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Company proclaims it’s compliant with ISO 27034-1

Microsoft says its coding practices and its corporate management structure both comply with an international application security standard to encourage secure software development.

Today at its Security Development Conference the company has issued a declaration of conformity with ISO 27034-1, an international standard that addresses secure coding practices as well as the organizational framework in which code is developed.

SURVEY: Security practices wanting in virtual machine world
Microsoft says its security development lifecycle meets or exceeds requirements of ISO 27034-1, meaning that other organizations that follow SDL are that much closer to ISO 27034-1 compliance. An addendum to the standard cites SDL as a template that can help organizations comply, Microsoft says.

The declaration comes from Microsoft and is not the same as if a separate certification body had reviewed Microsoft practices and declared them compliant.

Software developed in compliance with the standard comes with some assurance that it is less likely to be vulnerable to exploits. In addition, organizations that develop in-house applications in accordance with the standard have some assurance that the investment they make in compliance will put them on a track to what is widely regarded as a proven route to more secure code.

Coding practices could use greater attention to security, according to a survey commissioned by Microsoft last fall. Of 2,726 respondents made up of IT pros and application developers, 37% say their organizations build their products with security in mind. Of the 492 developers in the poll 61% say they don’t take advantage of risk mitigation technologies that already exist such as address space layout randomization (ASLR), Structured Exception Handler Overwrite Protection (SEHOP) and data execution prevention (DEP).

The survey indicates that reasons for failing to use these techniques include convincing management that the cost of employing them is worthwhile.

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Untreated, Internet Explorer vulnerabilities could lead to remote code execution exploits

Microsoft is issuing critical security bulletins this Patch Tuesday that affect all versions of Internet Explorer and deal with an exploit that attackers are actively working.

Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are the recipients of a patch that can prevent an exploit that enables remote code execution in the browser. This affects all Windows operating systems except XP.

“We always recommend upgrading to the latest version of any software,” says Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst with Lumension, “as that’s typically the most secure. If your system is compatible with IE 10 and you’re not running it already, upgrade now.”

The vulnerabilities being addressed may include one found in IE8 running on Windows XP machines that was dealt with yesterday by a hot-fix patch issued separately to deal with a zero-day attack that was actually being exploited in the wild against U.S. government agencies, Henry says. The same vulnerabilities are rated only moderate for machines running server rather than desktop operating systems.

“The patch will include fixes for other, less critical remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting Office and Lync,” says Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development for Tripwire. “These important vulnerabilities run the gamut, impacting DoS, spoofing, elevation of privilege and information disclosure.”

A second bulleting deals with another IE vulnerability believed to be one disclosed in March at the annual Pwn2Own hacking competition. It raised some eyebrows when the problem was not dealt with on Patch Tuesday last month. “Usually Microsoft releases Pwn2Own bug fixes in April, but this year other bug fixes must have been higher priority,” says Andrew Storms, director of security operations for Tripwire.

The rest of this month’s 10 bulletins are ranked important, a step down from critical, and like the two critical ones, three others address problems that can lead to remote code execution exploits. They affect mainly Office “The most widely installed is probably Bulletin 7, which is for Word 2003 and Word Viewer,” says Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys. “Bulletin 6 covers the Microsoft Publisher included in Office 2003, 2007 and 2010, and Bulletin 5 is for Microsoft’s instant messaging modules – Communicator 2007 and Lync 2010.”

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Also, a Windows 8 tablet for less than $400 is a natural for BYOD

Windows 8 is Microsoft’s best effort to catch up with Apple and grab tablet sales away from the iPad by including things iPads just don’t have, according to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

These things include keyboards and Microsoft Office, Gates says in an interview with CNBC. “With Windows 8 Microsoft is trying to gain share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device,” Gates says.

He says Windows 8 was designed to wrap PCs into a tablet form, as exemplified by Microsoft’s own Windows 8 hardware Surface PRO and Surface RT.

“So if you have Surface, Surface PRO you’ve got that portability of the tablet but richness — in terms of the keyboard, Microsoft Office — of a PC,” he says. “So as you say PCs are a big market. It’s going to be harder and harder to distinguish products whether they’re tablets or PCs.”

Microsoft sees customers are unsatisfied by limitations of pure tablets with touchscreens and no support for Office. “A lot of those users are frustrated,” Gates says. “They can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there so we’re providing something with the benefits they’ve seen that have made [tablets] a big category but without giving up what they expect in a PC.”
Small, cheap Acer tablet

A product listing for a rumored Acer mini tablet popped up briefly on Amazon.com last week for the surprisingly low price of $379.99 before the item was taken down.

But the specifications listed for the device indicate that it can support a full-blown PC version of Windows 8 on an 8.1-inch tablet.

The low price makes them attractive to consumers and increases the possibility that Windows 8 devices will become a factor in BYOD programs. At the same time these small tablets become more attractive to businesses because they can support all legacy applications that run on Windows 7 including the full version of Microsoft Office.

A separate version of Windows 8 — Windows RT — is designed for tablets that are based on ARM processors, but they only run Windows Store applications and a truncated version of Office. Windows RT devices also can’t join domains.

The Acer product in question is the W3-810-1600, pictured below in a photo that was posted two weeks ago by the French website minimachines.net but taken down at Acer’s request.

The screen resolution is 1280×800 pixels is the low end of minimum requirements for Windows 8 devices set by Microsoft, according to specifications posted by The Verge.

While it’s OK to build devices to that spec, it’s not without ramifications. The devices can’t support snap screens, which is a feature that displays two applications at once — one small and one large — and to reverse which one is bigger with a simple touchscreen swipe.

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The Microsoft service is available in the U.K. this week, the rest of the world this summer

Microsoft is rolling Skype in with its free Outlook.com email service, giving customers the ability to fire up VoIP calls directly from their mail inbox.

Within weeks the Skype for Outlook.com will be available in the U.S. and Germany, but for now is just deploying in the U.K., according to the Skype Big Blog. It will be available worldwide this summer.

The new Skype service includes both audio and video calls, so together Skype and Outlook.com will support voice, video, email and instant messaging.

The Outlook.com version of Skype requires a browser plugin for Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox, but it must be the latest version of each. Using customers’ Microsoft accounts, they connect Skype to Outlook.com.

Those who already have a Skype account have to manually connect it to their Microsoft account, which merges Skype and Outlook.com contacts.

Once Skype has been added to the account, Skype audio and video call buttons appear in the same window with IM chats. If a user is reading email and wants to call the sender, the user mouses over the picture of the sender that appears with the email and left clicks on the appropriate Skype button to set up the call.

Skype for Outlook.com is part of a larger effort of integrating Skype with existing Microsoft platforms. It is already integrated with the Microsoft Lync unified communication platform for voice calls, instant messaging interoperability and shared presence information.

The company promised in February to integrate Skype video calls in Lync within a year so that customers making calls on Windows Phone 8 devices can connect via Skype.

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At Microsoft’s developer conference, Steve Ballmer talked ecosystem, not tech.

It’s day one of Microsoft BUILD, the company’s major developer conference. Traditionally at these things (this is only the second BUILD, but before it there were almost 20 years of PC conferences that served a similar purpose) the keynote presentations are developer-heavy. The speakers tend to talk about Microsoft’s latest developer tools and operating system platforms, do some programming live on stage (always a crowd-pleaser), and show off new testing and source control features—playing to the audience.

But today was different. BUILD’s opening keynote was presented by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Ballmer was in top form. Thanks to certain videos, the man’s presentation style has developed a certain reputation: over-confident, volume cranked up to 11, bombastic, and, it must be said, sweaty.

Today, he was none of that. He was composed, funny, natural, and overall tremendously likable. He was, as always, excited about the products Microsoft is delivering, but where sometimes that excitement comes across as almost scary, today it was infectious enthusiasm.

Steve Ballmer is plainly a person who believes very strongly in the products that Microsoft has built, namely the recently-released Windows 8 and Surface and the imminently available Windows Phone 8. He believes in the underlying vision, and today, in his keynote, that’s what he was selling to the thousands of assembled developers in a giant tent on Microsoft’s campus, and many thousands more watching streams online.

The vision once had a name—”three screens and a cloud”—but that terminology appears to have been left on the scrapheap of history alongside the term “Metro”. Even without this name, that is the vision that Ballmer was selling. Three Microsoft platforms: the PC/tablet (because for Redmond, the latter is just one kind of the former), the smartphone, and the TV-connected console-cum-media player. All three are unified with a common design and aesthetic, have a (somewhat) similar development platform, and are tied together with cloud services.

That vision still isn’t fully realized, but it is manifest today in a way that it never has been before. This is Microsoft’s platform, this is Microsoft’s future, and what it needs from developers is simple: it needs them to buy into the platform and develop applications. It needs new applications, Metro-style applications, for Windows 8 and for Windows Phone 8.

Ballmer’s job today was to sell that platform to developers. He had to get them engaged and excited, and most important of all, to convince them that the audience is there; he had to convince them that if they built their apps, there would be tens and hundreds of millions of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 users to buy them. Build the apps and the customers will come.

How will Microsoft get those customers? A range of hardware spanning any usage scenario, from 10-inch tablets to 82-inch monster touchscreens including touch-screen Ultrabooks, all-in-one family PCs, and even powerful workstations, is a good start. This, coupled with a saturation marketing campaign, will be all but unavoidable.

For Windows Phone 8, Microsoft is betting big on Windows 8. With its common look-and-feel, the company is counting on Windows Phone 8 being the natural smartphone choice for Windows 8 users. Windows Phone 8 will be the smartphone that feels familiar to Windows 8 users, and thanks to cloud services like SkyDrive and Xbox Music Pass, it’s the phone that will be best integrated and best connected.

Will developers respond? The response at BUILD was enthusiastic, but this is arguably to be expected. At BUILD, there’s a certain degree of preaching to the choir—you don’t generally attend a Microsoft developer event unless you’re invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. The real test will be in coming months, when we’ll see if developers are taking Redmond’s platform seriously from the apps they produce. And the onus is also on the software giant to deliver the users it promised. Microsoft has built it, so will they come?

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QUESTION 1
You work as a senior developer at Certkingdom.com. The Certkingdom.com network consists of a single domain named Certkingdom.com.
You are running a training exercise for junior developers. You are currently discussing the use of
the Queue <T> collection type.
Which of the following is TRUE with regards to the Queue <T>collection type?

A. It represents a first in, first out (FIFO) collection of objects.
B. It represents a last in, first out (LIFO) collection of objects.
C. It represents a collection of key/value pairs that are sorted by key based on the associated
IComparer<T> implementation.
D. It represents a list of objects that can be accessed by index.

Answer: A

Explanation:

QUESTION 2
You work as a developer at Certkingdom.com. The Certkingdom.com network consists of a single domain named Certkingdom.com.
You have written the following code segment:
int[] filteredEmployeeIds = employeeIds.Distinct().Where(value => value !=
employeeIdToRemove).OrderByDescending(x => x).ToArray();
Which of the following describes reasons for writing this code? (Choose two.)

A. To sort the array in order from the highest value to the lowest value.
B. To sort the array in order from the lowest value to the highest value.
C. To remove duplicate integers from the employeeIds array.
D. To remove all integers from the employeeIds array.

Answer: A,C

Explanation:

QUESTION 3
You work as a senior developer at Certkingdom.com. The Certkingdom.com network consists of a single domain
named Certkingdom.com.
You are running a training exercise for junior developers. You are currently discussing the use of a
method that moves the SqlDataReader on to the subsequent record.
Which of the following is the SqlDataReader method that allows for this?

A. The Read method.
B. The Next method.
C. The Result method.
D. The NextResult method.

Answer: A

Explanation:

QUESTION 4
You work as a developer at Certkingdom.com. The Certkingdom.com network consists of a single domain named Certkingdom.com.
You have received instructions to create a custom collection for Certkingdom.com. Objects in the
collection must be processed via a foreach loop.
Which of the following is TRUE with regards to the required code?

A. The code should implement the ICollection interface.
B. The code should implement the IComparer interface.
C. The code should implement the IEnumerable interface.
D. The code should implement the IEnumerator interface.

Answer: C

Explanation:

QUESTION 5
You work as a senior developer at Certkingdom.com. The Certkingdom.com network consists of a single domain named Certkingdom.com.
You are running a training exercise for junior developers. You are currently discussing the use of LINQ queries.
Which of the following is NOT considered a distinct action of a LINQ query?

A. Creating the query.
B. Obtaining the data source.
C. Creating the data source.
D. Executing the query.

Answer: C

Explanation:

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QUESTION 1
You work as a senior developer at Certkingdom.com. The Certkingdom.com network consists of a single domain
named Certkingdom.com.
You are running a training exercise for junior developers. You are currently discussing the use of
the Queue <T> collection type.
Which of the following is TRUE with regards to the Queue <T>collection type?

A. It represents a first in, first out (FIFO) collection of objects.
B. It represents a last in, first out (LIFO) collection of objects.
C. It represents a collection of key/value pairs that are sorted by key based on the associated
IComparer<T> implementation.
D. It represents a list of objects that can be accessed by index.

Answer: A

Explanation:

QUESTION 2
You work as a developer at Certkingdom.com. The Certkingdom.com network consists of a single domain named
Certkingdom.com.
You have written the following code segment:
int[] filteredEmployeeIds = employeeIds.Distinct().Where(value => value !=
employeeIdToRemove).OrderByDescending(x => x).ToArray();
Which of the following describes reasons for writing this code? (Choose two.)

A. To sort the array in order from the highest value to the lowest value.
B. To sort the array in order from the lowest value to the highest value.
C. To remove duplicate integers from the employeeIds array.
D. To remove all integers from the employeeIds array.

Answer: A,C

Explanation:

QUESTION 3
You work as a senior developer at Certkingdom.com. The Certkingdom.com network consists of a single domain
named Certkingdom.com.
You are running a training exercise for junior developers. You are currently discussing the use of a
method that moves the SqlDataReader on to the subsequent record.
Which of the following is the SqlDataReader method that allows for this?

A. The Read method.
B. The Next method.
C. The Result method.
D. The NextResult method.

Answer: A

Explanation:

QUESTION 4
You work as a developer at Certkingdom.com. The Certkingdom.com network consists of a single domain named
Certkingdom.com.
You have received instructions to create a custom collection for Certkingdom.com. Objects in the
collection must be processed via a foreach loop.
Which of the following is TRUE with regards to the required code?

A. The code should implement the ICollection interface.
B. The code should implement the IComparer interface.
C. The code should implement the IEnumerable interface.
D. The code should implement the IEnumerator interface.

Answer: C

Explanation:

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QUESTION 1
You work as a Network Administrator at Certkingdom.com. The network contains a single Active Directory
Domain Services (AD DS) domain named Certkingdom.com. The network includes servers that run
Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2012.
All servers in the network have Windows Remote Management (WinRM) enabled.
You use a Windows 7 Enterprise client computer named Certkingdom-Admin1.
You are currently logged in to Certkingdom-Admin1. From your client computer, you want to obtain the IP
address of a Windows Server 2012 member server named Certkingdom-File1.
Which command or commands should you use?

A. Telnet Certkingdom-File1 ipconfig.
B. NSLookup > Server Certkingdom-File1 > ipconfig
C. WinRM –r:Certkingdom-File1 ipconfig
D. WinRS –r:Certkingdom-File1 ipconfig

Answer: D

Explanation:

QUESTION 2
Your role of Network Administrator at Certkingdom.com includes the management of the Active Directory
Domain Services (AD DS) domain named Certkingdom.com. The network includes servers that run
Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2012.
A server named Certkingdom-Win12Admin runs Windows Server 2012. You use Certkingdom-Win12Admin to
administer the Windows Server 2012 servers in the domain.
A newly installed domain member server named Certkingdom-SRV06 runs a Server Core Installation of
Windows Server 2012.
You need to configure Certkingdom-SRV06 to enable you to use the Server Manager console on CertkingdomWin12Admin
to manage Certkingdom-Win12Admin.
How should you configure Certkingdom-SRV06?

A. You should install the Remote Server Administration Tools on Certkingdom-SRV06.
B. You should install the Server Manager console on Certkingdom-SRV06.
C. You should enable Windows Remote Management (WinRM) on Certkingdom-SRV06.
D. You should use the Enable-NetFirewallRule cmdlet to configure the firewall on Certkingdom-SRV06.

Answer: D

Explanation:

QUESTION 3
Your role of Network Administrator at Certkingdom.com includes the management of the Active Directory
Domain Services (AD DS) domain named Certkingdom.com. The network includes servers that run
Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2012.
A server named Certkingdom-Win12Admin runs Windows Server 2012. You use Certkingdom-Win12Admin to
administer the Windows Server 2012 servers in the domain.
You want to use Server Manager on Certkingdom-Win12Admin to manage the Window Server 2008 R2
SP1 servers in the domain.
What should you do?

A. You should run the Configure-SMRemoting.exe –Enable cmdlet on the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 servers.
B. You should add the computer account for Certkingdom-Win12Admin to the RAS and IAS Servers group in Active Directory.
C. You should install the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Windows Management Framework 3.0 on the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 servers.
D. You should install the Remote Server Administration Tools on Certkingdom-Win12Admin.

Answer: C

Explanation:

QUESTION 4
Your role of Network Administrator at Certkingdom.com includes the management of the Active Directory
Domain Services (AD DS) domain named Certkingdom.com. The network includes servers that run
Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2012.
A server named Certkingdom-File1 runs the File and Storage Services server role. Certkingdom-File1 hosts
shared folders on the D: drive. Users access the shared folders from their Windows 7 client
computers.
A user attempts to recover a previous version of a file in a shared folder on Certkingdom-File1 but
discovers that there is no previous versions option.
How can you ensure that users can recover files using the Previous Versions function?

A. By modifying the Share Properties of each shared folder.
B. By enabling Shadow Copies on the D: drive of Certkingdom-File1.
C. By adding a condition to the shared folders on Certkingdom-File1.
D. By modifying the settings of the Recycle Bin on Certkingdom-File1.

Answer: B

Explanation:

QUESTION 5
You work for a company named Certkingdom.com. Your role of Network Administrator includes the
management of the company’s physical and virtual infrastructure.
The network includes servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and
Windows Server 2012.
Virtual machines (VMs) are hosted on Windows Server 2012 servers running the Hyper-V role.
You install a new Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V host server named Certkingdom-HVHost12. CertkingdomHVHost12
has four Fiber Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) and connects to two Fiber Channel
SANs using two HBAs per SAN.
You plan to create VMs on Certkingdom-HVHost12 that will need to access one of the SANs.
How should you configure Certkingdom-HVHost12?

A. By creating a Virtual Switch in Hyper-V.
B. By installing an additional host bus adapter (HBA).
C. By creating a virtual Fiber Channel SAN in Hyper-V.
D. By creating a virtual iSCSI SAN in Hyper-V.

Answer: C

Explanation:

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What does Microsoft have left to gain by being public when the stock is at a standstill?

Should Microsoft go private? Don’t dismiss the question, it’s a valid one, even if it would be extraordinarily difficult.

The stocks of most of the old guard of the tech industry have been stagnant for years, even though the companies have done reasonably well or even very well in some cases. Yet they get no appreciation from Wall Street and are taken for granted. A recent Seeking Alpha blog asked if Microsoft was good for anything other than its dividend. At this point, they have to ask what they gain by being public.

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I’ll say it up front so you don’t have to: going private would not be easy for any of these companies. Their stocks are heavily diluted and they would need a ton of outside money to buy up enough stock to go private. It would be very, very difficult and I acknowledge that. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering.

You take a company public for a variety of reasons. My very first gig out of college was as a financial reporter. One of the conventional wisdoms I learned back then was you didn’t go public because you needed money to survive. Companies that did that were likely a bad investment to begin with. You went public for the big cash infusion and also as a lure for top talent.

Well, that day is over. We all know about the three Microsoft billionaires (Gates, Ballmer, Allen) and thousands of millionaires the company made, but those were early employees. Trust me, no one hired in the last decade became a millionaire on their options.

You go public to have shares to trade for acquisitions. Most of the acquisitions made by Microsoft are actually very small, strategic purchases. Its only big ones have been Skype and aQuantive, and boy was the latter one an utter failure.

You go public to get the attention of institutional investors and build brand equity. Does anyone NOT know what Microsoft is?

On the flipside, though, are the headaches. A public company spends millions of dollars per year on compliance rules, such as the inane Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). SOX has been directly cited as the reason for the drop in initial public offering (IPO) activity in the 2000s while IPOs rose in foreign countries, including hundreds of American firms going public on the London Stock Exchange.

Also, back in 2005, the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation reported going-private transactions made up 25 percent of all public takeovers. In other words, public companies were taken over by private ones, and were subsequently taken off the market. That was double the pre-SOX level and the trend was largely blamed on SOX.

More important than compliance headaches is the complete monomania of Wall Street. It cares about a single thing: growth. If you don’t have a growth story, they don’t want to hear it. No company ever earned a Buy rating because it increased employee healthcare coverage or improved customer service.

Microsoft has a complicated, multi-year strategy to execute. It needs time and patience, something people clearly do not have with Windows RT. What better way to execute than to do it outside of the impatient eyes of Wall Street analysts who only care about next quarter’s projections. It’s not easy to implement a multi-year strategy when four times a year you have to hear ‘what are you going to do for me next quarter?’

Don’t tell me HP couldn’t benefit from this. Meg Whitman is doing her best and seems to be slowly righting the ship, but because people take the quarter-to-quarter view, and not the long view like a CEO with an ounce of vision has to take, she can’t get a break.

Intel’s stock is exactly where it was when Paul Otellini took over the firm in 2005. Back then, it was a $38 billion company, its products had lost major ground to AMD, it was under SEC and EU investigation and was being sued by AMD. Intel is now a $54 billion company, its revamped chips have laid waste to AMD so badly it’s no longer a competitive company, and all of the legal headaches are gone. And this is the thanks he gets for it.

Microsoft would similarly be well-served to operate in quiet for a while. The company has its own transition and transformation to address and it would be nice to do it without the quarterly dog-and-pony show. It won’t shield Ballmer from the criticism he has coming in response to Windows 8, but it would give him a chance to take a long view and actually execute on it without constant interruption.

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How Microsoft lost the future of gesture control
Microsoft’s Kinect was miles ahead. Here’s how they’re snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Ten years ago, Windows, Office and Internet Explorer were the only “platforms” that really mattered.

Microsoft historically attained its glory by making end user products for the masses, and only later and secondarily going after enterprise and vertical markets.

But the rise of Apple as a consumer electronics company, Google’s emergence as an everything company, and the advent of Web 2.0, the cloud and the social Internet have left Microsoft struggling to find a way to succeed in the markets of the future.

There was one shining exception to this trend in the consumer market: Xbox in general and Kinect for Xbox 360 in particular.

Kinect is a top-notch, low-cost in-the-air gesture control interface for Microsoft’s console gaming platform that was way ahead of its time and broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling-consumer electronics gadget ever.

So when Microsoft later announced a version of Kinect for Windows, everybody (including me) assumed that it would go on to dominate the future of gesture control, and use its dominance as an advantage to regain its lead in the desktop PC market of the future.

But now it looks like Microsoft blew it.
What’s wrong with Kinect for Windows?

Microsoft Kinect for Windows sounds like you should be able to use it with a desktop PC, and you can. Unfortunately, the closest you can get to the cameras is 16 inches away, and that’s when you put it into a special “Near Mode.”

That technical limitation puts the user’s head and body farther away from a screen than usual. So right out of the box, it can’t be used naturally, as we once expected, as an alternative to a mouse on a PC.

Microsoft doesn’t mind, because it isn’t really targeting end users like you and me.

Most of the example photos shown on the Microsoft website show Xbox-like distances where the user is across the room or at least five feet away from the Kinect.

These pictures show commercial and retail applications — a business presentation, a physical therapist, a retail eyeglasses store. Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows blog also emphasizes retail applications of the product.

It’s possible that Microsoft may eventually market Kinect for Windows to consumers. But so far, it looks like it’s not cultivating developers in that market.

Microsoft still hasn’t announced commercial availability of Kinect for Windows, though it did release an updated software development kit (SDK) this month.

Right now, Kinect for Windows ships to developers only and doesn’t come with software for controlling any interface. If you want to control something, you have to build your own software using the SDK.

This strikes me as weird on two counts. First, Microsoft is a software company. Why didn’t it make software for Kinect for Windows, at least to demonstrate basic control of the Windows 8 user interface?

Second, why ignore the consumer market for Kinect — especially since the Surface Tablet and Windows 8 are struggling to stand out as superior to alternatives from Apple and Google?
How Microsoft blew it

Microsoft had a five-year head start. The technology behind Kinect was originally invented in 2005. It took the company five years to move from invention to a fully ready-for-prime-time consumer product.

Kinect for Xbox 360 launched to consumers in 2010 with a whopping $500 million advertising budget.

Since then, Microsoft has sold more than 24 million units and has inspired a huge and active community of hobbyists and researchers who do amazing things with the Kinect.

One of my favorite blogs is called Kinect Hacks, which documents some of these projects.

How Leap Motion is making all the right moves
Microsoft shipped a surprisingly mature, polished mass-market consumer product for Xbox in the same year a small company called Leap Motion was quietly founded and funded.

Microsoft started shipping units in the millions at the same time Leap Motion began the long process of taking an idea and developing it into a product.

So what’s the difference between Kinect and Leap?
The Kinect for Windows gadget is a plastic thing about the size of a large car rearview mirror that has microphones and cameras that double as sensors, which point away from the screen and at the user.

The Leap, on the other hand, is tiny — about the size of a standard USB flash drive. It lies flat on the table pointing up, capturing the motion that happens above it.

In general, Leap is optimized for fine detection of fingers and hands, while the Xbox for Windows can detect fingers, hands, arms, body, face and voice.

While there’s much that Leap can’t do compared to the Kinect, its ability to detect finger and hand movements appears superior in terms of both “resolution” and performance — judging from the demos I’ve seen, anyway.

Leap can track up to 10 fingers. And it’s very fast — hand movements almost instantly affect what’s on screen.

Leap can recognize when you’re holding something, then track the thing you’re holding instead of the hand that’s controlling it — essentially turning any object into a kind of Wii controller. You can even tell Leap to track a pencil you’re holding in your hand, then write very finely in the air to instantly write on screen.

Some 12,000 developers are working with the Leap platform. The company recently announced an app store called Airspace.

While both products superficially do the same thing, the two companies have taken completely different strategic approaches.

Microsoft is ignoring the consumer market; Leap Motion is embracing it.

Leap’s other advantage is cross-platform support. It works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

The Leap device is due to ship May 13 at a price of $79.99. Microsoft sells Kinect for Windows devices to developers for $249 but has not announced user pricing or a ship date.

While Microsoft had a long head start in the cultivation of a developer community, Leap has been attracting developers fast.

Leap Motion did three things that Microsoft should have done.

First, it limited the initial feature set to focus on high performance, small size and low price, rather than trying to build a system that could do everything at any distance.

Second, it focused on consumers, rather than retail and vertical applications.

Third, Leap zeroed in on up-close-and-personal use at a regular desktop rather than on activities that involve people standing up across a room.

Combining these advantages, Leap targets the broadest consumer and gamer marketplace: the one made up of people standing or sitting immediately in front of a screen — any screen, regardless of whether their system runs Windows, Linux or OS X.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is focusing on users in retail, enterprise or industrial settings who will be standing some distance from their screens and who (presumably) would be willing to pay much more for a device. Oh, and it’s only aiming for people running Windows.

Leap’s target audience is at least an order of magnitude larger than Microsoft’s.

If you’re a developer, which is the more attractive market?
In short, Microsoft had one of the most successful consumer electronics products in history. In converting it to the desktop, it could have reversed its fortunes in that realm and knocked another one out of the park.

Instead, Microsoft screwed up, focusing on a very small and narrow market with a relatively expensive, complex product that is taking far too long to get into the hands of users.

Microsoft squandered a five-year head start and is now falling behind. By the time the company gets Kinect for Windows into the consumer market, I suspect Leap Motion will already own that market.

Microsoft should hope that Apple doesn’t acquire Leap Motion and build the technology into OS X exclusively — because then it’s curtains for Windows, too.

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