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Posts Tagged ‘architect’

We’ve gotten word of another departure from MySpace in the wake of CEO Owen Van Natta’s firing two weeks ago. The latest to leave is Chris Bissell, MySpace’s Chief Software Architect, who has been with the company for over four years. Bissell was one of the few remaining members of MySpace’s old guard, which has gradually left (or been fired) from the company since the executive shakeup last spring that removed long-time CEO Chris DeWolfe.

Bissell was charged with maintaining MySpace’s backend architecture and ensuring that the site scaled to meet demand. MySpace has confirmed that he is leaving the company.  The news comes on the heels of the departure of SVP of User Experience and Design Kate Geminder and stream architect Monica Keller, who both left within a week of Van Natta’s firing.

These departures aren’t really surprising given yet another executive shakeup at the company (though Bissell didn’t have any clear ties to Van Natta), but MySpace has some serious rebuilding to do. We’re hearing that the company has shelved a total redesign Geminder and her team were working on in favor of a Hail Mary strategy to become a discovery recommendation engine.

No executive job is safe in Tim Armstrong’s AOL, where he is still cleaning house and putting his own team into place. Even Bill Wilson, the architect of AOL’s let-a thousand-blogs-bloom content strategy which is a cornerstone of AOL’s new approach, is now being replaced as president of AOL Media by Armstrong’s former New York City Google colleague David Eun. “In a turnaround situation we are doing whatever is necessary to make the company successful,” Armstrong told me in a brief phone conversation.

At Google, Eun most recently was in charge of content partnerships for YouTube and Google overall. At AOL, he will be president of AOL Studios as well, which comes from AOL’s recent acquisition of StudioNow. Armstrong expects Eun to bring more video to AOL sites. “You will see an expanded amount of video,” he says, “video we produce ourselves and video partnerships.” In particular, Armstrong wants Eun to “supercharge” content partnerships. Eun will also oversee Seed, AOL’s content management system.

Armstrong says he has no more plans to make more changes to AOL’s top ranks. He’s been putting his own team into place since he took the job, bringing in Brad Garlinghouse as president of Internet and mobile communications to replace longtime exec David Liu and more recently hired former Google engineer Jeff Raynar to head up engineering in New York. At the same time, CTO Ted Cahall and many other vets have departed. And AOL is still in the middle of laying off a third of its workforce, so the executive turmoil might not be over.

Wilson will remain through May. “Bill has done a great job,” says Armstrong, “and I will continue to lean on him.” Wilson was in charge of the AOL homepage and its 80 Mediaglow properties, including Engadget, DownloadSquad, and Joystiq. But the new properties have not grown fast enough to account for the decline in the homepage traffic. AOL’s overall visitor numbers have done pretty much nothing all year, ending at 111 million U.S. unique visitors in December, 2009, versus 110 million a year ago. And that was only after a nice uptick in December (see comScore chart below). “The key metric for our content organization is unique visitor growth,” says Armstrong.

Will Eun do any better? Armstrong sets expectations low, warning that the overall numbers “may show up or down in terms of trading properties in and out,” but that what he will be focussed on is winning audience in the right categories.

Following its unveiling last week, everyone continues to debate Apple’s iPad. Some are certain that it’s doomed to fail, while others are sure it’s the future of computing. The truth is that, like the iPhone, it’s hard to make any kind of accurate judgement about it until you’ve actually used it. Unfortunately, that’s not yet possible since the earliest models are still about 60 days away from shipping. But until then, developer Frasier Speirs can give you the next best thing.

Speirs has made a Flickr set in which he dissects screenshots of the iPad from the promotional shots and videos Apple has released. On each photo he adds his own notes of things to take notice of. But rather than go for most of the obvious elements, Speirs focuses on a lot of UI elements that the majority of people will overlook while watching the videos. This is important because as any good fanboy will tell you, it’s often the subtle things Apple does in its UI work that make its devices stand apart.

And with the iPad, Apple has a number of new UI ideas it’s putting out there. As Steve Jobs made clear during his keynote, the iPad was built to be equally as good in either portrait or landscape mode. This is already different from the iPhone which, while full of plenty of nice landscape UI elements, is still going to be used in portrait mode most of the time. But on the iPad, there are elements such as a left hand pane that is visibile in the Mail app only when the device is horizontal. Turn it vertical, and it only shows the message area, and there are new overlays that you activate to navigate in this view. And that’s probably the most obvious example of elements Speirs points out.

If you’re really chomping at the bit to get your hands on an iPad, Speirs’ 53 photos should be right up your alley.

[via Finer Things In Mac]

Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to meet with a number of Microsoft executives, including Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business. Muglia’s group has grown rapidly to become the critical swing vote in Microsoft’s transition to the cloud, now closing in on almost a third of the giant’s overall revenue. And as Silverlight and realtime become the strategic heart of the integration of cloud and on-premise solutions, what Muglia had to say then will resonate much more clearly when he takes the stage next Tuesday with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to open the PDC in Los Angeles.

In June, I spent several days on the Microsoft campus talking with Microsoft executives about the impact of realtime and the emerging era of cloud computing. My conversation with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie began with a discussion of the recently unveiled Google Wave, now being rolled out for testing by some 100,000 users. Ozzie followed up on his Churchill Club chat, where he described Google as taking on such a hard problem that it might limit adoption:

RAY OZZIE: Whenever you innovate like that, you don’t know what you don’t know in a lot of dimensions. And like I said, I applaud innovation. I really like that in terms of experimentation. But when you do that, I just know from the Groove experience most recently, from the Notes experience before that, when you create something that people don’t know what it is, when they can’t describe it exactly, and you have to teach them, it’s hard.

Former Digg Lead Architect Joe Stump’s Blunder Move, a new iPhone development company specializing in board games, has released Chess Wars, an iPhone game that lets you play your Facebook friends in Chess while on the go with your iPhone. Chess Wars uses Facebook Connect for Mobile to directly integrate into the Facebook platform and play via the iPhone. Chess Wars also comes with a built in chat, so you can chat against your opponents while challenging them.

Stump mentions that in the next version of Chess Wars, there will be Push Notification for when new moves are made, direct Twitter integration and TwitPic for public taunting as well as more in depth Facebook Connect integration, like announcing the players moves over Facebook.

Stump also notes that the company is planning to release more board games in the near future, including Checkers and Reversi — both of which use Facebook Connect on the iPhone.

Blunder Move is a side project of Stump’s, not to be confused with Crash Corp, the gaming company he is starting with SocialThing! founder Matt Galligan (the board games were originally going to be released under the Crash Corp label, but after Galligan came on board it was decided to spin them off). Details on Crash Corp. are still scant, but we’ve heard that it’s working on “Alternate Reality Mobile Gaming”, that fuses the real world with fantasy gameplay.

Chess Wars is $0.99 and is available today in the App Store [iTunes Link]. Other notable Chess games for the iPhone include Chess Pro by 99Games Online, and iChess by myMobileApps.

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The web has been abuzz the past few weeks with chatter about Microsoft’s announcement today at its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans about the new version of Microsoft’s Office 2010. There’s even a mini-movie about its debut. Facing potential challenges from the browser from Google’s Apps product and its new Chrome OS, Microsoft has been touting its three screens strategy, which is the ability for products to synchronize across the phone, browser, and desktop, for some time now.

With the release of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and Visio 2010, we finally see implementation Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s mantra. We had the opportunity to see an in-depth demo of the new suite of products from Microsoft’s Group Product Manager for Office 2010, Chris Bryant. Here’s a complete breakdown of all the functionality that has been added, including screenshots:

The Move To The Browser

Most certainly a direct challenge to Google Apps, Microsoft is rolling out lightweight, FREE, Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. All based in the cloud, the web-based versions of these products have less features than their desktop cousins but still let users that users basic tools to edit and change documents.

PowerPoint 2010

PowerPoint has been upgraded not only with a new browser version, but also a slew of bells and whistles to the desktop version. Users now have the capability of editing video and images within PowerPoint with a basic video editing tool (not so different from the capabilities of iMovie) and a image editing tool, which is like a basic, simple version of Adobe Photoshop. Microsoft has also added the ability for users to launch a Web-ex-like live sharing feature with other users. So if you create a slideshow in PowerPoint, you can share it with other people in real-time (which can be run on top of Sharepoint).

Here’s what the video editing tools look like in PowerPoint:

To share a deck with other users, you send an email to individuals with a link. Once they click the link, they will see the slideshow within the browser. This feature can also be used on a mobile phone’s browser. You can also create a slideshow in the desktop version and then publish it to the web version to access it via the browser. The browser version of PowerPoint doesn’t include the video editing features, but most of the functionality of 2008 is included in the browser version.

Excel 2010

Excel spreadsheets can now run in the browser, and similar to PowerPoint, spreadsheets can be published to the browser via the desktop version. The browser version of Excel has limited features, but offers more in-depth functionality than Google Spreadsheets. Microsoft has added a particularly innovative feature called Sparklines, which gives a visual snapshot image of a data trend over time within a cell. You can also share Excel via the browser with other users and set special permissions on who can access the document.

Here’s what the web version of Excel looks like:

Word 2010

Bryant says that the number one piece of feedback from users producing documents on Microsoft Word is that they want to preserve the look and feel of a document created in the desktop version in the browser. Microsoft calls this “document fidelity” and created the browser version of MS Word accordingly. In the browser, documents retain the same look and feel as in the desktop. The browser version still has the “ribbon user interface,” where you can change fonts, size, formatting, styles etc.

An image of the web version of Word:

Microsoft has also updated the desktop version to have collaborative features so that multiple users can be editing a document at once. This collaboration is not available in the web, unfortunately. Microsoft says that users don’t want this feature but this might be a move to protect the Office revenue model.

When two people are editing at the same document (in the desktop version) at the same time, Word will notify each user when there are changes that need to be synced with their document. The copy/paste function of the desktop version has also received an upgrade, where you can see see a live preview for the paste function. The paste function also has an advanced option to create and insert screenshots. To make moving around a long document easier, Word now has a navigation visual pane and section header breakdown which makes it easy to jump from different sections of a document.

Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010 now has a ribbon user interface, like Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The UI of email conversations has been upgraded to look almost like a message tree, allowing users a more visual view of sent and incoming emails. Search functionality has been improved as well, making it much easier to find content. Also, you can preview calendars in emails and choose to ignore selective email conversations.

Sharepoint 2010

Like Outlook, Sharepoint now gets a ribbon UI, making the document hosting product more similar to Microsoft’s flagship products, like Word. You can tag authors of documents now and can share documents and files more easily.

Microsoft says that its browser versions have been tested on all major browsers aside from internet Explorer, including Firefox and Safari. Office 2010 is still being tested and reworked to function on Chrome. Microsoft also announced that it is streamlining the number of Office editions from eight to five. Office Web applications will be available in three ways: through Windows Live, where consumers will have access to Office Web applications at no cost; via on-premises versions; and via Microsoft Online Services, where customers will be able to purchase a subscription of MS Office. Microsoft says Office 2010 will be available in the first half of next year.

The key part of all of this news is the free, browser-based versions of Microsoft’s most popular Office products. Bryant says that Microsoft expects the browser products to be especially popular amongst student, but I think that the web-based applications will be hugely popular in the enterprise space as well, as long as there are security precautions taken to put documents in a secure part of the cloud.

But as more and more businesses are becoming comfortable with trusting cloud environments, Microsoft’s move to the browser could pay off in a big way, especially because it’s so easy to use both the desktop and browser versions of products interchangeably. The more successful Microsoft is in its browser strategy, the more they validate Google’s approach in the space, which will eventually put price pressure on Office.

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Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie faced down two hardball questions in a Q & A wrap to a conversation with Wired editor Steven Levy at the Churchill Club. On one, a much anticipated question about Google’s new realtime collaboration tool Wave, Ozzie had put a lot of thought into the answer. He praised the small startup project as only he could, as a clone of the Groove software he sold to Microsoft while joining the company and taking the CSA reins from Bill Gates.

But he also critiqued the Google effort as “anti-Web”, suggesting the project took on such a hard problem that its complexity might curb its adoption. Nonetheless, he seemed to relish learning from Google’s effort, positioning Live Mesh as a simpler reworking of Groove in the context of integration into the Microsoft OS. For a Silicon Valley audience who probably has paid little notice to Mesh, Ozzie’s careful dissection may spark some deeper attention as Wave exits its early pilot stages and grapples with integration into Google Apps.

The cutesy culture at Google might be coming to an end. The company is finally getting serious by dropping the don’t-blame-us-it’s-only-a-beta label on products that have been around for years. We thought apps like Gmail and Google Docs would be the first to lose the beta label because those are sold to enterprise customers. But Google Finance beat them to it. If you go to Google Finance today, you will see that it has quietly dropped the beta label.

It is about time too. Google Finance launched more than three years ago. By now, it is a fully baked finance site. But Google isn’t making a big deal about the fact that Finance is now a full-fledged product. In fact, it isn’t making a big deal about anything on Google Finance. The Google Finance blog hasn’t been updated since last March.

Maybe Google is keeping quiet about its finance site because, despite going at it for three years and driving traffic straight from Google’s search homepage (ticker symbols pull up stock charts from Google Finance), it hasn’t been able to make much inroads against the most popular stock site out there, Yahoo Finance. According to comScore, Google Finance attracted just 1.4 million unique U.S. visitors in April, compared to Yahoo finance’s 21.7 million. In other words, Yahoo Finance is 15.5 times bigger than Google Finance (see chart below). In the past year, Yahoo Finance added 2.2 million monthly unique users in the U.S. In other words, it added more people than Google Finance’s entire audience. The worldwide numbers show a similar disparity, with Yahoo Finance at 43.5 million uniques vs. 2.4 million for Google Finance.

I find both equally informative, but Yahoo Finance is still my default. Old habits die hard.

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