O'Reilly News: Microsoft

Velocity Preview - The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number at Microsoft

2009-05-18T15:07:01Z

The psychology of engineering user experiences on the web can be difficult. How much rich content can you place up on a page before the load time drives away your visitors? Get the answer wrong, and you can end up with a ghost town; get it right and you're a star. Eric Schurman knows this well, since he is responsible for just those kind of trade-off decisions on some of Microsoft's highest traffic pages. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference in June, and he recently talked with us about how Microsoft tests different user experiences on small groups of visitors.

Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access

2009-05-05T02:39:23Z

Rails? Microsoft Access? Aren't those from different planets? Well, they may have different origins, but their similarities give me hope.

The Varieties of Openness Worth Wanting in the Cloud

2009-03-27T21:42:03Z

All of the vendors in the cloud space have paid lip service to the idea of Openness in the cloud; and most everyone believes that being "Open" is a "good thing". In an environment in which few people agree on the specifics of defining the term "cloud computing", what exactly does it mean to have an Open Cloud?

Silverlight Development for the Flex Developer

2009-03-25T16:00:00Z

The jets and sharks, Hatfields and McCoys, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants, Adobe and Microsoft. Now several years in the making, the Adobe - Microsoft rivalry is gearing up. Especially with the anticipated new release of Silverlight 3 and Flex 4. As any seasoned Flex veteran will tell you, Adobe is the defacto standard for Rich Internet Applications. When asked about interest in Silverlight, the response may vary, but usually ends in “I haven’t actually spent a lot of time [or tried] it.” A product of Microsoft, Silverlight is. But as professionals in the RIA industry it is a good thing to be open minded. After all, as hard as it is to admit, Flash isn’t always the best tool for the job.

O'Reilly Week in Review for March 16th, 2009

2009-03-18T23:20:01Z

This week's roundup include discussion of the Sun/IBM rumors, the future of newspapers, Microsoft and Science Commons teaming up, and the weekly podcast quiz....

Microsoft and Science Commons Team Up To Add Semantic Content to Online Science

2009-03-11T15:00:00Z

John Wilbanks, VP of Science for Creative Commons, gave O'Reilly Media an exclusive sneak preview of a joint announcement that they will be making with Microsoft later today at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. According to John, who talked to us shortly after getting off a plane from Brazil, Microsoft will be releasing, under an open source license, Word plugins that will allow scientists to mark up their papers with scientific entities directly.

Kodu: Visual Programming on the Xbox with P2P Level-sharing

2009-02-24T16:22:50Z

How do you make programming fun? How do you make it fun enough for kids to want to spend hours learning how to make loops and if/then statements? Simple you give them simple visual commands that let them control robots on the Xbox -- or at least this is the thesis of Microsoft Research's Kodu. Kodu (formerly Boku) made a splash at Techfest two years ago and gave a demo at Ignite Seattle. Since that time the levels and characters have gotten much sexier and the controls simpler, but more powerful.

O'Reilly Week in Review for February 16th, 2009

2009-02-17T13:54:12Z

This week's podcast includes a roundtable discussion by the editors of Microsoft's new retail initiative, excerpts of an interview with Andrew "bunnie" Huang about product design in China, as well as the weekly podquiz, your chance to score a free O'Reilly Book.

Microsoft's Cloud Tax

2008-12-24T15:57:58Z

The importance of the differences among web application platforms like .NET, JSP, PHP, etc. drops dramatically under the cloud computing paradigm. Which architecture you choose really comes down to one question: what kind of programming and support resources do you have? If the answer is "Microsoft technologies", however, you should be aware of the Microsoft cloud tax.

Data Center Power Efficiency

2008-11-29T23:23:56Z

James Hamilton is one of the smartest and most accomplished engineers I know. He now leads Microsoft's Data Center Futures Team, and has been pushing the opportunities in data center efficiency and internet scale services both inside & outside Microsoft. His most recent post explores misconceptions about the Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers: I’m not sure how many...

Why Microsoft's free AV won't matter

2008-11-20T18:24:26Z

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that they're going to stop selling their consumer security product OneCare, and instead they're going to give away for free an AV product based on the same technology. I've had several people ask me questions...

Daddy, Where's Your Phone?

2008-11-17T13:27:17Z

I met recently with Vic Gundotra, formerly Microsoft's head of platform evangelism, and now VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for all their mobile efforts outside of Android. We were talking about Google's mobile strategy and the insanely cool new voice-activated Google search in the Google Mobile Application for iPhone. But what I really want to share is Vic's story...

Why Jerry Seinfeld Probably Cost Microsoft a Lot More than $10 Million

2008-11-10T11:59:25Z

In this article, I want put forth a case study to demonstrate how capturing feelings on the social web can allow companies to measure the reputation of their brand.

Fake real-time blog from Document Interoperability Initiative 2 at Redmond

2008-10-29T07:47:08Z

Can Microsoft's idea of "document archetypes" and "interoperable templates" be ramped up to provide a fresh new approach to both better document interoperability and better descriptive markup?

Ballmer Says MS Will Release a New Version of Windows for the Cloud this Fall

2008-10-01T23:25:26Z

On Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly gas said that the Company will release a new version of its Windows operating system as part of a new cloud computing platform in a matter of weeks. Call it "Windows Cloud" for now, but how seriously should we take his words?

Is Adobe Still Sleeping Well?

2008-09-26T23:47:18Z

Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what...

Microsoft Research offers a sampling in Cambridge, Massachusetts

2008-09-23T00:51:32Z

The opening of Microsoft Research's latest facility was celebrated today with a free one-day symposium here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I think the symposium succeeded in its goals of showing that the research facility is an independent entity that plays by the rules of open scientific debate and funds basic research of value to society.