Geek In Disguise

Microsoft Pivot: from the wizards at Live Labs

stevecla01 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:39:11 GMT

I just sat through Gary Flake’s session on Microsoft Pivot – a new project from Live Labs that frankly, blew me away. I sort of thought I knew what was coming but I didn’t and the sooner the video of his session is up the better – it’s one of those things you need to see. Here’s what the website says of Pivot

Pivot is an application intended to make it easier to view and interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. It enables the visualization of trends in related information using our own Seadragon technology. Pivot is currently available by invitation only to a small technical audience but you can learn more by visiting our website.

It’s an invite only trial for the moment so head over to www.getpivot.com to sign yourself up.

Microsoft Office 2010 public beta is live

stevecla01 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:05:29 GMT

There goes the network at PDC for a few hours….

I’ve been using the beta for a little while now and it’s a big improvement over the Tech Preview. Outlook in particular has some great new features that I expect Kurt Del Bene will demo in the next 30 mins. PowerPoint also gets some of the cool transitions that I’ve been waiting for.

go grab the beta

IE9 breaks cover at PDC09

stevecla01 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:40:44 GMT

Steven Sinofsky delivered a killer keynote here today at PDC09

There is some great IE9 content already up on Channel 9

Office Mobile 2010 beta released

stevecla01 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:46:00 GMT

As well as the Office 2010 beta for PC today, the Office Mobile 2010 beta was announced. Available now from Marketplace

Seesmic desktop on Windows

stevecla01 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:13:42 GMT

I just loaded up Seesmic desktop for Windows. thanks @loic and team…perhaps I can finally lay Twhirl to rest?

looks great so far and I love the support for Twitter lists.

Required reading here at PDC09

stevecla01 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:26:55 GMT

lots of ‘em on the Windows Azure stand

What does a Windows Azure container look like?

stevecla01 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:51:54 GMT

A lot like this….on site at the PDC in LA today.

Dilbert on the future of media

stevecla01 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:25:30 GMT

ho hi

Gartner Fellows interview with Ray Ozzie on Cloud Computing

stevecla01 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:04:20 GMT

Just over a week ago I was sent the Gartner Fellows Interview With Microsoft's Ray Ozzie on Cloud Computing. It’s a great read with Ray’s usual style of giving intriguing answers to tough questions about Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy. I asked our folks in Redmond if this would be released publicly which it now has been on the link above.

The exec summary is:

Key Findings

Ozzie's (and thus, Microsoft's) vision of cloud computing emphasizes hybrid enterprise/cloud computing, where organizations choose when and where computing takes place locally versus in cloud-based infrastructure, and emphasizes that the on-premises and cloud-based solutions work seamlessly together.
As with early encryption issues, Ozzie believes that security and privacy issues will be addressed as the industry matures in a combination of legislative advances, as well as industry cooperation.
Ozzie's vision for cloud computing includes system infrastructure, an application platform and finished applications being delivered as a service.
Microsoft is investing in its own data centers because it must in order to provide its consumer-based services. It believes it is helping to lead the industry in providing innovations in data center architectures.
Ozzie believes the future of cloud computing is in the experience delivered via a browser across multiple devices — mobile, PC and TV-type screens — which is a vision he refers to as "three screens and a cloud."

but for anyone with more than a passing interest in Microsoft’s move to the cloud, it’s worth reading the entire transcript.

3 screens and a cloud is the emerging mantra that I expect we’ll hear much more about at the PDC this week. The third bullet up there in the exec summary also points towards our intention to offer IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud offerings.

Before reading this document it’s actually worth a quick look back at Ray’s Services Strategy Memo from 2008 and even more so the leaked Internet Services disruption memo of 2005. Remarkable progress has been made since the first memo and the story is getting much clearer from the second memo. In particular, Ray understood the need for big investment in data centers and that is starting to pay off. He talks a lot about data centers in this Gartner interview. In particular he talks about the notion of scale out using homogenous equipment. It’s a big change from only a few years ago when scale was always considered to be scaling upwards – now with mega scale data centers you can move to a 9-5 rather than 24 x 7 support environment as you have so much redundancy built in you can design for the inevitable hardware failure, as well as adding scale on demand rather than scale up front. It changes the economics of buying “computing capability” massively and it’s why there is so much interest in cloud computing right now. If you’re Ticketmaster.com, it makes a tonne of sense to be able to scale on demand for the launch day of the sale of U2 tickets rather than having to buy hardware just for that day and have it latent for the rest of the year. Plus you can move CAPEX to OPEX.

Ray then goes on to talk about the changes for developers in this era of cloud computing. This will inevitably a huge topic here at PDC and it’s arguably the area where Microsoft can really shine. Taking the millions of developers who can write to the Windows & .net platforms in to the cloud as seamlessly as possible.

Ray talks about security and standards and the topic of relaxing of regulations to allow the cloud era to thrive. It’s a big topic and one that is going to grow in importance as software becomes increasingly part of the fabric of business. When that business is restricted by regulations that were designed for the analog era, the pressure for change will grow hugely.

Finally Ray talks about change in the post Bill Gates era. It’s be interesting to watch from the inside as there is clearly a different style at play which Ray acknowledges.

He’s turning the tanker for sure….and this week is another turn on the wheel.

Final voting for my blog

stevecla01 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:45:49 GMT

We’re down to the last few days of voting in the 2009 Computer Weekly blog awards. If you like my blog and think it’s worthy of your vote I’d appreciate 30 seconds of your time to cast a vote.

I’m listed under Individual IT professional male

thanks in advance

Steve

PGR Ferrari Edition on Zune HD

stevecla01 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:21:24 GMT

This is how PGR: Ferrari Edition looks on my Zune HD. In fact, it looks a LOT better than that and the gameplay, once you get used to the sensitivity of the accelerometer, is excellent. If you have a Zune HD, it’s a free download from the apps tab within the desktop software. Now looking forward to the Twitter app.

PGR: Ferrari Edition

Tear through the streets of London, Tokyo, and New York using intuitive tilt and touch controls. Choose from 12 Ferrari cars and test your skill in 33 events in Career Mode. Go head-to-head against three other players in a wireless network race. Share your records with your friends and race their ghost cars in Time Trial mode. Earn kudos for racing with style—it's not just winning, but how you win that counts.

PDC09 photos

stevecla01 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:49:00 GMT

My Flickr set for PDC09 photos . Yesterday was a pink day…with fine coffee at Toast

PDC09 brain strain

stevecla01 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:44:42 GMT

I’m back in LA this week for our Professional Developers Conference – a time to catch up with some friends from Redmond, press friends and customers and partners. It’s also a time to fill my brain with tech talk and I’m looking forward to sessions on Azure and SharePoint in particular.

I’ll be tweeting and blogging as much as I can though I’ve historically found this extremely hard to do at conferences so your mileage may vary as they say.

What am I looking forward to most? Day 1 keynote really…some cool stuff coming.

Under 6 weeks til Christmas

stevecla01 — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:44:00 GMT

time for some light relief from Bing

Anticipation

stevecla01 — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:20:00 GMT

Still a great advert