SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing yesterday (and simultaneously to the Web, without a hitch).  This works out well, as the SQL 2008 update to my MS Press book on SQL Server 2005 is almost done!  The book, now under the leadership of Lenni Lobel, should be out in October.  It will be even better than the last one, trust me.

With SQL Server 2008 ships Service Pack 1 to the .NET Framework 3.5. Its companion, SP1 to Visual Studio 2008, should be shipping very, very, soon.

“So what?” you might say. “It’s just a service pack.”  Well, not really.  This service pack is also a roll up of a collection of technologies, many of them data-related, that had been previously released as stand-alone Betas, Community Technology Previews and “futures” releases.  These include the ADO.NET Entity Framework (an Object Relational Mapping —ORM— framework), ADO.NET Data Services (formerly project “Astoria” — which allows you to create RESTful Web services around your data, very easily) and ASP.NET Dynamic Data (which creates entire functional data bound Web sites, simply by inspecting your data model).  And with these technologies, will come an added emphasis on LINQ To SQL (another ORM framework), which was only recently released itself, in November.

“And that’s not all.”  With SQL Server 2008 comes a new version of SQL Server Compact, as well as the Sync Framework and Sync Services for ADO.NET.  And don’t forget SQL Server Data Services, a cloud-based data service from Microsoft, currently in private Beta.

Is 2008 the year of the database?  Is Microsoft trying to compete for attention with the Beijing Olympics?  (I doubt that, given that NBC is using Silverlight to show every single Beijing event live and on demand.)  Are people at Microsoft so bored that they had nothing better to do than come out with five different data tools and a new release of their flagship database?

Nope.  Let go of your conspiracy theories.  Here’s an anecdote that might shed light: when I started writing for Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal (now Visual Studio Magazine) 14 years ago, I focused on database topics.  When I was offered a regular spot, it was to share the Database Design column with Roger Jennings.  It’s what I wanted; it’s what I fought for.  Because back then, business software development was all about database management and access.  And today’s no different in that respect. 

But what is different is that we have AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, Web services, cloud computing, smart phone applications, and a strong desire to automate the production of code that is common to a critical mass of applications.  That’s what all these new tools are about: addressing the new platforms and reducing menial coding tasks on any and all of them.  And with a new version of SQL Server ready to tie it all together.

Will all these tools survive?  Maybe not, but I think most of them will, and they’ll integrate more and more.  Some of the products are ground breaking, others represent Microsoft’s adoption (and adaptation) of tools that have abounded in the third party and open source spaces for a while.  Some are must-haves, others need to be treated more skeptically.  But all of them will strengthen the .NET platform, because active enhancement is a software platform’s lifeblood.  As in 2001 when .NET was still in Beta, developers should take advantage of the slower economy and study this new stuff hard.  When things turn up again, they’ll be ready, and customers are going to be happy.

A recent guest editorial by ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer on TechTarget.com has gone out on a limb and panned Microsoft’s messaging around Oslo and its greater SOA strategy.  Schmelzer and ZapThink really believe that Microsoft has SOA all wrong.  The most prominent objection in the editorial seems to be that Microsoft is way too nuts and bolts about SOA — seeing it as more about application integration and less about the architectural paradigm shift that many SOA proponents feel is crucial, not only to understanding SOA, but to understanding software today.  Quoting Schmelzer: “Microsoft has made a critical (if not fatal) mistake of turning SOA into a developer initiative focused on standards-based interoperability.”

At first blush, this critique sounds spot on, because Microsoft has made this alleged error before.  In fact, when the first version of BizTalk launched, it was hampered by Microsoft’s selling it as a developer tool.  If Steve Ballmer’s infamous Developers-Developers-Developers “monkey dance” is the company’s hammer, then we shouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft turns everything into developer nails.

But is that what’s really going on here?  For ZapThink, what is the crux of the philosophical/paradigmatic misstep on Microsoft’s part?  Quoting the editorial again: "The real power of SOA is not simply in standards-based integration (didn't XML and EDI provide that, too?), but in the power of composing heterogeneous services in environments of continual change."

In other words, SOA is all about loose coupling, and building (composite) apps around and for it, rather than point-to-point integration over Web services.  OK.  What in the Oslo messaging (and technology) somehow precludes this?  Isn't this what things like BizTalk Services, ADO.NET Data Services, SQL Server Data Services, support of RESTful services in WCF, and the WebClient programming model in Silverlight are all about?

I’m worried that there’s a failure of rhetoric (to quote The Police, backwards) here.  Microsoft does speak to the "connected business” in their messaging, and they absolutely speak to the necessity of helping developers build Web Services at scale, and with less plumbing engineering for each implementation.  Perhaps that’s not organized well for those that feel strongly that the priority should be on getting developers to build things that are solidly factored and designed for-reuse.  If Microsoft concentrates too heavily on helping developers hook stuff together, and doesn’t place a premium on changing the way developers think and plan how they build software, isn’t that selling SOA short?

At the very least, that criticism is doctrinaire.  It’s doesn’t speak to the substance of what .NET 3.0+ and Oslo are about (or not about), but is instead an oblique objection to what Microsoft is not saying, and not being fervent about.  Even if that sort of policy-oriented protectionism were reasonable, is the architectural principle of re-use-before-all-else providing the results to merit such an emotional defense?  If SOA is mostly about software re-use in the enterprise, how’s that mission working out, anyway?

To quote one analyst in a piece entitled Core Value of a SOA is the Ability to Reuse Services? Not a Chance.:  “[the value of] reuse is …much less than we expected, or the ‘SOA hype’ has been stating. The true value of SOA is the ability to create enterprise architectures that provide much better agility than the overly complex, static, and fragile architectures we have around today.”

Whoever said that seems in sync with some of the Oslo ideas around modeling, developer productivity and building scalable services.  Whoever said that must be in Microsoft’s pocket, right?  Ironically, it was ZapThink’s own David Linthicum.  If you’d like, read the full piece, so you can have all the context.

Is it really sensible for ZapThink to make re-use politics the backbone of its critique of Microsoft’s SOA strategy?  Granted re-use was not the phrase ZapThink used, but it’s the concept they seemed to invoke.  Meanwhile, ZapThink seems to lack re-use even amongst its own analysts.  Small wonder they dislike the phrase “connected business.”

With yesterday’s announcement that Yahoo and Microsoft have broken off all discussion of a merger (partial or otherwise) and that Yahoo has closed an agreement with Google to carry the latter’s paid search ads on the former’s search engine, it certainly seems like MicroHoo has bitten the dust.  Perhaps both companies have decided that the expansion of Yahoo’s fabled acronym (referenced in the title of this post) is the best philosophy.  I still believe there’s a lot of posturing going on, and I still believe a deal is necessary.  I also think a deal is possible, but I don’t think it’s guaranteed.

I once owned my own firm and I remember how strongly I felt that I would never sell it.  My own pride was wrapped up in the company and its success, and I took any subjugation of the company’s identity to equate to that of my own.  I suppose Jerry Yang may feel likewise about Yahoo.  But, with all due respect (whatever that means), that kind of internalized, emotional approach to business is more appropriate to running a candy store than to being the CEO of a top-tier Internet company.  I sold my firm in 2004 so that I, and my employees, could move on to bigger projects and new technologies.  I suppose the analogy's a weak one, but why won’t Jerry Yang do the same for his team?

Jerry may get over himself or Carl Icahn may succeed in ousting him and force Yahoo to pursue a Microsoft merger deal with vigor (instead of with passive aggression).  But the fact that so much time has elapsed since the beginning of this round of deal-making truly complicates things.  Whatever Microsoft may have felt was a fair price for Yahoo several weeks ago, the reality is that the passage of time and events have changed Yahoo’s intrinsic value and its value to Microsoft specifically.  Consider:

• The Yahoo brand is now tarnished.  And a shareholder rebellion led by Icahn will tarnish it further.  This would ostensibly have impact on the reach of Yahoo’s network of sites and the enthusiasm and satisfaction of its customers while surfing it, which could impact click-through rates.
• Microsoft has already lost valuable time and momentum pursuing this deal.  With each passing day, the potential boost to its Internet advertising prowess that a Yahoo acquisition could provide diminishes, and the lost potential revenue piles up.
• The caché for Microsoft on the Web that would have come from a swiftly and amicably executed deal with Yahoo is now beyond reach.

All of the above are Yahoo’s losses, first and foremost, but they hurt Microsoft too.  There’s no other deal that Microsoft can do that will bring them the audience share, and the demographic diversity of it, that Yahoo can offer.  And whether you believe that Microsoft should go into the Web advertising business or not, it’s important to realize that Microsoft is absolutely convinced that it must do so.  Under these circumstances, it becomes important that it do so as shrewdly as possible. 

At this point, doing a deal depends on (a) Carl Icahn’s maneuvers, and their success, (b) Microsoft’s willingness to accept acquiring a distressed property, rather than a trophy prize and, quite possibly, (c) Yahoo willing to accept a significantly lower price than the one it has already turned down.  That’s a lot of intrigue and compromise, and it’s far from certain that either company knows how to endure each or both, let alone do so quickly.  There’s a good business school case study in here somewhere.  It remains to be seen if it will be a study of success or failure.

This is a big deal folks.  Look what I just read in my inbox (it actually arrived yesterday):

Tomorrow the New York City Franchise and Review Commission (FCRC) will hold a public hearing regarding Verizon’s entrance into the New York City Cable Television market. On April 29, 2008 Deputy Mayor Lieber and Commissioner Cosgrave of the Department of Information and Technologies (DoITT) announced an agreement with Verizon to offer cable service throughout the City of New York. Currently, an overwhelming majority of New York City residents have only a single choice in cable television providers. If approved, the agreement would require Verizon to offer cable service to all residences in New York City, potentially establishing a competitive marketplace in an industry that has been dominated by single providers and a lack of competition since its creation. We encourage you to attend tomorrow’s public hearing taking place at NYC College of Technology, 285 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY. The hearing begins at 3:00pm and is anticipated to run until at least 6:00pm. As with all public hearings, feel free to attend and testify regarding your concerns.

I’m no fan of Verizon the company, but I think the FiOS product is a good one, and the rigor of a full cable franchise agreement would hold Verizon to the same standard as today’s cable providers in NYC (Time Warner, RCN and Cablevision).  This would force Verizon to serve all NYC neighborhoods, not just the more lucrative ones, and would ostensibly also compel them to provide public access programming carriage.

I’d love to have the better HD picture and faster broadband speeds that FiOS provides.  Perhaps more importantly, I’d love to see Time Warner Cable match those offerings, thus allowing me to stay with them.

I imagine a full city-wide franchise will anger Time Warner and Cablevision, who now serve mutually exclusive territory (Cablevision in the Bronx and Southern/Eastern Brooklyn; Time Warner everywhere else) because the previous franchise areas and awards prevented them from wiring the whole city.  And they’d have a valid point.  Let’s see what happens.  Maybe they’ll each get the opportunity to serve a city-wide area as well.  More competition.  Something the cable industry needs.

As the controversy over Vista’s performance, reliability and stability rages on, a surprising consensus is emerging from the community of die-hard .NET enthusiasts and professional software speakers/writers evangelists that I know: the “sweet” laptop install for Windows Post-XP is actually Windows Server 2008.  Several people I know and respect are shunning Vista in favor of running the ultimate Windows sever OS on their ultimate client machines.

What’s going on here?  Well, first let’s filter out the noise: some of my esteemed colleagues just like running a server locally…it lets them run things like SharePoint, PerformancePoint, and now Hyper-V on their laptop and I think some of this is resultant of the days long ago when you needed to run Windows NT Server in order to run SQL Server.  But even allowing for this “real men have servers in their carry-on” fetish, there’s a real story here.

People I know who are running WS 2008 on client machines find it to be fast, stable, and a joy to work with.  The general theme presented by people in this exclusive club is that all the gremlins, shall we call them, that Vista seems to invoke just don’t stick around when WS 2008 is in charge.

Meanwhile, when we present this case to folks in Redmond (and by this I mean thoughtful folks, not knee-jerk Vista zealots) we have been told, repeatedly and consistently, that WS 2008 and Vista share an identical code base, and that, essentially, the only difference between the two is what services and features are turned on by default.

Which leads me to a certain conclusion which, I repeat, is a real story: either the two Longhorn code bases are not the same, and the Redmondites are telling us an untruth (doubtful), or a major set of issues with Vista can be solved (and are caused) by its default startup configuration. The last parenthetical in the previous sentence troubles me.  A lot.  But the larger thesis of that sentence means that Microsoft could correct course with Vista, especially with corporate IT departments and their deployment plans, by supporting scripts, custom builds, and providing general support, for a streamlined Vista startup configuration. 

The fruit here hangs so low that it seems naive to believe this could provide a breakthrough.  After all, if this could fix a large part of the Vista problem, wouldn’t have Microsoft pursued this approach already?  I’m actually guessing not, and I’m going to skip past a discussion of why I believe this.  Suffice it to say that the driver issues, file copy speed problems, Apple TV commercials and general bad PR around Vista have caused enough cognitive dissonance in and out of Microsoft to throw people off even the straightest of trails.

Let’s see whether default configuration tuning can get Vista back on track, or if WS 2008 indeed has supernatural powers.

Microsoft’s withdrawal of its Yahoo acquisition proposal may just be a negotiating tactic.  Or it could in earnest.  Time will tell.  And many shall opine.  But what is the significance of the move?

I have heard a few people express relief that the deal won’t be happening.  I can understand this, to a point.  Almost exactly one year ago, I told Liz Montalbano of ComputerWorld that I thought Microsoft’s heart wasn’t in it when it came to acquiring a Web advertising firm.  And when MS bought AQuantive for 3x what Google paid for DoubleClick, I was worried that the deal made no sense and was just a big waste of money.

But when MS announced their intent to acquire Yahoo, things started to make sense.  Effectively, Microsoft has decided that being on the Web, and being a major player in Web advertising, is crucial to the evolution (and survival) of the company.  They’ve also decided that the combination of tactical acquisitions and organic development of MSN/Live ain’t cuttin’ it.  By bringing in Yahoo, Microsoft could thrust forward in this game, and bring in developers and executives who understood the space.  Furthermore, they could begin to derive real value from the AQuantive deal, since AQuantive’s ad serving platform and Razor Fish’s agency savvy could combine really well with the reach that Yahoo’s network of sites would provide.  Add Silverlight to the equation, with its rich media capabilities, and things get really exciting (and Yahoo’s presence on the Web could easily get Silverlight over the adoption hump it now faces).

Sure, Microsoft + Yahoo looks like a difficult cultural combination, and a difficult technological combination too, given Yahoo’s prolific use of Open Source software.  So what?  Let Yahoo operate largely separately, but let its executive and senior technical ranks collaborate closely with AQuantive and Microsoft “proper” on the necessary ad serving and ad network technology.  Let Microsoft re-invigorate Yahoo’s once exemplary developer program; after all, that’s what Microsoft does best.  And let the coalescing among the ranks take place gradually and naturally.  The people on most Microsoft product teams are bright, good-natured, and enthusiastic about their jobs.  Executive-level bickering aside, I strongly believe that technologists at both companies would get along really well, once all the animosity stopped being newsworthy and people got down to work.  Does that sound naive?  I stand by it.  Cast aside the stereotypes; the techies at Microsoft are talented and welcoming and I can’t believe the Yahoo guys wouldn’t reciprocate.  Some would leave right away, but the rest would really start to like coming to work.

I don’t think Microsoft should have paid $37 a share; I think $33 was already very generous.  So, from that point of view, walking was the right thing to do.  But if Yahoo doesn’t come back to the table with more reasonable demands, what will Microsoft do?  They need this deal, despite Steve Ballmer’s protestations to the contrary, and despite the prevailing wisdom that the merger would be unsuccessful.  And they’ve showed their hand, so the market knows they need the deal too.  I don’t see a good alternative acquisition.  And I’m considering AOL when I say that.  If Microsoft fails here, and continues to mis-handle its damage control around Vista, then the company will be in a bad place.  The setback won’t be irreparable, but it will be significant.

We’ll have to wait and see.  But watch carefully.  The next few months are crucial to the world’s largest software company.

Two big Microsoft announcements surfaced this week:

1. Tibco is developing a TIBCO EMS transport channel for WCF.  This will allow .NET WCF services to communicate over Tibco’s Enterprise Message Service bus.  For high-perf, real-time messaging, Tibco is the gold standard.  Now the Microsoft stack can play in that territory.  Very nice.  Oh, and for a nice added extra, Tibco will standardize on Silverlight for its RIA (Rich Internet Application) needs.
2. Microsoft is acquiring Covast’s EDI technology for BizTalk and will make the technology available to BizTalk licensees with Software Assurance.  Building on top of the EDI advances in BizTalk Server 2006 R2, this brings BizTalk into an industry leading position on the EDI messaging front.  It also further enhances the value of the BizTalk license, which now includes a variety of adapters and accessories that once imposed significant additional third party costs.

It is worth considering the idea that one of these initiatives hedges the other: the Tibco alliance could be seen as a snub to BizTalk, as the two products compete.  Arguably, however, BizTalk does not compete with Tibco (at least not successfully) in high-volume, real-time message processing.  Conversely Tibco does not compete with BizTalk on price, and focuses somewhat less on the slower-paced B2B supply chain scenarios where BizTalk continues to make a name for itself. 

Furthermore, .NET and WCF can now work with both messaging servers, and that’s a win for the whole Microsoft platform.  So the two moves together are, I think, sensible, shrewd, and even brave.  The tacit admission of Tibco’s dominance in certain spheres of SOA message bus implementations shows good market insight on Microsoft’s part.  The investment in BizTalk’s EDI capabilities consolidates Microsoft’s position in another class of SOA implementation where BizTalk competes very well. 

Check.  Check.

Bye, bye LogMeIn.  Live Mesh includes a version of Remote Desktop, that works a lot like LogMeIn: it’s peer-to-peer, runs over HTTP and can (but doesn’t have to) run in the browser.  Management also feels simpler.  Plus you get the ability to copy files between local and remote machines via the clipboard (which LogMeIn’s free edition won’t do) and you can throw up a “curtain” on the host machine so that your remote session is not visible to people in front of the machine’s monitor.  And it’s all free.  As it should be, thank you!

Only issue is that syncing the local and remote machines’ resolution does not seem to be supported in the current preview.

Recent articles like this one have been speculating on the possibility that a potential flaw in IIS might be responsible for a rash of malicious iFrame attacks that have plagued the Web recently.

It would appear that IIS, ASP[.NET, and SQL Server are not the culprits.  A response to me and others, direct from Microsoft follows.

***

We have been investigating these reports today and just posted two blog posts about them:

http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2008/04/25/questions-about-web-server-attacks.aspx

http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2008/04/25/sql-injection-attacks-on-iis-web-servers.aspx

The high-level summary is:

These *are not* a result of any known security issue with IIS, SQL, ASP or ASP.NET (or any other Microsoft product)

These are instead the result of SQL injection issues within the web pages/applications hosted on these sites

 The above blog posts provide more details on the attacks and have pointers on how to make sure your site doesn’t have SQL injection issues.

Got my invite yesterday and got it all working today.  From the user’s perspective (which is the only on available at this point in time), Mesh offers three things (1) FolderShare-style file synchronization between PCs, including the ability to share your folders with invited members/users (2) SkyDrive-style cloud storage, file access and sync participation and (3) Remote desktop access to connected devices that is VPN/NAT friendly (i.e. it works over port 80, in a peer-to-peer fashion).  That’s it.  For now.  Kind of makes me wonder why even the BBC reported on this thing.

Also, if you remember when Ray Ozzie first got to Microsoft and first got his blog set up, he posted on something called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE).  These extensions are to RSS (and ATOM, as it turns out) and allow simple feeds to function as the transport for synchronization.  SSE was later renamed FeedSync, and is the basis for Mesh.  And, in fact, you’ll see “news” feeds all over Live Mesh.  These are really easy to produce, given the FeedSync foundation to Mesh.

And that means that this whole thing is going to be programmable.  Mary Jo Foley’s got a slide on her blog that even shows that there will be Visual Studio integration for all this.  But there will also be JavaScript interfaces, and interfaces for other languages, and a whole URI-based convention for getting to everything.  Nice.  That makes it seem like it will be easy for me to sync the data my apps use, over the Mesh infrastructure (including the cloud storage bit) without writing a lot of code.  In fact, with a little LINQ magic, I should be able to query and iterate through files within my mesh-enabled folders and items within my Mesh-enabled applications.

Goody gumdrops?  Not yet.  Because until Microsoft cleans up the mess of things it’s created that cry out for synchronization, no amount of DIY programmability is going to make me happy.  I’ve been thinking about this today.  Here are some things I’d like to be able to sync.  Easily:

• Photos (to my PCs, Media Center/Windows Home Server, and mobile phone).  And I want the option to downscale the resolution on the copies pushed to my phone.  And I want the ability to push/pull content to flickr, Snapfish, Shutterfly, etc
• Music (to my PCs, Media Center/Windows Home Server, mobile phone, and MP3 player).  And I want the option to downscale the bit rate on the copies pushed to my MP3 player and phone. 
• Outlook calendar, contacts and tasks (between two separate Outlook instances on my home and office PCs).  And somehow this should work along with (and not against) Exchange Sync and ActiveSync/Windows Mobile Device Center.  And I want the ability to sync certain of my contacts with Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, and other online services and social networks.  No more double entry, and no more forcing me into an all-or-nothing situation in terms of what gets synced.
• OneNote notebooks, or sections or section groups between PCs and onto OneNote mobile (over the Internet, not only through USB and Bluetooth)
• SharePoint libraries and lists should also be an endpoint, and a source, of data
• Favorites, between my Favorites folder, and Live Favorites, and del.icio.us and others.  Make it work with Digg too.  And with Windows Help favorites.  And push mobile favorites to mobile devices as an easily selected option.
• Internet radio stations.  Push their URLs properly into Windows Media Player, Media Center, my Sonos setup, and the Resco Radio app on my phone.  Not to mention any internet-enabled MP3 player.
• RSS feeds, of course.
• Backup volumes, from my local or NAS drive to my Amazon Simple Storage Service account or my records retention vendor’s server.
• Ability to sync specific douments automatically to FedEx Kinko’s, Mimeo, and other printing services.
• A configuration of all of the above assets (perhaps in the form of an OPML file), so that when I get a new PC, I can instantly get it syncing all the right stuff

Right now, here are all the different Microsoft Sync technologies I can think of.  Let’s get them all to use Mesh under the covers, and get them to work in a federated, cooperative fashion:

• Exchange Sync
• ActiveSync (Windows Mobile Device Center)
• Offline files
• Vista Sync Center
• Windows Media Player sync
• SQL Server Merge Replication (Is this too big a stretch?  I don’t think so.)
• SQL Server Compact Edition Sync Services

It’s getting close to 1am now, so I’ll stop.  But I bet the above lists are nowhere near comprehensive.  The point is that a transport isn’t enough.  We need something that understands devices contextually and has a good idea of what to sync where, and at what quality. 

A few articles have cropped up in the last couple of days on Office 2007's "failing" OOXML compliance tests.  If you're interested in reading up on that, perhaps you'd like to start with the slashdotting of it.

Well, the whole point of moving a proprietary file format into open standardization is that the format is controlled by the standards body and gets changed along the way. This has already happened with OOXML, and this is the reason for the apparent non-compliance.  So this "failure" is actually a success.  Or, to quote Run D.M.C.,  "Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good."

A more precise explanation, with background information, can be found here.

Since Wednesday's announcement by Microsoft that it will publish the source code for major parts of the .NET Framework, there has been a lot of press and commentary.  Much of the press was positive and much of the commentary negative.

My own quotes were part of the positive press.  Specifically, I corresponded at length with Darryl Taft of eWeek, resulting in quotes in the article “Microsoft Reveals .Net Source Code” and with Mary Jo Foley, which resulted in a quote in her blog post on the subject.

Much of the negative commentary focused on how by publishing of the Framework source under their Reference License, Microsoft has prevented the Framework code from being truly Open Source.  Other commentators went further, and surmised that Microsoft has published the source for reasons of entrapment: essentially, by allowing people to see the source, Microsoft could then pursue developers involved in Open Source projects, including Novell’s Mono, who might be “influenced” into writing similar code and introducing it into these Open Source products.

With my own opinion and bias well-known and documented, I still feel compelled to respond. I do this because I fear that while some of these criticisms may be, technically, true, they are quite beside the point.  So here goes…

First, to the point that Microsoft is not releasing .NET Framework source code into a true Open Source vehicle: you are 100% correct.  There is nothing new here.  Except for the relatively small set of code that Microsoft releases under its “permissive” license, it is not an Open Source company, does not especially believe in the Open Source model, and does not view non-adherence to Open Source conventions as a failing, a compromise, or a cop-out.  Rather, it views what we might call “exposed source” as a learning tool, and a development aid.  Specifically, in the case of the .NET Framework source and Visual Studio 2008, the main scenario for using the source will be to aid and ease debugging of .NET applications.  Think Microsoft is being a tease?  Nope.  You’re just just mis-reading her signals.  Go proposition another girl.

Second, to the point that Microsoft may be luring Open Source developers into copyright infringement: (a) you’re ignoring history, and (b) you’re confusing Microsoft with a monolithic organization.  Allow me to elaborate on both points.  (A) Microsoft has been releasing source code since the early 90s, including that for its C/C++ compiler and its MFC and ATL frameworks for Win32 (Joel Spolsky speaks to this quite authoritatively in another Mary Jo quote here).  (B) There really are people at Microsoft who are hostile to Open Source and even somewhat vindictive toward its proponents.  Thing is, Scott Guthrie, the person who pushed for and announced the release of the .NET Framework source code, isn’t one of them.  Scott is a no-nonsense guy whose main concerns are developer satisfaction and technical excellence.  It was also Scott who worked with Novell and Miguel de Icaza, to make “Moonlight” (a Linux/Mono version of Silverlight) a reality, and to endorse it rather than relegate it to renegade status.  Scott was also a driving force behind ASP.NET which of course requires Windows on the server, but works with most any browser and OS on the client.

Let’s be real clear: worst case, things became no worse after Wednesday’s announcement than they were before it.  Best case, they became a lot better.  And I would encourage even the most ardent Microsoft critic to consider the latter opinion.  It’s a fairly safe bet that Scott Guthrie overcame internal resistance at Microsoft in order to release the Framework source.  He likely needed to convince people who felt strongly that exposing the source would be putting intellectual property at undue risk.  Scott probably needed to present a business case that showed how the developer gains and their positive impact on Microsoft's business far outweighed the risks of IP theft.  So if you want Microsoft to be more Open and less “evil,” you’ll want people with Scott Guthrie’s mind set to be successful, and you’ll want to support his initiatives.  If you want Microsoft to stumble, that’s fine too.  But if so, it becomes difficult to argue issues like this on the merits, since that viewpoint can lead to predetermined conclusions.

Microsoft has already sent out a save the date for next year’s MIX conference.  This comes just days after they announced an indefinite postponement of PDC ‘07.

Seems like the teams at Microsoft with the momentum are on the ASP.NET/Silverlight side of the shop.  And the show with the mojo is the one that builds bridges…to designers and thus to customers of other companies’ products.  It would be a bit glib to say “there’s a lesson in that,” so I’ll pretend not to say it.

Microsoft has just announced that it will be rescheduling this year’s PDC to an as yet undetermined date.  Microsoft’s reasoning for this, essentially, is that between MIX, Tech*Ed Orlando and Barcelona, and (I suspect) its Business Intelligence Conference held two weeks ago, and a slew of recent and soon-to-come alpha and beta releases, developers have enough to chew on for a while.  The folks in Redmond prefer to wait until we’re well into the next wave of technologies before launching a new PDC.  If my memory serves me correctly, Microsoft made the same decision two PDCs back and, with hindsight, people appreciated the decision and judged it wise.

Interestingly, Microsoft lists four events at which it will be presenting future technology content, and the first one on the list is VSLive! New York, to be held Sept 16^th – 19^th in Brooklyn, USA.  As the Conference Chair of that event, I’m gratified by this nice little promo.  We will in fact have content on “Katmai” (the next release of SQL Server) and very likely a keynote on Silverlight, all of which will be presented by product team members from Redmond.  Meanwhile, the vast majority of our content will be focused on technology that’s shipping today.  We think this strikes the right balance of “futures” and practical present-tense-relevant material.

Steve Berkowitz, the Microsoft Senior Vice President of Online Services, made what I consider to be a stunning admission of defeat.

Here’s the context: quoted in Mary Jo Foley’s blog, from his presentation at the JP Morgan technology conference, Berkowitz makes the distinction between “destination search” and “convenience search.”  Destination search, effectively, is search conducted at a search site.  Convenience search is performed in-place, through some context-sensitive search facility in an application or Web page.

Berkowitz believes Microsoft is more likely to have a good showing in convenience search than in destination search.  Implicit in this assertion is that (a) Microsoft doesn’t believe it currently has a good showing in either search area and (b) MS believes it is very unlikely that it will ever have a good showing in the destination search arena.  In other words, people who want to go to a search engine will go to Google, and MSN/Live Search’s (last?) best hope is essentially as a mashup Web service.

While I’m glad to see Microsoft admit that no one takes its http://search.live.com page terribly seriously, I have to say I’m a little shocked to see them write off the whole prospect of improving and competing in the “destination search” arena.  And besides, to admit that your search engine is second-class but to assume people will use it anyway as an in-place service strikes me as somewhat contradictory.  Select/Ctrl-C/Ctrl-E/Ctrl-V/Enter isn’t that hard.

Especially if it gives back better results.

Who did the best?  Google with DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, Microsoft with aQuantive for $6 billion, or WPP with 24/7 Real Media for $649 million?  I vote for WPP, and not just because they spent less.  WPP knows advertising and WPP knows acquisitions.  WPP’s holdings include Grey, Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, and the former J. Walter Thompson Co.  Now that’s a conglomerate.  I think they can leverage their deal better than an online classified ads techie concern like Google or a software powerhouse like Microsoft.  And I also think they can offer a “better together” suite of services for print, television, radio and onlline.  Do I think Microsoft and Google will benefit from their deals?  I give Google a 90% chance and Microsoft 50%.  But do I think they’ll be the last two Web advertising platforms standing? No way.

The State of Massachusetts has decided that they will continue using Microsoft Office but will make OpenDocument format (ODF) plug-in part of the standard install.

The irony is uncanny: in an attempt to be politically correct in support of open file formats, the Commonwealth's CIO has decided to tell people to use the world's de facto office software suite, but optionally (?) save their files in a format that may not maintain the full fidelity of the documents themselves.  The irony doesn't stop there: it turns out that Microsoft Office, rather than OpenOffice, is in fact the politically correct choice, given its richer accessibility features (i.e. features for people with vision, hearing and other disabilities).

That OpenOffice lacks these accessibility features cuts to the core failing of open source software: without a regular, paid staff of developers, some of the nitty-gritty features, the ones that are less "sexy" and which appeal to a minority of users, just don't get implemented.  With commercially developed software, people get paid to do what others might consider grunt work, and they get reviewed based on their performance on this work.  So it gets done.

The failing of OpenOffice will become more apparent once Office 2007 is released.  And maybe OpenOffice will respond, within two years or so, with something representing feature parity.  But playing catch-up isn't a software development strategy; it's a grudge match.

Something’s probably a little screwy with me.  I’ve chosen tonight, my first night of vacation, to try and get back to posting here.  No matter, whatever it takes, it takes.

Honestly, I am still convalescing.  About 2 months ago I finally finished work on Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2005, the book I’ve been working on with Stephen Forte, and nine other people too.  If you include the index, the book comes in at a hefty 900+ pages, and it still feels like we just scratched the surface of the product.

Our book was really, really late.  We should have released it in conjunction with the product itself.  Shame on us; I won’t bore you with the reasons why it took so long.  Except one: the product itself was late.  Want a fun factoid that illustrates this well?  We signed the contract for the book with Microsoft Press right around the time of the Yukon Technical Preview conference in Bellevue, in February 2003.  Yes, you read that right.  From the Tech Preview Conference, when the first alpha/preview bits were released in the form of VMWare images (Microsoft hadn’t yet acquired Virtual PC from Connectix!), to product release was almost three years.  Our book merely took another six months to finish and an additional month to hit availability on Amazon.

It’s not just SQL Server 2005 of course; Vista and Office 2007 are massively delayed too.  And what about “Longhorn” Server?  What about IE7, which went into Beta a year ago?  And when will Exchange 2007 really ship?

What’s going on in Redmond?  Clearly, I am not the first to observe this problem or ask this question.  But it bears asking nonetheless.  Forget all this talk about “innovation.”  I prefer to focus on simple “organization” and “dedication.”  What will it take for folks at Microsoft to get some hustle in them?  To feel the panic of a deadline?  To pull an occasional all-nighter?

Maybe I’m just bitter.  During the last three months of working on the book, I worked every day of the week, save for maybe four days off.  I closed deals at the office, I spoke at conferences, I wrote, I edited, and I answered hundreds email of messages a day.  I’m guessing many other software book authors go through the same thing.

As shareholders, as business partners, as platform advocates and as colleagues, we need everyone at Microsoft to do the same.  If the Zune is to succeed, if the XBox platform is to continue its upward climb, and if the Windows Server stack is to complete it ascension not just to serious contender, but to a ubiquitous no-excuses platform for the corporate IT world, Microsoft needs to bear down and push.

I'm not pushing again until next week though.  Now, back to vacation.

While the value of BI has been well-demonstrated for quite some time, that value has seemed hypothetical to many, because of the difficulty in keeping OLAP cubes up-to-date.  Compared to an OLTP database, OLAP cubes have, for many, projected an image of inferiority because their data has for the most part been reflective of historical facts rather than of current transactions. 

Historical data, and analysis of it, is very important, but appreciating that importance takes a certain vision and leap-of-faith.  In most over-stressed IT organizations, dealing with historical data feels less urgent than dealing with current data.  This has pushed BI down on the list of priorities…far enough down, in fact, that it has never gotten off the backlog list in many organizations.  And while techniques have always existed for keeping cubes reasonably up–to-date, doing can involve a lot of work and require a lot of resources (of both the hardware and human variety), pushing BI projects further onto the back burner

SQL Server 2005’s Integration Services and Analysis Services 2005 change the landscape of the BI market by making real-time BI easy.  New advances in these components allow you to load data directly into your cubes bypassing your data warehouse and/or allow Analysis Services to process cubes automatically in the background, in response to changes in your data warehouse.

I believe these advances will eventually change the whole dynamic of the BI market.  People at all levels of management and even non-management will now be able to perform sophisticated analysis on current data, and they’ll be able to do so much faster than they could with a relational database.

As groundbreaking as these advances are, for people new to SQL 2005, it will not be immediately obvious how to take advantage of them and thus it will not be obvious that they even exist: the direct data push capabilities of SSIS are stashed away in the Visual Studio toolbox and the proactive caching features of Analysis Services are buried deep inside a wizard and some dialog boxes.

Take a look.  You can adjust proactive caching settings directly from Management Studio or from Analysis Services projects in Visual Studio:

You can also do so from the Aggregation Design Wizard (available in both Visual Studio and Management Studio):

And the SSIS data push tasks are highlighted below:

I am posting these screen captures to make it clear how easy these tools are to get at, if you know where to look.  In many cases, using them requires only a modicum of effort.  I will try to coverage some basic usage scenarios in another post.

On April 24th, I will be presenting a session called "Real Time BI with SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services" at the sold-out Microsoft Financial Services Developers Conference, at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York City.  My firm, newly branded as twentysix New York, is a Platinum sponsor, and my twentysix colleague Kent Brown, will be presenting as well.

In my session, I will cover a number of methods for implementing real-time Business Intelligence, including use of the new proactive caching features of Analysis Services 2005 and the SQL Service Broker, as well as some approaches that work well in SQL Server 2000.

While I was in San Francisco for VSLive, I took half an hour to talk about BI with Ron Jacobs, host of ARCast, Microsoft's Internet audio podcast for software architects.  The show went up online yesterday.

You can read a blurb about it, and click a link to play it here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast_with_Ron_Jacobs

Direct links to wma- and mp3-formatted copies of the show are:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Podcasts/164350_ARCast020106-BIWithSQLServer.wma
http://channel9.msdn.com/Podcasts/164350_ARCast020106-BIWithSQLServer.mp3

The podcast is timely, given that I just returned from the Microsoft BI PAC (Partner Advisory Council) meeting.  While most of what was discussed there is under non-disclosure, what I can tell you is that Microsoft is serious about BI on the server, on the client, and from line of business applications.  Watch out Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion!

Forget about Web 2.0 (really, forget it, it’s a dumb name).  Bigger stuff is coming over IP (BSCoIP?).  And it’s about time for cable broadband in New York City to get faster, cheaper, or both.  Time Warner Cable has an excellent product and service in RoadRunner, but it’s starting to show its age.  Downstream speeds run at (a theoretical maximum of) 5Mbps, with upstream speeds of only 384Kbps.  RoadRunner Premium, running at 8Mbps down/512Kbps up, costs an extra $20/month.

While these speeds are pretty fast, CableVision trumps them: Optimum Online’s standard service runs at 8Mbps down and its new Optimum “Boost” service, available for a surcharge of between $9.95 and $14.95, claims speeds of up to 30Mbps down / 2Mpbs up.  CableVision doesn't offer service in TWC's franchise areas, so they're not technically a competitor.  But service that fast will generate demand that Time Warner will find unstoppable.

Worse yet, even with bundle discounts, RoadRunner costs $44.95/month.  While I’d never trade it for its archrival Verizon DSL, that service costs only $14.95/month for 768Kbps service.  If Verizon’s FiOS fiber optic service ever gets pulled through New York City’s conduits (which, you should know, are owned by a company called Empire City Subway, itself a division of Verizon), Time Warner Cable had better watch out.  FiOS offers a 15Mbps down / 2Mbps up service for the same $44.95 monthly charge.

Time Warner Cable’s also got to watch out for its traditional cable TV service as well; FiOS itself offers a digital cable service with a nearly identical channel lineup, equivalent video on demand capabilities, HDTV and DVR options.  The “expanded basic” service is only $34.95/month when bundled with its broadband service and $39.95 otherwise.  Compare that to Time Warner’s DTV service at a net cost of $53.95/month when combined with RoadRunner.

Rounding out the so-called “triple play” of broadband Internet, digital video, and VoIP phone service, Time Warner’s Digital Phone service costs $15 more per month more than Vonage's unlimited plan and that’s without voice mail.

While these premiums may be helping TWC today, they're going to create a huge backlash for them later.  It’s time for them to revamp their services and pricing.  They should also consider seriously a build-out of their system to once and for all get rid of the coax and pull the fiber all the way on-premises.  Yes, it will cost them a lot.  But without such a move, Verizon will eventually eclipse them as the internet provider of choice.  And once video programming is fully IP based, it’s only the Internet pipe that will matter.

I am this week’s guest on “.NET Rocks,” the popular Internet audio talk show covering .NET development.  This week’s show features me chatting about Microsoft BI technologies, with specific attention paid to Analysis Services in SQL Server 2005, including its OLAP and Data Mining feature sets.  I mention Business Scorecard Manager as well, and talk about Microsoft’s (increasingly well played) position in the BI market.

For those who don’t know, the main Web URL for the show is:
http://www.dotnetrocks.com

And Microsoft runs a mirror site here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/dotnetrocks
(although my show’s not up on the mirror site yet)

It’s only a matter of time before I actually start blogging regularly again.  No, really.  The problem is that I’ve been working on a book, albeit with two co-authors, and we’ve been in crunch mode for a while.  It’ll be over soon.  And the book will kick ass…if we ever finish it.

Between the book, a new job (now almost 15 months old) and a new son (now almost 14 months old), being overwhelmed has been a theme in my life for a while now.

The Internet overwhelms me too, and it annoys me.  There’s too much content, and too little editing (and I realize that this blog is complicit in that phenomenon).  One day people are going to remember why the hell they used to read trade and technical magazines.  They’ll remember that editors culled through stuff for them, and packaged it up in relatively small publications, that came out at a reasonable frequency.  You could read them from cover to cover and even wait in anticipation for the next issue.

Call me a Luddite, but that was a useful format.  It was respectful of my time.  And it was respectful of the authors’ work too.  Blogs and RSS aggregators and all the articles posted daily to the Web by the major trade pubs don’t offer that respect.  And that is a drag on productivity in the industry which impacts negatively on the economy.

So my quest has been to find outlets in the new medium that help me approximate the discriminating taste and editorial efficiency of the old magazine format.

I’ve only just begun, but I have found one very useful resource: Slashdot Review.  It’s a ten minute daily evening audio podcast (it comes out once each weekday evening as well as most Sundays) that summarizes the day’s most interesting posts on Slashdot.  It’s an extremely time-efficient way to keep abreast of tech industry current events, and the audio format will give your monitor-sore eyes a rest.

Slashdot Review’s host, Andrew McCaskey, is unaffiliated with Slashdot, though he’s an avid reader.  He adds his own articulate opinions at times, and educates his listeners in podcasting trends and technologies.  He also puts out a show with high production value, and that makes it fun to listen to.  I listen on my PC, my Creative Zen Micro audio player, and in my living room on my Media Center PC.  By the way, the show’s content does exist in blog form, and the podcast RSS feed I supplied in the last paragraph contains text that accompanies each mp3 "enclosure."

I’m going to keep looking for resources like this.  I’m now more hopeful that the Internet’s content pollution can be tamed.

In the latest issue of SmartMoney magazine, Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg explores the relative merits of iTunes and its competitors, including Napster and Yahoo Music, in an article titled “Rent vs. Own.”  Essentially the article compares the Apple AA3 format with Windows Media, with a heavy focus on Windows Media’s Plays for Sure subscription support.

The article has so faulty a premise (starting with its title) and so many misleading statements, that I felt compelled to challenge many of his points.  The full text of the original article is here and my rebuttal to it follows:

>> In the download model championed by Apple, the music service functions like a physical record store. You choose a track, pay 99 cents, and you own it. <<

This is precisely that model that most of Apple’s competitors follow as well.  The fact that many of them also offer subscription services does not diminish this.  Only one or two of the online music stores available through Windows Media Player require a subscription before you can buy tracks.

>> As long as you abide by the restrictions, which are designed to thwart mass copying by pirates, the song will play anywhere you want to hear it forever, with no further payments required. <<

Again, all purchased tracks from Apple’s competitors are provided on this basis as well.

>> This rental model has attracted a solid audience, but it is nowhere near as popular as iTunes — not even close. That may be because the rental model is far more complicated and restrictive than iTunes, and has several big downsides. <<

This premise of “iTunes or rental” presents a false dichotomy.  If people find the “rental” model too “complicated,” they can choose to ignore it and consider only the purchased track model.  Where is the downside in this?

>> Also, the rules for rental songs are more restrictive than for owned downloads such as Apple offers. At Yahoo, for example, you can store each song on only three computers, versus Apple's five. And you can install each song on only two portable devices, versus an unlimited number at Apple. <<

The number of PCs you can store your purchased tracks on varies by service.  MusicMatch (now owned by Yahoo) and Napster allow you to store tracks on up to 3 PCs; MSN Music allows up to 5.  Purchased tracks from any service can be copied an unlimited number of times to compatible portable devices.

>> At the Apple service, every song is a 99-cent download you can own, but at rental services, there are different kinds of songs. Some can be both rented and purchased (for that extra 79 cents each); others can be either rented or bought outright, but not both. Some songs can only be "streamed" — that is, they can be played directly from the Internet, but not downloaded, even on a rental basis. And some can be rented, but not streamed. You get the picture. <<

Actually, on Napster, most “rental” tracks can be downloaded, streamed, or purchased.  I have come across only a few that can be “rented” and not purchased.  It is true that some tracks are available for purchase only, and cannot be downloaded or streamed for free.  But on iTunes, all tracks have this limitation!  Does Mossberg really think that the additive option to subscribe to Napster or other services somehow diminishes their tracks-for-purchase offerings?

>> Another huge downside of the rental services is that the songs they rent — and even the ones they sell outright for the extra 79 cents — cannot be played on the world's best and most popular portable player: Apple's iPod…the rental-service songs are encoded in a format owned by Microsoft, Apple's rival, and Microsoft software is required to play them on a portable player. <<

With Apple’s scheme, iTunes locks you into iPod, and vice versa.  With Windows Media, an array of online stores provide tracks compatible with a wide array of players from a host of different manufacturers including Creative, iRiver, and Dell.  Most Windows Media players are offered at lower costs than iPod, based on hard disk or flash memory size.  The players and many of the services offer their own software, but you also give you the choice of using Windows Media Player as the single software tool for purchasing or subscription downloading or streaming of tracks, for playing them on your PC and for copying them to your portable player.  The Windows Media format has created a market, while Apple has created a monopoly.  Need I expand on the irony here?

>> Apple won't build the necessary Microsoft compatibility into the iPod. <<

Bingo!  I wholeheartedly agree with that observation.  The question is whether or not this is a defensible decision.

>> …the rental model is better for people interested in sampling a wide range of music without a large out-of-pocket expense. That might make it attractive to curious but cash-poor students, for example. The rental services also have many more "community" features than iTunes does, features that allow friends and families to share music recommendations, see what others are listening to and discuss music. So they may be better for people who view music as a social activity. <<

I’m not a cash poor student, and I’m not a teenager yearning to use my online music service as a chat or sharing tool (not that there’s anything wrong with that).  There’s no question in my mind that music is a social activity, but my guess is that Mossberg is using the word “social” in a condescending teenage-gabbing sense of the word and does not mean to invoke the spiritual, uplifting power of music.

>> But for most people, it's no contest: Right now iTunes and the iPod are the better choice in digital music. <<

I beg to differ.  Subscription services offer a great way to expand your horizons and listen to music you don’t own.  As you listen to the tracks you have purchased, you can click on links to artists that your service has determined have an affinity to what you’re listening to.  From there, you can check out the artists’ discographies, pick an album, and start listening to it without plunking down more money and without having to wait for it to download.  If you like what you hear, then you can buy it.  I have done so many times, and have been very happy with my purchases because I knew what I was buying.

And here’s a whole dimension that Apple doesn’t even care to cover: owners of Windows Media Center PCs who are Napster subscribers can do all of this from their remote control, on their television (with a specially designed user interface that is living room-friendly) and listen to the music on their audio/home theater equipment.  Portable players and earbuds are great (I have a Creative Zen 6GB player and I like it a lot), and music on PC speakers can be remarkably good, but getting the music on my own amplifier and speakers makes the other options sound just plain tinny.  I suppose you could hook your Apple notebook up to your stereo, but it’s just not going to be integrated nearly as well as a Media Center PC.

There’s no question that the iPod is hugely popular and incredibly well designed, both from a technology and an industrial design perspective.  Apple is heavily dominant in the portable music player market and probably will be for some time.  About 25 years ago, there was another dominant player: the Sony Walkman.  “Walkman” was then, as “iPod” is now, the generic noun for all products in the category.  Sony had a great cash cow product that eventually became commoditized and irrelevant.  Sony of course has survived, but they also had numerous other market-leading products like Betamax VCRs, Trinitron TVs, and mass market and high-end audio equipment.  The Betamax died, but the PlayStation has arguably become even more important, especially as games for the console now command budgets and revenue comparable to major motion pictures.

Apple doesn’t have this kind of diversified product line.  In fact, iPods are starting to represent the lion’s share of the company’s revenue.  Will the iPod eventually be “Betamaxed” or “Walkman-ed?”  Will Apple become a one-trick-pony like Palm?  Will it suffer a similar fate?  Walter Mossberg owes his readers the courtesy of exploring these issues fairly, honestly and more thoroughly.

I have an EVDO cell modem from Verizon Wireless, which I use primarily to get online and get work done when I'm on a train, or in some stationary position where there is no WiFi access.  The EVDO service, marketed by Verizon Wireless as "Broadband Access," and officially called 1xEVDO, is a 3G successor to the 1xRTT service Verizon Wireless introduced a few years ago.  1xRTT was barely as fast as a 56K dial-up connection, and I used it as an "in a pinch" solution when I needed to get online at any speed.  EVDO service meanwhile, hovers around 500Kbps and can "burst" at speeds of up to 2Mbps.

I am traveling this weekend for a wedding being held at the Bel Air Hotel.  For reasons too boring to go into, I am actually staying at the hotel as well.  You can imagine things are a bit expensive here: the cashews from the mini bar are over $22 and the movies are $15 a piece.  After a ridiculously overpriced breakfast, on the way into the room, actor Ray Fiennes walked right past us; not surprising then that incidentals seem to cost more than the rooms themselves.

Hey, don't get me wrong: it's a lovely serene place and the black tie wedding tonight will be picture-perfect.  The fact remains, however, that I need to get online and the in-room high-speed Internet access is $12.95/day.

Well, it's EVDO to the rescue.  I get a nice strong signal in the room, and I'm online with bandwidth running at a healthy clip.  The EVDO service is starting to be offered in a sufficient number of markets such that people may soon start using their own modems to avoid hotel broadband charges the way they now use their cell phones to do likewise with in-room telephone service.

Verizon Wireless needs to do two things to see this service enjoy wider adoption and see themselves enjoy the profits that are certain to result: optimize or completely phase out "dormant mode" (which causes the modem to disconnect after a short period of inactivity, then try to reconnect quickly upon subsequent network requests) and lower the monthly unlimited price from the current $79.99 to $49.99 or less.  These two changes, in combination with a wider network build out, could convert hordes of subscription WiFi customers and start to attract mainstream consumers.  A bundle deal with Verizon DSL (a service offered by Verizon Communications, not Verizon Wireless, which could be a spoiler) could even help Verizon compete with the cable companies.

This is Verizon's fight to lose.  Their overwhelming number of cell towers throughout the country and the quality of EVDO technology should put a stake through the heart of public subscription WiFi.  The question is whether Verizon and Verizon Wireless can learn to adopt aggressive marketing and pricing tactics to make the service a true success.