James Senior's Blog

I’ve seen Ray Ozzie speak a number of times and one of his favorite catchphrases that he reuses is “standing on the shoulder of giants”, and it’s starting to become a trending topic with Ev from Twitter too.  Here’s why Ev should be looking up (and down) when he’s standing on people’s shoulders.

Ray normally dishes out his shoulders/giants quotes as a hat-tip to others in the software industry who have gone before him and laid the foundation for software or services that he builds, for example when talking about Groove on his blog:

“From where I've come, it's truly breathtaking in so many dimensions, and the product could never be where it is without standing on the shoulders of giants - particularly Microsoft.”

Amazon were also worthy of a mention during his PDC08 keynote last year: (although not referring to them as giants, but just standing on their shoulders :-) )

“Some months after we began to plan this new effort [Azure], Amazon launched a service called EC2, and I'd like to tip my hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon for their innovation and for the fact that across the industry all of us are going to be standing on their shoulders as they've established some base level design patterns, architectural models and business models that we'll all learn from and grow.”

Now it seems that Ev from Twitter has picked up the same catchphrase too! He was recently speaking on an interview on the BBC where he talked about the rise of Twitter:

“Well we stood on the shoulders of giants, said Ev, neglecting to mention he came up with Blogging (Blogger) before ‘microblogging”.

It seems like everyone is standing on other people’s shoulders right now, from an idea perspective.  Of course, from a platform perspective, the idea is to get others to stand on your shoulders (e.g. Microsoft Windows, Apple’s App Store, Force.com etc.).  The more people you have standing on shoulders in your pyramid the more the rely on you, and you sure as heck better make sure that you have a solid foundation free from downtime otherwise you’ll quickly amass a angry mob.

Denial of service attacks are a bitch but you can defend against them, and today’s Twitter outage was a great example of what can happen due to a well coordinated attack.  Twitter is a platform with powerful APIs that have spawned loads of other software products, services and new business models. 

Twitter will get there in time, I'm sure, but to be a truly great platform you have to provide reliability and stability for those who are standing on your head in your pyramid.

Image courtesy of the Chinese Allstar Acrobats Inc. – keep up the good work guys.

Love this ad on the back of this month’s Wired magazine.  Patron clearly showing that they are down with the geeks when it comes to technology, and in fact is great lead in to talk about Microsoft’s more open stance when it comes to software development and the licensing of intellectual property.

How are we becoming more open? In lots of ways, for example last week at the OSCON conference Microsoft announced their first contribution to the PHP community projects with the ADOdb patches.  The work that the open source team at Microsoft are doing is really starting to pay off with Linus even coming out saying that Microsoft hatred “a disease”.

Here’s another something that you might not be aware of too, the MS-PL license – the license we release may of our CodePlex projects - is a one-pager (well actually it’s even shorter than that) and is probably one of the most succinct software licenses I’ve seen.  It’s this kind of work that really grabs the attention of Microsoft-haters and shows them that we are doing some cool stuff with the open source community.

This morning the Windows 7 team released the code to manufacturing (aka Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, etc) so they can start building it into their PCs ready for shipping on the 22nd October.

I’ve been using Windows 7 for the past 6 months or so and it is an amazing piece of software that represents the hard work of over 5000 engineers – great work guys!

When I joined Microsoft 3 years ago, we launched Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 and I thought that was big – we had unprecedented sales of all those products, double digit growth etc (just check the financials).  With Windows 7, Office 2010, Windows Azure, Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 3, Windows Server 2008 R2 and more being released very soon this is going to be a huge 12 months for Microsoft – huge.

Latika – who seems to be getting to shoot more videos that me these days – takes you through a quick tour of some of the cool features in the new release of Windows 7 http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/tour

A common misconception is that the cool functionality in the Live Messenger Web Toolkit is only available to developers who are using the Microsoft web platform i.e. ASP.NET.  This couldn’t be further from the truth. 

The Live Messenger Web Toolkit is entirely client-side based using JavaScript and HTTP endpoints, it will happily run on any platform, any web server and with any scripting language.  The Web Toolkit JavaScript was created using Script# which allows you to code in C# and then compile down to JS – neat.

For PHP developers we’ve just released a couple of cool things to allow you to put Live Messenger in your web apps:

• PHP Windows Live Messenger Web Tutorial
• PHP sample code
• Check out the Interactive SDK – cool for checking out samples and code snippets

This means if you code your web apps in PHP, Ruby, Perl etc. you can go ahead and use the Live Messenger Web Toolkit to light up your apps and create cool new social scenarios for people that visit your website.

Enjoy, and let me know how you get on!

You have to hand it to Dopplr, they have some pretty sweet features included in their service like Carbon Footprint calculations, travel tips provided by third parties like Mr & Mrs Smith Hotel Collection and telling me when my friends are going to be nearby.  The other day they sent me my 6 month travel report too which provides a really nice graphical representation of my travel timeline – check it out here: http://reports.dopplr.com/2009/c65e791a5db1713a.pdf

My other favorite travel service is Tripit which has probably the best feature of both service – the ability to email them direct with my travel receipts from American Express and have them create a detailed travel itinerary, automatically – neat.

Feel free to add me on Dopplr or Tripit!

I’ve been using Office 2010 for the past few months and now the technology preview is available to the public I wanted to share a few of the great features I’ve stumbled across recently.  This morning I came across “MailTips” which told me that according to Nishant’s out of office he is unlikely to respond to my mail and that I should remove him from the To line.  That is a nice touch.

I really dig Manan’s list of Office 2010 features, including Screenshot and Office Menu enhancements: http://www.beingmanan.com/wp/2009/05/office-2010-new-features/

How have you been getting on with Office 2010?

The BBC are reporting that Windows 7 is flying off the virtual shelves at Amazon with sales in the first 8 hours topping those of Vista during the entire 17 week pre-order period.  Pent up demand?  I think so!

I also love the statistics that by 2010 other businesses stand to make $320bn from products and services surrounding the new operating system.  Windows, it’s more than an operating system, it’s an economy.

Bill Gates left as Chief Software Architect about a year ago and since then he’s been devoting his time to his philanthropic work through the Gates Foundation, attempting to solve some of the world’s biggest problems; polio, malaria, poor education etc.

Aside from this, and as something of a personal project, he has been working on bringing to the fore a collection of videos that cover the lectures of Richard Feynman a noted physicist given at Cornell University in 1965.  Feynman was noted for his ability to make complex topics accessible and approachable and the “Messenger Lectures” were a great example of this.

Gates first saw these videos twenty years ago and since then he has been working to track down copyright ownership to bring them into the public view where they could be enjoyed by the world.  This effort has become known as Project Tuva and you can check out the videos on the Microsoft Research website here: http://research.microsoft.com/tuva

I guess it was only a matter of time before someone built a Twitter add-in for Outlook (actually I’m surprised it took so long).  Well the guys at Techhit went ahead and launched this free download that lets you get the following Twitter features right within Outlook:

• Update your Twitter status directly from Outlook.
• Receive your friend updates in Outlook.
• Archive, manage, group and search your tweets the
  same way you manage your email.
• Search, track keywords. TwInbox will automatically download ALL tweets matching the keywords you specify, even if you are not following the tweet sender. This feature is perfect for keeping up to date with the Twitter buzz on your name, brand, interests, etc.
• Group tweets by sender, topic, etc using the Search feature.
• Upload and post picture files and Outlook email attachments.
• See new tweets at a glance.
• Assign custom folder and categories to new messages.
• Use Outlook's "Reply" and "ReplyAll" commands to send twitter direct messages and @replies.
• Automatically sort new tweets into per-sender folders.
• Shorten URLs with.
• See graphs of your Twitter usage statistics.
• Tweets sent to you (@replies and direct) are marked with high importance, so you can see them at a glance.

The Office team was so impressed created a video explaining all about it:

Office Casual: How to Twitter in Outlook (with TwInbox)

Download TwInbox here.

Today at the World Partner Conference WPC Microsoft’s cloud vision took one step closer to the sky after announcing how much it will cost to run applications and store information in the Windows Azure Platform.  Here is the run down:

Windows Azure
Computing: $0.12 per hour
Storage: $0.15 per gigabyte stored
Storage transaction: $0.10 per 10K
Bandwidth: $0.10 in/$0.15 out per gigabyte

SQL Azure
Web Edition Database, incl. up to 1 GB relational database: $9.99
Business Edition Database, incl. up to 10 GB relational database: $99.99
Bandwidth (both): $0.10 in/$0.15 out per gigabyte

.NET Services
Messages: $0.15 per 100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens
Bandwidth: $0.10 in/$0.15 out per gigabyte

(numbers courtesy of Todd Bishop)

When Windows Azure Platform goes live in November it will be available U.S., Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. Local-currency pricing will be available at that time.

In March 2010, the list of countries will extend to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore and Taiwan, with other countries to follow thereafter.

The numbers against Windows Azure are similar to other services out there aka Amazon, but one thing that struck me was the SQL Azure with its $9.99 monthly fee is much more familiar to the database services that traditional database services run.  One could argue that the relational database provided by SQL Azure is far more valuable compared to Windows Azure Table storage (blob storage).