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Rumors that Yahoo might be in talks to acquire the blogging site emerged last week

Yahoo’s board of directors has approved spending $1.1 billion in cash to buy popular blogging site Tumblr, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The plan is for Tumblr to operate as an independent business, the Journal reported on Sunday, quoting anonymous sources.

Asked via email about the Journal’s report, a Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment. Tumblr didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tumblr has a solid base of devoted users who are passionate about its creative and community-building power and their fear of the effects of commercialization under Yahoo is palpable, according to Andrew Frank, a Gartner analyst.

“They fear loss of control over the interface, over privacy, and over the freedom of expression in general,” Frank said via email.

Thus, for the acquisition to be successful, Yahoo must strike a balance between keeping Tumblr users engaged and delivering a positive return to Yahoo shareholders through advertising. “It will be a daunting challenge which will shed light on the future of both Yahoo and creative social self-expression,” Frank said.

Rumors that Yahoo might be in discussions to buy Tumblr emerged last week, and on Friday Yahoo called for a mystery press event to be held in New York City on Monday afternoon. Tumblr’s headquarters are in Manhattan.

“Join us as we share something special,” reads the invite, sent to members of the press.

The Journal’s All Things D technology news site had reported earlier Friday, citing anonymous sources, that Yahoo might be interested in partnering with, investing in or outright buying Tumblr.

Adweek, in another report also citing unnamed sources, put the value of the deal at $1 billion.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is expected to be at the New York City event, according to CNBC.

The blogging and social networking site, founded in 2007, has 175 employees and hosts more than 100 million blogs.

Mayer is interested in Tumblr because she believes it can help boost Yahoo’s advertising revenue and give Yahoo a bigger presence in the consumer social media market, according to the Journal.

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Frank X. Shaw defends Windows disclosure strategy, denies aping Apple

Microsoft’s head of corporate communications defended his company’s Windows information disclosure strategy Tuesday, denying that Microsoft has adopted Apple’s “cone of silence” approach to imparting news.

“We know we’re not Apple,” Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s top communications executive, said in an interview yesterday. “We would love to have control all along the stack, as Apple does. But that’s not the business we’re in.”
Frank X. Shaw
Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Corporate Communication, in a photo he uses on his Twitter account. (Image: Frank X. Shaw.)

Microsoft’s communications strategy, specifically the way it reveals information about Windows to a broad audience — developers, PC makers, enterprise customers, consumers, the press and analysts — has been criticized by several of the latter. Windows 8 suffered because of Microsoft’s penchant for withholding information, those analysts have contended.

Developers were not provided enough information and tools to craft top-quality apps for the October 2012 launch, OEMs were caught short of touch-enabled devices, and enterprises remain confused about why they should adopt the new OS, the arguments go.

Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, has put it most succinctly when he claimed that Microsoft, seeing the success of Apple’s habit of divulging nothing until a product announcement, copied the strategy. “Microsoft doesn’t make a good Apple,” Moorhead said in an interview Monday.

Shaw wasn’t having any of that. “It’s an easy shorthand for people to use, but it’s not accurate,” said Shaw of the Apple comparison. “We choose our strategy on the needs that we have. There are times when we will be more conservative and times when we will be more open.”

Analysts, some who have requested anonymity for fear of risking their access to Microsoft, have been the most vocal about the relative paucity of information disclosed by the Redmond, Wash. developer, and have compared that strategy to what they saw as a more open communications game plan prior to Windows 7, which shipped in the fall of 2009.

The more secretive approach has been credited to Stephen Sinofsky, who until his ouster last year led the Windows division during development of Windows 7 and the follow-on, Windows 8. Sinofsky was known for keeping things under wraps when he led Office development for several editions, closing out his time on that team with Office 2007.

Shaw acknowledged that Microsoft’s approach to doling out information to the media, analysts, developers and OEMs is different today. “Yes, it has changed, because the world we’re living in has changed,” said Shaw. “If you look at Windows 7 and then look at Windows 8, there were a whole bunch of things with Windows 8 that we wanted to keep more confidential than public. Look at the decision to build Windows 8 on ARM. That was held very closely.

“But I think that’s a hard comparison to make,” Shaw continued, speaking of the contrast between Windows 8 secrets and pre-Windows 7 openness. “Windows 8 represented a significant platform shift, with touch, Windows available on ARM as well as Intel, a new app model and a new store, and a new set of hardware from us.”

In many cases, Microsoft has taken to parceling out information in small bits, a drip-drip-drip strategy that, to outsiders at least, seems to serve little purpose. The best illustration was when the company announced last week that it would release a public preview of Windows 8.1 at its BUILD conference in late June, but said it would provide other information, including pricing, “in a few weeks.” Just seven days later, however, Tami Reller, CFO of the Windows division, said that update would be free.

When asked why Microsoft didn’t simply give customers both pieces at the same time, Shaw did not directly answer. Instead, he said, “There are many options, and this was the one that we chose. We thought that it was the best way to get the information out.”

Microsoft has made other communication missteps recently. Earlier this year, when news broke that it was permanently tying each retail Office 2013 license to the first PC it was installed on, and would not allow users to later move that license to another machine, the company limited the disclosure to the end-user licensing agreement (EULA), which very few people read, then only confirmed the move after several rounds of questions from Computerworld. In March, after a heated reaction from users, Microsoft backtracked from the licensing lock-in.

“There’s a big continuum,” Shaw said. “At times we are unbelievably transparent, at times we are moderately transparent, and at times we are quiet. What drives this is not a corporate one-size-fits-all strategy, but the demands of the product or service, and the marketplace.”

Shaw also took exception to the point many have made that developers were not kept as informed about Windows 8 as in past iterations of the OS, and that what they did get was much later in the development cycle than in the past. That contributed to the Windows Store’s app tally and the omission, still, of some major apps, such as one dedicated to Facebook, the theory goes.

“We did tons of work with developers and ISVs to get them ready and to train them,” said Shaw, citing the 2011 BUILD conference and follow-on efforts. “The thing that people have to recognize is that until Windows 8 shipped, there were zero targeted devices.”

And sans those devices, implied Shaw, it was no surprise that at launch the app store had relatively few apps. “Developers are rational creatures,” he said, hinting that until they had hardware they could use to test their apps, they took a wait-and-see stance. “We had realistic expectations of what [the app store] would look like at launch. There was never a ‘work-done’ moment for us related to the launch.”

In the interview, Shaw again blasted press coverage of Windows 8.1. Some stories and opinion pieces described the changes Microsoft might make with the update as a retreat from its previous vision for the OS, and compared Windows 8 to the Coca-Cola debacle of 1985, when within months of the introduction of “New Coke,” the beverage giant yanked the reformulated soda.

Shaw’s counter-attack drew criticism of its own, with Moorhead saying it was a sign of weakness for a company as large as Microsoft to be thin-skinned.

Shaw disagreed. “These things stick,” he said of pieces by The Financial Times and The Economist, which he had earlier singled out as examples of what he called “sensationalism and hyperbole.”

“If you don’t do anything about it, it can become perceived wisdom,” said Shaw, explaining why he wrote the Friday post. “If we don’t say anything, then we shouldn’t expect other people to read our minds. So we get our voice out there.”

Speaking of New Coke, Shaw even had a take on the metaphor.

“If anything, Windows 8 is like Diet Coke,” said Shaw. “Diet Coke was a product that mapped an entirely new need expressed by the marketplace, something that tasted just like Coke but had zero calories.”

Diet Coke is the world’s second-biggest soda, behind only Coke itself and ahead of Pepsi, which it passed in 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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Beware of e-mails that play down the ease of cracking your leaked passcode.

Reputation.com, a service that helps people and companies manage negative search results, has suffered a security breach that has exposed user names, e-mail and physical addresses, and in some cases, password data.

In an e-mail sent to users on Tuesday, officials with the Redwood City, California-based company said the passwords were “highly encrypted (‘salted’ and ‘hashed’),” a highly vague description that can mean different things to different people. “Although it was highly unlikely that these passwords could ever be decrypted, we immediately changed the password of every user to prevent any possible unauthorized account access,” the e-mail added unconvincingly.

It’s unfortunate that companies make such assurances, because they may give users a false sense of security. As Ars has been reporting for nine months, gains in cracking techniques means the average password has never been weaker, allowing attackers to decipher even long passwords with numbers, letters, and symbols in them. Even Ars’ own Nate Anderson—a self-described newbie to password cracking—was able to crack more than 45 percent of a 17,000-hash list using software and dictionaries he downloaded online.

Jeremi Gosney, a password cracking expert with Stricture Consulting Group recently explained in an Ars forum post that it’s highly unusual for a leaked password list to go uncracked, as suggested by the Reputation.com e-mail.

“It definitely depends on the specific leak we’re talking about, but generally speaking, your average security expert/penetration tester/casual password cracker is probably only going to be able to recover at most 50-60% of passwords in any given leak,” he wrote. “Seasoned password crackers will likely recover 70-75%; and truly exceptional password crackers will recover 80% or more.”

Adding cryptographic salt to passwords is crucial to the safe storage of passwords because it forces password cracking programs to guess the plaintext for each individual hash, rather than guessing passwords for thousands or millions of hashes all at once. (Yes, it also thwarts rainbow-table attacks, but no one uses this method anymore.) But it’s easy to overstate the benefits of salting. It in no way slows down the cracking of a single hash, so if an attacker locates the hash belonging to a particular high-value Reputation.com user, the measure does nothing to thwart the cracking of that hash. The security value of salting alone only slows down cracking of large lists by a multiple of the number of unique salts, so that value decreases with each hash that is decoded.

A far more meaningful security measure is the type of algorithm that’s used to convert plaintext passwords into cryptographic hashes. If the company used SHA1, SHA3, MD5, or any number of other “fast” hashes, it’s extremely likely that at least some of the leaked password data has already been cracked. If, on the other hand, the company used bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2 or another “slow” algorithm specifically designed to hash passwords, the chances are significantly lower. Reputation.com makes no mention of the algorithm it used, so users should presume the worst. Anyone who used their Reputation.com password to protect one or more accounts on other sites should change those passcodes immediately. Passwords should be randomly generated by a password-manager, contain a minimum length of 11 characters, and include numbers, letters, and symbols. They should also be unique to each site.

For a deeper dive into the benefits of salting and hashing, see last Saturday’s story about the password breach that hit LivingSocial.com. Some of the user comments are especially illuminating.

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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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However, NASA is not the first group to launch Nexus Ones into space.

NASA on Monday launched three 2010-vintage Nexus One smartphones into orbit via an Antares rocket, saying that the Android devices would be among the cheapest satellites ever devised.

The devices are part of the administration’s PhoneSat program, which is designed to ascertain the suitability of consumer smartphone processors as cheaper satellite brains.

Michael Gazarik, NASA associate administrator for space technology, said in a statement that there’s no shortage of possible applications for the space-going Android phones.

“Smartphones offer a wealth of potential capabilities for flying small, low-cost, powerful satellites for atmospheric or Earth science, communications, or other space-born applications. They also may open space to a whole new generation of commercial, academic and citizen-space

The devices contain much of the hardware needed for basic satellite functionality, including reasonably modern processors, cameras, GPS receivers, radios and a host of other small sensors.

The phones are housed in four-inch cubesat structures, and will attempt to take photos of the Earth via their onboard cameras.

The PhoneSats are also part of an elaborate game, as they transmit packets of data back to Earth, where they can be received by amateur radio operators. While some packets are simple status reports, others are tiny fragments of the Earth pictures being captured from orbit, which can be reassembled into complete photographs.

Interestingly, however, NASA is not the first to undertake this type of project – a privately-held British company called Surrey Satellite Technology Limited launched a Nexus One into space aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s PSLV-C20 mission in late February. However, the STRaND-1’s price tag – “about as much as a high-end family car,” according to SSTL – is likely significantly higher than NASA’s PhoneSat, which cost less than $7,000.

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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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Amazon’s biggest competitor in the cloud: Salesforce.com?
Amazon and Salesforce are each pioneering companies in cloud computing, but are they competitors?

Who is Amazon’s biggest competitor in the cloud?
The go-to answer for many may be companies like Rackspace with its OpenStack platform, perhaps Google with its Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware or one of the up-and-coming cloud computing companies like Joyent.

But Mikhail Malamud, founder of cloud consultancy startup CloudAware, says another cloud company could pose the biggest challenge to Amazon’s cloud plans: Salesforce.com.

These two companies, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, are two of the leading cloud providers in their respective markets of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for AWS and software as a service (SaaS) for Salesforce.com. But Malamud believes there is one reason why Salesforce.com could be a formidable foe for Amazon in the cloud moving forward: data.

Salesforce.com’s data stash
“Data is the kingmaker in the cloud,” says Malamud, whose firm, CloudAware, provides a platform to access AWS resources.

Salesforce.com has an enormous cache of customer data, and not just any data, but some of enterprises’ most valuable data — customer information. Salesforce.com has data about who its users’ customers are, what interactions they have with those customers, and increasingly it’s been attempting to collect even more data, from human resource management to social data.

And Salesforce is building an ecosystem of products and services around that data. While the company may be best known as a SaaS-based customer relationship management (CRM) application, it also has a robust platform that allows customers to build new applications on its cloud.

Force.com and Heroku, the latter of which Salesforce acquired in 2010, are platform as a service (PaaS) tools allowing customers to leverage CRM data already in Salesforce’s cloud and build related applications that are customized to individual users’ needs. It’s where Malamud built his company’s app. A Salesforce CRM customer, for example, could build an application on Force.com that integrates with the CRM application to analyze the sales data. And Malamud says every new application that’s built in Salesforce.com’s environment is one less app that’s running in Amazon’s cloud.

Amazon: We’ve got data too
Amazon is responding in turn, though. In the past year AWS has made a concerted effort to manage more of its customers’ data. Announcements like Red Shift — the company’s headline announcement at its first-annual users conference, named re: Invent — is a new data warehousing service, meant to be a low-cost alternative to expensive on-premises database storage systems. Amazon Glacier is a “cold storage” service for storing a company’s long-term data, while Data Pipeline is a relatively new service that makes it easier to transfer all that data between various applications within Amazon’s cloud. “They’re clearly trying to get as much of your data as possible,” Malamud says.

Malamud says Salesforce will be the place where next-generation apps will be built, providing a legitimate threat to Amazon moving forward.
“It’s a legitimate theory, but it’s more of a longer term play,” says David Vellante, chief analyst at research firm The Wikibon Project, about the Salesforce.com-Amazon rivalry. The two companies are not really direct competitors right now, he says. They’re both cloud-based, but AWS at its core is about providing fast, easy and cheap access to virtual machines, storage and hosted applications in its IaaS cloud. Salesforce.com is a SaaS that is attempting to build up its accompanying PaaS.

Amazon’s bigger near-term competitors are the growing cavalry of IaaS providers looking to steal business from the company, he says. Google, Microsoft and Rackspace (with its OpenStack platform), as well as VMware, HP, Dell, Joyent, Terremark and Savvis, are just some of the whole range of IaaS providers looking to bite into Amazon’s market share that pose a more immediate threat to AWS.

Robert Mahowald, research vice president at IDC who leads the software as a service (SaaS) and cloud services practice, agrees with Vellante. “It’s not necessarily where the companies are today, but it’s certainly an aspiration of Salesforce,” he says. But he’s also on board with Malamud’s core premise of “follow the data.”

Applications that run in the cloud are fundamentally more important than the infrastructure they run on, so in that sense Salesforce has an advantage in being able to offer customers products, services and platforms that leverage data already in its cloud.

But AWS is a heavy-hitter in the cloud, too. Through partnerships with big enterprise software giants like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, AWS allows customers to migrate their existing enterprise software licenses to Amazon’s cloud and let AWS worry about all the underlying infrastructure.

Salesforce.com has a different business model: The company isn’t pushing customers to migrate their SAP, Oracle and Microsoft apps into its cloud; they want customers to be all-in with its own cloud. So far, the company has done an extraordinary job capturing the CRM market, but existing business apps aren’t being migrated into Salesforce’s cloud.

To Mahowald, that means the Amazon vs. Salesforce debate comes down to a new vs. existing apps debate. Amazon has everything in place to give customers the opportunity to outsource their packaged software onto its cloud, something enterprises are becoming more and more comfortable with. Salesforce wants to be the place where the enterprises’ next-generation business apps are built and stored.

The problem for AWS is that there are increasingly more and more competitors offering similar IaaS services. To date, Amazon has simply done it better than its competitors, Vellante says — it out-innovates competitors, has a broader range of services and continually lowers its prices. It’s tough for competitors to keep up, but a crop of providers are trying.

Some providers are carving out niches in vertical markets, offering healthcare-, government- or financial services-focused clouds, for example. Others are banking on the hybrid cloud — which combines both on-premises and public cloud resources — as being the future the industry. VMware, sensing an opportunity in the market, recently announced plans to create a hybrid cloud offering.

Salesforce isn’t competing with those offerings, though, Vellante says. Salesforce has found a niche in its ecosystem of customers and is nurturing and growing it. But Salesforce.com is not the be all and end all of cloud service providers now or into the future. “If you’re running a big data app and you need a 10-node cluster spun up today to host your analytics app, you’re not going to Salesforce,” Vellante says. “You’re going to Amazon or another IaaS.” It’s a different play for each of the providers, which is why Vellante says both of these companies — AWS and Salesforce.com — will be around for a long time, and they both likely will make a lot of money in the cloud.

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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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Microsoft at work designing “cool” future Surface devices
Microsoft has hired a model-maker to build prototypes
Despite shaky sales of its Windows 8 Surface tablets Microsoft is working on the next generation of the devices that it hopes will attract customer attention.

The company is advertising for a model maker/prototyper to join the Surface team as it works on new devices that will follow on the current ones, Surface RT and Surface Pro. “We are currently building the next generation and Surface needs you!” the ad reads in part.

The job calls for turning CAD data and graphic depictions of these devices into physical objects.

The posting comes as Microsoft has revised the specs for tablets that would make it possible for 7-inch tablets to be Microsoft certified for Windows 8. This involved lowering the resolution requirements for displays, which makes it possible for smaller-screened devices to win certification.

Sales of the devices have paled compared to other tablets, particularly the iPad. Since its release last fall, about 1.5 million Surface RTs have been sold and 400,000 Surface Pros over the month since it’s been available, according to estimates by Microsoft watchers. Microsoft itself isn’t giving out solid numbers.

That has led some to speculate that Surface might have been an example to demonstrate the possibilities of Windows 8, but that would be short lived as a product line.

Here’s the text of the Microsoft job ad:
“Are you passionate about building cool devices and technologies? The Surface Team focuses on building devices that fully express the Windows vision. A fundamental part of our strategy is having desirable and powerful devices that enable the experiences people want, and elicit their excitement. Creating these devices involves a close partnership between hardware and software engineers, designers, and manufacturing.

“The Model Shop Team is looking for a highly skilled and creative person to fill this role.

“Required Skills and Knowledge:
We are looking for a candidate who is an accomplished and well-rounded Model Maker in all the different disciplines of model making, from traditional model making to CNC to Rapid Prototyping.

“Candidate must have an excellent interpersonal skill as you will be working and collaborating with our existing team of Model Makers.

“You must be able to use dependencies including CAD data, artwork graphics in order to deliver high quality models and prototypes.

“Person may take on projects from end to end, utilizing internal and/or external resources to ensure quality deliverable. Person must be a creative problem solver and have the ability to make resolute decisions.

• 5 years model making experience
• Machining skills using vertical mills, lathes and other machine tool equipment.
• Soft Tool casting
• Finishing including painting and coatings
• Excellent motor skills for precise hand finishing of models and a keen eye for quality
• Minimum of BA in ID or Model Making, or an equivalent in experience
• Working knowledge of CAM programming and CNC machining
• Working knowledge of CAD, including Pro/E or Solid Works

Desired Skills:
• Knowledge of rapid prototyping technology including Objet 3D Printers.
• CAM programming using WorkNC.”

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