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Now that Halo 4 will run on Windows Azure, what’s next?

Barb Darrow — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:04:54 +0000

Microsoft knows how to make big, sweeping pronouncements. And there were a lot of those flowing out of the company’s Build Conference in Redmond, Wash. this week.

In a blog posted Wednesday, the day of his Build keynote. Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools business, talked up Windows Azure as the platform of choice for building and running modern applications. For developers, he said Microsoft’s Cloud OS — a combo of Azure and Windows Server 2012 — gives developers the most complete platform to build on “regardless of their preferred language, tool or framework.”

That’s a big claim and one that some non- .NET developers aren’t buying. Sure, they acknowledge that Microsoft has added support for non-Microsoft languages — PHP, Node.js etc — but they don’t trust that Microsoft is supporting them as robustly as it supports its own languages and frameworks. That’s a hurdle for Microsoft if it wants to attract these developers in addition to enterprise developers. Business users are heavily invested in Java or .NET code. according to Sinclair Schuler, CEO of Apprenda, a company that offers a business-focused .NET platform as a service.

Reaching out to web developers

In his blog, Nadella touted the company’s “internet scale” workloads including Skydrive, Office 365, Xbox Live and Bing. How many of those are running on Azure now? No one was saying, because the answer is close to zero. But, that’s about to change. Next week Halo 4 will launch and then, according to Nadella’s post: “2 million concurrent players will experience the power of Windows Azure, which is used to power the entire multi-player experience.”

Nadella continued:

” … the Halo 4 team was able to cut costs by more than 60 percent from the previous release. The team reduced the development time with high levels of infrastructure automation, and that in turn allowed them to re-platform the entire code base in less than a year. Finally, with the flexible and on-demand architecture of Windows Azure, each Halo 4 developer had their own development environment, which allowed development and testing to run in parallel.”

A Microsoft spokeswoman said Azure will “power the entire back-end and supporting services for Halo 4, which include presence, leaderboards, Avatar rendering, match making and more.” And, that the Bing Search API and Microsoft Translator will be available on the new Windows Azure Store.

Update: Commenter Tim Acheson points out that Bing Maps also runs on Azure.

Eating the dog food

Microsoft always brags about eating its own dog food (the world’s worst metaphor). So when it tells outside developers to build and deploy software on Azure when it isn’t doing so itself, it’s just awkward.

Halo ain’t Office or SharePoint, but it’s a start. When it comes to its productivity applications, Microsoft has nibbled around the edges by enabling developers to write add-ons for Office and Sharepoint that run on Azure. But as to when Azure will be the deployment platform for Office 365 or other of the company’s software-as-a-service products, your guess is as good as mine. Windows Azure launched after all, in February, 2010. Tick, tock.

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Use Starbucks card, get free WiFi deal starts today

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:13:33 +0000

At the risk of blasphemy, I’m writing this from my home office drinking a mug of WaWa coffee that I brewed myself. My well intentioned plan of rising early and hitting a local Starbucks to see if they indeed launched their new WiFi offering went amok, so I’ll have to rely on the source. Let me see… yup! Right on the Starbucks website, they now detail the plan. Here’s the skinny for those that prefer Skim Milk:

Register a Starbucks pre-paid card online
Use it at least one time per month for a purchase or a re-charge
Get two consecutive hours of WiFi use in a single session
Starbucks is working on allowing multiple sessions… stay tuned
Your free two hours is good every day for 30 days after you’ve used / re-charged your Starbucks card
You will need to agree to receive e-mails from AT&T and you will create an ID / password with AT&T

Not a bad deal if you hit Starbucks even once per month for a purchase. I still may get out to my Quakertown location later today to see if they’re up and running. Some locations might not be ready yet, so be advised…

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Web-Based "Cloud OS" Aims for App Developers and Users

Samuel Dean — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:25 +0000

While the idea of an Internet-based operating system has already been explored through offerings such as YouOS and EyeOS , Xcerion, a small Swedish company, is taking an ambitious new approach to the idea. The company’s XML Internet Operating System/3 Beta (XIOS/3) is best described as a “Cloud OS” and Web 2.0 service. I’ve been testing it on a Windows machine, loading XIOS/3 in Internet Explorer (you can’t yet load it in Firefox), and it generally looks promising.

XIOS/3 has many of the properties of an operating system (though strictly speaking it is more of a Web-hosted environment), and is targeted at online application development, collaboration, and sharing of free applications. It is XML-based, and uses AJAX to connect to back-end servers. If application developers begin to collaborate using it, it could become a promising new open-source platform and a flexible way for web workers to get jobs done.

XIOS/3’s desktop looks very much like the desktop that a Windows user is familiar with, complete with a sidebar on the right that resembles Google Sidebar (a clock, a weather widget, etc.), and tabs along the left that take you to programs you can run in the environment, a search engine, an XML editor for working with applications, and more.

Xcerion is backed financially by former Microsoft executives, and reports have already surfaced that XIOS/3 may begin to compete with Google and Microsoft in delivering numerous types of Web applications and services. For the time being, I see it as more of a Web 2.0 service that allows for collaboration on sophisticated online applications and sharing of those applications. It’s also in a limited beta version right now, so you need to apply to test the beta.

XIOS/3 allows you to do work offline and then automatically synch the work up with your data and applications when you go online. If I open up, say, a simple cash flow application and start changing values in the underlying data, then I go open another browser, my changes to the data will be reflected in the view in the second browser. In this way, web workers could easily collaborate on transaction-based, database-centric applications.

XIOS/3 also allows you to save data on your own hard drives, if you wish, or it can be stored online. Also, applications execute locally, so XIOS/3 is faster to use than some of the other Internet-based operating system offerings. It also has a very clean and easy XML editor.

To a large extent, the success of XIOS/3 will depend on coders building and sharing applications with it—just as standard operating systems have always depended on developers for success. You can find many screenshots of XIOS/3 and forthcoming applications at Xcerion’s home page. There is also a video demo and other information at the company’s blog.

The business model is to offer XIOS/3 and applications for it for free. In my own use, I found it stable, intuitive and good for collaborative application development. But what Excerion absolutely needs next, as is true in the Linux world and throughout the open-source arena, is enthusiastic developers.

Would you consider using a collaborative, browser-based spin on an operating system? Have you used any of the other Web-based OS offerings?

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Limelight Kicks Ass in IPO

Liz Gannes — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 20:39:02 +0000

Limelight Networks, the content delivery network focused on digital media and provider to many of the companies we write about, began trading on NASDAQ today. The Tempe, Arizona-based company sold 16 million shares of common stock for $15 to raise $240 million, and today closed up nearly 50 percent at $22.18.

At times the share price had jumped as much as 62 percent, according to Bloomberg. Limelight lost $3.71 million last year on sales of $64.3 million, but it has seen tremendous growth as more and more web video platforms and viewers are coming online.

Limelight faces a slew of new competitors, like Level 3 and Internap’s Vitalstream, who are ramping up their CDN operations. It has also been involved in a legal tussle with Akamai, the established market leader in the CDN industry.

The success of Limelight’s IPO amidst this fierce competition is more proof that CDNs are hot, and investors are willing to pay a premium price for these companies. Today Akamai also saw a boost from the market interest in CDNs, rising $3.37 to close the day at $45.60 a share.

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Convergence 2.0

Om Malik — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 16:03:43 +0000

Christian Lindholm, director of multimedia applications over at Nokia has some interesting thoughts on the whole concept of convergence and the role mobile phones will play in the evolution of a highly digital and mobile lifestyle. Lets call it convergence 2.0. He found evidence of it at the CeBit.

bq. Integrating voice, image, video and text is becoming possible in an uncompromised form factor known to the broad audience as a mobile phone.

Why because he thinks with tiny flash memory cards, MP3 players, cameras and videocams all being bundled into phones, the only thing missing is the high speed connection and even that is around the corner via 3G technologies.

bq. The integration of Wi-Fi totally changes to nature of a laptop. Laptops are now powerful enough and small enough to really become communications tools

Yeah we knew that and don’t need a phone guy to tell us about these things.

bq. The Home server, rebranded as an entertainment center is the future of the Home PC. Intel was showing off the “Kessler” concept which integrated PC, Wi-Fi, RAID and lots of other technology I still do not understand, but it left a permanent impression on me.

This is convergence 2.0, only I personally think the PC guys are still thinking of it as a PC. Intel and Microsoft despite their billions, and their allies like morons at HP, Dell and Gateway are going to fall flat on their face. I would have loved to hear Christian’s comments on the User Interfaces in phones and user Interfaces in the PC world, and what impact do they have in adoption and usage.

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