Colinizer - tech geek inside your mind

Saturday November 8 2008

Putting Your Eggs in the Live Services Basket

Filed under: Azure, Federated Identity, Live Services, Microsoft, Sheep, Software As A Service, Web Application — colinizer @ 17:07

The PDC excitement is over.

The Azure Service Platform has been disclosed.

The Live Services are included in that and one of the Live Services is Web Authentication with Windows Live ID, meaning that you can use existing Live IDs to authenticate users to your service.

The Great News

From the current licensing terms of Web Authentication amongst the licensing terms for Live Services:

These services or applications have no user limits or fees.

The Concerning News

Amongst the Terms of Service for Live Services:

9. How We May Change the Contract.

If we change this contract, then we will provide notice as provided in section 20 below at least thirty (30) days before the change takes place. If you do not agree to these changes, then you must stop using the Services before the change takes place. If you do not stop using the Services, then your use of the Services will continue under the changed contract.

We may choose in the future to charge for use of the Services. If we choose to establish fees and payment terms for such use, Microsoft will provide advance notice of such terms as provided in section 20 below, and you may elect to stop using the Services rather than incurring fees.

and

12. Term.

This agreement will become effective on your first use of the Services or APIs. This agreement may be terminated immediately for any reason and without notice by Microsoft. If this agreement terminates, all rights granted to you by this agreement will automatically terminate and you will cease to have any rights to use the Services or APIs.

You could invest a lot of time making your site use Live ID for authentication only to find that you have no service with no notice or additional costs with 30 days’ notice – and 30 days’ notice means nothing if the service can be terminated without notice.

So how can plan to mitigate against this?  Well if you already have a service, chances are that you have your own authentication and that you would be adding Live ID, in which case you should make it a supplemental identity, not a replacement.  This does mean that once you’ve added it you should make it clear to users how they can recover their original service credentials in the event that Live ID needs to be removed (possibly without notice or because it would be too expensive).  In adding a secondary identity, you may as well go the whole hog and support multiple identity providers if appropriate.  Deep down in your database you may have a Users table.  This essentially becomes an Accounts table with a new Identities table allowing for the mapping of 1+ identities to each account.  Each Identity is a user claim from a provider you trust (e.g. Live ID) or provider claims you trust (e.g. the provider’s claim to be a government ID provider is trusted). 

If you are creating a new service than you need to give this some serious thought.  If you can stomach understanding the identity frameworks, then I’d suggest multi-identity support from the start.

Note that with Microsoft Federation Gateway, the owner of a domain (e.g. domain.com) can now have all Live ID web-based logins to that domain (e.g. someone@domain.com), diverted to a web page they provide for login.  The web-based identity space is become truly federated.  For the wider Microsoft claims-based federation model, you can also check out things like Geneva, ADFS & Microsoft Services Connector CTP (which works with the Federation Gateway).

The change and termination clauses I mention above apply to all of the Live Services.  Many of the services are free up until a usage limit after which you need to enter into an agreement.  I haven’t looked into whether that commercial agreement includes  Service Level Agreement clauses or better change-management clauses.  If it does then I’m wondering if one can pay for the Web Authentication in order to benefit from such potential clauses.

Back when Live ID was Passport, this kind of Web Authentication was also possible, however there was a stiff annual fee deterring service providers from using it.

I suspect that many care-free hobbyists, micro-ISVs or larger are diving headfirst into support of Web Authentication using Live ID.  Caution is required…

Thursday October 23 2008

PDC 2008 Is Not Sold Out – Is There a Virtual Option?

Filed under: Microsoft, PDC, Sheep — colinizer @ 21:18

PDC starts in less than 4 days (or 3 if you include the pre-conference events) and it has not officially sold out yet.  They have reached their 10,000 registration goal (that’s $20M+ in revenue!) and plan to take registration up until the first day if it doesn’t go over capacity.

Some people may be surprised that it isn’t sold out at this point.  I’m wondering if the secrecy factor and the burn-factor from Vista’s first exposure at a PDC (WinFS anyone?) had an effect.

10,000 is a great achievement and there are carrots in place to encourage people to go to the event, including overtures of attendee-only content on free hardware.  I for one don’t have time to divert my attention to a week someone else right now.

While the bread crumbs have been laid out in principal about what will be talked about, it’s not yet clear what virtual attendees (that’s you and I observing from a far) will get.

Mix 08 was a great experience at a distance and my experience was that it was possible to keep up, if not stay ahead of those people immersed in-person.  Mix sessions were available on-demand a pleasingly short, though not impressively quick amount of time.

The first Keynote (of 4; 2 more on Tuesday and 1 on Wednesday) is at 08:30PT/11:30ET on Monday, but there’s no mention of a Live webcast.  I hope this is made available, as to not have it seems like somewhat of a cliquey shun, and they do have $20M+ in revenue to help cover it, plus I’d happy to pay $200 for full live access to a live keynote, live track switching, on-demand events and on-the-day download availability.  If they put together a Silverlight site of mammoth (albeit with underwhelming branding) streaming site for NBC Olympics, PDC should be a breeze.

A quick google search doesn’t reveal anything for a PDC keynote webcast.

In the meantime, if you like being teased, check out the PDC08 tagged videos on Channel9.

UPDATE 2008/10/24:  According to a response from Microsoft’s PDC logistics provider, they will be streaming the keynote and sessions within one to two hours of their completion at the PDC website.  I guess they are holding out for as many last-minute registrations as possible before publishing the details of live/on-demand resources.

Windows 7 Developer Resources off to a Worrying Start

Filed under: Microsoft, Sheep, Windows 7 — colinizer @ 20:10

Microsoft has a Windows 7 developer blog with its first post today.

With your help, this blog should evolve to become some sort of Windows 7 developer content index.

Ugh.  I certainly hope not.  Blogs are the worst places to look for information if you don’t know its there, having to rely on search engines to find the information, unless you want to get your content spoon fed to you as random prizes over time in your cereal box.  Microsoft needs to develop a systematic way of getting blogged knowledge, samples and tutorials into a central location.  Oh wait, that’s called MSDN, where sadly, the reverse it true.  Developer center sites point out to the blogs.  While this has made some at Microsoft into celebrities, it doesn’t do much for efficiency.

The number of grammatical errors in this new post are somewhat worrying too.

Saturday October 18 2008

Playstation Network vs. Xbox Live – Who Is The Clingy One?

Filed under: PlayStation, Sheep, Xbox — colinizer @ 8:16

I received an email today about updates to the Playstation Network Terms of Service and User Agreement.

The following appears to be a new clause under “The violations that are prohibited…” section:

“You may not provide anyone with your name or any other personally identifying information other than your own Online ID, or the name, password or personally identifying information of any other person or business through any means, including messaging, chat or any other form of PSN communication”

I’d like to point out that this is a horribly ambiguous sentence following “other than”, but appears to say that you cannot let people know who you really are or how they can contact you by any other means.  I can understand why one should be warned not to do this, but I don’t think it should be prohibited – plus they reserve the right to monitor communications.  If this were a pay-per-view community, I could understand it, but it’s not, and if people form virtual friendships, this would appear to prevent them from taking them into real life.

I did a quick check of the xbox live agreement and couldn’t find anything quite so… possessive.

Saturday October 11 2008

Silverlight 2.0 Announcement Rumour

Filed under: Microsoft, Sheep, Silverlight — colinizer @ 13:43

It’s rumoured that Microsoft will announce completion (but an actual release) on Monday October 13 2008 at 12:00 ET.  Keep an eye on Scott Guthrie’s blog or Silverlight.net.

Sunday July 20 2008

The Dark Knight

Filed under: Consumer, Review, Sheep — colinizer @ 5:38

IMHO, the movie thankfully exceeds the hype.  Heath Ledger’s performance is impressive, but does not carry the movie.  The sheer endurance and onslaught of the story is magnificent in itself  Christian Bale’s raspy voice ‘behind’ the mask isn’t ideal.

Thursday June 19 2008

Microsoft 2.0 - Short on Technical Tea-Leaves

Filed under: Microsoft, Sheep — colinizer @ 6:27

I’ve literally just finished reading Mary Jo Foley’s book, Microsoft 2.0 - How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era.  I picked up a copy at my local book store yesterday.

The books shows that Mary keeps on top of things and clearly edited the book right up to publication to get things in, falling just short of know the name Live Mesh to a Microsoft project she mentions.  Along with describing the Live Mesh project, she mentions cloud OS, virtual computing, Silverlight, etc., as largely separate items - the things I’ve been blogging about as converging in a ‘Live PC’ in my initial Live Mesh series.

Perhaps it’s just me - someone who drinks down Microsoft information like water in a desert - but I was gagging for some new information.  Other than a few research project names, I didn’t learn anything new from the book.  That’s not to say that other will not.  I was hoping she would give more technical predictions - some juicy possibilities to think about.  There needs to be a technical insight/predictions volume in a 2.0 edition.  It wasn’t very business-audience focused either - more of a very long blog post.

The book is good if you want to understand the current key players, organisational basics and business breakdown of Microsoft at this moment in time.  It is not a tea-leaf prediction factory at all, though it does pose questions about how things like a Yahoo acquisition and Ray Ozzie’s low-key leadership will or will not affect things.  As much as the book wants to ask what the new Microsoft will look like, it’s largely about what it’s like in 2007.  Mary wasn’t able to get official sanction or information from Microsoft for the book and perhaps that has crippled what could have been a more useful resource.

I have to say that there’s a lot of repetition in the book and various spelling/grammatical errors.  Hey, we all do those, but no-one’s paying me to do this or paying someone else to proof-read it.  I believe at one part of the book it reads that Microsoft did buy Yahoo.  Mary is also the queen of footnotes it seems.

The book does set Mary up as an information tracking authority though and she vows to keep information coming at www.microsoft2.net: it has a number of posts already.

Back to more technical reading…

Wednesday June 18 2008

Apple Irony

Filed under: Apple, Humour, Marketing, Sheep — colinizer @ 16:36

Apple is again running a new clever and contrite ad on cnn.com involving two ad spots synchronised.  It pans Vista because of apparent remaining glitches a year after release and users downgrading to XP.

I thought I’d head over to apple.com to see if they had any other amusing ads.  I went to this page, only to be presented with a Quicktime upgrade window that hung IE7…

Monday May 26 2008

Idol Thoughts

Filed under: Sheep — colinizer @ 3:47

Two guys named David were in the finals for American Idol this week.  David Cook (25) and David Archuleta (17).  I would jokingly call Season 7 of American Idol, the David Archuleta show because he was the mostly likely winner, but he had one major thing against him…  his fans were too young to stay up and vote for the finale!

Of course both David’s will have fans of various ages, but it’s quite likely that the majority of their fans could be from different groups.  The voting on the final show started at 9pm ET and was apparently open for 4 hours. 

Let’s assume that David Archuleta has a young teen audience.  Just considering the Eastern time zone, if voting started at 9pm ET, how many young voters would still be up voting after 11pm and as far as 1am?  I’m guessing that David Cook’s fan base could simply stay up longer.

David Archuleta’s humbleness, giggles and stumbling responses did show his young age, but technically his singing was superior.  He may not yet be in his prime for a touring deal yet.

Could the decision of the producers to have 4 hours of voting have affected the outcome?

One website was claiming to predict the result based on busy tones received when repeatedly calling the contestants’ numbers.  I wonder if they found David Archuleta’s numbers easier to dial as the evening went on.

Of course, the producers have likely known the voting pattern for the whole season including the finale - it’s a business after all…

Monday May 12 2008

A ‘Windows Live PC’ gives the UMPC, ‘Microsoft PC’ or Xbox Portable a Future

Filed under: Desktop Application, Internet-based Service, Live Mesh, Live PC, Microsoft, Mobile Application, Server Application, Sheep, Silverlight, Software As A Service, Software Development, Web Application, Web Service, Windows Live, Xbox, Zune — colinizer @ 2:35

In this series of posts I’ve talked about my concept of the ‘Windows Live PC’ as the trojan strategy in Microsoft’s Live Mesh.

I’ve talked about how such a virtual PC could be available on an Xbox 360, a Mac or other platforms.

One of problems with the Microsoft UMPC initiate has been that cost of PC capabilities in a small form-factor, and the need to up the component cost to provide Vista in that form factor.  This has made many UMPCs (so far built not by Microsoft, but by IHVs) more expensive than many notebook computers and with less power at the same price.

With my concept of the ‘Windows Live PC’ and minimal SSD storage, the UMPC could stop growing in power (and energy consumption, resulting in longer battery life) and just turn into a ‘Windows Live PC’ client.

In previous posts I suggested that such a client doesn’t have to be very powerful.  I also said that the xbox 360 is good enough.  In fact the original xbox is likely good enough too in many ways - even perhaps a PS2 or PS3!!

How about a PC the size of a Mac Mini or the size of a Zune?

What if Microsoft sold its own UMPC with SSD storage, the form-factor of something like a Samsung Q1 Ultra but not much processing power - how about an Xbox portable?

An Xbox portable would be the ultimate convergent future of Live Mesh, Xbox, Xbox Live, ‘Windows Live PC’, Xbox portable, WPF, Remote App, Windows Server 2008, Windows licensing, ISV solution channel, etc. 

Robbie Bach, J Allard, Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, Steve Ballmer & Bill Gates - take a look at this series of posts on Live Mesh - I know what you’re up to :) and if you’re not then you should be - it’s a vision I want to be involved in one way or another from the outside or the inside…

Older Posts »

Blog at WordPress.com.