What Microsoft need to blow us away at BUILD
Posted Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 7:12 pm by Jason Cartwright
The countdown is on. Microsoft is set to reveal all the juicy details of Windows 8, when the first Build conference gets underway at 2AM AEST tomorrow morning. Thanks to posts from Steven Sinofsky on the Build Windows blog, together with videos from Microsoft we already know a few pieces of what’s going to be included in the next version of Windows.
What we don’t know is, well, quite a lot. There’s an awful amount of attention on Build because Microsoft has done a really good job of keeping secrets. While Build will last for 4 days, the crux of the announcements will come during the opening keynote tomorrow morning. Watching Microsoft’s movements leading up to the event, Windows 8 is being positioned as fundamentally different to the successful Windows 7, rather than simply further refinements.
So if Windows 8 is to be truly revolutionary, what does tomorrow’s Build announcement need to contain to blow us away ?
LiveID login to any Win8 machine
Using a single machine is a very rare occurrence these days, wether it be home and work, or tablet and pc, or using internet cafes and libraries, we all seem to be touching multiple machines. Managing data online is an important part of the decentralisation puzzle, but what about login credentials and personal preferences? How many hours do we spend configuring each machine individually? The answer, far too long. This could be, and should be tied to you as a person. Creating user accounts currently is an annoyingly isolated, machine-specific venture.
- Imagine using LiveID as your authentication method for any Windows 8 machine
- Imagine Microsoft allow 3rd party identity providers like Facebook and Twitter to do the same.
- Imagine if you could bring Applications as well, or purchase history like iTunes does now and easy option to download.
If Microsoft does indeed include this in Build, it will fundamentally change the way we think about computers and devices and current ownership models. Naturally you’d need to be online, at least the first time you login, then it could cache your profile for offline use.
Actually deliver on 3 screens and the cloud vision
For years we’ve heard on this strategy touted by Microsoft, but today’s experiences between the phone, desktop, tablet and tv is actually incredibly segregated. We’ve seen the graphic of the Tile / metro UI running across Windows Phone, computers and the Xbox. So with upgrades to each one of these key platforms, Microsoft has the potential to finally achieve this. In reality, I don’t think this will be a home run. Expect a good step in the right direction, but not a solution without compromises.
- Imagine a scenario where Windows Phone gets airplay style content sharing with the Xbox.
- Imagine Zune, WMP, WMC all combined to one useful media interface that works from 3” to 70”.
- Imagine everyone of your devices being a throwaway, a copy of all data online
Cloud storage given equal placement as local storage
Saving files through desktop software to online service providers is a hassle. Take Office 2010 for example, the Save As option is much more accessible and fast than navigating through Skydrive folders. This needs to be fixed for online storage to really be a serious option for mainstream consumers.
Those in the know usually store files locally, then setup syncing software like DropBox or Live Mesh to sync to the web, but you ask the average consumer in the street and I guarantee they’ve never used it.
- Imagine being able to set your default Save As destination as an online folder.
- Imagine Libraries supporting SkyDrive, Box.net, Google docs, Flickr and others.
- Imagine browsing web folders was as fast as local files in Windows Explorer.
Releases
There’s a number of Microsoft release dates that are yet to be revealed in the closing stages of 2011. Microsoft may start confirming the release dates for a number of upcoming releases.
- Windows 8
- Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango)
- Commercial SDK and Marketplace for Kinect
- Skydrive upgrade
- Windows Live Wave 5
- Xbox Dashboard update
So what’s your list of Build announcements that you think Microsoft need to make for you to be blown away ? Comment away !
Will Skydrive’s unlimited photo storage kill Flickr ?
Posted Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 9:09 pm by Jason Cartwright
Liveside reported a couple of days ago that they “recently learnt that Microsoft will soon offer unlimited photos and Office documents storage on SkyDrive Wave 5. This move could have widespread ramification for a number of businesses, especially if they get Live Sync integrated.
Everyone from Dropbox to Flickr would be dramatically impacted if Microsoft makes this aggressive move. For the past couple of years I’ve paid for a Pro Flickr account, but if SkyDrive makes that free, I’ll jump ship in a second. Windows Live Wave 5 will also see a revamp of Hotmail, after a recent Hotmail event invite suggested we should ‘forget everything we know about Hotmail’.
With the Build conference this week discussing Windows 8, it’s likely Microsoft will discuss online service integration at a much deeper level to the OS, than what’s currently on offer. New of unlimited document and photo storage will spread quickly amongst those connected, but normal users are unlikely to take advantage of it unless made dead-simple and integrated into the Windows.
The desktop suite of products under the Windows Live Essentials banner is sadly still unknown by many. The theory was that by removing apps like Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Messenger, etc from Windows, it would allow for faster updates outside of the 3 year OS cycle. In reality, things have changed and the updates of applications could easily be done through Windows Update.
Getting back to the unlimited storage in Wave 5, it does have a limitation, it is just for docs and photos, everything else will need to fit into 25GB. Right now there is 5GB of storage for Live Sync, so should Sync and SkyDrive be integration (like they always should have been), you would expect that should grow to 30GB. The limitation is clearly a move to prevent users from storing and sharing large video files, which is fair enough.
If the storage of documents and photos online does become a reality, expect a big shakeup in the industry and some services to die. It’s hard to compete with free.. ask Netscape.
More info @ LiveSide.
Commercial Kinect SDK may come with Marketplace
Posted Monday, September 5, 2011 at 7:01 pm by Jason Cartwright
On June 16th this year, Microsoft made the Kinect for Windows SDK available for enthusiasts. This was an official release providing access to all the Kinect hardware, unlike the hacks that came before it. Since then, Kinect is being used in new and exciting ways, yep, your a creative lot.
I sat down with Stuart Tansley, acting product manager for Kinect for Windows SDK from Microsoft Research and Lawrence Crumpton, Academic Developer Evangelist, to discuss how people are using the SDK. We also discussed why we still don’t have voice controls in Australia, the commercial release of the Kinect SDK and much more.
For more info, head over to Kinect For Windows SDK. For all the creative creations, check out http://www.kinecthacks.com/.
Forza 4 and Star Wars Kinect playable at Tech.Ed
Posted Friday, September 2, 2011 at 9:32 am by Jason Cartwright
During last night’s closing party at Tech.Ed Australia, attendees were treated to something pretty special. Two hotly anticipated upcoming games, Forza 4 and Star Wars Kinect were actually playable at the event. Forza 4 is due for release on the 11th of October and Star Wars Kinect was recently postponed till early 2012 release.
Forza 4 showed off some stunning visuals including tweaks to the lighting system to increase realism. Its understood that previous generations required hard coded brightness / exposure levels in certain locations because the engine wasn’t able to accurately display how the car should look.
One of the biggest questions and concerns hard-core racing sim and Forza fans have is the integration or use of Kinect in Forza 4. The good news is that Forza 4 uses Kinect in a very subtle and optional way as developers Turn10 were conscious of not dumbing it down just to appeal to entry-level gamers. Forza 4 is a driving game that uses Kinect, rather than a Kinect Game.
Star Wars Kinect was also enjoyed by attendees, allowing for the childhood lightsaber-wielding fantasies to come true. One of the biggest concerns with the game is input lag. After early builds were shown to be laggy, developers worked hard on updates to solve the issue. Its difficult to say which build was on display last night, but there was still a small lag between players movements and the Kinect interpretation translating to on-screen movement. Given the game is delayed now, this may be a problem they need some more time to solve to get the experience right before unleashing it on the public. That aside, the attendees that did play, were having a bunch of fun.
Update
Star Wars Kinect on display last night was the same build from E3 earlier this year.
Those non-gaming attendees were treated to a variety of other entertainment during the closing party. Go-Karts in the underground car park, comedy and music performances in the main arena and an array of sporting events on the show floor.
Microsoft: Australian datacentre not financially viable
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:44 pm by Jason Cartwright
It’s official, Microsoft will not be building an Australian data centre. During a Cloud round table, Microsoft explained that it is not financially viable to build and run datacentres in Australia. A very long internal spread sheet is used to calculate the economics of where and when to build datacentres across the globe.
Temperature, Power Costs, Latency, Stable governments, Geography, Natural disasters are all taken into consideration when selecting the perfect site. Australia is also burdened with the 20 Million problem. Large datacentres only really make sense when used on a large scale. Unfortunately Australia’s volume of use wouldn’t match up to the cost model Microsoft want to charge for cloud services.
Despite being available in 41 countries, Azure deployments can only be published to the US, Europe or Asia. The closest being Southeast Asia, which Microsoft assures use that latency back and forward to, isn’t a problem.
Things are constantly evolving in this space. Take the new datacentre in Dublin, which can now run servers around room temperature meaning the water and cooling requirements are significantly reduced.
Some Enterprise customer needs are serviced in Australia by Microsoft partnering with providers of smaller datacentres like Fujitsu or Telstra for services like Office 365.
Interestingly Amazon have announced they are going to build an Australian datacentre. Clearly their infrastructure scale and cost models are different than that of Microsoft’s, in reality, the end consumer sees Amazon able to make it work, when Microsoft can not.
There is NO law that prevents offshore data storage in the cloud
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:17 pm by Jason Cartwright
Image by karindalziel
There is a trend developing amongst Australian companies. Those who went down the outsourcing route, are now reining back services and looking to cloud solutions to solve common business functions. With this trend, a number of questions arise around the storage of sensitive data outside Australian borders.
Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Australia, Greg Stone, says there is actually no legislation in place that requires businesses to store private information in Australia. This is a common misconception which is often quickly dissolved when legal advice is sought, rather than just assuming or following hearsay. One exception suggested was highly sensitive government information that may need to be stored locally for national security reasons.
Often concerns about the ability for foreign governments to force the turnover of data adds to the concern of data centres being located off-shore. In reality, the ability for international governments to request data is enabled through existing channels, wether the documents be stored in a filing cabinet, or on a server.
