June 29, 2009
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Introduction
Good afternoon. My name is Andrew Brust. I am the Chief, New Technology at twentysix New York, a consultancy specializing in application development, business intelligence and other software technologies. I am also a native New Yorker and former technology professional with the City of New York. In the mid and late 1980s, I was a programmer for the Department of Parks and Recreation and later I was the Computer Systems Director at the Department of Cultural Affairs. Thank you for allowing me to read my testimony today; I’m sure you can understand that given my career history and my current position, I have great interest in this legislation.
The language in Intro 991 seems to speak implicitly to a number of important features, advantages and a technology premise for the City’s data sharing platform. But a number of these points deserve to be called out explicitly, so I hope it’s OK that I do so briefly here. Beyond those points, there are some less obvious, but equally important, capabilities that I’d be grateful if you’d consider, and I will mention them briefly here as well.
Outbound Interface and Content
Let’s start with the interface the system will provide to its users and consumers. I think it’s incredibly important that the system provide data in a relatively raw form that developers can work with, rather than in a full-blown end-user interface. The reason why should be clear: developers will provide and produce interfaces and integrated services that use and serve the data. Should the City or various of its agencies wish to do as well, that’s fine. But the primary mission should be to provide an information platform that developers and entrepreneurs can innovate on top of.
Of course, if the data is provided in the right format, then transformation of it from machine-readable to human-readable form should be almost trivial. Today, the Atom Syndication Format, which is a particular schema within eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, is a common format for arbitrary, structured data and it can be rendered in human-readable form by most modern Web browsers. The REpresentational State Transfer, or REST, standard is arguably the most popular service protocol for allowing such data to be queried. And so I would certainly recommend that Atom and REST be supported.
But the reality is that other formats are important as well. On the data presentation side, these include JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON, as well as older formats like the longstanding comma separated values, or CSV, format. On the Web service side, Simple Object Access Protocol, or SOAP, is very important too. It was the first format supported by Web services and is still the most popular such format in the enterprise software development space. Each and all of these standards should be supported. That may sound like a tall order, but with proper design, it’s in no way out of reach. The best way for multiple formats, including formats not yet introduced, to be supported, is to implement things in such a way that the data is produced in a single, flexible format that can easily be transformed and re-published in virtually any other format. Similarly, the query logic should facilitate development of “layers” of code around it that support specific service protocols.
Reading and Writing
The system should allow writing data, in addition to reading it. City residents should be able to submit a tennis permit request through this platform, or even pay a parking ticket, or a water bill, or City income tax bill. City natives should be able to request a copy of their birth certificates, and numerous other submissions should be accepted, in addition to mere queries for information.
Back on the reading side, users and systems should be able to retrieve non-structured data, including archival photographs of specific City lots, maps, titles and deeds, audio from major speeches made by the Mayor and video of Council meetings and hearings as well. Ultimately this could more than make up for the loss of WNYC-TV. The fact is that Channel 31 was a video authority of record, and the loss of it has been significant; the data platform contemplated by this bill, if it supports rich media in addition to textual data, could bring about services that fill the gap left when WNYC was sold off, and go well beyond the services that linear, broadcast television can deliver.
License Issues
Beyond the formats, protocols and content that are produced, this system will require innovations in licensing as well. The availability of the data that this platform could produce will enable unprecedented analyses, products and services, useful for both commercial and social services pursuits. But to make possible a number of different query and data visualization services, applications will need to cache, aggregate, slice and dice the system’s data. To do so, they will need to stage the data in local or hosted databases and the City should expressly permit this so as not to impede the innovation that would result.
Beyond a permissive regime around the availability of data, the City will also need to allow companies to make a market, and to charge, for the value-added services they build on top of the public platform. Certainly, companies should not be charging for the mere redistribution of the data, but they should be permitted -- indeed encouraged -- to build user-friendly front-ends, interesting “mashups,” innovative analyses, and inventive integrations of the platform’s data.
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 cheapest hotel rooms are and where the most availability exists. 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. And none of these organizations should have to stop and wonder whether they are using or republishing the data in some unauthorized form.
On Being Open
Back to the technical now and, to an extent, the political. Consider carefully your use of the word “open” in the title of this legislation. I think everyone can agree that all data and infrastructure under this initiative should be useable from virtually any platform, programming language and type of device. If that’s what is meant by the word “open” in Intro 991’s language, then all is well. But if “open” is somehow meant to connote a requirement that Open Source technologies be used to serve or consume the data, or that any software that does so be required to comply with GPL or other Open Source licensing, then we will have a huge problem on our hands.
Rather, the City and its agencies should be permitted to implement the back-end platform as they see fit, whether they do so using Java, PHP, Ruby, C#, Visual Basic or COBOL. I would imagine that agency implementations would need to be signed-off upon or certified by DoITT, but as long as they produce their output and solicit their input using the correct formats, standards, protocols and interfaces, that should meet the whatever litmus test may exist.
Excelsior
I’d like to close on an issue of civic pride. The City of New York is a unique municipal government within the State. Most cities are contained within counties. The City of New York, as you well know, comprises five counties, and provides the services that in other parts of the State are delivered by special districts, incorporated villages, towns, cities and counties. As such, our data standards system should serve as a model for each of these distinct types of government within New York State. So let’s not just do this the right way. Let’s do this in an unprecedentedly exemplary, creative and exciting way. Let’s make this the time in history when the economy was down, but the great tradition of commerce and ingenuity in the City of New York was nonetheless invoked to bring about innovation, opportunity and a new standard in good government, adopted by other governments in New York, and other states.
Thank you again for the generosity of your time, attention and consideration. And, once again, good afternoon.
Last week, i.e. in a single week, Microsoft was on real tear: the company announced a release date for Windows 7, disclosed details of Zune HD and Zune’s integration into Xbox Live, discussed Project Natal and other coming improvements to Xbox, and launched its Bing “decision” engine.
And all this week, at a special software design review (SDR) event, Microsoft is introducing major new business intelligence features coming in SQL Server 2008 R2, including its project Gemini product that helps rogue “spreadmart” projects graduate into managed end-user BI projects that can be moved to the server, and which IT can support and monitor. (more on Gemini when the NDA embargo is lifted.)
I’m attending that SDR myself this week. And I’m wondering: is Microsoft gaining traction, in a way it hasn’t recently? And if it is, will it keep its eye on the ball and keep climbing the trajectory toward success?
Microsoft sure is the underdog. Its flagship operating system, music player and search engine have all been bona fide laughing stocks in their respective spaces. Is a comeback possible? Even if Windows 7 is stable, relatively pleasurable to use and modern, can it erase the black marks left by Vista? Can it disarm the humor in Apple’s television advertisements and somehow thwart that company’s famed Halo Effect?
Even if Bing provides better relevancy and some innovative ways to organize and cross-reference related searches, will that really tempt people to stop using Google? And if they do, will it be for more than a novelty trial period?
Despite Zune’s relative elegance and proverbially strong version 3 software, will people, in any significant numbers, give up their iPods and iPhones, especially when Zune offers no converged mobile phone device (and when Windows Mobile is not exactly a good omen in that department)?
And as marvelously successful as the Xbox franchise has been, will Project Natal technology really work reliably outside a demo scenario? What if even one in every 300 gestures is missed by the cameras? Imagine losing a game because controller-less play caused your maneuver to be missed. What if people take a test drive with Natal and then just go back to using their controllers? What if the tweets and blog posts and comments turn into a flame war death match against Microsoft?
Let’s be honest. These battles are all still enormously uphill, and common wisdom says the answer to many, if not all, of the above questions is a big, fat “no.”
Windows 7 will probably suffer from at least some guilt-by-association with Vista, and netbooks pose a huge danger to its license revenue story anyway. Bing will likely gain only some share in the search market and even if Redmond does consummate a deal with Yahoo, Google will still be king. The iPod’s not going to lose its franchise overnight; not even close. The Xbox is cool, no doubt, but it’s a long shot for the game console to turn what was science fiction into marketable reality.
So what can Microsoft do?
Microsoft should do what it has always done to win its competitive battles. Work diligently, stay focused and gradually improve products in the stack, despite what the critics stay (even if the critics are kind). Microsoft needs to take the long view, and avoid trying to score some sudden, dramatic comeback on these fronts.
More consistency and tenacity; less Hubris. Acknowledgement of the competitive threat, rather than dismissal of it. Smart people leading teams and less talented people not rising to leadership positions out of mere seniority. That’s what Microsoft needs, and I’d argue that’s the playbook the Windows 7 team, the Bing team, and the Zune team have been playing from.
I just hope they keep that book open and near them at all times. Grit, not heroics, constitutes the winning formula.
Aidan made his debut yesterday, Wednesday, 4/29/09, weighing in at a hearty 9 lbs, 11 oz. and measuring 22 inches.
His mom and brothers (as well as his dad) are doing well.
The dictionary defines an oracle as a prophet, or someone who can divine the future. Is that an apt description of the Redwood City, California company we know so well? If Oracle can predict the future, does its $7.5 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems relegate Microsoft industry dominance to the past? Or is it just about a winning move in a game of one-upmanship with IBM?
Emerging common wisdom (and Oracle’s own press release) says this deal enables Oracle to provide the first real competition to IBM for big data center plays. Likewise, it brings Oracle into the major leagues of Java influence players. This would all suggest that Microsoft, and its partners, could have hit snooze on their alarm clocks this Monday morning and rested easy for a while longer.
But not so fast. This deal puts Oracle’s push pins in a variety of places on the map where Microsoft has been making holes as well.
Let’s start with Oracle’s newly acquired ability to build turnkey appliances. Since they now own server and OS products, in addition to the leading relational database, they have what they need to sell a massively scalable data warehouse in a box. And if you think that’s not relevant, then please explain why Microsoft acquired DATAllegro to do exactly that, under SQL Server “Kilimanjaro”/project “Madison”. But while Microsoft will have to partner with HP and Dell to get their appliances built, Oracle can use SPARC and Solaris to do that all by themselves.
In his very nice piece on the Oracle-Sun deal, my friend Tony Baer opines that the JavaFX RIA technology, which looked like it was going nowhere fast, may now have some real support behind it, as Oracle now owns it and they have had only tepid support for Flash.
So now Microsoft has new competition on the DATAllegro/Madison and Silverlight fronts. But wait, there’s more…
Oracle buying Sun seems to consolidate the Java world into two main camps now: IBM and Oracle (don’t forget that Oracle had already acquired BEA and thus WebLogic). Oracle now seems in a very consolidated position to wrest away IBM’s dominion of Java (Sun itself was rather weak there, ironically). This could create more competition for .NET, and on a front where it felt the fight was settled.
Some people are saying that Solaris also gives Oracle what it needs to be a real player in the cloud. Maybe; maybe not. But if so, then Microsoft’s Azure has more to reckon with than it did before. And not just on the platform level, but on the application side. Microsoft has its own CRM. Oracle has Siebel. And PeopleSoft. And J.D. Edwards. And Oracle Financials.
As for MySQL, and the threat it continues to pose to SQL Server, the probable outcome is less clear. Oracle could make MySQL die a slow death. Or they could keep it alive in the role of rich benefactor, and use it as a foot in the door. MySQL shops could arguably be more willing to listen to Oracle, especially about data warehousing and BI, where MySQL is rightly perceived as quite weak, than IBM or Microsoft, since Oracle now owns MySQL.
Have I made my case? There’s a lot of competitive threat to Microsoft here. Even if more still to IBM.
But I see a “SilverLining” for Microsoft in this: a competitive threat from Oracle is much more constructive for Redmond than the competitive threat from PHP, a pre-Oracle-owned MySQL, Subversion, Eclipse and other Open Source offerings (and their adherents). Why? Because the Oracle threat is a competitive scenario where Microsoft is (a) more in its element, (b) better able to demonstrate value and (c) one where the winner actually makes money instead of just gaining market share for free or low-cost products.
Competition is scary but it’s good. I hope Microsoft can use this deal to get its own game on and start racking up a bunch of victories.
I wrote this post while in-flight, en route to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I had never been to CES before and I’ve wanted to go since I was a teenager. Truly. So I was excited, but my enthusiasm was somewhat subdued. Why? Because 2009 is shaping up to be The Year the Trade Show Died.
Such sentiment, in the mainstream press and elsewhere, has been brought on by the recession (and the travel and spending cuts it has engendered) and also by Apple Inc’s announcement that this would be the last year it participated in MacWorld, which, though independently run, is the namesake tradeshow of its flagship product. Apple explained, and perhaps needed to rationalize, that (1) it is able to reach its customers through many alternative channels and (2) that the expenditure involved in tradeshow participation is no longer necessary, nor even prudent. The first point is undeniable, but does the second point logically follow?
The truth is, of course, that erosion in tech show attendance began quite some time ago; immediately following the events of September 11th, 2001, shows took a big hit. They recovered, but never fully. The common wisdom around this is that technical content on the Internet, which is both free and available on-demand, has posed serious competition to live events. For instructional or research purposes, Internet content is, in many ways, better than live content: it can be paused, replayed, played at double-speed, displayed side-by-side with development tools as you work, or played in the background. It can be aggregated, categorized and “rounded up” in lists of recommended content from people who have more time than you do, perhaps, to cull through the material. But that phenomenon has merely ended live events’ tenure as the sole source of such content; it does not eliminate the efficacy and necessity of live events overall. Yet that elimination is what some believe is happening now.
I think that’s nonsense, even if it does call for a change in approach. A few years ago, I changed my conference strategy to de-emphasize sessions in favor of keynotes (where news-breaking announcements are made, and visions are conveyed) and networking with my peers. I see technology events as a great way -- indeed the only way -- to be part of the news, make lots of valuable contacts, strengthen existing ones, and see products and technologies live, in-person and with their creators and marketers present to answer my questions.
Can I do that on the Internet? I don’t think so. Even if keynote sessions are Web-casted live, and even if the video quality is acceptable and the bandwidth is adequate, all of which is still a tall order, being in the room makes a big difference. And the peer networking is irreplaceable. Facebook, instant messaging and email go a great way toward allowing me to network online. But at a live event, the concentration of a large number of industry figures, in the same place, at the same time, brings about a social momentum that online cannot replicate. Emoticons are a poor substitute for the subtleties of actual facial expressions, body English, simpatico and bonding. The intimacy of sharing a meal or, dare I say it, getting drunk with a peer or a group of peers, builds relationships far better than writing on someone’s “wall.” In fact, online social networking tools become far more valuable when they complement such in-person interaction than when they are used on their own.
But even for session content, live events do offer important advantages. A well-executed conference is planned such that its content is sequenced logically and symbiotically and builds to a climax. Conference chairs, if they’re doing their jobs well, act like orchestral conductors, who arrange sessions and speakers in a way that enhances their effectiveness and helps you make efficient use of your time. Just as a magazine editor adds value to the raw availability of articles on a topic, by identifying important topics and issues, selecting good writers to cover them and working with those writers to produce complementary works in a single issue, a good conference should save you the time involved in identifying and arranging important coverage, and picking people/sources to deliver it most effectively. Do-it-yourself editorial is an excellent option, but it shouldn’t be your only one. Often, it’s downright impractical.
Information wants to be free, and it is. Optimized collections of that information, and effective conveyance of it, is not a commodity; its value is huge. It’s worth your time (because it saves you time), worth your money (because it helps you make more of it) and it’s necessary to distinguish this value and service from mere distribution and exposition of the content itself. Granted, the economy probably will require you to scale back your participation in live events right now. But don’t let that trick you into thinking the underlying value of those events has somehow disappeared.
VSLive San Francisco is coming next month and you owe it to your career to attend if you can. A month later, Microsoft’s MIX conference will be held, and Web-focused developers and designers should take advantage of it and the chance to have fun in Las Vegas with their colleagues while there. Tech Ed will be essential in tying together the multitude of Microsoft technologies new in 2008, 2009 and 2010. And PDC will bridge those technologies to the those coming further in the future. Do you need to go to all of these shows every year? Maybe not. Do you need to go to any of these shows this year? If at all possible, then yes. And if you can’t, then make sure not to mistake current conditions with the shows being somehow passé. Necessity is the mother of invention. Circumstantial challenge is not the mother of obsolescence.
Pardon my lack of posts of late…I am now the author of Redmond Developer News’ Redmond Review column, and I’ve been grappling with how to write the column and keep posting here. I’ll ask you to continue bearing with me. While the column will focus on strategy and analysis for working with Microsoft and its stack, there are still plenty of topics that don’t fit there and do fit here.
Here’s on such topic: Windows Home Server (WHS), and the quiet release, back in June, of Power Pack 1. Before the release of Power Pack 1, WHS had a nasty bug: under certain circumstances, when saving files from an application directly to a share on the WHS box, your file could be corrupted. Never mind that WHS still worked perfectly fine when files were copied to it rather than saved directly to it. Never mind the amazing simple RAID-like disk spanning technology WHS offers, allowing you to pool numerous internal and external drives into a single mirrored volume capable of handling massive amounts of media files. Never mind that WHS offered (and continues to offer) one of the most reliable and foolproof backup solutions for home networks in the industry (read Scott Hanselman’s post on this subject if you don’t believe me). Never mind how easy WHS made (and makes) it for you to have Remote Desktop access to all your home PCs over the Internet. It didn’t matter. The press still had a field day with the file corruption bug, and Microsoft didn’t help matters by taking a very long time to address the issue.
But address it Microsoft did. With the release of Power Pack 1, the file corruption bug is gone. Vista 64–bit clients are now fully supported (they weren’t before). And you can now run backups of your WHS folders (as opposed to just the client machines) onto removable external drives.
Plus, there’s an important ancillary feature that’s workable now: you can turn on the Offline Files feature for a WHS share, allowing you to, say, transfer photos from your camera to the offline copy of your WHS Photos share on your laptop while away from home, then have those photos automatically be pushed up to the server as soon as your laptop is reconnected to your home network. If your setup is correctly configured, these photos can then be seen on Windows Media Center PCs or Extenders, or even non-Microsoft streaming media clients like DVRs and game consoles, without any additional effort. Use the PhotoSync add-in for WHS, and these photos can even be automatically uploaded to Flickr.
And speaking of add-ins, there are a ton of them. This is classic Microsoft ecosystem building at work. Add-ins are available for document storage, disk defragmentation, off-site backup (via Amazon’s S3 storage Web service), UPS monitoring, Web site creation, media management and more. The best place to go for a comprehensive list of add-in is the Add-ins section of the WHS site/blog www.wegotserved.co.uk. It’s not the only WHS site out there, but it’s the quintessential one, in my opinion. Steven Kerr’s video blog is a great resource as well.
This is an amazing product, and it’s available cheaply. You can buy the “system builder” edition of the software for as little as $99 (the price was recently reduced by 30%) and build your own WHS box, or you can buy ready-made systems (i.e. small form-factor servers with the software pre-installed). The most popular of the latter category is the HP MediaSmart Server, available for $499 from Amazon (for the 500GB version), but there are several others out there.
It’s fairly typical of the tech industry press (and perhaps the mainstream press as well) to cover a story very comprehensively when a product’s at fault. But the remediation of WHS’s file corruption bug has been one of the worst-covered, stealthiest stories out there. Regardless, there is now a fantastic product out there and, combined with its aggressive pricing, it offers immense value.
I thought I’d summarize a few recent developer tool announcements from Microsoft. Taken individually each of these announcements is certainly positive but may appear somewhat inconsequential. Taken together I think they constitute a very important trend. First, let’s enumerate them:
- Visual Studio Team System Database Edition, known informally as “Data Dude,” will be merged into Visual Studio Team System Development Edition. Current software assurance licensees of either product are being immediately granted a license to the other. The same is true of subscribers to MSDN editions that include either Team System product (subscribers will be able to download the other product from the MSDN Subscriptions site). This goes into effect October 1, i.e. just a few hours after I will be posting this. The announcement itself appears in a post on Brian Harry’s blog.
- Microsoft is shipping the Open Source jQuery JavaScript Library and providing Visual Studio integration for it as a free stand-alone Web download, and as part of the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC release. Microsoft will also integrate jQuery in future versions of Visual Studio.
- Microsoft joined the Object Management Group (OMG) earlier this month.
Each of these announcements is a win for the developer. Many influencers in the .NET community have been saying for a long time that Microsoft should ship a single version of the Visual Studio Team System client and dispense with most of the separate product SKUs. While the current Team Suite SKU is that unified edition, it’s viewed by many organizations as cost prohibitive and so Development Edition has seen the strongest uptake. For Microsoft shops to have to choose between the Development and Database Editions was really awkward. Most developers need both feature sets, but were forced to pick the Developer Edition. That caused them to miss out on the Database Edition features that they needed. Now that will no longer be the case.
The jQuery library, beyond its feature set (allowing developers to determine and modify HTML content programmatically), is an Open Source tool enjoying great popularity. Microsoft is working with the jQuery team in their efforts to integrate it into Visual Studio and has pledged not to fork the code (build their own custom version). In other words, Microsoft is embracing an Open Source technology, without reservation, and decided to do so in spite of an initial intent to build such functionality on their own. From Scott Guthrie’s blog post on the subject: “Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too.”
Remember that initial ad campaign for Vista? “The Wow Starts Now.” Well, maybe it hadn’t then, but it definitely has now. Scott’s quote demonstrates an uncanny display of common sense, that is not necessarily, ummm…, Microsoft’s hallmark. I believe strongly that this pragmatist, a-political approach to making .NET better and working with the broad developer community to serve their interests has a strong believer and advocate in Scott Guthrie and that his rising influence in the developer division means we’ll continue to see such announcements made and measures taken. This is Microsoft at its best. Bravo.
Continuing in this extra-Redmond peacemaking (“extra” as in “outside of”, not as in “more”), or at the very least, extra-Redmond détente, Microsoft has re-joined the Object Management Group and has, in effect, staged a reconciliation with UML (Unified Modeling Language). This means that the forthcoming Oslo modeling technologies are likely to “play well with others.” That is to say, other companies, other products, and other (skeptical) developers. That’s good citizenship and it’s good business. Again, the display of pragmatism is noteworthy.
An effective price drop on Team System, and an embrace of Open Source, UML and an open standards body. Is this the new, more open Microsoft that some predicted would take root post-Gates? Perhaps. Is it a merely a marketing ploy? Elements of it may be, though I think the earnest component of the announcements is the dominant one. But even, if in self-defense, developers wish to take a skeptical outlook on these moves, there’s tangible benefits for them to enjoy, and more for them at least to look forward to.
Many people have now seen the first “I’m a PC” television ad from Microsoft. (If not, see it here.) And whether or not you believe that the rather sudden transition from the Gates and Seinfeld ads to this new theme is mere coherence to a plan, the overwhelming reaction to the new spot seems to be positive.
What I really liked about the ad was its focus on diversity. Showing people from all walks of life, and from different countries (without being smug about it) is a good message. This really serves as a metaphor for the Windows platform: a diversity of OEMs, of software, of partners and, yes, of users.
In the Mac campaign, most of the spots feature just two people, both white, and both of some celebrity (being Bruce Willis’ side kick doesn’t make you a mega-star, but still…). The ads present a simplistic, dichotomized view of how computers are used in the world: for business and for “cool” stuff. The sub-text is that Windows = corporate = evil.
Now look at the “I’m a PC” spot: numerous people, some white, some of color. An Obama blogger and a McCain broadcaster. Regular people and an intellectual celebrity (Deepak Chopra). People with glasses, who aren’t nerds.
This shows the Windows platform to be democratic, and the Mac platform to be, essentially, elitist (turning the Mac dichotomy on its head…elitism isn’t cool) and dictatorial (in that the platform is so tightly controlled).
And the sub-text there is very important too: dictatorships run smoothly but offer less freedom; democracies offer more opportunity, but sometimes they can be messy. And that’s a good thing.
A world without walls indeed.
I was excited today to download Google’s new “Chrome” Web browser. Even I, a Microsoft technology die-hard, was intrigued by the idea of more competition in the browser space. While I am impressed with what I have seen so far in the Beta of IE8, I still feel that, viewed over roughly the last decade, Microsoft’s browser has changed so little as to be an embarrassment. Microsoft does a lot of things, and they have to prioritize. I suppose it’s not surprising that an area in which it has little competition has been the place where it has chosen to coast. Only stiff competition will push Microsoft out of complacency, it seems. And so Chrome is potentially good for IE.
I downloaded Chrome, and surfed with it for several hours. My initial experience was a good one. First, the thing felt very clean. There is no overload of toolbar buttons, menus, tool tips and dialog boxes. Chrome’s merging of the address bar and the search box into a single input control is intuitive; in fact it almost seems obvious, after the fact. Another nice touch: instead of a home page or a collection of home pages in different tabs, Chrome provides a thumbnail gallery of recently visited sites. Chrome’s ability to create shortcuts (on your desktop or QuickLaunch toolbar) that go directly to Web applications and bring them up in stand-alone, normally-framed windows, without all of the browser UI paraphernalia, is nice as well.
Of course, these features are really pretty easy to implement (the merged search and address bar with auto-complete being somewhat an exception). And given that the guts of Chrome’s rendering engine is essentially the WebKit Open Source code base, Google’s attempt at an innovative re-think of the browser seems more like a simple ergonomic skin on top of Safari.
But Google rightly points out, and cites as Chrome’s motivation, that browsers were designed for documents and yet are used by most of us for applications. So an important question hinges on a part of Chrome where Google has invested some real engineering effort: the JavaScript engine. Beyond the hype, it’s simply too early for me to know whether it offers any important advances over what’s already implemented in IE and FireFox. But if it does, then Chrome will represent an important stake in the ground for Google and its goal of making AJAX in the browser a true application platform.
That is Google’s Holy Grail, and it’s essentially the same agenda championed by Netscape some 10 years ago, with the same goal: fashion the browser into an operating system (or at least an application substrate) in its own right, and thus render Windows insignificant. Netscape failed, magnificently, at making this happen. But they also lacked cash and a real business model (a common problem for technology companies in that era). Google, meanwhile, has tons of cash, a very good business model in classified advertising, and a vested (perhaps even desperate) interest in delivering on this old challenge.
Google won’t wither away the way Netscape did, but it may hit a real cul de sac in its growth if it can’t hurt the Windows franchise in a substantive way. Can Google do it? Odds are against it, but it’s not impossible. If Google can’t do it, might it at least wage a costly war of attrition on Microsoft’s market share and caché, wherein Microsoft’s customers get cranky and restless (and slow to upgrade or renew their enterprise license agreements)? I think that’s a strong possibility.
Microsoft can fight back successfully, but it has to get hungrier and scrappier. Summer’s over; the Yahoo deal is comatose, if not dead. Microsoft needs to foster some indigenous competitive momentum on the IE team and it needs to do it now. It has Google to thank for giving it a swift kick in the rear. Let’s see if that action yields meaningful results.
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.