by alec on June 2, 2011
It was just before midnight last night that I caught up on the news that Microsoft had demonstrated the new Windows 8 UI at the D9 conference (liveblog and video here). The demo’s were slick, and Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky did a great job under pressure, handling Walt Mossberg’s pointed questions with aplomb. I sent him a congratulatory email afterward.
One question left unanswered by Sinofsky was the intended ship date for Windows 8. At best, he offered that Windows operating systems generally ship every 3 to 4 years. My bet is that Windows 8 is going to manufacturing in June of 2012. Why? In Redmond’s playbook:
- Serious public displays of important Windows operating systems usually start about a year before the ship date. The goal is to build a wave of demand around launch. The first public demos of Windows 8 were at the Mix’11 conference in mid-April, where Dean Hachamovich showed IE 10 running on Windows 8. Yesterday’s public demo of the new UI at D9 is another the next step in the demand building strategy.
- Large scale professional developers conferences are usually held in the fall of the year before a major Windows release. Developers need time to build products to target the platform, and Microsoft wants them to ship their products when Microsoft is ready with its own. In April Microsoft also announced the next PDC will be Sept 13, 2011 in Anaheim California.
- Operating systems releases targeted at consumers generally go to manufacturing no later than June of the year in which they ship. This is to allow hardware manufacturers to target the fall sales season – back to school, followed by Christmas – which is the busiest consumer buying cycle of the year in the PC world.
Microsoft is clearly targeting May / June 2012 for release to manufacturing. And, given how Apple and Google are gobbling up market share in the tablet space, it seems clear that Microsoft has no choice but to meet that date.
Any bets on the exact date?
by alec on April 12, 2010
Any vendor in the platform business knows that their primary product is programming interfaces – the so-called APIs that developers depend upon in order to deliver applications. The API exposes features of the platform, and differentiate applications running on that platform from all others. Lose control of the API, and you will lose control of the developer. Developers are the leading indicator for platform success. Ergo, lose the developer, lose the platform.
Steve Jobs’ protestations about quality aside, Apple’s recent moves to bar developers from using any but Apple approved technologies to write iPhone applications is naked self interest… nothing new. For example:
- In 1992, Borland was kicking Microsoft’s rear with Turbo C++ and a development framework called Object Windows Library (OWL) which abstracted the underlying Windowing system out of existance, allowing developers to write applications that run on several OS platforms, including IBM’s competing OS/2. In Canada, Microsoft’s developer market share was below 30% in 1992. They were about to lose the entire Windows franchise to Borland – a company that made programming languages. Microsoft responded by releasing C7 with the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), Visual Basic, and a number of other tools that eventually became Visual Studio. Within less than two years, market share amongst developers had climbed back over 70%.
- In 1993, IBM made their famous statement that OS/2 was a better Windows than Windows. They allowed Windows applications to be run inside a virtual machine on OS/2, giving them instant access to the thousands of Windows applications on the market. Having done that, however, developers chose to write applications for Windows instead, knowing that they would run well on OS/2. IBM never made significant inroads into the developer community, and OS/2 never gained traction.
- In the telecom industry, Nortel (and many others) routinely asked developers to sign NDAs before allowing access to the APIs for their products. The NDA was a legal mechanism by which vendors could prevent their APIs from falling into the hands of competitors, and thus hinder the development of compatible knock off technologies.
Controlling APIs by tying them to the use of specific development tools is simply a bare-knuckled way of retaining control of the platform, which is critical to the health of the iPod/iPhone/iPad franchise. It’s not about screwing Adobe or developers who use Flash. It’s about not allowing Adobe and other cross platform vendors to screw Apple.
As Microsoft learned from their experience with Borland, Jobs and co need to be mindful that developers will naturally migrate to tools which offer advantages such as productivity improvements, cost savings, or user experience benefits. Prohibitions, unfortunately, will only work for Apple for a short time. Ultimately, they must choose to compete for the hearts and minds of developers. I expect that they already know that, however, and are planning one or both of:
- a licensing program to allow third parties to build development tools that use the iPhone API natively.
- a suite of modern development tools and languages that give productivity benefits in line with what developers are used to in the web development world. MacOS already comes with Ruby built in. Why shouldn’t iPhone OS also support Ruby or something similar?
Either would also be in their rational self interest.
