Earlier this month Microsoft contributed a SQL Server Driver for PHP. They even have a SQL Server and PHP blog and their SQL Server forum now lists as PHP in their client list. The blog has an interesting post on development of the driver.
So, what does this thing do? It is for PHP5 only (not a big deal considering PHP4 will only be getting security updates after this year) on Windows (this part is a bummer, but not surprising) to access SQL Server 2000 and 2005 (anyone running anything older than that in production?).
You could work with SQL Server from PHP prior to this using FreeTDS. I’ve used the mssql_* PHP functions backed by FreeTDS on FreeBSD for years so this new driver from Microsoft isn’t a major game changer at this point.
That said, I find this a pretty exciting development.
Microsoft is actually providing a PHP library to work with some of their own software. I think that is great, although the really huge win would have been if it was available for non-Microsoft operating systems. This is great stuff though, not just talk, but real live code. Combining this with better PHP on IIS support I have a glimmer of hope that we’ll see more good things from Microsoft for PHP.
There has been plenty of PR about Microsoft doing more in this area, but providing real code and tools is what we actually need.
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Posted on November 3rd, 2006 /
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zune
There are two points that hit me very hard when looking at Zune.net:
- Microsoft wants desperately to be one of the cool kids. I got this same impression when saw a TV commercial for Zune.
- If you didn’t know already that Zune was a Microsoft product you’d be hard pressed to learn that based on Zune.net. The only place I saw Microsoft mentioned was at the very bottom: “©2006 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved”. There isn’t even a link to Microsoft.com.
Makes me wonder if they believe the only way to increase the coolness of Zune is to play down the fact that it is from Microsoft. Maybe their right.
So John Gruber (Daring Fireball) takes on the TechCrunch spin of Zune by describing it as High on Vapor Fumes. The point being mostly that until the device is actually out, ranting about how successful it will be is premature at best.
John ends his post with a few questions:
If they’re “not done with it yet”, on September 14, when will they be? How late can they wait to go into production and still hit shelves for the holiday season?
And if this really is a killer feature in a product they honestly expect to ship within the next month or two, why are they talking about it now? Why tip their hand to Apple in advance? Why blow all this media attention before people can actually fork over their money for the thing? Why not go for maximum impact with a “Here it is and you can buy one today!” debut a few weeks from now?
And the most important question of all: Brown?
When will they be done? Who knows. How late can they get it in to production to make into the holidays? I don’t know that one either, but it may not be that important. The telling question to me is asking that if this is so great, why talk about it now, possibly giving your competition ideas and time. Very simple, getting it into the minds of the consumer. If people believe that Zune will be many times better than the iPod, they’ll put off buying a brand new iPod of the holidays and wait for the new Zune device. Think of it as a battle for hearts and minds.
Microsoft may even realize that they aren’t going to make this holiday season at all and are doing this in a attempt to do nothing more than dampen iPod sales. That scores a little too high on the over the top conspiracy meter for me, but then again Microsoft if known for releasing products late.
As for the brown thing, no idea.
Isn’t that the truth :-)
The big news at the end of last week is that WinFS will not ship with Windows Vista. If you follow that link you should be warned that it is mostly spin. Don’t believe me? You’ll see gems like:
It’s great technology and we are super-excited to be productizing this way.
Productizing? Is that even a word? The folks at Merriam-Webster Online don’t seem to think so. I checked a few other dictionaries and turned up nothing. So Quentin Clark, what exactly is productizing that makes you “super-excited”?
Back to WinFS, it seems that it will be absorbed into the next version of SQL Server and ADO.NET. Given the last update to SQL Server (2005) took five or six years, is there any hope of seeing WinFS in SQL Server before 2010? Of course if you want to bring up file system announcements from Microsoft you could argue that the basis of WinFS was announced almost 15 years ago with Cairo. I expect that the general concept of WinFS will buried from a PR stand point as quickly as possible by Microsoft.
At some point I hope to see a giant collective “we’ll believe it when it ships” response when Microsoft announces yet another new technology that will change everything. Oh yeah, and it will ship in the next version of Windows.
CNN is reporting that Gates to leave day-to-day Microsoft operations:
Chairman Bill Gates announced Thursday that he will transition from day-to-day responsibilities at the company he co-founded to concentrate on the charitable work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates will continue on as the company’s chairman after transferring his duties over a two-year period.
…
Microsoft’s Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume Gate’s title as chief software architect and begin working alongside Gates on overseeing all software technical design.
There will be two year transition so I don’t think we’ll be seeing major shifts until after that point. I suspect many people will reference this as the beginning of the post-Bill Gates era of Microsoft.
I have to wonder what makes Microsoft think that we need five different versions of Windows Vista:
I can understand having a server version that is different from a client/desktop/notebook system, but these are all client versions. Ug, sometimes too much choice just results in more pain.
Hey, speaking of a server version, what is the next Windows server OS going to be? Will there be a Windows Vista Server to replace Windows 2003 server?
If some how you’ve managed to miss the microsoft ipod packaging parody (see below for updated link) then stop what you are doing for three minutes and go watch it.
UPDATE Wed 1 Mar 2006 @ 4:00pm: Looks like this video was put together by a Microsoft marketing group, according to Scoble.
UPDATE Fri 3 Mar 2006 @ 10:40am: The video is no longer available on the YouTube link. The folks over at iFilm have it as Microsoft’s iPod [2006].
Scoble is right, MS Office 12 supporting PDF is big. Having the ability to publish to PDF builtin into Office is a good thing. What’s funny about it is that now we get to make fun of Microsoft for doing the right thing. Usually we only get to make fun of them for not doing the right thing :-)
First off, as someone else has already pointed out, it is foolish for MS to limit this feature to just Office. This should be a builtin print feature system wide across all applications, similar to the way Mac OS X has been doing for years. If they wanted to take a short cut there are even a couple of open source apps that implement this, but some how I think a company with that much money in the bank isn’t short on resources.
Aside from the obvious jokes that will pop up about Microsoft coping Apple on this, there will also be jokes about Microsoft coping Open Office for this feature. Open Office has been able to publish in PDF format for awhile now.
If that isn’t enough fuel for the fire, here’s one more. From the announcement by Brian Jones:
I constantly get asked by customers if we can build in this support for publishing documents as PDF files, and now I can thankfully say “yes!” It’s something we’ve been hearing about for years, and earlier in this project we decided that while there were already existing third party tools for doing this, we should do the work to build the functionality natively into the product.
So customers having been requesting this feature “for years”, but Microsoft never acted on those requests. Further down Brian mentions one metric they used to track how much people wanted this feature:
In the case of PDF though, it was a really simple straightforward problem. Currently, on our OfficeOnline site, we are seeing over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support. That makes a pretty easy decision :-) … Of course we get requests for other formats too, but not nearly to this scale.
In looking at this from the reverse angle it sounds like documentation on how Microsoft has managed to ignore an overwhelming number of customer requests “for years”. Not something that I would really brag about.
If you’ve read Scobleizer you know he works for and pushes Microsoft pretty much every chance he gets. Recently he’s been on a kick talking about buzz around the web, citing things like the announcement of Google Moon recently. He also compared Microsoft and Apple in blog buzz and a few wider market counts. His reference to Howard Dean seems on when it comes to blog buzz, it doesn’t necessarily correlate to popularity in the general population. Despite that Scoble still seems to have a touch jealousy about not getting more blog love buzz for Microsoft.
So today he tried to go on the offensive by responding to a MacDailyNews post. Scoble managed to not learn his own lesson here, and most folks will likely call him on it. First off the MacDailyNews article is nothing but name calling (think 2nd grade here), even those who use Apple products (of which I am one) recognize this and quickly move on or completely ignore in the first place. He would have been much better if he’d just left this alone or focused purely on features, not trying to return fire.
But since he did lets take a look at his response:
- Tablet PC: I haven’t seen anyone use a tablet system, and I see a fair number of notebook systems in use by people through out the year. Perhaps it is because I work at a university and that market isn’t interested in tablet systems. Perhaps I’m missing the boat here, but I don’t see this as being a big deal. Having said that though, he is correct on this point, Apple does not offer a tablet system. Neither does Microsoft, they only sell the OS. If I install FreeBSD or Linux on said tablet system then Microsoft is out of the picture. I also couldn’t find anywhere on Microsoft’s website where I could actually purchase a tablet system.
- Media Center: Again, I couldn’t find anywhere on Microsoft’s website to purchase such a thing. They sell an OS for such a thing, but then again I could also use MythTV and get the same thing. He is right on some level though, Apple doesn’t sell a system with Tivo features. Neither does Microsoft.
- Mobile Phone: Still couldn’t find any place on Microsoft’s website where I can buy said Windows phone. They make software for mobile devices, but so do other vendors.
- Mac on Intel: And I can’t get Windows for my PowerPC system. There is a developer system from Apple running on Intel hardware, but that doesn’t really meet the term shipping in this sense. So he does have a small point here, but again if I install FreeBSD/Linux on my Intel box Microsoft is out of the picture. And just like before, I couldn’t find such hardware offered for sale from Microsoft either.
- Integration with XBox: It isn’t clear exactly what he means by this, but if it is simply the ability to have your computer talk to your XBox then he is right Apple doesn’t sell such a thing. I don’t see what this has to do with releasing a new operating system.
- MSN Watches: I have to admit that I’ve never even heard of such a thing. I don’t suppose that it uses any sort of open or published standard so that other vendors can make use of it also? If not how is this Apple’s fault?
The constant theme here is that none of the issues that he brought up has to do with operating systems, specifically Mac OS X Tiger and Windows Vista (or XP for that matter). No where does Scoble actually address the issue of feature comparison between two operation systems. He completely dodged the question entirely, perhaps he should go into politics?
Scoble will likely see his post succeed on one point though, it will probably generate some blog buzz in response. Unfortunately I suspect that most of it will be negative.
Just to be clear, I deal with Windows (2000, XP and 2003), Mac OS X (10.3 and 10.4) and FreeBSD (4.x and 5.x) systems on pretty much a daily basis. Each has strong and weak points and I generally try to do my best to only use each one where their strong points shine and avoid each one where their weak points are most exposed.
UPDATE 23 Jul 2005 1:15pm: After seeing his initial response, I have to wonder if this goal was just to get people talking about Microsoft and Windows. What is that saying about and publicity is good publicity, as long as they spell your name right?