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To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.

Those who responded were Peter Brown of the Free Software Foundation, Jim Zemlin of The Linux Foundation, Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement, and Linus Torvalds. All of them gave answers that were not only complex and nuanced, but sometimes surprising when compared to the attitudes that they are often assumed to have.

Now that Hyper-V is officially shipping you can expect to see a series of new developments in the data center virtualization market. Microsoft appears to be leveraging Hyper-V and virtualization to extend the reach of Server 2008 versus launching it as a head to head offering versus ESX.

I don't know why this keeps happening so often lately, but at least in the last few months, Microsoft kept losing various lawsuits and being forced to pay various amounts to other companies for patent infringements, but the hardest hits came from the European Comission. Anyway, fortunately for the Redmond giant, today is not about the EC. Unfortunately, the amount they have to pay is a bit more than just pocket money, because a federal judge just ordered them to pay Alcatel-Lucent no less than half a billion dollars!

As Bill Gates prepares to end his full-time work at Microsoft, he tells the BBC in an interview that it wasn't just what Microsoft did, but what his rivals didn't do that let Microsoft get ahead.

After member states filed four complaints against the standardisation of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva have responded by postponing publication of the revised specification. As the ISO announced, the planned ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until these complaints have been heard. Procedure requires that they be dealt with by the end of June, when the ISO and IEC have to hand over their comments on the complaints to two management committees for a final decision.

In response to community pressure, Microsoft has removed project Sandcastle from their CodePlex website. This is a temporary move while they contemplate Sandcastles future. Sandcastle is Microsoft's answer to JavaDoc. Though in active use at Microsoft for several years, it is still a very rough project and appears to be no where near ready for general deployment. Prior to the release of .NET 2.0 and the announcement of Sandcastle the standard tool was the much more mature NDoc. Unfortunately NDoc is no longer being maintained

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sat down for lunch with editors and reporters at the Washington Post and told them print will be dead in ten years:

There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

I just hope the Post’s Website will still be around because it is a great distribution partner for TechCrunch.

But seriously, we’ve heard these predictions before. And it is easy to make them again with the print media industry suffering a major contraction as advertising dollars flee elsewhere. Just earlier this week, I was on a media panel at NYU where Vanity Fair media columnist and Newser founder Michael Wolff told Newsweek editor Johnnie Roberts:

If Newsweek is around in five years, I’ll buy you dinner.

It’s a good line, and in general Wolff was pretty much the only person I agreed with on the panel. Still, I am not so sure print is ever going away. Paper is a more enduring technology than Ballmer or Wolff would have you believe. What is endangered is the current set of business models that produce print media. If the those businesses go away, obviously so do their products. But that presumes that new print businesses won’t emerge to take their place. Maybe they won’t be as profitable and maybe they won’t have as broad a reach, but as long as there is demand for books, newspapers, or magazines somebody will figure out a way to fill it.

(You can watch more videos from Ballmer’s lunch here)

Will Print Media Still Be Around In Ten Years?
( polls)

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Software makers need to create better natural interfaces, simplify programming tools and create better search and analytical tools for computer users, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has declared.

This morning at Tech-Ed, Microsoft unveiled a new product. Traditionally Tech-Ed hasn't been where Microsoft has unveiled new CTPs and betas, they typically reserve that for PDC while Tech-Ed focuses on training Microsoft developers on how to use the existing, current-version stuff. This kind of balance is required because developers need to know whether they're going to Tech-Ed or whether they're going to the PDC when they're both happening in the same

According to TechCrunch, Microsoft has withdrawn Yahoo bid. But what looks like an end of the saga, may still have a couple of unfinished episodes [...]

Adobe is making a big play to make Flash the de facto viewing environment not only for Web apps on your PC, but also on your mobile phone, your TV, and any other screen you can think of. It is announcing the Open Screen Project to make it easier to develop applications across devices—using Flash, of course. David Wadhwani, general manager of Adobe’s platform business (which includes Flash/Flex, AIR, and Cold Fusion), says:

We believe it is time for an industry-wide movement for a consistent way to develop across the Web for PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.

To help the project along, Adobe is:

1. Opening up the runtime to its Flash player for the first time so that anybody can create their own customized player. Specifically, it is going to open up the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. In the past, developers had to sign agreements not to create derivative Flash players because Adobe wanted to avoid the fragmentation that Java experienced during its early years. But now it feels that Flash is a strong enough standard to withstand the introduction of some new evolutionary branches.

2. Removing licensing fees for Flash on mobile devices. While Flash is free on PCs, cell phone makers and other device manufacturers must pay a royalty fee. This was a $52 million business for Adobe last year. (Versions of Flash are on 500 million mobile devices already, and that is expected to grow to one billion over the next 12 months). That business (which represents only 2 percent of Adobes overall revenues) is going away. Starting with the next major release of Flash (and AIR) for devices in 2009, it will be free to device manufacturers. That should help Flash spread even more.

3. Publishing the APIs for porting Flash to other devices. This currently also incurs a royalty fee. By opening it up, there is no reason why every device shouldn’t come with Flash pre-installed.

4. Publishing Adobe protocols for pushing content to devices like Flash Cast and AMF. Adobe will also work with wireless carriers on protocols for over-the-air software updating. (This is actually a hard problem because most software downloaded to a mobile phone gets stored in read-only-memory, where it pretty much stays until the device is replaced. Getting mobile software to update as easily as desktop software is the key to making sure mobile apps keep up with the times.

On the application creation side, Adobe increasingly will be adopting a widget approach. There is not much difference between a widget that runs as a module on a Web page and a mobile app that runs on a small screen. Wadhwani explains:

These things can expand up. Developers are looking to optimize for these small screen sizes. Instead of squashing it down from a desktop experience, it is easier to start small and build up.

The same approach can be used for apps on other devices as well, such as set-top boxes.

The promise of the Open Screen Project to developers is the age-old dream of being able to write an application once and deploy it anywhere across any device. Adobe and its slew of partners in the Open Screen Project (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Qualcomm, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Toshiba, NTT Docomo, Chungwa Telecom, ARM, Intel, Marvell, Cisco, NBC Universal, MTV Networks, and the BBC) are not alone in this desire. Notably absent from Adobe’s list of partners is Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Each has its own ideas on how this cross-device compatibility will work.

Apple thinks you should just buy Apple products that work seamlessly together (Mac, iPhone, Apple TV). Steve Jobs also notably snubbed Adobe by refusing to put Flash on the iPhone. Maybe his engineers can now make their own version that satisfies their exacting standards.

Google has never been a big fan of Flash, preferring the speed of Ajax in its Webtop apps. On the mobile front, it is betting on Android, its own open operating system. And it also develops mobile apps the traditional way—one device at a time.

But the company with the most overarching and different approach to Adobe’s in this regard is Microsoft. It is pushing its own alternative to Flash: Silverlight. (Although it has licensed Flash Lite for Windows Mobile as a stopgap measure until Silverlight works on mobile devices). More radically, Microsoft differs on how to make apps work across devices. It’s answer ultimately will be Live Mesh. As I wrote last week when Microsoft officially unveiled Live Mesh.:

The basic foundation of Mesh is this feed-centric programming model. A Web developer can build an app using any programming language or tools he likes (Python, Ruby on Rails, Flex) and then sync it across devices and other applications using two-way feeds as the basic data and communication channel. The promise for developers, says product unit manager Abhay Parasnis: “If you Mesh-enable your application, we will let you extend it to other devices.”

In many ways this effort is a counterweight to what we are seeing with Adobe Air or Google Gears, which are efforts to take browser-based apps offline. With Mesh, Microsoft is in effect reasserting the primacy of client-based applications. . . . Developers can customize their apps for whatever device they originally reside on—whether it is a PC, a smartphone, or a set-top box—and then Webify them by syncing them to other applications across the Web.

The more competition we get for ways to bridge applications across devices and screens, the more likely that we’ll actually start to see some of our favorite Web apps on something other than our laptops.

(Photo by AMagill).

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Finally, it seems the last major update to our beloved Windows XP is just around the corner!

Last night, Microsoft pushed out a ton of new features to Windows Live Maps, including a face-lift to some of its 3-D cities (Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix), the ability to export your collections to GPS devices and GeoRSS feeds (which means I can make custom maps for my Dash GPS), support for 3D-map video tours, better directions and traffic information, and also one-click directions that change the route on a map based on what direction you are coming from.

But there was one feature that really caught my eye. You can now import KML files into Live Maps. KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language, and it was invented by Keyhole, the acquired startup behind Google Earth that is now part of Google. KML has become a standard for describing maps hosted on the Web.

What this means, though, is that Live Maps can now drink Google’s milkshake. Because all the customized maps that people have made and share on Google Maps can be grabbed as a KML file. So now Microsoft can benefit from all that work done by Google Map users by simply slurping all of those maps into Live Maps.

For instance, here is a Google map created by a user named Matthew B. titled PA & NJ Winter Camping that shows camping sites in those states:

Now, here is the same map sucked into Windows Live Maps. It is the exact same information with the same pushpins and descriptions layered into Live Maps:.

Of course, this is a two-way street, since any customized map on Live Maps or in Microsoft’s Virtual Earth can now also be exported as a KML file. Google can take out its straw and slurp right back from the Live Maps glass. The difference is that Google’s glass is a lot more full and is more yummy because so many more people have created customized Google Maps than customized Live Maps.

So right about now, Microsoft is wielding an old wooden bowling pin, wiping its chin, and ranting, “I drink it up!”

(Milkshake photo by Dion Gillard).

And here is a picture of an enhanced 3D Las Vegas:

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n a growing effort to show the world it is embracing the open source community, Microsoft announced it will work with the Eclipse Foundation to offer the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit that can be used with the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation. The use of Eclipse technology will allow Java developers to make software applications that look native to the Windows Vista operating system. Eclipse is an open source community project that is the most popular Java development environment available to programmers. "In terms of future plans for collaboration, Microsoft looks forward to continuing its efforts with Eclipse and is optimistic that they can work together in an increasingly open and transparent manner," a company spokesperson told BetaNews.

Microsoft announced this morning that they'll be working more closely with Eclipse for better GUIs and identity management.

Flash Lite for mobile phones might not be good enough for Steve Jobs, but Microsoft is less picky. It is licensing Flash Lite for Windows Mobile. This is an acknowledgment of two things: there are a lot of developers and existing Websites out there that work with Flash, and the mobile version of Microsoft’s own competing Silverlight software is nowhere near ready to be deployed.

On the one hand, Microsoft is just being practical here. Adobe’s Flash is ubiquitous on the Web, especially for video. Even if Flash Lite is a compromise (it doesn’t run any apps or Web pages built with Adobe’s Flex tools, for instance), it does run on 500 million mobile phones already. Microsoft cannot ignore all of the apps being built for Flash Lite. (Jobs can because it is more important to him to protect the integrity of the iPhone experience by controlling it tightly).

But for Microsoft, this is just a stopgap measure until it can gain more traction for Silverlight, its Flash-competitor. The mobile version of Sliverlight 2.0 does not ship until the second quarter. Making WinMo more capable won’t detract from Silverlight’s appeal. There is a desperate need to get a full Flash-like experience on a mobile device. Flash itself is supposedly too slow on mobile phones. That leaves an opening for Microsoft to win over converts to Silverlight by bringing video, animation, and other rich-media experiences to mobile. Nokia is already on board.

Apple or Google could also try to fill the gap left by Flash on mobile devices. Or Adobe could get its act together and bring a more fully-featured version of Flash to mobile. The only other option is to wait a few years for mobile devices to become as powerful as today’s laptops so that they can display regular Flash Websites. Which option do readers think will win out in the end?

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