What's New

The Microsoft / Yahoo! Search Alliance

Microsoft and Yahoo! have unveiled the details of their collaboration on Internet search with the new Search Alliance website.  This is the result of a deal made earlier in the year where Microsoft agreed to provide the Bing search engine for Yahoo! search.

The website details how the two companies will work together and how they will still be competing.  This is important in order to assuage any fears Google people might have over the deal proving anti-competitive.

How Yahoo! and Microsoft will work together:

• Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace.
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to certain Yahoo! search technologies.
• Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by adCenter) search results.
• Full implementation of the terms of the Search Alliance is expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory clearance.
• Yahoo!’s Sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients, and Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

How Yahoo! and Microsoft will compete:

• The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance does not include each company’s display advertising, web properties and products, email, instant messaging, or any other aspect of the companies’ businesses.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! and Microsoft will innovate their own consumer search experiences to compete for search users and search queries.
• Yahoo! and Microsoft will service their respective publishers, also known as affiliate search partners.
• Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.

Microsoft simplifies Visual Studio

Microsoft is gearing up to release a version of its Visual Studio integrated developer environment that it promises will be easy enough for even business managers to use.

On Aug. 23, the company will release a beta version of Visual Studio, called Visual Studio LightSwitch, aimed at simplifying the process of developing applications.
"Professional developers are no longer the only people building business applications," said Dave Mendlen, Microsoft senior director of developer tools platform marketing.
Often, it is a business manager who will see a need for an office application, and try to rig one together using tools such as spreadsheets or word processing macros.
"LightSwitch gives business end users a simple way to create their own applications," he said.
The software will be a stripped-down version of Visual Studio bundled with a set of templates that cover a number of different enterprise processes, which a user can deploy to set up an application.
"You can start with one of these templates and add on top of it, using either Visual Basic or C#," Mendlen said. In some cases, the user may not have to add in code at all.
Applications built with LightSwitch can be run either on a local machine or on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing service, and be accessed with a browser using Microsoft Silverlight.
In addition to the templates, the software also offers a number of prebuilt functions, called experiences. Users must also identify a data source for the program, which can not only be a database such as SQL Server or Microsoft Access, but even a SharePoint repository or an Excel or Microsoft Word file.
The user interface is unique insofar that development mode and run-time mode are not separated, meaning that as soon as a user makes a change it will show up in the test instance of the program being run, Mendlen said.
By using the Microsoft .NET framework, LightSwitch also creates programs in such a way that, should they become widely used within an office environment, they can be easily taken over by a Visual Studio developer for further enhancement and improved scalability.
Microsoft is still in the process of finalizing the templates it will include with the first release of LightSwitch.
Mendlen describe one possible template: a centralized contact list. A manager of 30 salespeople for instance could use LightSwitch to create a single contact list, instead of having each sales person maintaining a list through Excel or Microsoft Word.
Microsoft has not set the pricing for LightSwitch, though it will be modest enough to be appealing "to the average business user," Mendlen said. The company has not determined how long the beta period will last.

Microsoft is also working with other third-party Visual Studio tool vendors to help them build additional templates. Eventually, the company would like to build out a process that large enterprises to build out their own internal-use templates as well.
For the templates, Microsoft created a new Extensible Markup language (XML)-based file format, though Mendlen did not specify the name of this format.
Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond praised the LightSwitch's focus on providing a way to easily build Web and cloud-based applications.
Development environments for allowing business managers to build applications with little no coding is not a new concept--Think of IBM's Lotus Notes as an example--but most of these products were client-server or local-machine based.
"In that spirit, there should be an easy way to build basic Web applications as it was to build Access applications back in the day," he said.

MIT researchers foresee an Internet that's 100x faster

MIT researchers have developed technology that they say not only will make the Internet 100 to 1,000 times faster, but also could make high-speed data access a lot cheaper.

The trick to such dramatic performance gains lies within the routers that direct traffic on the Internet, according to Vincent Chan, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT, who led the research team. Chan told Computerworld that replacing electrical signals inside the routers with faster optical signals would make the Internet 100 times -- if not 1,000 times -- faster, while also reducing the amount of energy it consumes.
What would the Internet be like if it ran that much faster? Today, a user who has a hard time downloading a 100MB file would be able to easily send a 10GB file, according to Chan.
With increasingly powerful computer processors and bandwidth-hungry applications, the Internet will reach a "choke point" within three to five years, Chan said.
Today's routers have trouble dealing with incoming fiber-optic signals, so those signals are converted into electrical signals that can be stored in memory until they can be processed, according to MIT's report. The electrical signals are subsequently converted back to optical signals so they can be sent back out.
That process eats up time and energy, so Chan and his team developed technology they call flow switching that would eliminate the need for such conversions.
A speedier Internet would be a huge accomplishment, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. "Right now, the network is the bottleneck for hosted computing. This change could transform the industry as we know it," he said. "We are going to need a faster Internet. We need it now."
However, analysts noted that it would be expensive to replace current routers with the new technology.

Microsoft's Not-So-Secret Plan to Cripple Windows XP

Microsoft isn't particularly pleased about the continuing success of Windows XP, which has more than twice the installed base of Windows Vista and 7 put together. So it's trying its hardest to kill the operating system that won't die, including refusing to issue security patches for XP SP2, putting many XP users at risk. Is that the right way to get people to upgrade?

A report out yesterday from Net Applications shows that Windows XP has more than twice the market share of Windows 7 and Windows Vista combined -- 61.87% for XP in July, compared to 14.46% for Windows 7, and 14.34% for Windows Vista.

Gregg Keizer of Computerworld reports that XP market share is dropping very slowly, and that its current rate of decline, it won't drop under 50% until January 2010. And even then, it will far outpace Windows Vista and Windows 7, and likely have more market share than both combined.

This is bad news for Microsoft, and it's doing everything that it can to kill XP.Microsoft officialy retired XP SP2 from all support on July 13, which means it will no longer issue security patches for that version of XP.

So if Microsoft can get SP2 users to upgrade to Windows 7, it will have accomplished a great deal. That may well be the motivation for not issuing a security patch for a Windows shortcut bug that puts those users and others at risk. Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security, told Computerworld that "There's a ton of people still running SP2."

Microsoft clearly would like to make life uncomfortable for XP users. In not issuing this patch, that's exactly what the company is doing. True, because XP SP2 is at end of life, Microsoft did not have to issue a patch. But this is a serious security issue, and XP SP2 users are clearly at risk now.

Microsoft has been trying in other ways to get people to upgrade from XP. It has announced that Internet Explorer 9 won't run on XP, and neither will the new version of Windows Live Essentials.

So there's both a carrot and a stick involved in the plan. The carrot: If you upgrade to Windows 7, you get to run IE9 and other software. The stick: If you don't upgrade, you'll be vulnerable to malware.

There's a better way to get people to upgrade: Design an operating system so good that XP users will happily give up XP.