Sure, it’s still big. Yes, it still competes vigorously. But with the odd exception (Bing, perhaps), Microsoft just doesn’t seem to have the energy to compete anymore. One indication of this is that most of the dirt that Roy Schestowitz digs up on Microsoft is from old court records. It’s as if Microsoft struggles even to be nasty anymore.

Apple offers a premium “desktop” experience that makes old feel new. Google replaces the “desktop” with the Web. Open source commoditizes and then innovates enterprise IT, as Accenture’s Alex Wied recently wrote. What does this leave Microsoft?

But Microsoft doesn’t wow in its traditional businesses. Surface, yes. Project Natal, yes. But there doesn’t seem to be much creative gas left in the enterprise computing tank.

Google may be resorting to some of Microsoft’s most frustrating practices, using its strong products to prop up weak siblings, but at least those siblings promise a different mode of computing.

The desktop is a tired metaphor. This is why Google’s Chrome OS, while not necessarily manna from heaven, is a welcome change, and just the sort of thing that Microsoft should be investing in, but is structurally, financially incapable of promoting in the same way and to the same degree that Google does. Because Microsoft dies if it innovates its way out of its Office and Windows businesses too quickly.

Simply put, Nokia and Microsoft are the equivalent of two St. Bernards that are forced to run in 90 degree heat and high humidity. They’re big. They’re winded. And they could knock you over–if they could only catch you.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

As news broke this week that Microsoft and Nokia would be partnering to (brace yourself!) port Office to Nokia phones, followed by the equally momentous (or not) news that (sit down for this one!) Microsoft will replace Entourage with Outlook for Mac OS X, I couldn’t help but agree with Larry Dignan’s assessment of the Nokia deal:

And perhaps that’s the point. How much innovation can there be, really, in Office? Or the Windows operating system? These are old paradigms that don’t need window dressing: they need the window shattered and shifted to completely new methodologies of computing, similar to what Google (Web) and Apple (entertainment) are doing.

I happen to compete with Microsoft in one area that it is growing from strength to strength (SharePoint), but for everyone else, Microsoft is becoming a footnote in the history of computing.

commentary

It leaves Microsoft desperately needing to refresh its approach to the market. Immediately. It can live off its billions for a long, long time, but it risks becoming like CA: ever-present but not very relevant.

So Microsoft dresses up tired press releases like the Outlook on
Mac announcement “like they’ve been working in the lab for some time now and have had some technological breakthrough that allows them to bring Outlook to Max OS X,” as ZDNet’s Sam Diaz puts it. The breakthrough would be putting Outlook in the cloud, Google Apps-style. It would be creating products that wow in the same way that Apple’s do.

My contacts at Comcast and TiVo tell me that a software update is in the works, but they’ve been vague on timing. “Coming soon” is as close to a date as I’ve received. I hope it arrives before the finals of the U.S. Open in September.

This last outcome is most intriguing. I can change the channel, and receive both audio and video, but the picture remains stuck in the tiny preview box from the “TiVo Central” screen–which is even smaller than the preview box on the channel guide. It defeats the purpose of owning an HDTV, to be sure. Starting an On Demand program and then returning to live TV sometimes fixes the problem; failing that, I must reset the cable box by unplugging it and plugging it back in before I get a picture. The reverse of the resizing problem also crops up from time to time, where the TV picture gets stuck in full-screen mode. It’s less of a problem but means it doesn’t resize itself to fit inside the preview box of the channel guide.

(Credit:
CBS Sports)

Two things I don’t like about the remote: there are no one-day forward and back buttons, and the Select and On Demand buttons are too close to one another. The Comcast DVR remote had buttons that let you jump forward (and back) 24 hours, which was convenient when hunting for a show or confirming that I did in fact have Lost set to record on Thursday. You can jump forward to a particular time and day and channel with TiVo, but it’s not as simple as jumping forward 24 hours at the press of a button. And with the On Demand button located in the center of the remote and directly below the select button, I frequently enter the On Demand screen by accident. The slowness of the TiVo interface only exacerbates this error.

On to the new and interesting Comcast + TiVo bugs; let me tell you about them.

… and wait… and wait… and wait…

Turning on the TV has become a thrilling roll of the dice. Aside from the expected picture of live TV, the many outcomes upon powering on the set include a blank, black screen; a frozen screen–often of a channel I never watch or one that I don’t subscribe to; a blank screen with the message “Cannot display live TV”; and a tiny image of live TV in the upper-right corner of my screen.

Back to yesterday. I picked up the action in the fourth set (my tennis fandom is offset by fatherhood) and starting recording at the beginning of the fifth set with the intention of watching the conclusion at my leisure–after dinner was consumed and kids put to bed. I actually recorded the program after Wimbledon since the match had been delayed earlier by rain. I padded the recording with an extra 2 hours, knowing that one does not play fifth set tiebreakers at Wimbledon. I was confident I had given myself more than enough space to capture the end of the match. Later, I returned to my 2 hour and 28 minute recording to watch the exciting conclusion only to find the recording cut out after about 10 minutes–at 3-3 in the fifth set. The green status bar at the bottom of the screen showed I had more than two hours remaining on the recording, but it wouldn’t move past 3-3 in the fifth set. I reset the box–something I’ve done regularly the past five weeks–hoping it would allow me to access the rest of the recording. No luck.

As I discovered on day one, the Comcast + TiVo box is painfully slow. Navigating the channel guide requires a large dose of patience, and setting a recording takes roughly a minute for the command to register. In one case, the “Please Wait” screen lasted 2 minutes, 14 seconds. With my old Comcast DVR, you could set a recording in less than 5 seconds.

In the two years using Comcast’s own DVR service, I never had a recording fouled up like this. Comcast’s DVR had its problems, but it proved to be a reliable recorder of shows–a key element to any digital video recorder in my estimation. Comcast + TiVo suffers from the same bugs as my old DVR service but adds new and interesting bugs. Like Comcast DVR, Comcast + TiVo freezes, stores up the 18 commands I entered in frustration on the remote during the freeze before unleashing a fury of rapid actions. Like Comcast DVR’s series recording, TiVo’s Season Pass also records three Daily Shows and three Countdown with Keith Olbermann shows per day, even though I set it up to record first-run only in both cases. (Comcast + TiVo does automatically create a folder of any show of which you have more than one episode recorded to help keep things organized.)

Unplugging the cable box to reset it corrects the blank and frozen screens, too, but it also means I must reprogram my remote each time I do. I’ve committed the 30-second skip code to memory at this point: Rewind > Slow > Fast Forward > Play > 3 > 0 > Advance.

What I didn't see yesterday: the end of the Wimbledon men's final.

Big TV, tiny image: one of the many bugs with Comcast + TiVo service.

It’s being hailed as the greatest Wimbledon final in history. This is a tennis tournament that has been played since 1877, and supposedly yesterday’s five-set match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal topped them all. I say supposedly because my Comcast + TiVo box decided that midway through the fifth set was a good time to stop recording the match. This is merely the latest but–since I’m one of the 12 tennis fans left in this country–certainly the most annoying of the bugs I’ve encountered with Comcast + TiVo service over the past month. If the promised software update isn’t rolled out before the fall TV season, I’m going to return to the old Comcast DVR service.

(Credit:
Matt Elliott/CNET Networks)

I’ve spent hours enjoying all of these guys, and I haven’t listened to Hancock’s winning album of Joni Mitchell covers (speaking of cutting-edge artists from 35 years ago), which may totally shred, but doesn’t this kind of sound like a makeup call? “Sorry we ignored funk and jazz and fusion back when they were relevant, but we finally discovered that stash we hid under the hot tub back in ‘78 and darned if your new album doesn’t sound half bad.” Does this mean that LCD Soundsystem or Panda Bear will win in 2043? Or maybe it’s meant to be more bait for Led Zeppelin to record a new album.

OK, OK, I was totally wrong about the Beatles, as a mere minute of research would have shown me. I think my confusion stemmed from the fact that they never won record of the year, which is considered the top award. But still, look at the records, albums, and songs that have won over the last fifty years. Do you see a lot of innovation? A lot of music that’s stood the test of time? I don’t.

I know it’s piling on, shooting fish in a barrel, whatever metaphor you choose, but I have never cared about the Grammys. Every time I see “Grammy-award winning” whatever, it means absolutely nothing to me.

Everything about it seems arbitrary–the categories, the nominees, the winners. Did you pay enough attention to know that Herbie Hancock won album of the year? (I didn’t until today.) Which year are we talking about–1973? 1983? No, folks, he won in 2008. Who’s next–John McLaughlin? Chick Corea?

One thing missing is change to the telephony package, laments one developer on the Android Developer discussion on Google Groups.

The new SDK has a new user interface, a geocoder that lets developers search for businesses as well as translate an address into a coordinate and vice versa, support for new media codecs, and code that lets developers create layout animations.

(Credit: Hello Android) (Credit: Hello Android) (Credit: Hello Android) (Credit: Hello Android)

“This is very disappointing, especially because we were told in the Android coding day in Israel that the telephony package will be updated soon,” the developer wrote. “We still cannot detect the ingoing/outgoing call number or send DTMF tones properly.” Prototypes of Android phones were shown at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. Google launched Android in November along with and the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 handset manufacturers, carriers and chipmakers that have said they plan to support Android products and services. Products are due out later this year.

Google released on Wednesday a new version of the software development kit for its open mobile platform called Android.

Here are some screenshots, via the Hello Android blog:

Is Apple really cutting production of the iPod Touch, just after releasing a new model?

He says this is “likely reflecting less-than-expected sell-through in 4Q, or thus far in 1Q.” (Come on, Craig, this is America, it’s Q1). The questions about iPhone sell-through in the fourth quarter have come up before, but iPod Touch sales appeared to be strong during Apple’s most recent financial quarter.

If the economy really is headed south, it’s going to affect us all; Apple won’t be immune. Apple’s stock fell another 5.69 percent Wednesday, or $7.36, to close at $122. It’s down 37 percent so far in 2008, while the Nasdaq as a whole is down about 9 percent.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Consumer electronics and PC companies know the first quarter is always a downer compared with the fourth quarter, which is chock full of holiday shopping goodness. Berger is saying, however, that Apple now plans to cut production by an even larger amount than originally planned. Based on “channel checks,” Berger says, Apple is cutting
iPod and
iPhone production by 60 percent compared with the fourth quarter, when it had originally planned to cut production by 50 percent compared with the fourth quarter.

Apple does not appear to be very bullish about its business in the first quarter, according to a financial analyst.

An Apple representative declined to comment on the report, which also suggested that the company is planning to reduce production of Macbooks while increasing production of iMacs. Banc of America issued a similar report regarding iPods last week, but said iPhone production is up after cuts in December and January.

Craig Berger of FBR Research tracks chip companies like Broadcom and Marvell that supply chips for Apple’s iPods and iPhones, among other things. AppleInsider spotted a report issued by Berger saying that Apple is reducing the number of iPods, iPhones, and Macbooks it plans to build in the first quarter.

And if cell phones are too small for your taste, Photobucket has a deal with TiVo so that you can access your online albums on your nice big HDTV.

Photobucket, the massive image-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp. last year, announced Tuesday the debut of its mobile Web site.

On the new site, now live at m.photobucket.com, members of the photo-sharing site can browse their own photos as well as public images, upload photos to the site from their mobile devices, and access a limited home page. In the future, the company has said, Photobucket Mobile will expand to allow video functionality as well as options to embed photos in social-networking profiles.

Not to mention the fact that some other popular image-sharing sites, like the Yahoo-owned Flickr, already run mobile Web sites, as do social-networking sites like Facebook that have photo-sharing features; Photobucket needed to catch up with the competition.

The Aircell Gogo service, which will be on the first planes this fall, will run $9.95 or $12.95 for trips under or over three hours, respectively, and will allow connection of any Wi-Fi device. It will be interesting to see what ports and applications they shut down–that is, Skype or other voice over Internet Protocol apps, and of course, porn.

Delta Air Lines announced Tuesday that it will outfit its domestic aircraft with Wi-Fi over the next year.

The airline expects to have more than 330 aircraft complete by summer 2009. The full fleet agreement between Aircell and Delta will provide a consistent, convenient experience for customers traveling on the airline who wish to use the Gogo Internet service.

(Credit:
Delta Air Lines)

The question for me is not how far Ozzie’s thinking has evolved, but just how far his vision has spread within the company and where the pockets of resistance lie. In his latest memo he talks about this new world order affecting every area of the company, from Windows to developer tools to entertainment devices. That means he’s going to need a whole lot of people to buy in to his philosophy for the vision to be made real.

Unified Device Management – Users will register their devices through a simple, web-based service. Once a part of a user’s device mesh, whenever they happen to connect to the internet the devices “report in” to the service — e.g. for status, health, location, and to exchange/synchronize information. Mesh-aware device configuration/personalization will be done through the web, and full remote control of a device (e.g. remote desktop) will be available from anywhere.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect

Office Live will bring Office to the web, and the web to Office. We will deliver new and expanded productivity experiences that build upon the device mesh vision to extend productivity scenarios seamlessly across the PC, the web, and mobile devices. Individuals will seamlessly enjoy the benefits of each – the rich, dynamic editing of the PC, the mobility of the phone, and the work-anywhere ubiquity of the web.

Unified Data Management – Folders and files (e.g. documents and media) will be automatically synchronized and made available across any or all devices, as well as through the web. Because every folder can now have an extended web presence, even PC-based documents and media can now have a social mesh element to them.

Most major enterprises are in the early stages of a significant infrastructural transition — from the use of dedicated and sometimes very expensive application servers, to the use of virtualization and commodity hardware to consolidate those enterprise applications on computing and storage grids constructed within their data center. This trend will accelerate as enterprise applications are progressively re-factored from a centralized “scale up” model to the horizontal “scale out” requirements of this new utility computing model.

For years, Microsoft has maintained that the PC is the center of the digital home and office.

Over the past decade our lives, our businesses, and our society have been transformed by the web.

CONNECTED PRODUCTIVITY – Office Live will bring Office to the web, and the web to Office. We will deliver new and expanded productivity experiences that build upon the device mesh vision to extend productivity scenarios seamlessly across the PC, the web, and mobile devices. Individuals will seamlessly enjoy the benefits of each – the rich, dynamic editing of the PC, the mobility of the phone, and the work-anywhere ubiquity of the web. Office Live will also extend the PC-based Office into the social mesh, expanding the classic notion of “personal productivity” into the realm of the “inter-personal” through the linking, sharing and tagging of documents. Individuals will have a productivity centric web presence where they can work and productively interact with others. This broadly extended vision of Office is being realized today through Office Mobile and Office Live Workspace on the web, augmented by SharePoint, Exchange, and OCS for the connected enterprise.

He stops short of specifically hooking Silverlight–Microsoft’s cross-platform, cross-browser rich Internet application technology that competes with Adobe AIR– into the Live Mesh experience, but the combination of the two brings Microsoft beyond its Windows-centric heritage.

For customers and partners who use and who’ve invested in Microsoft’s myriad offerings, we feel there’s tremendous growth potential in moving toward a world that fully embraces software, services and the web. The device mesh, the social mesh, cloud- based infrastructure, and server/service symmetry represent great opportunities across all markets we serve.

2. The Power of “Choice” as business moves to embrace the cloud.

Driven in large part by the high-scale requirements of consumer services, the value of this utility computing model is most clearly evident in cloud-based internet services. By extension, cloud-based enterprise utility computing, infrastructure services, and enterprise applications are all becoming a reality, affording IT a range of new choices in how to deploy solutions across and between enterprises; within their own data center, in a partner’s hosting facility, or with the vendor itself in the cloud. Software built explicitly to provide a significant level of server/service symmetry will enable IT to balance factors such as cost and control, and to leverage the skills of its key personnel most effectively. It will afford choice and flexibility in developing, operating, migrating and managing such systems in highly varied enterprise deployment environments that are distributed and federated between the enterprise data center and the internet cloud.

Since then, we’ve made tremendous progress in our expansion toward “software+services” – from the long-term quests we’ve undertaken and customer scenarios we now envision, to the great services and service-enhanced software we’ve begun to bring to market, and the amazing projects at various stages within our development pipeline.

In light of all the work that we’re doing, it’s important that we build a shared sense of what Microsoft’s path looks like in this transition toward software+services.

But, he said, “since then, we’ve made tremendous progress in our expansion toward ’software+services’–from the long-term quests we’ve undertaken and customer scenarios we now envision, to the great services and service-enhanced software we’ve begun to bring to market, and the amazing projects at various stages within our development pipeline.”

CONNECTED DEVELOPMENT – As individuals embrace a world of devices and our device mesh vision, and as businesses embrace cloud-based services and server/service symmetry, developers will need platforms and tools that span seamlessly from cloud to server on the back-end, and from PC to browser to phone (and more) on the front-end. This vision is being realized today in our .NET family of runtimes including .NET Framework and Silverlight, supported by Expression Studio for designers and Visual Studio for developers, enabling developers to leverage their skills across all these environments. Our tools will be designed to support development of solutions that seamlessly incorporate multiple tiers, with some pieces on the PC, and others on the web or mobile; with some pieces on an enterprise server, and others running cloud-based utility computing infrastructure.

1. The Web is the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The web is first and foremost a mesh of people. Elements of this social mesh will be a first-class attribute of most all software and service experiences, as the “personal” of the PC meets the “inter-personal” of the web.

At a higher level, myriad options exist for delivering applications to the user: The web browser, unique in its ubiquity; the PC, unique in how it brings together interactivity/experience, mobility and storage; the phone, unique in its extreme mobility. Developers will need to build applications that can be delivered seamlessly across a loosely coupled device mesh by utilizing a common set of tools, languages, runtimes and frameworks — a common toolset that spans from the service in the cloud to enterprise server, and from the PC to the browser to the phone.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Indeed Microsoft’s overall services strategy encompasses all of these areas: services for the individual, services for business, and services for developers. The intent of this memo is to map out that all-up strategy. I’ll outline three principles that guide our work, and describe how those principles are woven into our myriad software and services offerings.

More than two years ago when I wrote the memo entitled The Internet Services Disruption, much of the company was still focused on bringing our Office 2007 and Vista products to market. Aside from MSN, IE/IIS and our tools groups, it was truly “software”, not “services”, that was top of mind.

CONNECTED DEVICES – We aspire to bring together Windows, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile by creating seamless experiences that span these offerings. Windows Live, for example, enables seamless communications and media experiences across Windows, Windows Mobile, and the Web. Live Mesh, a new services platform technology that will also become part of Windows Live, further extends the Windows / Windows Mobile / Windows Live experience by bringing your devices together to work in concert with one another using the web as a hub, enabling:

Commerce on the web has moved well beyond the early online shopping cart. Nowadays, community is impacting commerce in dramatic ways. Head retailers such as Amazon utilize community extensively for recommendations, reviews, and wish lists. Tail commerce websites such as Craigslist utilize community extensively for conversation around local products. And Search has completely transformed online commerce. It’s an essential utility for how we research, how we shop, and how we buy on the web. It’s also become an essential mechanism for how we market on the web, and increasingly for how we sell on the web.

Following is the full text of Ozzie’s memo:

3. Small Pieces Loosely Joined for developers, within the cloud and across a world of devices.

In its early days the web grew through the explosion of information portals as gateways to content, marketplaces for commerce, and communications tools such as email, IM and newsgroups that drove a sense of community on the internet. Over time, the significance of these “3
Cs” — content, commerce, and community — has expanded tremendously, growing in ways through which they’ve become intermixed and mutually reinforcing.

There are three overarching principles guiding our services strategy – principles informing the design and development of products being implemented across all parts of Microsoft, for both individuals and business.

Successful experiences on the web are those that are organically compelling, highly engaging, and viral across their intended audience. By applying our three principles consistently across all the markets we serve, we have an opportunity to reshape our offerings for individuals, businesses, and developers, and to deliver a broad range of compelling scenarios.

Given this context, it’s strategic that we invest broadly in solutions and partnerships that advance our position in current and future generations of content, community, commerce, and search, and also in an advertising platform that’s attractive to advertisers, publishers and developers.

Central to this strategy is our embrace of both a world of the web and a world of devices. Over the past ten years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the web is at the center of our experiences – experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.

CONNECTED ENTERTAINMENT – Building upon our device mesh vision, our aspiration is that individuals will only need to license media once, organize their subscriptions and collections once, and use any of their mesh-connected devices to access and enjoy their media – from the living room to the desktop to their pockets. And building upon our social mesh vision being interwoven into everything we do, each individual will be afforded a media-centric or gaming-centric web presence through which they can express their tastes/interests/affinities and interact with others through linking, sharing, ranking and tagging of music, video, photos, games, and more. This vision is being realized today through the Zune Social for media and
Xbox LIVE for gaming. Services such as the MSN.com home page, MSN Mobile, MSN Video, Zune Marketplace and software such as Windows Mobile, Microsoft Mediaroom and Windows Media Center will be progressively transformed by this connected entertainment vision.

But while innovation in the “3 Cs”, search and ads is essential for success in services targeting consumers on the web, their impact barely scratches the surface of the much broader effect that internet services innovation will have on individuals, businesses, and developers.

In the memo Ozzie describes the software+services future as a merging of desktop, mobile and the Web data and devices, orchestrated through Live Mesh:

The web is first and foremost a mesh of people. Elements of this social mesh will be a first-class attribute of most all software and service experiences, as the “personal” of the PC meets the “inter-personal” of the web. Whether in work, play, or just life, the social element of software will continue to transform the ways that we interact with people with whom we have some affinity. All applications will grow to recognize and utilize the inherent group-forming aspects of their connection to the web, in ways that will become fundamental to our experiences. In scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View.

Community on the web once meant “group communications”, largely through rudimentary tools such as email, IM and IRC, message boards and newsgroups. Today, the action has shifted toward using composite communications tools and platforms that mash together content, applications and commerce, all within the context of group interaction. These social platforms are altering the way we connect and coordinate, establish identity and affinities, and build reputation. While this notion of composite communications is most prominently demonstrated in how we use profile-centric consumer social networking tools, such as Facebook, the social platform is also finding its way into the workplace in the form of increasingly rich workspaces, both real-time and asynchronous, that integrate communications and content relevant to a project or a team.

Transformation of our Offerings

In the memo, Ozzie outlines three principles to guide the company in this new era. Chief among those is the notion that “the Web is the hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.” The notion of a Mesh is one that Ozzie has been working on for some time and has culminated in the Live Mesh service that Microsoft detailed on Tuesday.

For consumers, advertisers and publishers, our investments in new forms of content, community, commerce, search and advertising are key. We’re investing significantly to ensure tremendous audience engagement, and to provide an attractive and well-targetable audience, ensuring that we continue to be an attractive partner for advertisers and publishers within a vibrant and competitive advertising ecosystem.

“More than two years ago when I wrote the memo entitled The Internet Services Disruption, much of the company was still focused on bringing our Office 2007 and Vista products to market,” Ozzie said. “Aside from MSN, IE/IIS and our tools groups, it was truly ’software’, not ’services’, that was top of mind.”

As our industry has evolved because of this web-catalyzed services transformation, so too has Microsoft.

It is our mission in this new era to create compelling, seamless experiences that combine the power of the internet, with the magic of software, across a world of devices.

But Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Tuesday that it’s time for the company to acknowledge a new reality.

CONNECTED BUSINESS – We will extend the benefits of high-scale cloud-based infrastructure and services to enterprises, in a way that gives them choice and flexibility in intermixing on-premises deployment, partner hosting, or cloud-based service delivery. Businesses large and small will benefit from services that make it easy to dynamically connect and collaborate with partners and customers, using the web to enable a business mesh. Business customers of all sizes will benefit from web-based business services. This vision is being realized today through the likes of Office Live Small Business. For enterprises, our new Microsoft Online Services provide managed, service-based infrastructure through offerings including SharePoint, Exchange, OCS, and Dynamics CRM. Our enterprise solution platform extends to the cloud through SQL Server Data Services, BizTalk Services, and many more services to come. At the lowest level within the enterprise data center, we-ve begun to deliver on our utility computing vision, with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, and through our Systems Center products including Virtual Machine Manager.

We’re also living in a world where the number and diversity of devices is on the rise; not just PCs and phones, but TVs, game consoles, digital picture frames, DVRs, media players, cameras and camcorders, home servers, home automation systems, our car’s entertainment and navigation systems, and more. To individuals, the concept of “My Computer” will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices — a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole. After identifying a device as being “yours”, its configuration and personalization
settings, its applications and their own settings, and the data it carries will be seamlessly available and synchronized across your mesh of devices. Whether for media, control or access, scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment will be unified and enhanced by the concept of a device mesh.

Transformation of our Company

“Over the past 10 years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the Web is at the center of our experiences–experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions,
cars, and more,” Ozzie said in a memo to be sent to employees on Wednesday (PDF).

Application design patterns at both the front- and back-end are transitioning toward being compositions and in some cases loose federations of cooperating systems, where standards and interoperability are essential. At the front-end, lightweight REST-based technologies have become ubiquitous, in some cases augmenting their WS-* counterparts, in integrating a broad variety of components combined seamlessly for the user at the surface of the browser. RSS and ATOM feeds have become lightweight channels and queues between software components. Declarative languages such as XAML have enabled rapid UI innovation and iteration.

Ray Ozzie

Guiding Principles

At the back-end, developers will need to contend with new programming models in the cloud. Whether running on an enterprise grid, or within the true utility computing environment of cloud-based infrastructure, the way a developer will write code, deploy it, debug it, and maintain it will be transformed. The cloud-based environment consists of vast arrays of commodity computers, with storage and the programs themselves being spread across those arrays for scale and redundancy, and loose coupling between the tiers. Independent developers and enterprises alike will move from “scale up” to “scale out” back-end design patterns, embracing this model for its cost, resiliency, flexible capacity, and geo-distribution.

He notes that this transformation has been a challenging one for Microsoft to embrace.

Unified Application Management – Installation and management of “mesh-aware” applications on any or all devices, along with their application settings and data, will be simple and transparent for the user. Individuals will now enjoy the centralized cross-device purchase/deployment experience formerly available only within the enterprise environment.

Ozzie indicates that the social graph–the relationships among people–will be part of what Live Mesh handles:

Content has changed at both the “head” and the “tail”. The line between editorialized portals and blogs has blurred, and all are consumed through feeds. Beyond news, movies and music and television have all expanded to embrace the web. And the interrelation of content and community has created a world of “social media”, where both head and tail content is intrinsically social by virtue of community linking, tagging, and ranking. Relationships and collective behavioral intelligence have changed how we stay informed, find and share media, and interact with one another.

As the “3 Cs” have evolved, so has the significance of online advertising as the economic engine powering our world of services. With growth projected from $40B today to $80B in the next three years, online advertising will continue to be the primary monetization mechanism for consumer services on the web. As advertising transitions more and more to being digital, measurable, and competitively bid, the “ad platform” is key. The advertising ecosystem surrounding this platform is reliant upon the continuous innovation of publishers and developers, whose interesting and engaging properties capture users’ time and attention and ultimately serve to match advertisers with a relevant audience. Continuous innovation in such high-engagement products and services, in each area of the “3 Cs”, will continue to provide the fuel to drive the advertising-based economic model.

“There is no reason for us not to see this through. We’ve come this far,” Fung told CNET News.com on Thursday. “TorrentSpy shutting down doesn’t mean a victory for the MPAA. The judge declared that TorrentSpy didn’t adhere to court procedures. That’s different than a judge deciding against the company after hearing their arguments.”

“IsoHunt is located in Canada and has a slightly different set of circumstances than TorrentSpy,” said IsoHunt’s attorney, Ira Rothken, who also represented TorrentSpy. “IsoHunt is waiting for the (judge’s decision) on a motion for summary judgment. The company is looking forward to defending itself and being the first to go to trial in a search-engine case.”

Fung said he’s been fighting the MPAA’s attempts to require him to turn over user logs on the grounds that his company is based in Canada, which has stricter privacy laws than the United States.

“The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the content industries,” the MPAA said in its statement, “and sends a clear message to operators of other illegal BitTorrent portals that they will not be allowed to operate in the United States without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders.”

The MPAA’s case against IsoHunt is in the U.S. District Court of Central California in Los Angeles, which is perceived by many to be extremely friendly to copyright holders.

This can’t come as good news to Gary Fung, chief executive of IsoHunt. His company was among a group of torrent-file search engines, which also included TorrentSpy, accused of copyright infringement in a 2006 lawsuit filed by the MPAA. With TorrentSpy gone, the MPAA can now set its sights on IsoHunt.

Whether that is true, the film industry has racked up plenty of file-sharing victories. Besides TorrentSpy, the MPAA was blamed for driving LokiTorrent and SuprNova.org out of business. And more recently, the MPAA won important legal precedents in the TorrentSpy case.

“TorrentSpy’s characterization of the site’s closure as a voluntary decision conveniently
ignores the fact that after two years of intense litigation by the major Hollywood studios, a
federal court found TorrentSpy liable for copyright infringement,” the MPAA said in the statement. “Late last year the court imposed the harshest sanction against the TorrentSpy defendants and ruled in favor of the studios because of TorrentSpy’s brazen, continuous, and systematic destruction of evidence and subversion of the judicial process. In short, the ruling meant that TorrentSpy would have to shut down their site sooner or later.”

The courts have not yet ruled on whether search tools can be held liable for copyright infringement. Most relevant cases have been settled before going to trial, copyright experts said. It’s important to note that IsoHunt and TorrentSpy don’t store any unauthorized movie files on their sites but the search engines are often used to find pirated copies.

The movie industry has seen mixed results from suing individuals for file sharing but continues to clobber BitTorrent search engines.

“The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the content industries and sends a clear message to operators of other illegal BitTorrent portals that they will not be allowed to operate in the United States without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders.” –statement from MPAA

But the 25-year-old CEO acknowledges that the U.S. and Canadian governments have agreed to honor court decisions in each other’s countries.

But Fung points out that TorrentSpy was never able to argue the main copyright issues in court. The presiding judge found in favor of the film studios after ruling that TorrentSpy destroyed evidence. Fung says he is determined to take up the copyright issue to the end. Unlike TorrentSpy, he doesn’t care what it costs.

In August, the judge denied TorrentSpy’s appeal. The decision will conceivably enable the MPAA to gain access to users’ personal information in similar cases, say legal experts.

TorrentSpy, once one of the most popular indexes of BitTorrent files, shut down on Monday following a two-year copyright battle with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). TorrentSpy, accused in a lawsuit of encouraging copyright infringement, finally crumpled under the legal costs.

But Fung is up against an MPAA legal juggernaut that is playing on its home turf, is fresh off a series of court victories, and has plenty of money. The lobbying group for the six largest movie studios said in a statement on Thursday that it took issue with TorrentSpy’s suggestion earlier this week that it lost on a technicality.

Here’s the current state of the art for Eee PC. Next up: a touch screen.

Because of their small size and inexpensive nature, Netbooks are hot items right now. Asus’ Eee PC is one of the more recognizable lines available.

Samson Hu, the general manager, also remarked that future models would get dual-core Atom processors once they come out, and that a new lower-cost model is on the way. According to some reports, there are even more models in the works but details are scant. In all, it’s a day of good news for Eee PC fans.

Users have wanted a touch-screen version of their favorite tiny laptops, and it’s been rumored for a while that future Eee PCs would implement them. But it wasn’t until Thursday that the general manager of the Eee PC line for Asus confirmed that they are coming–next year.