Why Microsoft can't afford Windows 7 to fail

BBC NEWS | Business | Why Microsoft can't afford Windows 7 to fail

By Tim Weber Business editor, BBC News website

Will Windows 7 allow users to forget Vista?

On Thursday, Microsoft launches Windows 7, the latest version of its operating system. Its success or failure will determine the future of the world's biggest software company.

When talking about Microsoft, it is useful to remind yourself of the sheer scale of its reach. Windows powers about 90% of the world's computers; by the company's own reckoning more than one billion people use it.

Windows also powers Microsoft. During its last financial year, a $58.4bn (£35.7bn) turnover generated an operating profit of $20.3bn (net profit: $14.6bn). Windows accounted for well over half of that.

For years, critics have claimed that Microsoft's virtual monopoly is about to end.

They say it will be brought down by a resurgent Apple, insurgent open-source rival Linux or a revolution in how we use computers, when the actual computing moves from desktop machines to the "cloud" where software runs on remote servers.

Windows without a Vista

In reality, Microsoft has been its own worst enemy. Ruthless behaviour towards rivals earned it the attention of regulators such as the European Commission and the US Department of Justice.

Windows 7 is much easier to install than its predecessor

More importantly, three years ago Microsoft botched the release of Vista, the operating system that preceded Windows 7.

Vista - a bloated, difficult to install operating system - left many early users with suddenly unusable hardware and software. The disaster badly undermined Microsoft's credibility with consumers and software developers.

Today, Vista is still outshone by its eight-year-old predecessor Windows XP. One (particularly low) estimate from web metrics firm Net Applications suggests Vista has a mere 18.6% share of the market. Others put it at just over 35%, which is still a poor figure.

Among companies, "Vista is the worst-adopted operating system", according to Annette Jump, research director at Gartner, a technology research firm.

The president of Microsoft International, Jean-Philippe Courtois, opts for understatement: "We don't feel great about Vista adoption."

Windows reloaded

Windows 7 is Microsoft's one and maybe only chance to redeem itself. "We have learned a lot from what went wrong with Vista," is a mantra repeated by every Microsoft executive.

The preparations for Windows 7 have been a remarkable step up from the days of dealing with Vista Alex Gruzen, Dell

For starters, Windows 7 is on time, arriving less than three years after the launch of Vista, which was two years overdue.

Early users report it to be fast, reliable, secure and easy to use on the move.

Most importantly, Microsoft went out of its way to avoid a repeat of its biggest Vista mistake, when it failed to prepare its partners for the new system.

Windows 7 loves Windows 95

"Peek" helps users find their way around a crowded taskbar

"The Windows ecosystem is the broadest in the world, and we have to take care of that," says Mr Courtois.

Microsoft's partners have noticed the change in tack. "The preparations for Windows 7 have been a remarkable step up from the days of dealing with Vista," says Alex Gruzen, the man in charge of consumer products at the computer giant Dell.

"In the past, Microsoft looked at its operating system in isolation, and gave it to [manufacturers] to do whatever they wanted," he says. "Now they collaborate, help to figure out which third-party vendors are slowing down the system, help them improve their code."

We expect a tangible Windows 7 bounce [in PC sales] Richard Huddy, AMD

Microsoft, promises Mr Courtois, has "worked very hard with Windows 7 to achieve applications compatibility." When it rolled out the first service pack for Vista, there were a mere 2,700 applications certified to work with the system.

At launch, Windows 7 boasts 8,500 certified apps.

And if you want to use old software on your computer, Microsoft has built in a "compatibility tool" that allows you to run applications that were built for operating systems as old as Windows 95.

Windows 7 also has a smaller "footprint" than Vista. It needs less computing power so older PCs run it quite happily. "Our PCs have gained another two years lifetime," says Chris Page, who deployed Windows 7 on nearly 700 computers in schools run by Warwickshire County Council.

Just one five-year-old laptop refused to run the new operating system, he reports.

The best or worst of times?

But is this the right time to launch an operating system? Parts of the world may be out of recession, but investment remains low and consumers are facing the prospect of rising unemployment.

The timing, however, might actually be Microsoft's biggest asset.

The new Taskbar preview is popular with users

"Technology has always been leading economies out of recession," says George Colony, boss of tech research firm Forrester.

Despite the downturn, IT investment is growing three times faster than most economies, reports tech industry analyst IDC. Even among consumers there are still pockets of growth, especially small netbooks with their low-power processors, which cannot run Vista but deliver zippy performance under Windows 7.

The launch of the new operating system will produce "a tangible Windows 7 bounce", says Richard Huddy of chipmaker AMD.

"Along with that, we're also seeing evidence on a global scale that the recession is starting to lessen."

"The fact that Win 7 is more efficient than Windows Vista means that it's viable for lower-cost PCs, so I think we can safely say we're increasingly optimistic."

The bottom line

At Dell, Alex Gruzen sounds bullish too. Many companies have kept old computers running for at least a year longer than they would normally do. Now "there is some optimism that the refresh cycle will begin over the next year; Windows 7 certainly helps, it provides a good catalyst for it."

April 2014: the deadline for Windows XP

A changed digital world is also driving change. Consumers and corporate computer users are becoming more mobile and Windows XP simply was not built for that.

Forcing the issue, Microsoft has said it will stop supporting Windows XP in April 2014. And even if there is an extension, by then most makers of third-party software for XP will have phased out their support, says Steve Kleynhans, vice-president of research at Gartner, "which will increase the pressure to upgrade" to Windows 7.

Also, organisations testing Windows 7, such as the UK accounting firm Baker Tilly and the City of Miami, report sharply lower support and energy costs, and higher productivity, according to Stella Chernyak, the product manager for Windows 7 Enterprise.

Gartner's Steve Kleiynhans also counsels companies against the traditional wait for "Service Pack 1", because these days Microsoft rolls out upgrades and updates continuously. The service pack will be a mere catch-up for those who have failed to install them.

The bottom line for Mr Courtois: "We expect business to adopt Windows 7 much faster" than previous operating systems.

Watching rivals

Microsoft has tidied up Windows Explorer

At Gartner, Annette Jump is more cautious: "We don't expect that Windows 7 will drive PC shipments," although companies "really will have to" upgrade to Windows 7, because otherwise "the support costs for older PCs will be piling up".

Microsoft's timing has been helped by the fact that one of its arch rivals, Google, won't launch its lightweight operating system Chrome OS before the middle of next year, which will be plenty of time to establish Windows 7 firmly in the netbook market.

Also useful is the misstep of its other nemesis, Apple, which uncharacteristically botched its new operating system Snow Leopard, not anywhere near as badly as Vista, but enough to give Microsoft a clear run for its Windows 7 launch.

Windows' last hurrah?

"I really have to go back to Windows 95 to remember people being so excited about a new operating system," says Mr Courtois, a 25-year veteran of Microsoft.

"Windows 7 is everything that Vista promised to be and more," enthuses AMD's Richard Huddy. Dell's Alex Gruzen calls the software "outstanding."

This may be hyperbole. Gartner analyst Annette Jump, for one, calls Windows 7 "a polishing release of Windows Vista".

But most reviews have been positive, even enthusiastic. "The fact it's an operating system I see nobody complaining about [suggests] you have something that's really good and solid," argues Mr Huddy.

That alone will not banish the fundamental threats to Microsoft's business model, though.

Over the next few years there will be "a big shift to [operating system] neutral applications like browser-based apps, Java, Silverlight, Flash, .Net", says Mr Kleynhans at Gartner.

"That will limit the dominance, the factors that drive people to have Windows."

Should Microsoft rest on its Windows 7 laurels, it might end up being its most, but also its last, successful operating system.

Laptop for every pupil in Uruguay

BBC NEWS | Technology | Laptop for every pupil in Uruguay

By Verónica Psetizki Montevideo, Uruguay 362,000 pupils in Uruguay now have the distinctive laptops. Uruguay has joined the small number of nations providing a laptop for every child attending state primary school. President Tabaré Vázquez presented the final XO model laptops to pupils at a school in Montevideo on 13 October. Over the last two years 362,000 pupils and 18,000 teachers have been involved in the scheme. The "Plan Ceibal" (Education Connect) project has allowed many families access to the world of computers and the internet for the first time. Uruguay is part of the One Laptop Per Child scheme, an organisation set up by internet pioneer Nicholas Negroponte. His original vision was to provide laptops at $100 (£61) but they proved more expensive. The Uruguay programme has cost the state $260 (£159) per child, including maintenance costs, equipment repairs, training for the teachers and internet connection. The total figure represents less than 5% of the country's education budget. Around 70% of the XO model laptops handed out by the government were given to children who did not have computers at home. "This is not simply the handing out of laptops or an education programme. It is a programme which seeks to reduce the gap between the digital world and the world of knowledge," explained Miguel Brechner, director of the Technological Laboratory of Uruguay and in charge of Plan Ceibal. In a similar project, every child in the tiny South Pacific nation of Niue has an OLPC laptop. In 2008, Portugal committed to giving Intel Classmate laptops to every six-10 year old in the country. "A revolution" In the run up to Uruguay's general election on 25 October, the project is being promoted as an achievement of the Tabaré Vázquez government. "It's been a revolution, which has helped us enormously, but it hasn't been easy," explained Lourdes Bardino, head teacher of School 173 in Las Piedras. Ms Bardino said that some teachers were originally opposed to the introduction of the XO laptops. "We have a lady who's been teaching for 30 years and when they gave us the computers and the training, she asked for leave because she didn't want to have anything to do with the programme. Later she changed her mind and now computers have changed the way she teaches." All the teachers have been given training, but the extent to which they use the laptops in the classroom is up to them. Research carried out recently by the State Education authorities revealed that some teachers have chosen not to include computer-related work in their lesson plans. Costs and criticisms The laptops have an open source Linux operating system with a user interface called Sugar. It has attracted some criticism from detractors for not being mainstream. However Mr Brechner believes that children should learn computer skills regardless of the software available. Blind children were being taught on a Microsoft Windows operating system, he said. The annual cost of maintaining the programme, including an information portal for pupils and teachers, will be US$21 (£13) per child. The future Its a culture shock scenario - many countries are simply too scared to put it into practice Miguell Brechner, head of Plan Ceibal Now that all the schoolchildren have their computers, the authorities say that they will endeavour keep the schools connected, particularly those in rural areas, where many still do not have internet access. There are plans to extend the scheme to secondary schools and pre-school children next year. Organisers of the Plan Ceibal have set up a consultancy in order to advise other countries wishing to replicate the Uruguayan experience. Mr Brechner said that Rwanda, Haiti, El Salvador, Paraguay, some provinces in Argentina and Colombia have been in touch although they have not yet decided to contract their services. "We would help them with tenders, planning, evaluation, which software to use, how to spread the word, training, all the "know how" we have developed. We don't have a manual. It´s a culture shock scenario - many countries are simply too scared to put it into practice."

NoSQL: Distributed and Scalable Non-Relational Database Systems

NoSQL: Distributed and Scalable Non-Relational Database Systems | Linux Magazine

Non-SQL oriented distributed databases are all the rage in some circles. They're designed to scale from day 1 and offer reliability in the face of failures.

Jeremy Zawodny

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

There's an interesting shift happening in the world of Web-scale data stores. A whole new breed of scalable data stores is gaining popularity very quickly. The traditional LAMP stack is starting to look like a thing of the past. For a few years now, memcached has often appeared right next to MySQL, and now the whole "data tier" is being shaken up.

While some might see it as a move away from MySQL and PostgreSQL, the traditional open source relational data stores, it's actually a higher-level change. Much of this is change is the result of a few revelations:

1. a relational database isn't always the model or system for every piece of data
2. relational databases are tricky to scale (especially if you start with a single monolithic configuration–they aren't distributed by design)
3. normalization often hurts performance
4. in many applications, primary key look-ups are all you need

The new data stores vary quite a bit in their specific features, but in general they draw from a similar set of high-level characteristics. Not all of them meet all of these, of course, but just looking at the list gives you a sense of what they're trying to accomplish.

1. de-normalized, often schema-free, document storage
2. key/value based, supporting lookups by key
3. horizontal scaling
4. built in replication
5. HTTP/REST or easy to program APIs
6. support for MapReduce style programming
7. Eventually Consistent

And I could probably list another half a dozen qualities that many of them share too. But to me, the first two are the biggest departure form the traditional RDBMS. Of course, you can stick with MySQL and go non-relational. That's basically what FriendFeed did, using MySQL as the back-end to distributed key/value store.

The movement to these distributed schema-free data stores has begun to use the name NoSQL. Rather than spending a lot of time on the philosophy behind NoSQL storage systems, I'd rather highlight a few that have caught my eye for one reason or another and spend a bit of time talking about makes each stand out.

Redis

I'm not going to say too much about Redis, since I recently covered it in Redis: Lightweight key/value Store That Goes the Extra Mile. I'll just recap by saying that it's a lightweight in-memory key/value store that handles strings, sets, and lists and has an excellent core of features for manipulating those stored data types. Redis also has built-in replication support and the ability to periodically persist the data on disk so that can survive a reboot without major data loss. Redis is still one of the newer kids on the block but version 1.0 was released a few days after I last wrote about it–Murphy's Law, huh?

Redis is interesting to me because of the simplicity of its API and the fact that it takes the traditional key/value store up a notch by adding those specific data structures and provides fast atomic operations on them.

Tokyo Cabinet

Coming straight from Japan, Tokyo Cabinet is a fast and mature disk-based key/value store that feels a lot like BerkeleyDB re-written for the Web era. It is usually paired with Tokyo Tyrant, the network server that turns Tokyo Cabinet into a network service that speaks HTTP and the memcached protocol, as well as its own binary protocol.

Like the other modern DBM implementations, Tokyo Cabinet offers B-Tree, Hash, and fixed-size array-like record storage options. It stands out for me because, when used with Tokyo Tyrant, you have a modern network protocol and interface on top a stable low-level database infrastructure that lets you choose the right data structure to use. It is also relatively mature technology that's in use as part of some very high-volume Web sites.

Apache CouchDB

To quote the Apache CouchDB home page:

Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution.

CouchDB provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests. There are myriad third-party client libraries that make this even easier from your programming language of choice. CouchDB's built in Web administration console speaks directly to the database using HTTP requests issued from your browser.

CouchDB is written in Erlang, a robust functional programming language ideal for building concurrent distributed systems. Erlang allows for a flexible design that is easily scalable and readily extensible.

In other words, CouchDB is very buzzword compliant!

Seriously, though, CouchDB was one of the first document oriented databases really designed for the Web and to scale with the Web. The fact that it's now under the unbrella of the Apache Software Foundation speaks to the quality of the code and the relative maturity of the project.

CouchDB appeals to me because it has always seemed to be the most futuristic of the non-relational data stores I've looked at. It's written in a language designed for large, concurrent, and reliable network systems. But it also gives you the ability to tap into Map/Reduce style processing using server-side JavaScript. It sounds a little crazy (or did when it first began), but it actually works quite well. The API is simple and well thought out, which provides a very low barrier to entry too. It's also easy to have a CouchDB instance on your desktop or laptop that you can develop with and then sync to a CouchDB server in "the cloud" or in your company's data center.

CouchDB also implements a very useful versioning scheme that makes it possible to build collaborative systems without having to re-invent yet another wheel.

Riak

The newest data store on my radar, Riak bills itself as a "document oriented web database" that "combines a decentralized key-value store, a flexible map/reduce engine, and a friendly HTTP/JSON query interface to provide a database ideally suited for Web applications." It uses the eventual consistency model in an effort to maximize availability in times of network or server outages. In fact, one of the most interesting features of Riak is that you can easily control the parameters that define how available your system is in the face of problems.

Those parameters come from Eric Brewer's CAP theorem (a good read) which says that the three ingredients we should care about are varying degrees of Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance. Riak, unlike other systems, doesn't force you into a specific set of CAP values. Instead, it allows you to decide on a per-request basis how stringent you'd like to be.

This control comes thanks to three variables: N, R, and W. In a distributed system, N is the number of replicas in the system. So if you write a new key/value pair with N set to 4, then 4 nodes will be expected receive a copy of it (eventually). This value is set on a per-bucket basis.

The R and W values are set on a per-request basis and control the number of nodes that the client must receive a response from to complete a successful read or write operation, R fo read and W for write. This provides very granular control over how clients can react to failed nodes in a cluster.

For good high-level overview, see this presentation from the recent NoSQL Conference in New York City.

Others

There are a surprising number of NoSQL systems available today. The ones I've noted so far have caught my eye in one way or another and each uses a different approach to providing an alternative to centralized relational database systems. There are a few others that I'm hoping to experiment with as time allows.

• MongoDB is a VC-backed distributed schema-free database with a very impressive feature set (including additional indexes), commercial support, and mosty hands-off operation.
• Project Voldemort is a fairly mature system that's in heavy use at LinkedIn and comes with automatic replication and partitioning.
• MemcacheDB combines the proven BerkeleyDB storage system with a network server that speaks the memcached network protocol so you can create memcahed-like nodes that hold more data than would fit in a traditional RAM-based memcached nodes and be assured that the data is not lost after a reboot. In some respects this is similar to the Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant combination.

Have you dipped your toe in the NoSQL waters yet? How did it go?

Jeremy Zawodny is a software engineer at Craigslist where he works on MySQL, Search, and various back-end infrastructure. He's also the co-author of "High Performance MySQL" and blogs at http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/