On Thursday, a scathingly bad review of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) was published by InfoWorld. I had considered writing a post to refute some of its points, but Paul Thurrott did just that, and did it masterfully. There's little value that I can add to his post, other than to link it and suggest that you read it.
Meanwhile, Sunday and Monday, much more fair reviews were posted at Cnet, ZDNet, Gizmodo, Engadget and MobileCrunch. All of these reviews were based on actual hands-on experience with a prototype Samsung device called "Taylor;" the InfoWorld post was based on the author's apparently unenjoyable experience at a product demo.
I'll let you read the reviews on your own and won't provide a CliffsNotes style redux of them here. What I will do though, is try and present some of the consensus findings, and how I think those findings bode for the success of the WP7 platform. Here goes:
1. The touch screen is accurate and fast. This is huge...my biggest concern about WP7 was that in the early demos, the combination of the hardware and software seemingly produced a substandard touch experience. If you look carefully at those early demos, you will see flicks and swipes that are either ignored, or which produce responses on an unacceptably delayed basis. What I said then is that Microsoft and its OEMs needed to fix this and make it flawless, otherwise it would be a deal-breaker. Seems like this gap has been closed, at least on the Samsung hardware that the reviewers used in their evaluations.
2. The keyboard is accurate and fast too. A couple of the reviewers were emphatic in their enthusiasm over the keyboard. This is a big deal too, especially as a high-value candidate WP7 customer group is current BlackBerry customers, and they are used to physical keyboards. This really looks like an area where Microsoft can tie with Apple and win against Android.
3. The highly text-oriented Metro interface is very appealing to certain users, and others find it disorienting. This is about what I expected, and even a bit better for Microsoft than I might have predicted. Microsoft decided -- wisely, in my opinion -- to craft a smartphone user interface that was not derivative of the iPhone's or Android's. I applaud this, but the danger in that is that Microsoft is breaking with a standard, and many people will see that effort as folly, and its work product as unusable. The outcome seems to be that InfoWorld hates it, a couple of the other reviewers were uncomfortable with it, and the remainder were pretty positive. Even Cnet (one of the doubters) sees the validity in doing something different. Together, these reviews provide a genuine endorsement of Microsoft's UI strategy gamble, even if not a vote specifically for Metro, in all cases.
4. Exchange integration and email in general seem very well implemented. Once again, this will appeal to the Blackberry crowd. Office integration seems more optimized for viewing documents than for editing them. That’s a disappointment, to be sure. But it’s no worse than the other platforms.
5. The camera is really good, highly accessible, and fast. This could be an unexpectedly important advantage for WP7. Megapixels aside, the state of the art in mobile phone cameras still sucks wind. If Microsoft breaks this precedent and people hear about it, then it could be a nice driver of new handset sales for the platform.
6. The Web browser, though not best in class, seems very good. This will surprise people who assume that Microsoft's lack of a WebKit-based browser means WP7 can't be functional for Web browsing. Opinions seem mixed regarding lack of HTML 5 support. My take: this will need to come fairly quickly, but is likely not to be crucial at launch. My Motorola Droid has a WebKit browser with decent HTML 5 support. But I think the only place I've put it to work was on the HTML 5 test and demo sites I hit with it, out of curiosity.
7. Everyone thinks the lack of cut and paste is unfathomably sucky. And they're right; it is. I think there's a very high probability that this capability will come in an over-the-air OS update within months of launch, and maybe sooner. In fact, I think there's a 30% chance that Microsoft will surprise us and have cut and paste ready for launch itself. Most reviewers bemoan the lack of multitasking too. I think this is less important – I think most iPad owners would agree, or at least they will up until the iOS4 release for their devices. That’s sort of my point: you can live without multi-tasking, until you have it, and then it’s a non-issue.
8. Facebook integration is elegant and simple. It "lights up" exciting and impressive functionality on the phone. But it's not configurable enough and is unwieldy for people with a large number of Facebook friends. Good enough for v1.0, but probably not for v1.1, let alone v2.0.
9. Twitter integration, other than through Windows Live, is conspicuously absent. Either Microsoft needs to add this, or a third party Twitter app, hopefully from Seesmic, needs to be be available immediately and its integration with WP7's hubs and other features must be exemplary. If neither a native nor good 3rd-party app is available at launch or very soon thereafter, it could make WP7 a laughing stock. That could happen anyway, of course, but the lack of Twitter integration could be a laughter accelerant.
10. UI inconsistencies in WP7 exist, especially around search and hidden “long taps,” and could prove fatal. Or not. On the one hand, WP7 needs to be perfect, and these apparent issues make it fail the perfection test. That, in turn, could prevent WP7 from getting over the incumbency lock that Apple and Android have on the market. On the other hand, neither of those platforms is perfect either, and they certainly were not perfect at launch. So maybe people will cut WP7 some slack, given the high points already discussed here.
11. Overall, WP7 will make Microsoft a contender in the mobile arena again. How long it can maintain that contention, and whether it can convert it to a leadership position is anyone's guess. But it is trying, it is getting traction, and it has the will to fight. Given the lowered expectations just about everyone has of Microsoft in this market, the mere fighting spirit and encouraging interim achievements it has delivered may catch people's attention. Heck, maybe that's why the crash and burn of Kin was so public and extreme.
WP7's introduction and market positioning will be seminal for Microsoft, to the upside, or to the downside. A significant success could restore morale amongst MS employees, partners and customers. If it merely establishes a toehold, that could be very positive too -- just look at Bing for evidence of this. But if WP7 flops, it could cause irreparable damage to a company that is already diminished in the mobile and consumer space, a space which is becoming ever more influential on the enterprise arena that is Microsoft’s bread and butter.
A WP7 flop could come even if Microsoft does everything right with the product. Many people have true disdain for Microsoft, and at least some of these people need to be won over. That's hard when the hatred runs so deep and the loyalty to other players seems to impenetrable.
To win this one, Microsoft needs to needs to do what it did to make Word overcome WordPerfect, Excel beat Lotus 1-2-3, Exchange overcome Notes, and Live Messenger overcome AIM, all combined with the chutzpah, naïveté and finesse used to launch Bing and make everyone forget about Live Search. Given all but the Bing victory occurred long ago, when Microsoft was much more on its game, this victory is nearly impossible. But if you bet on Microsoft, you'll certainly get good odds.
You might get a really good phone too. And isn’t that the authentic goal?
This week, Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft’s Developer Division, announced, via blog post, the early Beta release of a new tool called WebMatrix. WebMatrix is a free developer tool that enables Web development geared toward what might I might call Markup-and-Script developers (more on that in a minute). And although WebMatrix draws upon technologies already, or soon to be, present in the fuller ASP.NET Web development platform and the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), it is a radical departure from what those technologies have evolved into. Some review of Microsoft developer tool history might bring this into perspective.
Simple Beginnings
In the early and mid 90’s, Microsoft’s developer tools were pretty simple and straightforward. For Windows development, Microsoft had its Visual Basic (VB) product, and for Web development, it had something called Visual InterDev. For hardcore developers there was Visual C++, and for adherents to the acquired FoxPro product (now called Visual FoxPro, of course) there was that too. The four products were sold together as a single entity called Visual Studio, but that name was really a bundle and umbrella brand for the four constituent products. Most Visual Studio customers used VB and InterDev for their work. VB featured an easy drag-and-drop design environment for building Windows desktop applications: drop controls on the form, set some properties, add a little code, and you could have a functional application. Visual InterDev provided an IDE for developing Active Server Pages (ASP) applications, which were simple text files consisting of HTML and Visual Basic code (actually a scripting version of VB, called VBScript). The VBScript was embedded within the HTML markup within <% and %> tokens so that the ASP engine on the Web server would know to parse it and send it to the Active Scripting engine. The files ended in an .asp extension so that the ASP engine would be invoked in the first place.
None of this was especially difficult, and yet it was impressively powerful. With VB, and ASP/Visual InterDev, Microsoft provided a way for clever, logical thinkers to be productive programmers in a short amount of time, and to use the same programming langauge expertise for both desktop and Web applications. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Microsoft made programmers productive, but the low barrier to entry meant that lots of VB and ASP applications were written by bad programmers, and it gave the platform a bad name. Meanwhile, Java and its Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) flavor were eating VB and ASP for breakfast. J2EE was more complex and fragmented, but also more robust, scalable and, to be honest, it attracted a higher caliber of developer.
Redmond’s Revenge
Microsoft’s response was to create .NET. Version 7 of Visual Studio was the first version of Visual Studio .NET. It provided a single IDE for desktop development and Web development, which could be done in a new version of VB (called VB .NET), or in a new langauge called C#, which bore an uncanny resemblance to Java. C++ could be used inside this IDE as well, and so could Microsoft’s own licensed version of Java, called J#.
This version of Visual Studio and its Web technology, now called ASP.NET, extended the forms metaphor to Web development, such that the old “VB” and “ASP” were now called WinForms and WebForms, and they worked in a very similar manner. A (surprisingly) little known fact is that ASP.NET applications could still be developed using the old <%…%> syntax in the markup, without the need for forms and controls, but there was no encouragement from anyone to write ASP.NET code as if it were ASP.
The new IDE was more complex than any of the old ones, but in unifying them, it added simplicity too. A universal forms metaphor and a unified IDE, with the added rigor of the .NET Framework, and fully object-oriented programming made .NET very competitive with J2EE. Also, the programming was just enough harder to filter out many of the less capable developers who were on the Microsoft platform before. Microsoft made a big bet, and it won.
The Plot Thickens…And So Does the Platform
But Microsoft lost too. In political terms, it abandoned its base. And I think it did so based on a notion of false choice: it thought it had to cater to enterprise developers or productivity programmers, but that it couldn’t do both. And then it got worse: after the 2005 edition of Visual Studio and version 2.0 of the .NET Framework came out, Microsoft added a trio of technologies: the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Originally these three technologies were planned to be part of what became Windows Vista, and were to be known collectively as WinFX. When they shipped, however, Microsoft decided to dissociate them from Vista and allow them to run on XP as well. Since they were really extensions to .NET, Microsoft rebranded the collection as .NET 3.0.
And this is where things started to get really complex. WCF and WF were not, and are not, for the fain of heart. WPF introduced a completely new way to create desktop applications. And while it added a slew of new capabilities, its designer for Visual Studio removed most of the productivity from its WinForms counterpart. These technologies have since been updated and have been joined by Silverlight (a relative of WPF, remade for Rich Internet Application use), ASP.NET MVC (which does away with the WebForms metaphor, but does not return us to the single-file comingled code + markup model), Langage INtegrated Query (LINQ), the Entity Framework (a data access model which sits atop, but effectively replaces, the native data access core, known as ADO.NET) and an array of application lifecycle management features within the Visual Studio IDE itself.
This is neat stuff. This ups the challenge to Java. It accommodates development of very large applications, built by big teams, distributed across the world. All of that is good. Much of it is crucial and necessary. But none of it helps that original constituency of developers who want a highly productive environment in which they can build entire applications (albeit smaller ones), quickly, easily, and largely by themselves. And those folks have been willing to be neglected for only so long.
Voting with Feet
Many of those productivity programmers have left the Microsoft platform, and many newer, younger programmers who also fit that profile, have steered clear of .NET and Microsoft completely, for this and a variety of other reasons. A lot of them have moved to languages like PHP. If you look at PHP, you’ll see it bears a strong resemblance to the old ASP: code comingled with markup, contained in blocks offset with <?php and ?>, inside files with a .php extension. There’s no huge framework, nothing really like WCF and WF, and most PHP developers use very light tools for editing their code…thick IDEs exist, but aren’t so much the norm. PHP has a huge and enthusiastic community around it too. And while it may not be the right environment for those huge enterprise apps, it’s good enough: Yahoo and Facebook run it, in fact.
So we’re left with a situation where Microsoft is losing in market share, passion and enthusiasm to a development environment that works quite similarly to something Microsoft had 15 years ago. Yes, there are important differences: PHP runs on Linux as well as Windows. PHP is open source. Its syntax looks much more like C or JavaScript than it does Visual Basic. But the fact remains it has a simplicity and short path to productivity that intrigues developers and empowers them, and that’s exactly what Microsoft knowingly and willfully jettisoned
Microsoft could always promote the fact that code + markup still works with ASP.NET. You can still use <%…%> syntax…and store everything in single files with an .aspx extension that you can then just push up to a Web server. You can edit these files pretty easily in Visual Studio. If you have the discipline to ignore all the other stuff in ASP.NET and the .NET Framework and all those menu options and toolbars and dockable windows in Visual Studio, you’ll be fine. But advising abstinence and calm is no way to win over an entire population of developers that wants to spread out in territory that is friendly and navigable to them
Back to Basics
So instead of providing guidance around using a subset of ASP.NET Web Forms and a subset of Visual Studio, or just bringing back the old tools, Microsoft has done something far better. Through the introduction of a technology code-named Razor and its use in a new code + markup environment called ASP.NET Web Pages (not Forms) and provision of the new, highly streamlined WebMatrix IDE, Microsoft is beckoning the productivity programmers back, in a credible way, without , condescension. Now instead of starting your code with <%, you can use a simple @ sign for embedded expressions (and you don’t need to end the expression with anything!) or use @{ and } for full-on code blocks. You put everything into files with a .cshtml extension (you can use .vbhtml too, with the inline code in VB.NET but the Razor code block syntax differs slightly). Razor also provides so-called HTML Helpers that make short work out of complex tasks. Want a scrolling window with tweets from me? Just embed this code in a page:
@Twitter.Profile("andrewbrust")
There’s another helper just like that for Facebook, and a collection of others for creating data-driven user interfaces, sharing links on social networking sites and performing Web Analytics tasks.
WebMatrix also comes with a workstation-hostable version of Microsoft’s Web server (Internet Information Server, or IIS) called IIS Developer Express. And it comes with a small, file-based database engine called SQL Server Compact which is entering its 4th version, but only its first version optimized for ASP.NET. SQL Server Compact databases, and SQL Server Compact itself, can be easily deployed to any Windows Web server over any file copying protocol, including FTP. And WebMatrix can do that for you, with just a couple of clicks. It can even help you find a hoster and provision an account. There’s also built-in starter features for creating and editing data, and for performing SEO analysis on your pages.
Web Matrix isn’t exclusive to ASP.NET and SQL Server by the way…it also lets you edit and create applications using PHP and MySQL! That’s a HUGE step for Microsoft, especially with regard to the database.
Gimmick, Experiment or New Leaf?
WebMatrix isn’t perfect, certainly. And it’s streamlining sometimes borders on plain old bare-bones. There’s no IntelliSense (pop-up syntax completion), no rendered view of your Web Pages (you have to run the pages in a browser for that) and not much documentation that I can find, either on the tool itself or on Razor and the HTML helpers it includes. Also, this is not the first product Microsoft has had called WebMatrix…an earlier product with the same name, back in the early days of .NET, which provided a simplified IDE for creating ASP.NET WebForms, was put on offer, also for free. That product gave rise to the Visual Studio “Express” Editions…but the original Web Matrix project died.
Will its successor suffer a similar fate? Is this just a freebie tool that Microsoft will obsess on for a while and then let languish? Is it just a cynical attempt at converting PHP developers over to the full-blown ASP.NET stack? It’s hard to say…and Microsoft needs to make a real commitment to this WebMatrix if it wants developers to invest in it.
But it’s a great start, and it’s the first thing I have seen in a while from Microsoft that makes programming powerful and fun at the same time. I hope it’s a precedent, and not mere anomaly.
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that their short-lived social networking-oriented phone, Kin, was being discontinued. I’m glad. In a post I wrote over a month ago, I implored Steve Ballmer to kill the product. I didn’t just do that because Kin 1 and 2 received terrible reviews; I had other reasons to distrust this product’s efficacy.
The Kin team has been led by Roz Ho, whose title has been Corporate Vice President, Premium Mobile Experiences. During the development cycle for Kin, a.k.a. Project “Pink,” there was some reporting that Ms. Ho led the team badly. The team was the successor to the crew at Danger, the company that built the T-Mobile Sidekick, and which Microsoft acquired in 2008. The negative reporting on Ho included the suggestion that her leadership made for morale so low that most of the original Danger team quit their jobs.
Cnet’s Ina Fried broke the Kin Killed story Wednesday. In her piece we learned that the Kin team would be merged into the Windows Phone 7 group and that:
“Roz Ho, the Microsoft executive who lead the unit that developed the Kin will oversee the transition of the team and then move to an as-yet-determined role at the company, according to a source.”
None of this is surprising. Given the product’s history, It was clear to me that Microsoft would have to kill their Kin. But Windows Phone 7, which still looks promising, got under development quite a while back. When that team was organized, the legacy Windows Mobile team was disbanded. Why didn’t Roz Ho get the heave ho, too? (Ahem!) With WP7 on track and looking good, why on earth did Microsoft bring Kin to market? Here are my top 10 reasons, some more serious than others (drum roll, please, Paul):
10. Taking down a Corporate VP wasn’t politically feasible. Kin had to be brought to market, and had to fail, in order to topple Ho from her position and consolidate power in the WP7 team.
9. The investment in Kin, both in terms of the Danger acquisition and subsequent development was really big. Ballmer figured he had to give it the old college try…and then bail quickly if indeed the phones were duds.
8. Verizon wanted their own Sidekick-like device (not wanting to cede that part of the market to T-Mobile) and implored Microsoft to persevere with Kin’s development.
7. Microsoft knew the Kin would fail, but they wanted to use it as a trial balloon for Kin Studio, the companion cloud service that replicates most data and content stored on the phone. This would help Microsoft determine if the Studio concept should be used with Windows Phone 7 when it launches later this year.
6. When the Kin team finished its work, it was nearing the end of Microsoft’s July 1 fiscal year. They had leftover TV ad budget and they had to spend it on something.
5. Microsoft got the kin.com three-letter domain name and they couldn’t let it go to waste.
4. Microsoft really didn’t want Sharp to be a Windows Phone OEM. They didn’t have the heart to tell them though. This was their passive-aggressive way of getting Sharp to back off.
3. Microsoft was pissed at Engadget for their negative review of Kin. So they killed it and gave Gizmodo the scoop.
2. The announcement yesterday was an elaborate April Fool’s joke. But its ship date was delayed until the end of the quarter.
and…
1. The whole thing was a dare to Verizon from Apple. Jobs said if they carried the Kin in earnest for 2 months, he’d give them the iPhone in January. And Verizon really wanted the iPhone.
I once worked for a guy who told me sarcasm was the lowest form of wit. So be it. I’m done now.
This past Monday, June 21st, The New York City Council Committee on Technology in Government held a hearing on its proposed legislation, known as Introduction 029-2010, that would require all City agencies to publish their data online, in “raw” form. The data would be available to private citizens who wished to analyze it, hobbyist developers who wished to work with it, and commercial entities looking to utilize it internally or create products that use and add value to it.
Such initiatives have already taken root in other jurisdictions, including the U.S. Federal Government. Its open data portal, at www.data.gov, serves as a very good example to state and local governments who wish to implement the same sort of good government transparency through technology.
At first blush, the legislation would appear difficult for anyone to oppose. Donn Morrill, Chairman of the New York Technology Council (NYTECH), eloquently expressed this point of view in his testimony at the hearing: “This should not be a contentious bill. None of you will lose a vote. None of you will lose an endorsement. None of you will lose a dollar in financing by supporting this bill. What you will gain is recognition from the community that your affirmative vote will open doors for enterprising companies to develop new and exciting ways to experience New York City.”
In my opinion, Morrill’s quite right; enactment of the legislation should be a “no brainer.” The fact remains, however, that there has been resistance to it. A year ago I was present, and testified, at another City Council hearing on last year’s version of the same legislation. At that meeting representatives from the Mayor’s Office, in their own testimony, discussed the then recently-announced NYC Big Apps competition and the data feeds that were published to facilitate it. They proclaimed the Mayor’s “customer”-centric position that only select data should be published, because only select data would be of interest to City residents.
The Mayor’s thinking, at the time, was that investment of City resources in producing feeds of all non-privacy-protected City data would be impractical, given that only a relatively small subset of it would be used. Committee Chairperson Gale Brewer disagreed, explaining that determining which data was valuable prior to its publication was virtually impossible. Andrew Hoppin, the New York State Senate’s CIO (follow him on Twitter at @ahoppin), made a similar point in his testimony this week, appealing to the City to “Resist the temptation to adjudicate what [data] is of value and what is not of value".
I agree, and said so in my own testimony at this week’s hearing. I think the whole point of publishing government data is that seemingly mundane data can form the raw material of extremely useful information, be it related to health, economics, commerce or even potholes.
The good news is that at this year’s hearing, the Administration’s attitude seems to have changed. The recently appointed Commissioner of the City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), Carole Post, essentially the City’s CIO, expressed her agreement in principle with the legislation’s aim of making all agency data available. Where Post took exception to the legislation is in the cost and effort feasibility of making such a wide ranging set of data available in a relatively short timeframe. This is a tough call. As I said in one of my live tweets during the hearing, the "ask" of DoITT is big and scary. But if they express that, it looks like they're stonewalling. For what it’s worth, I think Commissioner Post is not stonewalling. I think she’s dedicated to this effort, and wants to avoid overpromising and under-delivering.
Getting the data out can be difficult, both for reasons of bureaucracy, and technology. If the data to be published is managed by a legacy mainframe application, getting it out there in digestible XML or CSV form may not be so easy. And even if it is, publishing static data is only the first step. Eventually the data should have an API (application programming interface) around it so that developers can query it interactively and, in some cases, create/submit data as well. Think about it: we don’t just want to get a list crimes that took place. We want to be able to query that list by neighborhood or police precinct, median income level of the area, severity of the crime, and determine also if the rate of crime in that narrowed category is increasing or decreasing. Insurance companies, real estate agents, and makers of security products may like to know likewise. And the City itself should want to know too, so resources in the next fiscal year can be allocated appropriately.
Beyond such analytical inquiries, there should also be an API for reporting crimes (which would require creation of data, not consumption of it) too. This could allow citizens to report crime, in real time, from their mobile phones, with the tap of a button in an app. The GPS in the phone could alert authorities to the precise location of the incident, and the phone’s camera could even submit a photo. Maybe such technology could address the “bystander effect” allegedly exhibited in the infamous Kitty Genovese stabbing case of the 1960s. Imagine if New York City government used technology to obsolesce a phenomenon made prominent in its own jurisdiction. Removing that blemish would be a proud moment.
I mentioned in my testimony that Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI), should be considered by the City as one platform for serving the City’s Open Data. OGDI is based on the Open Data Protocol (OData - itself based on numerous open Web standards) and Microsoft’s Cloud platform, Windows Azure. OGDI is itself an Open Source starter kit that provides not just for the publication of data, but of a programming API and the ability both to read and write data.
Regardless of the protocol used, Open Data for this nation’s largest city is immensely important and it’s very heartening to see the Council and the Administration in relative agreement on this point. Should the legislation be enacted, and implemented, the opportunities for entrepreneurs and the potential benefit to the public, to business and to the City itself will likely be big, exciting, and inspiration for municipalities across the world.
June 21st, 2010
The Importance of Open Government Data
To all those present, good afternoon. My name is Andrew Brust. I help run a consulting firm, twentysix New York, here in Manhattan. I am also a technology columnist and blogger, and serve on the New York Technology Council’s Advisory Board. As I have explained in previous testimony, I am a lifelong New Yorker, and began my IT career in the employ of the government of the City of New York.
I’ve testified to this Committee before, voicing my support for Open Government Data. I’ll reiterate today that I feel the benefits of publishing data from all City agencies are huge. In the City of New York we have a large government consisting of many departments, authorities and commissions. Given the pervasiveness, especially recently, of technology in ordinary peoples’ lives, it only makes sense to publish this data online. Data published in raw form allows citizens to query that data from computers, smart phones, tablets and other devices. It also allows software developers, be they hobbyists or entrepreneurs, to create applications that analyze the data, mash it up with private data, or visualize it geographically, or through charts, gauges, and diagrams.
Just as the Federal government has created data.gov as a portal for data from Federal agencies, so too should the City of New York, perhaps through DoITT, create a portal for City data. This would provide a platform for an aftermarket in City data-based products and services. It could stimulate greater public participation in government. In the same spirit as the Green Book directory and the various NYC TV cable channels, a City data portal that were both human- and machine-readable could enable self-service acquisition of government information and make City services more effective in the process.
The prospect of opening up each data stream in each agency might seem daunting to City IT professionals. I would encourage DoITT and the individual agencies to conceive of the requirement with the right mindset. Data feeds are just software services, and good software is built on the premise of designing a service layer at the foundation. So rather than taking the approach of building closed systems and then opening them up, agencies should premise the architecture of their systems on building the services/feeds first, then layering application logic and functionality on top of them. With this approach, Open Government Data would become a byproduct of normal software development, rather than a burdensome, discrete step.
This would still leave the “back catalog” of applications and databases, of course, but that can be processed in a phased, scheduled way. Each pre-existing data source exposed would facilitate not just public consumption of the data but re-use of that same data by the agency in new software applications.
Mashup Examples Redux
In my previous testimony, I suggested some examples of how government data could be utilized and commercialized. Allow me to present these ideas, briefly, once more.
Google Maps should be able to show where the big potholes are; Zagat should be able to indicate which restaurants have a sterling Health Department inspection record; WebMD should be able to create heatmaps showing which neighborhoods are hardest hit by an epidemic, and the New York Times ought to be able to indicate which boroughs and neighborhoods are getting the most, or least, arts funding.
Retail consultancies should be able to show which precincts are best and least served by certain types of shops. Tourists should be able to see where the highest concentrations of hotel rooms are, and thus where the most availability and best prices may exist. Members of this Committee should be able to see how well Verizon is living up to its commitment to deploy FiOS service to all areas of all five boroughs.
Children’s Aid Society should be able to illustrate where concentrations of child homelessness and abuse exist. Food for Survival should be able to show which ethnic, geographic, economic and age groups are most susceptible to hunger.
Ultimately, the thing to remember is that data is a raw material, which the City government can refine only to a certain extent. Making the raw material available to the public allows a far greater amount of refinement and value to be added to that data, than can be had by keeping it sequestered within the agency that has collected it.
The City as Data Consumer
Even City government can directly benefit from such Open Government Data. That’s because integration of systems between agencies will be much better facilitated through a normal data sharing regime than through customized, point-to-point data interchange. This will enable streamlined construction of numerous systems. For example, a comprehensive city-wide enterprise data warehouse will be much easier to build in a data sharing environment, making the Mayor’s Management Report much easier to produce. The notion of a general inquiry system, across all agencies, for 311, becomes compellingly feasible. Key Performance Indicators, and hierarchical balanced scorecards for the entire City government become approachable, as does an automated alerting system that would cover the situation where any of those KPIs fell below or exceeded acceptable values.
The exciting internal applications for Open Government data should eliminate any fear that the external applications would be limited or underwhelming. They should also eliminate doubt as to the importance of sharing virtually all data (within important privacy and security limits), no matter how mundane some of the data, in raw form, may seem.
A Possible Technology
The technology platform with which agencies publish and even host their data most likely should be determined at the discretion of the individual agency itself. Making all agencies adhere to a single technology, hosting or cloud platform would likely be cumbersome to the point of being counterproductive to the goal of publishing the data in the first place.
That said, I would like to alert the Committee to an important technology and platform, from a perhaps unlikely source: Microsoft. Microsoft has created a framework called the Open Government Data Initiative, or OGDI. The software developer’s kit for OGDI is, believe it or not, published under an open source license. It was developed not by a product team on the corporate campus in Redmond, WA, but by the field organization that works with developers in the U.S. public sector (including federal, state and local government). OGDI is already being used to publish data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, General Services Agency and Geological Survey, as well as from the city government in the District of Columbia, and the City of Edmonton in Canada. Rather than just a static feed, OGDI provides a fully queryable Web service as well as built-in capabilities for mapping and charting the data. Data can also be downloaded in CSV, Excel, or KML formats, the last of these being compatible with Google Earth.
You may know I work closely with Microsoft and have done so now for the better part of two decades. As I have done so, I have often been critical of the proprietary approach the company takes to certain technologies, including data access. But recently things here have changed.
First Microsoft developed a data Web Services technology for its .NET software platform; the technology is called WCF Data Services, but its original code name, which many people still use, was “Astoria.” From the beginning I thought any technology that shared a name with a neighborhood in Queens had to be good. And it was: Astoria is based on open standards including HTTP, REST, ATOM, XML and JSON. These are common Web programming technologies that are in no way unique to Microsoft; that, in and of itself, was noteworthy. But then Microsoft took this approach a step further, doing something quite uncharacteristic: it took Astoria’s format and wire protocol and published it as an open protocol, which could be implemented on any platform. Microsoft christened the platform-neutral assets from Astoria the Open Data Protocol, or OData.
OData is compatible, in a raw way, with any programming environment which has the capability of interfacing with the Web. But what about a full library that consumes OData feeds and makes their data items appear as rich objects that developers can program against, without having to write the code to procure the feeds and parse each record and field within them? Of course such a facility exists for Microsoft’s .NET platform. But it extends well beyond that: OData native client libraries also exist for JavaScript, Java, PHP, Ruby, and Objective C (used by the iPhone/iPad platform). Microsoft has actually published the source code from the .NET client implementation (available under the Apache Open Source license) so that everyone has access to a sturdy reference implementation. On the server side, in addition to Microsoft’s Astoria implementation, IBM has implemented OData for its WebSphere eXtreme Scale REST data service (for its grid database service).
The Open Government Data Initiative is built upon OData, and I hope City agencies will consider using it. To me, this isn’t about supporting Microsoft. It’s about getting Open Government Data up quickly and easily, in machine-readable form and with a basic user interface that is Section 508-compliant for accessibility. It’s also about encouraging Microsoft to continue this open approach to technology, so that it becomes more the rule than the occasion.
Data for the People
Regardless of which technology or collection of technologies the City Of New York uses to open its data, my hope is that it will indeed do so, somehow, and quickly. The data shouldn’t be proprietary to City agencies, because the data isn’t the City government’s property. The data belongs to the public, to use for public benefit and innovative results. I applaud the Council and this Committee for being such strong advocates of such an outcome, and I fervently support passage of Int. 029-2010. Thank you for your time and attention today.
Three days ago I participated in a special outreach campaign. Specifically, I was part of an effort to mentor various members of the U.S, Congress (in both the House and Senate) in issues concerning technology companies. I took part in a full day of meetings on Capitol Hill, organized by the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), an organization with which I have been associated for more than 10 years and on whose board I now sit.
I met with many elected officials' staff, but also had certain meetings with members of Congress themselves. I have participated in an ACT "fly-in" before but, even so, I was once again exhilarated with the experience of engaging members of Congress so directly,
The participating ACT membership split up into five groups, roughly defined along geographic lines, such that each group was matched with its own members' elected officials. All in all, the ACT membership met with the offices of more than 30 Representatives and Senators, from both major parties. We carried forth important messages about Cloud computing, net neutrality, intellectual property, taxation of carried interest and its impact on funding of tech startups, and more.
The good news? The ACT delegation was respectfully received, and members of both parties seem very cognizant of the importance of small technology companies to the economy. Everyone listened to us attentively, many took careful notes, and several seemed interested in working with ACT in the future, in order to understand tech issues better.
The bad news? Many, though not all, members of the Congress, including those who have significant influence over legislation affecting the industry, remain ignorant of many aspects of technology. It's a bit frightening, to be honest, and as good as the fly-in was, it certainly didn't resolve the problem.
That problem will only be solved if and when our participatory democracy enjoys, well, greater participation from the tech industry. That's a tough order because, in my experience at least, most technology entrepreneurs tend to be cynical about government, and politics too. In fact, there seems to be an intractable paradox: those who need to educate elected officials most are those least likely to believe that they can. Given how busy techies are, and their corresponding need to triage their time, political activism often gets ruled out.
Where does this leave us? I am not sure. But I would encourage people to get involved, on a trial basis, and here's why: everyone who I have seen try, including those most skeptical, become excited, engaged and much more optimistic once they've been through the process. And the next such convert could be you.
ACT maintains an office in Brussels and lobbies the European Parliament, as well as the U.S. Congress. If you're a tech entrepreneur or executive in the US or the EU, consider joining ACT and getting involved. Participate in one fly-in. If it doesn't change your outlook, so be it. But I bet it will, and I bet you can make a concrete difference in laws that affect your business, and you.
I tried writing a post for this blog last night, while at the this year’s Microsoft Tech Ed and Business Intelligence conferences, in New Orleans. But I literally fell asleep while writing it. That’s probably a sign that my readers might have done the same while reading it.
Why the writer’s block? This was a very good show for me, but I think I was having trouble figuring out exactly why. Now that I’m on the flight home, I’m starting to piece it together.
One reason, for sure, was that I’ve spent years in both the developer and the BI worlds, and a show that combined the two was really enjoyable for me. Typically, the subject matter, the attendees, the Microsoft execs and managers, and even the social circles have been separate. This year’s Tech Ed facilitated a fusion of each of these previously segregated groups. That was good for me as a speaker; for example, I facilitated a Birds of a Feather session on PowerPivot (Microsoft’s new self-service BI offering) which was well-attended, and by a large number of non-BI pros. The fusion was good for me as an attendee too, as Microsoft BI, in the form of a new Pivot Viewer control, made it into the Day 1 keynote, demoed by Microsoft’s key BI champion, Amir Netz. And it was good for me socially, as I was able to meet with peers in both camps, and at one location.
Speaking of meeting with industry colleagues, I did a lot of that at this show. Probably for the first time ever, I carefully scheduled and conducted a series of meetings with friends and business acquaintances in the developer tools, data visualization, utilities, publishing and training areas of the Microsoft ecosystem. Beside the time efficiencies in conducting so many meetings, I discovered another benefit. I got a real handle on the tech industry’s economic health.
The news here is good. First of all, 2010 has been a great year for just about everyone I spoke to. The mood is positive, energy is high, and people are working really hard. This is, of course, refreshing to see, and it’s a huge relief. Add to that the fact that this year’s Tech Ed was about 2.5 times larger in headcount than last year’s (based on numbers from unofficial, but reliable, sources), and the economic prognosis seems excellent. But there’s more to it than that.
Here’s the thing: everyone I talked to seems to be working, and succeeding, at changing their business models to adapt to changes in the industry. Whether it’s the Internet’s impact on publishing and training, the increased importance of the developer audience in South Asia, the shift of affordable developer and business talent to unfamiliar locales abroad, or even lapses in Microsoft’s performance in the market, partner companies aren’t just rolling with the punches; they’re welcoming the changes and working them to their advantage. No one seemed downtrodden, or even fatigued. Even for businesses who have seen core revenue streams become commoditized, everyone seems to be changing their market strategy and winning. Even Microsoft, of whom I have been critical recently, showed signs of successful hard work and playbook change, in the maturing of their cloud strategy, their commitment to it and their excitement around it. And the embedded, managed, self-service BI strategy that Microsoft has been touting looks like it’s already being embraced by customers, even though PowerPivot, and other new Microsoft BI products, were released only recently.
The collective optimism I have witnessed, and that I have felt, tells me good things about this industry and the economy. The stock market had huge mood swings during my stay, and that may yet subdue the industry recovery I have seen this week. Nonetheless, I am convinced that a strong foundation of hard work, innovative thinking and, if I may, true renaissance is underlying this industry’s success.
That kind of strength will generate a strong recovery, I am certain, whether now or once we’re past another round of choppy weather in the broader economy. The fundamentals are good.
Next week marks the first full week of June. Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology. In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday. Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans. A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003. I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch. I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference. My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer. Just so you know.
Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches. First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle. WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release. These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite. Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices.
Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all. The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite. Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new.
I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate. In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it). This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem. And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect.
Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us. Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances. For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way. Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers. This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful.
A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways. WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related. It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets. However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development. Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards. In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs.
What about Tech Ed’s editorial content? Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut. The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions. Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture. I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7. Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer.
All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products. Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs. I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience. Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all. Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy.
My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event. The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat.
My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products. Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.
Last year, I wrote Steve Ballmer an email, and he was kind enough to write me back. The email contained a scan of a column I wrote praising Microsoft’s BI strategy. His reply contained three simple words: “Super nice thanks.” Well, now I’d like to write to Steve again, in an open letter format, and this time the love may be a bit tougher. But I’m still super earnest.
The past two days have been eventful ones for Microsoft: The company announced the departure of company veterans Robbie Bach and J Allard and the market announced Apple is now besting Microsoft in market capitalization. Plus, announcements were made that make it plain that Ballmer will, in effect, be running Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division himself. With that in mind, I’d like to offer my list of a dozen things I think Microsoft’s CEO should do to improve that division’s offerings and, hopefully, its bottom line.
So here goes:
1. On Windows Phone 7, Stay the Course
The press is teeming with headlines and reader comments proclaiming the death-before-arrival of Windows Phone 7. That’s plain silly. You’ve got the makings of a great and unique SmartPhone platform, and you’re the only company (even considering RIM) that can offer full fidelity Exchange integration, not to mention implementing Office on the device. Let the existing team finish this puppy and ship it. And then have them pump out a few updates, over-the-air, quickly. Show them that Google Android’s not the only product that can do good, rapid dot releases.
And another thing: make sure your OEMs’ devices have flawless touch screens. If they don’t, then you shouldn’t certify them for delivery to customers. Period.
Oh, and kill the Kin, quietly. It was DOA, and you know it.
2. Move Media Center to the Xbox Platform
Media Center is, at its core, a good product. But delivering a media distribution and DVR platform on a sophisticated PC operating system like Windows 7 just creates too many moving parts. Xbox already functions as the best Media Center extender device – it should actually be the hub as well. Media Center is mostly based on .NET code – and XNA is a .NET environment for Xbox – find a way to bridge that small gap and make Media Center a joy to work with instead of a frustration. Beating Apple TV out of this sub-market is the lowest hanging fruit on the tree (goofy pun, but it’s true).
3. Integrate Media Center with Mediaroom, or Kill the Latter
You have two media products with almost identical names. One is for standalone DVRs and the other is for IPTV cable set tops with DVR capabilities. Can we merge these please? My previous request of putting Media Center on Xbox would seem to tie into this nicely, since you’ve announced plans to do that with Mediaroom already.
4. Fix the Red Ring of Death
People love the Xbox, but they really don’t love sending their consoles back every 18-24 months, when they get a bunch of red lights flashing on power up. You’ve handled this defect about as gracefully as possible, but it’s been around for a long time now and it doesn’t seem to be fixed yet. You can do better. In fact, you must do better, or you insult your customers.
5. Add Blu Ray to Xbox
I know, streaming movies are the future; physical media is legacy technology. So if that’s true, why did you back HD DVD so hard? You know why: for now, the film studios won’t allow a large selection of new release, HD, surround sound content be distributed on any medium other than Blu Ray or cable pay per view/on-demand. Don’t you want home theater buffs to see the Xbox as a fantastic device for their rigs? Don’t you want to put PlayStation 3 out of its misery? And if you follow my suggestions above (move Media Center to the Xbox and fix the Red Ring problem), you’d have it all sewn up. Do I think Blu Ray functionality will move a lot of units? No. Do I think that it would move more units with desperately needed influential home theater consumers? You bet. And you might sell more ZunePass subscriptions in the process.
But while you’re at it, make the fan quieter, please.
6. Make More of Windows Home Server
Home Server is a fantastic product. And for reasons unknown to me, it seems like you’re letting it languish. Development of the add-in ecosystem seems underfunded. WHS’ unparalleled ease of use and reliability for home PC backup (and emergency restores) goes unsung. Product cycles are slow. Support for your OEMs, who are doing great work, especially in the green space with Atom CPUs, seems lacking. You’ve married a trophy girl and you keep her cloistered at home! That’s cruel, unusual and, um, incredibly ill-advised.
Make use of this ace card, and while you’re at it, give it real integration with Media Center. The integration thus far proof-of-concept quality. You should go way past that – both products will benefit immeasurably.
7. Set Up a Partner Platform for Custom Installers
There’s a whole sub-industry of companies that install, integrate and configure home theater, security and connected home products. They have an industry group. They are influential in the high-end of the consumer electronics industry, and so are their customers. They love Media Center and they love Windows Home Server. But I have talked to several of them at the Consumer Electronics Show and they tell me you don’t love them. They find it very difficult to do business with Microsoft, even though they want nothing more than to sell and evangelize your platform. This is a travesty. Please fix it. Get Allison Watson and the Microsoft Partner Network on board and have her hire someone who knows how to run a channel program for consumer electronics companies. Problem solved. Markets expanded.
8. Make Your Own Hardware
In other areas, I know you love your partners. I help run one, so I appreciate that. But when it came to Xbox and Zune you built them it yourself (albeit on a contract basis, which is fine). Windows Phone 7 has a chance to work as an OEM play, but it would work better if you produced the devices. At least consider building a reference device that sells alongside your OEMs’ offerings. That’s what Google did with the Nexxus One. And while that phone was not itself a big seller, it catalyzed two wonderful things : (1) a quality bar was set and (2) partners exceeded it. Before the Nexxus One, the best Android handset out there was the Motorola Droid. The Nexxus One was better, and the HTC Droid Incredible and Evo 4G are now even better than Google’s phone, which is why Verizon and Sprint decided not to carry it. Imagine if all Windows Phone 6.x devices were on par with the HTC HD2. I tend to believe you’d have a lot bigger market share than you do now.
9. Continue with Your Retail Initiative
From what I hear, it sounds like it’s going well. And this goes right along with making your own hardware. When you build it, they will come. And then it makes the likes of Best Buy and Staples do better.
10. Make an Acquisition (or Two)
TiVo and/or Moxi look ripe for the picking. With their ability to build stuff people love and your ability to run a business, you might just have something. But do a better job than you did when you bought Danger. Buy the ideas, not just the customers, eh?
11. Make Beautiful Stuff
You’ve heard this one before, I know. But I have some head-shrinking advice on this one. You know that Apple obsesses over its industrial design. You know that appeals to consumers. But it seems you think doing so is Apple’s game exclusively and so you shouldn’t even try. Bull dinky. Come to New York and visit the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design gallery. You’ll see that lots of companies and product categories have had very high design value well before Apple existed. You can do this, and the Zune HD was a great start. Now run with that. Find those negative voices in your head that are telling you that you can’t and shut them up. For good.
12. Burst the Bubble
Some of the products you’ve built seem like they were conceived in a bizarro world. That would appear to be the result of groupthink. You must do better. And there’s lots of people willing to advise you. This includes just about everyone in the Regional Director program, and probably a bunch of MVPs. Heck, I bet the guys at Engadget could help out too. Imagine if you let them see the Kin before it shipped. Talk to high-end gear consumers. Talk to Best Buy and CostCo customers too.
Signing Off
I hope this was of value to you. As I wrote this I kept telling myself how obvious, even trite, some of these pieces of advice were and then, because of that, doubting they’d really help. But I decided that they must not be obvious to Microsoft. Sometimes when you get wrapped up in stuff, it’s hard to clear your head. I think my head’s pretty clear here though (I’m wrapped up in other stuff), so maybe my perspective can help. If not, well, then, I guess they all can’t be super nice.
The competition between the Web and proprietary rich platforms, including Windows, Mac OS, iPhone/iPad, Adobe’s Flash/AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight, is not new. But with the emergence of HTML 5 and imminent support for it in the next release of the major Web browsers, the battle is heating up. And with the announcements made Wednesday at Google's I/O conference, it's getting kicked up yet another notch.
The impact of this platform battle on companies in the media and advertising world, and the developers who serve them, is significant. The most prominent question is whether video and rich media online will shift towards pure HTML and away from plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. In fact, certain features in HTML 5 make it suitable for development for line of business applications as well, further threatening those plug-in technologies.
So what's the deal? Is this real or hype? To answer that question, I've done my own research into HTML 5's features and talked to several media-focused, New York area developers to get their opinions. I present my findings to you in this post.
Before bearing down into HTML 5 specifics and practitioners’ quotes, let's set the context. To understand what HTML 5 can do, take a look at this video of Sports Illustrated’s HTML 5 prototype. This should start to get you bought into the idea that HTML 5 could be a game-changer.
Next, if you happen to have installed the beta version of Google's Chrome 5 browser, take a look at the page linked to below, and in that page, click on any of the game thumbnails to see what's possible, without a plug-in, in this brave new world. (Note, although the instructions for each game tell you to press the A key to start, press the Z key instead.). Here's the link:
http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara
As an adjunct to what's enabled by HTML 5, consider the various transforms that are part of CSS 3. If you're running Safari as your browser, the following link will showcase this live; if not, you'll see a bitmap that will give you an idea of what's possible:
http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms
Are you starting to get the picture (literally)? What has up until now required browser plug-ins and other patches to HTML, most typically Flash, will soon be renderable, natively, in all major browsers. Moreover, it's looking likely that developers will be able to deliver such content and experiences in these browsers using one base of markup and script code (using straight JavaScript and/or jQuery), without resorting to browser-specific code and workarounds. If you're skeptical of this, I wouldn't blame you, especially with respect to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. However, i can tell you with confidence that even Microsoft is dedicated to full-on HTML 5 support in version 9 of that browser, which is currently under development.
So what’s new in HTML 5, specifically, that makes sites like this possible? The specification documents go into deep detail, and there’s no sense in rehashing them here, but a summary is probably in order. Here is a non-authoritative, but useful, list of the major new feature areas in HTML 5:
- 2D drawing capabilities and 3D transforms. 2D drawing instructions can be embedded statically into a Web page; application interactivity and animation can be achieved through script. As mentioned above, 3D transforms are technically part of version 3 of the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) spec, rather than HTML 5, but they can nonetheless be thought of as part of the bundle. They allow for rendering of 3D images and animations that, together with 2D drawing, make HTML-based games much more feasible than they are presently, as the links above demonstrate.
- Embedded audio and video. A media player can appear directly in a rendered Web page, using HTML markup and no plug-ins. Alternately, player controls can be hidden and the content can play automatically.
- Major enhancements to form-based input. This includes such things as specification of required fields, embedding of text “hints” into a control, limiting valid input on a field to dates, email addresses or a list of values. There’s more to this, but the gist is that line-of-business applications, with complicated input and data validation, are supported directly
- Offline caching, local storage and client-side SQL database. These facilities allow Web applications to function more like native apps, even if no internet connection is available.
- User-defined data. Data (or metadata – data about data) can easily be embedded statically and/or retrieved and updated with Javascript code. This avoids having to embed that data in a separate file, or within script code.
Taken together, these features position HTML to compete with, and perhaps overtake, Adobe’s Flash/AIR (and Microsoft’s Silverlight) as a viable Web platform for media, RIAs (rich internet applications – apps that function more like desktop software than Web sites) and interactive Web content, including games.
What do players in the media world think about this? From the embedded video above, we know what Sports Illustrated (and, therefore, Time Warner) think. Hulu, the major Internet site for broadcast TV content, is on record as saying HTML5 video does not pass muster with them, at least not yet. YouTube, on the other hand, already has an experimental HTML 5-based version of their site. TechCrunch has reported that NetFlix is flirting with HTML 5 too, especially as it pertains to embedded browsers in TV-based devices. And the New York Times’ Web site now embeds some video clips without resorting to Flash. They have to – otherwise iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users couldn’t see them in the Mobile Safari browser.
Speaking of the iPad, MIchael Scafidi, Razorfish’s Technology Director and Presentation Layer Technology Practice Lead, in the firm’s New York City office, believes it to be a catalyst for HTML 5 adoption. When I asked him whether he thought Flash would lose share to the new open Web standard, he said “For advertising on the iPad, yes, specifically due to the lack of support of Flash on the iPad.” On the current state of the art in Web browsers, Scafidi commented “IE 8 will not support HTML 5 in banners so an alternative will need to be used until IE9. Outside of the iPad and iPhone Flash will still be used for more immersive media and advertising.”
What do other media-focused developers think about all this? I talked to several to get their opinions. Michael Pinto is CEO and Founder of Very Memorable Design whose primary focus has been to help marketing directors get traction online. The firm’s client roster includes the likes Time, Inc., Scholastic and PBS. Pinto predicts that “More and more microsites that were done entirely in Flash will be done more and more using jQuery. I can also see slideshows and video now being done without Flash. However if you needed to create a game or highly interactive activity Flash would still be the way to go for the web.”
A dissenting view comes from Jesse Erlbaum, CEO of The Erlbaum Group, LLC, which serves numerous clients in the magazine publishing sector. When I asked Erlbaum whether he thought HTML 5 and jQuery/JavaScript would steal significant market share from Flash, he responded “Not at all! In particular, not for media and advertising customers! These sectors are not generally in the business of making highly functional applications, which is the one place where HTML5/jQuery/etc really shines.”
Ironically, Pinto’s firm is a heavy user of Flash for its projects and Erlbaum’s develops atop the “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl) stack. For whatever reason, each firm seems to see the other’s toolset as a more viable choice. But both agree that the developer tool story around HTML 5 is deficient. Pinto explains “What’s lost with [HTML 5 and Javascript] techniques is that there isn’t a single widely favored easy-to-use tool of choice for authoring. So with Flash you can get up and running right away and not worry about what is different from one browser to the next.“ Erlbaum agrees, saying: “HTML5/Javascript lacks a sophisticated integrated development environment (IDE) which is an essential part of Flash. If what someone is trying to make is primarily animation, it's a waste of time…to do this in Javascript. It can be done much more easily in Flash, and with greater cross-browser compatibility and consistency due to the ubiquity of Flash.”
Adobe (maker of Flash since its 2005 acquisition of Macromedia) likely agrees. And for better or worse, they’ve decided to address this shortcoming of HTML 5, even at risk of diminishing their Flash platfrom. Yesterday Adobe announced that their hugely popular Deamweaver Web design authoring tool would directly support HTML 5 and CSS 3 development. In fact, the Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 HTML5 Pack is downloadable now from Adobe Labs.
Maybe Adobe is bowing to pressure from ardent Web professionals like Scott Kellum, Lead Designer at Channel V Media, a digital and offline branding firm, serving the media and marketing sectors, among others. Kellum told me that HTML 5 “…will definitely move people away from Flash. It has many of the same functionalities with faster load times and better accessibility. HTML5 will help Flash as well: with the new caching methods you can now even run Flash apps offline.” Razorfish’s Scafidi, on the other hand, believes “on the platforms that support both [Flash and HTML 5] it will be the best technology that meets the business needs that will prevail.”
Although all three Web developers I interviewed would agree that Flash is still required for more sophisticated applications, Kellum seems to have put his finger on why HTML 5 may nonetheless dominate. In his view, much of the Web development out there has little need for high-end capabilities: “Most people want to add a little punch to a navigation bar or some video and now you can get the biggest bang for your buck with HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.”
I’ve already mentioned that Google’s ongoing I/O conference, at the Moscone West center in San Francisco, is driving the HTML 5 news cycle, big time. And Google made many announcements of their own, including the open sourcing of their VP8 video codec, new enterprise-oriented capabilities for its App Engine cloud offering, and the creation of the Chrome Web Store, which the company says will make it easier to find and “install” Web applications, in a fashion similar to the way users procure native apps on various mobile platforms.
HTML 5 looks to be disruptive, especially to the media world. And even if the technology ends up disappointing, the chatter around it alone is causing big changes in the technology world. If the richness it promises delivers, then magazine publishers and non-text digital advertisers may indeed have a platform for creating compelling content that loads quickly, is standards-based and will render identically in (the newest versions of) all major Web browsers. Can this development in the digital arena save the titans of the print world? I can’t predict, but it’s going to be fun to watch, and the competitive innovation from all players in both industries will likely be immense.