I was listening to the most recent TWiT where there was discussion about the recent algo change at Google.  During the conversation, there was an off-hand comment about whether or not the following relationship held water:

Google:Social as Microsoft:Search

That one kind of bent my mind around a bit.  There isn’t any new thought here.  Social is presenting all kinds of problems for Google, and despite their success in South America and some other locales with Orkut, they really haven’t made much of a dent in social.  A fact made more known by the recent additions of the talents of Marissa Mayer to the task.

Some have argued that social isn’t in the DNA at Google, and that’s the source of their problems.  It’s not too hard of a stretch to make the same claim about Microsoft: that we never had search in our DNA.

The analogy, however, breaks down when you spend a bit more time thinking about the subtleties of the companies.  Microsoft, at the core, is a platform company.  This is an important distinction, and one we will revisit in a little bit.  Microsoft started with dev tools, moving to operating systems, into desktop publishing and productivity, into the enterprise with OS and database, and branching ever more from there into mobile, cloud, web, etc, and of course into search.

Microsoft has had many successful forays beyond what is viewed as it’s knitting.  I have tried, quite unsuccessfully, to drive home the following point to people: Microsoft is a tremendous business even without Office and Windows Client.  Think about these businesses:

1. Windows Server
2. SharePoint
3. SQL Server
4. Project
5. Visual Studio
6. System Center
7. Exchange
8. Xbox

Those are businesses which are very, very large.  As in, start thinking about three commas.  Think about that for a moment.  Let that wash over you.  What else does Google have?  Search is their hit.  It’s a master stroke sort of hit, but really, what else have they done?  Android is big business, to be sure, but it exists to serve search.

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I cannot believe I have only been working on the Windows Phone 7 team for three months.  So much has happened, it feels like a lifetime.  What’s been most impressive to me has been the pace of the engineering team.  Considering how many technologies from across the company we are bringing to WP7, it’s absolutely amazing what they are doing.

This week, during Andy Lees’s keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, we announced that the Windows Phone Developer Tools have gone BETA.  Beta means that we have a near final version of the tools for building apps and games for Windows Phone 7.

I wanted to share with the community just how excited the developer community has been.  As a data guy, I like numbers because they tend not to lie.  Since the Mix10 release in March of the first CTP tools (and then the refresh in April), we have seen over 200K downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.  That was before we shipped a Beta, and certainly before we had 5M devices in market to fuel demand.  At some point we’ll release the Beta download numbers, but based on the number of people registered for the live training course next week (hint: it’s got a comma in it), there’s a lot of people who want to build apps for Windows Phone 7.

For me, that’s a pretty solid indicator of the excitement levels, how much our developer community is anticipating getting involved with WP7, and that it is time to get serious about building apps and games, or building out your business, for Windows Phone 7.  The opportunities are plenty, even if you don’t want to build apps.  We showed one of our partners, Preemptive Solutions, on stage at WPC showing how they are building analytics tools so that app developers can build better apps.  Get creative, and start building.  Stay nerdy my friends.

The rumor mills and speculation are running at fever pitch.  I really should have predicted that 2010 would be the year of the tablet.  With bloggers falling all over themselves trying to get the scoop on the Apple table, it seems that the bloggers are trying to call a tablet from Microsoft to be announced tonight, though Mary Jo says “I don’t think so.”  With all that in mind, I was trying to figure out how to explain the world of tech in which we live.

Any unannounced, but speculated on, Apple product lives at the intersection of Impossible, Inspiring and In-Demand.  People may scoff at the notion of “in-demand” being applied to a table, but Bing tells me that there are 22.5 million results for Apple Tablet.

Here in the developer platform product management team, we have kicked off a new campaign about the .NET Framework.  There are so many people doing so many amazing things with .NET, and we want to hear from you.  The site linked to above has stories from some of our customers doing some very unexpected things with the .NET Framework.

Those stories were submitted by our field, but now we’re asking you directly.  Are you a .NET developer?  Have you done something cool you want the world to know about?  Great, come share your story and get featured on the wall of fame.  Free traffic and visibility is never a bad thing.

For those of you willing to create a demo of your product using DemoMate from Impresys, you could win a car or a 12-day Galapagos Islands trip.  You heard me…Bob Barker says “come on down!”  We’re looking for interesting and unique solutions build on top of our stack.  Bonus points if you interop with non-MSFT technologies.  We have a distinguished panel of judges who will select the winner.

Last, if you are going to be at PDC, come to our party.  We’re working in conjunction with the great guys at .NET Rocks (who, incidentally, have a great dev focused podcast) to throw a party at 8pm in the Visual Studio/.NET Lounge Theater.  Free food, drinks, prizes…good times to be had by all.

Robert Cringely has an article up at the NY Times about Chrome vs Bing.  It’s a fine piece, but there’s a bit in the middle that makes me shake my head:

Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately.

This is not an uncommon refrain, though most times people call MSFT a one trick pony.  This continues to confuse me.  I sat down with Scoble a couple of weeks ago at the Structure09 conference and we talked about MSFT.  He’s a former employee, and he too made this quip when the topic of Bing came up.

I read through the most recent 10-Q for Microsoft to see if I could pull out proof of what I am about to state, but the content wasn’t there.  There’s more detail in the 10-K filing from last year, so here goes.  If we start from the premise that Microsoft did $60B in revenues in 2008, and Office and Windows are the only products we have, where does that leave us?

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Mini-MSFT is back, with a post about Microsoft turning The Corner.  It’s interesting to contrast his point of view with that of MG Siegler over at ParisLemon.  Given my own perception of  Valley bias on the part of Siegler (he is one of the new voices of Techcrunch after all), it’s great to see that we’re making progress which is being met with receptivity and not suspicion.  Further, everyone is focused on the most important beneficiaries – customers.

I have to admit, since returning to the company a little over a year ago, I have had this sense that things are looking up.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s no shortage of frustrations for me, but that’s to be expected when you come from a tiny company where you were the founder and CEO to a large company where you a cog in a wheel.

With the new fiscal year, I have a new role and a new team, and I plan on making liberal use of my training and experiences in constrained resource environments to do some things that will harken back to the mojo days of the late 90s and IE/Netscape goodness. Read the rest of this entry »

This week should be an exciting one.  Not only do I get to travel down to CA and see old friends, I get to talk to a bunch of great startups, and cap the week off by participating in a panel discussion at Structure 09 – the 1:30PM session titled “Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise as a First Step.”

The panel is being run by George Gilbert, who, like myself, is an ex-Wall Street guy, and he used to work at Microsoft.  He’s now running TechAlpha, and based on the few conversations we’ve had in preparation for the panel discussion, it should be a good one.

If you are going to be at the conference and want to get together to talk about your company or your cloud needs, find me by sending me a DM or @ on twitter – I am @brandonwatson.

It looks like I will be speaking at the Structure09 event on June 25th in San Francisco.  I was invited to join a panel on cloud computing, and am honored to have the opportunity to share the stage with many industry heavy weights.  Quite frankly, I’m not sure I measure up to the panel, but the team over at GigaOm have faith in me.

If you haven’t already registered, they gave me a discount code for anyone who reads this blog or follows me on Twitter.  It should be a really good event.  They had their inaugural event last year, and I’m certain this one will be even better.  Here’s the synopsis of the panel:

Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise Clouds As A First Step

Enterprises aren’t yet able or ready to migrate their applications to public clouds.  Public cloud infrastructure can’t run existing enterprise applications without requiring a rewrite.  Yet the lure of usage-based resourcing is strong. The solution? Build your own cloud with your existing infrastructure investment as a first step. This panel will contrast vendor visions about how internal systems can work in unison with external cloud platforms. A must attend for those looking to find solutions or opportunity in the migration path to cloud services.

Panelists

Moderator – George Gilbert, Lead Analyst, TechAlpha
James Urquhart – Market Manager Cloud Computing,Cisco
Brandon Watson – Azure, Microsoft
Steve Herrod – CTO Vmware
Dave Hitz, CTO, NetApp
Joseph Tobolski, Cloud Computing Lead, Accenture

Summary

There was a report released April 15^th by McKinsey called “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing.”  The premise of the report was that the cloud was actually quite a bit more expensive for large corporations than running their own datacenters.  While it allows a nod to small to medium businesses in stating that the cloud may make sense for them, the top line message was that cloud services overcharge for things that companies could do for themselves.  The piece ends up being a push for virtualization, and knocks Windows as a main cost issue for moving to the cloud.

Report Out

The report starts out with McKinsey’s view on the cloud.  They lay out that the premise for the cloud has been lower cost and faster time to market, but the reality is that these claims are overstated and that “cloud computing” is at the top of the Gartner hype-cycle.

The report takes it one step further to claim that since there is no agreed upon definition for what the “cloud” is (apparently they found a study that found 22 definitions for the “cloud”, which seems low to me considering the conversations I hear at conferences and on news groups), large companies should not think about “internal clouds” but rather focus on the immediate benefits of virtualization of servers, storage and network operations.  They posit that the newness of the cloud is distracting IT departments’ attention from technologies that “actually deliver sizeable benefits; e.g. aggressive virtualization.”

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Everyone seems to be all over this netbook meme that’s been floating around for a while.  When I first played with a netbook, it was an Asus 9” Eee PC.  I have to admit, I didn’t get it at first.  The machine that I was given to borrow over a few days was running Windows XP.  It had a very small keyboard.  Do I have large hands?  No.  (You know what they say about guys with small hands right?  They still can’t type on netbooks.)  I just found the keyboard very difficult to acclimate to for even basic tasks.

I returned the netbook, and a couple of months later was treated to another loaner.  This time it was the Lenovo S10.  Ahhhh, now we’re talking.  The keyboard was still very frustrating, and while “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” turned out something closer to “tje qujkfs bokraskdj fokse sfdl; sdlkt” I did eventually get used to the keyboard (we’re talking a few hours of use) and can now touch type on it no problem.

My issue with the netbook was that it’s effing slow.  Don’t listen to what anyone tells you.  It’s slow. The Atom processor is slow.  The memory (even with 2GB) didn’t feel sufficient.  The graphics were painful, and when loading web pages, which have a habit of stressing your graphics if there are any flash pieces or AJAX-y stuff going on, things seemed to bog down.  This was all on XP.

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