SteveStreeting.com

Spring is usually a time of change, and I finally got a gap in my schedule where I could wipe my primary Windows machine and install Windows 7 (64-bit). It’s had XP on it for years – my experience with Vista on secondary test machines quashed any desire to ‘upgrade’ my primary work environment, and despite owning Windows 7 for some months a number of things have stopped me installing it, from lack of driver support for my office wifi-connected all-in-one printer / scanner, to work commitments where I couldn’t afford to take the time out to reinstall and set up several complex environments.

So, as someone who hated Vista, what are my impressions? It’s actually pretty good. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely better than what came before, which is exactly what I expect from an upgrade (and exactly what Vista didn’t deliver). Things I like:

• Taskbar – clearly inspired by the OS X Dock, but adds some features of its own too like the jump lists and window previews. I’d prefer if clicking the button when there are multiple windows open switched to the last one you had been using, instead of forcing you to pick one, but on the whole it works well.
• Windows Update gets out of my face – Vista’s Windows Update was a dog, while it was kicking in it sucked resources like a bastard and threw off any performance testing I was doing, sometimes for long periods (made worse perhaps by the fact that I didn’t use Vista that much). The new one seems much lighter.
• Responsive – they say they’ve improved the parallelism in many systems, and it certainly feels like it. The same machine feels faster on Windows 7, compared to feeling slower in Vista.
• Libraries – these are like customising your sidebar in OS X’s finder, but add more features like grouping and collection searching. Nice.
• Devices & Printers – when I looked at this view and saw that it came up with photos of my exact mouse, printer etc, without any specific drivers etc installed apart from the base system, I thought that was pretty cool. It’s actually a useful view in practice too, but the pictures made me grin, because I’m shallow. But then, if you don’t smile at least once when you use an OS for the first time, something is wrong on the usability side.

There are some stupid things though:

• UAC remains dumb – it still text-matches filenames like ‘patch.exe’ and arbitrarily decides that they need to be admin-level. Sure you can tack a manifest onto it to tell it not to, but for Christ sakes, talk about a blunt instrument.
• Startup items – Why is changing what apps load at login still so esoteric? It hasn’t changed since Windows 95, and they’ve hidden the Startup menu by default now (and services are even harder to find). Just not user-friendly at all – compare to OS X where Login Items is very simple for anyone to use.
• Network Drive Login Scope is obscure - This is new in Windows 7 – if you connect to a NAS or other network drive, enter your login and click the ‘Remember’ checkbox, it only actually remembers until you log out, not permanently as in previous versions. To change this is very obtuse and user-unfriendly – you have to open Credentials Manager, delete the existing credential (because editing the scope is not possible for no particular reason), and re-create it with the same details (again, scope is not an explicit option so you just have to go on faith here). By doing this the scope becomes ‘Enterprise’ rather than ‘Session’ (which is obscure in itself) and the result is that your credentials will be remembered across logout / reboots like in XP / Vista. It took me some forum browsing to figure this out, and it’s just not an intuitive design. Adding a ’scope’ combo to the remember option that says ‘Until logout’ or ‘Forever’ would solve it, but no, that would just be too simple & intuitive.
• Aero Shake is just silly

But, the bottom line is that on balance it’s pleasant to use despite a few oddities, and I’m happy with Windows 7 as my main Windows OS now in a way I never was with Vista. I still find OS X more pleasant to use, but this is the closest Windows has ever come to it, and it adds a few ideas of its own too, that importantly actually work & add value – compared to Vista that mostly imitated and whose additions just fell flat (Flip3D, I’m looking at you). So, a good OS, and the first one from MS since 2001 that I don’t regret spending money on.

What a difference a few years can make. For a long time, Microsoft was seen as public enemy #1 of those who liked to promote, produce and consume open source (I’m deliberately not describing it as a ‘movement’ here – that implies political motivations which I assert that only a vocal minority have). It was entirely their own fault of couse; blustery, really quite bizarre tirades from the only two CEOs their company has ever had cemented their position as the McCarthy’s of the modern era. It wasn’t helped, of course, by extremists on the opposite end of the spectrum, but still – the way the company behaved in previous years has at times been utterly shameful.

The reason it wasn’t sustainable is that they started to lose the very people they’ve always done a pretty good job of nurturing – developers. Even reasonable, level headed developers who have few extremist tendencies but who could see the many benefits of open source  (I count myself among them) began to turn away from the company as they seemed hell-bent on protecting their vested interests using whatever means possible, and irrespective of the collatteral damage – mostly through lies and threats.

I developed my early career around the time that Microsoft was rising, with their software replacing the mainframes and minis that were so tricky to work with at times, and I really appreciated them for it. They made my life easier as a developer in the 90’s. In the new millennium though, when they started rattling sabres over open source, and trying to bind me and my products into ever more of a restricted, Microsoft-only environment, they did precisely the opposite. The notion that you could use their really nice tools, so long as you only targetted Windows & Office, and with constant posturing over whether using open source was ‘communism’, drove me and probably plenty of other developers in precisely the opposite direction.

For as long as Steve Ballmer is in charge, I’ll have a healthy amount of skepticism about whether Microsoft can really, genuinely change its stance at its core. Like Bill Gates before him, these are agressive 80’s-style businessmen who  I can never hope to understand or remotely trust. But what’s clear is that either he’s learned how out of step he is with his potential customers, or he has been forced by others in the company to accept a changing stance on open source.

2009 is for me the year that Microsoft became a regular citizen of the open-source environment. Sure, before that they set up Port25 and CodePlex, but these were mostly self-serving and didn’t necessarily demonstrate MS’s ability to play well with others, which is precisely what open source is about. What really changed in 2009 is that Microsoft began to use external open source, intentionally and unintentionally, and crucially played it squarely by the rules with little or no fuss. This is a very big deal.

One of the first steps was Visual Studio using jQuery, which is entirely sensible. Historically Microsoft has had a terrible tendency to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily, which ends up being more hassle for everyone. Re-use of mature components for everyone’s benefit is what open source is about.

This year though, Microsoft has issued code under the GPL, something I’m sure many people thought would never happen. Firstly there was contributing code to Linux for Hyper-V, and most recently they (unintentionally) used some GPL code in a USB/DVD boot tool for Windows 7, an issue that was raised by a third party but which on investigation Microsoft confirmed – leading them to commit to releasing the full code under the GPL to customers.

Of course, this is precisely what they are bound to do legally. But the fact that it is being resolved in an open and completely unemotive manner, in the same way that any other responsible company would deal with it, is quite significant. This is Microsoft, the company that said the GPL was anti-American and borderline communist – openly and contritely resolving a GPL issue in the correct way with no sleight-of-hand or posturing. I respect that a great deal.

Welcome back to the community Microsoft, it’s about bloody time. Congratulations to all the reasonable people inside the corporate beast who are finally managing to turn the supertanker. I really hope you convince Ballmer to retire soon though, he’s a relic of a bygone age and an impediment to the new image you’re trying to create.

Quick check – ok, the sun is in fact not as black as sackcloth. But today, something earth-shattering happened – Microsoft has contributed code to Linux.

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that I’d never live to see the day this happened. It’s 20,000 lines of driver code to make Linux run better under Hyper-V, which is of course in their interest (since you have to buy a copy of Windows Server 2008 as the host) , but that’s par for the course for open source contribution (you scratch your own itch!), and it’s a massive watershed regardless. From what I hear there’s still a lot of concern at Microsoft about how to manage contributions across the company boundary (in both directions), so I’m not sure what extra procedures they would have put in place for the developers involved in this process to keep the corporate legal army satisfied – perhaps pre- and post-project selective mind-wipes – but the fact that they managed to make it happen is a big deal.

Microsoft has wielded by far the most acrid rhetoric about open source in the past – we all hear that it’s changing, and I know particularly of specific people at Microsoft (mostly developers) who take a much more open view, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that while the top brass who set the ‘old’ policies remain in situ, substantive change will be difficult. But this move is one of many lately that make me think that just maybe, people higher up the chain are starting to get it. Or at least, they’re starting to defer to people who know better.

I’d argue that very few people in the open source community are inherently anti-Microsoft, they’re just a little more free-thinking when it comes to technology choices, a little more honest with their opinions, and have come to view MS as ‘the enemy’ primarily because of the old rhethoric the company used to use on a regular basis to attack them (and some parts of the company still don’t seem to be getting the ‘openness’ memo – as TomTom found to their detriment). Microsoft, or rather, Mr Gates and Mr Ballmer specifically, effectively made themselves the enemy of the open source community with their often ill-conceived tirades, and that’s something that will take a long time to heal. But, as we all know, actions speak louder than words – and if the company continues to make these kinds of conciliatory moves, they will start to win people in the open source community back, at least those people that judge on facts rather than old predjudices.

Trust takes a long time to be earned, particularly from where MS started from, so it’ll be a long road – but if this is how things are going to develop in future, then bon voyage, MS.

There have been cries of joy on the intertubes recently from people who like .Net but who like using it on non-Windows platforms (or believing they have the option to do so), in that Microsoft has extended their Community Promise to Mono, meaning they won’t sue over uses of it. Or so it’s been rather shallowly reported in some circles, more on this below. Firstly I’ll just say that no matter what, this is a positive step. I’ve long thought of Mono as a technically excellent project which an awful lot of uncertainty and legal confusion around it, which was only really made worse by the highly specific arrangement that Novell and Microsoft brokered a while ago.

What this announcement does is bring some clarity to the situation, which is good. However, I think people should hold off putting the bunting out just yet, because as ever the devil is in the detail, and the promise only in fact covers ECMA standards 334 and 335 – that is, C# and the CLI. As anyone who has used .Net knows, there’s an awful lot more to it than that, and this promise is currently equivalent insuring the wiring and plumbing in your house, but none of the contents. So it’s nice that these standards are now explicitly covered, meaning that projects that solely rely on C# and the CLI plus other completely independent components are safe. But if you’ve used anything else, such as any of the recreations of the rest of the .Net framework, you’re still on very uncertain territory, and in some ways you could say it’s even more uncertain, since clearly Microsoft omitted those from this promise for a reason (which may be a deliberate, strategic position, or it might be that they’re just not ready to take that more significant step yet – we don’t know).

Mono intends to cope with this by providing clear dividing lines between what’s covered and what’s not, which is very sensible. However, I do suspect that will result in the vast majority of the stuff that developers actually need to rely on when writing what are generally considered ‘.Net systems’ (such as implementations of core components of the .Net framework) will still be in no-mans land. Thus, while this promise does move things on in a positive way, in many ways it again casts light on how uncertain the legal position of the other elements is. Personally, my position is pretty much unchanged from before – if you’re writing ‘.Net applications’, that is, using the .Net frameworks, then you’re targetting Windows, don’t fool  yourself into thinking otherwise. There’s certainly scope for using C# and CLI in cross-platform scenarios (which was the safest course even before this announcement, since those were the only standardised parts), but on the basis of both legality and conformance I’d say it’s best to stay away from any .Net framework components if you intend to be cross-platform.

Maybe MS will extend this promise to the older .Net framework versions later on; that would seem a smart move, get people on the ladder but keep all the new stuff to yourself?

I’m glad that E3 is back – it adds a little excitement and pizzazz to the gaming calendar, and luckily this year it seemed to be pitched at about the right level – not the crazy-bonkers E3 of old, but big enough to be interesting.

Whilst I think there’s a lot of other interesting stuff going, inevitably the ‘big 3′ console manufacturers are the shows that people pay most attention to, at least initially. Who will out-do who, we wonder? Well, now all 3 conferences have happened, I thought I’d post my highly unscientific, from-the-hip impressions.

Microsoft

Microsoft went first, and I think it’s fair to say that they set the bar fairly high in terms of ’star’ appeal, rolling out both Macca and Ringo to talk about Beatles : Rock Band, and Hideo Kojima to announce that a MGS game was coming to the 360 (some would say ‘at last’, but personally I have zero interest in MGS, since I like to play games rather than watch them). There were the expected Halo-related announcements (x2), Forza 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 (already covered), Alan Wake finally reappeared and looked good actually, definitely very creepy – perhaps a replacement for the RE franchise which seems to have run out of steam somewhat.

The other major announcement was the worst kept secret in the world, except the name – Project Natal; Microsoft’s play into the motion control arena. It looked pretty interesting – we already knew that Microsoft was acquiring 3D camera technology company 3DV so we kinda knew mostly what to expect, but nevertheless the demos were intriguing. Funnily enough, the face-tracking & emotion detection technology shown in Lionhead’s Milo was very similar to tech I’d seen demonstrated at FMX/09 – the academy there is working on very similar areas using OGRE for the rendering, although the voice & colour recognition was new. I’m still skeptical about the character interaction aspect – AI chat bots have never really worked well in unscripted environments and obviously the demos would have been scripted, so it’s hard to know how well it would work in practice, we’ll just have to see. Obviously if it worked in general terms as well as the Milo demo did, it would be pretty incredible, but I don’t think anyone really believes it will; and to be fair Peter Molyneux was very honest about the fact that the version on show was using lots of ‘tricks’, and was clearly set up to respond to particular things (like the colour of your shirt).

On the game control aspect, I’m one of those people that thought EyeToy was rubbish; this camera clearly is a lot more advanced, so perhaps it will be workable, but I just can’t help but suspect that environmental conditions and practicalities will make it not quite as magical as is claimed. We don’t all have completely clutter-free living rooms, and despite the camera technology and no doubt some clever interpolation/extrapolation software, the fact is that control is still dependent on what the camera can actually see. While it might work for a game where you mostly just have to stand straight-on to the screen waving your arms about, or holding your hands/feet out front in clear view, I can’t see it working in cases where you might stand side-on (tennis games) or other less posturally discrete set-ups, or where you have a living room with a coffee table and random cat intrusions. Much as I’ve been throroughly let down by Nintendo on the Wii front, I have to say that I think having a discrete device involved in the mix which tracks motion is probably more reliable & fast in a general sense than relying entirely on image processing. It’s interesting to see Sony’s take in comparison (later).

Nintendo

Super Mario Galaxy 2, New Super Mario Bros Wii, and Metroid Other M were the primary interesting things to me here. Nothing really startling (even Other M, while interesting in style, is all highly familiar) and really just more of the same with the odd twist, but even so these might give me a decent reason to use the Wii again after becoming thoroughly disillusioned with it.

Other things were just bonkers, or dull. A pulse monitor peripheral. Umm, right. Inevitable Wii Fit sequel. Inevitable Wii Sports sequel. More DS JRPGs. Nothing of huge interest to me.

Sony

I currently don’t own any Sony platforms, but even so like the others the news was mostly expected, barring a few choice things. FFXIV was announced to apparently many gasps, but that doesn’t interest me (FFVII was ok, but these games are too heavily scripted to be RPGs for my liking, and why do they always star teenagers with daft hair?) . Then there was GOWIII of course, bombastic as usual.

Project Trico was demonstrated as Last Guardian, which looks awfully stylishly done and very interesting indeed. The only thing that makes me cautious is that both Ico and Shadow of the Collossus were very artful games, which I could appreciate from a distance, but which I really didn’t enjoy actually playing. When you strip away the artyness and focus on gameplay, Ico was in essence one big escort mission with block/lever puzzles; I hate escort missions and block/level puzzles have been done to death. SotC was at the heart comprised of a chain of scripted boss fights, using the standard learn sequence/find weakness/destroy gameplay. I know I’m entirely in the minority here but while I wanted to like both games, and really appreciated their artistic approach to the medium, I found I’d rather just appreciate them from afar rather than actually play them, because I found that activity surprisingly frustrating and annoying. That said, if Last Guardian manages to be as artful as it appears and manages to not make me hate playing it, it could be one of a few titles which make me want to add a PS3 to my TV cabinet.

Finally, the Sony also had a motion controller on show – they’re really all the rage these days! It seems they’ve decided to use a hybrid device including accelerometers and a comedy pink bauble which the PS3 camera tracks; this essentially seems very similar to the Wii except that the motion sensing is clearly much more refined (Wii Motion Plus might counter that though), and the camera is fixed, watching the controller, rather than the camera being in the controller looking for IR dots above the TV – this is a more flexible setup in practice. I actually think this looks like the most likely of all the motion technologies to actually work well in a huge number of scenarios, because it’s not just relying on one technique (cameras or accelerometers), and both techniques seem very robust, unlike the Wii where it’s a little imprecise. It’s not having to do anywhere near as much processing as the 3D camera of Natal needs to do to operate without any physical controller, so I’m guessing it’s likely to be more responsive; the demo certainly seemed to be very fast. Natal is cool & much more revolutionary (Sony’s answer seems like an evolution on Wii style approaches), but I do wonder whether relying on solely the camera is a good idea, even with that snazzy 3D technology – I think Sony might have the more practical option here.

The one problem both Natal and Sony’s version have though is that they’re add-ons. The Wii will still probably retain its crown in the ‘waggle department’ just because it comes built-in.

So, that’s my edited highlights. Lots of interesting stuff just from these 3, and plenty happening outside that too. It’s good to have E3 back.

It’s always fun to watch Apple and Microsoft slug it out in the advertising space – here in the UK we mostly have to do this via YouTube, since apart from a short stint of amusing Mitchell and Webb Apple ads and those pretty bland “I’m A PC” ripostes, we don’t really see the front-line assaults which take place on US TV screens.

So I hear that MS have a new set of ads out, where “regular” people go and look for a laptop, whereby they look at the Mac and say “whoah, far too expensive!” and then go and buy a Dell instead. Fair enough, the 3rd party PC market certainly gives you a wider choice of blending specifications than Apple does – in practice, Macs aren’t actually much different in price to a similarly specced PC, it’s just that all the components are generally of similar ‘grade’ – so you can’t cut corners to save money like buying something with a big screen but a crappy GPU, or a large HD with a slow motherboard, or a fast CPU but crappy battery life.  Of course, many people don’t realise they’re making these sacrifices and just look at the price – but if you do know what you’re doing, you can tailor a machine closer to your needs. Anyway, I enjoyed the “Homeless Frank” spoof of these new ads:

A couple of years ago I would have made the same arguments against the Mac that MS makes with it’s Laptop Hunter series; and indeed I did, when a Mac-owning friend tried to convince me to buy one, despite being a .Net guru (who now works for Microsoft!). However, now that I’ve owned a Mac for almost 2 years, I feel completely different – in a laptop at least, I’m very willing to sacrifice a little configuration flexibility in favour of having a device that is of uniformly good quality, and is nice to use. After all, laptops are always compromised in terms of upgradability once you’ve bought them, so it’s generally better to buy something decent from the outset anyway.

I know that buying a Mac laptop is going to encourage me to spend a little more money than I otherwise might get away with. But, what I get for that is a really nice device, that has the added bonus of being able to run OS X as well as Windows. I still use Windows every day, almost exclusively because of Visual Studio these days (and some games) since everything else I use runs on the Mac too anyway, but running both Windows and OS X on the same machine merely serves to make me love OS X more, despite still being a newbie with it in many ways. Windows is fine to use and all, but there’s something about the way OS X just gets out of the way, doesn’t pester me with stupid warnings all the time, doesn’t need a virus scanner to slow it down, allows me to unmount my USB drives without hunting down every Explorer window that is using it first, and countless other little things that have slowly endeared me to it despite being a total skeptic to begin with. I’m a technical guy by nature, but even I can appreciate technology that doesn’t waste my time with trivial stuff I don’t want to care about – and at the end of the day Windows (and Linux) still feels like it’s designed for “PC users”, whilst OS X feels like it’s designed for people, specifically people with stuff to do other than worrying about keeping the computer happy. The day that XCode equals Visual Studio in functionality (it’s not far off, but it’s not there yet), and I can run Steam on OS X, is the day I might seriously consider not using Windows on a daily basis anymore. But, we’ll see whether Windows 7 changes that view.

Note: I’m going to pick the way I discuss this carefully, since I have a good friend on the LINQ to SQL team (yes, we Guernseymen do get around) and I feel bad to criticise too much in this area; nevertheless I think there are lessons to be learned and I have a definite angle on this, being an ex-business coder and open source enthusiast. My thoughts here reflect pretty much what I’ve already suggested on his blog, but in more detail, so hopefully this won’t offend him!

LINQ was a new feature introduced with Visual Studio 2008, and LINQ to SQL is the lightweight SQL Server implementation. News broke recently that Microsoft have decided to concentrate on the larger and more ‘complete’ Entity Framework instead, and encourage people to move to that for their more advanced needs rather than continuing to expand L2S. They’re not dropping L2S, it’s essentially being ring-fenced on a feature basis and will continue to be supported by the team. However, many people are reading between the lines and assuming that, in practice, LINQ to SQL is now a dead-end, and many of them are very upset about that, having invested development time in adopting it, and who were expecting it to continue evolving.

I can see both sides of this – MS need to have a strategy, they have finite resources, and they feel focussing on EF is the best way forward. However if you’ve adopted technology, and invested your own time in it, you want that investment to be strategically valid. While L2S isn’t being dropped, it is unlikely to escape the perception of being ‘on the bone pile’ if the strategy is to expand & promote EF as the preferred solution in future. When updates to a technology you’ve invested in are wholely controlled by one company, and that company decides it no longer wants to make it the core of their strategy, you basically have to suck it up and accept that. The problem here is that producers and consumers of the technology don’t necessarily agree on the best way forward, so bad feeling is the result.

It really doesn’t have to be this way though. What if Microsoft, on deciding that they wanted to focus on EF, released L2SQL as open source instead? Maybe it isn’t strategically core for them anymore, but those who have invested heavily in it already are bound to feel differently. Popular technologies (and I would venture that L2SQL is probably very popular due to its power & simplicity) tend to foster their own communities, and even if only 1% of the developers using it would actually become contributors to it, that’s still probably more people that Microsoft would want to dedicate to the effort from an internal team over the long term.

I’m not even sure what MS would lose from doing that – the technology is free already, so it’s not a revenue generator for them, and it would do wonders for community relations. What they would lose is control, which is perhaps what they’re afraid of – maybe that they’d have to compete with an open source L2SQL – but competition is good for customers. I get the impression from my MS contacts that they feel it’s not viable, that people wouldn’t want it to be open source, that they like the simple, spoon-fed, ‘MS knows best’ approach – but personally I’d say the existence of the Mono project is an indication that this isn’t doing the community justice. I think this poor view of the community model is formed because the open source communities around extending MS products tend to be much, much smaller than those elsewhere (like Java, Linux, Apache etc), but I’d counter that that’s precisely because of the tone that MS sets; ie that you dance to their tune. Environments that are open to more extensive external involvement tend to attract more active contributors, so saying there wouldn’t be enough people when you’re operating in a closed way is actually a self-fulfilling argument.

In the days of the ‘new open Microsoft’, I can’t see a downside to them open sourcing key parts of their framework in practice. Developers these days are a lot more savvy than 5-10 years ago about how they spend their time, and open source is winning a lot of favour not because it’s free, and not always because it’s cross-platform, but because it’s open, and cannot be taken away from them. A number of my customers use Ogre specifically because they’ve been with proprietary systems in the past, which have fallen victim to the companies controlling them deciding they didn’t want to support them anymore, or didn’t want to take them in the direction the customer wanted, or wanted to force them to move to something else when they didn’t want to – and they found themselves restricted / railroaded by a system they’d invested a lot of their own development money in.

Open source for these people means ‘taking the chains off’ – they know that no matter what, there’s no one company that can tell them what to do with their own investment. They’ll stay on the main track while it’s beneficial to them, they can benefit from the core development just like proprietary software customers can, but if at any point they disagree with the ‘central’ decisions, they can do what the like. That’s a very powerful insurance policy in development circles, something I hear time and again from customers as a major positive, and personally I think Microsoft needs to think about that more. They are very much still in the ‘producer/consumer’ mindset (or ‘cathedral’ if you will), but the world around them is rapidly changing to a model of iteration, collaboration, and distributed control. Fewer and fewer customers like to be dictated to by a central oligarchy anymore, and many are going to places they feel more empowered – which is usually the open source camp. Microsoft simply cannot afford to ignore this for much longer.

I don’t know if they’re actually airing these adverts Stateside, or whether they’re a web-only phenomenon for the moment, but Penny Arcade drew my attention to them today. Colour me unimpressed. If the intention was to shake off Vista’s sales blues, or to generally ‘connect’ with the wider consumer in a way that Apple does so well but Microsoft almost never does, but I’d have to classify this effort as a failure of sizable proportions.

Maybe it’s me; maybe I just don’t ‘get’ Seinfeld-style humour, or maybe it’s that Bill Gates really doesn’t remotely inspire or entertain me (making skiploads of cash every nanosecond might inspire some people to revere him, but not me). From my perspective though this is a fairly poor attempt at deadpan humour which leaves me with an impression of Gates being even more of an arrogant but incredibly dull grey suit than I thought before. Worse – it seems his thinking is that acting like a dull grey suit in wacky surroundings will somehow make him endearing and amusing, which couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s equivalent to your Uncle Henry who, despite bearing an unnatural affinity with tweed, thinks he can transform into John Travolta when he hits the wedding reception dance floor. Deeply painful to watch.

Tip to Microsoft – if you want endearing consumer-friendly ads, write Gates out of the script next time, he’s a dead weight.

*edit: I know this is old news but I’m behind a little, very busy lately!

More patent silliness from those idiots in the US Patent Office, as they get exploited by soulless corporate types again:

US Patent 7415666: Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments

I really can’t imagine how messrs. Sellers, Grantham and Dersch can sleep at night, having officially claimed that calculating how far to advance down a document when you hit the PageDn is a significant innovation that warrants the protection of 20-year exclusivity that a patent brings. It beggars belief that an engineer could possibly think that way – I’m guessing a company-sponsored discount lobotomisation scheme, or perhaps it’s enough to run internal training courses such as ‘TKNGTHPSS101: Stifling innovation by patenting the bleeding obvious’.

Time to stop this nonsense. Now.

Some people think I bash Microsoft a lot on this blog, and maybe that’s true, but I don’t think I ever do it unfairly. To prove that I don’t just comment on the bad stuff, here’s a major piece of positive news about the software behemoth: Microsoft appears to have fixed the flaws in the Open Specification Promise (OSP).

The major flaw in the OSP when it was originally announced is that the promise not to sue people who developed upon or used Microsoft protocols and formats extended only to those who operated non-commercially. This of course made the whole OSP basically useless, because the primary area where people want to inter-operate with Microsoft is in the enterprise, where, rather unfortunately, most companies do not work for free. Most enterprises are not particularly happy about engaging the services of purely voluntary organisations, at least in visible or critical areas, because of the potential exposure to core business functions; they need support contracts, even if in practice they don’t strictly need or use them – I’m sure that I’m not the only person at the sharp end of getting problems resolved who ended up getting good answers faster from nonprofit communities rather than official support channels.

Anyway, all of a sudden and with little fanfare Microsoft appears to have addressed this; on Friday they updated the OSP to remove the non-commercial clause. The surprising bit is perhaps not that they realised it was broken (I’m sure the beleaguered pro-open source elements in the company knew this from the start), but that the upper echelons allowed them to fix it. The rhetoric spouted by the likes of Ballmer does not gel with this kind of move, and even the recent high water mark of Ballmer committing MS to being more open had the look of a man who had a gun to his back, and it didn’t take long for him to start beating his drum about patents again after that. I’ve been skeptical the action on the ground would be free from gotchas or caveats, and the original OSP certainly reinforced this. No longer.

With this change, Microsoft has made a significant step in the right direction. Companies deploying & supporting the likes of Samba, OpenOffice & POI have operated under something of a cloud until now, glancing nervously over their shoulders in fear of suddenly becoming a target for the three hundred pound gorrilla beating its chest about patents and Linux, and customers felt the anxiety too I’m sure – leading to less credibility being afforded to those kinds of alternatives. If MS stay true to this agreement it really does open opportunities for better competition in the commercial sector, which can only be a good thing for customers. Keep this kind of practical change up Microsoft, and I might even start liking you again. Just get rid of that relic of 1980’s capitalism you have at your helm