Cross-document messaging
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shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 11
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HTML5 data communications - 1 views
www.networkworld.com/...020911-html5-data.html
visual-document visually-immersive web-document HTML5 Web-Compound-Document
shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 11
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Sounds like the core of a 1992 Windows Desktop Productivity "Compound Document" model. Applications need to message, exchange and link data. In 1992, the key technologies embedded in a compound document were DDE, OLE, ODBC, scripts and macros. Later on, ActiveX and COM was added. Today the MSOffice desktop productivity environment links into the MS-Live Productivity Cloud or the BPOS - SharePoint private cloud with a raft of WPF-SilverlightX stuff. Good to see the Open Web fighting back with their own compound document model.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 09
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Microsoft opens Outlook format, gives programs access to mail, calendar, contacts - 0 views
www.computerworld.com/...cess_to_mail_calendar_contacts
Microsoft Outlook interop de facto standards
shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 09
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Microsoft on Monday said it will provide patent- and license-free use rights to the format behind its Outlook Personal Folders opening e-mail, calendar, contacts and other information to a host of applications such as antimalware or cloud-based services.
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Documenting and publishing the .pst format could open up entirely new feature sets for programs such as search tools for mining mailboxes for relevant corporate data, new security tools that scan .pst data for malicious software, or e-discovery tools for meeting compliance regulations, according to Microsoft officials.
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The ripples from the European Commission v. Microsoft decision continue to flow. The catch, of course, is that the patent rights will almost certainly be subject to the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, a weasel-worded document that actually grants no rights. http://law.bepress.com/unswwps/flrps/art71/ But someone with some clout will push that issue sooner or later.
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shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Aug 14
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Microsoft, Apple, and Google: How three tech giants have evolved in the 21st Century | ... - 0 views
www.zdnet.com/in-the-21st-century-7000032953
Office-365 wordSDK Microsoft-Cloud Google-cloud Apple-cloud
shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Aug 14
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In 2002, the Desktop Platforms division accounted for 33 percent of Microsoft's total revenue. That percentage has been steadily dropping, and in fiscal 2013, the corresponding division (which now includes Microsoft's Surface hardware) was responsible for only 25 percent of the company's steadily rising total revenue. Server products, Office and other desktop applications, and cloud services increased steadily during that time. Looking at operating income (what's left of revenue after you subtract expenses) tells a more interesting story. From 2002 through 2004, Windows was the dominant contributor to Microsoft's profits, accounting for as much as 89 percent of total operating income. But that began changing in 2005 as those investments in enterprise software and cloud services began to pay off.
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"Over the past week, I've been blowing the virtual dust off more than a decade's worth of annual reports from Microsoft, Apple, and Google. My goal was to follow the money and figure out how each company's business has changed over the past decade. Consider this a follow-up to my February post, "Apple, Google, Microsoft: Where does the money come from?" My tally starts with financial results for 2002, the year after Microsoft signed a historic consent decree that settled the U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit. It was also the first full year after the introduction of the iPod, which was the first step on Apple's transformation from a PC company to one that revolutionized mobile computing and communication. The earliest annual report I could find for Google was from 2003, the year before its big IPO. In Microsoft's case, the question I was most interested in was "How dependent is the company on Windows?" The Windows monopoly began crumbling as soon as the settlement was signed (although it's debatable how much influence that lawsuit had on the market). Over the past 10 years, Microsoft has shifted its reporting structures a few times, making it hard to draw perfect comparisons over time. But the chart below, which shows revenue from the desktop versions of Windows and related products, is close enough."
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Why Microsoft Azure could have the last laugh in the cloud wars | CITEworld - 0 views
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Venture capitalist Brad Feld recently wrote an interesting post predicting the end of Amazon's dominance of the cloud computing market, and concluded, "it’s suddenly a good time to be Microsoft or Google in the cloud computing wars." I'd go one step farther. Using Feld's arguments, I'd say that Microsoft is in the driver's seat. More like this The dark side of the cloud price wars between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft The rise, fall, and rehabilitation of Internet Explorer Microsoft, Apple, and Google battle for the mobile enterprise Featured Resource Presented by Citrix Systems 10 essential elements for a secure enterprise mobility strategy Best practices for protecting sensitive business information while making people productive from Learn More First, the price war. Microsoft and Google are on approximately equal ground when it comes to cutting prices -- both have highly profitable core businesses that they can use to subsidize a price war in cloud infrastructure, even to the point of sustaining losses for a while to gain market share. Amazon does not.
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Second, the quality argument. Like Feld, we've also pointed out that there are niche cloud providers that do a better job than the big guys at providing infrastructure-as-a-service for specific verticals, but when you move all the way up the stack to full software-as-a-service applications, Microsoft has an edge among the big three with Office 365.
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Google has been making inroads into smaller businesses with Google Apps for almost a decade now, Microsoft remains the standard in the biggest and most profitable business customers -- as this recent investigation from Dan Frommer at Quartz showed, only one company in the Fortune 50 uses Google Apps. (That company happens to be Google itself.)
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The third argument, support, is mostly a wash. While Amazon's support may be terrible (I have no evidence of this, but I'm taking Feld's word for it), Microsoft and Google and their respective ecosystem partners do a decent job of supporting customers on their stacks.
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But then comes the fourth argument. Feld points out that once companies get to $200,000 per month of cloud-infrastructure spend, it's actually significantly cheaper to build their own data centers
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Microsoft is the only one of the big three players with an on-premise offering -- Windows Server and the rest of the Microsoft infrastructure family. Maybe the exact break-even point will change as the cloud price wars continue, but Microsoft has the most pieces customers would need to move from all-cloud to a hybrid or on-premise solution. Or, for that matter, for existing on-premise customers to begin experimenting moving some workloads to the cloud.
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There's one more point favoring Microsoft. Google's core business is selling online advertising. That business makes up about 90% of Google's revenue, and it has enviably high operating margins -- around 30%, based on Google's 2011 financial report. (I picked 2011 because that was before Google bought Motorola Mobility, which changed the margin structure.)
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It's unclear how the Google Cloud Platform helps that business. Are customers using Google's cloud somehow more likely to advertise with Google? I don't see it. Are Google advertising customers demanding to run other workloads on Google technology? I don't see it.
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Meanwhile, while Azure almost certainly offers lower margins than, say, on-premises Windows Servers, it's necessary -- customers are moving workloads to the cloud, and Microsoft needs a competitive offering there to keep them on the Microsoft stack so they continue to buy other Microsoft products. Plus, as I argued in point four, today's Azure customers could become tomorrow's on-premise Microsoft infrastructure customers.
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In other words, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Engine both lower the profit margins of their parent companies. But Azure is clearly strategic while Cloud Engine, as far as I can tell, is not. Who's more likely to keep investing in and improving its cloud?
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right now, Microsoft's chances look pretty good to me. No wonder they put the cloud guy in charge of the company.
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Dropbox Slashes Its Price as the Cost of a Gigabyte Nears Zero | Business | WIRED - 0 views
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how many gigabytes you can store, and at what price.
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The cut brings Dropbox in line, once again, with rival services at its gargantuan competitors: Google and Microsoft. But Dropbox’s decision to bury the lead signals something more important about the business it’s in:
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in the competitive market for file storing, syncing, and sharing, gigabytes don’t matter quite as much as they did in the past.
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The game is all about what you can do with them.
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ChenLi Wang, Dropbox’s head of product
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So, if Dropbox isn’t really selling storage, then what is it selling? Services.
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The competition becomes squarely about what each competitor can do, rather than how much users can upload.
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That’s been the approach Microsoft has taken, says Michal Gideoni, director of product management for Office.
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Gideoni describes storage for Microsoft as just one aspect of its “holistic” approach to the cloud, an approach anchored not by file-syncing but by Office 365, the online version of its iconic productivity software.
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As at Dropbox, Gideoni talks in terms of workflow, of data on the move, not just of a box for holding data in place.
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Dropbox for Business also offers deep integration with Office files, but so far those features are not available with the consumer version.
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"When I talk to folks at Dropbox, they're eager to tell me about how different people are using its file-sharing service: the musician, the photographer, the professor, the startup founder. They like to talk about new features, like password-protected links and the remote wipe tool that lets you remove files from a lost computer. But what they save for the end of our meeting, almost like an afterthought, are the two numbers that traditionally meant the most for a data storage service: how many gigabytes you can store, and at what price. As it turns out, these numbers look at lot better than they used to. On Wednesday, the company slashed the price of a gigabyte by 90 percent on Dropbox Pro, the paid version of its signature consumer product. Up until now, users paid $9.99 per month to store up to 100 gigabytes of data. Now, for that same price, they can store one terabyte. The cut brings Dropbox in line, once again, with rival services at its gargantuan competitors: Google and Microsoft. But Dropbox's decision to bury the lead signals something more important about the business it's in: in the competitive market for file storing, syncing, and sharing, gigabytes don't matter quite as much as they did in the past. The game is all about what you can do with them. "It's how you get the content in and out and how does it let you do the work you want to accomplish," says ChenLi Wang, Dropbox's head of product. "We want people to rely on Dropbox as the home for all their stuff as opposed to thinking of it as a fixed storage limit." What Dropbox Is Selling"
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shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Dec 15
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Microsoft pushes Trade Secrets Bill - 1 views
thestack.com/...trade-secrets-act-2015-support
Trade-secret-legislation Microsoft Patents Microsoft-Patent-Consortium
shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Dec 15
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A spokesman for the Microsoft On The Issues website has expressed the company’s support for new legislation that would reform the legal framework for companies wishing to protect their trade secrets in a cloud-centric world where such information is frequently forced to reside on networks. In the post Microsoft’s Assistant General Counsel of IP Policy & Strategy Jule Sigall rallies behind business and academic concerns supporting the proposed Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015 (DTSA), which goes before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee today. Sigall, who is also Associate General Counsel for Copyright in Microsoft’s Legal & Corporate Affairs department, makes an ardent case for reform of the current legislation, as furnished by the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA). UTSA’s provisions are argued to be fractured, and rendered ineffective both by the inability of plaintiffs to pursue suits in federal courts (despite trade secret infractions being Federal by nature), and by the fact that not all states have adopted or instituted all the measures provided by the legislation. Additionally the limited provision for redress in international cases of trade secret theft are to be addressed.
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Sigall presents the case of Microsoft’s Cortana AI as an example of why new legislation is necessary: ‘[Behind] Cortana sits a vast amount of technology developed or enhanced in-house by Microsoft – voice recognition; language translation; reactive and predictive algorithms that can synthesize context, location and data, and interface with the vast resources of the Bing search engine index; and a complex array of cloud servers to crunch and serve data in real time. This technology represents tens of thousands of hours of research, trial and error, and continued improvement as Cortana is adapted for new devices and new scenarios’
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Sigall argues that better protection procedures for trade secrets, the only form of IP which currently lacks comprehensive cover in law, is essential for start-ups whose ideas, business plans and even customer lists may constitute the only marketable value of a company that is just in the stage of consolidating. ‘A trade secret is unique among forms of intellectual property in how it is legally protected. While it is a federal crime to steal a trade secret, a business that has its trade secrets stolen must rely on state law to pursue a civil remedy. Owners of copyrights, patents, and trademarks can go to federal court to protect their property and seek damages when their property has been infringed, but trade secret owners do not have access to such a federal remedy.’
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Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015 contains [PDF] significant material from its doomed predecessor of 12 months ago, and one of its boldest initiatives is the extension of ex parte seizures, instituted in UTSA in a more limited form (particularly in the 1985 amendment to the Uniform Law Commission’s 1979 initial legislation). An ex parte seizure provides a kind of restraining order or injunction on disputed information, or even the dissemination of knowledge about whether the information is disputed, and places it under federal protection on the plaintiff’s behalf.
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Microsoft had a hard time adjusting to the open source revolution, particularly in regard to the PC/Mac Office product which at one time represented the most successful and ubiquitous software in the world, and the many legal and semantic wrangles over the closed-source nature of Office formats such as Word led ultimately to a hybridised open source .docx format which is still argued to not be the OpenXML that was promised.
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According to Sigall the state-by-state system currently in place was ‘simply not built with the digital world in mind’, and calls for ‘A uniform, national standard for protection’ which does not stop at state lines or even national borders.
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In practical terms this seems likely to extend the circumstances under which information about leaks, hacks or thefts of information can be made the subject of gag orders for legal reasons, since it brings trade secrets into the same legal framework as other forms of intellectual property which enjoy more comprehensive coverage and recourse in law. The bill would also extend the purview of the 1996 Economic Espionage Act to take in a more rigorously conceived concept of ‘trade secrets’.
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Even with the issues clear, the risk of disproportionate or over-reaching response in the event of the new bill passing successfully through congress in 2016 (it is unlikely to pass this year) is clear enough that the lack of network discussion about it is quite surprising. Essentially DTSA represents the same kind of proposed ‘judicial fast track’ – though in favour of corporations instead of governments – that has outraged so many commenters in the wake of the November 13th Paris attacks.
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Silence in court Amongst its more quotidian clauses, the Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015 effectively offers corporate plaintiffs increased opportunity to federalise disputed private material in cases involving trade secrets, with all the penalties for infraction associated with that change of status – and far greater scope for sub judice orders likely to contain and conceal future breaches of information.
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Eric Goldman of the Santa Clara University School of Law has just published a paper outlining the risks of extending ex parte seizures in the manner that DTSA 2015 proposes. Goldman writes that ‘the Seizure Provision does not solve many, if any, problems. In light of the remedies already available to trade secret owners in ex parte temporary restraining orders (TROs), the Seizure Provision purports to apply to only a narrow set of additional circumstances. In exchange for that modest benefit, the Seizure Provision creates the risk of anti-competitive seizures and seizures that cause substantial collateral damage to innocent third parties. To discourage such abuses, the Act imposes procedural safeguards and creates a cause of action for wrongful seizures. Unfortunately, those safeguards are miscalibrated to achieve the desired protections against abusive seizures.’
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Lots of possible Constitutional issues lurking. The Constitution creates only two types of intellectual property, patents and copyrights. "(P)roperty interests . . . are not created by the Constitution. Rather, they are created and their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law." Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co., 467 US 986 (1984), https://goo.gl/ZljO1H (trade secrets case). The traditional source of rights in trade secrets have been state law. Thus there is a state's rights issue lurking in this legislation, a question whether the federal government is invading the States' police power, an "our federalism" question.