Apps that use the “new Windows” approach to programming will be built in HTML and JavaScript, said Windows president Steven Sinofsky at D9′s Windows 8 announcement today.
Windows 8 will run traditional Windows applications as well, but the company will encourage developers to adopt this new approach to application development that depends on the new wave of web technologies.
We’ll have to see how this fits together with leaked information from January about development technologies Microsoft reportedly codenamed Jupiter and Mosh.
Apple allows a similar approach, although their focus is clearly on getting developers to work with Objective-C, creating apps that can be sold in iTunes. Outside of that model, developers can create mobile applications for iOS using HTML and JavaScript and allow users to save bookmarks to them as apps on the home screen.
In Windows 8, each app the user installs will have its own tile in the Start pane, an interface that’s a hybrid of user information and application navigation. One of the tiles that can be seen in the screenshot above is for a Windows Store. Presumably, Microsoft is following Apple’s lead on this one, and the Windows Store will be a lot like the Mac App Store.
If you’re a developer who wants to get into the practical details of Windows 8 development, Microsoft has set up an event called BUILD for this September.
msmoriarty writes "Microsoft told a group of MVPs today at Tech-Ed that it plans to take Visual Basic 6 open source and will release the source code on CodePlex. A source at the event said that Microsoft is planning to release only the VB6 language on codeplex – not Visual Studio or related tools." Update: 05/20 02:24 GMT by T : Alas, too good to be true. msmoriarty writes with an apologetic retraction: "We got it wrong — Microsoft denied and went back to our source and they pulled confirmation. Our apologies."
Will Android kill the iPhone? Or is it the other way around? It’s tempting to stick with the market share battle mindset when it comes to smartphones, but as Asymco’s Horace Dediu points out, the real question may be, who can tempt away users of dumbphones, or traditional cellphones?
Dediu compiled second quarter smartphone market figures for the past four years (see chart at right), which makes it easy to see just how much potential is left untapped among dumbphone users. His data shows that smartphones now account for 27 percent of phones shipped to retailers.
“What the chart shows is that Android (and phone versions of iOS) have taken share from direct competitors but have taken more from non-consumption,” Dediu writes. “Rather than focusing on rivalry between platforms, minds should be focused on the shape of the smartphone adoption curve.”
Looking at the smartphone market in that light, there definitely seems to be room for entrants aside from Google and Apple to make their mark. For example, even though Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 devices may not be selling like hotcakes yet, there’s potential for the platform to explode if it can properly tap dumbphone users (that definitely seems to be the angle with its Windows Phone ad campaign). Microsoft’s upcoming partnership with Nokia to create flagship Windows Phone devices could help in this respect.
But it’s definitely not going to be easy for Microsoft, or any other modern smartphone newcomer, to entice dumbphone users. In addition to powering high-end smartphones, Android is well positioned for dumbphone consumers, since it’s versatile enough to run on low- and mid-range hardware.
Research firm Gartner also released its latest mobile device numbers today, which gives us a more granular look at the state of the industry. Smartphones accounted for 23.6 percent of phones sold in the second quarter (compared to last year), according to Gartner, which falls in line with Dediu’s smartphone shipment statistics. Gartner’s numbers show that over 100 million smartphones were sold in the last quarter out of a total of 428 million mobile devices.
Additionally, the firm says that only 1.6 million Windows Phone 7 devices were sold last quarter. That’s a tepid response, for sure, but it’s definitely not enough to scare Microsoft off of smartphones. As I’ve previously argued, Microsoft is in the smartphone market for the long haul with Windows Phone, and I suspect it will work even harder to target dumbphone users over the next year.
Just days after reports that Google and Facebook were interested in partnering with, and possibly buying VoIP company Skype, comes a claim from the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft is planning to buy the company for $7 billion, in a deal worth closer to $8 billion after Skype’s debts are considered. This mirrors an earlier rumor of a Microsoft-Skype deal published by GigaOm. An annoucement could be made as early as Tuesday.
Update: It’s now being confirmed by AllThingsD; a deal valued at around $8.5 billion, with a press release expected at 5 AM Pacific time.
Last year, Skype had revenue of $860 million on which it posted an operating profit of $264 million. However, it overall made a small loss, of $7 million, and had long-term debt of $686 million. A $7 billion purchase price would represent a huge premium over the $3-4 billion conjectured in the Facebook and Google deals.
We’ve all lived the nightmare. A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he1 can’t seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it finally emerges, is so kludgey that it ultimately must be rewritten from scratch by more competent people. And yet his interviewers—and/or the HR department, if your company has been infested by that bureaucratic parasite—swear that they only hire above-average/A-level/top-1% people.
It’s a big problem, especially now. There’s a boom on. I get harassing emails from recruiters every day. Everyone’s desperate to hire developers…but developers are not fungible. A great coder can easily be 50 times more productive than a mediocre one, while bad ones ultimately have negative productivity. Hiring one is a terrible mistake for any organization; for a startup, it can be a catastrophic company-killer. So how can it happen so often?
Like many of the hangovers that haunt modern software engineering, this is ultimately mostly Microsoft’s fault.2 Back when they were the evil empire where everyone secretly wanted to work, they were famous for their “brain-teaser” interview questions – Why are manhole covers round? – and, of course, they asked new university graduates about computer science theory; “Write me a binary search.”
Everyone wanted to be like Microsoft, even Google, until everyone wanted to be like Google (until recently); and so that interview meme persisted. Check out these two recent posts on the subject of interviewing, courtsey of Hacker News: one from a would-be employee, one from a Google interviewer. A couple of illuminating quotes from the latter: “I’m not even necessarily saying that this is a good metric” and “If it’s any consolation, at least we don’t ask gotcha riddle questions anymore. Those were especially offensive.”
It’s nice to see that Google have almost sort of realized that their recruiting algorithm is problematic. Too bad they haven’t fixed it. See also Jean Hsu’s “How Effective Are Technical Interviews?” The fundamental problem is that the skills required to pass today’s industry-standard software interview are not the skills required to be a good software developer. Oh, there’s some correlation, but it’s like the Oakland Raiders always drafting the fastest runners available, only to discover to their endless dismay that the NFL is not a foot race.
Actually it’s worse than that. At least wide receivers have to run, whereas I can guarantee you, without fear of contradiction, that no software engineer will ever have to write a binary search after they are hired. It’s like choosing a contractor because they know how to forge and cast steel using coal, iron, an oven and a bellows, when they actually need to know a) the address of the nearest Home Depot b) what to do with the steel once they buy it.
Joel Spolsky once correctly explained that you’re generally looking for two things in an employee: Smart and Gets Things Done. (Academia is teeming with people who are the former but not the latter.) First, though, you have to establish something else: Not Completely Inept. You’d be amazed how many totally incompetent people show up for technical interviews. Google’s binary search is presumably intended as their “FizzBuzz” – a low bar you have to hurdle just to get in the door. But a FizzBuzz should take all of five minutes, before the real interview begins.
So what should a real interview consist of? Let me offer a humble proposal: don’t interview anyone who hasn’t accomplished anything. Ever. Certificates and degrees are not accomplishments; I mean real-world projects with real-world users. There is no excuse for software developers who don’t have a site, app, or service they can point to and say, “I did this, all by myself!” in a world where Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services have free service tiers, and it costs all of $25 to register as an Android developer and publish an app on the Android Market.
The old system was based on limited information—all you knew about someone was their resume. But if you only interview people with accomplishments, then you have a much broader base to work from. Get the FizzBuzz out of the way, and then have the interviewee show and tell their code, and explain their design decisions and what they would do differently now. Have them implement a feature or two while you watch, so you can see how they actually work, and how they think while working. That’s what you want from a technical interview, not a measure of its subject’s grasp of some antiquated algorithm or data structure. The world has moved on.
1Yes, I am being deliberately sexist here, because in my experience those women who write code are consistently good at it.
2I don’t mind that Bill Gates is a megazillionaire; he’s done a lot of really interesting and innovative stuff. I do mind that a lot of unworthy people rode his coattails to minizillionaire status, eg the inventor of Hungarian notation, probably the dumbest widely-promulgated idea in the history of the field.
Will Android kill the iPhone? Or is it the other way around? It’s tempting to stick with the market share battle mindset when it comes to smartphones, but as Asymco’s 
We’ve all lived the nightmare. A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he1 can’t seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it finally emerges, is so kludgey that it ultimately must be rewritten from scratch by more competent people. And yet his interviewers—and/or the HR department, if your company has been infested by that bureaucratic parasite—swear that they only hire above-average/A-level/top-1% people.
