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WHAT? … Windows Live Spaces SaaS moving to WordPress.com SaaS? … It is part of a NEW strategy with Windows Live Essentials 2011 released now!
The news from Microsoft: WordPress.com and Windows Live partnering together and providing an upgrade for 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers [Sept 27]
Then Paul Kim, the VP of user growth from WordPress.com: Welcome Windows Live Spaces Bloggers [Sept 27]
Then a 3d party correction from the web: Microsoft: Windows Live Spaces already dead, WordPress.com will only get 1% of 30M users [Sept 30] which could be much understated as noted by Paul Kim’s response in the end:
Paul Kim, Automattic’s vice president of user growth, responded: “We don’t have an exact estimate for how many Spaces bloggers will move over to WordPress.com in the next 6 months, but in the first 48 hours we’ve completed close to 50,000 migrations which is very promising.” That number is impressive enough. Real measure will be the next 48 hours or 48 days.
There was a real surge in posting activity on wordpress.com. After 5 days the graph showed the following:
As you could see from the numbers there were approximately three times as many additional postings in the last 3 days of the first 5 days period, than in the first two. That quite probably would mean ~150,000 additional migrations giving the total number of migrations to ~200,000 already in the first 5 days.
So the 1% of 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers could indeed be an understatement, even a great one. Would be interesting indeed to see the numbers in the coming months. Microsoft PR meanwhile made a refinement by saying that those 30 million include the viewers as well, while the number of authors is “just” 7 million.
If the final number of migrated blogs will be in the range of several millions than this will indeed be a huge gain for the WordPress.com. The current number of blogs on that site is 13.9 million, so an increase of 10% to 30% for nothing would indeed be a great win for them.
But what is the win for Microsoft? Their announcement is giving the following reason:
WordPress powers over 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is seen by over 250 million people every month. Not only that, Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on improving blogging experiences. So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com.
The Why is Microsoft giving away web traffic and abandoning users? [Sept 28] question is answered by Tim Anderson as:
Part of the reason may be that blogging itself has changed. The original concept of an online diary or “web log” has fractured, with much of the trivia that might once have been blogged now being expressed on Facebook or Twitter. At the other end, blog engines like WordPress have evolved into capable content management systems. Many blogs are just convenient tools to author web sites.
Microsoft gives up on Live Spaces: blogs to be shifted to WordPress.com [Sept 28] on the guardian.co.uk has a similar reasoning:
You’ve got six months before it disappears into the great Bit Bucket where Geocities has gone. …
Following the news that Vox is closing (on 30 September), and that its parent Six Apart (which created Movable Type) is joining with VideoEgg to create a new company called Say Media, one has to think that the pool of hosted blogging platforms is shrinking rather rapidly. Atthis rate, pretty soon it’s only going to be Blogger and WordPress.
And if that’s what it comes down to, you’d have to say that WordPress has the edge. It’s being taken up by the British government, even for non-blogging websites, where it acts as an effective content management system.
That though may overlook the emergence of “superfast blog” systems such as Tumblr, which strip away a lot of the stuff on the outside – which can make blog upkeep complicated or tedious.
Even so, it’s not clear from here where blogging, as a separate activity, is really going. I still have the sense – as I said last year – that the long tail of blogging is dying. Microsoft’s capitulation over Live Spaces seems an acknowledgement of that (its previous post, linked in that quote above, notes how much of a problem spam blogs and comment spam have been; indeed, when I used to trawl blogs for Technology content, Live Spaces blogs were notorious for being pure splogs or copy/paste jobs).
WordPress.com has done a better job keeping the spam out. The question now is whether it is building its business on top of an iceberg in a warming sea – or on dry land.
And indeed quoting from the referred The long tail of blogging is dying [June 24, 2009] post on the guardian.co.uk (emphasis is mine):
But recently – over the past six months – I’ve noticed a new trend: fewer blogs with links, and fewer with any contextual comment. (I’m defining a blog here as an individual site, whether on Blogger or WordPress or an individual domain, with regular entries.) Some weeks, apart from the splogs, there would be hardly anything. I didn’t think we’d suddenly become dull. Nor was it for want of searching: mining for blog comments, I use Icerocket.com. Technorati.com and Google’s Blogsearch.
Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they’ve all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com – though it’s still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it’s a “retweet”, echoing the headline. The New York Times also noticed this trend, with a piece on 9 June about “Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest“, which pointed to Technorati’s 2008 survey of the state of the blogosphere, which found that only 7.4m out of the 133m blogs it tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. As the New York Times put it, “that translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned”.
I see it: NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one of them hasn’t been updated for 60 days, it turns brown, like a plant dying for lack of water. More and more of the feeds I follow are turning brown. Why? Because blogging isn’t easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it’s to easier things that people are turning. Facebook’s success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can’t index it to see who’s talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone’s Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude.
It is important to realize that Microsoft didn’t get WordPress.com hosting in exchange for this migration. Matt Mullenweg made this quite clear in his last year’s post of WordPress and Windows Azure [Nov 29, 2009]:
Are you moving WordPress.com to Azure?
No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic’s hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic.Do you use Azure at all?
Yes, we’ve been testing out their blob storage as an alternative to Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloudfiles. We don’t currently use it in production.
And nothing has changed since then. The Microsoft: Windows Live Spaces already dead, WordPress.com will only get 1% of 30M users [Sept 30] post is mentioning the following:
As for platforms, Kim responded: “WordPress.com, where these migrating Spaces bloggers are moving to, runs on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.” In a follow-up e-mail, Kim responded: “We don’t plan to host any of these blogs on Windows Azure at this time.”
So there should be some additional gains for Microsoft in order to pass millions of authors and tens of millions of readers, as well as the advertising revenue attached to that. And indeed there are:
1. Microsoft’s lost eight years online: More than $6 billion down the tubes [Aug 13] which particularly stating that:
In fiscal 2010 ending June 30, Microsoft reported an operating loss of $2.35 billion on revenue of $2.2 billion for its online services division .
… [see the previous financial year data to see how there is an accumulated loss of more than $6 billion] …
[ZDnet’s conclusion:] Microsoft has generated no return on its Internet ventures. It has been nearly a lost decade for Microsoft online. Looking at the profit and losses, you could make an argument that Microsoft would have been better off avoiding the Internet. Strategically, that argument is absolutely crazy. On the financial front, shareholders may just want a dividend. Things could change. Perhaps Microsoft’s online investment has helped it with the transition to cloud computing somehow. As things stand today, the Web is one big money pit for Microsoft.
So saving some money with Windows Live Spaces migration is an important point for Microsoft, although not the major one as we would see further on.
2. What Microsoft is abandoning now is the thing of the distant past. One can easily understand that when reading again a 3d party authorative source Why are 30 million Microsoft refugees headed to WordPress.com? [Sept 28] (emphasis is mine again):
Microsoft had very good founding concepts for MSN Spaces in 2004 that later overlapped with Facebook. At the time I first met with Microsoft managers about its online services strategy, I was an analyst with the now defunct JupiterResearch. Microsoft product managers outlined a clear and compelling strategy about people publishing content for whom they know. The Web is too big, they rightly asserted. What matters is contenting your stuff to people who would be most interested in it, like family, friends and coworkers. I liked what I heard.
Four years ago, I compared Six Apart’s Vox to Windows Live Spaces. In August 2006, I wrote at the now defunct Microsoft Monitor blog: “Features are highly comparable. Both services are free, ad supported and provide mechanisms for blogging, sharing photos, music or videos and connecting to a widening circle of friends and family.” Vox is shutting down in two days. Windows Live Spaces will be gone in six months. Is it coincidence that these two services with similar design goals and features are shutting down around the same time? I think not.
Facebook has fulfilled most of the same philosophical and development goals articulated by Microsoft managers six years ago. In early 2007, Facebook had about 30 million subscribers — about as many as Windows Live Spaces today. Facebook now claims more than 500 million subscribers, although some people dispute they are all active. Facebook users share photos, status updates and other content with a circle of friends, family and other known or accepted relationships, which is exactly what Microsoft wanted to accomplish with Spaces and connected Live services.
3. Microsoft has reworked all of its Internet and web related strategies. I’ve already reported a few of that (but will report much more very soon). See these posts on my blog:
– Microsoft strengths for the PC -> cloud transition [June 27]
– Mobile search SaaS battle [June 28]
– Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet [July 13]
– Microsoft going multiplatform? [Sept 17]
– Microsoft to lead standards compliance and implementation? … or how Microsoft is aiming to create a radically new Windows client platform via a set of “whole computer capable rich web” standards. [Sept 20]
4. Their on-line services strategy part has just been completely rearranged by Windows Live Essentials 2011 available for download now [Sept 30]. The key elements of this change are (only some of the emphasis is mine here):
Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed and built to connect your PC to the services you use every day. We’re also announcing today that Dell will be the first global PC manufacturer to ship PCs with Windows Live Essentials 2011 and Windows 7 pre-installed, just in time for your holiday purchases. Many other PC manufacturers are also planning to make Windows Live Essentials 2011 available and we’ll continue to keep you updated as they start releasing.
… Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed from the ground up for Windows 7. You can pin your applications to the taskbar and use jump lists to quickly get to common tasks. The ribbon brings common tasks to the front, letting you filter photos, change your font, or publish to your favorite services in a single click.
For parents, Windows Live Family Safety gives you the tools to help keep your kids safer on the Internet.
… If you have more than one PC, or a PC and a Mac, Windows Live Mesh helps you sync your files and folders across your PCs and connect back to your PC from virtually anywhere.
- Excellent overview: Windows Live Mesh 2011 [Nov 22]
… Use Window Live Photo Gallery to share photos with your friends on SkyDrive [this is now the one Microsoft on-line service outside of Windows Live Essentials], Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook, and more.
… Create a video using Windows Live Movie Maker and instantly publish it to YouTube.
… Stay in touch with your friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace using the new Windows Live Messenger.
… Use Windows Live Writer to update your blog on WordPress.com [with Essentials 2011 it is the default], Blogger, TypePad, and many more blogging services.
… Use Windows Live Mail to keep track of your email from Hotmail [this is now the other Microsoft on-line service outside of Windows Live Essentials], Gmail, Yahoo, and more.
… Together with Windows 7 and the new Internet Explorer 9 beta, Windows Live Essentials completes your Windows experience and connects your PC to the services you use every day. Try it out and let us know what you think!
My final conclusion: Microsoft is not abandoning its eight years of on-line investments (which produced $6B+ loss so far) but splitting that among its classic strategic business lines. What we see now by Windows Live Spaces SaaS moving to WordPress.com SaaS and with the introduction of Windows Live Essentials 2011 is for the current (Windows 7) and the next generations of Windows clients. Windows clients will continue to be free of any advertisements and hence there is no service should be in Windows Live Essentials which could only be financed through advertisement revenue. With Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, WordPress.com (with Essentials 2011 it is the default], Blogger, TypePad, Gmail, and Yahoo mentioned as important partner services, there is a clear demarcation line between Windows Live and 3d party services. In addition Windows Mail is that part of Windows Live Essentials which integrates both the 3d party web mailing services (Gmail, Yahoo etc.) and Microsoft’s own Hotmail Service. Hotmail thus remains the critical on-line service for Microsoft as well as the Live Messenger service of the Windows Live.
This is a very nice and rational on-line services strategy for the Windows clients. Please note that Microsoft Bing services are offered on their own, and those are the ones which should be supported by advertisement revenues in the long run. Also the Hotmail and Live Messenger services could be covered — at least partially — by advertising revenues in the long run. And certainly there is SkyDrive and Office Web Apps on SkyDrive which are in fact services that could mostly be covered by the Microsoft Office business line. BTW this is also true to a certain degree for Hotmail and Live Messenger.
Look at the Windows Live site for more information! You will even more clearly see that Microsoft did not lost its mind by migrating Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com in such a “no return” way.
Microsoft to lead standards compliance and implementation? … or how Microsoft is aiming to create a radically new Windows client platform via a set of “whole computer capable rich web” standards.
This is the question and the final conclusion I came to after studying all the details related to the announcement of Microsoft and Top Sites Celebrate the Beauty of the Web With Internet Explorer 9 Beta Release [Sept 15]. Let’s see the accompanying fact sheet Windows Internet Explorer 9 New Features at a Glance which has the following grouping and the related to my question major statement excerpts about the IE9 Beta (emphasis used within the excerpted text detail is mine):
Hardware-accelerated graphics
As an example of how Internet Explorer 9 takes advantage of the power of the whole computer, the rendering of graphics and text has been moved from the central processing unit (CPU) to the graphics card (the graphics processing unit or GPU), using the Direct2D and DirectWrite sets of Windows application programming interfaces (APIs). Hardware-accelerated text, video and graphics mean that your websites perform like applications installed directly on your Windows-based computer.
New DOM and new JavaScript engine
The newly optimized document object model (DOM) in Internet Explorer 9 provides dramatic speed improvements by interacting more efficiently with Chakra, the new JavaScript engine. Chakra interprets, compiles and executes code in parallel by taking advantage of multiple CPU cores. Although each of these is significant on its own, combining these changes, along with using hardware-accelerated graphics, makes the browser all-around fast.
F12 developer tools
Clean site-centric design makes sites shine and integrates them with Windows 7:
Clean browser user interface Pinned Sites JumpLists Windows Aero Snap for your websites Thumbnail preview controls Icon overlays Notification Bar New tab page One Box Address Bar Top Result Feel the confidence and trust that you are in control with Internet Explorer 9:
Download Manager with SmartScreen filter integration Add-on Performance Advisor Hang recovery Compatibility View Automatic updates Group Policy support Write interoperable markup with HTML5 and Internet Explorer 9:
Extensive support for HTML5, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 (CSS3), ECMAScript5 and DOM provides a new set of capabilities that will help enable developers to write one set of markup and know that it will work and look the same in all modern browsers. Internet Explorer 9 was designed with support for industry standards built in to help ensure that the same markup works the same across browsers.
• HTML5 support. Internet Explorer 9 builds on the work done to implement HTML5 features in Internet Explorer 8, and adds several compelling features. Support for the video and audio elements enables native, hardware-accelerated video and audio content on a Web page without the need for a plug-in. Developers can now insert a video or audio clip onto their page as easily as they do images. Plus, support for the canvas element enables easy and dynamic graphics rendering, all while taking advantage of hardware acceleration through Windows and the graphics card. In addition, support for the selection APIs enables programmatic selection of text on a page, and HTML parsing improvements help make HTML authoring more versatile.
• DOM Level 2 and Level 3. Internet Explorer 9 adds support for more of the Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM L2) and Level 3 (DOM L3), and improves DOM L2 support over existing implementations. These DOM additions are taken from several DOM specifications, including DOM L2 and L3 Core, DOM L2 Views, DOM Element Traversal, DOM L2 and L3 Events, DOM L2 HTML, DOM L2 Style, DOM L2 Traversal and Range, and WebIDL (interactive data language).
• SVG. As the SVG standard has developed, developers have been requesting native support in Internet Explorer, and it is available in Internet Explorer 9. Support for SVG in Internet Explorer 9 enables powerful, attention-grabbing visuals with incredible detail, all without the need for a separate download or plug-in. Like all the graphics, text and media features in Internet Explorer 9, SVG in Internet Explorer 9 takes advantage of hardware-accelerated graphics.
• CSS3. Building on the work that was done in Internet Explorer 8, which is fully compliant with the Cascading Style Sheets Level 2.1 (CSS2.1) specification, Internet Explorer 9 adds support for many components of CSS3, enabling even more flexibility and functionality for Web designers and developers. Internet Explorer 9 introduces features from several CSS3 modules, including the Backgrounds & Borders Module, Color Module, Fonts Module, Media Queries Module, Namespaces Module, Selectors Module, the Values & Units Module, and support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF).
• ECMAScript 5. The JavaScript implementation in Internet Explorer 9 is enhanced with many features defined by the latest edition of the ECMAScript standard. New ECMAScript 5 features introduce significant improvements to the JavaScript language and increase developer productivity. In addition, the Internet Explorer 9 DOM is designed to natively support ECMAScript 5, providing a consistent and natural programming model for developers when programming the Internet Explorer 9 DOM from JavaScript.
With things like that it is clear that Microsoft is aiming at a radically new Windows client platform creation which is based on the latest “rich web” standards capable of taking advantage of the power of the whole computer. In that sense what has debuted now as Internet Explorer 9 Beta is not less than:
- the fist implementation of that new Windows client platform, and also
- the live laboratory of platform development alongside with the development of new “rich web” standards.
The final questions are certainly how efficient is the current implementation and how much the latest “rich web” standards are covered by IE9 Beta?
To answer those two question let’s turn to the technology media leaders on the web having the opportunity to analyze the new release not less than week before it has been released by Microsoft:
Engadget Internet Explorer 9 Beta review [Sept 15] concentrated on completely redesigned fuctionality and performance, not advancements in the standards space (btw a pretty complicated issue):
IE9 bested Firefox 3.6 in lots of the tests, but Chrome still won out in them all. … What doesn’t really come through in those benchmarks is the browser’s hardware accelerated graphics. … There isn’t all that much in terms of graphics-heavy HTML5 sites at this point in time and Flash 10.1 already relies on the GPU, but we did try Microsoft’s Test Drive suite of sites in a number of different browsers. The JavaScript-based Amazon Shelf demo … is pretty stunning; on the M11x with the GPU activated, the demo ran at 60fps (about 55fps when we turned a page in a book). With the GPU off, the experience was a bit more sluggish – it ran at 16fps and 9fps when turning a page. … How does that Amazon Shelf demo work in other browsers? Both Chrome 6.0.4 and Firefox 3.6 don’t take advantage of the GPU, so even when it was turned on it notched 6fps. The results were much better in Firefox 4 Beta 5 which is optimized for GPU acceleration — it hit the 60fps mark
ZDNet Internet Explorer 9 beta review: Microsoft reinvents the browser [Sept 15] tried to answer questions readers were typically asking: Is it fast enough? Is it compatible enough? Is it cool enough to win back former IE users who have switched to other browsers, first to Firefox and more recently to Google Chrome? And will this shiny new browser be able to rehabilitate the tarnished Internet Explorer brand? From ZDNet’s review there was again answer only to my performance question (emphasis in the quoted text is again mine):
The single biggest performance boost in IE9 comes from its support for hardware acceleration. Because IE9 runs only on Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7, it can be tuned to offload some rendering tasks to modern graphics hardware, which often has more raw processing power than the rest of the PC. (Microsoft claims that current browsers use only 10% of a PC’s power, which might be a bit of hyperbole.) It’s clear from daily use, though, that hardware acceleration really does make a difference in rendering text, images, and graphics. As a result, Microsoft finds itself in an unaccustomed position, out in front of other browsers, which are furiously trying to play catch-up.
I tested the IE9 beta alongside Firefox 4 beta 5, which was released in September 2010 and is the first Mozilla offering to support hardware acceleration. I also tested it against the most recent beta of Google Chrome 6, which doesn’t use the GPU for rendering. (Google has reportedly placed that feature on its roadmap for Chrome 7.) … The biggest performance differences, not surprisingly, were apparent on Microsoft’s own graphics-oriented tests at its IE Test Drive site. On the FishIE Tank example, which uses the new HTML5 Canvas tag, here’s how the three browsers compared: … IE9’s frame rates stayed high as I kicked up the number of animated fish in the virtual tank. Performance remained smooth and glitch-free even when I moved the window across multiple monitors and docked it to the side of the display using Aero Snap. Firefox 4, by contrast, was able maintain high frame rates for short bursts, but moving the browser frame caused performance to plummet and even froze the display for long periods. Using Firefox, frame rates plummeted dramatically when I selected the most demanding settings (500 and 1000 fish). …
For a more independent performance test, I enabled all three browsers for YouTube’s HTML5 channel and tried playing a handful of high-definition videos at 720p and 1080p resolution. All three browsers performed admirably within a window and at full-screen resolution. IE9 and Chrome 6 were able to maintain full-fidelity playback even when tearing a tab out of the browser pane and dragging it to its own window. Firefox 4, on the other hand, failed this test, stopping the playback and starting the clip over when it landed in a new window.
The other new performance-enhancing component in IE9 is the new Chakra JavaScript engine, … ran the SunSpider benchmark using only the most recent beta releases of IE9, Firefox, and Chrome. The difference between each browser is only about one-tenth of a second, and that composite result includes dozens of complex operations. The independent JSBenchmark test produced similar results, with the IE9 beta running 21% faster than the latest Firefox 4 beta but 29% slower than the latest test build of Google Chrome 6. The conclusion? JavaScript performance isn’t a significant differentiator between modern browsers, and IE9 can hold its own with any Webkit-based browser on this score.
Based on these two indepedendent reviews (and a lot of others with similar findings) I can conclude that performance-wise Microsoft is on track to create the radically new Windows client platform. From the point of view of upcoming “rich-web” standards, however, I should do my own investigation. That will come in the next post in this blog.
SoC advances for client, server and mobile basestation level
Hot Chips 22 (for now, later at Archives) has shown for the first time that System-on-Chip (SoC) technologies are moving beyond their usual realm of relatively small performance and/or dedicated applications, right into the leading edge mainstream.
Update #2:
– Acer adopts AMD CPU for tablet PCs [Nov 25]
Among Acer’s announced initial batch of tablet PCs, a 10.1-inch Windows 7-based model is believed to use AMD’s Ontario APU codenamed C-50, according to sources from notebook players.
… The dual-core C-50 APU, which consumes only 9W of power, is currently priced at about US$55-60 and includes an integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics chip [and also UVD dedicated hardware acceleration for HD video including 1080p resolutions, see later].
– Live and interact in total mobility — Tablets according to Acer [Nov 23]:
… support of its goal to simplify content consumption – a strategy which began with the development of Acer’s multimedia sharing system, Clear.fi. Acer’s strategy is based on the concept of sharing multimedia content and enjoying it across any device, and Tablets are ideal devices for this purpose.
A 10.1” Android tablet for a superb mobile and home entertainment experience … Designed for HD entertainment, this tablet comes with a high resolution, high color contrast display, allowing you to play or share HD video with your friends wherever you are. … Available April 2011
7” Android Tablet: the epitome of mobility … On the 7” (1280×800) 16:10 aspect ratio full touch screen, you can enjoy games, photos, videos while keeping up with your emails or your favourite social networks. Video chat or record a video with the front-facing HD camera. With HDMI support, hooking it up for a big screen video experience is easyier than ever! … Available April 2011
10.1” Windows Tablet: Versatility in a tablet form factor … an extremely innovative solution that combines touch screen user-friendliness with the comfortable experience of a physical keyboard. In fact, the tablet comes with a docking device that includes a full-size keyboard and more connectivity options to enhance the user experience. … Thin and light (only 15 mm and less than 1kg), and with a 10.1”, high resolution display, it’s easy to carry around and really unobtrusive. This tablet ensures outstanding entertainment and a superior touch experience. … Available February 2011
– Acer debuts 10.1-inch Windows 7 tablet: AMD-powered, inbuilt 3G, coming February 2011 [Nov 23]
Update #1: AMD’s upcoming SoCs first described on Hot Chips 22 are hybrid CPUs/GPUs called by AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs)
– AMD Benchmarks Zacate APU [Sept 13]:
… the parts that will begin shipping in Q4 2010: Zacate for mainstream notebooks (18W TDP) and Ontario for netbooks (9W TDP).
Both APUs will have a pair of low-power Bobcat cores and an AMD DX11 GPU. AMD isn’t publicly confirming how many cores the GPU side will have but both will share the same die manufactured on TSMC’s 40nm process.
AMD’s 9W Ontario part clearly goes after Atom in the netbook space (and Bobcat’s out-of-order architecture should ensure performance success), Zacate is going to go after the ~$500 mainstream notebook market. To prove its point AMD setup a Core i5 notebook and a Zacate test platform running City of Heroes at the same settings …
– AMD’s Zacate APU Performance Update [Sept 15]:
… AMD gave us full access to the Zacate platform to do whatever we wanted. AMD wanted us to be completely comfortable with the Zacate comparison. We downloaded the Batman Arkham Asylum demo off of Steam and loaded it on both the Zacate and Core i5 systems.
… The actual gameplay was noticeably quicker on Zacate and the numbers show a 45% performance advantage. This is huge. To sanity check that data we fired up City of Heroes on both machines and played around with them. … On average we saw a 55% improvement over the Core i5 system. … AMD wanted to highlight the DirectCompute performance of Zacate and let us publish the first results from the platform running the N-Body Simulation benchmark: 23 GFLOPS on Zacate and 8.8 GFLOPS on Intel Core i5-520M.
… At the end of the day my take on Zacate (and Ontario) hasn’t changed: these two APUs have the potential to make the low end netbook/notebook market interesting again.
The most glaring examples of the learnings on the Hot Chips 22 were:
Lifting the veil on the hybrid processor-graphics chip in the new Xbox 360 [Aug 23]. This SoC technology has enabled the new Xbox 360 S device’s power consumption and noise significantly reduced, not to speak of the price, which is now $200 for a 4GB version. Because of this Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 S [is a] smash hit, although some are questioning the durability of this trend, attributing it rather to previous Xbox replacements and expecting the bigger trend of the video game industry being down to come into play later. See: Xbox 360 Sales Surge, but Is It an Anomaly? [Aug 16].
AMD Discloses Bobcat & Bulldozer Architectures at Hot Chips 2010 [Aug 24]. These are brand new architecture cores which soon will be integrated into different SoCs, with sub 1 W Bobcat coming into the Ontario SoC (with a yet undisclosed GPU core) aimed at netbooks, ultra-low voltage tablet (slate etc.) and notebook devices the earliest. This might happen by the end of the year, or in Q1 2011.
More information:
– AMD update from IFA 2010 [Sept 6]:
AMD plans to ramp production here in 2010, with systems available in early 2011. So here at IFA 2010, we’re both demonstrating the capabilities of low-power AMD Fusion APUs, and providing a little more information on the individual products. “Brazos” is the codename for the notebook, netbook and desktop platforms that will be built from the APU. But the APU itself comes in two flavors based on performance and (low) power draw:
- An 18-watt TDP APU codenamed “Zacate” for ultrathin, mainstream, and value notebooks as well as desktops and all-in-ones.
- And a 9-watt APU codenamed “Ontario” for netbooks and small form factor desktops and devices.
Both low-power APU versions feature two “Bobcat” x86 cores and fully support DirectX11, DirectCompute (Microsoft programming interface for GPU computing) and OpenCL (cross-platform programming interface standard for multi-core x86 and accelerated GPU computing). Both also include UVD dedicated hardware acceleration for HD video including 1080p resolutions.
– AMD’s Bobcat mobile architecture will play it straight [Aug 27]: “Bobcat will smoke Atom clock-for-clock in raw performance, but the performance per watt picture is a bit less clear. This is because it is quite apparent that AMD will have a harder time keeping its power consumption down than Intel does with Atom. … Bobcat is more of a threat to Atom in the netbook and laptop segments than it is in the kinds of appliance-type niches that Intel is now aiming its Atom-based SoCs at. And nobody is going to try to squeeze Bobcat into a smartphone form factor anytime soon”.
– AMD Bobcat & Bulldozer Hot Chips Presentations Online [Aug 25],
– AMD Sets New Mark in x86 Innovation with First Detailed Disclosures of Two New Core Designs [AMD press release, Aug 24],
– AMD Bulldozer and Bobcat Hot Chips Press Kit [Aug 24]
– ”Bulldozer” 20 Questions, Round One [AMD, Aug 23]
– Keeping AMD’s 2011 Code-Names Straight [Aug 24]
– AMD’s Bulldozer Architecture Preview: New from the Ground Up [Aug 24]
– AMD Heats VISION – Hot Chips 22 [Aug 24]
Mindspeed to Present Next Generation of 4G Base Station Technology at HOT CHIPS 22 Conference [Mindspeed press release, Aug 23]. Here the essence is:
“3G and 4G network operators are looking to migrate to a more flexible cellular landscape, which can accommodate compact base stations, such as microcells, picocells and metro femtocells. Mindspeed has designed the Transcede family of baseband processors to enable tomorrow’s network architects to deploy powerful 4G macrocells and ‘small cells,’ which are built on a common framework.”
Launched earlier this year at the 2010 Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain, the Transcede family of SoCs integrates an unprecedented 26 programmable processors into a single device, including two ARM(R) Cortex A9(R) multi-core symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors, ten CEVA(R) digital signal processors (DSPs) and ten DSP accelerators that support the complete wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA), LTE or WiMAX (Layers 1, 2 and above) processing needs of single- and multi-sector base stations.
More information:
– Transcede 4000 Series Product Brief [Jan 24]
– Documentation
Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet
On the first day of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this week there was not much about the Windows slates. It is not surprising given that Intel has just begun real and honest marketing of its sufficiently low power SoCs (see: Intel SoC for Cloud Clients [June 25]).
- Read also this quite important, follow-up post:
Microsoft (Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer) on the cloud clients [Oct 9]
- Mr. Ballmer is now (Oct) talking consistently about “next year”: How Steve Ballmer told me what to do with my iPad! [Oct 6]. The most important part of that (others are quite interesting as well):
… what you’ll see over the course of the next year is us doing more and more work with our hardware partners creating hardware-software optimisations with Windows 7 and with Windows 7 Media Center …
- Even more, Mr. Ballmer is emphasizing that whatever they will be doing on Windows 7 and Windows 7 Media Center basis will still not be the real thing, and everybody should wait for Windows 8 with real “Big Button touch” — i.e. (I would add) waiting till 2012:
… Media Center is big and, when people say ‘hey, we could optimise [that] more for clients’ I think what they generally mean is ‘Big Buttons’. Big Buttons that’s, I think, a codeword for Big Buttons and Media Center is Big Buttons not Little Buttons. I’m not trying to trivialise that – it’s a real issue.
We’re not going to do a revamp of Windows 7 over the course of the next year for that purpose. Whether we should, or we shouldn’t, we’ve put all our energy around doing a great job on that and other issues in the next version of Windows …
- It is also worth to read Mary Jo Foley’s follow-up on that: Is Microsoft betting on Media Center to save its Windows slate bacon? [Oct 6]
- Related post on my other blog: Windows 7 UI overlays from Microsoft and elsewhere [Aug 30]. This is clarifying the UI situation for Apple iPad competitive Windows slates.
- Related: Compal president pessimistic about non-Apple tablet PC shipments in 2011 [Digitimes, Sept 2]. His prediction is only 15 million units at max while Apple tablet PCs ~10-12 million. Also: “Wintel netbook sales have recently been devoured seriously by tablet PCs and if the two firms do not consider dropping prices or improve performance, sales will continue to drop.”
Notebook supply chain still has no clear visibility for December orders [Sept 6]: “First-tier notebook makers Quanta Computer and Compal Electronics have recently adjusted their third-quarter notebook shipment forecast from positive growth to an up to 10% drop; however, they still forecast to see growth in the fourth quarter and are working aggressively to bring up their shipments for the quarter.” - Update: Even the most Windows slate concious manufacturers are publicly admitting now their dependence on Intel’s lagging chip capabilities (finally): MSI waiting on Intel Oak Trail for Win 7 tablet, Android version will hit before end of the year [Aug 23]. See also Mary-Jo Foley’s Another Windows 7 slate dropped from this year’s Christmas list [Aug 24].
Update: Toshiba’s dual-screen Libretto W100 laptop on sale in America for $1,100 [Engadget, Aug 16]. Excellent price for this unique, Intel U5400 based device which has only 0.8 kg weight and 3 cm thickness (when closed). See the complete offering on the Amazon site: Toshiba libretto W105-L251 7-Inch Dual Touchscreen Laptop (Silver/Black). Look at the picture on the right (copied here for convenience). Toshiba’s characterization is nothing less than: “ultramobile companion goes beyond slates and tablets to deliver something more: a full Windows 7 experience to be enjoyed across two touch screens. So now you can enjoy many different things – games, ebooks, movies, music, TV and so on – from a single handheld device.”- Toshiba is, however, mum on the battery life, just stating 36 Wh with the large capacity 8-cell Li-Ion battery. Considering Intel U5400‘s 18 W max TDP this is clearly not enough for even 2-3 hours of continuous use. This is why vendors should wait for Oak Trail’s Q1 2011 arrival for their Windows slates.
- Update: and surely we will have the notebook convertibles with full touch screen capabilities like this: New Smaller LIFEBOOK T580 Is The Gateway to Fujitsu’s Tablet Line Up — Slate-beating LIFEBOOK tablet PC combines touch screen mobility with the convenience of a keyboard [Sept 2], see also the detailed specification. Notable differentiator: “Even in direct sunlight, the screen display is bright and clear thanks to high-definition LED backlighting with an Ambient Light Sensor that automatically adjusts display brightness, while a smear-proof coating means no distractions from fingerprints.” Price, availability: “The LIFEBOOK T580 is the lowest-priced tablet PC in Fujitsu’s line-up. Exact pricing varies by region. Fujitsu’s LIFEBOOK T580 will be available for all regions in late November 2010”
- Update: Acer to launch three tablet PC models featuring 5- to 7-inch panels [and Android 3.0 in the first quarter of 2011] [Sept 14]: “Before the Android models are released though, Acer will launch an x86 model using an Intel processor and Windows 7 to test the water in the market”.
- Crucial issues for the future: What if a Microsoft Surface like functionality will go into this kind of handheld design? I mean a case when one of the screens is configured to work (via software added to Windows 7) as a Microsoft Surface which is even more enhanced with a tailored very general input functionality. I came to this idea when watching the concept video on YouTube (also available on the Amazon site). Even more: What if the Microsoft Courier prototype will also be adopted to this design and brought to the market? Those two things will change the whole market by themselves! And these are “just” software additions to the existing Windows 7. The screens are already multitouch!
- This little device has been the best what Microsoft could demonstrate at this partner event. See all the detailed information below on that Toshiba Libretto W100 as mentioned at the partner event as well as elsewhere around the web.
This is what Microsoft could tell and demonstrate on this important event:
Microsoft’s Ballmer: Windows 7 slates are coming this year [Mary-Jo Foley’s “All about Microsoft” blog on ZDNet, July 12]
I think it’s way overdue for Microsoft to tell customers what’s coming on the slate front. We’ve heard that there will be Windows Embedded Compact tablets and slates coming, but it’s doubtful (I’d think) that those will be able to run Windows apps.
Microsoft execs can’t — with any credibility — keep pooh-poohing slates, claiming they’re nothing more than PCs, given how quickly the iPad has been gaining traction. Microsoft is known to be focusing on the slate form factor with Windows 8, but that operating system is still likely close to two years away from release.
All that said, there’s more to a slate than just the physical form factor. If there isn’t longer battery life, instant on/off and some kind of app store with not just the usual business apps, but also consumer-focused apps and games, I’m not so sure users are going to bite…
So let’s see in the speech transcripts what has exactly been said today about the slates:
Steve Ballmer: Worldwide Partner Conference 2010 [July 12]
… over the course of the next several months, you will see a range of Windows 7-based slates that I think you’ll find quite impressive. Tami is going to show you some of those today. They’ll come from the people you would expect, from Asus, from Dell, from Samsung, from Toshiba, from Sony. Windows 7-based slates, they’ll come with keyboards, they’ll come without keyboards. They’ll be dockable. There will be many form factors, many price points, many sizes. But they will run Windows 7. They will run Windows 7 applications. They will run Office. They will accept ink as well as touch-based input. And they will be very good for the kinds of scenarios that all of us are going to see for knowledge workers in the business that we serve that want to have something that works super well at work, but also supports their kind of personal interests as they travel.
Tami Reller: Worldwide Partner Conference 2010 [July 12]
(Video record: select from the presspass video gallery)
[Ryan Asdourian demoing for Tami Reller, [8:05 – 11:10]: none of the devices shown in this period of time are releated to the slates or tablets, they are rather variations on notebooks and netbooks]
… [11:10] but I’ve also got some surprises. I’ve got this right here, this Sony P. It’s a beautiful machine. Open this up, this is running the full version of Windows 7 right here. And it’s just really light, it’s beautiful, easy to carry around.
[11:35] Let me hand this oneout as well. Just play with this for a second. While you do that, I’m going to show you this one last machine I’ve got. This is called the Toshiba Libretto. And it’s got two capacitive touch screens. You see here, I can actually interact with it right here, and it’s got a core i5 chip so it’s actually running an HD video and I’ve got a document open at the same time. It’s a beautiful machine. [11:50]
… [32:30] seeing apps is really what brings it to life. And seeing some of the great apps that have been built by you. So, let me ask Ryan to come and show us some of the great innovation out there. Welcome back. [[32:40] Ryan Asdourian demoing for Tami Reller] … the first demo I’m actually going to show is actually on this [Hanvon] slate I’ve got here. This is the Copia Reader. And what I can actually do here — I go ahead, I click into this, and what I see is a lot of articles here. I can actually go ahead and drag these right here to my reading queue. I can go ahead, save some of these in my favorites, and this app is actually tied into a bunch of my social networks, so I can see what my friends are doing
as well, and they can comment, I can comment on their stuff. It’s a really interactive, rich way to interact and this is all built with Windows, WPF, and has Azure as a back end, so it’s a great example of rich client app and putting the cloud with that. [33:20]
The Sony P-series Lifestyle PC: Just don’t call it a Netbook [Jan 7, 2009]
VAIO P Series Lifestyle PC | Sony:
Estimated Battery Life with Standard Battery6 (included)
– Default Settings: Up to 4.5 hours
– Max. Brightness: Up to 4 hours
Estimated Battery Life with Extended Battery6 (sold separately)
– Default Settings: Up to 9 hours
– Max. Brightness: Up to 8 hours
Power Requirements: 68W + 10%
Toshiba Libretto W100 resurrects the classic UMPC brand with dual 7-inch displays [Engadget, June 21]
Toshiba libretto® Dual-Screen PC:
Toshiba libretto® W100 Dual-Screen PC (coming in August): “Enjoy up to 5 hours battery life” (see here) Warning[Aug 24]: This reference is for Toshiba’s UK site. Elsewhere Toshiba is mum on the battery life, just stating 36 Wh with the large capacity 8-cell Li-Ion battery. Considering Intel U5400‘s (used in current W100/105) 18 W max TDP this is clearly not enough for even 2-3 hours of continuous use. Vendors should wait for Oak Trail’s Q1 2011 arrival for their Windows slates! No question about that.
Toshiba Libretto W100 preview [Engadget, July 1]
So, what’s our overall takeaway after spending an afternoon with the W100? It’s definitely working better than the model we saw a few months back, but even when it did work there’s not much you can do with it. It’s neat as a web surfing device, but very few things take advantage of the two screens — for instance, we’d like to see a compelling e-reading app (eh hem Toshiba Book Place). In the end — even if Toshiba gets all the hardware and software kinks worked out — we’re far from convinced that there’s a place for the W100 in our lives for $1,100.
The latest showing of the lonely Hanvon slate device was just last weekend:
Hanvon Touchpad B10 tablet computer at CES China [July 12]
… new Touchpad B10 [linking to Hanvon’s product page] tablet computer. The 9.96 x 6.61 x 0.70 inch, 1.98 pound device is powered by a 1.3GHz ULV 743 Celeron processor and GMA X4500 display chip from Intel on a GS45 chipset with 2GB DDR2 memory and a 250GB hard disk drive.
- Update: Hanvon B10 Win7 tablet goes on sale, gets video unboxing [Aug 25]
Here is an earlier report from Asia already declaring local availability and even superiority: Chinese tablet maker Hanvon throws down the gauntlet to the iPad [May 20]
To mark the availability of its first slate tablet in China, the TouchPad, Hanvon chairman Liu Yingjian smashed an Apple-shaped ice sculpture with a hammer, insinuating that his products are superior to the iPad. He claimed that the Apple slate is like a mere toy which cannot satisfy the real needs of a consumer or business user, unlike the TouchPad B10 and B20 tablets which run on Windows 7.
Quite an ambitious company! E-Reading the Market – Hanwang sells nearly all the digital readers in China. Founder Liu Yingjian knows that won’t last for long. [Forbes, May 28]
(You could see a collection of related videos as well: Hanvon’s E-Reading Market [June 1])
- Update: they have indeed a quite pressing need to do something against Apple iPad as per Hanwang denies e-book reader inventory piling up, says paper [July 19]
China-based Hanwang Technology has denied rumors that its Hanvon-branded e-book reader sales have been seriously dampened by competition from the Apple iPad and its current inventory has piled up to as high as 500,000 e-book readers, according to a Chinese-language report on sina.com.cn.
Hanwang chairman Liu Yingjian is cited saying that although the second quarter was the weak season for e-book readers, Hanvon’s sales was significant, and the company expects at least 300% growth in net profit in 2010, the report noted.
The 3d party application shown on that slate is not less ambitous: Welcome to Copia
– We’re not just changing the format.
– We’re rewriting the whole reading experience.
– Introducing Copia, the world’s first social reading experience — reading, learning and sharing all in one.
And the latest report regarding the availability: Copia Coming in July? [June 20]
(There is an embedded video demonstration [June 7] of the software as well.)
Mobile search SaaS battle
Excellent essay on the subject by Krishna Subramarian on TechCrunch:
Clash of the Titans: The Battle To Become The Mobile Search Leader.
The essence is well summarized in the introduction:
Mobile search is still one of the big unclaimed prizes on the mobile web. Everyone from Google and Yahoo to Apple is going after it, but Microsoft’s Bing may stealthily become the king of the castle by aggressively promoting Bing through mobile apps. Let’s look at each player’s mobile search strategy.
Update: there is a specific battle under formation in China which could significantly alter the worldwide search SaaS battlefield as well
– China Mobile Challenges Baidu With Plans for Online Search [Sept 16] which is making the mobile operators’ position pretty clear by observing that: « The operator joins carriers in the U.S., Europe and Japan in turning to data services to spur earnings as the Chinese phone market saturates. “For China Mobile to get a meaningful contribution from new businesses, they really have to turn into big successes to make a difference, as the company is so big,” said Jim Tang, who rates the stock “neutral” at Shenyin Wanguo Securities in Shanghai. “China Mobile gets about 70 percent of its revenue from voice, and growth is completely flat there.” »
– China Mobile: 4G network coming soon [Sept 15] is stating that “4G data card is close to debut and the carrier and partners are working on the research of 4G handset chip … China Mobile is expected to launch 4G mobile communication services as early as 2011 to boost its high-margin data services, according to the GSM Association.”
– China Mobile to set up device sourcing company [Sept 17] is telling that “The planned device-sourcing company will begin to purchase TD-SCDMA-enabled [3G] feature phones with prices below 1,000 yuan (US$148) at the end of the year and then shift to smartphones [likely with integrated 2G, 3G and 4G] priced below 2,000 yuan in the first half of 2011″.
Background information on this blog:
– 3.9G TD-LTE rollout in 2012 with integrated 2G, 3G and 4G? [July 19, with updates till Sept 17 and beyond]
– OPhone OS (OMS) 2.0 based on Android 2.1 [July 5, with updates till Sept 17 and beyond]
The operator joins carriers in the U.S., Europe and Japan in turning to data services to spur earnings as the Chinese phone market saturates.
“For China Mobile to get a meaningful contribution from new businesses, they really have to turn into big successes to make a difference, as the company is so big,” said Jim Tang, who rates the stock “neutral” at Shenyin Wanguo Securities in Shanghai. “China Mobile gets about 70 percent of its revenue from voice, and growth is completely flat there.”
Microsoft strengths for the PC -> cloud transition
Great interpretations of the recently published Microsoft by the numbers post in TechCrunch: Decoding Microsoft’s Fantastic Passive-Agressive Numbers Post.
To understand the real short-term perspective on Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 based clients for the cloud read my another news nugget: Intel SoC for Cloud Clients.
To make more sense of all that you could read/watch:
- Whether tablet PCs can become market segment is still uncertain, says Microsoft VP particularly the quote: “Microsoft will not offer new Windows versions to support non-Intel architectures that are targeting tablet PC development”
- Steve Guggenheimer: Computex Keynote when quite detailed explanation is needed on what Microsoft is going to do in this whole PC -> cloud transition, mainly from client perspective (although back-end / cloud server perspective has been given at the end as well). Here the kind of leading light quote for everybody is: “We have a tremendous opportunity to deliver the technology that at one point was only on the PC, and the content that at one point was only on the PC, across a much wider range of not PCs, but phones, TVs, and alternative devices.”
- Regarding the TV opportunity, as an example, there is a just 4 min long excerpt from the video record of the keynote worth to see: COMPUTEX 2010: Guggenheimer Keynote, Windows Embedded Standard.
- Regarding Microsoft updated, current way of thinking as platform software provider, there is also just a 6 min long excerpt from the video record of the keynote worth to see: COMPUTEX 2010: Guggenheimer Keynote, Platform Software. An essential quote from that: “… the truth of the matter is, technologies converge, but devices don’t. So, all of these devices start to share more and more technology over time, but we actually get more and more devices not less. At the same time we see more and more content going digital, right, we see more and more of the devices starting to move forward.”
So Microsoft’s strategy is to expand his main “Windows for PCs” platform as much as possible both downwards (the tablets/slates being the smallest, mobile devices) and upwards (TVs, larger interactive surfaces for the biggest, stand-alone devices) while continuing to stick to the Intel x86 platform hardware.
Note 1: Microsoft is continuing to support other hardware platforms (mainly ARM) with his, Windows Embedded CE derived, complementary offerings, mainly in the “true” mobility space:
as evidenced by the latest Microsoft Outlines Commitment to the Future of Enterprise Handheld Devices announcement, complementing the already announced Windows Phone 7 (Q4 2010 delivery)
while the next version of Windows Embedded CE, renamed to Windows Embedded Compact 7 (Q4 2010 delivery) will also continue to have the broadest possible appeal, with vision reformulated now as “… to create a device that seamlessly connects with PCs, media, online content, and data. You want to reinvent the way people interact with their devices”. So OEMs/ODMs could work on their own (building their own higher level software) as well, even for the tablet/slate area if they found the non-x86 hardware platform (mainly ARM) better for their offering but want to have Microsoft technologies as much as possible, at the same time.
Note 2: The above mobility strategy picture may confuse my statement about the more general role of Windows Embedded Compact 7. In order to prove the validity of that I am copying here the roadmap for the Windows Embedded Handheld.
