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Microsoft will ship Windows 7 sometime in or near Jan. 2010, according to a letter company senior vice president Bill Veghte sent to Microsoft customers Tuesday.
The letter, sent to enterprise and business customers, will eventually be publicly posted on Microsoft's Web site.
In the letter sent to "Windows Customers" and titled "An Update on the Windows Roadmap," Veghte said "our plan is to deliver Windows 7 approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista."
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Veghte wrote, "You have told us you want a more regular, predictable Windows release schedule" and he said that was the impetus for setting the 2010 the ship date.
Vista has been slowly gaining steam, but is still drawing fire from critics who say it has not lived up to promises.
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Veghte went further in addressing customer concerns over application compatibility, which had been a problem shortly after Vista's release.
"You've also let us know you don't want to face the kinds of incompatibility challenges with the next version of Windows you might have experienced early with Windows Vista. As a result, our approach with Windows 7 is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7. Our goal is to ensure the migration process from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is straightforward."
Veghte's discussion of Windows 7 was part of an effort to clarify the June 30 XP deadline that will see the operating system removed from retail shelves and OEM hardware, and to tout the virtues of Windows Vista. Veghte also thanked customers for their loyalty and support.
Google plans to launch a service called App Engine Monday evening that the company hopes will attract programmers and eventually companies needing an expandable foundation for online applications.
App Engine, free to the first 10,000 people who sign up, offers a combination of several online Google services for those who want a place to host software, said Pete Koomen, a product manager on the Google developer team. Those include the BigTable service for data storage and processing--as expected--along with authentication to let people sign on to services and e-mail to let the system handle communications, he said.
At an event called Campfire One Monday night, Google plans to show off some internally developed Web applications written with the service. One of them lets people sign up for carpools, joining the service, declaring whether and when they want to drive or be driven, and then being matched to likely partners.
The company is pitching App Engine as an easy way for programmers to build software without having to worry about rebuilding it once it gets too big for its original hardware or software britches.
"We've seen cases where developers have had to rearchitect systems every six to nine months because of the load of increasing traffic," Koomen said. Using Google's App Engine sidesteps those issues by distributing software across Google's own servers, automatically handling larger-scale use, he said.
It looks to me like the move could put some competitive pressure on other online services such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Salesforce.com's AppExchange.
But Stephen Arnold, author of "Google Version 2," sees grander ambitions in the App Engine plan. Google's BigTable software and accompanying Sawzall technology for analyzing huge quantities of data offers big companies a way to tackle data-mining tasks they currently can't manage, such as American Express plumbing five years' worth of credit-card transactions to determine the merits of Father's Day promotions.
"This is a real zinger for the banks and credit-card agencies," he said.
App Engine programs can be written in the Python programming language, Koomen said, though Google is seeking advice on what other languages to support. With App Engine, programmers can use a Google software development kit to write the software on their own computer, then upload it to App Engine when desired.
Google's App Engine initially will have limits of 500MB of storage, 10GB of daily data transfer bandwidth, and 200 million daily cycles of processor use. That should be enough to power a Web site with about 5 million page views per month, Koomen said.
After the preview period ends, all comers will be able to use that amount of capacity for free, and using more will cost pay-as-you-go fees that Google isn't yet announcing.
Google expects to generate some revenue from the service and from AdSense if developers incorporate that service into their Web applications, said Tom Stocky, another Google product manager. But the real payback from the service is indirect, Koomen said.
"The primary motivation is to enable the Web as a platform and move it forward," Koomen said. "If it's easier for developers to build Web applications, (that) means more applications. That attracts more users to the Web and helps Google as well."
Future features will include mechanisms for storing files larger than 1MB, billing users for computer use, and support for offline applications, Koomen added.
Google engineers also will discuss the site at the Google I/O developer conference in May.
Update 8:15 a.m. PDT March 8: All the early spots appear to be taken, but you can sign up for the waiting list at Google's Web site. Some more links for the project include a thorough overall App Engine description; source code for the project, under the open-source Apache 2.0 license, available for download; a gallery of applications; and Google's App Engine blog. Also, I removed a potentially erroneous reference to a the database in Amazon's EC2 service; Amazon hasn't described what its SimpleDB service uses.
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Dimdim’s No Duh, Recession-Proof Proposition
As some of you may know I have been building web games for different social networks with some friends for the past few months. I have noticed a downward trend in revenue with apps and wanted to highlight it here. To generate a discussion, ideas and possible solutions:
Problems:
1- On social networks in general the
audiences are low value. These are kids spending money on a certain set
of things: clothes, cell phones, food, movies & gasoline. Clicking
on ads for other things isn’t that appealing.
2- The older demos are not installing applications. They have the money
and/or provide money for their kids who are using the applications.
3- Saturation.
There are now 100 million+ new page views a day that cubics, google
adsense, lookery, etc…can provide ads for. That drive eCPMS down to
~$.10 or lower.
4- Scale. Your
page views aren’t significant enough. Let’s say you can create
100,000,000 page-views a month. At $.10 / 1,000 pvs (eCPM) you are now
making $10,000. Considering that might be 1-2 full-time people +
hosting costs means you won’t be a trillionaire anytime soon.
Solutions:
- Use your app as a marketing vehicle to your own destination site.
- Reach out to brands (try hard) for individual sponsorships. Great but not too scalable.
- Virtual Goods? It’s huge in Asia. Great read here. Thanks Dave.
- Fun. Do it as a hobby or lifestyle business. Nothing wrong but this will be well suited for college students or part-time hackers.
Any other thoughts?
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iTunes Store Top Music Retailer in the US
New comScore data shows U.S. traffic at Facebook and MySpace (NWS) dropping slightly during February. But ignore those numbers: February is a short month, so a decline from January isn't surprising. What's more interesting is comScore's estimate of unique visitors per day, which increased for both social networks: Facebook was up 2.6%, from January to February, while MySpace grew 3%.
MySpace
- Total Uniques: 68 million. Down 1%
- Average Daily Visitors: 17.7 million. Up 3%
- Average Minutes Per Visitor: 242.9 Up 19%
- Total Uniques: 32.4 million. Down 4.2%
- Average Daily Visitors: 8.6 million. Up 2.6%
- Average Minutes Per Visitor: 161.3 Down 6.2%
But things get really interesting when you look at both company's international traffic. Facebook continues to close rapidly on MySpace's visitor total: At 100.7 million uniques in January, Facebook is now just about 8% smaller than MySpace' 109.3 million. A year ago, MySpace's worldwide lead was nearly 4x.
And in terms of unique visitors per day, Facebook has already eclipsed MySpace: It did so in November. No wonder Facebook keeps playing up its international growth plans, which have only just started to kick in.
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Cisco, Dell and others have seen lumpy customer demand, but the folks that are producing those volatile sales patterns–CIOs–are moderately optimistic and expect solid technology spending in 2008, according to a survey by UBS.
In its survey, UBS noted that:
Our CIO survey–completed in February–points toward surprisingly solid IT spending growth in ‘08. While we remain cautious on IT spending, the survey suggests that the spending environment may not be as dire as many think, and supports the optimistic outlooks of HP, EMC, Sun & IBM.
In other words, technology spending may not be so doom or gloom after all.
Among the high-level takeaways:
- Among the 100 CIOs surveyed by UBS, 45 percent of respondents expected their IT spending to grow in the first half of 2008 with 14 percent seeing a decline. And 46 percent saw their IT spending increasing in 2008 with 12 percent spotting a decline.
- PCs are going to take the brunt of budget cuts. UBS found that notebook demand should be solid, but desktop purchase will be put off. The UBS survey found that Dell’s PCs were the “most sensitive to the economy.” That explains Dell’s fourth quarter results, which disappointed many analysts.
- Servers are the biggest spending priority for 2008 and HP is leading the field. Virtualization is driving blade server purchases and storage demand. Twenty seven percent of CIOs said their server budgets would increase.
- U.S. CIOs are more optimistic with 52 percent of respondents expecting a budget increase. CIOs in the UK are pessimistic with only 21 percent of respondents expecting budgets to increase.
- HP is becoming the vendor of choice for CIOs in servers, desktops, notebooks and printers. Purchase intentions for Dell weakened. CIOs also said Dell has resorted to cutting prices over the last six months and has been most aggressive in grabbing market share.
- Vista isn’t driving demand. Among the CIOs surveyed, 63 percent are not expecting Vista to boost purchases. UBS reckons that Vista SP1 may tilt that percentage more toward Microsoft’s favor. This chart tells the tale:
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