Why it matters that Steve Ballmer uses a Toshiba G500
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Web browser, Futures, Windows Mobile, Microsoft on
Steve Ballmer was kidding around with former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki at the MIX 08 conference here in Las Vegas, but there was an edge to a lot of the banter. Kawasaki had a MacBook Air hidden amongst his papers and he flourished it, asking if Ballmer wouldn’t like a machine that light and thin. Ballmer hefted the machine and bellowed that his notebook was lighter and a real machine to boot, complete with an Ethernet port. “That thing is missing half the features of a PC. Where is your DVD drive, let me look for that. I’ll have a bake-off with my Tosh versus that thing backstage…”
It’s halfway between good theatre and Ballmer’s enthusiasm, but there’s always a shrewd side to it. When one attendee persuaded him to stand up and do the “Web developers, Web developers, Web developers…” dance, Ballmer followed it up by saying if it was a bet, he wanted half the winnings. And there’s more to his PC than the weight.
If it’s ligher than a MacBook Air and it has a DVD drive, Ballmer’s machine must be the Toshiba Portégé R500, a notebook that’s so light I’ve seen it hanging from a helium balloon. The publicity might cheer Toshiba up after the HD DVD debacle, but it’s also a good way to look at what Silverlight and IE 8 really mean to Microsoft.
Today, most users need a DVD drive - for installing software or watching films on a long flight. In five years time, Ballmer said, “it may not make a bit of difference”. In five years, online applications and services may take over from desktop apps as well (although ubiquitous connectivity is years away - the only decent 3G speed we’ve ever had was in San Diego, home of Qualcomm, whereas travelling in Arizona you can’t get voice let alone data, because Cellular One has no international roaming agreements).
If they do, Microsoft will be ready because Silverlight is designed for applications: Silverlight 1 is video, Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform development platform that you can write for in a range of languages. AOL’s Silverlight mail app will look the same everywhere and be the same code everywhere. Even though it runs on a Mac or a Linux box (with Novell’s Moonlight plug-in), it’s not leaving behind the Windows heritage because Silverlight is a substantial proportion of the Windows Presentation Foundation.
Silverlight runs in the browser, WPF apps run on the desktop (and because Moonlight is based on the .NET clone Mono, WPF apps could come out of the browser on Linux but not on the Mac). Aston Martin showed a Silverlight app in Ray Ozzie’s keynote that lets you look at a car in great detail and pick the colours and finishes that you like, then make an appointment with a dealer; they showed the companion WPF app for the dealer to show you that custom car in true 3D, on a large screen controlled by a UMPC (the 3D model isn’t running on the UMPC, it’s on a high-end gaming PC with an NVIDIA card that the Aston team bought at the local PC shop in Vegas).
Same APIs, same programming model, same graphic files, same controls, same XAML markup. Cirque du Soleil’s recruitment app runs on tablet PCs today and they copy files by hand to review in an intranet application; they showed a prototype of a WPF app to use on the road for assessing performer auditions and a Silverlight intranet app that the Mac users in the office can use to review the auditions that are automatically synchronized.
Internet Explorer 8 gets synchronization too, with local storage for Web sites; so if you’re halfway through a document and you have to leave the office and get on a plane, the Web app you’re writing it in can switch to offline mode and let you save the file. To start with this will be like a big cookie in a simple text file, but the IE team plans to implement a local database for future versions, which will let developers write more powerful Web apps that work offline and on. Making the back button work on Ajax sites - so you can zoom in to a map and click Back to zoom out again - is great for users; the address bar will update as well, so when you get to the right place on the map you’ll be able to copy the URL to send to a friend. But that’s also good news for Ajax Web apps; the app could save your state locally and put you back to where you were last time you visited. A lot of IE is playing catchup, but the team is looking at the bigger picture too.
Silverlight takes Microsoft beyond Windows and beyond PCs. Silverlight for mobile starts with Silverlight 1 and video, so we have to wait longer for the cross-platform apps to go mobile. But Nokia is putting Silverlight on S60 phones - and Moonlight will run on Linux phones. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a version of Silverlight for Xbox - and at this point you should think of the Mesh service for syncing PCs and devices that Ray Ozzie hinted at in his keynote. Today you need the PC with the DVD drive and the Ethernet port and the full operating system and the full applications. In five years time you might be mixing and matching an app on your phone with an ultralight notebook for longer trips and a full PC back at base - and using Silverlight and WPF on all of them.
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