However, there are some people in the community who have always viewed Mike’s popularity as a bad thing.  They felt that too many people just do whatever Mike says, whether it’s the best thing to do or not.  So these other people started throwing their own parties.  Not as many people went to these parties, but they were glad they were there and not at Mike’s parties.

Over time, Mike got married.  His wife, Silvia, was very popular among the people at Mike’s parties.  Silvia would light up the room whenever she appeared.  It is said that Silvia could feel comfortable at some parties outside of Mike’s, but nobody at those parties really cared about Silvia, so Silvia mostly hung out with Mike’s friends and was very popular among these people.

Over time, an interesting thing happened at the parties that Mike wasn’t at.  A youngster by the name of Javice Crypt started going to these parties.  At first Javice was awkward.  Nevertheless – she developed a few friends at each of these other parties, and eventually her network of friends started to grow over time.  Even Mike would greet her when passing her on the street and would invite her to his parties.

Eventually, Javice grew up.  In fact, she matured into a beautiful young woman who had so many friends that people learned to ignore her awkwardness and admire her good traits.  She became popular at all the parties.  Her widespread popularity meant that it didn’t matter which party you went to – as long as you knew Javice, you were welcome.  Mike’s parties were no longer the only large parties in town.

Javice’s popularity grew so much that even Mike started to court her.  He invited her to all of his parties and showed her off to all of his friends.  He even talked about how important Javice would be to his future parties.

Mike’s friends found this confusing.  They liked Silvia, and enjoyed her company.  They didn’t really know this Javice that well, so they confronted Mike and asked “All you talk about these days is Javice.  We really love Silvia – what is your future with her?  Should we continue to like her, or should we become friends with Javice?”

“Well, I love Silvia,” Mike replied.  “I am married to her.  We have had a long relationship and due to her maturity, she knows how to do things that Javice cannot do yet.  I’ve even talked about how the relationship between me and Silvia will grow in the future.”

“Yes, that’s true,” people said, “You have said that, but not recently.  And when you do talk about future parties, all you talk about is Javice.  What are we to think of the future of Silvia?”

And all Mike would say is “Javice’s popularity is undeniable, and she is therefore very important to my future parties.  For more details, you will have to wait until my Build Conference in Anaheim this September.”

And this is why I am learning JavaScript – because Microsoft refuses to give a straight answer about the future of Silverlight in Windows 8.

My writer’s block was solved when I read something unexpected in a blog from Mary Jo Foley, whose full time job is to report about what is going on inside Microsoft.

I was planning to write how if you split software developers into two camps – i.e. one set of developers expert at writing smart phone applications, and one expert at writing desktop applications, because you give them different toolsets, then the toolset provided for the new tablet computers will influence how many developers you have writing software for that tablet computer.

The toolsets offered by Microsoft for desktop development and mobile development aren’t that different, but there are differences.  I don’t know Apple’s toolsets well enough to comment on them (that’s why this post was delayed – I thought I would learn the details about Apple’s toolsets, but I never had time, and I probably never will).

The fact that the iPad’s operating system is based on the iPhone platform implies that Apple is looking to leverage their iPhone developers.  Conversely, Microsoft’s success so far with NetBooks, was because those little laptops fell into the domain of the desktop application writers, of which there are more of than there are Windows smart phone developers.

Since I announced plans for this post, Microsoft unveiled “Windows Mobile 7” – their new mobile software environment, featuring a new user interface.  And then, in Mary Jo Foley’s blog, I read rumors about Microsoft taking the user interface of Windows Mobile 7 and possibly porting it as the user interface for desktop computers.  As radical as this seems, I think the tablet computer platform is at the heart of such a theory.

Moving the new Windows Mobile 7 interface to tablet computers makes sense because it’s a better design than Windows 7 for people who will interact with the device using their finger tips.  You’ll probably see Microsoft do some combination of the following two things:

1)      Promote to developers the logic of developing applications for the new Windows Mobile software.

2)      Provide tools to desktop developers, extending the same tools they use today, to develop applications with this user interface running on Windows 7.

Supporting the Window Mobile 7 user interface on Windows 7, given the right tools, could therefore pull in more of those Windows 7 developers to produce Zune-like applications and run them on Windows 7-based tablet computers.

Don’t expect the Windows Mobile 7 user interface on all computers – you don’t just take away something as commonly known around the world as the Windows desktop user interface and replace it with something as different as the Zune user interface.  But you may have options to select between the two, or you’ll see computers that are essentially the same systems, marketed with different names, to different markets, with different user interfaces.

Phones running the Windows Mobile 7 user interface won’t appear until late this year, but the implications of Windows Mobile 7’s success will finally ripple over the wall separating the mobile and desktop markets.  Early rumors are that Silverlight, Microsoft’s latest technology for building rich websites, and XNA, the tools Microsoft provides for building Xbox applications will play key roles in this new landscape. How this shakes out will define what Windows-based tablet PC’s and possibly desktop PC’s will actually look like.

Let’s take a look at what this announcement means you’ll see from hardware manufacturers moving forward.  Next week, we’ll discuss what the implications are for software developers.

It isn’t like the concept of a tablet-style computer is new.  Microsoft has been promoting tablet-style computing devices for years, with very limited success.  What is new is that people are now starting to buy them.

Last year’s holiday season featured tablet-style computing devices as one of the hottest gift categories.  But people didn’t buy them from Apple, Dell, or HP – they bought them from Amazon, Sony, and Barnes and Noble.

Amazon isn’t saying how many Kindle readers they’ve sold, but they have stated that holiday season sales shocked them compared to original sales expectations.  Amazon did report though, that on Christmas day they sold more downloaded eBooks than the old fashioned ones made of paper.

eBook reading has become a “killer application” – software so compelling that people will buy a brand new device just to have access to it.  PC manufacturers must be drooling at Amazon’s performance.  If people will buy a device that only runs one application, then they certainly must be willing to buy similar devices that can run many applications.

Is eBook reading software exclusive to devices from Amazon, Sony or Barnes and Noble?  Hardly.  According to Flurry Analytics, by September of last year, the number of new eBook applications appearing on Apple’s App Store surpassed the number of new game applications.  In October, 2009, 20% of the applications submitted to the App Store were book apps or dedicated books.  One of the eBook reader applications available from the App Store is even from Amazon itself.

If you followed Apple’s iPad announcement, you probably are aware that the device was panned by critics.  The iPad does too little, features some of the same limitations as the iTouch that become even more pronounced on a more general purpose computing platform (i.e. no Flash support for web browsing), has too little memory, and costs too much.  The iPad has “version 1.0” written all over it.

Expect Apple to come out with future versions that are more functional and less expensive.

More importantly, expect HP, Dell and all other PC hardware manufacturers to come out with similar devices.  Microsoft even has a tablet device, code-named Courier, in development, although no release plans have been revealed.  Expect them all to provide eBook reading capabilities, multi-touch support like the iPhone has always had and which Microsoft now supports in Windows 7.

Tablet computers are a new category that offers little real market experience for all the computer manufacturers to draw on to determine what will really make them sell.  Plan on seeing a few “ducks”.  Like ducks, who can both swim and fly, but do neither exceptionally well, these products will do your everyday computing and web surfing, and will have the communication capabilities found in smartphones.  Whether they do any of it well enough for people to spend money on the device is yet to be proven.

Like the initial iPad, plan on all of these devices at first to have a little less functionality at a price that’s a little too high for everyone to rush out and buy it right away.  Expect prices to drop and functionality to rise.

What will be interesting to watch is what happens to companies like Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  The classic business of these companies is to sell books.  Their present hardware devices encourage that, with some extra hardware revenue generated in the process.  Will their devices become more functional?  Less functional with commodity pricing to encourage wider acceptance and increased downloads? Will they deemphasize their hardware and strike software and distribution deals with the PC manufacturers?  One thing is for sure – the holiday season at these companies in 2010 will be very different than it was in 2009.

But not everything Microsoft does is successful.  And near the top of that list is their whole mobile and smart phone effort.  Let’s just say they’re screwing this up so bad, you can hear the crickets and see the birds circling in the mid-day sun.

Hiding out in the same neighborhood as Windows phones is Microsoft’s music player device, the Zune.  Don’t be afraid if you’ve never heard of the Zune – most people haven’t.

Microsoft’s performance in the smart phone market is giving them the type of challenge they’re not used to fighting.  According to Gartner, their market share dropped from 11% in Q3 2008 to 7.9% in Q3 2009.  The big winners in the market are Apple (now at 17.1%), RIM’s Blackberry (now at 20.8%) and Google’s Android (now at 3.9%).  All of Microsoft’s hardware partners – HTC, LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson – are developing on Android, and Palm and Motorola no longer ship Windows phones.

When Microsoft holds big conferences with software developers, the Kool-Aid they try to get you to drink reflects the areas they think are important and strategic to them.  Windows 7 and Cloud Computing have received a lot of visibility over the last year.  In the meantime, they’ve been embarrassingly quite on what’s going on in the mobile world.

This is expected to change at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona in February and  at Microsoft’s MIX conference for developers in March, where details of the next version of Windows Mobile (“Windows Mobile 7”) are revealed.  Nothing official has been released, but rumors have started to swirl based on anonymous leaks.

Expect Windows Mobile to get a major user interface upgrade.  Plan on iPhone-like multi-touch support.  Expect different editions of the OS, one targeted to the business market, and one targeted to consumers.  Expect integration of features from the Zune.  Expect requirements for hardware platforms so that application developers can plan on minimum capabilities such as memory, processing speed and display size.

But don’t expect any phones with Windows Mobile 7 to ship until at least Q3 this year and more likely Q4, or maybe early next year for all the capabilities to available at your local phone store.  This puts Microsoft on the hot seat to stem its market share losses during 2010 while hyping the capabilities of an OS that won’t be shipping until late in the year.

Personally, for Christmas this year, I got a Zune, the under-rated MP3 player completely overshadowed by Apple iPod line of music players.  I like the Zune and its best feature – a music download service that has some real advantages over iTunes.

But  when I put both my BlackBerry and my Zune in my shirt pocket at the same time, I really wished I had a Zune with a phone in it.  You know, like an iPhone.  Take the design of the Zune, stick your windows phone in it, and you’ve got a legitimate competitor to the iPhone in the consumer market and the BlackBerry in the business market.

The stakes for success of Windows Mobile 7 are high.  The Windows Mobile team at Microsoft is now in the same division as the Zune and the Xbox.  Microsoft has become a hardware manufacturer in markets where for a variety of reasons it made sense for them to do so – like the Xbox for gaming, and the Zune for portable multimedia.  If phone manufacturers are unable to generate the success in the market for Windows Mobile 7 that Microsoft needs, don’t be shocked if a year or two from now we’re discussing the next model of Microsoft’s own phone.

What ties me so strongly to Microsoft are the tools they provide to developers for creating applications to run on Microsoft platforms.  Microsoft invests a lot into making life easy for developers – the more applications running on Microsoft platforms, the more successful that platform can ultimately be.  Whether it’s a Windows-based PC, Windows-based phone, or an Enterprise Server in some data center running Exchange, SQL Server or other high priced Microsoft enterprise software, Microsoft wants more developers creating more applications for that platform.  It’s an ecosystem, and the developer community is the engine that helps drive Microsoft where it wants to go.

A key element of Microsoft’s strategy of making developers productive is to provide a range of tools for different environments that all operate the same way.  A developer who knows how to write an application on a desktop PC, should know how to write an application on a phone, how to develop a website, how to build a game for the XBox 360 or how to develop an application that runs “in the cloud”.

The reality of what Microsoft actually ships though isn’t quite as perfect as this scenario may sound.  Different sets of tools are released from different product groups – they each have their own release schedules and each group fights a natural tendency to produce tools optimized for their platform while still keeping in lockstep with the tools being offered by other groups.

Over the long run though, this strategy works.  There is a vision, and understanding the features and technologies that Microsoft hypes to developers the most, and seeing what’s new in the latest set of tools released can give developers a good view of where the other tools are eventually moving to.

I can’t invest in becoming an expert in development tools offered from multiple vendors if each of those tools works differently.  It’s enough of a challenge staying an expert in Microsoft tools that I can’t spread my time learning tools from Adobe, Google, Apple, Oracle or the open source community as well.

If you buy into embracing Microsoft’s set of tools like I have, then you naturally want Microsoft to be successful in everything it does.  If Microsoft is successful with a given product, then it creates opportunities to sell software that supports that product.  If Microsoft fails, then the market they fail in becomes locked out to the Microsoft developer.

Clearly, Microsoft isn’t successful in everything they do.  And in my next blog, we’ll discuss one of those markets – the smartphone and mobile device market, and speculate what Microsoft will be doing over the next year to change this situation.

One purpose of this year end evaluation is to identify those things that get less attention than they should – activities that get a lot of attention at the last minute as a situation turns desperate, when a little constant attention would have averted a last minute crisis management drill.  I’m proud to say that “reflection and planning” has been one of my targets for improvement, so my planning effort this year was less about a soul-searching determination of what the future should look like, and more about planning how to make it so.

One of the key points to come out of my 2010 planning process to is the importance of communicating those goals to others.  So here’s the 30,000 foot view of what to expect from me and SPAINB Development in 2010:

SPAINB Development will grow.  Without getting into the gory details, despite the economy, 2009 sales were up, and I’m looking for 2010 to be even better.  We achieved this growth because we improved the whole sales-and-marketing process – more networking, more prospects, more customers, and we continued to provide quality product and great customer support at competitive prices.  2010 should see even more advances in our sales and marketing processes, and more customer opportunities based on broader technical offerings.

More of our business will come from Web-based applications.  Today, most of the software we develop runs on Windows desktop computers.  We’ve sat on the sidelines of the web market, waiting for tools that allow us to leverage our desktop software knowledge to develop rich user interface applications on the web.  The wait is over and we’re embracing Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which allows us to create visually attractive, high performance web applications using the same .Net expertise and application models we use to efficiently develop desktop and mobile applications.  Desktop applications will continue to be a major focus, but we expect more of our 2010 growth to come from Silverlight-based web applications.

We will expand the size of our team to support our growth.  I’ve already started to grow the “team” beyond just myself, leveraging the skills of other trusted professionals to expand the bandwidth of the “software development” department, and adding professional graphic design services.  At the beginning of the year, my wife Bobbi came on board full time to help with operations, sales and marketing.  All of this internal growth will be backed by processes and controls to make sure that the product quality and customer support that has helped us grow so far is at least unchanged, and hopefully even better.

I will run a half marathon in 2010.  I slip this personal goal in here to push myself to make this happen.  I’ve registered for the Lehigh Valley half marathon at the end of April, although based on training progress so far, there’s no guarantee that I can get in shape in time for that race, but I’ve still got time to work on it.

Goals – defined and communicated.  Now, back to the tactical grind of achieving them….

Everyone knows what happens when you create a customer newsletter.  You start out very enthusiastic and publish a couple issues on a regular schedule, and then you get busy.  The newsletter isn’t as important as everything else going on, it’s hard to come up with things to write about and before you know it, voila, the newsletter is way behind schedule.

Once you’re behind schedule with a newsletter, it starts to become even less important a task to get done.  Before you know it, you give up.

Here’s the new policy for my newsletter: There is no schedule.  Right now, at the beginning of the year, I’m very enthusiastic, and I’m really (no, really!) going to publish something, anything, on a regular basis.  But if I miss an issue, it’s my fault, and I’m not going to feel guilty about it.

I’ll vary the content so that easier to find something to write about and still be interesting.  Let’s call this one of my New Year’s Resolutions.

Other than what you’re reading right now, I’ll write engaging, interesting, thought provoking content.  You’ll know more about SPAINB Development and the whole world of software development than your neighbor who’s not getting the newsletter or reading the blog.

Thanks for reading.

-Bill