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.