Late last week, Microsoft Research shared a couple of things about Social Desktop, a prototype of which they are debuting at TechFest 2009 in a couple of days (along with dozens of other things). From the looks of it, this will be a much talked about product even if it stays in proof-of-concept phase for now.
And if they decide to open it up even just a little, this could be a major breakthrough in tearing down the virtual wall between the desktop and the web, a trend we’ve been noticing for years.
The service would essentially be capable of providing you with a secure unique ID for all the files and folders on your desktop, enabling users to share, comment on, tag and search files like photos and videos via a dedicated web page powered by .NET. Think of this as social URLs that link to files which could easily be pushed to third-party services like Twitter or Digg but also Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger without the need for you to copy, move or upload anything. Furthermore, social interaction around the files would be visible from inside the Windows desktop OS, blurring the line between the desktop and the web even more.
You can have a URL drill into a subportion of a document or a PowerPoint deck, or data can come from a Web service or a database. Social Desktop is a local service that maps the user’s local data into a .NET service bus service, enabling local data to be accessible through firewalls. Social Desktop also provides a Web-service view over the same data, with inherent RSS event streams for any container. New data sources can be mapped into the URL hierarchy, enabling a distributed view to be built. There are simple sharing paradigms that enable URLs to be shared temporarily or permanently.
Social Desktop runs on Silverlight and leverages both the Windows OS and Windows Azure, the software giant’s very own cloud services platform which Microsoft announced in October 2008. TechFlash reviewed the service as well last week, and asked the project leads how Social Desktop differs from Live Mesh. The response came from Lili Cheng, who manages Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems Group: “In the Mesh model, you can almost imagine your PC being pushed to the cloud,” she explained. “In this, you can almost imagine the Web being embedded inside your desktop.”
I don’t know about you, but to me this all sounds very promising and I’m curious if using Social Desktop would change my file sharing habits. Even with the plethora of free, simple and fast online backup and sharing services around, there’s still a trust barrier not easily overcome by startups who need to market their services extensively on an inherently low budget to reach any kind of scale. Besides, Social Desktop even relieves you from the not-so-cumbersome task of moving a file to the cloud in order to store or share it, so that makes for one hell of a substantial benefit compared to other services where you’d be required to register and do a series of actions before that happens.
Unfortunately, a Microsoft spokesperson told NetworkWorld that Social Desktop at this point is merely a research prototype which will not be a feature in Windows 7, nor will it be available for public use.
But I still want to get my hands on Windows 7 Beta (it makes use of the new operating system’s file-preview functions) right now even if just to test this application once (and if) they release it.
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Posted in Ideas, Internet, Microsoft, Software, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Computer enthusiasts who want to get their hands on the trial version of Microsoft’s next operating system have just two more weeks to do so.
The company says it will end availability of Windows 7 Beta on Feb. 10.
There are a couple of loopholes, however. Users who started to download the OS before that date will have until Feb. 12 to complete the process. Also, Microsoft will continue to distribute product keys beyond Feb. 12 to users who have previously downloaded Windows 7 Beta but have yet to obtain a key.
“We are at a point where we have more than enough beta testers and feedback coming in to meet our engineering needs, so we are beginning to plan the end of general availability for Windows 7 Beta,” said Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft’s in-house Windows blogger, in a post Friday.
Microsoft will post warnings on its Web site that the download program for Windows 7 is about to end starting Tuesday. A final version of Windows 7, Microsoft’s follow-up to Windows Vista, is expected to be available in late 2009 or early 2010.
Perhaps due to Vista’s unpopularity, computer users have been downloading Windows 7 Beta in droves. Microsoft dropped limits on the number of available copies of the software after a crush of download requests for the new operating system brought the company’s servers to a halt during the first weekend of availability earlier this month.
Windows 7 offers numerous new features, including native support for touch-screen interfaces and more than 20 hotkey combinations designed to simplify use.
Microsoft needs Windows 7 to be a hit. Vista has failed to catch on with mainstream computer users and businesses have shunned it outright. Many users have complained about Vista’s hardware requirements, intrusive security measures, and lack of compatibility with older applications.
Dissatisfaction with Vista has allowed Apple to gain share against Microsoft in the computer operating system market in recent months. Windows’ market share in November fell below 90% for the first time in years while Mac OS is now flirting with the 10% mark, according to market watcher Net Applications.
It’s all taking a toll on Microsoft’s bottom line. Last week, the company said second quarter profits tumbled 11%. It also announced a restructuring plan that will see it lay off 5,000 full-time employees and an additional 5,000 contract workers.
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What does it cost to host an e-mail account? It seems like a simple question, but a remarkable number of enterprises surveyed by Forrester had no idea of how to answer that question. A new report by the research company has taken a look under the hood of both in-house and commercial e-mail services, and put some numbers on the per-user costs associated with a variety of options. The surprise result was not so much that Google’s corporate services come out ahead, but rather how large a lead it has on every other option.
The title of the report, “Should Your e-mail Live In The Cloud? A Comparative Cost Analysis,” is actually somewhat misleading. The cloud implies a diffuse network of servers that hold partially redundant copies of information. Some of the services examined by the report don’t necessarily offer that sort of setup, although the report frequently refers to any off-site service as “the cloud.”
Semantics aside, Forrester surveyed over 50 IT workers at major enterprise companies to see how they handle e-mail, contacts, and calendaring services. They also discussed options and costs with 21 vendors of these services, and created some rough estimates of how much each portion of the various services cost.
One of the things they discovered is that the business community is largely unaware of the costs of running an e-mail account. Many of those surveyed gave guesses from $2 to $11 per user, although a detailed accounting showed that the costs were often several times that (Forrester came up with $25.18 per month, compared with $8.47 for Gmail). Part of the problem is that costs are often split among several cost centers, with software licenses part of a different department’s budget from the salaries of the people that support it. In some cases, the e-mail system was running on older hardware that had initially been bought for a different purpose and had been depreciated.
Despite the confusion, a lot of companies realize that e-mail has become expensive for two simple reasons: spam and malware. Nearly half of those surveyed were evaluating off-site solutions because e-mail costs had risen, while another 30 percent were performing the evaluation as part of an upgrade or service consolidation process. Fully 85 percent of these companies were leaning towards moving some of the services off-site.
The biggest reason for doing this seemed to be so that someone else could deal with staying on top of spam and malware; over half of those surveyed were planning on implementing a hybrid system where an external service filtered mail on its way into and/or out of the company’s internal servers. Reasons cited include the challenges of staying on top of the threats and up-to-date with the software, as well as the resource-intensive nature of combating mal-mail. Another 30 percent were leaning towards a complete outsourcing of the service, presumably in part because of these costs.
The author of the report calculated the monthly costs for the components of various systems, such as storage and client software. The biggest cost was clearly archiving, which is often legally required for a lot of positions. Beyond that, the software and filtering costs all came in at roughly 10 to 15 percent of the costs when they’re needed—off-site services, for example, eliminate separate purchases of server and filtering software, and lower staff costs in exchange for a monthly subscription. The overall conclusion is that any company with an employee count of under 15,000 would probably benefit from using off-site services.
The two examples of actual cloud services, Microsoft’s Exchange Online and Google Apps for Business, came out significantly ahead. Exchange Online provided significantly lower costs until somewhere above 30,000 seats, while Google Apps’ monthly cost consistently came in at half the cost of others, in part because its subscription cost is so low, and in part because the “client software” is a free web browser.
The author of the report cautions that there are a lot of variables to consider, such as how often the company adds and removes users, the frequency of large attachments, and the archiving requirements. Still, the results make it clear that Microsoft is now undercutting most of other services available, including those that rely on Exchange itself. But Google has managed to significantly undercut Microsoft. Although its solution is nowhere near as integrated as Exchange, an increasing percentage of the workforce is getting comfortable with managing their life and e-mail through a web browser.
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Late last week, Microsoft Research shared a couple of things about Social Desktop, a prototype of which they are debuting at TechFest 2009 in a couple of days (along with dozens of other things). From the looks of it, this will be a much talked about product even if it stays in proof-of-concept phase for now.
