I’ve put my spin on this topic a number of times over the years, and this time I wanted to take a (mostly) objective look at the problem.  Microsoft tries to address the criticism by pointing out how many of the “Top 25″ apps are indeed available on Windows Phone.  They do that based on an overall list of downloads on other platforms.  Or they’ve focused on certain areas, like gaming and social networking.  And by focusing on trying to attract a few high profile apps.  I wanted to take a different spin.  I’m going to take a handful of categories that are important to me, and I believe many others, and see how well represented apps are in the Windows Phone Store.

Let’s start with Banking and ask a very simple question.  Of the Top-10 banks in the U.S. how many have apps available for Windows Phone?  Three.  And one of those is just for its credit cards.  Want to guess how many of those banks have apps in the Apple App Store?  All ten.

You might think this is just a banking problem, but it is anything in finance.  Windows Phone has apps for Zero of the Top-10 Mutual Fund companies.  Seven of those companies provide apps for the iPhone.  How about if you just want to do research on mutual funds?  Sorry, you’ll need an iPhone, Android Phone, or Blackberry for that.

Moving on, how many of the Top-10 U.S. Airlines have apps for Windows Phone?  Three.  For the iPhone it is eight.

Now the truth is I was going to do this for several more categories but it is too depressing for me to continue.  If you want to understand the situation with Windows Phone yourself step away from a few missing headline apps, and from the nice set of headline apps that have recently been announced on Windows Phone.  Step away from the “Is 145,000 apps enough?” question.  Instead pick a category of apps that are important and find a “Top 10″ list for those.  If it’s a real world category then pick the Top 10 businesses in the real world (as opposed to lists of what are downloaded on other platforms), and see how many of those have official apps in each of the app stores.  Try to find categories where Windows Phone has a passing grade.  Try.

Note: I did this comparison quickly so counts might be +/- 1 as additional search terms lead to discovery of additional apps.  But this won’t change the situation at all.

When I joined Microsoft in early 1994 I discovered what I then considered a somewhat odd way of driving product development.  I would sit in Bill’s reviews of product plans and many would have as a key goal of the release “Win Reviews”.  As an enterprise guy this was odd because at the time reviews played a minimal role in that space, but for end-user products reviews were critical.  Also, whereas enterprise software teams could talk directly to a high percentage of their (existing or potential) customers (CIOs, VPs of Operations or Development, DBAs, etc.) reviewers became a key proxy for end-users.

Recall that we are talking (effectively) pre-Internet.  The dominant force in communicating information about computer hardware and software were a handful of print magazines.  As the PC era reached its pre-Internet peak these publications had grown to the size of small (and sometimes not so small) phone books.  And they were filled with reviews of new products and comparisons of competing products.  Trying to decide between Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and Lotus Ami Pro?  Or Windows vs. OS/2?Articles in these magazines were going to weigh heavily in your decision process.

The major publications took this one step further by getting into a “lab war”, building out hardware labs and hiring technical staff so they could dig more deeply into products.  Even enterprise-oriented products like SQL Server found ourselves fighting lab wars in a couple of publications.  But whereas for SQL Server this was mostly a marketing activity (supporting reviewers by providing resources to help them make sure they’d configured the product correctly, understood the new features, etc.) for end-user products making sure you would come out on top in reviews became a product driver.

So “Win Reviews” drove actual product requirements.  This meant understanding what reviewers would care about, what they liked and disliked about various products, how you might wow them with your new release, etc.  It meant engineering the product with reviewers in mind as the proxy for your end-users.  One could debate if that was really the right thing to do for end-users, and I believe that’s one reason why “Win Reviews” fell out of favor as a product requirement driver.  Circa 1992 reviewers were probably a fair representation of the end-user community.  By 2002 PCs were so ubiquitous that reviewers just represented the Power User niche, and catering to them made it difficult to address the needs of the broader user base.  Somewhere between those two dates worrying about reviews moved out of the product requirements arena and became purely an outward-focused marketing effort.

For the most part this transition away from letting reviewers drive product requirements was a good thing.  It was facilitated by a dramatic growth in ability to directly communicate with the user community.  Of course there was the much mentioned explosion in telemetry.  And Microsoft (through a growing sales force and closer partnerships with OEMs, ISVs, consultants, etc.) greatly increased its direct communications with customers.  Plus the Internet provided a means for users to express themselves directly.  The way I found out how badly I’d missed the boat by leaving Declarative Referential Integrity out of SQL Server 7.0 was by following newsgroups and forums and getting blasted about it.  The formal communications channels had not brought it up at all!  So adding DRI became one of the top priorities for SQL Server 2000.

Now jump forward to the modern era.  On one hand you could expect that reviews should play a smaller role than ever in driving product definition.  But consider the marketing side of things.  When a market participant is the overwhelmingly dominant player they have little incentive to worry about reviews.  Reviews, in essence, can only benefit the underdog.  However, when markets are highly competitive reviews can make a significant difference in purchasing decisions.  Today every segment Microsoft plays in is competitive and often highly competitive, with significant areas in which they are the underdog.  Even in an area they are dominant, desktop computing, they have tremendous competition from their own legacy.  Windows Vista had to compete with Windows XP.  Windows 8 has to compete with Windows 7.  Reviews matter.

Consider where Windows 8 would be today if the preponderance of reviews had lauded it as a great follow-on to Windows 7.  Consider if Windows 8 had amongst its goals “Win Reviews”.  It would have taken a very small number of concessions to the purity of the evolution, and/or prioritizing taking a few steps further along the evolutionary path, to swing the balance of opinion on Windows 8 from negative to positive.  Windows 8 is a great release but to many reviewers, and the Power User class they are part of, it seemed like Microsoft was intentionally rubbing their noses in excrement.  And they’ve repaid the favor by lumping Windows 8 in with Windows Vista (which is a totally ridiculous comparison).

We see this in other areas as well, security being a prime example.  Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender hasn’t been doing that well in published reviews by testing organizations.  When you look at why you discover that there is a disconnect between the methodology the testing organization uses and the way Microsoft thinks of its collection of capabilities.  The methodology often bypasses parts of Microsoft’s offering while exercising the equivalent parts of its competitor’s offerings, thus Microsoft comes across as having the weaker product.  Microsoft addresses this as a marketing problem, trying to get testing organizations to change their methodology and explain the situation to the public.  What it hasn’t done is step back and say “what do we need to change in the products to win the reviews?”

Given where Microsoft is in its various markets what it needs right now is the preponderance of reviews of all of its products to be overwhelmingly positive.  And you can’t get that via outward focused marketing activities.  What Microsoft needs right now is to take a tip from the PC software market of 20 years ago and make “Win Reviews” part of its product planning process.

I am using Windows 8 on numerous machines, most of which don’t have touch screens!  My Surface RT has a touch screen and I use the keyboard, track pad, and short-cut keys whenever the situation allows.  But even when my Surface is being used more as a notebook than a tablet, I still reach up and touch the screen from time to time.  Launching an app?  I usually touch the screen.  Need to share something?  I usually touch the screen to bring up the Share Charm.  Scroll through pages in an article?  Yup, I usually touch the screen.  Even touching links on a web page is often easier with the finger than with a touchpad-controlled mouse pointer (though this is not the case with a real mouse).  But a lot of the time, such as when I’m writing blog entries or doing email, my fingers never leave the Type Cover.  I find this mixed mode usage extremely natural.

My frustration with Windows 8 on most of the PCs I use is that they don’t have touch.  And worse, they don’t have multi-touch and gesture-enabled pointing devices.  I’ve played with the Logitech T650 touchpad and it makes the Windows 8 UI design much more palatable.  I’ve noted the same thing when playing with newer non-touch notebooks in stores.  If their touchpad supports the edge-swipe gestures and multi-touch then the Windows 8 UI is a pleasure to use.  If they are just old-fashioned mouse simulators than you really notice the seams between the UI and your hardware.    Microsoft did not optimize Windows 8′s user experience for older hardware, it supports them as a convenience to users.  Microsoft optimized Windows 8 for new hardware, including things that haven’t yet come to market.

Even if you don’t like the idea of reaching out and touching your screen there are a lot of new things coming in terms of Natural UI that Windows 8 is simply a prep for.  I’m surprised that Microsoft hasn’t yet released a next-generation Kinect specifically for controlling Windows devices, with native support in the OS and first-party apps as well (of course) with Windows RunTime support.  But that will come.  And then there is the Tobii REX, which I’d love to add to my existing non-touch PCs!  In both cases we’re looking at new ways to control your PC.  Ways that would be impractical with Windows XP, Windows 7, or WIMP in general.  Why do I say that?  Because they don’t have the precision that WIMP-based interfaces require.  While Kinect enables completely new scenarios, both it and REX can be used to supplement (rather than replace) traditional keyboards and mice in classic “Desktop PC” scenarios.

Still looking for options?  In the past we’ve seen examples of projection keyboards.  Imagine a version that when you “touched” a function key it switched from projection of the keyboard to projection of the screen on the horizontal surface in front of you.  And then let you manipulate the UI using touch and gestures on the projection.  Once again this is far more feasible with Windows 8′s “Modern” or “Metro” than with classic WIMP.

Something less dramatic?  Logitech almost has it right, almost.  I want a mode where the touchpad functions more as a virtual overlay on the touchscreen and lets me touch things rather than mouse over them.  I’d switch to “mouse” mode when editing documents or other higher-precision pointing activities, but stay in “touch” mode for most UI manipulation.

Microsoft is not saying that touch is the “be-all and end-all” of user interface, it is just making it and similar technologies first-class citizens.  Are there tradeoffs involved in such a move?  Of course.  Some are short-term (e.g., one main window with one snapped window in Windows 8), some are long-term.  But they aren’t abandoning the mouse and the need for precision pointing.  Or the physical keyboard.  And they aren’t insisting on a future where you have to stand there for hours with your arms stretched out in front of you.

Presumably the Xbox will require an Internet connection in order to run games and that the reason for this is to enforce the Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme.  From what I can tell the real controversy is about DRM and not the actual need for an Internet connection.  People hate DRM in every form, style, intent, etc. that mankind has come up with.  Even the people who insist on protecting their intellectual property with DRM actually hate DRM, they just can’t make the business model work without it.  But in this case the controversy isn’t about DRM specifically, it is about the notion that the next generation Xbox’s DRM scheme would eliminate the resale and rental models for games.  Right?

So let’s explore “Always-On” along two dimensions.  First I want to talk about the raw requirement for an Internet connection and then I’ll dig into the DRM topic.  Yes I know most of you care more about the DRM part, so skip ahead if you want.

I’ve tweeted one point about Always-On and it was something I learned from a friend some time back.  They live in a rural area with only Hughesnet satellite Internet available to them.  Hughesnet has a Fair Access Policy (FAP) that limits how much data you can use in any given 24-hour period after which they slow your connection down to dial-up speed for 24-hours.  My friend had to disconnect his family’s Xbox from the Internet because he’d go to get online to do work and discover his kids use of the Xbox had caused the FAP limits to be exceeded.  Metered connections of one sort or another are all that is available to tens of millions of Americans, and even supposedly unlimited service actually has limits.  Outside the U.S. metered connections are more common.

So when Always-On is mentioned as part of the Next-Generation Xbox I’m left to wonder if Microsoft is paying sufficient attention to the details of what this implies.  To give an example of a case where they did not take DirectAccess.  It has an always-on management channel that will, in the background, ship updates to your system whenever it is connected to the Internet.  In its first release there was no way for an administrator to say “don’t ship updates if this is a metered connection”, and so hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of data would be shoved down to your PC no matter what the implication.  This was a significant inhibitor to adoption of DirectAccess, particularly outside the U.S.

So the question is, how much attention is the Xbox team paying to networking issues like metered connections and poor connection reliability?  The truth is that addressing these is not rocket science, it is just prioritizing dealing with them.  For example, can I specify subsets of Xbox functionality that can use the Internet connection?  Can I say, “yes you can use it to maintain DRM but you can’t use it for anything else”?  Can I decide if I want updates downloaded automatically or only with my permission?  Etc.  Another example is when one says “always-on” what does that really mean?  A lease-based mechanism would seem to provide any imagined benefit while handling poor connectivity and reducing bandwidth usage.  In other words, once you check DRM for a game it takes a lease that could last for 24-hours, 72-hours, or perhaps even 7 days before you have to renew it.  You don’t actually have to go out on the network every time the game is played.

Although the real noise in the system isn’t about the network usage, in practice that could become the real problem if Microsoft hasn’t paid attention to the details.

So what about DRM?  DRM frustrates us all both because it intrudes on usability but also because it restricts us from doing things that we feel we are entitled to.  For me the most important variant of this is that when I purchase something I feel it belongs to me and not to a specific device.  I should be able to use it from any device I own, or in fact anywhere in my household (e.g., my wife should be able to watch the movie too).  This becomes more and more true as the price of whatever purchase I make goes up.  At $.99 I do not feel put out by the need to buy something for each of the devices I or my family want to view or run something on.  At $5 I am annoyed (and somewhat impeded) by it.  At $50 I am outraged.  Many new top-tier console games are running around $60, so you know where they sit in my personal hierarchy.

In this context I understand why people would want to be able to create secondary market for games that cost $50 or $60.  That’s a lot of money to spend for something that you, or your kids, lose interest in after a few days or weeks.  You want to either buy a used copy for less, sell the new copy you bought when you lose interest, or rent a copy because you know you won’t be playing the game regularly.  And so you have a particular market dynamic that has been working for much of the last two decades.

But the world is changing.   Game prices for mobile devices are an order of magnitude less than what you pay for those on a gaming console.  Are you getting more for your money on the console?  Of course you are.  Are you getting 10x worth?  For hard-corps gamers maybe, for most people probably not.

Let’s review the game console business model.  Consoles use a subsidized business model.  They are sold for far less than the cost to manufacture (let alone market, sell, and distribute) in return for a share of the sales of all games sold.  So Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo lose money on every console sold, but when you buy your 5th or 6th game they start to make money.  And it isn’t just their games, it is any game on the console.  So buy EA’s FIFA Soccer 13 for an Xbox and a portion of what you’ve paid to EA actually goes to Microsoft.

There are billions of phones, 1.3 Billion PCs, hundreds of millions of tablets, but only about 60 million (of the market leading) Xbox 360s in the world.  For even a top-tier console game that means the potential unit market is actually quite small. Game development costs are high.  Marketing costs are high.  And you’ve got to share the wealth with the console manufacturer.  Combine that with pricing pressure coming from the mobile gaming segment and one has to wonder if the current console game business model is sustainable.  I posit that it is not.

Which brings us to the Always-On DRM question for the Next-Generation Xbox.  If one combines that model with $60 games the result is a total disaster because it is effectively a price increase in a market with severe downward pricing pressure.  But what if this is really about changing the console game business model.  What if you wanted to, nee had to, drive the price of top-tier console games down to $30 or even $20?  The game publishers still have to make a profit on a relatively low-volume product.  Microsoft still has to get enough of a cut to make the Xbox business profitable.  What if the way to do that was to kill the resale and rental markets but drive the price of a new game down to less than they currently go for on the used market?

From the standpoint of business people inside Microsoft and the game publishers this seems like a win-win situation.  Game unit sales volume would go up dramatically.  Opportunities for in-app purchases and other ancillary sales would go up dramatically.  And the cost of a game to the end-user would drop.  There is no loser in this, except for the people running resale and rental businesses.

The bottom line on both my networking concerns and the broader DRM concerns is that not only don’t we know if there really is an Always-On requirement, if there is we don’t know any details.  Microsoft could be giving us something that will make the Next-Generation Xbox far more attractive to a far larger user base, or instituting business practices that kill of the console gaming business entirely.  We just don’t know.

The traditional PC market is in long-term irreversible decline.  That doesn’t mean it goes away, mainframes are still with us for example, or if it does (as happened with minicomputers) that it goes away in the next decade.  But sales volumes will rapidly shift to smartphones, tablets, and tablet-inspired devices.  Microsoft can cannibalize its own traditional business or watch Apple and the Android cartel do it to them.  Microsoft’s approach is to try to redefine the PC to encompass the so-called post-PC world.  That’s a tough thing to do, and one can question details of the route that Microsoft takes, but they have no choice.  Despite what many Windows 8-haters believe.

One recent comment on this blog challenged Microsoft’s move away from the traditional desktop with the assertion that Apple remains committed to that market with OS X.  Let’s be clear here, despite Apple’s relative (to previous decades) success with OS X the Mac is a pimple on the overall PC market.  The much maligned Windows 8 has already passed any version of OS X in market share and will pass the combined market share of all versions of OS X by the end of this year.  If you want to hold OS X up as proof of the vitality of the traditional PC market you may be demonstrating the opposite.  That the much-loved OS X hasn’t been able to exceed single digit market share range despite Microsoft’s travails with anti-trust restrictions on its business practices, the Vista debacle, and a general malaise towards the company suggests that the desktop is a niche.  Few want to pay the costs of moving to OS X because they don’t see that as a meaningful change.  Their personal and corporate attention is on the much more impactful paradigm shift that is under way.

One could also challenge the assertion that Apple is investing in OS X.  It’s more like a cash-cow.  Years ago they reportedly cut the size of the OS X team and moved the resources to IOS.  Even in the last couple of days there have been reports of resources being taken off of OS X to help with the development of IOS 7.  Apple continues to invest enough in OS X, and refreshes of the Mac product line, to keep it generating healthy profits.  But the full weight of the company is behind IOS and the non-desktop world not OS X and the desktop.  I wonder if critics would have been happier had Microsoft put a skeleton crew on producing Windows 7.1, 7.2, etc. while the bulk of its resource went into producing a Windows-based “Tablet OS 8″.

Microsoft has been in the toilet for over a decade now yet neither OS X nor the variety of attempts at Desktop Linux have made a dent in its desktop dominance.  On the other hand, IOS and Android are kicking the c*** out of Microsoft.  Apple and Google have taken advantage of a paradigm shift away from WIMP as a usage model and the “desktop” as the place most people do computing.    And now that is spreading from being secondary devices (or consumer toys as some try to position them) that reduce Minutes per Day (MpD) usage of PCs (and lengthening the PC replacement cycle) to replacing traditional PCs outright.  Retail is a very visible example of this, where iPads are replacing in-store PCs and PC-based cash registers as the primary device used by store employees.

Microsoft may fail to make the transition and become irrelevant just as Gartner asserts.  I think the Windows team made some rookie mistakes in putting out Windows 8.  Those are things they can recover from, although the delay in getting to a place where the reinvention of Windows garners more praise than hate makes their cause significantly more difficult.  On the positive side it looks like both Windows Phone and Windows are shifting some of their attention back to the Enterprise market where their traditional strength lies.  That’s probably a strategy they should have pursued from the beginning, but fear of “keep doing what you’ve done and you’ll keep getting what you got” caused the pendulum to swing too far to the Consumer.  Again, not technically irrecoverable but certainly a huge speed bump in achieving business success.

Microsoft has a long and difficult road ahead of it and they will make mistakes along the way.  But they really have no choice in whether or not to attempt the journey.  The traditional PC is the new mainframe.  And even for the mighty IBM, mainframes are just a niche business as this point.  When it comes to computing the phrase “change or die” has never been more appropriate.

With the latest revelation that Windows Blue is likely to be called Windows 8.1 I ended up in an amusing Twitter stream of speculation about Windows Server naming.  Microsoft has maintained a consistent naming convention for server (of all flavor) releases since 2000.  I’ll give some history of this, speculate on what happens this year, and speculate a bit on the future.

Back in the mid-90s when Microsoft decided to name both client operating systems and Office (e.g., Windows 95 and Office 95) by year rather than version number Jim Allchin declared that his products (Windows NT, SQL Server, etc.) would never adopt that naming convention.  I want to say that Jim said “Over my dead body” but my memory is fading enough that I won’t promise he actually said that.  Anyway, Jim didn’t die when 5 years later he agreed to adopt the calendar-based naming convention for Microsoft’s server products.

Prior to 2000 each of the server products was on its own development schedule and had little in the way of coordinated marketing.  But as it turned out 2000 was going to be a big year for product launches with most of the server products bringing something to the table.  Paul Flessner, who had become head of the Server Applications Division, and others were of the belief that marketing individual products to IT departments was no longer the way to go and that Microsoft should put more emphasis on marketing the family over the individuals.

There were two problems with marketing the 2000 wave of products as a single family.  The first was that it wasn’t really developed that way.  Of course there were the usual efforts by each team to coordinate certain features and usage scenarios, but it wasn’t as front and center in the product planning as one would have pursued had the family concept been around when we started as opposed to coming out of marketing later.  The second, and easier to fix, problem was that product naming conventions left little guide as to the relationship between the products.  That could be fixed, and was fixed, by adopting a common family naming convention.

This was the coming out party for .NET and so the naming convention that was adopted was .NET yyyy.  Yes, oh so briefly, SQL Server 8 had become SQL Server.NET 2000.  All the other server releases followed this pattern.  My SQL Server 8 developer conference was hijacked to become the .NET Developer Conference (“Featuring SQL Server.NET 2000″), a mistake for which I will never forgive Paul   It didn’t take long before the .NET was dropped from the name of all the products but they retained the convention of using the year rather than version number to indicate specific releases.  So SQL Server 2000, Commerce Server 2000, Exchange Server 2000, etc.

Over the years this has been rejiggered in a number of ways.  For a while all these products were marketed together as the “Windows Server System” which included Windows Server itself as well.  And while no serious attempt was made to force all the products to release in waves, as the Office team does, there has been an increased level of coordination.  For example STB maintains a set of criteria that all of its products must meet in order to be allowed to ship.  Think of it like an internal logo program that is used to achieve some consistency across server products.

Initially management of the Server family was purely virtual.  While Paul Flessner ran the Server Applications Division (which at the time owned Exchange Server too) he did not own Windows Server (which remained in the Windows organization) nor Developer Division.  But he did have an overall business ownership role across them.  Microsoft is not a good organization for matrix management, so eventually all of the servers  were consolidated into what we now know as STB with Eric Rudder as its leader.

Bob Muglia took ownership of Windows Server, reporting to Eric, and sought to accelerate its development (which had been slowed by the Windows’ teams effort to transition the client OS to the NT kernel, followed by the Longhorn debacle).  Bob instituted a system in which Windows Server would release more frequently than Windows itself, alternating releases without kernel changes with those in which Windows had a release of its own (and thus a revised kernel).  These non-kernel releases were given the designation R2, the first of which was Windows Server 2003 R2.  In time the kernel vs non-kernel differentiation became meaningless and the true meaning of R2 became a way to designate a minor (or perhaps more appropriately positioned as a “.5″) release.  Other server products adopted the convention, although they have not used it very extensively.

Without any significant changes in branding we have STB on-premise products with a fairly clear naming convention.  The product is either the product name followed by the year, or it is the previous product release name followed by R2 (or R3, R4, etc. though that has rarely happened).  That means a Windows Server Blue would either be named Windows Server 2013, Windows Server 2014, or Windows Server 2012 R2.  Let me explain the 2013 vs 2014 thing.  There is some concern that a product shipping in the 4th calendar quarter of the year would seem dated just a few months later if it used the actual year of release in its name.  So sometimes Microsoft will use the subsequent year in the name.  But my bet on Windows Server Blue is that it will use the Windows Server 2012 R2 name.

Although I’ve heard some rumbling that Windows Server Blue might actually bring more dramatic improvements to Windows Server than Windows Blue is bringing to Windows 8, I have my doubts that they could bring so much to the table that they’d want to use a major version name.  Not only that, but being the conservative upgrade types that most IT leaders are, Microsoft might want to send a message of stability rather than one of change.  Depending on what kinds of changes are in Windows Server Blue they may be able to get IT departments to switch deployment efforts mid stream from a Windows Server 2012 to a Windows Server 2012 R2 effort.  It is unlikely they could get them to switch mid-stream to a 2013 named release.  So I think the dynamics point towards Microsoft using the R2 naming convention in this case.

There is a third reason for Microsoft to use the R2 convention, which is that the entire server product family branding scheme is getting rather dated.  At some point Microsoft will want to re-brand all of the products to better communicate their appropriateness for cloud and hybrid environments in addition to on-premise.  Is 2013 the year in which they will do this?  Overall for the company it is a year of consolidating the position they established with the 2012 product wave.  So maintaining a notion of stability where changes are more incremental and meant to mature the 2012 wave makes the most sense.  But if I factor out Windows 8 and focus on how solid a release Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012, etc. are then a rebrand of the server products seems more reasonable this year.  Still, I’m betting against it.  Why?

As many have noted the value of the “Windows” brand is in decline.  For one thing it doesn’t carry much cachet with consumers any more.  For another, Windows 8 isn’t your father’s Windows and future versions will make this even more obvious.  So Microsoft could in fact be on the cusp of a more dramatic re-branding than just changing how server products are named.  If that is in the cards then it makes no sense for the server products to change before the company has figured out an overall re-branding.  And given I think they won’t want to make such a disruptive change in 2013, the server naming conventions likely won’t change in 2013 either.

For me the bottom line is that Windows Server 2012 R2 is the most likely name for Windows Server Blue, followed by Windows Server 2013 as a second possibility.  Anything more dramatic wouldn’t be a total shock, I just don’t expect it.  Anything more off the reservation, but not part of a major re-branding, would just be silly.

(Update: I forgot to mention that Windows 2000 originally got that name because it was supposed to be the follow-on to Windows 98 SE.  When the team was unable to finish all the app and driver compatibility work a final follow-on in the Win 9x family was added to the plan.  Since Windows 2000 had already taken that name the Windows 9x release was called Windows ME.  So the Windows 2000 naming was not the result of the name syncing scheme described above, but rather the bridge from the client OS use of that scheme to the server use of it.)

I’ve long wondered why the Consumer Electronics industry hasn’t updated to more modern control technologies than IR.  It isn’t that they haven’t made (fairly minor) stabs at it.  Occasionally you’ll see a piece of equipment from the 1990s sporting an RS-232 interface.  Though usually it is more for programming purposes than actual control.  More recently they’ve been sporting Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, though in most cases that is for data (e.g., stream a movie from the Internet) and not control.  Radio Frequency (RF) remotes have also had a niche status, although one might have expected RF to replace IR long ago it hasn’t made much of a dent.

If you don’t understand the problems with IR let me give a brief summary.  It requires line-of-site to use wirelessly and expensive repeaters, extenders, blasters and other paraphernalia for interconnecting equipment.  It is horribly unreliable, with devices interfering with one another as well as cabinet design and room lighting causing problems.  It is slow, requiring you to hold a remote pointed at the same place for several seconds as it spits out a sequence of commands to operate multiple devices.  This last point caused my Mother so many problems (she’d end up with the TV on and the DVR off, or vice versa and be unable to get them back in sync) that we took away her DVR.  It really is time for this ancient and insufficient technology to die.

Of course the Consumer Electronics industry evolves very slowly, unless given a kick in the rear by the Computer Industry.  And once again it looks like Apple will be the one to apply boot to backside.  My sources are telling me that Apple intends to introduce a new proprietary control technology along with its forthcoming Apple TV called FireIR.

Apple’s FireIR will reportedly continue to use IR technology, but use a new proprietary high-speed protocol to replace RC-5 and the other protocols currently used in Consumer Electronics.  The FireIR protocol will be protected by Apple patents and Apple will require all connected equipment to use it.  For example. Apple will not license FireIR for use in Universal Remotes that support multiple protocols.  So in addition to your remote your CD player, DVD player, Stereo receiver, etc. would all need to be replaced by units that support FireIR.  The iPhone 6 as well as future iPod and iPads would of course support FireIR, completing the perfect Apple Consumer Electronics ecosystem.

I’m sure that most of you are worried about if Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox 720 will support FireIR, and friends on the Xbox team are telling me no.  That’s not a surprise as it seems unlikely that Apple will license FireIR to competitors.  Microsoft is working on its own alternative using technology developed by Microsoft Research.  WiNCE  (Wireless Next - Consumer Electronics) is a wireless version of RS-232 that supports very high-speed data transfers in addition to a remote control protocol.  Whereas Apple will combine FireIR control with 802.11AC for data transfer Microsoft is hoping to supplant both with WiNCE.  Microsoft will license a subset of WiNCE to the Consumer Electronics industry, and submit that subset to the IEEE for standardization.  Of course the Xbox 720, Windows 9, Windows Phone 9, and other Microsoft products will support a richer super-set of WiNCE that Microsoft hopes will lead to deployment of completely Windows-centric homes.

Personally I think that both Apple and Microsoft are crazy and that these developments are simply the ultimate example of the “greater fool” theory at work.  My understanding is that the Consumer Electronics industry doesn’t want either of them having this much power and is looking to establish its own replacement for traditional IR.  My bet is on Samsung’s proposed NG-TCOAS.  NG-TCOAS, or Next Generation – Two Cans On A String, is a universal technology that can be implemented easily and cheaply by all types of Consumer Electronics equipment.  Samsung will, of course, bake support into its own variant of Android as part of a strategy to wrestle control of that operating system from Google.  But that is a story for a future blog post.

I’m pretty upset about Google’s decision to drop support for Google Reader.  I think it is a mistake, and one that will come back to bite them (and actually already has).  I’ll get to more details of that a little later, but first let’s examine this on general principles.

All products and services must die at some point.  Maybe like Bonomo Turkish Taffy they will be reborn, but at some point a company has to decide it is no longer worth offering the product or service.  Often they hold on too long leading to failure of the organization itself.  Other times they have to look at the costs of continuing the business.  Those costs include actual costs, which may exceed the revenue received, and opportunity costs.  Opportunity costs include a tradeoff where putting $1 into business A produces $1.20 in return while putting it into business B produces $1.80.  So you stop investing in A and invest in B.  And that probably sends A into a death spiral.

There is also the problem of management attention.  The biggest complexity around management is not the number of people in your organization nor the size (in $) of the business, it is the number of different things you have to manage.  Be good at managing 100 pet stores and you can manage 1000 or 10000.  Be good at managing 100 pet stores and try to simultaneously manage 100 Women’s clothing stores and you will fail.  You just don’t have enough cycles to do both businesses justice.  Get into a conglomerate like GE and the complexity goes up a couple of orders of magnitude.  Those who can mange the diversity of businesses become CEOs (and get paid a lot for that ability).

But even great CEOs, let alone mediocre ones, hit their limit.  They reach the point where they can’t understand or manage the diversity of businesses.  They realize that this problem is not just theirs, but that the next level or two down in the management chain is struggling with the same problem.  They realize that they aren’t managing opportunity cost very well.  And they start to narrow the focus of the company.  And when they do that, products and services have to go.

Perhaps the most persistently popular posting on my blog is one discussing the demise of Microsoft Forefront.  Forefront TMG was a successful product, but it had to go for all the above reasons.  Forefront as a business had to go for all the above reasons.  It’s not that Microsoft couldn’t have successfully competed head-to-head in the security products business, it is that it was at the bottom when evaluated against management distraction and opportunity cost.  Most of the capabilities live on in the businesses that needed them, could justify the investment, and had the management cycles to mange them in the context of other products.  SPAM filtering in the context of an email server is not a distraction, it is a core capability.  Meanwhile what can be lost in all of this is the customer.

Once you have one customer you have a problem because you can’t discontinue a product or service without pissing off that customer.  It doesn’t matter if you have 1 or 1000 or 1 million, the reaction is going to be the same.  So TMG customers are pissed off.  When Microsoft discontinued Money large numbers of people were pissed off.  Customer’s don’t care that the customer base isn’t growing, or that in fact it is shrinking.  What they care about is that they are using the product or service, that they invested heavily in it, and that there is no wholly suitable replacement.

How upset customers will be is one of the factors you have to consider in deciding to kill off a product or service, because it can impact other product lines.  If you are in the Dishwasher and Jet Engine businesses and you decide to kill off your dishwasher line then it probably doesn’t have any impact on Jet Engine sales.  If you are the supplier of both computer servers and computer storage to large enterprises and you kill off your server business it may very well tank your storage business as well.

Besides outright killing business are there alternatives?  Sure, you can sell or spin-off the business.  It is questionable how much goodwill you retain as a result.   If you picked DEC Rdb over Oracle because you didn’t much care to do business with Oracle, but then DEC sold Rdb to Oracle, how happy with DEC were you?  If, as I’d agitated for, we had spun Rdb out from DEC as its own company would customers have been happier?  Now instead of dealing with a large well-resourced company they’d have been dealing with a small one with very limited support resources.  One that would probably have failed or been acquired by yet another company they didn’t want to do business with.  It’s lose vs. lose vs. lose.

I actually tried to sell Forefront TMG when it became clear it was no longer strategic.  The financials of the sale didn’t make enough sense, and my argument that it was the best thing for customers was somewhat debatable.  On the good side the pressure from my efforts lead to a modest increase in funding that allowed TMG to soldier on a few more years.  Did Microsoft re-think that “sell it” idea last year when they finally decided to end-of-life TMG?  Would customers be happier if TMG were sold to a small company that would give it a modest ongoing life?

Google was long accused of having a product strategy that consisted of throwing jello at the wall to see what would stick.  Of course it’s not binary.  There is no stick vs. no-stick.  Everything sticks, a little.  A couple of years ago they decided to get real about their product portfolio and start trimming things that hadn’t really stuck nor had a way forward.  As a manager and as an investor (though not in Google, fwiw) I applaud them for this.  It should, over time, make them a much stronger company.  But every time they drop one of their offerings they piss off customers.  So far it has been worth the tradeoff, but is killing off Google Reader going to cause grave bodily harm?

I used to manage RSS feeds using Microsoft’s My.live.com page, one of their own initial jello-throwing efforts around the creation of Windows Live.  Of course they never reconciled having both My.live.com and My.msn.com and eventually they killed My.live.com.  My.msn.com can actually function as an RSS reader, but while My.live.com could export your feeds as a OPML file my.msn.com couldn’t read a OPML file!  So I created a Google account and imported my feeds into Google Reader instead.  For years now that has meant I grab my first cup of coffee, sit down at the computer, and look at Google Reader.  Moreover, it has meant that whatever else I do through the day I’m always logged into my Google account.

I’ve used other Google services since creating the account so I could use Reader, but for me none are particularly sticky.  When Reader goes one thing is certain, I will no longer log in to my Google account except when absolutely necessary.  That isn’t a statement of protest, that is just a statement of reality.  Without Reader I have no reason to leave my browser logged in to Google.  It also leaves me reliant on just one other Google service, Google Voice.  Now the truth is that I use Google Voice for just one thing, to get speech-to-text versions of voicemail, and that means it isn’t a very sticky service (particularly since my mobile provider now offers speech-to-text, for a modest charge).  Meaning I could very easily end up relying on no Google services, and dropping my Google Account entirely.

Google Reader also happens to be something that is heavily used within the community of “influentials”.  So while other services that Google has dropped were met largely with a whimper, this one lead to an explosion of protest.  Adding fuel to the fire, Google had driven most competitors out of the market with Reader so there is a feeling that something nefarious is going on here.  Did Google pre-plan to monopolize the RSS Reader market so they could then kill it?  I highly doubt it.

Many have pointed out that RSS Feeds are somewhat of a dying breed, because people use Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks as an alternative.  I partially agree with that assessment though I personally have a problem with it.  I may want to follow a tech blogger’s occasional technology posting, but that doesn’t mean I want to see a couple of dozen of his tweets every day about everything from his political viewpoints (which I may or may not agree with) to what his cat had for breakfast, just so I know when he’s updated his blog.  And in fact multiply that by the 100 or so blogs I follow and the Twitter stream becomes so large that I can’t find the announcements of blog entries (or read the tweets of those I really want to follow).    So I see RSS Feeds retaining an important, if modest, niche.  At least until Twitter comes up with better filtering tools.

Hey Twitter, if you want someone to help you build an RSS Feed replacement into your service drop me a line.

From a business standpoint why should Google have kept Reader alive?  One reason really, that “Google Account” is super-valuable.  It is a means for getting someone to use other services.  Moreover, it is the ultimate means of performing tracking.  As long as I’m logged in to a Google Account while using Google services, including search, they can track my behavior.  And because it is first party none of the attempts to block that tracking apply.  TPLs?  They don’t apply to First Party cookies.  Safari and other browsers’ outright blocks on Third Party cookie?  No effect on First Party tracking.  Identities are important, and Google seems to have forgotten that.

Of course for heavy users of Google services none of this probably matters.  I doubt very many people who use Gmail as their primary email service are going to move to a competing provider.  But for the hundreds of millions of us who use Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or an ISP’s mail and maintained a Google Account for use of various ancillary services the death of those services means we have no reason to maintain a relationship with Google.  And in the long run that will hurt them.  Not fatally of course, but potentially enough that it would have paid for them to keep services like Reader alive.

Products and services eventually have to die, as painful as it is for users.  If I weren’t a user of Google Reader I’d simply look at this and wonder if Google really did a good business analysis before making the choice.  And if they did, then I applaud them for making the hard decision, taking their lumps, and moving to put all their weight behind more strategic initiatives.  But since Google Reader was one of the most important services in my daily life, it’s hard to be that dispassionate about it.  I feel totally screwed over by Google.  It adds to my view that Google is not a good company to do business with.

So as I prepare to move on from Google Reader I’m also thinking about what would happen if I dropped my Google Account entirely.  What would be the impact both short-term and long-term.  That re-evaluation of the business relationship is exactly what happens any time any company decides to discontinue a product or service.  What Microsoft has done with Forefront made complete strategic sense.   But there are certainly many corporate customers who no longer view Microsoft as their provider of security software, even though Microsoft still offers most of what they need.  And there are no doubt a few who became wary of choosing non-security Microsoft products over leading third-party alternatives, though that caution will pass with time.  As will much of the impact of the negative reaction to the end of Google Reader.

(And now the update.)

I’ve moved on from Google Reader to Newsblur, which overall seems like a better cloud-based RSS Reader to begin with.  I did go with a paid account, both because that better met my needs and because Newsblur still isn’t taking new free accounts as they struggle to scale.  I’ve found one app on Windows Phone that supports Newsblur, but none on Windows 8.  So I’ll be using the web on the latter for now.  I’m sure in the coming weeks we’ll see multiple apps support Newsblur, as developers of apps that targeted Google Reader otherwise face the demise of their app.

Although I’d originally signed up for Google Voice as a potential second line or business telephone I barely used it that way.  Skype is a much better option for my needs.  So I was using Google Voice as a voicemail service, but I’ve switched that back to my carrier’s voicemail.  I also question the future of Google Voice as Google just isn’t acting as if it is a strategic offering.  And so rather than committing to it further I decided it was better to pull the plug before Google’s next “spring cleaning”.

I’d toyed with Google+, but long ago concluded that it really offered me nothing over my established social network on Facebook.  I can’t think of a single person I want to be “friends” with that is on Google+ but not Facebook (but most of my Facebook friends are not on Google+).  I could have split my personal networking on Facebook and business oriented networking on Google+, but I already do that with Twitter (which I use almost exclusively for technology networking).  So I stopped all use of Google+ many months ago.

I looked at my Gmail and discovered that other than a few distribution lists the only individuals contacting me there were the results of accidents (i.e., I’d mistakenly sent something out from that account and people had replied to it.).  And all of those individuals have my Hotmail address already, so it didn’t really matter.  I could drop the Gmail account with no real repercussions.

In one of those bizarre privacy violating situations I realized that Google had connected my account to a brother’s Picasa album.  For Google this shows the value of having someone logged in to their Google Account all the time.  For me it was disconcerting.  I don’t use Picasa myself.  Another area where people are (unknowingly?) sucked into the Google Account (lack of) privacy realm is YouTube.  I don’t post to YouTube myself, but because I was always logged in Google could track every YouTube video I watched.

If I ever want to post to YouTube I’ll create a new account that I use just for that purpose, and not leave myself logged in except when I’m posting.  Ditto if I ever decide to use Picasa, though I see that as much less likely.

Free of all need for a Google Account I deleted it.  I am now completely Google-Free.

If you go back and read my earlier posts you know I’ve been expecting changes like allowing more concurrent apps on-screen than just the one full size view plus one snapped view.  I’m really happy to see that coming.  And I’m very happy that Microsoft will apparently make even greater use of Skydrive to sync state and backup data in the cloud.  I also expect there are numerous improvements that won’t really appear until the second, and final, development milestone.

Windows Blue is a completion release, taking Windows 8 to where Microsoft wanted it to be but couldn’t fit in to the available timeframe.   Its primary influence is almost certainly things that Microsoft had on its Windows 8 planning list but fell below the line.  How does that happen?  Well you’ve got functionality (and performance etc.), time, and resources as the principle variables in any development effort.  Resources are hard to vary once you are into a project, so that leaves schedule (time) and functionality that you can tradeoff.  Windows 8 used up every inch of the schedule available.  Originally it was planned as a 3 development milestone release (which is where rumors of an April 2012 RTM date first came from).  Somewhere mid-release they realized they needed an additional development milestone, which pushed RTM out a few months.  But with “Holiday 2012″ as a hard deadline, that left many things undoable in a “V1″.  Windows Blue picks those things up.

Windows Blue is also the first place where Microsoft could really react to the feedback coming from the Developer, Consumer, and Release Previews.  Pretty much what we have in the market today was cast in drying concrete by the time the Developer Preview hit the market.  At best minor tweaks came out of the Developer Preview and bug fixes out of the later previews.  In planning Windows Blue Microsoft would have taken both customer feedback and telemetry from the previews into account.  Post-RTM usage would come too late for influence over Blue and will instead factor into Windows 9.

I find two topics coming out of the blogosphere rather bizarre.  The first was an expectation by some that Microsoft would abandon Modern and return to the classic desktop.  This is bizarre because it would mean a decision to turn Windows into a pure legacy offering with a slow death ahead of it.  But hey, the 5% of the overall user population who are in the “desktop is the future” camp would have been happy.  Anyway, there was not a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening.  Microsoft may want to provide a solution optimized for the 5% for years or decades to come, but that isn’t the future for the other 95%.  The right answer for the 95% is to rapidly evolve Modern to meet their needs.

The other side of this bizarre coin is those claiming that Microsoft would abandon the desktop by Windows 9.  I’ve pointed out that the move away from the desktop is a 5-10 year evolution.  Many other observers thing it is well over 10 years.  Windows 9 would be only two years into that cycle.  David Vaskevitch used to point out that people tend to overestimate the amount of change that is possible in 2 years and underestimate the amount of change that will occur in 10 years.  Once again I think he’s right.

The other thing about moving away from the desktop is the standard logic error so many people make.  A is B does not mean B is A.  Microsoft will move quickly to make the desktop superfluous for those who just need Modern applications.  That says absolutely nothing about removing the desktop for those who have a need for it.  The desktop will disappear from Windows RT relatively soon, perhaps by Windows 9, because once you have a Modern Office and Modern system utilities it is superfluous.  It will live on in mainstream Windows for many years to come because customers have a need to run desktop applications.  But that will be a continually shrinking market, and at some point Microsoft will use various moves (pricing, licensing, etc.) to accelerate its decline.  I don’t expect any of that to happen with Windows Blue or Windows 9.  Maybe Microsoft will ramp up the pressure to narrow the desktop focus to only things that really need the desktop by Windows 10.  Maybe.

In the meantime we’re just a few months away from a pretty significant evolution forward on Windows 8.  Some of that evolution, in the case of first party apps, is already rolling out.  By the start of the summer it looks like anyone who wants will be able to try out Windows Blue, and by the fall we’ll all be enjoying Windows 8 the way Windows 8 was always meant to be.