Microsoft Talk

Windows 7

After a much maligned Vista fiasco, Microsoft went back to the drawing board and created a new Operating System called Windows 7. When Windows 7 was pre-released a few weeks ago, early adopters hailed it the Vista replacement they had been looking for.

Steve Ballmer, at yesterday’s delivering of the keynote address at the International Consumer Electronics Show, stated that the new OS was ‘nearly final’ and ready for for regular PC users to “download and tinker with”.

Windows 7 is allegedly able to work with net-books and pc’s that have light processing, ram and memory power. From the early adopters, the praise is well earned. Some with said net-books and light powered pc’s state that Windows 7 is fast, easy to use and boots up more quickly than Vista, and drain battery life more slowly than Vista. Gone are the error messages, boot and driver issues. It’s nice to see Microsoft coming out with a product that has everyone buzzing…in a good way.

Steve Ballmer also talked about the new Live Search engines that Microsoft has been developing, to market and place on more notebooks, net-books and pc’s. And he announced a new version of its Ford Sync in-car technology that folds in the voice-operated directory service TellMe, which Microsoft bought in 2007.

He did note that while the economy is experiencing a recession, where people and corporations are saving more and spending less, Microsoft will continue to finance and develop more and better technology to enhance a ‘rich digital life’ for us all. He reassured that Microsoft will continue to develop faster and qucker than their rivals, I mean, technology peers (is what the article says).

An expert has determined that Microsoft may have earned more than US$1 billion from its controversial Windows Vista Capable sticker program, which is still at the center of a class-action suit being decided in a Washington state court.

In a court report, Keith Leffler, an associate professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Economics, estimated that Microsoft derived revenue of $1.505 billion from its Vista Capable program, in which the company partnered with hardware vendors to put stickers on PCs letting customers know the machines could run Vista reliably.

Though portions of Leffler’s statement were redacted, it appears he based his estimate on revenue figures he received from Microsoft. His statement was made public as part of a class-action lawsuit filed March 2007 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle by Washington resident Dianne L. Kelley. She claimed that Microsoft’s program was deceptive because a PC she purchased could not run a premium edition of Vista. The case is still pending.

Microsoft’s hardware partners began shipping PCs with the “Windows Vista Capable” logo in April 2006 as a way to let customers know if they purchased a new Windows XP PC before Vista was available, their machine could easily be upgraded. However, the designation was potentially confusing because a PC with the label was only guaranteed to run the least expensive, most basic version of Vista, called Home Basic.

A month later, Microsoft launched a Web site to explain the hardware requirements for different versions of Vista, as well as a new PC designation called “Windows Vista Premium Ready.” Microsoft used the new designation to label PCs that could run premium editions of Vista — such as Home Premium and Ultimate — which have more features than Home Basic. The company also provided coupons for people who purchased these PCs to upgrade to the appropriate version of Vista either for free or for little cost once the OS was made available.

Many see Vista ultimately as a failure for Microsoft, as many consumers have complained about the OS and many business customers have opted to skip it and run Windows XP until Vista’s follow-up release Windows 7 is available. This is all in spite of the fact that Microsoft spent more than five years developing Vista and claimed it would be the most successful OS for the company since Windows 95.

From Yahoo Tech: Microsoft is used to criticism; after all, it’s a standing joke that the third version of any Microsoft software is the first one that works right. But the backlash against Windows Vista in 2008 was unprecedented. The new OS had been out for a year, finding its way into new consumer systems through 2007 but not getting much adoption by business.

Throughout 2007, InfoWorld heard IT staffers and CTOs grumble about the new OS, despite some nice features for IT, such as unified install images. Application incompatibility, a UI rejiggered without any user benefit to its changes, and a bothersome security mechanism increasingly annoyed individual users and small-business consultants.

InfoWorld contributing editor Randall C. Kennedy’s Vista tests showed that it took way more resources than XP. As his tests revealed, the new Aero interface was a major resource pig, but it wasn’t the only one. And in his testing, Service Pack 1 didn’t help matters any.

The Vista backlash begins
By January 2008, 11 months after Vista shipped to the broad market, InfoWorld launched its Save XP campaign.

Our rationale was that Microsoft had already extended XP’s kill date from Dec. 31, 2007, to June 30, 2008, due to customer queasiness over Vista, so we had hoped it might do so again. It was not a birthday present that Microsoft liked.

By the time of the “Save XP” campaign, consumers and businesses alike were beginning to realize that they could not get XP past June 30 and thus no longer had the option to ignore Vista if they didn’t like it. In the six months that followed, more than 210,000 people signed an online petition to keep XP available indefinitely, and the news media was full of reports of an anti-Vista backlash. Resistance to Vista grew, especially by businesses. Major analyst firms joined in, recommending that Microsoft delay XP’s demise until 2009.

Microsoft defended Vista, saying its usability studies showed that users loved its new interface and that the new security approach was needed to finally force developers to abandon sloppy programming techniques — to be fair, Microsoft had been imploring developers since 1999 to change their behavior, to little effect.

But Microsoft was embarrassed by revelations that its own execs had trouble with Vista and that computers labeled “Vista Capable” in fact could not run Vista, calling into question Microsoft’s honesty, as well as that of many PC makers. The result was a messy lawsuit that is still dragging on, as it became clear that Microsoft was split internally about the accuracy of its “Vista Capable” certification claims.

We suppose it happens in families too, where one twin seems charmed from the start while the other lives under a shadow. Certainly that’s the case with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, the one almost universally heralded and the other widely snubbed. Still, isn’t it odd? How do two operating systems, born together and sharing so much DNA, arrive to such different fates?

According to InfoWorld Test Center’s Tom Yager, the reason is simple: Microsoft got it right when it listened to the customer and got it wrong when it didn’t. Windows Server 2008 is everything that IT buyers asked for, while Vista is the product of an older Microsoft design paradigm: “You’ll know what you want when we show it to you.”

Alas, business customers who had been happy with the trim and trusty Windows XP largely rejected the fatter, slower, bothersome Vista. So far, it doesn’t look as if Windows 7 will offer much different.

So while Vista has lived under a cloud and taken a backseat to Windows XP among IT shops (and to Windows 7 in Redmond), Windows Server 2008 has been widely praised as a mature and polished Linux killer and a no-brainer upgrade from Windows Server 2003. J. Peter Bruzzese, InfoWorld’s Enterprise Windows blogger, minced no words: “You must move to Windows Server 2008.”

The advances beyond Windows Server 2003 seem too numerous to count. At the top of Bruzzese’s list are BitLocker drive encryption, an improved firewall (that automatically configures for server roles), Address Space Load Randomization (another security enhancement), and a rewritten networking stack — all of which Vista shares, by the way. The new networking stack makes a case for hitching Windows Vista to Windows Server 2008’s wagon: Network I/O tests of Windows Server 2008 show a significant speed advantage for Vista over XP clients, especially under heavy loads.

Windows Server 2008’s ability to offload TCP/IP processing to supporting network interface cards is another way to reap big performance gains. Other advances improve availability and lighten the server admin’s load. Multipath I/O lets you configure a redundant path to storage to guard against hardware failure. Self-healing NTFS repairs file system corruption in the background, without interrupting service. Restartable Active Directory Domain Services allow other services (DNS, DHCP, WINS) to continue while AD is restored. Read Only Domain Controllers, which cache only local users’ credentials, bolster security at branch offices.

Just learning about Windows Vista? Now updated with Service Pack 1, Windows Vista is easier, safer, and gives you more entertainment choices than earlier versions of Windows. Want examples? Here are ten of the coolest things you can do:

1. Find that file in a few quick clicks
You don’t need to remember folder names to be organized anymore. Save time by instantly tracking down any document, photo, e-mail message, song, video, file, or program on your PC using Instant Search.

2. See everything you have open at a glance
Have you lost track of what files and programs you’ve opened? Flip through all your open files and windows with a simple click of your mouse using Windows Flip 3DA—you’re just one click away from everything you’re working on.

3. Keep photos organized—and ready to share
Is your collection of digital photos getting out of hand? You don’t have to search through folders to track down the ones you want. Now you can tag your photos with a date, keyword, rating, or any label you choose so you can find them quickly and easily in Windows Photo Gallery.

4. Create a custom movie without a fine arts degree
Making a great home movie just got easier. Use Windows Movie Maker to blend videos and photos into a rich movie, complete with your own soundtrack, titles, and credits.

5. Keep track of your music—and play it anywhere
The larger your collection of digital music grows, the harder it can be to organize and keep track of it. But now you can easily scroll, flip, browse through, and play your entire music library in Windows Media Player 11. You can even create new playlists of your favorite tracks with a single click.

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Great question that has been popping up all over the internet. XP users concerned about having to upgrade.

Courtesy Guy R. Briggs: Q: My company just bought me a Dell Vostro PC, with the Windows XP “downgrade” installed at my request instead of Windows Vista. If in a year’s time I do my annual PC-cleansing routine of FORMAT C:, OS re-install, patch/update and Acronis image, what am I going to have to do to get a machine that works?

Dell gave me both Vista and XP installer CDs. Will I have to install Vista first?

A: The short answer is “no,” meaning there is no need to install Vista first. The XP installation CD that Dell gave you works like any other XP installation CD. You install XP, enter the product key and activate it. Microsoft will continue to do activations until extended support expires in 2014, perhaps longer.

Two things to be careful of: (1) you need the product key, so make sure you keep it in a safe place, and (2) make sure you’re installing XP on the same machine.

Microsoft’s policy is that the OS dies with the machine, so even if the old machine has been melted down to its component base metals and will never run any OS again, you can’t “move” the license to a new machine.

Your annual wipe ‘n’ reload might go a bit easier, especially as support for XP decreases, if you save all your current device drivers beforehand.

Offers Additional Opportunities for IT Pros and Hardware Vendors
Q&A: Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Windows Server and Solutions, says coming improvements in the Windows Server operating system will offer greater opportunities for customers and partners in areas such as virtualization and scalability.

In part:

What sort of reception has Windows Server 2008 been getting in the market?

Laing: There’s been a lot of excitement about this product and its momentum is still growing. For example, since its launch in February, we have seen more than one million downloads of the RTM versions of Windows Server 2008, and more than 500,000 customers and 90,000 partners trained on Windows Server 2008.

But the real measure of its success is the bottom-line svalue our customers have been experiencing. For example, earlier this year researchers at consulting agency Capgemini looked at several companies and institutions that were using Windows Server 2008. They found that Windows Server 2008 streamlined their IT operations and improved management, security and reliability. IT costs were reduced by up to $124,000 per year through staff efficiencies and reduced downtime.

How does Windows Server 2008 R2 differ from the previous version? What are the most notable new features?

Laing: We think it’s important to give customers a predictable timetable to plan for the next versions of our server technologies. We are working on an update release for Windows Server, named Windows Server 2008 R2, which is in line with the release cadence Bob Muglia outlined several years ago. As part of this update, we are integrating the latest service and feature packs with some new technology investments focused around four categories: virtualization, management, scalability and the Web.

From a virtualization standpoint, we’re building on our state-of-the-art virtualization technology with a newer version of our Hyper-V hypervisor technology as well as some new features that customers have been asking us for, such as Live Migration. This feature, which is included with Windows Server 2008 R2 at no additional charge, lets you move a running workload from one machine to another in milliseconds, with no loss of performance from the user’s point of view.

On the management front, Windows Server 2008 R2 will be a foundation for datacenter automation. We are making multiple improvements that give customers the reins to truly manage their servers the way they desire, whether that is locally or remotely, via a graphical user interface (GUI) or from the command line via Windows PowerShell. We are also making improvements to help customers reduce and better manage their datacenter power consumption. Windows Server 2008 R2 can automatically turn processor cores on and off based on the workload of the system, or reduce the power consumption by adjusting processor speed.

Another area of innovation in Windows Server 2008 R2 is the ability to more easily administer and support Web applications on a streamlined Web platform. We’ve integrated Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS) manager extensions to make it simpler to administer local and remote Web servers, and added support for ASP.NET and PHP to the Server Core.

And finally, we continue to invest in scalability. In Windows Server 2008 R2, we have built in support for up to 256 logical processors, which will allow our customers to more fully exploit today’s powerful CPUs, deploying only the features they choose and scaling those solutions to meet their organization’s needs.

If you like watching sports, you’ll love Windows Media Center SportsLounge.1 Included in Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate, this rich portal takes your sports television viewing experience to a whole new interactive level. A partnership with FOXSports.com, SportsLounge is the place to catch your favorite games, players, teams, and fantasy sports leagues—all from the most comfortable chair in your den.

Keep an eye on the Live Scoreboard

With On Now in SportsLounge, you can watch your favorite game live, while seeing real-time scores on the Live Scoreboard that runs across the top of the screen. The displayed scores are shown for all the additional games on other channels that are available with your current antenna, cable, or satellite TV service.

If you want to quickly see what’s happening with a different game on another available channel, just select the game from the Live Scoreboard, and Windows Media Center will instantly tune to that channel with instant access—no need to navigate the program guide.

Find upcoming games

You no longer need to search the entire program guide to find out when the games you care about most are coming on. On Later finds all the games airing over a two-week period that are available from your television service and neatly arranges them according to date and sport.

You can record a future game at the press of a button on your remote while viewing the upcoming schedule. Just find the upcoming game you want to watch, press the record button, and Windows Media Center adds it to your scheduled recordings.

Track your favorite players

With the Players feature, you can set up Windows Media Center to track your favorite professional athlete. Players displays stats over the course of the season or the stats for a current or recently played game. If you’re using the On Now feature and watching one game, and your favorite player makes a huge play or is on deck to bat on another channel, you’ll be notified of that event; SportsLounge will give you the option to directly tune to that channel to watch the play.

It’s no secret that the nature of software development is radically changing. Come to PDC2008 to experience Microsoft’s vision for cloud computing and building applications that seamlessly bridge the gaps between PC, Web, and phone, and be the first to see the full range of advances in Windows 7, the next major version of the Windows client operating system.

What are the platform infrastructure details behind the Mesh technologies? Corporate Vice President of Live Platform Services, David Treadwell, will be spilling all the beans in his PDC keynote in just a few weeks, but in this Q&A he gives us a sneak peek. David explains how there’s so much more to Mesh than just the user experience, and how he and his team will be revealing the underlying particulars that fall below the line at PDC – the platform infrastructure that helps developers build stellar Software + Services apps. And did Treadwell mention bits that will be given out at the PDC? We think he did, but you gotta listen to find out more about what the PDC team affectionately calls the “goods.”

Use this letter to convince your boss to let you attend the event!

Dear {Enter Your Manager’s Name Here},

I enjoy my job and have always appreciated how well you manage me. As you know, I don’t ask for much. I am a humble employee with simple needs, and I would like to attend Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles, October 27th-30th.

Wait! Before you respond, let me explain. This is not the typical conference that is more boondoggle than substance. The PDC (which is what the kids on Facebook call it) is where the best and brightest come together with the technical geniuses of Microsoft.

The PDC is where the speakers are not marketing folks, but actual developers and technologists who build the products. Remember those tough questions about Microsoft tools we had last week that we could not find an answer to? Well, I will have an opportunity to talk directly to the product team from Microsoft. In fact, one night they all gather in one place where I can ask all the questions we ever had and get real answers! And business cards!

But it isn’t just the speakers; it’s the other attendees. These are some of the smartest folks using the same tools and technologies we are. I can learn a lot from them and see how they have overcome issues we have run into. I keep reading the blogs (on my own time, of course) and everyone says that networking is one of the top reasons to attend.

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Software plus services approach fuels adoption as applications and services, new phones, and updates reach customers.

Choice: A Smartphone for Every Style

Today, customers can choose from a growing portfolio of new Windows Mobile 6.1-based phones and updates, with more expected in 2008 and beyond, bringing new time-saving features, easier phone navigation and management as well as increased security safeguards. Windows Mobile 6.1 supports System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 and Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 advanced mobile policies, helping keep business information protected. Information about the latest updates and new phones is available at http://www.windowsmobile.com.

Recent related announcements include the following:

• AT&T announced that upgrades are available now for the BlackJack II, MOTO Q Global and AT&T Tilt smartphones, with new Windows Mobile 6.1-based phones launching later this year.

• Intermec Technologies Corp. today announced that its CN3 mobile computer is the first rugged handheld to operate on Windows Mobile 6.1 and will begin shipping later this month.

• The HTC Touch Diamond with TouchFLO 3D, HTC’s captivating 3-D touch interface, surpassed 1 million in global phone sales in its first three months and is expected to debut in the U.S. soon. HTC is also shipping the HTC Touch Pro and HTC S740.

• Sony Ericsson has released a beta SDK for Windows Mobile 6.1 for building and testing XPERIA Panels and applications. The SDK, integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio, offers developers a familiar environment and sets a new direction for a rich, immersive user experience with a focus on hardware-accelerated visual effects and interactivity. The XPERIA X1 will be available soon.

• Velocity Mobile announced the Velocity 103, a touchscreen device that features the easy-to-use Odyssey interface and Velocity Over the Air updates. Along with the Velocity 111 and Velocity 83, the Velocity 103 will be available later this year.

Versatility: Applications and Services Enhance the Windows Mobile Experience

Helping people discover new experiences, Microsoft created the new Total Access (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/totalaccess), a guide to everything people can do with a Windows Mobile phone. Available online by registration, the site provides exclusive offers such as trial applications, extras such as ring tones and wallpapers, and how-to content.

To accommodate the creation of new applications, Windows Mobile provides a flexible, open platform for developers. AT&T announced Nikos Konstas, an independent developer from the United Kingdom, as the winner of the AT&T Game Development Contest for Windows Mobile, the first collaboration of all members of the mobile gaming ecosystem to further innovation of games on the powerful Windows Mobile platform.

Microsoft LifeCam users get bonus with access through new Windows Vista gadget.

Microsoft Corp. unveils Video Messages, a groundbreaking service that combines the flexibility of e-mail and voice mail with the personal expression of a video call; it is the video version of voice mail. Video Messages allows consumers to record and send personalized videos that their friends and family can access anytime, anywhere they are online* the perfect solution when they are not available for a live video chat.

Microsoft is offering this new service through a LifeCam video messages gadget and a Web site so everyone can get in on the fun. Video Messages is the perfect way to send a personalized “happy birthday” message to a friend or have the kids leave a quick “hello” message to grandma across the country when she is not home.

“Video Messages offers a groundbreaking way to communicate,” said Bennie Soto, product marketing manager at Microsoft. “It provides a free, easy and fun way to stay connected and share the special moments in your life without thinking twice about time zones or busy schedules; you’ll never have to plan a specific time for video calling again.”

Go, Go LifeCam Gadget

The best way to experience Video Messages is with a LifeCam video messages gadget, available for people running Windows Vista and using a supported Microsoft LifeCam. By downloading the new gadget, LifeCam users can create, send and receive video messages from their desktop. They can even select six of their top friends who will always be visible in the video messages gadget just like storing top friends’ numbers on speed dial for easy access. This added convenience is a great benefit for LifeCam customers because the Video Messages controls are always available; they can just click on a friend’s image, record a video and hit send. A demo of the LifeCam video messages gadget in action is available at http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/digitalcommunication/videomessage.mspx.

Just learning about Windows Vista? Now updated with Service Pack 1, Windows Vista is easier, safer, and gives you more entertainment choices than earlier versions of Windows. Want examples? Here are ten of the coolest things you can do:

1. Find that file in a few quick clicks
You don’t need to remember folder names to be organized anymore. Save time by instantly tracking down any document, photo, e-mail message, song, video, file, or program on your PC using Instant Search.

Just open the Start menu and begin typing in the Instant Search box—Windows Vista searches file names, application names, the full text of all files, and metadata, and then displays the results right away.

2. See everything you have open at a glance
Have you lost track of what files and programs you’ve opened? Flip through all your open files and windows with a simple click of your mouse using Windows Flip 3DA—you’re just one click away from everything you’re working on.

Plus, in Windows Aero,A when you rest your mouse pointer on the taskbar, you can see thumbnail images of the windows you have open without having to expand them—so you can find what you’re looking for at a glance.

3. Keep photos organized—and ready to share
Is your collection of digital photos getting out of hand? You don’t have to search through folders to track down the ones you want. Now you can tag your photos with a date, keyword, rating, or any label you choose so you can find them quickly and easily in Windows Photo Gallery.

You can also use Photo Gallery to fix and edit photos, and then share them with family and friends through slideshows, e-mail, or prints—so everything you need for photos is in one place.

4. Create a custom movie without a fine arts degree
Making a great home movie just got easier. Use Windows Movie Maker to blend videos and photos into a rich movie, complete with your own soundtrack, titles, and credits.

When your masterpiece is ready to share with family and friends, you can easily create a professional-looking DVD in Windows DVD Maker.U

5. Keep track of your music—and play it anywhere
The larger your collection of digital music grows, the harder it can be to organize and keep track of it. But now you can easily scroll, flip, browse through, and play your entire music library in Windows Media Player 11. You can even create new playlists of your favorite tracks with a single click.

You can keep your music moving with you by easily synchronizing your portable music device. Or you can share the contents of your entire library with other computers on your home network or with digital media devices such as Xbox 360.

6. Surf multiple waves of the web at once
Do you like to jump from website to website? Satisfy your appetite for multitasking without having to open several browser windows. You can open multiple webpages in one window and easily click between them with the tabbed browsing feature in Windows Internet Explorer 7—plus, you can see thumbnail images of all your open webpages at a glance with Quick Tabs.

7. Record and watch TV on your time
Watch TV on your own schedule—not the TV networks’ schedule. If your PC has a TV tuner, you can record, watch, and pause live television on your desktop or mobile PC using Windows Media Center.M

With multiple TV tuners, you can even record one channel while watching another. When and where you watch your shows is now up to you.

8. Bring your TV and PC together—and take home entertainment to a new level
Tired of huddling around the PC for entertainment? Connect your PC to one or more televisions in your home using a Windows Media CenterM Extender like Xbox 360, and enjoy all your digital entertainment on the big screen—from photo slideshows, home videos, and digital music to live and recorded TV shows and movies.

9. Keep the things you need most at your fingertips
No need to open a web browser to check traffic and weather, open a calculator to add up a few numbers and open an application to see your calendar. Now you can put mini-applications called gadgets right on your desktop, where you can see and use them whenever the mood strikes. Just use the Windows Sidebar pane to store and organize your favorite gadgets.

10. Help your kids stay safer
Worried about your kids’ computer use or about what they may encounter online? Now you can give your kids a safer experience and set PC usage boundaries for them by using the centralized Parental Controls in Windows Vista. You can even restrict games and websites based on your family’s values.

Plus, you can better protect your PC and your personal information, as well as your family, with built-in security tools like Windows Defender and anti-spam and phishing filters.

An advertising blitz intended to help Microsoft polish the tarnished brand of its Windows Vista operating system began this week with a head-scratcher of a commercial.

The ad features Jerry Seinfeld flexing some new shoes, Bill Gates adjusting his shorts and no mention of Vista. Microsoft says the ad is meant to get people talking, and that other parts of the marketing campaign will actually get into what its software can do.

But the advertising, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars over several years, is really just “air cover,” according to Bill Veghte, the Microsoft executive who is responsible for sustaining Windows, probably the most lucrative franchise in history.

For more than a year, Mr. Veghte and his team have been developing ways to transform the experience of buying and using personal computers that run Microsoft software.

Corps of Microsoft engineers, for example, have been dispatched to tweak hardware and software to make Vista PCs faster and less crash-prone. Microsoft has stepped into the world of PC retailers in a way it never has before, offering training and advice — and even paying to put hundreds of “Windows gurus” in stores.

By now, Microsoft insists that most of the frustrating technical problems with Vista, which was introduced in January 2007 after repeated delays, have been resolved — and many industry executives and analysts agree.

Vista represented a big shift from its predecessor, XP, so it required a lot of new drivers — and Microsoft did a poor job of communicating how much work was needed. Often, Microsoft said, an older driver still worked with Vista, but it slowed down the PC or made it crash unpredictably. Today, 77,000 hardware devices and components are compatible with Vista, more than twice the number when Vista was introduced.

In a Seattle warehouse, Microsoft built a “retail experience center” to test ideas about the behavior of shoppers. With retailing now accounting for 40 percent of PC sales worldwide, and growing twice as fast as other sales channels, Microsoft decided it had to get more directly involved instead of just delivering products and promotional subsidies. “We weren’t coming in with the tools and people to help them,” said Bill Brownell, general manager of retail marketing at Microsoft.

Microsoft is sharing its research with retailers. It is also paying for a few hundred Windows experts to talk to shoppers in Best Buy, Circuit City and other stores. These Windows gurus technically work for employment agencies, but Microsoft recruits and trains them.

With PC makers, Microsoft started an initiative called Vista Velocity to improve performance. It includes days of specialized testing, close collaboration with Microsoft engineers and fine-tuning of software programs and hardware drivers. On some models, for example, the start-up time for Vista has been reduced by 60 percent.

Share more than photos; share an experience.

First there was the snapshot, and then came video. Now there is Microsoft Photosynth, a new service from Microsoft Live Labs that goes far beyond how you now view, experience and share photos.

You can share or relive a vacation destination or explore a distant museum or landmark; with a digital camera and your own creativity and inspiration, you can use Photosynth to transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your “synth” is put right in your shoes, sharing in the same sense of exhilaration and wonder that you did at the time, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos.

Imagine yourself beneath the Eiffel Tower or in the heart of Times Square. Now imagine being able to see that exact scene in an amazing new way. With Photosynth, you can look up or down, pan from left to right, zoom in, or pull back to reveal the full sense of where you were. Photosynth provides incredibly realistic close-up detail of a place as seen in the collaboration with National Geographic. Exclusive synths of some of the world’s most renowned locations, such as Machu Picchu and the Parthenon, were created using photographs taken by National Geographic.

An Entirely New Medium

Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to estimate where a photo was taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos. The potential uses of Photosynth can range from sharing experiences to storytelling and documentation:

• Share experiences. Think about the times you have been in the midst of a beautiful location or having a once-in-a-lifetime experience and wished you could share it with more immediacy and sense of place than still photos or video can capture. Photosynth puts viewers in the center of the moment and in control of how they experience it.

• Tell a story. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a synth composed of 20 or 50 photos makes visual storytelling as rich and compelling as a short story. Synths capture the totality of important moments in time, such as the anticipation and joy of an entire wedding party and guests at the moment vows are exchanged, or the elation of a child scoring a winning soccer goal as the fans cheer.

• Form a community. Synths can bring the best of your digital photos together with the best of everybody else’s. Imagine if you took a trip to Rome with your friends and each of you took photos of the Trevi Fountain. Later, you can tag and upload all of the photos from each person’s camera to create a synth of it. In addition, you can share that experience and your favorite places with others by embedding the synth in your profile on a social networking site.

• Educate or archive. If you want to re-create how you decorated your home for the holidays or how you planted your garden last season, the ability of Photosynth to provide intricate detail allows documentation impossible to achieve with conventional photos.

Using Photosynth

Getting started with Photosynth is easy:

• To begin, just take a few dozen digital photos — 20 to 300 photos are required, depending on the size of the place or object — with overlap between each shot, from a number of locations and angles.

• Next, download a small, free software application to your computer from http://photosynth.com. This software works in concert with the Photosynth Web site, which is also a free service.

Is this a product and service you’ll use? Tell me how you will use Photysynth in your daily personal and work life.

Browse Encouraging Health.

On July 24th, Microsoft announced that it intends to acquire DATAllegro Inc., a provider of breakthrough data warehouse appliances. The acquisition will extend the capabilities of Microsoft’s mission-critical data platform, making it easier and more cost-effective for customers of all sizes to manage and glean insight from the ever-expanding amount of data generated by and for businesses, employees and consumers.

“DATAllegro is a tremendously innovative company that has started to redefine the data warehouse market,” said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft. “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers enterprise-class capabilities in business intelligence and data warehousing, and the addition of the DATAllegro team and its technology will take our data platform to the highest scale of data warehousing.”

“Integrating DATAllegro’s nonproprietary hardware platform and flexible software architecture into Microsoft SQL Server will provide customers with the strongest offering in the market,” said Stuart Frost, CEO of DATAllegro. “We are excited to join forces with Microsoft and continue the innovation this company was founded on.”

Unlike most data warehouse appliance vendors targeting the 1–25 terabyte range, DATAllegro has specialized in large-volume, high-performance data warehouses. DATAllegro’s data warehouse appliance installations boast some of the largest data volume capacities in the industry — up to hundreds of terabytes on a single system. DATAllegro clients span such markets as retail, telecommunications and manufacturing.

According to a report by Donald Feinberg of Gartner Inc., “As data warehouses are becoming more strategic to organizations and as data warehouse appliances mature, the adoption rate of the data warehouse appliance is increasing rapidly.” (“Data Warehouse Appliances Are More Than Just Plug-And-Play,” July 13, 2007.)

In addition to offering large capacities, DATAllegro’s patent-pending technology is designed for complex workloads including high concurrency and mixed queries. DATAllegro is one of the few data warehouse appliances built on a nonproprietary hardware platform including Dell and Bull servers and EMC storage. This flexible architecture makes it ideally suited to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server.

After completing the acquisition, Microsoft will retain most of DATAllegro’s team as well as its headquarters in Aliso Viejo, Calif., making it a Center of Excellence for data warehousing. Existing DATAllegro customers will continue to be supported.

What this means for you and me, is faster and more effecient service from any company.

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