RIM stands by Flash mobile as it pursues HTML5

Research In Motion will continue to use Adobe Flash Player, at least for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, even after Adobe announced it will discontinue Flash for the mobile Web.

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RIM also said in a blog post that it will push ahead with both Flash and HTML5, a Flash alternative, for the PlayBook, just as it did when the PlayBook launched earlier this year.

Google, which launched the open-source Android mobile operating system, hasn't commented on Adobe's decision to ditch the Flash Player in future mobile browsers in order to focus on HTML5.

However, many Android developers and partners with Android phone makers have raised concerns about Adobe's decision, some saying they want to continue using Flash and want details on the progression from Flash Player to HTML5.

Microsoft decided not to include Flash in its Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" devices, after saying earlier in the year that it planned to work with Adobe to see if Flash software would work with Windows Phone mobile OS.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa said Microsoft's decision not to support Flash in Windows Phone 7.5 or Windows 8 Metro "has to have weighed in" Adobe's decision on Flash. "Deciding how much [Adobe should] invest in Flash is no doubt related to the overall investments that other key vendors are making in HTML5 ... The support for HTML5 is overwhelming from browser makers and platform owners."

IDC predicts that 90% of smartphones and tablets will have HTML5-ready browsers by 2013. On the other hand, IDC said it will take until 2015 for 90% of desktop browsers to support HTML5, which is one reason Adobe has stuck with investing in Flash for desktop browsers.

Apple and former CEO Steve Jobs never supported Flash on its various iOS devices because of performance problems when running Flash video that resulted in battery drain.

RIM's blog, penned by Dan Dodge, the CEO of the QNX division at RIM, gave plenty of credence to HTML5, calling it a "powerful, open standards-based development platform."

Dodge didn't say how long RIM plans to work with Flash, however. "As an Adobe source code licensee, we will continue to work on and release our own implementations [with Flash] and are looking forward to including Flash 11.1 for the BlackBerry PlayBook," he wrote.

Notably, Adobe had said it will release Flash Player 11.1 for Android and for the BlackBerry PlayBook, and will then discontinue development of Flash Player for browsers in new mobile devices.

RIM was "pleased" by Adobe's plan to continue development of Flash-based apps delivered via Adobe Air and through RIM's BlackBerry App World, Dodge added.

RIM's Alec Saunders, vice president of developer relations, added to Dodge's support in a separate blog, saying: "What I would like the developer community to know is that RIM will continue to support developers who have built Adobe Flash-based apps on our platform."

Lessons on the future of work from the days before email

Like many of you, I just spent the last few hours trying to make some headway on my email inbox, the only 40 year old technology still at the heart of my work day. What better way to relaunch this blog on "the future of work," I thought, than with some reflections on what work was like in the days before email.

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These days weren't that long ago -- I remember joining the strategy consultancy McKinsey & Company in the mid-90's, and spending my entire first day in our New York office getting trained in... voicemail. Yes, voicemail.

With distributed teams working on-site at hundreds of different clients around the world, voicemail was the tool of choice at McKinsey back then for providing important project updates to the partnership. We were taught how to write an outline of our voicemail's three main points ahead of time (there were always three main points), how to record our message clearly, and how to send it to the entire project team at once. Busy partners were trained on how to play back their voicemail at double speed to save time.

Of course, voicemail was a nightmare to work with. You couldn't search, and you had to go through your inbox sequentially, even if the most critical message was at the end of the queue. You had to dial-in and check it constantly. The most amusing limitation was the need to record a message all in one take -- I remember one of my engagement managers spending literally an hour in our team room recording and re-recording a particularly sensitive message to the partner, trying to get the tone just right while the rest of the team tried to keep a straight face. We did also have our Lotus Notes email system, but getting online was still a little dicey from a remote hotel or customer conference room, so voicemail was the channel through which important things got done. I got on email once a day to read the newsletter from HR and other office updates.

By the time I left the firm three years later, that had all changed. By then, email ruled the day. Voicemail became the thing that I checked at the end of the day to make sure there was nothing critical that I'd missed.

My point? There was a time before email. And there will be a time after email. I'm not saying that email will die, but email will someday surely assume the role that the voicemail and the written memo play in today's workplace. Because email is, in its own way, just as broken as voicemail when it comes to supporting the way people work. Email is:

Completely unstructured, even when talking about increasingly structured things
Message centric, instead of centered on the people or topics it is about
Siloed, forever stuck in inboxes across the company instead of a centralized place where it can be discovered and shared
Asynchronous to a fault, in an increasingly realtime world
Lacks context -- every email message is an island, lacking context form everything else in your business

I'm not just picking on email -- that's just one example of how the way we work today is broken. We still use spreadsheets to keep track of who is doing what, by when. We still use presentations to organize meetings and make decisions. We use text documents to jot down things we want to remember.

There must be a better way to work. That's what I want to explore here in this blog -- examining the future of work.

Of course, the future of work is already here, its just unevenly distributed (with a nod to William Gibson). In the technology industry, we get little glimpses of what the future of work might look like every day -- when Box.net raises a new round of funding, when Jive files for its IPO, when Google brings a feature like Google+ to its productivity suite, when established vendors like SAP and Oracle struggle to catch up as they duke it out with vendors like Salesforce.com, and even when emerging companies like my employer Podio make us more productive doing things like collaborating on projects from our mobile devices.

But these are just glimpses. As someone who spends nearly as much time thinking about the nature of work as I do actually getting work done (sometimes to my own detriment!), I'm continually amazed by how early we are in this transition. But at least I'm not staying up late re-recording voicemails to my teammates anymore!

Microsoft to talk cloud at Tech Ed

Cloud computing will once again be a major theme for this year's Microsoft Tech Ed conference, according to the company. And attendees seem to be interested in finding out how the cloud can be used in conjunction with their own operations.

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"Over the past six months, Microsoft has thrown new words at us -- like 'hybrid cloud' -- so I think a lot of people will be there to try to get their minds around these terms," said Rod Trent, the CEO for myITforum.com, which will provide the community forums for Tech Ed.

Participants, Trent said, seem eager to "understand how the cloud will fit within their organization. How much data can they push to the cloud? How much costs savings will it offer?"

Microsoft reckons that many of their customers are testing cloud deployments, evaluating these services and products for production use in the years to come. So this year's show, being held May 16 through May 19 in Atlanta, will focus on Microsoft's cloud offerings, and explain the development tools from the company and partners that were designed to help organizations better use the cloud.

The conference will kick off 9 a.m. Eastern Time Monday with a keynote by Robert Wahbe, Microsoft corporate vice president for server and tools marketing. He will be joined by Jason Zander, corporate vice president overseeing Visual Studio, who will showcase new technology.

Microsoft plans to run the keynote as a webcast. Additional interviews and sessions will be broadcast over Microsoft's Tech Ed site.

As far as cloud computing, the company will have much to discuss. Over the past few months Microsoft has touted a number of higher-profile customer adoptions. The Target chain of department stores, for instance, now runs 15,000 virtual machines across its retail stores, using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center. Toyota is using Windows Azure for its next-generation telematics services.

But the company also has had its share of high-profile mistakes. Just this week, users have been complaining of outages from Microsoft's hosted Exchange offering.

Attendees should pay very close attention to how Microsoft details its cloud strategy, advised Charles King, principal analyst for the firm Pund-IT. Like Microsoft itself, companies such as VMware, Red Hat, Rackspace, Google and others have all made significant progress in their cloud software and offerings. "How does Microsoft think its approach is better than the competitors?" he said.

"If you've watched Microsoft over the last year or so, and all the reorganizations, it looks like they may be heading more quickly to the cloud than they were a few years ago," Trent said.

Trent set up a page, called Twitter Army, for attendees who wish to file reports of what they have learned at the show, so the knowledge can be shared with others.

Not to say that other topics won't be addressed at the conference. In addition to cloud computing, session tracks are also dedicated to topics such as databases, business intelligence, developer tools, middleware, Microsoft Office and SharePoint, unified communications, security, virtualization and Windows for the client, server and the mobile phone.

For one attendee, learning about Microsoft's Lync unified communications server will be one of the chief draws of the show.

Scott Ladewig, information services networking and operations manager for the Washington University in St. Louis' Olin Business School, is attending the show "to see what is current and what is coming" from Lync and other Microsoft technologies, he said.

The business school, like several other schools within the university, runs Microsoft Office Communications Server, Lync's predecessor. Ladewig will be looking for information on how to unify these systems, as well as get them to interoperate with other unified communications offerings, such as the one offered by Cisco.

"OCS has pretty much everything we are looking for but obviously we want to stay current," he said.

Apple's enterprise approach: Passive aggressive

Apple’s approach to the enterprise is passive aggressive. The expenses involved with courting the enterprise highlight why.

Apple could be a bigger player in the enterprise, but chasing CIOs around could be damaging to its operating model.

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In a talk arguing that Google and Apple were disruptive to Microsoft in corporate IT, Gartner analysts Tom Austin and David Mitchell Smith commented on the company’s corporate ambitions. With Steve Jobs’ passing, a few of us expect Apple to be more aggressive about the enterprise.

Jason Perlow recently outlined the case for Apple focusing more on corporate sales. Indeed, Apple CEO Tim Cook is an IBM alum and mentions the enterprise frequently on earnings conference calls. In fact, Cook is just about the only one that talks about Apple’s enterprise gains via consumerization.

Also see: Apple in the enterprise: The road forward

Apple’s R&D spending hits bottom as percentage of revenue

“It’s not that Apple doesn’t care about the enterprise, but the enterprise doesn’t drive product development,” said Smith. “It let’s consumerization happen and then does limited tweaks for the enterprise as long as it doesn’t affect product design.”

You can go through years of earnings call transcripts and find Cook mentioning the enterprise regularly once the iPhone launched. However, I’ve been told that Jobs chose to look the other way about budding enterprise sales—who can argue with profits falling out of the sky. Jobs tolerated small enterprise focused projects—say the B2B App Store and swat teams looking to poach verticals from RIM—but saw corporate customers as a distraction.

It’s a distraction that may pay off though. The room here in Orlando was packed for a presentation about the prospects of Google and Apple as vendors. For our purposes, we’re focusing on Apple here. A separate post looks at Google.


Smith and Austin called Apple’s approach passive aggressive. There’s a good reason for Apple’s approach though—targeting the enterprise is expensive. They said in their presentation:

Apple’s operating expense (OpEx) numbers explain their passive aggressive approach to enterprise business. Enterprise direct selling and enterprise-specific requirements would severely distort that model. Apple wants enterprise business, but not at the type of price paid (in R&D and SG&A) by enterprise providers. Apple’s vertical integration allows it not only to reduce cost of goods but also to exploit new technologies more quickly than competitors who are not as vertically integrated.

This is where consumerization gets so interesting for Apple. the company may not have to focus on selling to corporations because its customers will bring devices into the workplace anyway. In many respects, Apple fans are the enterprise sales team. And they happen to work for free.

How Microsoft Research helped Craig Mundie speak Chinese

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, doesn't speak Chinese. But on Tuesday he did, via a life-like virtual avatar shown at the company's offices in Beijing that can simulate his voice and speak in other languages.

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"What was spoken in Mandarin today I never recorded," he said after seeing the demonstration. "But it is my voice. They have a computer model of my voice box."

The virtual avatar, which was designed for language translation, is just one of the new technologies the company has been working on at Microsoft Research.

The research group started on Microsoft's Redmond campus, expanding to five other labs around the world, and now has more than 850 researchers with PhDs. It celebrated its 20th anniversary on Tuesday, beginning with an event at the Microsoft Research Asia facility in Beijing at which Mundie spoke.

Mundie oversees Microsoft's research group, and is also charged with planning the company's long-term strategy, as far as 20 years in the future. He has frequently promoted the idea of so-called natural user interfaces that operate via touch, voice commands, or even reading a person's facial expressions.

"When we think of natural interaction, we think of emulating all of the human senses," Mundie said in an interview. "Touch, vision, speech synthesis and recognition, the ability for all of these to be operated together, they will be the most important in the next few years."

Microsoft's Kinect, an add-on to the Xbox 360, is just the company's latest products to adhere to this concept, allowing users to play games simply with body movements. While Microsoft intends for Kinect to move beyond gaming and PCs, other natural user interface technologies are also in the works. On Tuesday, Microsoft researchers showed off an image search tool that will allow users to find pictures by sketching the general outline of the object they are looking for. The image search will then find the best matches by mining the Internet.

But the natural user interfaces Microsoft is building also extend to virtual environments. Avatars that not only look like actual users, with photo-realistic effects, but can also mimic their voices and approximate the lip movements of speech, could provide life-like exchanges among users without the need to leave their computer, Mundie said.

"Another dream we have is that I should be able to sit in my office, send my avatar to meet somebody in Beijing, and I can speak in English and the avatar speaks in Mandarin in real-time," he said. "We want the computer to be a simultaneous translator."

Natural user interfaces will be a future game changer that will reshape the market, according to Mundie. But to reach that point means refining smaller-scale technologies while also finding new ways to apply them, he said. One of the best examples of this has been Kinect, which was the culmination of seven to eight research activities occurring at Microsoft Research.

"There's no reason to believe we won't see these natural user interface elements become a more integral part of the Windows experience," he said.

On the other hand, it's hard to predict where tablet devices will fit in the overall picture of computing, Mundie said. He noted that tablets fit in a special area among devices too large to fit in one's pocket, but also lacking in the complete computing features of a PC.

"I think there will be a whole range of products that fall in that gap. And that they will be applied to a whole range of tasks: reading, writing, annotation." he said. "I think there will be demand for those things and that the tablet form factor may be with us for a long time. Or it might be displaced by some other more radical technology."

Microsoft throws support behind USB 3.0 with Windows 8

Microsoft is incorporating a software stack in its upcoming Windows 8 OS to natively support devices based on the USB 3.0 interconnect, which is in a battle for adoption with Intel's Thunderbolt.

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USB 3.0 is the successor to USB 2.0 standard and can transfer data 10 times faster between computers and external peripherals such as cameras and storage devices. Most laptops and desktops today come with USB 2.0 ports and many PC makers are offering USB 3.0 ports as an option. The current Windows 7 OS does not include native support for USB 3.0, but device makers offer drivers to ensure products are compatible with the OS.

The growing support for USB 3.0 and wide usage of USB 2.0 was a compelling reason to improve the USB software stack, said Dennis Flanagan, Microsoft's director of program management for the devices and networking group, in an entry on the company's Building Windows 8 blog.

"By 2015, all new PCs are expected to offer USB 3.0 ports, and over 2 billion new 'SuperSpeed' USB devices will be sold in that year alone," Flanagan wrote.

Microsoft is writing a new software stack and controller for Windows 8 based on the "design principles" of USB 3.0, which will bring plug-and-play support for new devices such as external storage, webcams and keyboards, Flanagan wrote. The company is retaining the existing software stack to support older USB devices.

But there are few USB 3.0 devices available today, so to create the new software stack the company had to simulate and build virtual USB 3.0 hardware, including ports, hubs and devices.

The hardware support for USB 3.0 is also growing. Intel has already said it will integrate USB 3.0 support in chipsets for processors code-named Ivy Bridge, which will reach PCs early next year. AMD has already integrated support for USB 3.0 in its Fusion chipsets, which are already shipping for PCs.

USB 3.0 transfers data at speeds of up to 5 gigabits per second, which is slower than the transfer speed of rival interconnect technology Thunderbolt. Developed by Intel, Thunderbolt can transfer data between host computers and external devices such as displays and storage at up to 10 gigabits per second. Thunderbolt has been viewed as an alternative to USB 3.0, but Intel has the said the technologies are complementary. Apple uses Thunderbolt in its products.

Thunderbolt currently supports the PCI Express and DisplayPort protocols, and the interconnect does not require any OS support beyond existing software stacks for those protocols, an Intel spokesman said in an e-mail.

But Microsoft's backing will aid the fast growth of USB 3.0 and provide higher transfer speeds for consumer devices, said Jim McGregor, research director at In-Stat.

"Thunderbolt will be one of many peripheral options available, just like IEEE1394 and Firewire, but I think USB will be the predominant interface because it is so heavily tied to the largest growth segment of the market, mobile devices, for both interconnectivity and power," McGregor said.

Thunderbolt is based on copper wires, but ultimately will be based on optical technology. That will boost the interconnect's transfer speed and distance, Intel has said.


"[USB 3.0] will still not be as fast as the Thunderbolt optic link, but copper never will be as fast as optics," McGregor said.

Wireless charging could trump both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt, provided it takes off, McGregor said. The transfer speeds may not be as fast, but device makers are showing interest in the technology, he said.

"It may eventually eliminate the need for peripheral connectors on mobile devices and then everyone will look to wireless interfaces," McGregor said.

Other than enthusiast users, drivers aren't something average PC users need to worry about, but native support for USB 3.0 in Windows 8 can't hurt, said Nathan Brookwood [CQ], principal analyst at Insight 64.

"When they are talking about the history of Windows 8, they are going to be talking about the user interface and ... touch," Brookwood said.

Business paper use remains high

Businesses aren't rushing to create paperless offices; in fact, some are relying on paper documents more than ever, according to a new study by CompTIA.

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The computer industry trade association's survey of 400 IT and business executives on the use of printers found that most companies expect to maintain or increase paper usage over the next two years.

The survey found that 38% of the companies are printing more paper documents than two years ago, and another 8% said they are doing significantly more printing. Of the balance, 27% said there was no change, 23% said they were doing less printing, and 3% said they were doing significantly less printing.

Those surveyed were also asked to forecast their printing needs in the next two years, and for the most part, the percentages show little variance.

"I was surprised it wasn't on the wane more," said Tim Herbert, vice president of research at CompTia.

Herbert believes personal printing, such as printing out boarding tickets or directions, is on a downward trend, but commercial printing is maintaining its pace.

While some businesses have moved away from the use of paper, sectors like education, government and health care remain extremely paper-intensive, said Herbert.

Printer sales seems to back up the trend, according to IDC data cited by CompTia. In 2010, IDC reported that 125.2 million printers were shipped worldwide, up 12.1% from the prior year.

The study is aimed at companies in the managed print services market. With the results, CompTia advises that such companies must offer customers more than printer maintenance services. They must also move to provide services around document management, such as document retention and workflow.

IBM beats Microsoft in market value --- here's how Microsoft can take back the lead

IBM has surpassed Microsoft in market worth, an ironic turn of events considering that Microsoft outsmarted IBM years ago and left the company practically for dead. It's a sign of how Microsoft hasn't been able to adequately adjust to a changing world. Microsoft would do well to examine how IBM turned around its fortunes, and learn some lessons from the company's revival.

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Bloomberg reports that as of the close of the market yesterday IBM had a market value of $214 billion, surpassing Microsoft's $213.2 billion. It was the first time since 1996 that at the close of a trading day IBM had a greater market value than Microsoft, Bloomberg says. Apple, meanwhile, had a market value of $362.1 billion as of yesterday, Bloomberg calculates.

Decades ago, the tiny upstart Microsoft outsmarted the computing beheamoth IBM when Microsoft bought the rights to a clone of Digital Research's 86-DOS operating system, tweaked it and renamed it MS-DOS, as part of a deal with IBM to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Microsoft got a significant amount of money from the deal, and still retained the rights to DOS, leading the way to a flood of clones that eventually swamped IBM.

When Microsoft thrived and IBM stumbled, it was seen as symbolic of the rise of the personal computer and the decline of mainframes. Microsoft was the future; IBM the past.

IBM, though, eventually recast itself, getting out of the PC business entirely by selling off its PC division to Lenovo. And it focused instead on software and services. It was a prescient move, not only because of the great demand for software and services, and the high margins there, but because even though no one noticed, the PC itself will eventually be surpassed by other devices such as smartphone and tablets, and demand for it further hurt by the growth of the cloud.

So what can Microsoft learn from IBM? That sometimes you have to ignore your own company history and culture, and set a very different direction. IBM became immensely successful because of hardware, but after its decline it became immensely successful because of its focus on software and services.

What's the equivalent for Microsoft? To end its heavy reliance on Windows to prop up the company. Windows will remain a cash cow, but PCs don't lead the way towards growth. If the company wants to grow, it needs to better target mobile devices and the Internet, and not necessarily view the world through Windows. It's not clear that will happen. At the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2011) in July, CEO Steve Balmer made it clear in his opening speech that he believes that Microsoft's future is Windows, saying:

"Windows is the backbone product of Microsoft. Windows PCs, Windows Phones, Windows slates. Windows Windows Windows Windows Windows."

I don't believe that's the way to the future, though, and there's evidence that Ballmer might not believe that either. In August Microsoft laid out in a blog its vision about the future of TV, entertainment and the living room. Windows wasn't in that vision. Instead Microsoft sees the Xbox 360, Kinect, and Bing teaming up to transform entertainment-related technology.

That willingness to abandon what's worked in the past is what saved IBM. If Microsoft does the same, it can help the company regain its position as the pre-eminent tech giant.

Windows 8 will run from USB thumb drive

Windows 8 will include a new feature that lets IT administrators provide workers with a portable Windows environment on a USB thumb drive.

Called "Windows To Go," the feature seems aimed at enterprises that want to equip employees with "complete managed Windows images" that they can use to turn a PC into a doppelganger of a secured in-house machine.

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It's not known whether individuals will be able to use Windows To Go for the same purpose, or if the feature is enterprise-only. It's also unclear whether Windows to Go comes with a price tag: One report, based on a briefing with reporters at BUILD on Monday, said that the feature will cost about $50 per seat.

Microsoft declined to provide more information about the feature, which was among those demonstrated to analysts earlier this week, according to Michael Silver of Gartner. Instead, a spokeswoman referred to the short summary of a session at the BUILD Windows conference, which kicked off Tuesday in Anaheim, Calif. with a two-and-a-half-hour demonstration of some of the operating system's key components and changes.

"Windows To Go is a new feature in Windows 8 that enables enterprise administrators to create USB drives containing complete, managed Windows images that users can use to boot and run Windows on any Windows 7 or Windows 8 capable computer," the session summary stated. "Windows To Go makes it possible for employees to use a managed device whether they work from home, a client office or in a free seating environment."

The session will be held Thursday, and will be led by the feature's development lead, Arvind Padole, and its lead program manager, Steve Silverberg.

Padole holds several patents on software licensing technologies. His participation makes sense: Microsoft's emphasis on fighting piracy and its practice of locking a copy of Windows to a specific piece of hardware means the last thing it would want is for the feature to be abused by counterfeiters.

While BUILD attendees get first crack at learning about Windows To Go, others will be able to view a video recording of the session on Microsoft's Channel 9 website, probably by Friday.

Microsoft unveiled the most information so far about Windows 8 during a keynote presentation yesterday by Steven Sinofsky, the president of the Windows division. BUILD will also host more than 270 individual sessions for developers on various aspects of the new operating system.