Adrian Bridgwater ZDNet.co.uk

Microsoft is giving its core developer tools away for free to university and higher-education students in the UK, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, China, Canada and the US.

In a speech to be delivered later today at Stanford University, chairman Bill Gates will give details on the DreamSpark programme’s free downloads, which include full professional versions of Visual Studio 2008, the Expression Studio design tools, XNA Game Studio 2.0 for developing Xbox 360 software, SQL Server Developer Edition and Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.

“The Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance has set up over 600 licensed labs with free software in computing-specific faculties around the UK over the last five years. DreamSpark will now extend this and make our tools available to students of any academic subject, from history to music to ancient languages,” said Dr Andrew Sithers, academic manager at Microsoft.

“Our scaled-down Express versions are still available free of charge to hobbyists and students, and I hope these may still serve as a valuable entry point for those interested in getting their hands on a more powerful set of products through DreamSpark,” added Sithers.

Microsoft said it recognises that a new set of training and reference materials will be needed for the younger breed of newcomers to software development. There is currently a “gulf” between the ease of downloading the products and students actually being able to use them properly, the company claimed. To address this need, the company is planning to develop a new set of tuition materials as soon as possible.

To bring the DreamSpark programme online in the UK, Microsoft is working with service providers, academic institutions, the government and student associations, such as the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research and not-for-profit IT services group Eduserv, to ensure the necessary student identity-verification technology infrastructure exists. Microsoft says that the programme will be expanded as fast as this community-based effort with government and organisations can be connected.

According to a Microsoft-commissioned IDC study of the economic impact of IT across 82 countries, technological innovation is a “critical economic growth engine” and is predicted to generate 7.1 million jobs worldwide over the next four years.

“The UK’s productivity and future competitiveness depend on making the most of technology. Microsoft is an active supporter of e-skills UK’s campaign to make the UK world-class in technology skills and helping the workforce of the future to develop valuable IT skills,” said Karen Price, chief executive of e-skills UK.

During 2008, Microsoft intends to extend the DreamSpark programme to school-level students in Australia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and elsewhere.

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Apple has called a special event at its Cupertino headquarters next Thursday, 6th March, to discuss the current state of the iPhone and its future.

It’s widely believed that Apple will use this time to launch — or at least provide a decent information update — on the Software Development Kit (SDK). Steve Jobs had originally said that this software, which will allow third-party applications to natively (and officially) run on the iPhone, would be available this month. However, that date slipped.

Many believe that the iPhone should have been an open system from the start. It’s one of the main reasons (along with trying to break away from the exclusive network carriers) why so many iPhones have been hacked.

Whether that practice will stop when the SDK is released will probably depend upon how restrictive it is. If it’s only made available to selective developers, or it closes away too much of the internal workings of the iPhone, then the hacking may well continue.

Next week’s event may also be used to introduce more business-oriented applications for the iPhone, which could make it more attractive to business users, particularly with new tariffs introduced in the US, and similar ones expected in the UK this year.

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With Google’s financial backing, Steve Chen is optimistic about offering real-time streaming on the Web.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen says the site plans to launch a live video service this year.

In a brief interview videotaped at a New York party thrown by YouTube, Chen told Sarah Meyers of Pop17.com that YouTube had always wanted to offer live video but lacked the resources. That, however, has changed, since Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006.

The video and transcript of the interview were posted by TechCrunch. In the interview, Meyers asks, “When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?”

Chen responds: “2008. We’ll do it this year.” He goes on to say, “Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do. We’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually launch something this year.”

Live video, which is the ability to use a Web cam to record events and then stream the results in real time to the Web is not new to the Internet. Yahoo launched such a service as an “experimental release” this month.

Along with showing Web cam-generated video streams from people’s computers, Yahoo Live also offers developers an application programming interface for mashing up live video streams on a Web site or client application. The API uses REST, or Representational State Transfer, an XML-based protocol for invoking Web services over HTTP.

A unique feature in the service is the ability to see people watching the same video, assuming their Web cams are linked to the service. In addition, there’s live chat while the video is playing.

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By Emil Protalinski 

Earlier this month, Microsoft blog sites erupted with the news that Bill Gates had cancelled his Facebook account after The Sun ran a story saying that Gates made the move because he was “getting more than 8,000 friend requests a DAY.” Speculation ranging from Gates having a secret profile to someone else controlling his account quickly began to surface. Despite many rumors of Microsoft buying Facebook in September of last year, all that ended up happening was a $240 million advertising agreement. It would appear that Gates has realized he has no interest in Facebook, beyond corporate deals, simply because he’s a businessman. 

And what’s the Facebook equivalent for businessmen? LinkedIn. Significantly less popular than Facebook (according to Alexa, it ranks 215 on the web as opposed to a rank of 7), it is oriented around expanding business contacts and building an electronic résumé. News.com first broke the story that Gates had moved to LinkedIn, saying that he would use the service to ask the site’s 19 million members “how technology can be better utilized for charitable causes.” 

The social networking site was down on Thursday because of “upgrades to improve our service.”Supposedly, a “notable advertising announcement” is also on its way. Could Gates’ move have been part of an advertising deal with LinkedIn? Considering Gates is the number one searched person on the site, and since Google already has MySpace under its thumb, I would say such a move is only a matter of time.

Chairman and cofounder of the largest software company in the world, Gates is always being watched very closely by the tech industry, even more so I would say since he decided to give up his day-to-day duties at Microsoft, by July 2008. After his last CES keynote and his last day, his plans and decisions seem to be less out in the open, but this only makes them more of a big deal. As demonstrated just over a week ago, it will be a long while before we see the last of Gates, especially when it comes to Microsoft.

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This is the most important acquisition in Sun’s history,” said CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

By Charles Babcock
InformationWeek
February 26, 2008 05:20 PM

Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) has completed its acquisition of MySQL six weeks after announcing its intent to do so. As of today, Marten Mickos, MySQL’s former CEO, is now senior VP of a new software database group, reporting to Rich Green, executive VP for software. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Mickos also will report directly to him as part of Sun’s senior management team.

The $1 billion cost of acquiring MySQL was worth the price, said Schwartz. MySQL “was the crown jewel of the open source marketplace,” with 11 million customers and “the strategic value of opening new markets to Sun,” he said in a teleconference announcing the closure of the deal on Tuesday.

MySQL is the speedy, open source, Web-page-serving database that’s used by Facebook, Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Slashdot, and other giants of the Web. With Sun’s help, MySQL can now overcome what Schwartz termed “the chief liability of open source companies,” supplying 24/7 global technical support.

The acquisition “marks the end of a remarkable era for MySQL and the beginning of another remarkable one,” Mickos said at the teleconference. “As part of Sun, we will grow to serve more customers with bigger deployments and bigger scalability.”

The announcement was filled with superlatives. “This is the most important acquisition in Sun’s history,” said Schwartz, even though Sun’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Storage Technologies in June 2005 was much larger. Reminded of StorageTek, Schwartz said, “We don’t have any second thoughts about history. MySQL as a database is as much about storage as StorageTek. We’re gathering together the most compelling open source storage platform in the industry.”

Sun is counting on MySQL’s continued growth in the $15 billion-a-year database industry to fuel additional software sales out of the Sun portfolio, although analysts put MySQL’s share of that at somewhere less than $100 million a year in revenue. Both Mickos and Schwartz took pains to say that Linux, not Sun’s Solaris, will remain MySQL’s primary operating system. In fact, MySQL runs on Linux as its most popular platform, with Windows second, and Solaris coming in a distant third. Nevertheless, MySQL was developed on Solaris, said Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun.

At a media summit Feb. 13, Schwartz raised some eyebrows when he said the popular LAMP stack, which includes Linux and MySQL, doesn’t have to be taken literally. Sun will encourage developers to use Solaris, instead of Linux, with the stack.

Regardless of operating system choice, Schwartz asserted that with MySQL, Sun has a set of software that more directly competes withMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Windows Server and SQL Server database. “I couldn’t agree more strongly,” he told a questioner, when asked if the acquisition brings Sun closer to head-to-head competition. But Sun will compete on building out the next generation of Web applications for the Internet, not dominance of the desktop.

Sun’s Green said it wasn’t the right time to talk about future possibilities stemming from the acquisition, but it wasn’t unreasonable to expect Sun to more closely integrate MySQL with Sun middleware, such as its GlassFish application server project.

As developers build out Web applications that interact with individual site visitors, answer questions with fresh product information and data, and conduct transactions, Sun wants to be the supplier to the enterprise for the network’s next phase. Sun plans to buy additional open source companies, but it clearly views MySQL as the cornerstone of its campaign. It gives Sun an open door to the builders of the next generation of applications.

That acquisition wasn’t only big for Sun, said Schwartz. “It was the most important acquisition in the industry,” he said during the teleconference.

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By Eric Lai

Vendor says it’s now more responsive to user feedback; proof could be in big product launch

Microsoft Corp. may be the world’s largest software vendor, but it would also top most outside counts of the number of crimes committed against good coding practices.

Whether it’s for shipping software too late (Windows Vista, SQL Server 2005) or too early (Windows ME), releasing products that are too insecure (Outlook Express 5.5 and 6.0, Internet Explorer 5.5) or too locked-down (Vista again), making too few changes (Visual Studio 2003) or too radical of an alteration (Office 2007’s ribbon interface), or writing code that is too bloated and complicated (Vista one more time) or too dumbed-down (Bob), Microsoft rarely catches a break from its critics.

Obviously, it’s not that Microsoft lacks for talent among its 31,000 developers. But the sheer size of the company’s programming workforce, and the number, heft and widespread popularity of its products, conspire to create an environment that can be inconducive to efficient coding.

If you believe executives within Microsoft’s server and tools division, though, the software vendor has become a much more agile developer over the past few years.

Led by that unit, which is still known internally by its old acronym STB (for the server and tools business), Microsoft has embraced new development tactics to help its programmers get products to market faster while also writing better code and being more responsive to feedback from users.

What sort of tactics? Things such as gathering feedback from users before embarking on the writing of any code; replacing or augmenting the conventional model of alpha and beta releases with its Community Technology Preview (CTP) program, which uses a “release early, release often” approach to testing software in the field; and creating independent “feature crews” that can quickly build specific features and communicate directly with users about them.

“I don’t know that there was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” Soma Somasegar, senior vice president in charge of Microsoft’s development tools, said in an interview this month. “We just realized that we’re building products for customers, not just for technology’s sake. So the sooner we could engage with our customers, the better we could make it from an architecture, feature, quality and scalability perspective — all of the things that customers care about.”

That transformation, which began four years ago, will culminate on Wednesday, when Microsoft formally launches the 2008 versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio — each of which was developed using some or all of the new techniques listed above — at an event in Los Angeles.

Skeptics still abound. For one thing, they point out that despite Microsoft’s newfound commitment to user feedback and development flexibility, actually releasing the three new products simultaneously didn’t turn out to be possible.

Visual Studio 2008 has been available since November, while Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing earlier this month. Meanwhile, RTM on SQL Server 2008 was recently delayed until this year’s third quarter, one quarter later than previously planned — although Microsoft did issue what it described as a “feature-complete” CTP release of the database last Wednesday.

“Aligning the launch date was a PR exercise,” said Greg DeMichillie, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash. DeMichillie, who worked as a developer within the STB for a decade, also remains unconvinced that Microsoft is now a paragon of agile development.

“Clearly, CTPs and the other changes deliver a benefit,” he said. “Users get earlier glimpses of products, and Microsoft gets feedback earlier. But the jury is still out on whether Microsoft is going to ship software more quickly and reliably as a result.”

John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data Corp., a market research firm that focuses on development tools, said via e-mail that Web-centric vendors such as Google Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. are both much more nimble when it comes to software development, and that even IBM tops Microsoft in agility.

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