Christopher Herot's Weblog

Dan'l Lewin at Microsoft Cambridge

Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Strategic and Emerging Business Development (SEBT) was in Cambridge today to have breakfast with some local entrepreneurs   While Microsoft has always competed vigorously in the application business, it has also actively courted developers, even those of competing products.  As desktop applications got networked together and client-server became the dominant paradigm, developers naturally gravitated towards the server platform that paralleled the client.  With the rise of the Web, however, developers had the choice of Linux or WIndows, and as it turns out Linux was just the beginning of a collection of open source tools such as Ruby on Rails and Drupl.

Dan'l was here in Cambridge to listen, and to learn how to build closer ties to the Boston-area ecosystem of developers, academics, and venture capitalists.  He also described what Microsoft was doing to win over the next generation of developers, including a program called BizSpark that provides startups with everything Microsoft makes, for free, for three years.  Microsoft is doing some innovative stuff, including the Azure cloud computing platform.  Programs like BizSpark and a concerted effort to contribute to the developer community should serve them well, if they can win the hearts and minds of each new generation of developers.

After the meeting, I got a tour of Microsoft's Cambridge facility from Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae.  (Photos here.)  With the help of SkB Architects of Seattle they've transformed an otherwise well-placed but undistiguished office building at 1 Memorial Drive into a space that makes you feel creative as soon as you walk into it.  Now if it was only available to people who didn't work at Microsoft.

Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?

My home server runs Linux, but I recently came across this very clever viral ad campaign from last December for Microsoft's Home Server, including a "children's book" which contains endearing explanations of how the server came to be in your house: "When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much..."

You can purchase the book (for $5.95) from Amazon or read it at www.stayathomeserver.com where you can also view some videos shot in the style of Stephen Colbert.

Will Google Save Yahoo from being Assimilated?

Inside MySpace

David Carr at Ziff Davis' Baseline has a very useful article, Inside MySpace.com about how MySpace faced the problems of scaling to their current size of  40 billion page views and 26 million users.  Some of the more interesting observations:

• The thorniest problem as they scaled was the database.  Once their original, single database couldn't handle the load, they tried various methods of partitioning (in order): separating update and retrieval, having different databases for different parts of the web site and, finally, splitting the users among different databases.  There were further refinements to virualize the SAN, add a caching layer and move to 64-bit SQL Server.
• Unlike most large sites which are built on some variety of LAMP, MySpace is built on Microsoft  ASP.NET and SQL Server.  This may be the largest such site, and it appears that Microsoft is powerfully motivated to make it a success.  I will say from our own experience at Convoq that this platform does do a lot for the programmer and scales quite well.
• The reliability problems that MySpace's users experienced as the site went through its growing pains did not seem to hurt the business.  Users complain but they don't leave the service and, unlike a bank, no money is misplaced.  In some cases MySpace consciously chooses performance over reliability, for example extending the time between database checkpoints.
• The decision to allow users to use HTML tags and CSS was "kind of a mistake" when the developer neglected to strip them out.  Although this results in messy looking pages and costlier performance, giving the end user such freedom is now credited with much of the site's success as a place where users go to express themselves.

Larry Dignan commented on the Baseline article on his blog at ZDNet and there is a lively thread on Slashdot. 

EOLAS and the Update to Internet Explorer

Microsoft recently released update 912945 to Internet Explorer.  Curiously it is offered as a ‘non-security update’ in the “Optional software updates” category on Windows Update.  Although there is no mention of this in any Microsoft documents that I could find, this update is in response to Microsoft's setbacks in the long-running EOLAS patent case.   EOLAS, a spin-off of UC Berkeley, was issued US Patent 5,838,906 for DISTRIBUTED HYPERMEDIA METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY INVOKING EXTERNAL  APPLICATION PROVIDING INTERACTION AND DISPLAY OF EMBEDDED OBJECTS WITHIN A  HYPERMEDIA DOCUMENT, which they claim is infringed by ActiveX.  After years of litigation, and an impassioned letter from Tim Berners-Lee, the US Patent and Trademark Office agreed.  (See the docket report, especially the Notice of Intent to Issue a Reexam Certificate.)  The deciding issue was that although there was plenty of prior art that embedded graphics in a document, none of the materials submitted in the case showed dynamic, interactive embedded content, at least not without requiring the user to click first.

One interesting sidelight is that the PTO rejected the argument that Viola was prior art on the grounds that it's embedded applications were implemented in an interpreted language, a distinction that may have lost its importance in recent years.

Rather than pay $521 million to EOLAS, Microsoft issued an update which engineers around the '906 patent.  There appear to be two changes that are provided:

1. When a user encounters an ActiveX object, such as a Flash movie, he/she first sees an annoying text box admonishing the user to click first.
2. To avoid inflicting this text box on their users, developers need to change the way they embed the ActiveX control.  Instead of doing it inline with an EMBED tag, they need to use JScript to invoke a separate file the uses the DOM to embed the object,

The net result is that developers have to go to a lot of work, users will encounter a lot of annoyance, lawyers collected lots of fees, and otherwise nothing has changed.  You would think EOLAS and Microsoft would have settled for a much smaller number and walked away happy, but we will never know.