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Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Robbie Bach delivered the keynote last night at the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas and it was the usual mixture of self-congratulatory boosterism and product and technology demos. Here is my list of highlights:
Windows 7
After a report on how well Windows 7 is selling, there were the PC demos including a prototype Hewlett-Packard slate PC that the technical press was pining for.
It looks like a touch enabled netbook to me and while it may have a niche, I suspect I would be screaming for a keyboard (or at least a stylus) in under a minute of usage. Perhaps more interesting were the ultrathin Lenovo A300 laptop with a 21.5" screen and the Sony VAIO home entertainment notebook with a 24" screen. How big does a laptop have to get before it becomes a single element desktop?
Bing
HP is making Bing the default Web search engine and MSN the default home page on all their PCs in 42 countries.
Xbox
Ballmer put the usual lipstick on this pig and Robbie Bach appeared later to flog upcoming games (including another lucrative Halo version) and tout Project Natal, the motion sensing technology that will appear later this year to replace the standard controllers for some games.
Windows Mobile
Zzzzzz.
Mediaroom 2.0
Bach also announced Mediaroom 2.0, the latest version of Microsoft’s IPTV offering for service providers which now supports PCs and smartphoes as well as set top boxes and Xbox consoles for TV viewing.
Summary
Microsoft really did not have much of its own to show again this year. I am almost beginning to miss the goofy Bill Gates future technology skits.
Today’s the big day for Microsoft’s client operating system crew - Windows 7 is now generally available:
Today Microsoft Corp. announced the worldwide availability of its new Windows 7 operating system. Windows 7 delivers on a simple premise: make it easier for people to do the things they want on a PC. The new operating system offers a streamlined user interface and significant new features that make everyday tasks easier and allow people to get the most out of computers of all styles and sizes.
Er, about those new Windows 7 features:
Best of all, Windows 7 represents a departure from Microsoft’s usual “success is measured by the length of the feature list” philosophy. This time around, it was, “Polish, optimize and streamline what we’ve already got.”
Rather like a service pack, eh? Yes there is new eye candy in Windows 7, but wariness of antitrust regulators forced some standard applications to be dropped along the way:
Finally, out of fear of antitrust headaches, Microsoft has stripped Windows 7 of some important accessory programs. Believe it or not, software for managing photos, editing videos, reading PDF documents, maintaining a calendar, managing addresses, chatting online or writing e-mail doesn’t come with Windows 7.
What kind of operating system doesn’t come with an e-mail program?
Instead, you’re supposed to download these free apps yourself from a Microsoft Web site. It’s not a huge deal; some companies, including Dell, plan to preinstall them on new computers. But a lot of people will be in for some serious confusion — especially when they discover that the Windows 7 installer has deleted their existing Vista copies of Windows Mail, Movie Maker, Calendar, Contacts and Photo Gallery. (Mercifully, it preserves your data.)
Some good news is that since Windows 7 is Vista SP3, the device driver model did not change and Vista device drivers will work for the most part on Windows 7. However, you really should hit Microsoft’s Web site and download the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to check your Vista system for incompatibilities before upgrading. For example, I have an Epson scanner that apparently needs an update.
Finally, if I seem a little grumpy about Windows 7 - I’m not really. It seems like the operating system Vista should have been and would have been if not for a development catastrophe. I fully expect that businesses who were reluctant to adopt Vista will rapidly get on board since the defects of usability and compatibility have been remedied (by time if nothing else in the latter case).
What I do find irritating is that Vista users are being charged for what is effectively a service pack. Through no fault of their own they purchased an operating system that wasn’t finished yet. Admittedly Vista SP1 and SP2 helped, but now that Vista is finally finished Microsoft has slapped a different brand on it and is charging for the upgrade.
Microsoft’s Developer Division has a lot on its plate: Windows 7, Cloud Computing, SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, and the yearning to somehow get Visual Studio Team System to make inroads on IBM’s Rational application lifecycle management tools. Visual Studio 2010 and the accompanying .NET Framework (.NET FX 4) is Microsoft’s answer and this week they announced Beta 2 and a scheduled general availability of March 22, 2010.
You will note, of course, that VS2010 lags Windows 7 and that is a problem for developers who really want to be at the cutting edge., particularly with .NET. While you certainly can build applications with Windows 7 features with Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 SP1 that comes with Windows 7, it is not the kind of experience Microsoft would prefer for developers. More to the point for development organizations: you won’t get fired for not exploiting the new Windows 7 features in your mission critical apps so inevitably such apps will be slow to arrive and even slower because of the schedule mismatch.
As for the rest of the agenda:
Beta 2 also includes integrated tooling for SharePoint, including project templates and debugging support, and runtime and tooling support for developing great Windows 7 applications.
Since Beta 1, new Windows Azure Tools templates make it easy to get started developing Windows Azure applications, and enhanced support for Silverlight 3 databindings let you focus on writing your code.
Team Foundation Server is now included in all versions of Visual Studio 2010 with MSDN. For small teams that need only core development features such as source control, bug tracking, and build automation, TFS Basic offers a simple, streamlined install and runs on server or client machines. Test Elements users will notice a more intuitive and responsive user interface.
In the latter regard, Microsoft has completely reorganized the packaging of Visual Studio and the Microsoft Developers Network to, among other things, merge Team System into the base packages.
Mary Jo Foley reports that Microsoft’s virtual XP Mode has been released to manufacturing and will be generally available with Windows 7 on October 22. You may recall that when Microsoft revealed XP mode for the first time in May, it appeared to be lagging Windows 7.
The idea here is for XP Mode to provide a 32-bit virtual XP machine on Windows 7 for running legacy Windows XP applications that for one reason or another did not run on Vista and presumably would fare no better on Windows 7. I have personally run into several small business applications that misbehave oddly on Vista (not counting the numerous device driver incompatibilities which XP Mode won’t fix) and I’ll be interested to see if XP Mode will help. Yes, the vendors that create these applications should fix them, but that is cold comfort for small business users that depend on them. The same also applies to larger enterprises that create their own applications in-house and have been daunted by the task of converting them to Vista/Windows 7.
Note that XP mode will only be available as an add-on for Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise customers who are using PC’s with microprocessors that support hardware virtualization (Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) or AMD Virtualization (AMD-V)) and not all recent PC’s qualify. Ed Bott explains and provides an Intel list with some AMD lists in the comments. Moreover, even if your microprocessor supports hardware virtualization, your PC vendor has to support it in BIOS as well. If you absolutely need XP Mode, you might well be better off waiting to buy a machine with it preloaded unless you are willing to wade through the swamp.
