Dan Griffin's Blog
Comments on security, PKI, smart cards, cryptography, and entrepreneurship.
Two classic Bill Gates-isms
June 29, 2008
There’s a seven part series from the BBC on YouTube, filmed for Gates’ last full-time week at Microsoft (having ended two days ago). They captured some classic Bill-isms while filming two executive reviews, one from this year and one from 10 years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gOrWBPt1bA&feature=related
“You guys never understood. You never understood the first thing about this.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_LHBfHrWIo&feature=related
“It’s a Turing machine and this is the syntax, right?” [As in, give me the bottom line ...]
Gotta love it!
Permalink | Comments (0)Microsoft Hyper-V finally RTMs
June 26, 2008
The Hyper-V virtualization technology for Windows Server 2008 released today - see the press release.
And, as with any Microsoft technology, don’t forget to check out the Solution Accelerators available for virtualization - link here.
Permalink | Comments (0)JW Secure is now a Microsoft Certified Partner
June 24, 2008
I’m happy to announce that JW Secure is now a Microsoft Certified Partner. We’ve also completed the ISV/Software Solutions competency.
What does that mean? Well, mainly that JW Secure has completed a long list of successful software development projects with a variety of customers using Windows-compatible security technologies. And that those qualifications have been registered with the Microsoft partner program.
Click on the image to see our official blurb on the Microsoft partner page.
I’m happy to announce that JW Secure’s SmartUtil smart card utility has been Certified for Windows Vista.
What does that mean exactly? Well, basically, that SmartUtil was well designed, well tested, and that it works really well too 
And furthermore, that it was tested not only by JW Secure, but also by an independent lab that has been vetted by Microsoft.
Find SmartUtil on the official certified list by clicking on the graphic below and doing a text search in your browser for smartutil.
Windows 7 to ship three years after Vista RTM?
June 23, 2008
I just ran across this CNET interview with Steven Sinofsky, the new head of the Windows division, while researching my previous post.
The three-year delta is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, Sinofsky came from the Office team, which prides itself on a rigid regimen of feature planning and two-year ship cycles. They’ve done a good job.
Thus, I thought the whole point of his new job was to do the exact same thing in Windows. Not that I thought he was going to be able to pull it off, but he was at least going try, by way of draconian measures, to ship Win 7 within two years. At some point in the past 18 months, he apparently gave up.
Second, that they’ve already announced a three-year ship cycle implies that it’s likely to be 30% longer than that. That’s a long time to let their flagship product languish, in the form of Vista, on the market. Again, a smarter strategy would have been to really push for a two year cycle. And then do it again. That way, we’d have had Win 8 by the time we’re actually going to have Win 7.
Permalink | Comments (0)Just read this Steven Levy article about Bill Gates last week as a Microsoft ‘employee’. Pretty good - Levy is an undeniable Microsoft expert, having studied and written about Microsoft and the software industry for many years.
Interestingly, Levy referenced this blog post from last year: Microsoft is Dead, by Paul Graham. I suppose that Levy’s actual intent was to reference the sentiment expressed by Graham’s essay, rather than the factuality of it, since it’s lacking in the latter.
In any case, I do agree that Microsoft is facing big challenges. Their two main problems are, one, that they aren’t getting the best people (Google is - see below), and two (Graham hit the nail on the head here), that they’re pursuing the wrong innovation strategy.
Regarding the latter, innovative software doesn’t come from companies that are already big. But the solution isn’t to buy Yahoo; buy all of the possible next Googles, leave them alone until there are clear winners and losers, and then harvest.
Some comments follow on more of the specifics raised in the article.
Regarding the granddaddy cash cow: Windows. It’s important to remember that Microsoft still has a monopoly, and that its software runs almost every client computer. The real issue is that each Windows release competes with the previous one, and that from that perspective, Vista is getting killed by XP.
It surprises me that so many people - including those in the product group at Microsoft - see Apple/OSX as the biggest competitor to Windows. As I already stated, Windows is the biggest competitor to Windows. Given that so much of the demand for Windows, as well as the growth partner ecosystem which gives the platform its value, has been driven by enterprise customers, why would you model future versions on a niche consumer product?
Finally, back to Google. I agree that Google is perceived as the overall technology leader in the industry right now, and for many of the right reasons, the most important of which is that, again, they’re hiring the best people.
But while Google owns search, and Microsoft’s attacks on that space have been unsuccessful, it’s also true that Google’s attacks on other areas (e.g. productivity applications) have been unsuccessful. What will be interesting is who wins the next frontier - cloud computing - and how. Yes, Google has a head start, and yes again, they’re hiring the best people, but the battle hasn’t been fought yet. Microsoft has consolidated many of its best people around productizing its cloud computing strategy, and its greatest asset in the battle may be the one that got the company started in the first place: developer tools.
Permalink | Comments (0)My guest FCS blog post
June 19, 2008
Check out my guest post for the Forefront Client Security team on their TechNet blog. I talk about the implementation of the Forefront plug-in for Network Access Protection, how the wire traffic looks, and some security tradeoffs.
Permalink | Comments (0)Critical presentation/demonstration tool
June 15, 2008
ZoomIt, which I didn’t learn about until this week, is from SysInternals. It beats the pants out of trying to manually enlarge the font size of every window you’re using in a demo to a large audience, for example. A couple of the presenters at TechEd this week put it to effective use.
Permalink | Comments (0)My vote goes to w.bloggar, because, as Jim Allchin used to say, it just works. It’s easy to install, it supports lots of different blog hosts via XML-RPC, it correctly handles categories (including selecting multiple), and it doesn’t screw up your formatting (at least not that I’ve experienced thus far).
I also tried Windows Live Writer, but not only was it difficult to install, it didn’t work.
Permalink | Comments (0)
