-screen issue, not all of which are related to the security update.
"In researching this issue we have identified at least 10 different scenarios which will trigger the same black screen conditions," Prevx said. "These appear to have been around for years now." As for the latest security update, Prevx said changes to the way registry keys are handled appears to be the reason it is causing black screens.
I've asked Microsoft what it recommends users should do for now and will post its answer here.
Microsoft released its latest security updates on November 10, issuing six bulletins addressing 15 flaws.
Update, 3:35 p.m. PT: A Microsoft representative said that the company continues to recommend that customers "test and deploy" the November security updates.
"Based on our investigation so far we can say that we're not seeing this as an issue from our support organization," the representative said. "The issues as described also do not match any known issues that have been documented in the security bulletins or (knowledge base) articles."
Steven Sinofsky may not be talking about Microsoft's future Windows plans, but the Windows Server team appears to see more value in letting customers know its road map.
In at least two slides apparently shown at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, Microsoft suggests that a major release update to Windows Server is due around 2012, with one of the slides confirming the Windows 8 code name.
I've asked both the desktop and server teams for more context on the slides, which were noted this week by blogger Stephen Chapman. A similar slide cropped up--that time in Italian-- in August.
For his part, Sinofsky sat completely stone-faced when I asked him in our interview Wednesday where Microsoft was at relative to Windows 8--later noting that he hadn't even used the word Windows next to the numeral 8.
"I didn't say any of the words--Windows 8--those were all your words," he said
The 2012 time frame would roughly coincide with Windows Server's plans of having a minor release every two years or so and a major release every four years. It released Windows Server 2008 R2, a minor update, earlier this year as the desktop team released Windows 7.
In recent years, Microsoft has tended to line up its desktop and server releases fairly closely, although in this case the desktop OS was probably a more significant release than its server counterpart.
LOS ANGELES--While some have criticized Steven Sinofsky for being tight-lipped, the Windows boss insists that he is being prudent, not secretive.
"Everybody wants to know what's coming and what's next." But, he said, talking too soon, too early is actually a bad thing that just leads to frustration.
"You reacting to some nightly developer build isn't really productive to anybody," Sinofsky said in an interview at this week's Professional Developers Conference.
Sinofsky says that people don't want to show up to a restaurant and watch a potato being peeled and taste it half-cooked. For the same reason, he prefers to not talk about things until they are well, fully baked.
"It's hard to imagine what else you want to see while it's in progress," Sinofsky said. "I don't want to see the daily cuts of a movie. I want to see what the director thought at the end."
As a result, Microsoft didn't show Windows 7 until last year's Professional Developers Conference, just a year before the product was released. That's in sharp contrast to the prior version of Windows, which was first shown as Longhorn back in 2003. It ultimately suffered through numerous delays and significant changes before being released as Vista.
Windows boss Steven Sinofsky said his Windows philosophy boils down to a single word--responsibility. "There's not another project in software to work on that a billion people use and we take that really, really seriously."
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)From early indications, Sinofsky would appear to be on to something. While Vista was largely panned by critics and shunned by businesses, Windows 7 has thus far had strong early sales and gotten high marks from reviewers.
It's some of the same philosophy Sinofsky took in his earlier days, when he led development of Microsoft's Office franchise.
"Normal people have stuff to do," he said.
That's also why he doesn't really look for public feedback until the software is largely done.
"We don't want feedback on a screenshot," he said.
Sinofsky shifted from Office to Windows in March 2006 and earlier this year added responsibility for the business side of Windows as well, becoming the unit's president.
He said his philosophy toward Windows really boils down to a single word--responsibility. "There's not another project in software to work on that a billion people use and we take that really, really seriously in the hallways of our dev team," he said.
Sinofsky also isn't one to be swayed by emotional arguments for or against a feature. If you want his attention--show him the numbers. He said he wants feedback, but he wants that feedback to "be based on data and not assertions or opinions or anecdotes."
During his PDC talk on Wednesday, he referred to the other approach as "testosterone-based engineering."
"It turns out we did a lot of things by that method," Sinofsky said. Often times, decisions on which features to include in the next version of a product were made that way. People, Sinofsky said, would basically just ask their friends.
"Let me get this straight," Sinofsky said. "You are going to ask your 10 friends who all go to Fry's and build their own gaming machines and that's going to be the way we decide which features go in the product?"
That, he said, "seems a little homogeneous. It seems a little limited in its reliability."
But these days, Microsoft has a better option, gathering lots and lots of data from real-world use. Quite often, he said, the data will show things that might not be intuitive to Redmond's engineers.
As an example, he showed a graph at the conference that showed the huge variety of graphics resolutions that Windows users were operating at, including a significant number with VGA-resolution displays. Folks in Redmond initially assumed they didn't really need to worry about such low-resolution screens.
True to form, Sinofsky was emphatically silent when my questions drifted toward the future. I asked whether we might see a beta of Internet Explorer 9 at Mix and he literally just sat there silent until I asked the next question.
Later on in the interview, the mere mention of Windows 8 got the same stone-faced glare.
"I won't ask you what's in Windows 8, but can you talk at all (about it)? You mentioned that you are a few weeks into designing IE 9," I said. "Are you a similar amount into Windows 8?"
Silence. More silence.
"I didn't say any of the words--Windows 8--those were all your words," he said. "Next."
Sinofsky did have some interesting things to say when I asked for his take on competitors like Google and Apple.
"You have to take it very seriously," he said of the competitors. "That's always, always true in the software world. In the software world it doesn't take a lot to have a dramatic shift in how people perceive you or how they act. It's just very important no matter what your perceived or real or measured share is at one moment, it doesn't take a lot to change it down the road."
Windows 7 isn't just getting good reviews, it's also selling well, CEO Steve Ballmer told shareholders Thursday.
Delivering opening remarks at Microsoft's shareholder meeting, Ballmer said that Windows 7 was off to a "fantastic start."
"We've already sold twice as many units as any OS in a comparable time frame," Ballmer said. "Windows 7 is simply the best PC operating system that we or anyone else has ever built."
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivers a point at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in July.
(Credit: Microsoft )By last week, Windows 7 accounted for 4 percent of Web-accessing devices, according to Net Applications; it took Vista more than seven months to reach that level.
Addressing the overall economy, Ballmer reiterated that things seem to have stabilized.
"The economy has, at least for now, leveled off," he said.
The meeting is still going on and has just entered the question-and-answer session and I'll update this post if anything interesting comes up. So far, though, it's been mostly about local and legislative matters, rather than technological issues.
Microsoft vs. Apple
There was one fun one from a shareholder who noted that young people tend to gravitate toward Macs and that Apple seems to be outmarketing Microsoft.
"You've got a real bad image out there," the shareholder said. "You sure don't have that younger generation."
Ballmer acknowledged that there are "certainly always opportunities for improvement."
"We all watch television," he said.
That said, Ballmer noted that "96 times out of 100, worldwide, people choose a PC with Windows."
He added that even in the toughest market--the high end of the U.S. consumer market--Windows is chosen 83 times out of 100.
"That doesn't let us rest on our laurels," Ballmer said. "Apple has picked up a couple tenths of a percent of market share."
But those couple tenths matter, he agreed. He said the downturn in the economy has actually bolstered Windows' competitive position. "People understand that Macintoshes are quite a bit more expensive."
Another questioner asked why Microsoft can't better compete against Apple's iPhone and other smartphones.
"Certainly our objective is to have the leading position," Ballmer said. "I think we have a lot of opportunity to improve...Undoubtedly we've got our work cut out for us."
He did say that Microsoft has put a lot of smart people on the task.
"We've got our heads down to do our best," Ballmer said.
LOS ANGELES--As a software guy, Windows division president Steven Sinofsky readily admits that he had little idea of all that goes into building a laptop.
Like many at Microsoft, he tended to think of products as done once the software was finalized. During the past couple of months, though, he has gotten a much better idea, as his Windows team went through the process of designing and building a Windows 7 laptop in conjunction with Acer.
Steven Sinofsky, surprised the PDC crowd on Wednesday, announcing that paid attendees would get a free notebook that Microsoft helped design.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)That laptop made its debut on Wednesday, as Microsoft handed out the devices to paid attendees of the Professional Developers Conference here. It's quite a little laptop, built around an 11.6-inch swiveling touch screen that works as either a tablet or traditional notebook.
Sinofsky wanted to give attendees at this week's PDC a computer that would really show off Windows 7's capabilities, including a touch screen and top-of-the-line wireless. Oh, and it should be light. And have a glossy screen. And not cost too much.
"They look at you like, 'what are you building'?" Sinofsky said in an interview with CNET.
Sinofsky said it's kind of like remodeling a kitchen. "You start off by saying I want these cabinets this counter top and this kind of a sink and all of a sudden you've got this kitchen you can't afford and don't have the time to build. That's pretty much the first phase of building a laptop."
In the end, Sinofsky had to make a few compromises, but the process itself was an important one for the Windows team, Sinofsky said. While PDC attendees got the laptops, his team got a better appreciation for the full process of designing and building a Windows PC.
"That was part of the learning, really making sure we can walk in their shoes," Sinofsky said.
The Windows team quickly learned about some of the trade-offs that computer makers have to make, as well as some of the hidden costs. At one point, Sinofsky said, he wanted to cut out Bluetooth in order to add GPS capabilities.
There were two problems with that, though. First, taking off Bluetooth would actually cost money. It was already part of the wireless chipset and the standard chassis had a blue indicator light built-in already, meaning that it would cost more to cover up that light.
And with Sinofsky's ideal laptop already containing multiple flavors of Wi-Fi, Ethernet, wide-area networking and three audio paths, there just wasn't room for GPS.
"They were like, look we're running out of room here," Sinofsky said.
Other things Sinofsky did get. Although most laptops with touchscreens have matte finishes, Sinofsky said "We really wanted a glossy screen."
Sure enough, the PDC has a glossy touchscreen.
That's just a part of what Sinofsky talked about in our interview on Wednesday. Look for more from our chat in the coming days.
LOS ANGELES--After spending much of Tuesday in the clouds, the second day of the Professional Developers Conference on Wednesday is expected to be far more grounded.
On tap is a discussion of the Office 2010 beta as well as the first details on Internet Explorer 9, although Microsoft is not providing code. Microsoft is also talking about Silverlight 4 and releasing a beta of that product.
8:30 a.m. PT: Windows unit president Steven Sinofsky takes the stage.
Sinofsky said that Microsoft approaches Windows 7 like building a movie theater. Microsoft's job is to provide "great seats, great sounds and maybe a concession stand" while developers make the actual movies.
Although developers were interested in hearing about IE 9, the most popular part of Steven Sinofsky's talk was when he announced that paid PDC attendees were getting a free Windows 7 laptop.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)8:35 a.m. PT: Sinofsky is talking about the Windows 7 development process from before the code was publicly released through beta testing and release.
He's hitting on familiar refrains--trying to be more predictable, talking about features only when they are fully baked, and all of the "telemetry" Microsoft uses to get automated feedback.
Sinofsky is talking about the different mechanisms Microsoft uses from Windows Error Reporting, or Watson, to its Software Quality Monitor. Sinofsky notes that the monitoring tools require the user's permission in the final versions of Windows.
During the beta process, though, "we opt you in automatically," he says. (Not to quibble, but technically that's known as opt-out.)
Semantics aside, the shift to automated feedback has had a major impact on the way Windows is developed. In the past, Sinofsky said, bugs got fixed, in large part, based on "whoever screamed the loudest."
Sinofsky said it was basically "testosterone-based bug fixing."
With automated mechanism, Microsoft can see which problems are affecting the most people most often.
8:40 a.m. PT: Sinofsky is sharing some numbers about the Windows 7 beta.
Microsoft got 1.7 million feedback reports, or one feedback report every 10 seconds in the first two weeks after beta. There were 8.1 million installations of the beta, including 4.3 million installations of the release candidate.
There were 10.4 million error reports, which resulted in 4,753 code changes. The start menu was clicked 514 million times in the past six months, while the new Aero Snap and Shake features were clicked 46.4 million times during the same period.
8:45 a.m. PT: Sinofsky is talking about usability studies Microsoft does to test new features, and showing some examples of user feedback on the User Account Control dialog box.
First up, is a mother of a 5 year old who said that when she finally gets time to sit at the computer she'd rather not be interrupted. Instead, she suggested it would be better if there was a place she could go to find all the messages (not too different from the action center eventually included in Windows 7).
Now he's showing some testing of the Aero Snap and Aero Shake features that help manage multiple open windows.
"Get on down... I like that," said one user.
8:50 a.m. PT: If you haven't already, check out CNET's Ray Ozzie interview that posted this morning.
8:53 a.m. PT: Sinofsky brings out Mike Angiulo, who heads up Microsoft's dialogue with the "ecosystem"--folks like PC makers, software, and hardware developers.
He shows off Sony's super-thin, super-light Vaio X. I'm playing around with a demo model of this machine. People are really amazed with this computer. It's so light, some of the people I've shown it to could barely believe it was real.
Microsoft thought it would be good to learn how a laptop is made. It worked with Acer to build a 3.79 pound laptop with multi-touch, preloaded Office, etc.
"It was great for us as members of the ecosystem," Sinofsky said. The best news for those at PDC-- they are making the laptop available to paid PDC attendees for free.
That got the crowd excited. "Not this one, this one is mine," Sinofsky said, clutching the one he is showing off.
The laptops won't be ready for pick-up until 12:30 though. I encourage you to stay here for the rest of the talk."
9:08 a.m. PT: Talk shifts to Internet Explorer.
"There's a balance between standards and real-world," Sinofsky said.
Sinofsky talks about where Microsoft is headed with Internet Explorer 9.
We're about three weeks into the Internet Explorer 9 development, he says.
Sinofsky acknowledges some areas Microsoft needs to do better. One is the Acid 3 benchmark, IE 8 got 20 out of 100 on that test, while IE 9 is at 32 out of 100.
Performance, particularly JavaScript performance, is another area. He shows WebKit.org's SunSpider benchmark which shows IE 9 in the same ballpark as test versions of other leading browsers. Earlier versions of IE performed much worse on SunSpider than other browsers.
"We're getting very close to basically being a wash," Sinofsky said.
9:14 a.m. PT: Sinofsky shows another feature of IE 9--the ability to easily do rounded corners.
More importantly, the IE 9 rendering engine will shift text and graphics rendering to the graphics chip. That allows smoother text and faster performance. Although some browsers shift a bit of 3D work to the graphics processing units in PCs, Microsoft says IE is the first to tap hardware acceleration for standard text and graphics.
Sinofsky shows a few examples, including Bing Maps, where unaccelerated graphics rendered 14 frames per second, while hardware acceleration in IE 9 allowed upwards of 60 frames per second.
Geek detail: The IE logo on the taskbar for IE 9 was gray, as opposed to the blue logo of IE 8.
9:26 a.m. PT: Developer Division head Scott Guthrie on stage talking about Silverlight and Silverlight 4.
Priorities for the next version include improved media features, such as access to Webcams and microphones on a PC and output protection for those with premium content.
Developer Division head Scott Guthrie followed Stephen Sinofsky on stage on Wednesday, showing off some of the features of Silverlight 4.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)Guthrie demos a photo booth application, including video and still capture as well as different pixel shader effects, such as a crayon filter. The technology probably allows a lot more, but Apple fanboys would be right to point to the photo booth application on the Mac (though this is a concept app and Silverlight 4 is browser-based technology, not a desktop application).
Another focus for Silverlight 4 is improving Silverlight outside the browser.
9:37 a.m. PT: Guthrie's having a little trouble with some of the Silverlight demos, showing IIS server's support for creating iPhone-capable video.
"If someone is backstage and wants to kick the browser, feel free to," Guthrie said. "We'll try one more time."
9:40 a.m. PT: Guthrie is talking some of the technical features of Silverlight 4, including a new text editor that supports Roman fonts, as well as Arabic, Hebrew, and Kanji, among other alphabets.
9:45 a.m. PT: Guthrie shows a Silverlight-based video jigsaw puzzle. Turns out it is a video of the infamous Rick Astley video. "You've all been rickrolled," Guthrie said.
Also, for those who want to see the IIS smooth streaming on iPhone demo that Guthrie struggled to get working, it is on the Web here.
9:50 a.m. PT: It's getting code-heavy now, as Microsoft demos how to create Silverlight stuff in Visual Studio 2010. Meanwhile, there's some more detail on Microsoft's IE 9 plans in this blog post.
9:55 a.m. PT: Microsoft hasn't started talking about the Office 2010 beta yet, but it looks like you can start getting it from Microsoft's Web site.
10:04 a.m. PT: Still no Office talk on stage, but the beta is live and Microsoft has posted an article noting that Office Mobile 2010 is also in beta and available for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones via the Windows Mobile Marketplace.
The beta also adds an Outlook Social Connector, which allows users to bring in Windows Live and other social networking feeds into Outlook. LinkedIn is the first that will take advantage of it--early next year--but there is a software development kit for others to do so.
10:15 a.m. PT: The beta of Silverlight 4 is now available for download, Guthrie says. The final release is due in the first half of next year.
10:17 a.m. PT: Office unit senior vice president Kurt DelBene is introduced to talk about Office 2010.
10:20 a.m. PT: DelBene talking about efforts to bring Office not just to the desktop, but also via hosted services.
By the way, while I've been live blogging, we've also posted a story and photo gallery looking at the Windows Azure data center container that is on display at the PDC show floor.
10:35 a.m. PT: DelBene notes that the Office 2010 beta is now available, as are betas of the Office Web Apps for businesses as well as office Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.5.
"I hope that you will all download (Office 2010)," DelBene said.
As I note in my story on the Office 2010 beta, though, the Web Apps remain in their current Tech Preview form on Windows Live. There's no time frame for when they will get updated to the beta versions, which include Word editing and the OneNote Web app.
10:45 a.m. PT: Lots of Sharepoint demos. Lot's of coding. I'll spare you the details.
LOS ANGELES--Although Microsoft intends to talk a bit about its plans for the future of Internet Explorer this week, the company won't offer preview code of its next browser, CNET has learned.
The software maker is also not planning to announce a move to the WebKit engine, as some had speculated.
Ray Ozzie, speaking Tuesday at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)In his opening keynote at the Professional Developers Conference on Tuesday, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie pledged that Microsoft will make Internet Explorer the absolute best Windows browser, but did not offer further details.
Microsoft is expected to talk more about its browser plans as part of Wednesday's keynote speech. During that talk, he is expected to talk about some--but not all--of its "focus areas" for the next browser version, a Microsoft representative told CNET.
The latest version of IE 8 was released in March and is also built into Windows 7. Despite the new release, though, Microsoft faces intense competition from Firefox as well as from Google and Apple.
In addition, Microsoft has struggled to get Internet Explorer users to move past IE 6.
At a key supercomputing conference on Monday, Microsoft released a test version of its Excel spreadsheet redesigned to run on powerful clusters of servers.
By engineering Excel to run better on such clusters Microsoft said that customers are seeing spreadsheets that normally would take weeks to calculate now run in a few hours.
The software maker also released a beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2--the latest version of Windows Server designed to run in high-performance compute clusters. The announcements were made at the SC09 conference in Portland, Ore.
Microsoft has taken the standard version of Excel 2010 and combined it with new Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 technology, allowing Excel to run on the cluster. The final version of Excel compute cluster and Win HPC Server 2008 R2 is expected to be ready in summer 2010. The capability has been in development for about 18 months.
The announcements are the latest in Microsoft's push over the last few years to better compete against Linux in the market for compute clusters--high-performance systems built by linking together large numbers of standard servers. Last year, for example, Microsoft managed to crack the upper echelons of the supercomputing ranks, landing in the top 25 rankings for the first time.
Microsoft also said the next version of its developer tools--Visual Studio 2010--will help ease the task of writing software that can run efficiently on such systems.
"Until now, the power of high-performance and parallel computing has largely been available to a limited subset of customers due to the complexity of environments and applications, as well as the challenges of parallel programming," Microsoft senior director Vince Mendillo said in a statement.
As for the new version of HPC Server, Microsoft said it offers the ability out-of-the-box to support clusters of up to 1,000 nodes as well as diskless boot and improved management and diagnostics abilities.
When Ray Ozzie first landed at Microsoft in 2005, he found a company with lots of good ideas. He also found things were getting in the way of innovation, everything from businesses that weren't thinking about the broader company strategy to the way Microsoft stationed each of its workers in their own office.
As the new chief software architect set out to work on Microsoft's cloud-based strategy, he also started doing his part to shift that corporate culture. To house his team, Ozzie had Microsoft tear up its typical floor plan. Instead of tons of hallways and offices, Ozzie wanted lots of common space and whiteboards everywhere. Once a notable oddity at Microsoft, such work areas have become increasingly common in recent years.
Ray Ozzie, chief software architect,
Microsoft
Ozzie also quickly set to work on changing Microsoft's product development, first detailing his plans publicly in a 2005 memo, titled the "Internet Services Disruption."
In the missive, Ozzie talked about the emergence of advertising as a business model for software, new ways of delivering software, and the need to make things simpler in an era where users are inundated with technology choices. Ozzie and company Chairman Bill Gates talked about a wave of "Live" software that would extend Microsoft's products with new Internet-based services.
Ozzie challenged the company that it was faced with new challenges and aggressive competitors that threatened its cash cows, but was careful to only rock the boat so hard.
"In assessing where we are and where we need to be, some new efforts will surely require incubation," Ozzie wrote in 2005. "But in many areas we have 80 percent of the product and technical infrastructure already built--we just need to close the 20 percent gap."
The extent to which Ozzie has managed to reshape Microsoft's product and culture since then will be on display this week, as Microsoft hosts a major conference for its developers in Los Angeles.
Azure, Office unveilings
At the Professional Developer Conference, as the event is known, Microsoft is expected to announce the commercial launch of Windows Azure as well as a beta version of its Office 2010 software. Ozzie is set to speak on Tuesday, while office unit senior vice president Kurt DelBene will be part of Wednesday's keynote address.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
The arrival of those two products shows just how much has changed since Ozzie's memo.
Shown for the first time at last year's PDC, Windows Azure is the operating system re-imagined for the cloud computing era. Instead of controlling a local PC or server, Azure is designed as a platform where developers write programs that run from inside Microsoft's massive data centers. Microsoft and customers have been testing Azure since then as part of a free technology preview. Starting in February, though, Microsoft plans to start charging based on how much computing resources a customer is using.
Office, while one of Microsoft's core products, is in the midst of a major shift. Amid competition from Web-based rivals such as Google Apps, the product is morphing into a number of different forms, everything from the traditional desktop suite, to a hosted Web service, to free browser-based applications.
Showing off other wares
Beyond Azure and Office, Microsoft will also be talking about other topics ranging from identity systems to developer tools.
It will also be showing some new technology coming out of its labs--highlighting some closer ties between the company's research unit and its product groups.
Live Labs head Gary Flake is scheduled to show off "a new approach to exploring information on the Web."
Meanwhile, Microsoft's Seadragon unit is showing off a couple new projects. Seadragon is known for a "deep zoom" technology that allows a user to dive into an image, going from a wide angle to the finest grain of detail.
One of the group's new efforts--Snapdragon--is designed as a new concept approach to image search. "Snapdragon utilizes Flickr images to prototype what image search would be if, instead of searching, we allowed users to explore images and the relationships between them," Microsoft said on its Web site.
The other is a collection of work by artist Chris Jordan. Jordan's work is particularly well suited to Snapdragon's deep zoom since it uses thousands of everyday objects to create a broader image. In one picture, for example, Jordan uses thousands of cigarette packs to recreate Van Gogh's smoking skull portrait. In another, Jordan uses soda cans to recreate a Seurat painting.
But more than any one product or technology, PDC will serve as a chance to check back and see what impact Ozzie has made with that 2005 memo and in the years since.
For some groups, Ozzie's memo was a codification of what they were already doing. Corporate vice president Dave Thompson, who was running Microsoft's Exchange team at the time, said his group was already moving in that direction--having already bought FrontBridge and PlaceWare--acquisitions that became Live Meeting and Exchange Hosted Services. Plus, Microsoft had started its pilot program with Energizer to see what other sorts of services it might be able to take on for large businesses.
"When Ray sent his memo, it was a broad call-to-action that was a great affirmation and a rallying point for the efforts already underway," Thompson said in an e-mail interview.
But Ozzie acknowledged that the shift to services--and the transition from Bill Gates' style to his--was more jarring for others.
"My engagement style is far different from Bill's," Ozzie said in a recently published interview with analysts from Gartner. "For a number of groups, that has worked out really well. With others, there are challenges. Some people have a different style or a different view of how they want to take it."
Ozzie says that Gates was supportive of the places that his successor wanted to take the company, but also said that neither he nor Gates really knew how to get there.
"In those days, I had conversations with Bill and he'd say, 'Well that's pretty dramatic or radical in terms of what you are trying to accomplish. It's the right thing to do and if you do it, that will be great,' " Ozzie recalled in the Gartner interview. "And I said, 'How?' And he'd say, 'I don't know. It starts with a memo, and I don't know what happens after that.'"
Nonetheless, Ozzie says, Microsoft has gotten where he hoped the company would get. "When I look back and I read the memo, so many of the things that I had written have come to pass, not because I drove them to make it happen, but because the organization made it happen. It may have happened a little differently here or there, but it happened. So, I'm very pleased about that."
Of course, CNET News will be on hand to see what else Ozzie and team have in store, so check back throughout the week to catch our live, ongoing coverage of the event.
