Telefon üreticileri Windows Phone Mango işletim sistemli telefonlarını tanıtmaya başlamışken Microsoft boş durmuyor. Microsoft internet üzerinde yeni yazılımı ile ilgili bilgileri
Showing posts with label windows phone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label windows phone. Show all posts
Telefon üreticileri Windows Phone Mango işletim sistemli telefonlarını tanıtmaya başlamışken Microsoft boş durmuyor. Microsoft internet üzerinde yeni yazılımı ile ilgili bilgileri 
The consumer push from Microsoft continued this week, with the retail launch of Kinect on November 4 and the opening of the newest Microsoft store in Oak Brook, Ill, the same day.
There’s more consumer news coming next week, as well as some goodies for business users as well.
On November 6 (Saturday), Microsoft will be opening another new Microsoft Store. This one will be in Bloomington, Minn., at the Mall of America. The Bellevue, Wash., store is slated to open on November 18.
On November 8, Microsoft and partners will make its first Windows Phone 7 phones available in the U.S. on AT&T. The Samsung Focus and HTC Surround will be available in stores that day (no pre-orders allowed). The HTC HD7 will be available from T-Mobile the same day, as well.
It will be interesting to see if the U.S. launch is as plagued by phone shortages as the earlier launches in other countries have been. Microsoft has more than 1,400 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace now, the vast majority of which are games at this point.
On November 8, Microsoft will kick off its TechEd Europe conference, which is targeted at IT professionals. From the docket, it looks like there will be lots of focus on the cloud, virtualization, its Lync PBX-competitor technology and more.
Microsoft is on tap to show off a new Windows 7 migration tool — “P2V Migration for Software Assurance” — at the conference. The P2V tool is a combination of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) and the company’s Sysinternals Disk2 VHD product, and is currently in beta.
The Silverlight vs. HTML 5 panel at the show should yield a few fireworks, as well.
Other Microsoft tidbits from this past week about which I didn’t blog already:
Microsoft has released F# 2.0 under the Apache 2.0 license: The Microsoft F# team made a new drop of the F# 2.0 compiler and core library available this week as part of the F# PowerPack Codeplex project — all of which is now under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. Previously, F# was available under a Microsoft Shared Source license. Microsoft moved IronRuby and IronPython under the Apache 2.0 license just before the company offloaded those development efforts to the community. It doesn’t sound as if that’s the company’s intention with F#, however, as Microsoft recently integrated F# support directly into Visual Studio 2010.
Microsoft is moving the Seadragon Ajax project to the Expression team: Seadragon Ajax is the JavaScript implementation of the Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon project. SeaDragon is a library for DeepZoom viewing. Microsoft is in the process of disbanding Live Labs, and is sending most of the remaining Live Labs projects and employees to work on the Bing team. It looks like Seadragon Ajax will have a different home.
Microsoft may have another Azure prize-cut plan up its sleeve: On the heels of introducing the new “Extra Small Instance” pricing for entry-level Windows Azure developers, Microsoft may be readying another low-end pricing option, as cloud blogger Roger Jennings noted this week. Microsoft is surveying Azure users regarding their interest in a pay-per-use/consumption pricing model – something that would give Microsoft more leverage against Google with its Google App Engine platform-as-a-service offering. Extra Small instance offer doesn’t start until January 7, 2011 and requires participants to be Microsoft partners, Jennings said. But so far, there’s no start date, or even guarantee, that Microsoft will end up fielding pay-per-use Azure pricing.
Microsoft is getting ready to take on the iPhone and Android with its new smartphone platform. The company sent off the new system-software to phone makers on Friday, and Windows 7-equipped phones will be on store shelves by the holiday shopping season.
Microsoft is reportedly spending a billion dollars or more on development and marketing of Windows Phone 7--pretty much guaranteeing the company will take a loss on the product for years--in an effort to chip away at two California-based companies: Apple and Google.
All of which sounds like business-as-usual in the competitive tech industry. But, in fact, Microsoft's gambit is clearly illegal. How do I know? I read a recent appeals court decision involving Seattle Weekly's parent company, Village Voice Media.
VVM owns papers in a dozen cities, including San Francisco. That's where the VVM paper, SF Weekly, has been sued--so far, quite successfully--by a competitor, the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Bay Guardian accuses its rival of unfair business practices, saying the paper engaged in "predatory pricing." At a jury trial two years ago, the Bay Guardian won a $16 million judgment against SF Weekly (which, like all VVM papers, is separately incorporated; VVM is not named in the suit). That decision was upheld last month by the First District Court of Appeal in California.
In their lengthy written decision, the appellate court judges make it clear that everything Microsoft is doing--investing in the creation of an improved product and selling it at less than its true cost, with the express intent of taking market share from a California competitor--is completely prohibited in the Golden State.
Under California code, it is against the law for a business there "to sell any article or product at less than the cost...or to give away any article or product, for the purpose of injuring competitors or destroying competition."
Sounds slightly archaic in the Internet age, right? By this logic, SF-based Facebook engaged in illegal conduct when it started up its free social-networking service, thereby causing irreparable harm to fee-charging Classmates.com, which had been in business for years.
Nonetheless, the Bay Guardian ruling stands, at least while it's appealed further.
So where does that leave Microsoft and its smart phone? Clearly in the hot seat. Or so it would be, if it were being subjected to the same absurd, Depression-era standard of conduct being applied to alt-weeklies. Consider the parallels:
When the company now known as Village Voice Media took over SF Weekly in 1995, "additional salaried journalists were hired to bring high-quality 'long-form journalism' to the paper," as the appellate judges noted. At the same time, however, SF Weekly sold advertising at rates that were "well below" what might be warranted by those high costs, according to trial testimony.
Likewise, Microsoft has spent heavily to create a new and improved smart phone, developing a new user interface, integrating the phone with Xbox, and adding other features. As TechCrunch reports, Microsoft's licensing fee to phone makers is 15 bucks per phone sold with Windows 7. Which means 67 million Windows 7 phones will have to ship before the company covers its costs. (FYI, Apple hasn't even sold that many iPhones yet.)
Microsoft's approach here is similar to what the company did with the Xbox and with the Zune--sell at a near-term loss in order to seek long-term market share. It's also what every Internet company has done since the dawn of free search, free e-mail, etc. And it is, apparently, against the law in California.
Careful readers of the law will note that there's a second prong here: The miscreant party must not only be selling below cost, but for the purpose of harming a competitor.
In the VVM case, for example, it has been widely reported (even by the New York Times)--and was testified to at trial--that VVM Executive Editor Mike Lacey once allegedly stomped on a copy of the Bay Guardian to convey just how intent he was on destroying the competing weekly.
Likewise, last year, Steve Ballmer reportedly wrested an iPhone from a Microsoftie's hands and pretended to stomp on it in front of thousands of employees at an all-company meeting.
The Robber Barons are surely rolling over in their graves at the notion that "stomping" is now sufficient to get you hauled into court.
So far, Apple has shown no signs of going the route of Bay Guardian owner Bruce Brugmann and suing Microsoft. Maybe because Steve Jobs, unlike Brugmann, has little fear of being outgunned and outmaneuvered by his competitor.
But keep in mind that failure is no defense in this case. As the California judges observe, the offending party doesn't even have to succeed in harming its competitor to violate the law. "[A]n injurious effect is not an essential element of the violation," they write, quoting a previous court decision from the 1940s.
So even if Microsoft doesn't manage to make any inroads against the iPhone or Android, it will still be guilty, guilty, guilty....as is every other smart, enterprising company these days.
In a recent note on the case, two attorneys with the Boston-based firm Bingham McCutcheon, well known for its expertise in antitrust law, wrote as follows:
The nature of competition is to want to win--to beat the competitor. But [in the wake of the Bay Guardian ruling,] loose talk and hyperbole in staff meetings, PowerPoints, e-mails or elsewhere, when coupled with evidence of pricing below "fully allocated" cost, may now lead to treble damages...regardless of any actual impact on competition or consumers.
One critical catalyst of platform adoption is related to the ecosystem of applications available for an OS, and the Redmond company knows this perhaps better than anyone.
In this context, it should come as no surprise that the software giant is offering a range of tools and resources as free download just to get developers to start building apps for Widows Phone 7.
With a developers community already estimated to be 12,000 members strong (and over 1,000 apps already on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace), Microsoft is offering the Programming Windows Phone 7 ebook for download completely free of charge.
The Programming Windows Phone 7 ebook was announced at the end of October 2010, but it went live on the Microsoft Download Center where it is up for grabs on November 2nd.
“This book is a gift from the Windows Phone 7 team at Microsoft to the programming community, and I am proud to have been a part of it,” reveals author Charles Petzold.
“Within the pages that follow, I show you the basics of writing applications for Windows Phone 7 using the C# programming language with the Silverlight and XNA 2D frameworks.”
The book can be leveraged by all devs, from beginners to those that have already put together apps for other mobile platforms.
According to Petzold, developers are only required to know basic principles of .NET programming as well as having a working familiarity with the C# programming language, and they can get right to work.
At the same time, devs will need the right tools to help them get the job done. As such they have to download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools, including Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, XNA Game Studio 4.0.
If they don’t have an actual Windows Phone 7 device they can take advantage of an on-screen Windows Phone Emulator for testing scenarios.
“This book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses basic concepts of Windows Phone 7 programming using example programs that target both Silverlight and the XNA framework.
“It is likely that many Windows Phone 7 developers will choose either one platform or the other, but I think it’s important for all developers who have at least a little knowledge of the alternative to their chosen path.
“The second part of this book focuses entirely on Silverlight, and the third part on XNA 2D. For your convenience, the chapters in each part build upon previous knowledge in a progressive tutorial narrative, and hence are intended to be read sequentially,” Petzold added.
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