Geek In Disguise

I’m going to come right out and say it – when I saw the Google Superbowl ad, it made me think of Bing. Not because I work at Microsoft and I was thinking wow, nice ad I wish we did that (okay, maybe a bit…) but seriously, more because it showed me what I dislike about search - the constant search and re-search. Having to manually refine each time I want to find the next part of my quest. Surely we can do better than that?

That’s where I think the Bing guys are on to something. Like when you search for a camera and it says in the left side bar “hey, were you looking for the manual perhaps, or where to buy a camera or check reviews or see the specs?”

I’m not saying Bing magically does a better job of the queries that are in the Google video…more that our Bing team seems to be working to make the journey in the video much more enjoyable, much less about entering a new search all of the time. I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice this?

Taking things one step further in many ways is Microsoft Pivot which has the potential to truly bring serendipity back to the web by taking you on a journey through information – from broad to narrow and broad again. Reminds me a need to go play with Pivot some more.

Wow. That’s quite a stat…when people say to me that Microsoft is new to this whole cloud thing, that’s what I’ll respond with. I have to confess for a while I wasn’t sure about calling existing services like Messenger and Hotmail “cloud services” but they genuinely are and it feels a little like the terminology has caught up with what has been going on for a while – namely that applications and services are being delivered across the Internet from remote data centers. Of course “cloud” has taken off as a meme as companies have realised this is increasingly a smart way to consume and build business applications and get the economies of scale from running in a data enter with not tens but tens of thousands of servers.

So are Messenger and Hotmail cloud applications or services? Yes, I think they are though they’re not cloud computing in the truest sense of that term as in my mind, that is more associated with the consumption of computing capability (i.e. compute cycles) on which you may build an app like Messenger. Simple huh? :)

Anyway…if you want to read more about the history and growth of Messenger, the product team has posted a great post with some incredible stats

Messenger users now represent:

• 65% of all Internet users in Brazil
• 48% of all Internet users in Canada
• 48% of all Internet users in Spain
• 47% of all Internet users in France
• 40% of all Internet users in Italy
• 39% of all Internet users in UK

• People use Messenger for 163 billion minutes every month, which is about 9.4% of all time consumers spend on the Internet worldwide
• More than 40% of our users sign in each day (more than 130 million daily users)
• Every day, those users share over 1.5 billion conversations and send more than 9 billion messages.
• And at peak times, that drives more than 40 million “simultaneous online connections,” (the number of people signed in at the same time).

I just noticed Roger Halbheer has posted a couple of new whitepapers on Cloud Security that are not the usual techno megafest – these are more targeted at the executive summary level.

The first paper is written by Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing organization and is a high-level overview of the Cloud and its security opportunities and challenges. It’s aptly titled Security in Cloud Computing Overview.

Cloud Computing Security Considerations is a CIO or CEO level paper and roger is looking for feedback on this one – you can drop him a line at roger.halbheer@microsoft.com -  I think it does a good job of covering compliance and risk management; identity and access management; service integrity; endpoint integrity; and information protection.

I know this looks like a big fat advert in the middle of my blog….and it is….sort of. I don’t get any money if you click on it though, it’s there to show what I think is a killer offer for UK students. For only £1 per month, any student in the UK can now get a free domain and web hosting that would normally cost £4.99 a month….these pesky kids eh ;)

Anyway, Microsoft here in the UK have partnered with Webfusion (under their 123-reg brand) to launch a hosting package for students. All that’s needed is an ac.uk email address plus there is a link to our DreamSpark program to provide access to the Microsoft dev tools and the Web Platform Installer.

As offers go, this seems pretty damn good to me. A tonne of stuff, all for a quid per month.

nice plagiarism – made me smile to see the Met Police having some fun with the Microsoft Windows campaign :)

Innovators Use Bing apparently – count me as an innovator then ;) That’s all very nice of course and possibly true but the network effects of search engines (and advertising more importantly) mean you want to see that line tick upwards L-R rather than downwards as the innovators are by their very nature always looking for something new whereas the middle majority and laggards tend to be hard to shift once they’re using a product. Of course what you really want is the classic approach that innovators are the barometer for the future behaviour of the laggards but who’s to say that’s going to be the case here. I’d like to think so of course.

There are some other interesting facts coming out of the survey of 17,000 people conducted by Wunderman. More at BusinessInsider.com

Do I need some new PC speakers? No, not really as my JBL’s are serving me wonderfully but these Bowers & Wilkins PC and laptop speakers really do look (and I imagine sound) rather nice. Need vs. want. Story of my life :)

Time to add to my list for Mr S. Claus I think or ping @bowers_wilkins

An appropriate image today on Bing UK as they 6 Nations kicked off.

Nice new ad from Porsche

Lovely infographic from Ben Sandofsky that shows the birth of Twitter and its development. Icons represent developers, and particles represent files added or modified

thanks to Daz for the link

The Bing team just announced on their blog that Bing will now be the default search engine for Facebook on a global basis (previously it was default for the US only. So Bing just acquired a 400m user base…nice news for a Friday. Or any day in fact.

In related news, an interesting article this week by The Economist on Qi Lu who heads up Bing at Microsoft

Any geek worth their salt can translate this icon in to wifi speeds for you at the drop of a hat. It’s crazy though…why do we subject consumers to logos this this on a consumer product? Seriously, who gives a crap if it’s a, b, g, or n….you may as well say slowest, slow, fast, fastest. The only benefit I can see to having this nomenclature is when a consumer wants to match a PC (for example) with a router and because all manufacturers have chosen to adopt this terminology we force them to have to learn it to make buying decision.

If I use cars as an example, they often use letters to define capability or capacity – T for turbo, D for diesel, and then engine sizes like 1.8 or 3.4. Those naming conventions aren’t perfect but the wifi stuff is crazy.

There has to be a better way. At least they don’t land you with the full table to decode what those letters really mean

Rob Margel just posted a link to the Forza Motorsport 3 Theme pack for Windows 7. Nice free addition to your OS though I was a tad disappointed not to see more vehicles than just the Audi R8 in there. I guess there is mileage in this as as series though. Ahem.

As Brother Marc pointed out, the whipper snappers of Microsoft UK got a spot in The Sunday Times last weekend and it reminded me of Douglas Coupland’s classic Microserfs. Needless to say I’m not comparing the to the plot which ultimately led the intrepid Daniel and crew to jobs off in Silicon Valley :)

I read that novel back before I joined Microsoft and I remember the lines

Bill is wise.
Bill is kind.
Bill is benevolent.
Bill, Be My Friend...Please!

[In an extremely bizarre moment of coincidence, literally as a type this, I have just been given a Bill Gates commemorative coin that has been found in our house. I have literally no idea where this came from. Very spooky. Very]

Anyway….back to the post. Microserfs is a fun book and I suspect there are some elements that held true a while back but Microsoft is a changed place and the graduates on our MACH scheme as rock stars. A few years back when I led a technical team in our partner organisation, James Senior and Matt McSpirit were our MACH guys. They’re both top drawer talent and will go a long way in this company. The MACH scheme helped them though both had oodles of talent  in the first place. I expect the Rachna Patel, Sarah Melrose, Gaby Ball and Craig Parker are all the same – I love Rachna’s stated ambition of “global recognition” and that’s what you can get at Microsoft. I don’t mean that in a boastful way, it’s more a testament to the global reach of the organisation and our software.

I only dreamed of working at Microsoft when I left university – I didn’t think I was smart enough (and I’m still not sure I am) but I got a lucky break and kept my head down (ha ha) for the last 12 years or so. It turned out okay. 12 years on, it’s still an amazing place to work and you get to work with amazing people.

Back to our MACH’s. I’m a huge advocate of the whole scheme and frankly, now is the time more than ever for us to get the most from them – they’re the digital natives that many of us are not. I have one word for them: ThinkWeek

As a kid, that was the logo to have on your shoes (aka sneakers). I was a fully fledged Jordan fanatic and still have several pairs of the famous footwear. Some things never leave you I suppose….well, maybe apart from my ability to jump that is.

Well our friends at Nike have a site that if Flash rich but this week they made the jump to Silverlight and Azure as they celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Jordan partnership. Mosaic 23/25 calls on the trusty deep zoom capability of Silverlight to bring you a photo of his Airness that is made up from user submitted images. Mosaic also uses Azure to deal with traffic bursts and scale the application with our cloud platform. Azure enables the site to create new mosaic in about 10 minutes, employing up to 40 backend, parallel instances… impressive when you consider that a typical mosaic is constructed with over 5 billion pixels

I also just read over on Brandon’s blog that during the NBA All Star Weekend in Dallas, the Jordan folks will have large flat-screens that will be running a Windows 7 multitouch experience to let you interact with the history of the Jordan Brand over 25 years. They’ll also have Microsoft Surface units that allow multiple people to have fun with the brand…I’m not sure what the app is but I have high hopes from the Surface team.

I sort of lost interest in basketball at the end of MJ’s era…good to see the legend lives on though.