Why I probably won’t buy a Windows Phone 8 device this fall

Posted on November 12, 2012 by halberenson

Let me be clear, I want Windows Phone 8.  And OEMs have introduced some pretty compelling phones with it this fall.  But I think I’m going to keep my new device lust in check.  At least I’m going to try.

My long-term plan has been to upgrade phones every year.  One year I’ll get one at a low price with the two-year commitment, the next I’ll pay full no-commitment pricing.  My first Windows Phone 7 device, that I paid no-commitment pricing for, was the Samsung Focus.  When Windows Phone 7.5 devices first appeared I decided to wait to see what Nokia would bring to the table, so next up was the Nokia Lumia 900 with a two-year commitment.    My next device is going to be another full price no commitment purchase, so I need to be a bit on the picky side.  If I want WP8 and I think there are compelling phones out there, why aren’t I rushing to get one?  Some of the reasons are uniquely personal while others relate to general faults in the way Microsoft and device manufacturers have handled things.

The first factor of course is that by waiting for the Lumia 900 I put myself off schedule.  I have another 18 months to go on my plan commitment.  18 months is pretty much a lifetime in the smartphone world.  If I spend good money now then I (in theory at least) will miss not only this coming spring’s refinements to the current WP8 generation but the entire new generation likely coming a year from now.  I really don’t mind skipping one update cycle, but two?  That’s going to be hard.  If I wait for this spring I should, at a minimum, be able to get an upgraded version of the devices that were just introduced.  And perhaps there will be a totally new compelling option to consider.

A second factor is that Microsoft’s developer strategy for Windows Phone 8 means I won’t be missing that much over the next six months.  By delaying general availability of the WP8 SDK it means that the bulk of developers didn’t get started working on WP8 apps until the beginning of November.  By the end of this week the U.S. enters the fall holiday season as people start to travel for Thanksgiving.  In the U.S., at least, developer productivity nosedives for a little over a month from Thanksgiving through New Years Day.  That means we can expect only a trickle of apps that fully exploit new WP8 capabilities between now and mid-January, or later.  It won’t be a rushing stream until late Winter nor a flood until Spring.  In other words, the apps that would make an immediate WP8 upgrade “necessary” just aren’t there.

Third, I honestly can’t decide between the available options right now.  I like where Nokia has been going, and I really like my Lumia 900 (though its camera, one of the reasons I bought it, didn’t live up to expectations).  The Lumia 920 has a tremendous amount of candy I really want.  On the other hand the HTC 8x has most of that candy in a much more pocketable form.  What should be the deciding factor is the 920’s camera.  Nokia is supposed to be blowing away the competition on the camera front, but in real life the story is too nuanced to make a compelling case.  Software improvements may yet elevate the 920 well above the crowd, but until that is proven to be the case it adds to my questions about making an 18 month commitment to this device.  Altogether this lack of a clear winner amongst Windows Phones makes my delaying a purchase a little easier.

Fourth, Microsoft’s handling of the upgradability of existing devices, and particularly the Lumia 900, has left me with a healthy dose of mistrust.  Nokia’s own ad campaign, claiming that all smartphones before the Lumia 900 were just a beta test and the 900 was the real deal, is a perfect example.  Huh?  It turns out that the 900 was itself was part of the beta test.  And Nokia and Microsoft knew that, and promoted the 900 as the real deal flagship Windows Phone offering, just weeks before they revealed it was dead-end.

Forget the technical aspects, I understand why Microsoft might have found it undesirable to bring the Windows 8 kernel to the older hardware, Microsoft has messed up the marketing side.  Where is information about Windows Phone 7.8, and why oh why not have called it Windows Phone 8 Entry (or Basic or something to indicate it was a subset)?  Calling the WP7 upgrade WP8 Entry, particularly as new low-end phones running it are being introduced concurrently with true WP8 devices, would have taken out the emotional sting.  Revealing more details on the release, even under the WP7.8 banner, would have made owner like me feel Microsoft was more committed to taking care of its Windows Phone customers.

On its own I’d be sufficiently over the bungling of the WP7 to WP8 transition for it not to matter.  But when combined with where I am in my contract, the lack of compelling new apps, and the lack of a clear winner amongst the devices striving to be the WP8 flagship it makes waiting six months to move to WP8 not just tolerable but perhaps desirable.  Because there is an elephant in the room.

Is Microsoft doing a Surface Phone?  On the one hand I’ve argued that they are unlikely to introduce their own phone unless (and until) they determine that the device makers, including Nokia, aren’t getting the job done.  Or moreover, that a totally new mobile phone strategy is required.  But it could be that Microsoft has decided it will introduce a “North Star” device in every category.  In which case it is entirely possible that it let the OEM device makers have the glory for this fall’s major product wave, but it will take center stage with its own device as part of the spring refresh.   That’s extremely speculative on my part, but it adds some spice to my thinking about waiting.

There it is, my thinking on why I shouldn’t, and probably won’t, rush out to buy one of this fall’s Windows Phone 8 devices.  Waiting for the spring refresh won’t turn out to be much of a burden, keeps me on my one device per year schedule, and might even reveal more desirable options than exist today.

Should you wait?  I think that heavily depends on what type of user you are and where you are in your own adoption cycle.  My situation is mostly one shared with those who purchased the generation 2.5 Windows Phone devices (that is, the spring 2012 introductions).  Still living on a first generation WP7 device?  Past the two-year commitment mark?  Not a Windows Phone user at all but looking to make a switch?  Happy to live with whatever you buy today for the life of a contract?  Then by all means go ahead and get one of the new Windows Phone 8 devices!  They, and WP8 itself, look awesome.  I just won’t be joining you for a few months.

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Mobile, Windows Phone | Tagged , , , , | 13 Comments

Where are the 7″ Microsoft tablets?

Posted on November 9, 2012 by halberenson

A few days ago I was contemplating a blog post with my speculation about a 7″ Microsoft tablet when rumors of an “Xbox Surface” re-surfaced.  I tend to believe this rumor because I’ve been expecting that a portable Xbox family member would appear, something I discussed back in a March 2011 blog posting.  Seems like I speculated on the wrong specific solution but may have gotten it right on the strategic side.

Anyway, the reason I was thinking about this topic was Windows marketing chief Tami Reller’s comment that there were no 7″ Windows tablets on the way.   Given that this area is exploding, and has now been legitimized by Apple, I was wondering how Microsoft could ignore such a high-volume market segment.  Doing so is incredibly risky since a customer buying into one of the other ecosystems with a 7″ class device is somewhat locked in to that ecosystem going forward.  Or if you follow the MpD theme I’ve been on then the way to look at this is that not having 7″ class devices can dramatically reduce the Minutes per Day of Windows use.  I don’t think Microsoft is stupid enough to let 100s of millions of MpD sucking devices enter the market unchallenged.

So what could Microsoft’s strategy be?  Long-time readers know of my fondness for the Content Consumption-Content Creation axis for understanding devices and it makes sense to use it here.

 

Content Consumption vs. Content Creation

Microsoft’s strength and strategy for differentiating Windows 8/RT is its better content creation capabilities than either IOS or Android.  Meanwhile 7″ tablets are deep into the pure content consumption device space.  So it makes sense for Microsoft to target the 10″ and above class devices with Windows 8/RT and avoid taking it, as is, down into the 7″ class where it loses its differentiation.

With this in mind my assumption became that rather than produce a “pure” Surface in 7″ that Microsoft would pursue a more customized content consumption device to play in this category.  It would be based on Windows 8/RT, but be marketed quite distinctly.  My own thinking had focused on the partnership Microsoft has with Barnes and Noble around the Nook.

We still don’t know what is expected to come out of the Barnes and Noble partnership, but it is clearly something bigger than just getting a Nook app for Windows 8/RT.  I’ve been expecting a Windows RT-based Nook that is B&N branded and sold and/or a Nook Surface that is Microsoft branded and sold.  And have been expecting that such a device would combine the Nook ebook offering with the Xbox Music and Video services to create a Kindle Fire (and its ilk) competitor.  I still think this likely.

The question now becomes what are all the components of a Microsoft assault on the 7″ class tablet space.  Could we see multiple 7″ class consumption oriented devices or will there be just one?  Put another way, is there a Nook Surface and an Xbox Surface or is an Xbox Surface Microsoft’s all-encompassing vision of what a 7″ device should be?  As they have done with the Surface, making content creation a differentiator, Microsoft’s vision could be to differentiate in the 7″ space by focusing more broadly on entertainment than purely on content consumption.  Certainly that’s what being part of the Xbox family implies.

Perhaps an Xbox Surface is the device Microsoft offers while B&N offers a Nook RT.  Microsoft would focus on the more premium offering, pricing it more like the iPad Mini, while B&N would focus on the price sensitive segment of the market pioneered by the Kindle Fire.  Squeezing on a market segment from both the top and the bottom is a classic way to attack entrenched competitors, and for once Microsoft might be well be positioned to do this.

What of the OEM community?  Do they play in the 7″ class?  Does it matter?  In what most of us think of as the big war going on in the 7″ space it probably doesn’t.  So the question becomes what other market niches might a 7″ Windows RT-based tablet address?  Are their places where a very business-oriented 7″ tablet makes sense?  What about using a 7″ device for going after emerging markets?  The former might be a small niche, the latter a very large (but so price sensitive it is not very profitable) one.  I can see Microsoft encouraging OEMs to address these areas, but perhaps wanting to give Windows RT some time to establish itself in its primary market before risking dilution of its positioning.

I expect Microsoft to enter the 7″ class device space with a content consumption, and perhaps broader entertainment, optimized device sometime in 2013.   Until this week I would have bet on that being a “Nook Surface”, but rumors of an “Xbox Surface” make even more sense.  If done right it could be a real game changer.

 

Posted in Computer and Internet, Home Entertainment, Microsoft, Mobile, Windows | Tagged , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Understanding Office

Posted on November 7, 2012 by halberenson

Last week I overheard two of the top Microsoft “watchers” discuss the Office group having bet against Windows 8, presumably because Office 2013 is not fully a (set of) Metro (aka, Windows Store) apps.  Ok, as much as it pains me to defend Office I’m going to do so.  I’m going to defend them because they are more right than wrong.  Especially when you take a shareholder perspective.  Not only will I defend what Office did for Windows 8, I’m going to defend some of their licensing decisions.  Oh that should be fun.

Let’s start with Office as a business, because that is at the center of making a “bet”.  Office is Microsoft’s largest and most profitable business.  Being the largest is a little transient as Windows ebbs and flows with the success or failure of various releases.  Being the most profitable has been pretty constant for years.  Many years.  If Steve Ballmer wants to get fired all he has to do is mess up the Office profit stream.  Seriously.  This profit stream is so important that even Bill Gates backed down from messing with it.  Seriously.  The Office leadership does not wake up every morning and say “What can I do today to make Windows more successful?”  They wake up and say “What can I do today to make Office more successful?”.  And as much as that pains a “Systems” guy, that is something any shareholder should be happy about.

Office has been up against four strong headwinds for over a decade.  The first has been its own success.  With near saturation of its traditional market for desktop productivity apps they have struggled to find ways to grow, or at least get existing customers to upgrade to new versions.  The primary response here has been to grow the Office suite, particularly through the creation of the Office Server products such as Sharepoint and addressing long-term weak points like collaboration.

The second headwind has been the emergence of free, or extremely inexpensive, alternatives to Office.  This started with the emergence of Open Office, though it wasn’t until Google Apps that free productivity software gained serious mind share.  Prior to Google Apps Microsoft was content to address the free/cheap consumer productivity app space with a separate suite called Microsoft Works.  The challenge from Open Office lead them to create a Works Suite that includes Microsoft Word rather than just the Works Word Processor.  For Office 2003 Microsoft created a “Student and Teacher” edition to bring Office into the academic world at low-cost.  By Office 2007, with Google Apps now a reality, Microsoft turned “Student and Teacher” into a “Home and Student” edition so they had a low-cost offering to counter Google Apps for consumers who wanted the real thing.

It’s important to current discussions to understand these efforts by Microsoft to counter free/low-cost Office competitors because they are playing out even in the latest offerings.  The Microsoft Surface and Windows RT come with Office Home and Student Edition for the same reasons it was created back in 2007.  How do you bring a free/low-cost Office to consumers without a material negative impact on Office’s margins?  Keep in mind that the vast majority of Office revenue and profit comes from sales to businesses, mostly larger businesses.  So the trick is to keep those businesses buying the more expensive and profitable editions of Office while making the same software available to consumers at low-cost.  Microsoft has tried a number of things to do this, from the composition of the suites to licensing restrictions.  In other words, Home and Student was carefully crafted so that it would not significantly cannibalize sales to businesses.  We’ll get back to this when it comes to the Microsoft Surface and Windows RT later on.

The third head-wind has been the cost of ownership associated with Office, and other products that don’t bring a strategic advantage to the customer.   This is not primarily the license price, although it is a factor, it is the associated capital and operational costs.  Microsoft was already struggling against this problem when Google brought GMail and Google Apps to the party.  As Cloud-based services they transferred much of the capital and operational expense to Google.  Microsoft had started work on bringing Exchange into a services world and Google forced them to accelerate the effort.  After several half-steps the arrival of Office 365 signaled Microsoft’s full commitment to Office as a Cloud service.  The complexity of the Office 365 licensing and pricing schemes is once again a tribute to Microsoft’s attempts to offer customers added value while preserving Office margins.  Again this plays into today’s world with Surface and Windows RT.

The fourth headwind has been the switch from formal communications such as memos and reports to informal communications such as email, instant messaging, and text messages.  This has reduced the Minutes Per Day (MpD) that users spend using Office and reduced its perceived value.  Microsoft has responded in numerous ways, from the addition of OneNote, to Lync, to the Office Web Apps, to the strategy that is playing out with Office on Surface and what is expected to appear soon on IOS and Android.  Again this will all come together in a little while.

Before I move on to what Microsoft’s overall strategy appears to be let me address the “bet against Windows 8” statement.  With Office as both Microsoft’s largest revenue and profit generator with most of that money coming from businesses, and with it being at the center of Microsoft’s real competition with Google, what topics dominated Office 2013 (a.k.a  Office 15) planning?  It wasn’t let’s build a Metro version of Office.   The discussions would have been more around topics like “How do we make the next steps in the cloud transition?”, “How do we improve collaboration?”, “How do we enable cross-organization collaboration?”,  “How do we respond to customer demands for Data Leakage Prevention capabilities”? , and many other topics that are top of (customer) mind for productivity software.   And somewhere down the list, not way down but not near the top either, was “What do we need to do to support Windows 8”?

I know this is hard to accept for those who think about Microsoft as “the Windows company”, but supporting Windows 8 was not “the high order bit”.   There has been endless discussion about how Enterprise adoption of Windows 8 is going to be light.  So how could Office, almost totally dependent on Enterprise sales, make Windows 8 the high-order bit in planning Office 2013?  Unless they wanted to drive revenue and profit towards zero, Office 2013 had to be a product that was attractive to Windows 7 customers!   Working on Windows 8 was a feature, not the driving focus, of the release.

And there is really nothing new here.  After the Windows 95/Office 95 wave the Office team became extremely resistant to betting the farm on new operating systems or other new technologies.  I can’t tell you how many frustrating conversations I had with the leadership of various parts of Office over trying to get them to adopt new storage technologies.  But that’s for another blog entry.

I think there are other factors at play as well.  Would the Office team even have had a stable enough environment to create applications as complex as Word and Excel with Metro in time for Windows 8 RTM?  Would they be full recreations, or new subsets (like OneNote MX that doesn’t have all of OneNote 2013’s functionality)?  Maybe more importantly, at the time Office 2013 planning was going on did anyone really think that Tablets would have as strong a focus as they do today?  (They didn’t.)  Or did anyone know that Windows RT wouldn’t be supporting desktop apps in general?  I think most people, all of Microsoft included, believed Windows on ARM would ship with general support for desktop apps.  So why try to prematurely shoehorn Office into Metro?  I will bet that the Office team was horrified when they became the center of a discussion about dropping support for desktop apps in Windows RT, making Office the only non-system app that runs there.

The bottom line here is that Office didn’t bet against Windows 8, they simply bet for the Office business.  And I think Surface buyers should be happy about this.  If Office had created a suite of (almost certainly subset) Metro apps then that is what the Surface and other Windows RT systems would come with.  Instead we get the full versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote.  Something early Surface buyers seem thrilled about.

That brings us back to our broader discussion.  Microsoft already has a situation in which it derives only modest Office revenues from consumers while businesses provide it with huge Office revenue and profits.  It needs ways to strike major blows against the headwinds while preserving that revenue and profit.  How does its known and rumored plans do this?

Three principles are at the core for how Microsoft is approaching Office licensing and packaging.

The first is that many users, and nearly all business users, have a need for a range of Office applications and services beyond the core four (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote) applications.  So Outlook (and Exchange) have real value.  Access, Publisher, InfoPath, Project, Sharepoint, Lync, and features like IRM/DLP have value.  And so every business user is going to be licensed for some variation of Office that includes one or more of these applications or features.  And there will be offerings for bringing (some of) these to consumers as well.

The second principle is that users have multiple devices and will want to use Office from all these devices.  Their usage pattern will be linked to the type of device in question, the type of user they are (e.g., consumer vs. business), and their use of Office on other devices.

The third principle is that consumers will pay little or nothing for Office, but having offerings for them is important to maintain or increase MpD.  Or put another way, consumer use of Office protects and increases the demand for Office in businesses.  Having consumer Office offerings also enhances the attractivness of Windows and Windows Live, making it a good thing from a corporate citizen standpoint.

Put all these together and you get an explanation for Microsoft’s licensing and packaging behavior.  Packaging Office Home and Student on the Surface addresses consumer needs for free/low-cost productivity applications while protecting (both via the apps included in the suite and licensing terms) a business using Surface as a way to reduce its need to buy Office Pro (or other) licenses.  To be clear, an analysis would show that nearly everyone buying a Surface for work use already is entitled to use it for business use by way of an existing Office license the organization paid for.  Even an individual is unlikely to be impacted by these licensing terms, unless they attempt to make Surface their only computer running Office for business use (e.g., a home business).  There is a 99.999% chance that Microsoft will ignore these license violations, unless they become so common that Microsoft decides to offer a Home and Business Edition upgrade to address this scenario.

This philosophy will almost certainly spill over, as rumored, to Office on the iPad and Android tablets.  Microsoft envisions, and wants users to envision, tablets as an adjunct to a more Content Creation-oriented device running a more full featured version of Office.  They will use packaging and licensing to protect the Office revenue stream, and as a side effect keep Office availability on non-Windows tablets from becoming an excuse for (businesses) to make those tablets employee’s primary computing device.  How far will Microsoft go down this path?  The current rumors have the iPad and Android apps as document viewers for free, but requiring some other Office license for editing.  The latter would either a require code from an employer representing their licensing of Office in order to unlock the creation functionality, or an Office 365 subscription.  And, interestingly, they now have an Office 365 Home Premium subscription they will be trying to interest consumers in paying for.

The bottom line here is that Office is a business that is making decisions intended to preserve and expand its revenue and profit.  It isn’t subordinate to the Windows business, and while it does things to support Windows it won’t sacrifice itself on the Windows altar.  It is trying to adapt to the varying demands of an environment that looks extremely different today from how it looked in the 90s.  And while I think they’ve been doing it surprisingly well, that isn’t without throwing a lot of packaging and licensing confusion into the mix.

And what of Metro versions of Office apps beyond OneNote MX?  They are coming.  Just because the Office group needed to focus on the desktop apps for Office 2013, and probably need to do yet another rev on them for Office 16 (when most businesses will still be running Windows 7) The initial success of Surface and other Windows 8/RT systems represents a real opportunity for an Office MX.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see additional Metro members of the Office family in 2013!

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Windows | Tagged , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Performance of the Microsoft Surface and Windows RT

Posted on November 6, 2012 by halberenson

The evidence is growing that Microsoft’s decision to provide developers little or no access to Windows RT systems prior to general availability is coming back to bite them.  In particular, there are reports that performance is sub par.  First we had reports that some third-party apps worked poorly on Surface, then that Office 2013 was sluggish, and now browser benchmarks show the Surface is slower than recent iPads and other devices.  And that is no surprise to anyone who has worked in the performance realm.  Indeed Windows President Steven Sinofsky’s rebuttal to complaints from a member of the Office 2013 team indirectly tells us what the problem is.  You can’t get good performance by doing work on anything less than real hardware and it is hard to tell who had access to any real hardware.  Third Party software developers didn’t have access to Windows RT systems at all, and it appears that Microsoft’s own teams didn’t have access to production quality systems.

The problem of software developers having real hardware for a sufficient period to tune their software has been with us since the beginning of the computer industry.  Hardware drove the industry at first, and the software guys were expected to keep up.  Remember you put vast amount of capital into building factories, buying parts inventory, stocking replacements at repair centers, and then training both manufacturing and support personnel.  When the hardware is ready to ship you can’t just leave systems sitting on the shipping dock waiting for the software as that has a material impact on financial results.  So software developers are pressured to take shortcuts to have their software ready to go when the hardware is ready.

An early example of why this is a problem comes from DEC, which in the days of the PDP-11 had numerous operating systems for it.  In order to make the problem of providing hardware to these operating system development groups tractable a hardware pool was created.  Operating System developers would then schedule time to use the hardware in the pool.  On one release of RSTS/E the developer had just a few hours with a particular piece of hardware and the release shipped claiming support for it but not actually working.  The debacle was so huge that from that point forward the RSTS/E group set a policy that they would support hardware only if they were provided with dedicated devices far enough in advance to allow for proper development, debugging, and testing.   The policy stuck, and represented a major rebalancing of power between hardware and software groups.

For a slightly more recent and directly applicable example we have the >8 processor support in Microsoft SQL Server 2000.  We’d intended to support 32-processor systems in SQL Server 2000 from the beginning and were working with the one piece of hardware available to us, the Unisys ES/7000.   Of course Unisys was developing the hardware at the same time, and the SQL Server lab only had an early prototype without many of the optimizations that Unisys was planning for the final product.  Poor initial performance was linked to the lack of those hardware optimizations, and eventually we were forced to delay 32-processor support until after the initial release.  Once the SQL Server team had access to a full production ES/7000 we discovered that, oops, it wasn’t the lack of optimizations in the prototype but rather that SQL Server needed considerable work to optimize algorithms for it (and similar machines like HP’s Superdome).  The immature hardware was masking the areas where SQL Server needed work.  These changes, almost sufficient for us to consider a separate minor release, were folded into SQL Server 2000 SP1.

The SQL Server experience, and many others by the way (e.g., I could give numerous VAX and Alpha examples not to mention other Windows examples), show that you (a) need to do performance optimization for any new system and (b) you need near-final hardware to do that.  But that does not appear to be the way Microsoft approached the Surface and Windows RT.

Even within Windows teams (that didn’t have known ARM-specific work) were originally told that they didn’t need to plan any work to support Windows on ARM (WoA).  Basically the build team would build everything for ARM and then let you know if they had any problems.  I don’t know if this was part of the efforts to keep WoA secret or a genuine belief by management that no significant work was required.  And I don’t know when or if this changed, though the change would have been after Windows 8 planning had wrapped up.  In any case, it appears that many (most?) teams within Windows would not have had dedicated (even prototype) ARM hardware at their disposal nor people scheduled to do any evaluation or optimization work.

So what of the Internet Explorer team?  And particularly the Chakra JavaScript Engine team?  They clearly had resources devoted to WoA work, but did they have real near-production hardware to use?  And if so, did they have it in time to do meaningful tuning before Windows 8 RTM?

I think that’s the problem for Microsoft Office as well.  Surprisingly late in the cycle someone mentioned to me that they didn’t yet know what the Office team was doing to support tablets, let alone WoA.  This suggests that Office kept this to a small team, meaning most of Office engineering did not have access to ARM hardware nor expertise or expectation of needing to do any WoA-related work.  And even the small team focusing on WoA might not have had access to near-production grade systems to perform performance evaluation and tuning on.

Of course there was no broad, or apparently even narrow, beta of WoA.  And no distribution of systems to developers so they could test their own apps.  So anything that might have caught performance issues in advance, and allowed time to resolve them before end-user availability, appears to have been forgone.  Microsoft basically bet that, other than things close to the metal like the HAL, boot path,  and drivers, that no tuning for WoA systems was required.  They were wrong.

The good news is that Microsoft has adopted an aggressive update posture for Windows 8 and Windows RT.  Apps distributed through the Windows Store can be updated on a weekly, or even more frequent, basis.  And Microsoft doesn’t seem shy about using Windows Update to update other Windows (or Microsoft) components.  So just as Microsoft responded quickly to the initial Office 2013 performance issue, we can expect they will address other Surface, Windows RT, and Windows 8 performance issues over the coming weeks and months.

Microsoft may have counted on its rapid update ability to mitigate their strategy of developing Windows RT and the Surface in the dark.  But first, and particularly in the case of the Surface, they have to worry about performance issues (real, or benchmark positioning) permanently damaging their new product family’s reputation.  Because once that happens it, and not reality, will dominate the conversation.

 

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Windows | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

About that WP8 SDK

Posted on October 28, 2012 by halberenson

We’re just hours away from what will hopefully be an enlightening and exciting Windows Phone 8 launch.  I must admit I’ve mostly been ignoring Windows Phone the last few months .  It’s hard to get excited, or even pay attention, when Microsoft is trying so hard to keep everyone in the dark.  Hardware announcements with no software details?  No upgradability of old devices, and little information on the WP 7.8 release that will cover those as well as new low-end devices?  I just tuned the Windows Phone world out.  We’ll see if Microsoft can regain my attention  tomorrow.  If they can’t get me interested I don’t know how they’ll get anyone interested.  Sigh.

One of the manifestations of Microsoft’s Windows Phone behavior the last 6 months is that WP8 will launch before the general developer community has gained access to the WP8 SDK.  It seems odd that Microsoft seemingly doesn’t want apps that take advantage of new WP8 capabilities available at launch.  Or does it?  More worrying is that they don’t seem to mind alienating developers, which has clearly happened.  So what is going on here?

Of course rumors that WP8 ran late, and that the SDK wasn’t ready for prime time,  probably have a basis in fact.  That would explain why we didn’t see a developer event with SDK availability months ago but not why the SDK hasn’t been released yet.

Of course we know that the WP team is trying to keep some consumer features secret so, unlike last week’s Windows 8 launch, there is actually some news tomorrow.  But they could have handled that by providing an SDK with features removed.  The original plan for WP7 was to bring an SDK to Mix with a mule UI so the Metro UI could be kept secret until launch.  Pressure to show that Microsoft was doing something in the mobile space forced them to disclose the Metro UI before Mix, so the mule idea made no sense.  But they certainly could have used a similar plan to get an SDK to developers for WP8.

That brings me to two ideas that I think could really be the main reasons for holding back the SDK.  Either one or both may have been in play.  Developers won’t like either of them.

The first factor at play may be the release of Windows 8.  I half-seriously tweeted the other day that perhaps they intentionally held  back the WP8 SDK to keep developers’ attention on Windows 8.  I think this dynamic might have been at play, though not as explicitly as I just stated it.  A product group owns a very small percentage of the resources involved in supporting developers.  They need DevDiv to create tooling for them.  They need DPE to run most of the evangelism activities.  They need industry marketing groups to work with the ISVs and IT shops they are responsible for.  They need the Microsoft field organization, sales reps and technical specialists, to encourage and work with their accounts in creating apps.  And they need MCS to train and have available consulting resources to help clients create apps.  And I think every one of those organizations was told “Priority 1 is Windows 8, Priority 2 is Windows 8, Priority 3 is Windows 8,…Priority 10 is everything else”.  Seriously.  Windows 8 is that important to Microsoft’s future.  And so the Windows Phone team found themselves without the support they needed for breadth developer engagement.  This forced them to concentrate their efforts on selected key developers, which is why we saw a targeted release of the WP8 SDK.

But I think another factor may be at play.  If you examine the results of making developer tools and SDKs available way in advance first for WP7 and then for Windows 8 you see something very disturbing.  The numbers of apps grows quickly, but app quality is low to moderate.  The broad reach approach does not result in a plethora of high quality apps.

The Windows Phone Marketplace ended up with 125,000 apps yet misses many of the key ones.  Small developers created apps that read the RSS feeds for various news sources, for example but the new sources themselves ignored WP7.  The RSS feeds are no substitute for the full news app.  Starbucks didn’t bring their app to Windows Phone so some Seattle-area Starbucks fans created one of their own, but it doesn’t have all the functionality of the official app.  Uber didn’t do a Windows Phone app, but someone else did.  Unfortunately it just grabs your address using GPS and formats an  SMS message.  Sonos didn’t do an app, a third party did one that requires you’re running the Sonos app on a PC.  There are numerous lame travel and other apps.

Note that Apple and Android also have the low quality app problem, except they also have the high quality and official apps. Microsoft needs more of the later.

This suggests that if you have limited resources to spend on getting apps into your app store you are better off narrowly targeting them towards getting the important apps from their official sources.  Once you do that you can then expand your efforts to attract the broad developer community.

There are other benefits to having a small targeted developer program.  NDAs work with small audiences, not large audiences.  You can spend more time gathering feedback from the participants.  And so on.

So why haven’t the broad set of developers seen the WP8 SDK yet?  I’d bet on all of the above being part of the answer.  But perhaps the last one is the most important for the future of Windows Phone.  If the Windows Phone team successfully engaged with the key applications developers, so that WP8 ships with the right high quality apps available then it will be healthy for the platform.  And the broad developer community will jump on board.  If they either didn’t engage those key developers, or failed in their effort to get the apps on board, then they’ve also pissed away the broad developer community.   And dealt Windows Phone a mortal blow.  We’ll get our first indication of which it is in just a few hours.

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Mobile, Windows Phone | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Understanding the Microsoft Surface (a sort of Review)

Posted on October 28, 2012 by halberenson

This is a review of the Microsoft Surface, though it won’t be like most other reviews you read.  I’m going to focus my effort on positioning the Surface in today’s so-called “post-PC” era.  You want unboxing, descriptions of buttons and connectors, spec comparisons, etc. then this isn’t the review for you.  You want real world insights, then stay tuned.

I received my Surface on October 26th, having pre-ordered it from the Microsoft Store on October 16th.  It is the 64GB model with black Touch Cover.  I also ordered a separate Type Cover thinking that I’d normally use the Touch Cover, but switch over to the Type when I knew I was going to be doing an intense amount of typing.  I’ll talk more about the two keyboards in actual use later on.

Before getting to the Surface itself let me introduce a positioning concept that will come in handy later.  In earlier postings I’ve talked about the key differentiator  between tablets such as the iPad and PCs (be those Windows or Mac) being along the dimension of Content Consumption vs.. Content Creation.  Tablets are optimized for Consumption while Notebooks/Desktops/Workstations are optimized for Creation.  It’s an imperfect model, for example Windows Media Center turns a PC into a Consumption-oriented device, which brings to mind a truth I heard long ago: all models are flawed, some models are useful.  The Consumption vs. Creation model is very useful.  Now obviously there are other dimensions to consider as well, for example degree of mobility.  I won’t ignore those dimensions here, but they aren’t as big a focus.  I created the following slide to make this clearer and I’ll be referring to it in a number of places along the way.

The above slide is meant to be read from bottom up, and briefly shows where devices are positioned (in terms of design center) along the Content Consumption to Content Creation dimension.  So a device like an iPod is designed almost purely for consumption of music and a Kindle is designed almost purely for consumption of ebooks.  At the other extreme, a workstation being used for the design of aircraft parts is designed almost exclusively for Content Creation.  This doesn’t mean you can’t use these devices for other things, it just talks about what they are designed (aka, optimized) for. Now on to the Surface.

The Surface is a great tablet.  It is amazingly well-built and well thought out.  As a pure piece of engineering it stands as an equal to the best Apple or anyone else has to offer.  When you add Windows RT to the mix you get something that is, in the context of use as a “pure” tablet, a strong competitor to the iPad.  There are definite differences, some strongly in the iPad’s favor (e.g., number of applications currently available), and some in Surface’s favor.  In most cases the significance of those differences comes down to personal preference.  Let me give an example.

The iPad, with its growth out of the iPhone, started life as a Portrait-orientation optimized device.  It could always do Landscape orientation, but most apps didn’t take advantage of that.  These days many iPad apps give a much better experience in Landscape because they can put a navigation pane on the side of the content whereas in Portrait they have to keep the navigation pane hidden until you specifically ask for it.  The iPad feels more comfortable in your hands in Portrait than in Landscape, although when used propped up on a flat surface it is always in Landscape.  I’m not rendering judgments here, just pointing this out because Surface is so different.

Surface is optimized for Landscape orientation when in hand or propped up on its hinge.  It feels really good in the hands when held in Landscape.  Yes it works in Portrait, but it feels odd that way.  Microsoft chose a 10.6″ 16:9 aspect ratio display that makes the Surface feel long and narrow in the hand when held in Portrait orientation.  Of course this may be more odd in countries that standardize on 8×10 paper than A4.  An iPad is more like an 8×10 pad of paper while the Surface is more like A4, perhaps making Americans the odd man out.

Why did Microsoft make this tradeoff?  Three reasons are apparent.  The first is that Surface is optimized for display of HD video.  The second is a feature unique to Windows RT (or 8) of allowing a second application to be snapped to the edge of the screen.  While this can be done on a more typical 10.1″ display the extra space on the Surface makes for a better experience when multiple apps are in the foreground.  The third reason is one you’ll have to wait for.

The Portrait vs. Landscape orientation optimization  could be a deal breaker for some users, especially if you rush to judgment.    I loved the Portrait orientation of my iPad and worried about my transition to a Landscape optimized world.  So far I find I’m adjusting well, but if this is a deal breaker for you then you might want to look at the ASUS Vivo RT  instead of the Surface.  The Vivo RT is a 10.1″ Windows RT tablet that feels better that the Surface when held in Portrait orientation.  It also is extremely light, coming in at 1.2 pounds vs. Surface’s 1.5 pounds (without a cover).  So if you are extremely weight sensitive the Vivo RT might also be the better option.  The Vivo RT does come with a keyboard base that turns it into a notebook, but that presents a dilemma. You won’t want to carry the base around with you unless you know in advance that you’ll need it, and you won’t have it with you when you do discover you need it.  The Surface doesn’t force you into this tradeoff.

The Surface feels a little thicker in the hands then a recent iPad, even though they are actually the same thickness.  In my hands the Surface feels sturdier, better built, and easier to get a solid grip on.  The difference here, besides the material used, is that Microsoft went for square edges as opposed to Apple’s rounded edges.  The rounded edges make the iPad feel thinner than it is.  The Microsoft design gives them room for a full-size USB connector.  I also find the Surface comfortable to hold with just a (front) cover while I’ve never been comfortable holding an iPad with its back uncovered.  The iPad just wants to slip out of my hands.  Maybe that’s why I see so many iPad’s with third-party covers.  People try Apple’s Smart Cover and decide they want something that makes the iPad easier to hold as well as providing a sturdier way to prop it up.

Which brings me to an important point I think is missed in most reviews.  Everyone wants to compare the thickness and weight of devices as they come from the factory.  They don’t do comparisons of thickness and weight in terms of how they are actually used by customers!  Let’s start with the simplest example.

The Surface weighs 24 ounces while the iPad 3/4 weighs 23 ounces.  To begin with, how many people will notice a one ounce difference?  Moreover, the Surface includes a built-in hinge for propping it up on a table while the iPad does not.  Perhaps the lightest way to add a propping mechanism to the iPad is with Apple’s Smart Cover.  The Smart Cover adds 3.5 ounces so now it is Surface 24 vs. iPad 26.5.  But the iPad now has a cover and the Surface doesn’t.  Add the Type Cover and the Surface is now sitting at 31 ounces.  But now it has a keyboard and the iPad doesn’t.  Or maybe the iPad needs a case because it had a slippery back while the Surface doesn’t. Or….  The number of variations in what users actually have as a tablet experience is extremely variable and rarely related to the out of box size and weight of the device itself!  Take a look at this picture:

iPad 2, Surface, iPad 1

On the left is an iPad 2 in an aftermarket case.  My wife tried at least half a dozen different cases (including the Apple Smart Cover) before settling on this one for its combination of a good hinge and looks.  She also has a separate Bluetooth keyboard that, of course, she never has with her.  I almost piled it on top just to make a point but felt that was overkill.  On the right is an iPad 1 in Apple’s original sleeve-style case.  In the middle is a Surface with the Type Cover attached.  Note which is the thinnest tablet in actual usage configuration?  The Surface blows away the iPad 2 and is significantly thinner than the iPad 1.  In fact if I didn’t mind the thickness of the iPad 1 (which I carried around constantly for over two years) then I’d be ok carrying around the Surface even with a slightly thicker Type Cover!    How about weight?  The Surface with Touch Cover and the iPad 1 in its sleeve cover come in at nearly identical weights, about 31 ounces.  And my wife’s iPad 2?  It is a whopping 37 ounces!  So my point is, while the Surface is competitive in raw weight and size it may be outstanding in real world usage configuration.  Especially if…well, you’ll have to wait for it.

Let’s talk about Windows RT purely from a tablet perspective.  The UI is inviting.  The live tiles are awesome.  It takes some getting used to, but no more than any other recent touch-oriented UI.  Mary Branscombe recently made a great point, “was pinch zoom intuitive before six months of training videos disguised as ads”?  No.  Six months from now everyone will think that swiping in from the edge of the screen is a completely intuitive way to bring up menus.

Windows RT, and thus the Surface, currently has a relatively small library of applications available.  But it is growing fast.  Twice last week I tweeted or blogged about how I missed some application that I’d been using on the iPad.  Within a couple of days, once within hours, the missing app appeared in the Windows Store!  Right now between most of my high-usage apps actually being available and the fact that having full IE10 lets me fill in with just about any web site (except for Flash limitations) I’m having a good tablet experience.  And based on the initial response to Surface, and general likeliness of large numbers of Windows 8 systems being purchased or upgraded, I think the library of Metro (aka Windows Store) apps is going to continue to grow and grow fast.  Bottom line: Don’t let the size of the Metro app library keep you from getting a Surface if you otherwise find it a compelling offering.

Now we’re going to get to the core of the matter.  What really makes the Surface difference.  In your hands it is, at worst, yet another tablet.  Prop it up on a table or other flat surface and something magical happens.  The weaknesses of typing on a virtual keyboard or positioning on a capacitive touch screen fade away and you get all the benefits of a real keyboard and pointing device.  Sure that shows up in simple ways, like being able to easily and accurately type in a password.  For real magic though take a look back at that first graphic I posted.  While walking around with the Surface in hand it would land in the same place on the Consumption/Creation scale with the iPad.  But put it down, even on your lap, and it takes a giant leap in Creation capability.

Look at that graphic again.  It was created using Microsoft Powerpoint running on the Surface.  The Surface was on my lap, hinge open, with my using the Touch Cover’s keyboard and trackpad to create the slide.  It isn’t a terribly complex graphic, but creating and aligning all those text boxes, resizing arrows, etc. is work.  In particular it takes high precision pointing, something that iPads completely lack.  Windows RT has full support for high precision (e.g., mouse and trackpad) pointing.  Both the Touch Cover and Type Cover have trackpads!  The Surface would also work with a Bluetooth or USB Mouse for even greater precision if, for example, you decided to use Surface at your desk.  But I was just sitting around in the Mall waiting for my wife’s eyeglasses to be ready when I decided I wanted to create that graphic.  Surface meant I could do it then and there instead of waiting to get home to an old-fashioned PC.

And this long wordy blog posting?  I could have created it with the Touch Cover but decided it would be great to give the Type Cover a try.  So I’m sitting at the kitchen table writing this on my Surface with Type Cover.  How different is it from what the experience would be on my trusty (and very mainstream) two-year old Toshiba Portege 705 notebook?  None at all.  Well actually it is a little better, because the trackpad on the Type Cover actually works better than the one on the Portege!

This brings us to that third explanation for the 10.6″ screen.  With the slightly longer tablet Microsoft is able to put a nearly full-size keyboard on the Touch and Type Covers.  And if you want an odd observation, it puts the screen more in the category of notebooks (typically 11″ and up) instead of netbooks (which were typically under 10″).  Basically though between the size Microsoft has chosen, the high-resolution display they’ve standardized on, the covers with integrated keyboards and pointing devices, and software like Microsoft Office the Surface is a good Content Creation device.  And the real magic is, you don’t give up on the great characteristics of a tablet to get the creation capabilities of a notebook.  It is difficult, extremely difficult in fact, to find tradeoffs that Microsoft had to make in Surface in order to have a good Content Creation device that detract from it being a great tablet.  The greater orientation to Landscape use may be one, but only if you are really married to using a tablet primarily in Portrait orientation.

A little on the Touch vs. Type Covers and then I’ll end this even though there is more to point out.  I had no trouble adjusting to the Touch Cover and was fully productive with it almost instantly.  That said, I certainly can type faster on Type Cover.  The Type Cover is thicker, but as I pointed out that would still leave a Surface about the same thickness as an iPad 1 with Apple’s original case.  Not bad at all if you are going to be doing a lot of typing.  So I think the tradeoff is that if the keyboard is just a “nice to have” feature for entering text while you are sitting down, or you can’t stand virtual keyboards, or you like having it on the odd chance you’ll need to write a long email or make a Powerpoint slide, then the Touch Cover is for you,  However if you know you are going to be using the Surface as a notebook substitute much of the time, then you my just want to pay the price (both in thickness and a little more money) for the Type Cover.

What I’ve seen of the Surface also brings the forthcoming Surface Pro.  The Surface is meant to be a tablet with a decent amount of Content Creation capability.  It is tablet first and second, notebook substitute third.  The Windows 8-based Surface Pro, with its ability to run legacy desktop applications, digitizer for accurate pen input, and other features puts use as a notebook substitute almost on par with using it as a tablet.  Some users will use it as a tablet first and notebook second, but others will use it as a full on replacement for a notebook that also happens to be a tablet.  As with the Surface, the Surface Pro should exact fairly minimal tradeoffs to let it fulfill both roles.

The magic of the Surface is that you can use it all day purely as a tablet without paying a penalty for its ability to do Content Creation.  That magic is enabled by Windows RT, but it is really brought to life by the Surface hardware.  For any given user the choice of a Surface, another Windows RT or Windows 8 device, or indeed an iPad (or Android tablet) is going to come down to a lot of personal preferences.  Sweeping attempts to position one or another as best don’t actually mean much.  Where Surface, and Microsoft’s overall approach with Windows RT and Windows 8, shines is when you have a need to do Content Creation.  Whether that is replacing some (or all) of your current use for a notebook or desktop computer, or just a desire to be more productive than is possible with a virtual keyboard, it is the place where the Surface shines.

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Windows | 37 Comments

Just keep calling it Metro

Posted on October 27, 2012 by halberenson

I have been trying every which way to avoid calling the new Windows 8 user experience and applications by the code name Microsoft used, Metro.  But I’m giving up.  I mean “Windows Store Apps”, “Microsoft Design Language”, “New Windows Experience”, or whatever BS ways they’ve been coming up with to try to refer to this stuff just doesn’t cut it.  Sure they have some kind of trademark problem with the name Metro.  So why not come up with some catchy easy to use name to replace it?  Absent that I’m going back to using the name Metro.  It’s their trademark problem, not mine.

I’ve been through something like this before.  You know why DEC’s Alpha is named Alpha?  That was its code name.  It was totally untrademarkable.  DEC tried a couple of alternative names.  The first one they announced turned out to be pronounced a bit too close to the Arabic word for excrement.  One replacement got through a trademark search but, oops, actually turned out to be someone elses trademark.  There may have been other attempts, but meanwhile the entire world knew it as Alpha.  DEC finally tried to create a trademark by adding AXP to it, so Alpha AXP was the official name.  But the AXP disappeared.  Today anyone in the IT realm knows what Alpha is, and it doesn’t matter that you couldn’t trademark the name.  The Rdb group got a lot of shirts that year, because every time they changed the name of Alpha we had to reprint the shirts 🙂

So, I’m calling on press, analysts, bloggers, developers, end-users, and every other sane human being on the planet to just keep referring to the new Windows 8 stuff as Metro.  If Microsoft doesn’t like it they can give us a new catchy name that we might start using instead.  But if they keep insisting we stuff descriptive phrases into every place that demands a noun then we’ll just have to use a noun of our own choice.  And I choose Metro.

 

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Windows | Tagged , , , | 28 Comments

Today’s the day! Will there be any real news on Windows 8 or Surface?

Posted on October 25, 2012 by halberenson

One of the things that has bothered me the last fifteen years or so is how companies, and Microsoft in particular, have released so much information about products in advance that launch events are merely parties. In the old days we’d reserve some good jucy news for the launch. And technically, release of pricing and availability were considered the providence of “launch”.

We already know pricing, availability, licensing, etc. Millions of people already have Windows 8 so there is no feature news. Surface remains a bit of a mystery, although we just saw a wave of reviews. So what’s the point of today’s launch event? Is it just a party? Will there be any news?

One piece of news I’ve been expecting, maybe even to the extent that it will classify as an “October Surprise”, is about a major boost in the quantity and quality of apps in the Windows Store. Over the last 24 hours some major apps, including ones I personally consider important, have appeared (unheralded) in the Windows Store. I think we’ll hear about them during today’s launch. I think there are others that will appear in short order, perhaps even in the next 24 hours, that Microsoft will feature in today’s launch. And I believe they’ll put a lot of energy into showing third-party commitments, perhaps even “partnerships”, for more exciting apps that will be available in the Windows Store over the next few months.

In other words the big news may be that the app picture, the one universally noted weaknesses of Windows 8 and particularly Windows RT, is far brighter than it seems today. Is this wishful thinking on my part? Probably. But it makes a lot of sense. It is something easy to hold back until launch. And some of the data points I’ve noted, like the absence of key apps from ISVs I absolutely know would not ignore a Microsoft launch of this magnitude, suggest it is the case. We’ll know soon enough.

Will there be any other substantial news? Based on history I’d say no, but then Microsoft has been rewriting the script a lot lately. They could go as far as to pull an Apple and announce a new product that no one knew was coming. But I doubt it, unless it is just a hint of something (e.g., a future Windows RT-based Nook tablet for example). Still, we can hope for more news. And even if there isn’t anything, at least they’ll be putting on a good party.

Posted in Computer and Internet | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Why users hate tracking

Posted on October 24, 2012 by halberenson

Last week I was helping my mother move into a new apartment and needed a wireless phone jack to hook up her fax machine.  Of course I used my Acer Iconia Tab W500 to research the available options and find a local store to pick one up.  But imagine my surprise when the next day, right there in the middle of a political article in Slate magazine was an ad for an RCA Wireless Phone Jack.  Coincidence?  Excuse my French, but NFW!  Wireless Phone Jacks are a rarely used, highly flawed, and rapidly disappearing technology.  The only way an ad for one would ever be displayed is that my behavior the previous day had been tracked, allowing Slate’s ad vendor to display this highly targeted ad.

Now let me compare my emotional response to this tracking to the one I had a couple of weeks earlier when my bank told me they thought someone had cloned my credit card.  Stolen credit card: one heartbeat skipped,  and then I got on with the process of verifying there were no other signs of identity theft.  Stolen privacy: My heart stopped, my head spun for a moment, and then I got REALLY angry.  A better comparison to discovering I’d been tracked might be to the time we discovered a cleaning person was stealing from us.  The theft was very comparable.  In one case physical property, in the other my privacy.

Now I know that my experience last week was fairly minor in terms of actual loss, but substitute health related searching and browsing.  Or sex related searches and browsing.  Or even something as simple as shopping for Christmas presents.  Does a woman really want colleagues, friends, and family to discover she’s pregnant because every time they walk by her computer there are ads up for birthing centers, OB/GYNs, prenatal vitamin supplements, and baby-related paraphernalia?  Or do you really want people discovering you have a chronic illness based on the ads displayed on your computer.  Or how about your wife figuring out what you are getting her for Christmas based on ads being displayed?  And that’s just the risks of the legitimate use cases!

Credit card information is stolen from websites all the time.  Passwords are stolen all the time.  Employee data is stolen all the time.  Other personal information is being compromised all the time.  And now there are databases of your most intimate details, as captured from your use of the Internet, stored where someone can and will eventually steal them.  Fixing a stolen credit card is easy, if sometimes painful.  Fixing a broader identity theft is difficult and can result in issues that linger for years.  Fixing harm from the loss of personal information in tracking databases may be impossible.

Understand that I’m not completely against the gathering of information for personalization and targeting purposes.  I (mostly) love how Amazon uses on-site tracking to personalize its site.  They pioneered this concept and it was largely responsible for their original success selling books.  There is still risk to my privacy because Amazon knows an awful lot about me, but as long as they aren’t sharing this information I’m content with the tradeoff.  And I have no problem with advertisers putting me in a broad demographic bucket.  I’d much rather see adds for new cars than for feminine hygiene products.  Really.  But they need to accomplish this without tracking and retaining every search I’ve done, every web page I’ve viewed, every link I’ve followed, every product I’ve purchased, etc.  To me that’s what Do Not Track (DNT) is about.

I’d like Do Not Track to have a definition that prohibits the collection of detailed information about me but doesn’t prohibit them from making a demographic bucket guess.  Advertisers seem to want it to mean nothing, while privacy advocates want it to mean you can’t collect any information about me.  For now the advertising community is winning because they simply ignore the Do Not Track indicator.  That’s why, despite my browser having sent DNT I was still tracked.

Now before anyone points out I could block tracking with Internet Explorer’s Tracking Protection List (TPL) feature, or add-ins such as Adblock for Firefox, I need to say that I usually do have a TPL set up.  It turned out that when I loaded the Windows 8 RTM on my W500 I forgot to turn on a TPL.  Now that I’ve done that I know that I’m safe from most tracking.  Unfortunately only a very small percentage of users will realize they need to enable technology to block tracking, which is itself the reason that Microsoft made turning Do Not Track on part of its express setup for Internet Explorer 10.

The war between advertisers and privacy advocates is just starting to heat up.  But I have some advice for the advertisers.  You’ve crossed the line.  If someone like me, who recognizes and generally supports the benefits of personalization, is moving towards the position of the most virulent of privacy advocates then you are in trouble.  If someone who thinks that government regulation is always worse than letting the private sector sort things out is actually considering that government may need to step in (given that one of government’s few, in my view, legitimate roles is to protect people from theft), then you are in big trouble.  It’s time for you to come up with a proposal that truly protects user privacy while giving you decent demographic information.  Absent that you are likely to find yourself limited by government regulation to a “Nielsen Family” type approach.

Finally, I wanted to comment on advertiser push-back to Microsoft making Do Not Track part of the Express Settings for Internet Explorer.  This was a great pro-privacy move by Microsoft, yet it was also the most advertiser friendly move they could have made!  Microsoft has had the option for a few versions of Internet Explorer to turn on a feature to automatically block potential tracking sites.  And in IE9 it added the ability to use third-party Tracking Protection Lists, such as one from people responsible for Firefox’s Adblock.  Microsoft could have turned on TPLs by default and taken any tracking ability out of the hands of the advertising community.  If advertisers continue to fight Microsoft’s choice of Do Not Track as a default setting for IE, or a privacy-protecting definition for Do Not Track, then Microsoft still could make use of a TPL the default.  And I hope they do.

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Privacy | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

“Jane you ignorant slut”

Posted on October 23, 2012 by halberenson

If we weren’t already drowning in articles defending Windows 8, or claiming it was going to be a bigger disaster than even Windows Vista, for the last year this week makes you want to hop on Noah’s Ark.  From Ed Bott’s “Windows 8 is the new XP” to this rebuttal (which reminded me of SNL’s parody of Point/Counterpoint) we are awash in speculation about Windows 8’s success.  Rather than speculate on Windows 8’s success or failure, which I believe will be far more nuanced than most commentators, I want to explore what Microsoft’s real strategic goal likely is with the release.  And I think it is different from what most people, even most Microsoft employees, may believe.

Let’s start with what is definitely not a goal for Windows 8, broad-based Enterprise adoption.  By that I mean, the rollout of Windows 8 to traditional desktop and notebook computing.  Keep in mind that back when Windows 8 was being planned Windows 7 had just shipped.  Because of the time, cost, and complexity of enterprise-wide operating system rollouts most enterprises would either still be rolling out Windows 7 or have just completed their rollout around the time Windows 8 shipped.  Indeed Windows 7 just recently passed Windows XP as the most popular version of the operating system in use.  No enterprise would have the appetite to immediately start the cycle over again so quickly, and so (I believe) the prevailing wisdom inside Microsoft was that they would skip Windows 8.  In other words, before Microsoft had decided on the details of a new app model, the Windows Store, the Start Screen, or removing the Start button they knew there was no point in targeting enterprise desktops as Windows 8 upgrade targets.  The next window of opportunity for enterprise desktop upgrades doesn’t open until 2015 or 2016, giving Microsoft plenty of time to refine what they’ve done in Windows 8 to make it attractive for that upgrade cycle.

So if broad enterprise adoption of Windows 8 isn’t a goal then what is?

Minutes per Day (MpD) of usage is the ultimate leading indicator on the health of a product.  If it drops low enough then customers wonder why they are spending money on your product at all.  If it keeps increasing then the perceived value of your product to the customer goes up and they want more of it.

Microsoft faces MpD challenges across its product lines.  MpD for Microsoft Word has been dropping for a decade as users stopped writing memos in favor of writing emails.  Then Outlook/Exchange and Hotmail MpD dropped as users move to Instant Messaging and SMS for short messages.  Windows MpD drops as consumers and information workers do more communications, information consumption, and entertainment on iPads and smartphones.

The overwhelmingly number one goal for Windows 8 (and Windows RT) is to reverse the downward MpD trend.  So how does it do that?  Let’s go back to the enterprise for a moment.  Have there been changes in how many MpD a task worker, for example someone answering phones in a call center, spends on Microsoft products?  No.  How about a product engineer designing aircraft parts?  Nope, no significant change.  Could changes to Windows increase the MpD for these users?  Probably not by a material amount, and certainly not by changing their desktop computing environment.  To reverse the MpD trend you have to attack two things, the cause of the shift in existing MpD from Windows to other products and new usage scenarios that creates MpD that has yet to be captured.

Since the bulk of the downward pressure on Windows MpD comes from tablets, Windows 8 is primarily focused on addressing that trend.  It tries to do that both by directly going after the tablet market that Apple created with the iPad (e.g., Surface with Windows RT), and by addressing the market segment that is being pulled to the iPad due to lack of alternatives that meet their current computing needs (Windows 8 on hybrids/convertibles).

In some cases Microsoft seeks to capture the entire MpD that is going to iPads, which is not just what has shifted over from PCs, and shifted from TV/Radio/Books/Magazines/Newspapers to iPads, but what has been created by entirely new usage scenarios that tablets enabled.  Because this market is still young Microsoft has a good chance at obtaining a significant, though not leading, market share over the next couple of years.  The iPad will still rule, but Microsoft might get enough share to reverse the overall MpD decline and position themselves for increased MpD over the long haul.

In other cases Microsoft is just seeking to shift some of the MpD back from iPads to Windows-based devices.  Let’s assume that a user owns an iPad and also gets a Windows 8 Convertible as their next notebook.  Every time they pull the Windows 8 tablet off its base and take it to a meeting instead of grabbing their iPad it increases Windows MpD.  Every time they go out to lunch and take that tablet instead of their iPad to read the paper or answer email it increases Windows MpD.  Every time they are sitting on an airplane and decide to read a book or watch a movie on their Windows 8 device after finishing working on a sales report, instead of putting it back in their briefcase and grabbing their iPad, it increases Windows MpD.  And if you follow the MpD argument, then maybe not this year, or next year, or even three years from now, the MpD on their iPad will drop low enough that they wonder why they even bother to carry it.  And then Windows becomes their full-time tablet OS.

The place where Microsoft does expect Windows 8 to succeed in the enterprise is in scenarios where tablets or other NUI-driven devices are called for.  I’ve used the scenario before where a retail chain decides to give all its associates tablets so they can help customers on the floor instead of dragging them back to a desk.  Having someone walking the floor with a Windows 8 device will dramatically increase MpD compared to usage from behind a desk, as well as stemming the loss of MpD that occurs when an iPad is used to implement this scenario.  Telepresence is another area where I think Windows 8 will shine and lead to increases in MpD.  In other words, I expect that most enterprises will adopt Windows 8 for specific scenarios while using Windows 7 as their primary client computing operating system.  And that should add to overall Windows MpD.

There are similar ways to increase Windows MpD by enabling or improving consumer scenarios that benefit from NUI.  From monitoring your baby’s room or home security system, to video calls with your friends and family, to checking your voicemail, to looking up recipes, to immersive entertainment, all without having to sit down and grab a mouse, there are numerous scenarios that Windows 8 targets better than any other operating system.  And each leads to an opportunity to capture (often totally new) MpD.

Financial analysts, industry analysts, press, and pundits will focus on market share, units sold, revenues, and profits.  But if you are really thinking about the long-term and the ultimate success or failure of Windows 8, look to MpD.  I wouldn’t be surprised if when CEO Steve Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates have strategic discussions that’s what they do.

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