StevieBallz

People can still develop for free using VS2010 Express on Windows 8. I don’t see the really big issue there.

I’ll try to refrain from ever mentioning it again ;)

Students get free Access to the Pro Version through Microsoft’s Dreamspark program. I don’t know of too many OSS projects that would use VS Express. It’s just missing too much functionality – especially Source Management.

They are not killing the Desktop. They don’t provide updated free development tools which are mainly used by people first starting to write programs because of their limitations.

And obviously Microsoft wants those people to start building Metro Apps as that currently is where there is a need for new Apps.

Of course you currently need the Desktop as there are currently only a few Apps and those are mainly labeled “App Preview” meaning that they don’t represent what will be available in the end. They’re mainly trying to give people an insight into how certain function should be implemented, etc.. but don’t give you all the functionality that is going to be there.

There the confusion goes. WinRT is the programming environment for Metro-Apps, Windows RT is the ARM-version of Windows 8. Windows RT won’t allow any Desktop-Apps aside from Explorer, Internet Explorer and Office.

Office btw. is developed using Native Code. The only big Microsoft Application written using .Net ist VS2010+ (they’re also using WPF there).

For real projects people don’t use VS Express anyways because it lacks several important features. Starting with extensibility, multiple project support in one Solution, Source Code Management Connectivity – the list goes on and on. It’s really more of a “get started”-offering. And for those kinds of people Microsoft seems to be trying to make them learn WinRT instead of having them learn Desktop first and Metro later.

And given that the differences between .Net 4.0 (VS2010) and .Net 4.5 (VS2012) are not that big and that as far as I know there are not to many new features for native development in VS2012 this is actually pretty much a non-issue.

Microsoft cut development of VB6 ages ago and people are still using it.

Samsung built Bada even though there was Android. Samsung is now working on Tizen even though there is Android. They might opt to launch some Samdroid devices without completely cutting lose from Google just to see how that works out for them.
It’s not that much different from what Amazon did with the Kindle Fire and given Sammy’s other OSs it’s far from being completely against their business practices.
This is still not to say that they will but if one of the OEMs is going to do this I bet it is Samsung.

As far as reports go there was no percentage in the agreement but a sum of 5 to 15 $ (depending on whose rumors one believes) per device was given back when licensing to HTC was concerned. This seems to apply irrespective of the actual price of the device.

Aside from that a complete cross licensing for all Android and Chrome based products on HTCs side is done. The details aren’t known.

Barnes & Noble before entering into an agreement with Microsoft told that Microsoft was asking for a similar amount as licensing a Microsoft Mobile OS would have cost them (which made them go to court because they alleged Microsoft of a breach of it’s Anti-Trust obligation but this was thrown out by the court prior to even opening a full investigation). This lends credit to the range that was reported for HTC.

No – the end price of the product, which is one point that made the whole thing sound so crazy. Otherwise Microsoft would have to sell 800 million windows licenses a year (if you’d use an average price of 200 $ / license which is more expensive than what OEMs pay for those licenses).

Well – if those 2.5% are ok under FRAND is which is disputed in the Microsoft vs. Moto case in the US. Up to now it seems to have developed to a point where Moto acknowledge that 2.5% might have been non FRAND but that Microsoft could have sent a counter offer so they might have ended up with a FRAND agreement.

And then came the injunction business in Germany.

We’ll see how things develop further – it’s going to stay interesting.

One should be cautious with the conclusions drawn by fosspatents’s Florian Mueller but it’s pretty harsh to say that one should not report on rulings by courts because he was the one to publizize those.

2,5% of the product end price. That would be 2,5% of the Windows Retail Box, but also 2,5% of the end price of a PC that comes with Windows preinstalled. Or 2,5% of every X-Box sold.

As Microsoft stated that would be ~ 4 billion dollars/year. Microsoft is currently paying 7.5 million dollars a year to license another over 2500 patents on the h264 video standard to the MPEG LA – to put things in perspective.

In the end it’s down to the courts to decide if those 2.5% of the end price is FRAND or not (it seems pretty much in comparison to me).

You’re right although I don’t see a way in which they could argue this as this time Microsoft sued over those patents first in Germany so they are not interfering with a US lawsuit that is already ongoing.

On the other hand: I’m no lawyer and they seem to be increasingly creative when it comes to those kinds of tricks.

Microsoft does use Motorola’s patents. That fact isn’t disputed by Microsoft. The problem for Microsoft is that Motorola officially comitted to licensing these patents under FRAND terms. As Microsoft’s patents are not comitted in a similar fashion Microsoft’s patents are viewed as more valueable which is why Microsoft in it’s other dealings with OEMs did a cross-licensing but in addition they have to pay a certain fee per device.

The basic difference it boils down to is FRAND or not FRAND.

It’s actually a little more complicated. Microsoft wanted to license the patents which are necessary to implement h264 from Motorola under FRAND terms (something to which Motorola had commited). When in Microsoft’s view Motorola offered a license that was in no way FRAND Microsoft went to court in the US to get the matter settled.

Motorola then went to Germany some time later and tried and got an injunction based on those patents. Due to a particularity of the geman legal system Motorola would have to post a security bond and demand compliance by Microsoft in order for the injunction to become active.

Microsoft prior to the German ruling convinced the US judge that Motorola was trying to gain leverage over Microsoft in the US case by trying to enforce their patents in another country to create facts that would irreversible no matter the outcome of the US litigation that had come first. Therefore Motorola got banned from enforcing the german preliminary injunstion – at least until the main proceedings in germany are over or the main proceedings in the US legal case are over.

Therefore I believe it highly unlikely that a US court will help Motorola against Microsoft’s injunction as Microsoft’s concerned patents are not pledged to be licensed under FRAND terms.

I currently have one “App” for which the current state is pretty annoying – my Hotmail inbox. It is displayed on the Lock screen but it is not pinned to the start screen. Looking through the app list there is no indication that there’s new mail :(

Interestingly it seems it worked faster than it displayed the items. I could enter cmd and press enter and the Command Line would appear immediately. If I waited for the icon to display prior to that I’d have to wait some seconds.

The interesting part is that this also applied for non-exact matches…

The problem I see most commonly cited is that you would have to move the mouse to the corner, then wait for the “tooltip” to appear and can only then click on it. But it suffices to move the mouse to the corner and just click (doesn’t matter if the image hint already appeared or not).

That would mean that all Apps would have to be launched that implement the search contract and to standardize how they were to display their results. I could go along if you said applications and documents at the same time.

There was no Start Orb in the Metro-Apps so by switching to hot corners they tried to go for a consistent behavior, no matter what kind of app you were currently running.

Still the desktop should be better integrated. I’d love to see the possibility of desktop apps implementing the Contracts – especially ShareTo

For whatever reason this does not work in Windows XP using the Classic Desktop Theme (which I’m stuck with at work). Whatever made them position the Start-Button some pixels from the corner is beyond me…

To be fair one of the most common arguments is that when the startmenu is fullscreen it is more distracting as you visually lose all clues to what you were doing just now.

I don’t see that problem currently but I’m only using the Consumer Preview on an Asus EP121 tablet (my usb-wifi doesn’t work with the Consumer Preview on my PC).

They pay for billing, they pay for hosting, etc. The question is how big of a percentage that is of their overall sales? For small Apps like on Smartphones those 30% might actually relate to the cost they would incur otherwise but for big desktop applications like Photoshop this will likely be different.

I’d love to see at least the possibility for desktop applications to implement contracts, even if it was just the Share-Contract. The Problem with Application Deployment seems to be that most applications aren’t simply dropped into their install folder with attached config files but rather write to the registry, install DLLs into the system (which Metro-Apps aren’t allowed to do – they’re separated), etc.

But I guess Microsoft also wants to incentivise building Metro Apps so there are Apps for the ARM-based tablets.

To clarify: when you edit a tile you can delete a Metro-App or unpin any App from Start.

Swiping on the start-screen from top or bottom (or right clicking with the mouse) brings up an “All programs” option where you find bascially all Application-Shortcuts grouped together in categories as they were in the old start menu.