I’m no photographer. If I take 20 digital pictures a year, that is a lot for me. So I’m obviously not part of the target audience — at least the user-generated content part — for this technology. But I did discover a few things about PhotoSynth that I found noteworthy during my sit-down meeting recently with Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the co-creator of PhotoSynth (as well as creator of the SeaDragon seamless-browsing technology which helps power it).

If I had to choose the six things that most surprised/impressed me about PhotoSynth, this would be my list:

1. Microsoft is trying to create a whole new lexicon around PhotoSynth. Microsoft wants synth to become a commonly used verb. “Synths” are collections of photos stiched with PhotoSynth. When someone asks how “synthy” something is, what s/he really wants to know is how complete a collection of synths is. (In other words, are there large gaps missing in a series of user-generated photos of Notre Dame? Or are the transitions between photos smooth?)

2. For now, PhotoSynth is a completely consumer-focused technology. But Microsoft is expecting busines users to create commercial PhotoSynth experiences, as well. Aguera y Arcas cited shoppig for things that are “extremely visual” as one likely application. It’s not hard to imagine medical-imaging applications of the technology. PhotoSynth tags can be embedded on any Web page (the way YouTube tags are today), which may result in other, new commercial uses of the technology.

3. PhotoSynth Version 1.0 already is optimized for multicore machines. “The Microsoft multicore guys want to try some of our technologies,” Aguera y Arcas said.

4. So far, there is no touch support for PhotoSynth and no connection between PhotoSynth and Windows Live Photo Gallery. But future PhotoSynth releases will no doubt add support for these and other Microsoft-backed products and technologies. And yes, a software developer kit (SDK) is coming, but no date yet as to when.

5. PhotoSynth is yet another example of a Software + Service. The software components are the synther and the viewer, which reside on a user’s machine. “Everything gets stored to PhotoSynth.Net,” Aguera y Arcas explained.

6. What’s next for the PhotoSynth team? From the PhotoSynth site: “Following this release, the Photosynth team will join MSN — an important step in continuing to improve Photosynth and share the experience with an even wider audience. In addition to letting users create and share synths at photosynth.com, over the next year Photosynth will begin to become a key part of the experience for MSN’s 550 million monthly visitors worldwide. Synths will be prominently featured on MSN.com. To create a more absorbing experience for its visitors, MSN will use synths of popular destinations and notable events in many of the places where static images are used on the site today.”

Those interested in checking out PhotoSynth can download it for free, as of August 20.  The team is making sure the world knows that PhotoSynth may have gone 1.0, but it’s still a work in progress. From the PhotoSynth site:

“What you see on this site is the first of many versions of Photosynth. Call it beta, call it 1.0, call it whatever you want… just know we are hard at work adding support for more browsers, more platforms, and more hardware, and just making the experience that much more amazing.”

Any PhotoSynth testers out there discovered other unusual tidbits about this much-touted Microsoft technology?

(On the server side, the Softies have been rolling out a major release followed by a minor update (known as Release 2, or R2) every two years. On the client side, the timing has been off, but the major/minor cadence has been pretty similar.)

Starting with Windows 7, however, that logic and naming structure that Microsoft has worked to establish for Windows seems to breaking down.

Yes, I’m going to reopen the can of worms about Windows Server 2008 being one and the same as Windows 7 Server. The reason I’m not letting go of this is because a bunch of things still just don’t add up (and not just to me — to a number of other folks in the Windows community with whom I have spoken).

In the August 18 posting to the Windows Server blog about Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 Server, Group Product Manager Ward Ralston noted that even though Windows 7 Server (a k a Windows Server 2008 R2) is an interim, more minor release, “the (Windows 7) client in fact will be a major release.”

Hmmm. No one seems to be buying that. Customers, partners and Microsoft pundits — basically, almost everyone other than Microsoft execs — is already considering Windows 7 client to be a minor release. Microsoft officials have been careful to explain that there won’t be any major changes to Windows 7 client and that most apps that work on Vista should work on Windows 7 without a problem. And given that it’s a lot harder to get customers excited about a minor release than a major one, the Windows team’s reticence to call any Windows release a “minor” update is understandable.

At the risk of being accused of being a tin-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, let me posit a couple of thoughts as to what might have happened:

Possibility A: The Server team did, indeed, decide to release one fewer versions of Server (killing off what originally was going to be Windows Server 2008 R2 and going straight to Windows 7 Server). I don’t know exactly when this decision might have been made. But as you can see from this 2007 roadmap slide on the UX Evanglist blog, Microsoft’s plan, as recently as November 2007, was to ship Windows Server 2008 in late 2007 or early 2008. If that schedule continued, Windows Server 2008 R2 would hit in late 2009/early 2010, and Windows Server 7 in late 2011/early 2012. But Stephen “UX Evangelist” Chapman also has a  roadmap slide, dated January 2008, which seems to equate Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (though that slide also may be interpreted as Windows 7 client and Windows Server 2008 R2 being built atop the same code base).

Possibility B: The Server team decided the R2 naming had become beyond confusing and decided to go with big, round numbers (Windows 7 Server, Windows 8 Server, Windows 9 Server) instead. That would mean the product which should have been named “Windows 7 Server” (if Microsoft stuck to existing naming conventions) is now actually Windows 8 Server (maybe?). Or is it Windows 7 Server R2? Hmmm. I think it is interesting Microsoft is declining to provide even a placeholder name for the major release of Windows Server due to follow Windows Server 2008 R2.

Before I get another email from anonymous at anonymous.com accusing me of intentionally misleading readers (and why would i do that — not quite sure on that one), let me just say I find the usually transparent Windows Server team’s opacity on this to be unusual.

What do you think Microsoft should codename/call the release of Windows Server that follows Windows Server 2008 R2?

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Other write-in candidates?

Update: As a few readers have pointed out, looks like the head of Windows Engineering, Steven Sinofsky, and I were on the same wavelength today. Scary! After reading the latest Sinofsky post, I’m still not sure if the Windows team and its leader consider Windows 7 to be a major or a minor release — but I think the internal view is that Windows 7 will be a major one. Sinofsky blogged:

 ”The magnitude of a release is as much about your perspective on the features as it is about the features themselves. One could even ask if being declared a major release is a compliment or not. As engineers planning a product we decide up front the percentage of our development team will that work on the release and the extent of our schedule—with the result in hand customers each decide for themselves if the release is “major”, though of course we like to have an opinion….

From our perspective, we dedicated our full engineering team and a significant schedule to building the Windows 7 client OS. That makes it a major undertaking by any definition. We intend for Windows 7 to be an awesome release.”

Intel is kicking off an open beta for what it’s calling the Intel Parallel Studio products that it expects to last through mid-2009. The family will include code analysis, design, debugging and performance tools, all of which will integrate with Microsoft’s Visual Studio and are being optimized to support Microsoft’s Concurrency Runtime. Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR).

Update: The Concurrency Runtime from Microsoft’s Developer Division is not the same as the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR); it is part of the Parallel Extensions to the .Net Framework. However, the CCR sounds like it is on its way to become part of the Developer Division’s set of deliverables.

Hidden away as part of Microsoft’s Robotics Studio is the CCR , as well as the related Decentralized Software Services (DSS) runtime. These runtimes are designed to help with programming multicore, distributed systems. As I noted in April:

“In the Microsoft Robotics Studio, you see the new programming model we are creating at Microsoft,” (General Manager of Microsoft’s Robotics Group Tandy) Trower said.

“The developer division at Microsoft is in the process of integrating the CCR library into the parallel frameworks it is devising (but not specifically into the Parallel FX parallel extensions to the .Net Framework), Trower said. Ultimately, Microsoft is planning to make CCR part of Visual Studio itself and possibly even part of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), he said. Microsoft’s Mobile and Embedded teams are planning on integrating CCR and DSS into their own toolkits, as well, Trower said.”

CCR and DSS evolved from Microsoft’s BigTop/BigWin grid-operating-system project that the company killed off a few years ago.

Microsoft is on tap to talk more about CCR its concurrency runtime at the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in late October. Here’s one of the session descriptions detailing some of what officials will discuss:

Concurrency Runtime Deep Dive: How to Harvest Multicore Computing Resources
Presenter: Niklas Gustafsson

Learn how the Concurrency Runtime provides an efficient and scalable infrastructure for multiple concurrent programming models by bringing together cooperative work scheduling and resource management into one component. This deep dive presentation gives you an idea of what it means to target the Concurrency Runtime with your domain-specific library or language. We also cover many of the internal algorithms of the runtime to help educate you on the applicability of the runtime to your scenarios.

Anyone out there been dabbling with the Concurrency Runtime and/or CCR/DSS? If so, in what kinds of projects?

I noted yesterday that Microsoft only had 11 more days within which to deliver the more customer-focused IE 8 Beta 2 if it were to hit its August deadline. According to one well-placed tipster, who requested anonymity, the current plan is for Microsoft to make IE 8 Beta 2 available for download from its Web site by August 28. And the final version is tracking for a November release, the tipster added.

Microsoft is expected to provide some previously undisclosed new features as part of the upcoming beta release, including some kind of new private-browsing (a k a “porn mode”) functionality.

(To be clear: Microsoft isn’t confirming it will have the same kind of “private browsing” functionality that Safari already offers, and some are speculating that all Redmond will end up doing is identifying which sites are porn sites, which won’t be very useful to those who are hoping IE 8 will help them cover up their online tracks. )

Microsoft is expected to make the Beta 2 build available to anyone who wants it. The Beta 2 build is the successor to the more developer-focused IE 8 Beta 1, which Microsoft also made available to any interested parties, on March 5. I’m hearing that folks who already have IE 8 Beta 1 installed will get Beta 2 via Automatic Updates.

Over the summer, execs said Microsoft was on track to deliver the final IE 8 bits before the end of 2008, but offered no further particulars.

When it ships, IE 8 will work on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 systems only. IE 8 will be Microsoft’s most standards-compliant release of its browser to date, the company has said. Because it is undoing a lot of the non-standards-based coding it had done in previous IE releases, it’s not known yet how many existing sites and apps won’t render correctly with IE 8. But Microsoft has been trying to get the word out to developers to check for compatibility before the final IE 8 release goes live.

The IE 8 team, for its part, isn’t talking publicly yet about ship targets and due dates, which isn’t too surprising when you remember that the IE team is part of the Windows client organization. The official comment on delivery dates, delivered via an IE spokesperson:

“We’ve said beta 2 would be in August and the next IE would come within 2 years of the last IE (which shipped with Vista, Jan 30, 07).”

What new features and functionality are you hoping to see in IE 8 Beta 2?

The actual Windows 7 client code was not distributed via WSUS. But the appearance of Windows 7 on the list of products that will be serviced over WSUS paves the way for Microsoft to start pushing something Windows-7-related to customers in the coming months.

“WSUS doesn’t push products - just patches. so this could just be in preparation for something that is weeks or months in the future. It’s just a new category.” said one WSUS customer, who confirmed that he saw the “Windows 7″ box on his update check list this morning.

The appearance of Windows 7 on a WSUS server was noted by Yannis Pantzis, who posted a screen shot of it on his blog. (I am providing a copy of his screen shot in case he is asked/required to remove it.)

WSUS is one of a number of Microsoft patching tools. Others include Windows Update and Microsoft Update. WSUS is typically employed by larger enterprises.

Microsoft has been providing a select number of outside testers with early Windows 7 builds over the past few months. A first, more widely distributed test build is expected around the time of Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in late October, 2008.

The final release of Windows 7 is expected in the latter half of 2009, according to Microsoft execs — and some partners who claim they’ve been told by Microsoft that the company is expecting to deliver Windows 7 before the usually touted 2010 delivery date.

Update: At the end of the day on August 20, I received this official response from Microsoft on what happened with WSUS and Windows 7 today, delivered via a company spokesperson:

“Today, Microsoft published a top level category for “Windows 7 Client” onto Windows Sever Update Services (WSUS).  This is a standard step in the Windows OS development process that allows internal  Microsoft teams who are testing Windows 7 beta drivers/updates to begin testing publishing tools. The inclusion of the ‘Windows 7 Client’ category is simply part of Microsoft’s current standard development process for Windows prior to release, and is designed to ensure the highest quality at RTM from day 1.”

No doubt, Microsoft has been holding back some features that will be added to the new test build. Istartedsomething’s Long Zheng blogged on August 20 about one such possibility: Private browsing, a k a “porn mode.” Private browsing is a feature that the Mozilla team ended up pulling from Firefox 3 (and 3.1), but one that Safari has had since 2005.

Private browsing allows those browsing the Web to erase their online tracks in history, cache and personal information entered and shared by a user on a Web page.

I asked Microsoft whether Zheng was right, and all a spokeswoman would say is the company will have more to say about privacy as IE 8 evolves.

There have been a couple of IE Blog posts that offer hints that Microsoft may be going beyond the pure “private browsing” mode.

From a June 24, 2008 IE Blog post on trustworthy browsing:

“(T)there’s more to online privacy than cookies, as cookies are only one implementation of content that can disclose information to websites. In some discussions, people have also described IE7’s Phishing Filter as a privacy feature because it helps protect users from sharing information. The larger challenge here is notifying users clearly about what sites they’re disclosing information to and enabling them to control that disclosure if they choose. As we talk more about privacy, we will broaden the discussion to include additional protections from sharing information that the browser can offer users.”

Some IE users have been saying for years that they want somthing more granular than the current browser option to delete all cookies or all temporary Internet files. From way back in 2006 in the comments on the IE Blog, poster Nick Davis said:

“I *hate* clearing my history, because lots of history is useful. What’s that new supplier’s site I went to last week and forgot to bookmark, etc. I hate losing all that info, just to cover up the fact that I, ahem, bought a gift for a loved one.

“Selective history. That’s what we need. Or a way to selectively delete browsing history after the fact. I mean, we’re only over 10 years into this whole web browser thing, and we have basically the same feature since v1.”

Any guesses as to what Microsoft might deliver on the privacy front with the forthcoming IE 8 Beta 2 and/or final release (slated to be available before the end of 2008)?

Being one of the keepers of a large and growing database of Microsoft codenames, I thought it might be fun to try to add to my collection. Here are the rules:

1. Submit to me via e-mail a new Microsoft codename that you either know or would like more information about. (You can remain anonymous if you’d like, but you do need a real e-mail address so that I can notify you if you win.) Send submissions to mjf [Shift2] microsofttracker.com.

2. I will post a new codename a day for one week, starting next week, on my blog. I won’t identify the submitter (unless you’d like to be mentioned by name). I’ll include any info I can find on what the codename is and how it fits into the Microsoft universe. Any hints or tips you can provide to guide me will earn you bonus points.

3. Anyone can submit: Softies, Microsoft partners, Microsoft customers, Microsoft rivals. You can submit multiple times if you’re bored and the spirit moves you.

4. Fake codenames will be frowned upon and senders of bogus codenames will be cursed with bad luck and this Microsoft watcher’s wrath for 13 years.

5. The “best” and most unusual codename (as judged by yours truly at the end of next week) will win. The prize? A free, autographed copy of Microsoft 2.0. I will ship it to any mailing address in the world that you designate. If you already have your copy, you can get one for a friend, a loved one or eBay….

I’m looking for new and as-yet undisclosed codenames. If you’re not sure whether something is new, you can always ask….

The first new codename will be posted on my blog on August 25. May the best codename wrangler win!

Update: Thanks for the great submissions that are coming in. Surprisingly, there are more than a few folks submitting codenames that they think Microsoft should consider when they are looking for new ones with which to christen forthcoming products. I don’t consider these wrath-worthy fakes, but they aren’t exactly what I’m looking for. So if you can, please try to tailor your submissions to current Microsoft codenames.

But a new white paper, sponsored by Microsoft and written by the always entertaining consultant David Chappell, provides more clues aboutwhat the Softies are planning to unveil at this October’s Professional Developers Conference. For anyone looking to understand how and where Red Dog, Zurich, BizTalk Services and SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) all fit together, the 13-pager is worth a read.

Chappell, who provided an insightful talk at TechEd in June on Microsoft’s “Oslo” initiative (while managing to tread safely through a minefield of non-disclosure agreements) has done the same thing with his new paper, “A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms: An Enterprise-Oriented View.” He doesn’t reference any of the aformentioned codenames by name.

But Chappell does provide a taxonomy for an application platform that’s useful when trying to piece together the various Oslo components under development. As Chappell outlines it, first there’s the foundation — platform software on a machine, including a base operating system, storage and standard libraries. Next up is infrastucture services (remote storage, integration services, identity services, etc.). And then there are application services — the services out of which cloud applications are built.

Chappell cites Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as the best-known example of a cloud OS today. He explains:

“By far the most well-known example of an operating system in the cloud today is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 provides customer-specific Linux instances running in virtual machines (VMs). From a technical perspective, it might be more accurate to think of EC2 as a platform for VMs rather than operating systems. Still, a developer sees an operating system interface, and so viewing it in this light makes more sense here.

“Each development team is free to use whatever local support it likes in this VM—Amazon doesn’t care. The creators of one application might choose a Java EE app server and MySQL, for example, while another group might go with Ruby on Rails. EC2 customers are even free to create many Linux instances, then distribute large workloads across them in parallel, such as for scientific applications. While the service EC2 provides is quite basic, it’s also very general, and so it can be used in many different ways.”

Microsoft is known to be working on a low-level “cloud OS” that is code-named Red Dog. Red Dog is expected to harness the power of multiple, distributed systems in a datacenter so that cloud apps can be more scalable and easier to write. And Zurich — Microsoft’s extension of .Net to the cloud — is part of Redmond’s solution here, as well.

At the highest level, Zurich is Microsoft’s Software+Services platform: This is what Microsoft and third-party apps cloud applications will be built upon. It’s akin to platforms like Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google’s AppEngine platform — both of which are mentioned in Chappell’s paper. He never directly mentions Zurich, though. This is as close as he gets:

“Microsoft also provides local support for applications in the cloud as part of its CRM Live offering. Based on the Dynamics CRM platform mentioned earlier, this technology targets data-oriented business applications, much like Force.com. And like both Force.com and AppEngine, it includes both run-time application support and a data store. Microsoft has also talked about its plans to go further in this area, with a platform that will support standard .NET development languages and tools. The intent, Microsoft says, is to allow portability of both applications and developer skills between the company’s on-premises foundation and its cloud foundation.”

On the infrastructure services side, Microsoft already has a bunch of pieces in place. SSDS is Microsoft’s equivalent to Amazon’s Simple DB storage service. BizTalk Services, a version of which is in beta, provides integrated workflow and integration. Windows Live ID provides federated identity services.

Application services are the most fuzzy and ill-defined piece of the cloud puzzle. In his white paper, Chappell groups lots of things in here — Live Search, Virtual Earth, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Contacts, etc.

I’m still puzzling over how a couple of Microsoft products and technologies fit into this matrix. What about Live Mesh and the Mesh FX (Framework) that Microsoft mentioned briefly when it rolled out its Mesh vision earlier this year? Is Live Mesh simply an application service that runs on top of Red Dog/Zurich?

And whatever happened to the obscure “xRM” — the “Titan” platform-as-a-service offering from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team? Chappell mentions that Microsoft was working on such a beast (though, again, without calling it out by name) in his section on Force.com and AppEngine. Is the xRM technology still around? If so, how does it fit in with Red Dog/Zurich/Oslo et. al.?

Anyone know of other pieces of Microsoft’s cloud-computing puzzle that we might see at the PDC in October, if not before?

On August 15, however, there was mention of an Office 14 alpha release on one of the Microsoft blogs that I read skim regularly. That post, about PerformancePoint Server, mentioned the Office 14 (O14) alpha TAP (Technical Adoption Program) release. The monitoring and analytics component of PerformancePoint Server (Microsoft’s business-scorecarding server) will be part of the O14 TAP, the posting said. And the alpha process for that O14 TAP is slated for November/December 2008. From the post (which since I blogged this has disappeared):

“The Alpha process will begin in the November/December timeframe this year. When you submit, please identify as a PPS M&A candidate. The deadline for submissions is August 28th.”

Microsoft opened up its Office 14 TAP nomination program in mid-May 2008. Here are excerpts from the note the Office team sent to Microsoft employees asking for potential tester names:

From: Office Customer Program Team
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2008
Subject: Office “14” Technology Adoption Program : nominations open!

The Office “14” TAP team is excited to announce that the Office “14” Technology Adoption Program (TAP) is now accepting nominations!   Nominations will be accepted until 8/29/08 and can be found at http://tap/team/Office14TAP/O14Nominations/Forms/MyItems.aspx. This nomination form should only be completed and submitted by Microsoft FTEs (full-time employees).

Recruiting and on-boarding for this phase of TAP will occur in two waves. The first wave starts now and will continue through the summer. This wave will focus on recruiting customers to validate server-centric scenarios (not involving client products as these will become available in the second wave). The second wave of recruiting will occur early next calendar year and will include client-centric scenarios.  Selection criteria aims to maximize testing coverage for deployment scenarios and new product features. Other factors considered during selection include industry diversity, potential business impact for the customer, completeness of provided forms, and customer willingness to provide feedback and participate with product group on rigorous testing the product.

Companies willing to participate in public relations opportunities will receive preferential consideration. The numerous selection criteria will be balanced with a very limited number of available participant slots.  Please note that Office “14” servers are 64-bit only.

Regards,
Office Customer Program Team

In case you want the official response from Microsoft on all things Office 14-related, here it is again, delivered via a company spokesperson on August 18:

“At this point we don’t have anything further to share on O14 build/timing - it is too early to discuss specific features, capabilities or timing for the next release.”

It still sounds like the final Office 14 is on track for 2009 — though probably not in the first half. Anyone else — TAP or not — hearing otherwise?

After sending me a note that led me to believe that Microsoft had decided to veer from its original plan of an R2 update followed by a full-fledged Server update, a Microsoft spokeswoman called on August 18 to tell me that her note to me was misleading.

So, scratch that Friday evening post. Microsoft is still doing what it had led folks to believe up until this point: A release called Windows Server 2008 R2 is still on the books (now officially slated for 2010). And there will be some release two years after that which may or may not be called Windows 7 Server. (Microsoft currently won’t say anything about the planned naming for this release.)

And just to keep things extra confusing, the spokeswoman told me that if and when anyone hears references to “Windows 7 Server,” what they really mean is “Windows Server 2008 R2.” In other words, the codename for the Windows Server 2008 R2 release is “Windows 7 Server” — which, based on previous Microsoft naming conventions, should be the codename for the release that comes out after Windows Server 2008 R2…. Yeah….

A comment sent to me by an anonymous reader, good old anonymous@anonymous.com this morning makes more sense now. (Note to reader: Why anonymous? If you don’t want me to use your name in a posting, I won’t.)

“Okay, I don’t know how someone on our side could have miscommunicated this or if you are purposely reporting this incorrectly, but let’s be clear on this: Windows 7 Server is and has always been Windows Server 2008 R2.

“Furthermore, Windows 7, despite it’s rather pretentious sounding code name (a result of Sinofsky’s like of big round numbers) is NOT Windows NT 7, but rather 6.1(current builds are numbered 67xx as a direct continuation of the longhorn codebase). Put simply, it is not a big jump as a codebase revision and the new changes, on both the client and server, will be focused on user features, not core OS components. The big core OS changes are WDDM 2 and a kernel scheduler update to remove the simple bitmask enumeration of processors so that the OS can schedule more than 64 concurrent threads.

“Finally, and I can’t be more clear on this, ‘Windows 7′ client and Windows Server 2008 R2 will RTM simultaneously (and just so you are 100% clear on this) and are based on exactly the same codebase (just as Vista SP1 and Server 2008 are based on an identical core OS codebase).

“As for the next major release (meaning a full revision of the NT codebase) that will not occur until well after the current Win7 wave.”

So there you have it. Next up: Windows Server 2008 R2. To all you readers who thought it made sense that Microsoft was skipping over R2, looks like that’s not the case, after all. Sorry for the miscommunication.