Web Programmers

By Robin Harris

What went wrong? I’ll tell you what went wrong: Microsoft execs - starting with Steve Ballmer - don’t care enough about their customers. Which is too bad for the thousands of smart, hard working ’softies who do.

I went through the Vista Capable lawsuit Exhibit A emails. Lots of warnings that Vista was a train wreck, that its requirements exceeded the market, that the continual changes and slips were killing OEMs and that many peripheral vendors had simply given up trying to stay in sync.

Where was Steve?

Even execs get shafted
If you were confused and/or burnt by the “Windows Vista Capable” logo, you have good company. Mike Nash, now Microsoft Corporate VP, Windows Product management, said in an email:

“I personally got burned by the Intel 915 chipset issue on a laptop that PERSONALLY (eg with my own $$$). . . . I now have a $2100 email machine.”

Board member and former Microsoft President/COO Jon Shirley also had Vista woes:

“I upgraded one of the two machines I use a lot to Vista. The most persistent and so far hardest to fix issues are both MSN products, Portfolio in MSN Money and Music (downloads I had bought in the past).

. . . there are no drivers yet for my Epson printer (top of the line and in production today but no driver yet), Epson scanner (older but also top of the line and they say thwy not do a driver for) and a Nikon film scanner that will get a driver one day . . . . I cannot understand with a product this long in creation why there is a such a shortage of drivers. I suppose the vendors did not trust us . . . enough to use the beta for driver testing?”

Good question, Jon. Ballmer replied: “You are right that people did not trust us . . . “.

Was it Intel’s fault?
Intel clearly put pressure on Microsoft to ease the graphics requirements for the “Vista Capable” designation. Intel VP, Software and Solutions Group Renee J. James got a lot of attention from William Poole, a Microsoft VP.

Mr. Poole seems to have been Microsoft’s primary contact to Intel’s James. Mr. Poole played an key role in strangling Netscape - based on his testimony in the antitrust trial. He knows how to play rough.

Thus John Kalkman’s email statement doesn’t quite add up:

In the end we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.

If Intel couldn’t sell motherboards, could Microsoft sell Windows? Further, Intel’s 915 graphics performance wasn’t bad. In a November, 2004
ExtremeTech review, the 915 could do 73 fps on Halo and 60 on UT2004 - not bad for integrated graphics 3 years ago.

My reading: Vista’s hardware requirements exceeded what most consumers were buying. Microsoft bloatware overshot the market and they had a choice: lower requirements or hose the available market for Vista.

They lowered requirements. The “Intel made us do it” claim is an excuse, not a reason. The emails also show that HP had worked hard to meet the original requirements. If Microsoft cared about consumer requirements they would have supported HP over Intel - even at the cost of initial Vista sales.

Product intro tight rope
Product intros are a balancing act. The development team is racing to implement features and fix bugs while marketing is prepping customers and sales. Features are dropped weekly while “show stopper” bugs are keeping everyone in suspense.

Top management has to balance what was promised against what can be delivered. Vista’s last minute slips - especially the one that pushed delivery past the holidays - were painful attempts to correct major problems. Ultimately they were too little, too late.

The Storage Bits take
The Vista project was entirely on Ballmer’s watch and he bungled it. The CEO is where competing priorities get sorted out. It’s clear that Ballmer couldn’t get his team focused on a great customer experience.

Allchin’s development team overestimated consumer PC performance at Vista ship. Ballmer over-promised Wall Street on Vista sales. The continuing slips eroded vendor support.

Marketing split hairs - charging OEMs $8 more for Vista Home Premium! - and created a messaging mess that no one could understand. Let alone tell engineering they were dreaming.

Downgrades to XP are running wild. Microsoft’s prestige has taken a huge hit. Millions are looking at, and many are buying, Macs. Low-cost PCs are forcing Vista prices down. The news seems to keep getting worse, not better.

The fish rots from the head, Steve. And you’re the head. Time to go and give someone else a shot. The world’s largest and most profitable software company can and must do better.

The World Wide Web Consortium has published a public draft of the first major upgrade to HTML in over a decade.

Released on Tuesday, the first working draft for HTML 5 is a result of work carried out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group, which brings developers, browser vendors, and content providers together.

In its final form by 2010, HTML 5 is intended to bring the markup language forward into today’s richer Internet environments, with new application programming interfaces to control audio and 2D video content.

“HTML is of course a very important standard,” said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML, and W3C director. “I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web. To integrate the input of so many people is hard work, as is the challenge of balancing stability with innovation; pragmatism with idealism.”

The W3C HTML Working Group studied the Web’s evolution and was driven by developments, such as the Ajax development process, to draw up the new standard for a Web that is now far beyond a collection of static pages. New features in HTML 5 will mean that elements of today’s most popular Web sites can be standardized to promote interoperability. Ultimately, these elements will then proliferate as they begin to show up in authoring tools, experts have claimed.

HTML 5 will focus on client-side data storage to enable users to edit documents interactively. It will also address costs by providing concise rules on handling HTML documents correctly, alongside instructions for how to recover from errors. In line with these augmentations, new features are also planned to help bring familiar page sections and navigation elements to the screen. Written in either “classic” HTML syntax or an XML syntax, HTML 5 is also intended to extend Web-application interoperability outward to the mobile platform.

“A huge amount of data is recorded on the Web in HTML, but often encoded to work for a specific program, rather than following the existing specifications. In order to preserve this information, we need to know how to process it even if the particular programs it was designed for disappear,” said Charles McCathieNevile, chief standards officer for mobile-browser company Opera. “The new HTML 5 drafts clarify how existing HTML can be parsed in a reliable way according to a specification that others can freely implement in the future. They also add specifications for a number of important Web features that have been implemented and found acceptance over the last decade.”
 
News of HTML 5 comes at a time when vendors such as Microsoft are becoming increasingly vocal about browser interoperability. In December, Microsoft claimed Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) correctly passed the Acid2 browser test, a part of the Web Standards Project. “Successfully rendering Acid2 is an important landmark for IE8, as it highlights the interoperability, standards compliance and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release,” said a Microsoft representative.

However, some experts have claimed that Microsoft’s Acid2 assertions may be premature. The company has attracted some criticism from developers over its approach to render modes in IE8.

HTML 5 will be the first implementation under the W3C’s royalty-free license scheme. The HTML Working Group is made up of around 500 participants, including AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera.

For more information visit W3C HTML 5

PHP

Arriving on the scene in 1994, PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output. However, it can also be used for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. The PHP Group also provides the complete source code for users to build, customize and extend for their own use.

PHP primarily acts as a filter. The PHP program takes input from a file or stream containing text and special PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data for display.

From PHP 4, the PHP parser compiles input to produce bytecode for processing by the Zend Engine, giving improved performance over its interpreter predecessor. PHP 5 uses the Zend Engine II.

Microsoft .NET Framework

Microsoft needed an answer to what they probably viewed as a losing battle for web API supremecy. Although they conquered home computing, they were falling far behind the vast amount of  Internet friendly programming languages popping up left and right. Programmers were dropping their studies of Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C++, and opting to focus on writing code that would be useful on the ever emerging Internet (like PHP…).

Born in 2000, Microsoft .NET Framework is a software component that is a part of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It has a large library of pre-coded solutions to common program requirements, and manages the execution of programs written specifically for the framework. The .NET Framework is a key Microsoft offering, and is intended to be used by most new applications created for the Windows platform.

The pre-coded solutions that form the framework’s Base Class Library cover a large range of programming needs in areas including: user interface, data access, database connectivity, cryptography, web application development, numeric algorithms, and network communications. The class library is used by programmers who combine it with their own code to produce applications.

Programs written for the .NET Framework execute in a software environment that manages the program’s runtime requirements. This runtime environment, which is also a part of the .NET Framework, is known as the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR provides the appearance of an application virtual machine, so that programmers need not consider the capabilities of the specific CPU that will execute the program. The CLR also provides other important services such as security mechanisms, memory management, and exception handling. The class library and the CLR together compose the .NET Framework.

The .NET Framework is included with Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, and can be installed on most older versions of Windows. Applications built using .NET Framework must be deployed from a Windows based server.

Why PHP Is Better

In a managed environment such as the Microsoft framework’s CLR or Java’s JVM, the .NET Framework regularly occurring garbage collection for reclaiming memory suspends execution of the application for an unpredictable lapse of time (typically no more than a few milliseconds). This makes such environments unsuitable for some applications, such as those that must respond to events with sub-second timing.

PHP is usually deployed and most at home on a Linux based web server. Deploying a web based application on a Linux server offers significant advantages over Windows servers in the areas of security, speed, and overall integrity of the application.

.NET Framework applications must be deployed from a Windows based server which, because of all the well known Windows vulnerabilities, are frequently targeted by unsavory individuals seeking unauthorized access. If you use Windows at home or in the office, you’ve probably been prompted to update your software every few days to protect it from recently discovered vulnerabilities. A Windows web server requires the same updates, however many hosting providers don’t bother to update the servers as frequently as they should (and sometimes not at all). Why? Because to upgrade the webserver, they have to download the update and restart the server. Restarting the server causes the server to go down for a few minutes, and all current users on the .NET application lose any data they entered if they are unlucky enough to be working when the server was restarted.

In the end, PHP is less expensive, faster, more secure, and able to be deployed from a Linux server that is also less expensive, faster, and more secure than their Windows based counterparts.