Oliver Bell’s Weblog

As it turns out, quite a lot!

I’m really pleased to see that my colleague from the UK is now running his own blog. James was one of the architects behind the UK’s Gateway project, one of the first truly massive implementations of Microsoft BizTalk in a central government scenario.

Today he is what we call an Industry Technology Strategist, leading the technical side of the work we’re doing with projects like the Citizen Services Platform for local and regional governments.

James has one of the most rounded and in depth views on the role that technology can play in government, and how to actually use that technology, of anybody I have met.

I’m sure anybody with an interest in eGovernment will enjoy reading more about his work.

You will find The “Other” James Brown over on MSDN blogs.

In 1957 Joe Bohlen and and George Beal, both at Iowa State Collage, began to look at how technology was adopted in farming communities, how markets are created around new technologies and how that leads to broad adoption of that technology as people start to understand the role it will play in improving their work or play.

What they came up with can be easily summed up in a graphic that many of you will recognize as the technology adoption curve, essentially breaking up the cycle of innovation adoption into five distinct segments.

The Wikipedia entry on the TAC shows how the breakdown of these segments applied to the farming communities that Bohlen and Beal studied.

• innovators - had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented
• early adopters - younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders
• early majority - more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours
• late majority - older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active
• laggards - very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educated

The technology adoption curve has been used in many texts and studies since then, you may be familiar with Everett Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations, or Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

Moore in particular does a great job of mapping each of these segments to the issues that we face in marketing modern day computing technology, how we kick start markets then prepare ourselves to “cross the chasm” that exists between each of the segments, addressing the different ways that innovators think compared to the early or late majority for example.

Over the years I have used the ideas that Moore puts forward to construct organizations that take Microsoft into new markets, while preparing us for the inevitable pressures that we face in terms of scale as we move from early adopters to that early majority stage, ensuring that we have the right materials and organizational structures in place to address the needs of those segments.

I’ll use adoption of our own products as an example, after watching various product cycles over the last fifteen years it is something I have become pretty familiar with.

The enterprise side of Microsoft’s business model is predominately partner led, and it is quite easy to work out how to apply this model to the way that we bring new products to market alongside those partners.

You will generally find the product development groups working directly with enterprise customers in the innovator stage, carefully looking at the role the new product will play in their data-centre environment and applying development and support resource directly to ensure that the product meets the customers need and works in their environment.

For the early adopters we have Microsoft Consulting Services, our own consulting group who specialize in developing skills around the use of new products alongside these early adopters, building understanding around scaleable deployment, interoperability with other products in their data centre and how to architect solutions that make best use of the new product. It is still pretty rare that you see many of our partners involved at this stage, some obviously do include themselves but risks are high at this stage and services profitability is generally pretty low.

In the early majority stage you will find our Microsoft Consulting Services group, or often just the materials that were delivered through the work with the early adopters, working more with partners rather than directly with end users. The goal here is to begin to see capacity build up in the 1.2m partners that we have so that they can carry the product forwards into the wider base of end users in the general market.

From there Microsoft’s work is generally done, market forces do their thing from that point. Through the late majority segment you will see partners continue to build skills and customers increase the pace of adoption. Much of what Microsoft has learned at that point is documented in the public knowledge base, or fully understood by our Premier and Product support groups.

Throughout the lifecycle you see the growth in understanding and capability that is vitally important for delivery on the scale that will be needed as a technology hits the peak of the curve.

These are basic market dynamics.

However, the government market is different and in many cases because of the expectations upon government and the size of the systems involved has to begin with the dynamics we find in the late majority segment of the curve.

For obvious reasons the experimentation that is needed in the earlier part of the curve can be frowned upon when it comes to complex government systems. Innovators are out there, but they are hard to find in many geographies, the risk can be just too high. When you do find innovators they are rarely working with the same multi-national systems integrators who will eventually deliver the  technology on a scale that meets the needs of the whole of government.

The smaller companies work with the scarce number of innovators and build the skills needed to understand the technology, but do not have the manpower to deliver broadly across government. The larger systems integrators have the manpower, and while often winning the contract to deliver against a large government requirement often do not have the skills that they need to do so, nor do they have any market led way of building those skills.

It is often much easier to spot this broken dynamic in markets where large scale system integrators dedicate their capability to broad delivery in just one or two segments of government, such as healthcare or military systems. In essence these providers are forced to jump into the middle of the technology adoption curve, missing out on the natural growth in capacity that would have occurred in the innovator, early adopter and early majority segments of the TAC.

It is hard to see where some of the large systems integrators will build the skills they need to deploy some of the new technology that government is looking for without waiting for those skills to be generally available in the marketplace and then hiring in new people. While this reduces the level of risk for everybody involved, it also means that government will rarely get to take advantage of recent innovations.

When thinking in those terms it becomes pretty easy to work out why a systems integrator, deploying a technology that has yet to pass the centre of the curve, will often fail to do so.

I’ve posted extensively about our various interop related efforts over the last year or so, highlighting many of the big steps that we have made in this area, each one incrementally making us a more interoperable platform than before and a more participatory citizen in the wider software industry.

When I came into the office this morning I knew there was a backlog of such announcements building up that I wanted to talk about, but hadn’t quite grasped how much has gone on over the last couple of weeks.

Below is a round up of news around multi-platform development for Azure, the document interoperability initiative, ODF support in Wordpad (!), working with the Samba project, participating in the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) WG, SAML 2.0, and OpenID.

First of all is news of what we’re doing for developers around the Windows Azure and Azure Services platform that I talked about yesterday. Up on microsoft.com you’ll find pointers to the SDKs that are already under development, not only for .NET but also for Java and Ruby, and a whitepaper that explains the objectives of these projects.

From the whitepaper;

The Azure Services Platform has been built from the ground up with interoperability in mind. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple Internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and “plain old XML” (POX). This interoperability opens up opportunities to build new or enhanced applications using existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework, or with other developments environments such as Java, or Ruby.

For a product that is still only a community technology preview (CTP) I think we’re off to a good start.

Next is news of the latest Document Interoperability Initiative workshop that was held in Redmond last week, this time focusing on plans for Open XML. The DII workshops are an important component of our commitment to engage more openly and more thoroughly with the community, this is the second workshop to be held in Redmond, the first one looked predominately at our plans for ODF support in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2.

Jesper Lund Stocholm has his hands on the beta for the SP2 code, and has posted about his experiences with it earlier this week.

Doug Mahugh has a comprehensive write-up of the latest DII workshop;

The latest DII workshop took place in Redmond over the last two days. There were presentations at this event from a variety of people, including members of the Office product groups at Microsoft and developers and consultants from several other companies. Topics covered included planning an IS29500 document test library, server-side document assembly strategies, various approaches to document validation, use of content controls in e-courseware, and goals for future DII events. John Head already blogged a few thoughts from the workshop, and I expect we’ll see more in the days ahead from John, his colleague Andrew Schwantes, or other blogger attendees such as Dennis Hamilton and Alex Brown. The DII we site has an event summary, and you can find downloadable copies of most of the presentations here.

Doug’s post is lengthy and gives really good insight into the discussions that took place at the event, I’d encourage you to follow the link and read the whole report. There are also a couple more posts on the topic that I’ve seen, John Head of PSC has shared his presentation, and Alex Brown has declared Open XML boring, in the nicest possible way of course!

Finally on DII, for those of you who are really interested in digging into the depths of the topics discussed, all of the Microsoft led presentations have been posted on the Document Interoperability Initiative site.

In other brief document format related news, you might have caught Stephen Sinofsky earlier today mentioning that the version of WordPad in Windows 7 will support both ODF and Open XML, Stephen McGibbon has promised some screen shots.

Applets. “We’ve also decided that once every 15 years or so we’re going to update the applets in Windows,” Sinofsky said, showing off his bone-dry wit. That means updates to Calculator, Paint, WordPad, which will now support open document formats including Open XML and ODF.

Next up is a post from Samba’s Andrew Bartlett in which he discusses the significant progress that has been made between the Samba Project and Microsoft’s Server devlelopment team over the last year, it was Brett Roberts who brought this to my attention, as a tangential point Brett also has some discussion about a recent event he ran alongside Google discussing our respective approaches to Software + Online Services.

Back to Samba, Andrew’s post is here;

This has been an amazing year of changes for those of us with an interest in interoperability with Microsoft, and these two events are an excellent example of the change in practice.

In short, Microsoft organised an industry plug fest for CIFS and AD technologies and then invited the Samba Team to it’s home campus for a week of hands on testing with their engineers. This follows up on documentation of over 100 protocols delivered, well over 100 requests for clarification answered, Samba code debugged and fortnightly conference calls held.

There can be little disagreement that this is night and day from the position we had with the Samba team three or four years ago. I think we probably have a way to go before the company as a whole pervasively understands the value of this type of relationship, but there are certainly a growing and significant number of individuals in the company who “get it”.

Fourth on the list is our recent decision to get involved in the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol Working Group.

From Sam Ramji’s blog;

Messaging (and I mean enterprise messaging, rather than email) is an area that is of keen interest to customers like JP Morgan Chase and Credit Suisse. As they run their businesses on real-time messaging, they need to be deep experts, and drive changes in their messaging platforms to fit their business. Along with companies like Cisco, Novell, iMatix, RabbitMQ, WSO2, and Red Hat, these industry leaders have built a standard for ubiquitous messaging: AMQP. 

The Advanced Message Queueing Protocol is an open specification supported by open source communities and currently implemented by Apache QPID, RabbitMQ, and OpenAMQ.  The contributors established the AMQP Working Group as a body to manage the process of developing the specification.

It’s my pleasure to announce that Microsoft has been invited to join the AMQP working group  by the six founding members. We have committed to participate in the development of the specification and are keenly interested in the developing need for interoperability in enterprise messaging.

This is a great standards story, and a great interoperability story.

Fifth on the list is support for the Web SSO profile for SAML 2.0 in “Geneva”, a code name for our upcoming claims based access platform.

Don Schmidt has the following;

At the Professional Developers Conference this week Microsoft is announcing the beta release of “Geneva”, the codename for its new claims based access platform. This platform helps developers and IT professionals simplify user access to applications and other systems with an open claims-based model. “Geneva” helps developers to externalize user authentication and identity processing from application code by using claims that are obtained with pre-built security logic that is integrated with .NET tools. “Geneva” helps IT professionals to efficiently deploy and manage new applications by reducing user account management, promoting a consistent security model, and facilitating seamless collaboration across departmental, organizational and vendor boundaries. User access benefits include shortened provisioning lead times, reduced accounts, passwords and logins, and enhanced privacy support. “Geneva” implements the Identity Metasystem vision for open and interoperable identity, and includes built-in support for standard federated identity protocols.

SAML 2.0 support by Microsoft has been a big discussion point here in the region, especially in countries such as New Zealand where SAML plays key roles in the government’s national authentication program.

Finally, and equally important, an announcement from the LiveID team at PDC yesterday that they will be supporting OpenID.

TechCrunch has some info on this announcement;

Login standard OpenID has gotten a huge boost today from Microsoft, as the company has announced that users will soon be able to login to any OpenID site using their Windows Live IDs. With over 400 million Windows Live accounts (many of which see frequent use on the Live’s Mail and Messenger services), the announcement is a massive win for OpenID. And Microsoft isn’t just supporting OpenID - the announcement goes as far as to call it the de facto login standard.

…as does Microosft’s Peter Galli;

This means that Windows Live ID accounts will be able to be used to sign in to any OpenID Web site. The Windows Live ID OpenID Provider (OP) enables anyone with a Windows Live ID account to set up an OpenID alias and to use that alias for identification at an increasing number of OpenID 2.0 relying party sites-for example: Plaxo, Pibb, StackOverflow.com and Wikispaces.

Putting around half a billion LiveID users to one side. this is good news for me personally, next time I want to post a comment on Harish Pillay’s blog I won’t need to do it anonymously!

That should be more than enough for one post, as I’ve said before it is evidence that we’re delivering on the public promises we have made around interoperability that will eventually make a difference to the way that developers, ISVs, customers and other partners perceive us.

This week feels like it has delivered a pretty strong set of evidence to support those public statements… and it is still only the second day of PDC!

We’re holding our Professional Developers Conference in LA this week, and along the way there are a few really significant announcements coming from our executive staff.

Monday saw the first public unvieling of the CTP for “Azure”, our cloud services platform.

There is coverage pretty much all of the computing and general press, the story in the NZ Herald is linked here.

The man who replaced Bill Gates as Microsoft’s top technical thinker said that Microsoft will compete with Amazon.com, IBM and other rivals in selling information storage space and computing power “in the cloud,” distributed across massive data centres worldwide. The system, Windows Azure, will let companies and hobbyists alike build web-based programs without having to invest in their own server farms.

Ozzie’s remarks at a Los Angeles conference for software developers indicated that after several years of disparate experiments, Microsoft is closer to a companywide strategy for coping with an upheaval in the software industry - the shift from powerful desktop programs to more lightweight, inexpensive ones that run over the internet.

… and from the BBC here.

The platform was described by Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie as “Windows for the cloud”.

The framework will be offered alongside the next Windows release, Windows 7.

The move sees Microsoft taking on established players like Google and Amazon in the rapidly growing business of online software.

The aim is to allow developers to build new applications which will live on the internet, rather than on their own computers.

Looking at some of the work taking place in the technology industry here in the region, this is a significant step for us. As Ray points out, you no longer need to be a multi-national corporation to draw on the levels of compute and storage power that is needed to build applications to serve the wider base of customers that exist on the internet. For Asia especially, where small and medium size businesses are a significant piece of the economies in the region, this represents a huge amount of opportunity.

If you’re looking for a little more reading on the shift that is happening in the industry at the moment then my friend and colleague Stephen McGibbon pointed to an extensive article that was posted in The Economist earlier this week.

The Economist just published a leader “Clouds and Judgment” together with a special report, “Let it rise” all about cloud computing.

IT’s global “cloud”
The evolution of data centres
Software as a service
Connecting to the cloud
The economics of the cloud
The long nimbus
Computers without borders

More soon…

Here is this weeks round up of interesting odds and ends I have found on IPv6. It is pretty obvious that there is a lot of discussion going on!

OECD Future of the Internet Economy

Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist at APNIC discusses the IPv6 transition.

Internet Development –Governments as Catalysts For The Internet … - eGov monitor - London,UK

The future of the Internet relies on a rapid deployment of a new generation of IP address protocol, IPv6, by both public and private sectors. …

From the Suspicions Confirmed department - By Christopher W Linfoot

BT has shockingly confirmed that its new 21st Century Network (21CN) infrastructure does not support the crucial IPv6 protocol, which is kind of important because it’s now a well established fact that existing IPv4 addresses are in …

Big Changes Ahead for the Internet, Says Vint Cerf - PC World - USA

The Internet will get support for IPv6, a more secure domain name system and international characters, during the next couple of years, according to Vint …

Carriers are IPv6-ready, but agencies and other large … - GCN.com - Washington,DC,USA

By Joab Jackson Telecommunication service providers have their networks ready for IPv6 traffic, yet they are seeing little customer demand from agencies or …

Not much traffic for IPv6 networks

Telecommunication service providers have their networks ready for IPv6 traffic, yet they are seeing little customer demand from agencies or other large organizations.

Governments influence internet evolution - ComputerworldUK - UK

It provides a short overview of the IP addressing system, and urges Government to facilitate the deployment of IPv6. “Governments are influential forces for …

IPv6- IPv4 Threat Comparison

I found an interesting read about the different threats found in IPv4 compared to IPv6. This might be worth your time (: http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0405/pdf/miller.pdf Sad to hear that MitM attacks will be pretty much as easy as before. …

Migrating to IPv6: A Practical Guide to Implementing IPv6 in …

Migrating to IPv6 gives a comprehensive overview of IPv6 and related protocols, the layers below IPv6 to the application and end-user layers. Author Marc Blanchet offers a direct and clear route to understanding the topic, …

Urgency for IPv6 not felt yet - ZDNet Asia - Singapore

By Victoria Ho, ZDNet Asia The business case for IPv6 has not been felt urgently by the industry, but the issue will come to a head in two years. …

Dubai meeting pivotal to Internet’s future - The National - Abu Dhabi,United Arab Emirates

The new format, known as IP Version 6 (IPv6), allows for considerably more: 79 billion billion billion times as many as the current system. …

My colleague Eric White from our developer group has been quite prolific over the last few months, his blog focuses on LINQ, XML and of course Open XML.

He posts frequently, and sometime over the last week has been kind enough to compile a table of contents for his recent work. The entire ToC is here, I’ve pulled out his Open XML focused posts below.

Open XML

Open XML SDK and LINQ to XML

Transforming Open XML Documents using XSLT

Transforming Open XML Documents to Flat OPC Format

Transforming Flat OPC Format to Open XML Documents

The Flat OPC Format

Creating Data-Bound Content Controls using the Open XML SDK and LINQ to XML

Create a List of All Parts in an Open XML Document

OpenXmlCodeTester: Validating Code in Open XML Documents

Using LINQ to XML to Retrieve Content Controls in Word 2007

Remove Comments

Remove Personal Information

Accept Revisions

Automated Processing of Open XML Documents using PowerShell

Extract Comments

OpenXML Content Types in an XML Document

Bulk Convert DOC to DOCX

The Legacy Hashing Algorithm in Open XML

Automated Processing of Open XML Documents using PowerShell

Rick Jelliffe has posted a lengthy discussion on the future role of ODF, his conclusion;

So what is there that we can do to nudge us in the direction of this large-scale interoperability? Participate in the most congenial standards body to your interests, and encourage them to support plurality (modularity, alternatives, feature harmonization with each others standards, graceful degradation) and the dissolution of the great website/document divide. And to foster good reasons (carrots and sticks) so that the large developers see value in this kind of enabling standard. For developers, make browsers plugins that accept resources from an unzipped XML-in-ZIP document delivered over a web service; or enhance the existing XML-in-ZIP formats to cope with web formats (ODF with CSS, for example) better: round-trip rather than just convert-and-discard. There is lots to do —unblock the plumbing: for example, get standard URL format for compound documents, particularly inside ZIP archives and a standard for ZIP.

He discusses some of the history of document formats, some ideas about how we got to where we are, and a couple of possible scenarios that outline where we (the wider community) might go next.

The conclusion above says it all for me.

Blogging or moaning to friends about the state of things won’t create good standards - participation will.

ComputerWorld NZ has a break down of where the two US presidential candidates stand on several significant tech issues.

Both senators bring tech experience to the race, although the experience is significantly different. Obama has had relatively little legislative experience related to technology, but he’s a self-described text-messaging addict who released a lengthy tech policy paper last November. McCain admits he doesn’t spend much time with computing devices, saying he relies on his wife’s help with computers. But he’s also a long-time member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, the panel that debates and votes on much of the tech-related legislation that goes through the Senate.

The whole article is worth reading, there are areas where the two candidates are well aligned, and obviously places where they have very different views - the net neutrality debate and the programs to deploy broadband to rural areas of the US will take significantly different routes depending upon who is heading up the new administration.

Doug Mahugh has raised his head above the surface of the ocean to take a breath, I know he has been extremely busy with the prep work for this weeks DII workshop on OpenXML, so it’s good to see him finding a moment to share details of some of the work that is passing across his desk.

His post covers a whole range of items, including details of several ISVs and developers who are continuing their work with OpenXML, building out tools for use by end users and libraries for developers.

One of the items that did stand out for me was originally a post over on Gray Knowlton’s blog.

Gray’s post talks about the ongoing uptake of the OpenXML file format. We have seen significant adoption by our own customers and partners, as you might expect, but it is also good to see that uptake start to be reflected out on the wider internet.

Gray uses the Google search data, which was cited by many during the IS29500 standardization process.

For those interested in reading more you will find Gray’s post on  adoption data for Open XML and ODF formats by following this link.

The innovative work that Microsoft Research have been undertaking with Surface continues with technology that they have dubbed “SecondLight”.

PcMag is carrying a story that explains how some of this works;

The experimental SecondLight technology adds a second dimension to Surface, allowing users to slide “magic lenses” over the display to provide a second surface that can be linked to the first. In one example, Microsoft researchers projected a picture of a car on the Surface display. But add separate, portable pieces of glass that can be moved across the display, and presto! the glasses are transformed into “X-ray specs” allowing a wireframe model to be viewed.

Microsoft Surface has a lot of potential in several scenarios, commercial and consumer. There is no doubt that we will see a lot of evolution in HCI technology over the coming few years, and Surface is one of the technologies that is leading the way in that area at the moment.