'Innovate During Slowdown or Perish' – Microsoft

A rather chilling reminder of the times we live in, this message from Steve Ballmer echoed throughout the course of the Microsoft TechEd, held in Hyderabad

Monday, June 01, 2009

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When Steve Ballmer descended upon a gathering of more than 200 software professionals, coders and engineers, at the Hyderabad International Convention Center, he admitted to being in a 'not usual for me' down self, when he began his keynote with a statement like “The world economy is currently in reset mode, and if the economy has to grow, it cannot be done with debt, but with innovation and productivity”. Positioning Information Technology in a rather therapeutic avatar, Ballmer stressed that non-IT innovation will be fueled by IT innovation at times of slowdowns like these.

Microsoft TechEd India 2009, a three day jamboorie organized by Microsoft every year, brings together software professionals, analysts, and media under one roof to exhibit the company's developer initiatives for the year, and broad product roadmaps. In both the areas, the event this year had lots to talk about –from a sneak peek into Windows 7, to a rather surprising number of 'open' initiatives at the developers' disposal – from open APIs for Windows 7, including the Server variants, to open platform support for Windows Azure, the Cloud offering – in short, a well-received sense of freedom for developers not having to learn or unlearn their expertise in a particular programming language. Microsoft echoed a rather encouraging statement all through this year's TechEd: “irrespective of your language specialization, we now allow you to connect to Microsoft seamlessly.”

Deciphering developers
The event brought together domain experts and evangelists from Microsoft, who spoke on various technical and business aspects of various products and platforms. Don M. Smith, Product Manager (Patterns and Practices) and Blaine Wastell, Senior Program Manager were two of them. Speaking on their understanding of the make-up of developers worldwide, they said in unison, “the majority of developers can be classified into two segments, one, who are motivated by the technology itself and two, who focus on the impact of the final solution.” Blaine Wastell explained, "The first category of developers is those that seek to grow with a particular technology or development environment. They begin with the basics and end up learning the technology inside out. The good thing is that they can stretch a technology to its limit and the bad thing is that other technology is alien to them." He continued to explain the second category of developers. "They work backwards. The final product is what matters to them.

Depending on the business need and understanding of the usage of the solution, they choose the relevant technology, or have a mix and match of technologies to achieve the desired result."

Steve Ballmer addressing software developers at the TechEd in Hyderabad

So, which of these two methods is ideal in the current economic scenario? Don Smith said, "A mix of both. In an ideal scenario, a product, software or application has to be developed by a bunch of people, certain components of the coding need deep knowledge of the relevant platform or knowledge, but for increased usability and adoption of the final solution, you do need developers who can shuttle effectively between platforms."

The seventh wonder?
PCQuest got an exclusive preview of Windows 7, at the TechEd this year. According to Microsoft, the new features have been built based on three key areas, productivity enhancement, overall speed, and ease of use. For starters, there are the display and experience enhancements like automatic wallpaper changes every 30 minutes, based on the theme you have selected. To make you feel at home when you are traveling, you can use the theme of your desktop based on the location. Another interesting enhancement extends itself from the Vista version. The Ribbon feature, which was introduced with Vista will now be featured in very basic applications like Paint and Calculator and Wordpad. Also, the APIs will be made available for extensions into corporate networks.

But the 'wow' factor in Windows 7 comes from the Aero series of enhancements – like the Aero Peek, which gives you a 'live' peek of the applications you are multitasking. For instance, if you have your Media Player streaming a video, and an image viewer open while you are typing out a document or a mail, all you need to do is to scroll your mouse over the taskbar at the bottom of the screen to open a mini video screen or the image.Taking image-based enhancements like these to the next level, Windows 7 incorporates motion sensor technology by understanding mouse gestures. Imagine you have four windows open running the same or different applications, you can choose one application, for instance the Calculator and 'shake' it (literally) with the mouse. The rest of the windows get stacked up on the task bar and only the Calculator stays up on the screen.

For enterprise customers, Microsoft has paid a lot of emphasis to security and manageability. In a scenario where an enterprise organization needs to have data transferred between branch offices, a 'branch cache' of the data or application that was invoked, is stored not in the server, but in the client which used the application recently. Subsequently, if anyone else in the branch needs to use the same application, it is invoked from the user's client. Add to it, enhancements like Adaptive Bandwidth and Application Blocker, Windows 7 is slated to be the next big transitional operating system of the times.

Taking Interoperability a step further
Taking this open initiative a step further, Microsoft has also funded for interoperability with other programming languages with its Java SDK for Microsoft .NET Services and Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET services. .NET Services essentially is .NET on the Azure Services Platform. Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect, Microsoft said, "We at Microsoft have realized that we have been going after only the developers who focus on enterprise-class applications, and this where the concept of Silverlight comes from. Now we realize that there is a huge breed of what I call the 'hobbyist' developers who grasp languages swiftly and contribute a small chunk of a big application, or create small applications as part of a big project. Interoperability with platforms will expose these developers to the capabilities of the cloud."

Another interesting initiative is the ability to port Silverlight on Eclipse. Now, a Silverlight developer can invoke instances or vice versa from Eclipse, making software development more pervasive and taking it to higher levels of being open.

.NET on the cloud has three important components, a Service Bus, Access Control and Work Flow. The Service Bus is an HTTP-based clearing house for third party platforms and applications. If a Java Application needs to interact with one in a different environment, the Bus will form the messaging bridge based on the Access Control, which takes care of the authorization, Authentication and Registration. The Work Flow component orchestrates the connection effectively.

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