Month: January 2012

I wasn’t able to keep up with my usual feeds and sources of news and gossip during the week with all the meetings I was attending, travel, presenting, and catching up in the office.  But one thing I noticed was the re-emergence of some Linux people moaning about secure boot, and more comments (positive, negative and speculation) about Windows 8 ARM tablets.

On ARM tablets, other than the fact that we’ve seen them at Build (behind glass cases) and that they will eventually appear on the market, we know nothing else.  There’s no end of pointless speculation.  We can’t criticise them because we don’t know what they are.  If you are knocking them then I’d love to learn about your hands on experience with these Windows 8 devices … mainly because the manufacturers haven’t put any on the market or released any specs yet.  So shut the frak up!

As for the Linux folks, I don’t always agree with him but Paul Thurrot got it right on.  When Apple make it easy for you to install Linux on an iPad or on an iPhone, then come talk to us.

The truth is that Windows devices are changing.  When I got in the business in the mid 90’s it was the norm for an IT person or an enthusiast to not buy a home PC.  Machines from Gateway 2000 (their abandoned factory in Dublin is still sitting there, with the alleged drug rehab clinic inside!) or Dell were so restrictive and overpriced.  Change was happening at incredible rates.  In Dublin we would have gone to a place like Peats to buy a case, motherboard, and all the other gubbins to build a machine to meet our requirements.  Later we’d order from Komplett.  But most gamers switched to the PS2 (and PS3) or Xbox (and Xbox 360) to get consistent and easy to access games.  Switching out graphics cards every year to be able to play the latest game was not cool.  In fact, I felt like the price of a custom build went up and way beyond the factory PC.

Customisation seems to be dying.  Take the slate PCs (the “flat laptop with a touch screen” precursor to the Windows tablet that) that are on the market now.  The one we got at Build 2011 has a small SSD.  I’ve love to upgrade it but I can’t.  The chassis is sealed.  There’s no obvious way to open it.  It’s probably a safe bet that if it was a retail model, even opening the chassis would void the warrantee.  The new ultrabook I got is similar.  It has tiny screws that require an Allen key that you’d find only in the best of PC toolkits (lucky I got one from MSFT a few years ago) or a jewellers.  But again, opening that chassis will probably void the warrantee. 

I think we are moving from the customisable Windows PC era to the era of the Windows device.  Most BSODs I have encountered have been caused by device drivers.  If Microsoft can dictate device specifications, as they do with Windows Phone, then they can improve the user’s experience of Windows stability.  That’s one of the things Apple gets praise for, but they can control the hardware, driver, and OS to guarantee a better experience.  Microsoft has to deal with an incredible breadth of internal devices and drivers, made of manufacturers of varying skills and professionalism. 

My desire to customise has reduced over the years.  Buying components by myself is expensive.  The likes of Asus or HP can bulk buy and sell on to me as a part of a machine at a much better price.  Maybe I’m alone in this but I like this change.  A simple, pick it up and just use it appliance is what I want.  And I really don’t care if it can’t dual boot Linux.  Let the penguin shaggers go buy Linux devices instead

Mary Jo Foley mentioned on TWiT Windows Weekly that Dave Cutler, the Microsoft man who helped create Windows NT and Windows Azure, had moved to Xbox along with a senior hypervisor architect.  Why would Microsoft want that to happen?  My mind went racing and one of the live listeners thought the exact same thing as me.

There’s not been much innovation in the life of the gaming console in it’s long history.  We went from twisting paddles, to joysticks, to controllers.  Not something big.  We went from cartridges to DVD.  Not a huge leap either.  Wii and Kinect really were big changes but I feel we’re only at the start of that evolution.

An interesting thing happened sometime in the last couple of years (don’t ask me when precisely).  A service called OnLive kicked off.  It was a cloud based game streaming service.  The game executes in a remote data centre and the gamer connects to it via their local machine.  The restrictions are based on latency, meaning that the gamer must be relatively close to the data centre, e.g. not playing in London with a data centre in Sydney.

What I instantly thought when I heard the above was that maybe Xbox Live was thinking of doing something similar, but by taking advantage of the Microsoft Global Foundation Services data centres that are located globally and host services such as Windows Azure, Office 365, and so forth.  Imagine it, games running in optimized virtual machines on specifically designed gaming virtualisation hosts.  If you could design the hardware and write the hypervisor from scratch, and take advantage of a network of globally dispersed data centres with huge bandwidth capabilities, well you could do something cool.  Then combine that with technology similar to Windows 8 RemoteFX (design for the WAN) and the availability of Xbox Live on Windows Phone, Xbox, and Windows 8 … hmm … and throw into the mix the reported incredibly high numbers of people who subscribe to Xbox Live Gold.  This could be really interesting. 

Imagine the possibilities.  You finish up work.  On the bus or train you take out your Windows Phone, you start up a game that is streamed from a “local” data centre.  You arrive at your stop and pause the game.  In the sitting room you power up your Xbox, connect and un-pause the game.  You want to go upstairs so you wake up your Windows 8 tablet and transfer the game connection to there.  Seamless. 

At this point, the gaming device becomes less important.  It’s all about the service and the subscription.  Actually, that’s kind of true right now.  Xbox is sold at a loss or cost price so you can get the machine, subscribe to Live Gold, and buy the games.  It’s the “attach” that Microsoft makes money from.  If Microsoft could take the Xbox out of the mix and focus entirely on the service then they can remove device churn from the equation and eliminate consumer hardware as a limiting factor to gaming/entertainment  innovation.

That’s my mad theory on it anyway.  It could be really cool if something like this happened.

I was listening to TWiT Windows Weekly on the drive this morning and Mary Jo Foley declared a book to be the best book about Microsoft company history around.  I was intrigued.

Showstopper is by G. Pascal Zachary.  It tells the story of how a team developed Windows NT, the original version of what would become Windows XP/Vista/7/8. 

I’ve just bought it and sent it to my iPad.  I’m in the middle of reading another book at the moment.  This one will be next on my reading list.