Elvis Still Hasn’t Left the Building: Ballmer’s Farewell Letter to Microsoft Shareholders

On his seemingly endless farewell tour, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer can cross another one off the list: His final letter to shareholders as the leader of the software giant.

But, unlike this emotional goodbye to the employees of Microsoft two weeks ago, Ballmer’s letter in the 2012 annual report was largely devoid of the same genuine verve or vigor.

In fact, it was a classic box-checker of a missive. Consider (with my asides):

“Fiscal Year 2013 was a pivotal year for Microsoft in every sense of the word.” (You can say that again.)

“We are still in the early days of our transformation, yet we made strong progress in the past year launching devices and services that people love and businesses need.” (Jury=Out.)

“What is a high-value activity? Think of the experiences people have every day that are most important to them — from communicating with a family member and researching a term paper to having serious fun and expressing ideas.” (Every time a new buzzword is declared a consultant gets his fee.)

“[The new organizational restructuring] ensures we have one strategy and work as one team with one set of shared goals.” (Apparently, there can be only One Microsoft.)

“This framework was designed to give valuable insight into our progress in the key transformations we are undertaking in our businesses to drive long-term growth.” (I have no idea what this sentence means in any way, but it sounds impressive.)

“We have seen incredible results in the past decade — delivering more than $200 billion in operating profit. I’m optimistic not only as the CEO but as an investor who treasures his Microsoft stock.” (I have shown you the money, so why won’t Wall Street show me the stock love?)

“Working at Microsoft has been a thrilling experience — we’ve changed the world and delivered record-setting success — and I know our best days are still ahead.” (Elvis has left the building. Sort of. Soon. I promise by Thanksgiving. Ok, maybe by Christmas. I think.)

Here’s the whole thing:

TO OUR SHAREHOLDERS, CUSTOMERS, PARTNERS AND EMPLOYEES:

This is a unique letter for me — the last shareholder letter I will write as the CEO of the company I love. We have always believed that technology will unleash human potential and that is why I have come to work every day with a heart full of passion for more than 30 years.

Fiscal Year 2013 was a pivotal year for Microsoft in every sense of the word.

Last year in my letter to you I declared a fundamental shift in our business to a devices and services company. This transformation impacts how we run the company, how we develop new experiences, and how we take products to market for both consumers and businesses.

This past year we took the first big bold steps forward in our transformation and we did it while growing revenue to $77.8 billion (up 6 percent). In addition, we returned $12.3 billion (up 15 percent) to shareholders through dividends and stock repurchases. While we were able to grow revenue to a record level, our earnings results reflect investments as well as some of the challenges of undertaking a transformation of this magnitude.

With this as backdrop, I’d like to summarize where we are now and where we’re headed, because it helps explain why I’m so enthusiastic about the opportunity ahead.

Our strategy: High-value activities enabled by a family of devices and services

We are still in the early days of our transformation, yet we made strong progress in the past year launching devices and services that people love and businesses need. We brought Windows 8 to the world; we brought consistent user experiences to PCs, tablets, phones and Xbox; and we made important advancements to Windows Server, Windows Azure, Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365. We are proud of what we accomplished this year and continue to be passionate about delivering better devices and services more quickly.

To increase innovation, capability, efficiency and speed we further sharpened our strategy, and in July 2013 we announced we are rallying behind a single strategy as One Microsoft. We declared that Microsoft’s focus going forward will be to create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.

Over time, our focus on high-value activities will generate amazing innovation and new areas of growth. What is a high-value activity? Think of the experiences people have every day that are most important to them — from communicating with a family member and researching a term paper to having serious fun and expressing ideas. In a business setting, high-value activities include experiences such as conducting meetings with colleagues in multiple locations, gaining insight from massive amounts of data and information, and interacting with customers.

Microsoft will enable these types of high-value activities with a family of devices — from both Microsoft and our partners — as well as with our services.

As we go to market, we will primarily monetize our high-value activities by leading with devices and enterprise services. In this model, our consumer services such as Bing and Skype will differentiate our devices and serve as an on-ramp to our enterprise services while generating some revenue from subscriptions and advertising. Enterprise services continue to be an area of great strength, growth and opportunity as businesses of all sizes look to Microsoft to help them move to the cloud, manage a growing number of devices, tap into big data and embrace new social capabilities.

Executing and accelerating

In the past year we took many bold steps forward in executing on our strategy.

First, we are well underway in implementing the new organization structure announced in July. The teams are working together in new and exciting ways. The key change we made is deceptively simple but profoundly powerful: Instead of organizing our teams around individual products, we’ve organized by function, including, for example, engineering, sales, marketing and finance. It ensures we have one strategy and work as one team with one set of shared goals.

Second, in September we announced we are purchasing Nokia’s Devices and Services business — including its smartphone and mobile phone businesses; award-winning engineering and design teams; manufacturing and assembly facilities around the world; and teams devoted to operations, sales, marketing and support. This is a signature event in our transformation and will bring together the best mobile device work of Microsoft and Nokia. It will accelerate our growth with Windows Phone while strengthening our overall device ecosystem and our opportunity.

Third, in September, we also announced a new segment-reporting framework. We have five new reporting segments tightly aligned with our focus on delivering innovative devices and services for both our enterprise and consumer customers. This framework was designed to give valuable insight into our progress in the key transformations we are undertaking in our businesses to drive long-term growth.

As I think about what’s ahead, I’m incredibly optimistic about what Microsoft will deliver. We are accelerating as we bring to market Windows 8.1 PCs and tablets with our partners, Surface 2, Xbox One and new phones; advance our enterprise services including Windows Server, Windows Azure, Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365; and innovate on new high-value activities.

Moving forward

With the decisions we’ve made this year, the strategy we’ve put in place, the organization we’ve designed, the world-class talent we have, and the devices and services we are creating, we are well-positioned to deliver growth and world-changing technology long into the future.

We have seen incredible results in the past decade — delivering more than $200 billion in operating profit. I’m optimistic not only as the CEO but as an investor who treasures his Microsoft stock.

Working at Microsoft has been a thrilling experience — we’ve changed the world and delivered record-setting success — and I know our best days are still ahead.

Thank you for your support.

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
September 27, 2013

By: Unknown On 6:47 AM

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Microsoft Denies Report of Ad Data Being Harvested From Xbox One’s Kinect

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

It’s still a month and a half away from launching, but Microsoft’s next-gen gaming console kicked up another messaging controversy over the weekend when Advertising Age reported that the Kinect camera, mandatorily bundled with the system, could be used to harvest marketing data about users.

But Microsoft is flat-out denying that report, saying it was based on a misinterpretation of marketing and strategy VP Yusuf Mehdi’s on-stage presentation at a marketing conference in Phoenix. The reporter did not interview Mehdi to confirm his interpretation of the speech, a company spokesperson said.

The original report quoted Mehdi (pictured, top) as saying Microsoft’s strategy with the new console is to bridge offline and online worlds: “It’s early days, but we’re starting to put that together in more of a unifying way, and hopefully at some point we can start to offer that to advertisers broadly.” However, the company says that line was in reference to content that can carry over from the Xbox One into platforms like the second-screen companion, SmartGlass.

“For example, just as Xbox SmartGlass allows companion mobile experiences that are synchronous to what is being watched on TV, advertisers could create new experiences unifying their content across devices,” the company said in an emailed statement. “The quote from Yusuf in Ad Age is not in relation to Kinect.”

This sounds plausible because just last week, Microsoft’s Director of Product Planning Albert Penello wrote in a forum Q&A that he was not aware of any Kinect-data-based advertising initiatives.

“[N]obody is working on that,” Penello wrote on NeoGAF. “… [I]f something like that ever happened, you can be sure it wouldn’t happen without the user having control over it. Period.”

Indeed, the company’s statements issued today reiterate that same point: “We have a long-standing commitment to your privacy and will not target ads to you based on any data Kinect collects unless you choose to allow us to do so.”

A spokesperson said Microsoft is “actively seeking a correction” to the original story.

By: Unknown On 2:47 PM

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Give Kinect data to marketers? Microsoft might—but not today

No "active work" on Kinect ad targeting, but that could change in the future. 
by Kyle Orland

Since Microsoft announced that the Kinect would be a central, packaged part of every Xbox One sold, some have expressed concern that Microsoft might use the device to gather information about players for marketing purposes. In recent days, the company has given slightly different responses to that concern, depending on which executive is speaking.

Last Thursday in a NeoGAF thread, Microsoft Director of Product Planning Albert Penello pushed back hard against the idea that Kinect would be collecting marketing data. Penello said he wasn't aware of any active work being done in that area, and he said that if such a feature was introduced, "You can be sure it wouldn't happen without the user having control over it. Period."

A couple of days later, Microsoft Corporate VP for Marketing and Strategy Yusuf Mehdi had a decidedly different focus in remarks he gave to the Association of National Advertisers' "Masters of Marketing" Conference. As Advertising Age reported, Mehdi's speech hinted at the potential for Microsoft to use data from Kinect and general Xbox One use for market research in the future.

"We are trying to bridge some of the world between online and offline," Mehdi said, according to the report. "That's a little bit of a holy grail in terms of how you understand the consumer in that 360 degrees of their life. We have a pretty unique position at Microsoft because of what we do with digital, as well as more and more with television because of Xbox. It's early days, but we're starting to put that together in more of a unifying way, and hopefully at some point we can start to offer that to advertisers broadly."

The two statements aren't necessarily in conflict; even if Microsoft isn't actively working on Kinect data collection, Mehdi and his team may have amorphous plans for such data sharing in the future. And even though a Kinect will be included in every Xbox One package, the camera no longer has to be connected to the system for the console to work, so users can easily opt out of any Kinect-based data collection just by declining to plug the device in.

Back in March, an Xbox Live advertising developer at Microsoft said in an interview that advertisers get a "slightly more limited set" of data from Kinect than game developers do, because "the company is very keen on protecting the user from any sort of abuse." Writing on NeoGAF, Penello referenced that interview as evidence that the Kinect could be used in targeted advertising, but not that it wouldbe.

By: Unknown On 9:36 AM

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AllThingsD in the Media: Microsoft’s Next CEO (Maybe) and a New Video Chat App

Another busy week of tech news — and when was the last time it wasn’t a busy week? — meant AllThingsD’s personnel was equally busy in the media.

Early in the week, on Sept. 30, Kara Swisher was on CNBC to talk about the still-unfolding story about the possibility that Alan Mullaly, the current CEO of automaker Ford, may be in line to replace Steve Ballmer as the next CEO of software giant Microsoft. Swisher was first to report the news that Mullaly is being considered for the job.

Also, Walt Mossberg was on The Wall Street Journal’s Digits to talk about the new video chat app Spin.

By: Unknown On 12:31 AM

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Rumor: Microsoft offering to drop Windows Phone license fee for HTC

Form an orderly queue for your free Windows Phone license. 
by Jason Inofuentes

Just a mock-up, but awfully pretty.

Aurich Lawson

It's hard to see an area at Microsoft that isn't going through some degree of transition, and Windows Phone is definitely no exception. Having carved out a small piece of the market, Microsoft has taken some big steps to improve the position of its still fledgling mobile operating system. Its first step was to develop a close relationship with Nokia; the second step seems to have been to buy Nokia's handset division outright. But that move has spawned much speculation that Microsoft's handset partners are disgruntled and considering eliminating their Windows Phone portfolio. According to a report from Bloomberg, Microsoft may be making a big move to stem the tide by cutting or eliminating its licensing fee.

Bloomberg reports that conversations between HTC and Microsoft have revolved around the idea of HTC putting Windows Phone onto its Android handsets as an alternative. It's unclear how this would work, but it could mean that users would choose a handset model and then choose an operating system, similar to being able to choose between Windows and Linux in some notebook models. The prospect of a dual boot solution seems ludicrous and impossible to implement, but Bloomberg's reporting leans strongly in that direction. As enticement to pursue this strategy, the report states that Microsoft has offered to cut or eliminate the licensing fee.

Whether it's a dual boot solution or something more sensible, the move would require Microsoft to broaden the supported hardware specifications of Windows Phone to support the higher-end hardware that's de rigueur in Android handsets. Evidence for such an expansion of hardware support can be gleaned from the near certainty that this fall's GDR3 update to Windows Phone will include options for 1080p displays.

Microsoft has long derided the free operating system strategy, even going so far as to brag that licensing issues with Android have resulted in handset manufacturers needing to negotiate licensing deals with it—effectively saying that Android isn't free, it's just that Microsoft collects the money. For Microsoft to eliminate the licensing fee for Windows Phone would be a huge shift in strategy and might help revive the somewhat dormant Windows Phone lines from the likes of Samsung or HTC. At the same time, it would help repair any damaged relationships that Microsoft may have incurred in becoming a first-party handset manufacturer with the purchase of Nokia.

HTC may be a ripe target for such a deal. Its unaudited quarterly results, announced yesterday, demonstrate how tough things have been financially. After laying off a big chunk of its US staff, HTC reported a quarterly loss for the first time in the company's history. While it has had some design wins with the HTC One and One mini handsets, it has also had its share of weak spots, including the HTC First handset, which it made in partnership with Facebook. The last Windows Phone handset that HTC released was the HTC 8XT, a decidedly mid-range handset that hasn't delighted users the same way last year's HTC 8X did.

At press time, neither HTC nor Microsoft had any comment regarding these rumors, though Microsoft's representative did stress that conversations with their device partners are confidential. We will report further as this story develops.

By: Unknown On 8:29 AM

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VIDEO: Microsoft Bings on a challenge to Google in search

Jefferson Graham previews Google's new Search and sees how it stacks up to Bing.

It's Microsoft vs Google in search: Bing is vastly improved, but Google, well, out Googles it.

by Jefferson Graham

Jenny Cameron prefers Google to Bing. (Photo: By Sean Fujiwara)

Microsoft has its work cut out for it with its provocative "Bing It On" search challenge.

Say this three times to a co-worker, and gauge the reaction: "People prefer Bing over Google for the Web's top searches." Skeptical, most likely.

The words are Microsoft's tag line in a marketing campaign for Bing, the No. 2 search engine after Google.

Google had 67% market share in July, compared with 18% for Bing, according to measurement firm ComScore Media Metrix. But its influence is growing: Bing now provides search results made with the Siri digital assistant on Apple's iPhone and iPad, and provides search for Facebook and Yahoo.

Meanwhile, Google recently celebrated its 15th birthday by announcing refinements in its search engine, so we staged our own "Bing It On" test and took a deep dive into search-land.

First, the bottom line: Bing is way, way better than you might think, vastly improved since its 2009 launch. It's a very respectable second opinion, and if you were forced to only use Bing for searches, you'd be well served.

But Google is, well, Google — home of the driverless car, Internet-connected glasses and very simply, the greatest search engine ever. It is not just a way of life for most computer users, it is also — at least for this columnist — far ahead of Microsoft, especially in mobile.

Bing's challenge campaign (Photo: Microsoft)

Both Google and Bing get the majority of their results from links — the more folks point to an article or website, the more likely it is to be at the top of results. Both tap into the vast array of online databases — Wikipedia, IMDb, YouTube, Amazon and elsewhere — to add additional information.

Google's newly enhanced results also look at what it calls the "Knowledge Graph," a massive database with 570 million items, connected 18 billion ways, according to Google.

The results understand questions — "What time is it in Tokyo?" — and conversations that begin with a question and continue with follow-up queries you can ask in shorthand.

For instance, we asked Google to show us photos of the Eiffel Tower, and continued with "What year was it built?" and "Where is it?"

Google got all three on the money.

It can now do comparisons — "What's the difference between olive oil and butter?" — and show the calories, carbs and total fat for each.

Additionally, the Knowledge Graph pulls from your various Google tools, as long as you're signed into Google.

You may or may not like this, depending upon how much personal information you want Google to have. But once you're signed in, Google can pull from your Gmail, Google+ social network, Picasa photo library and more.

In our tests, we asked Google to yank "my sunset photos" (from G+) and find my upcoming flight to New York (from Gmail), and both worked spot on.

Google found Jefferson Graham's upcoming flight, since he was signed into Gmail.(Photo: By Sean Fujiwara)

In past USA TODAY pieces about Google search, we've heard from readers who were uncomfortable having Google know even more about them. They found Bing to be less intrusive.

Reader Rich Steinberg, a Bing user, said "I avoid using Google as much as possible. I don't trust them at all."

Reader Mark Jenkins said he switched to Bing, because he didn't like how Google tries to jump-start his queries by offering responses before he's finished typing the question. "Bing makes suggestions but does not start something until I say go."

Here by the beach, most consumers we spoke with were die-hard Google users.

"I only use Google," said Jenny Cameron, from Bakersfield, Calif. "It's my default."

Angela Stephens, visiting from Georgia, switches immediately back to Google when Bing shows up on her computer. "I never use Bing," she says.

But Gwen Speas of Oregon does. Her Bing search is part of her MSN home page, and she likes it. "I use Bing, but I say Google," she says. "I'm actually Binging."

Beyond the "Bing It On," campaign, Microsoft is working hard to woo users from Google by paying them. The Bing "Rewards" program distributes retail discounts and freebies, similar to a frequent-flier program. A massive Bing searcher (every two searches is worth a point) could get a free Redbox DVD rental (110 points), $25 off an Expedia flight (250 points) or a $5 Starbucks card (525 points).

THE NEW GOOGLE SEARCH

Google suggested we try the searches on mobile, where voice-activated search has gotten much attention from the company. The results — from flights, photos, olive oil vs. butter and a query about how many calories there are in a grape — handily beat Apple's Siri in speed and relevance.

Bing's app (on iOS, Android and Windows Phone,) paled in comparison:

• The Eiffel Tower query: Bing showed hotels near Eiffel Tower and a Wikipedia article about its history.

• "Show me my sunset photos." Results: Online sunset pictures.

On the plus side, when we asked Google and Bing a trick question — "How old is Punky Brewster?" — " Bing got it right, and Google didn't.

(Bing responded with the age of the actress who played Punky on the 1980s sitcom — Soleil Moon Frye — while Google responded with a link to a Wikipedia entry for the TV show as the top result.

So, it's great that Microsoft is spending lots of money and energy on improving its search results. No one wants to live in a world where Google's results are the only option.

While the company clearly overreached in claiming that people prefer Bing to Google (just look at the market-share data) Bing has morphed into a fine search engine.

Complaints about Google search largely have to do with privacy. Maybe you don't want Google to know what you're thinking, or fish through your e-mails and pull up your flight info, or give you search results before you've even finished typing.

That said, if it's basic information you're looking for, you want it to be fast and accurate, and are willing to surrender parts of your life to Google, well, it's still far and away the best game in town.

By: Unknown On 12:39 PM

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Microsoft investors call for Bill Gates to step down as Microsoft chairman

Three top 20 investors think that Gates will block adoption of new strategies. 

by Peter Bright

Reuters is reporting that three of Microsoft's 20 largest investors want company founder Bill Gates to step down as chairman of the board.

The investors claim that Gates as chairman blocks the adoption of new strategies, and similarly that he will tie the hands of whoever is chosen to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO. Gates' role on the committee to find Ballmer's replacement is cited as evidence for this.

The Microsoft board has already said that Ballmer's Devices and Services initiative will continue under the new CEO.

There is also concern that Gates is more interested in his charitable work and that his influence is more significant than his shareholding should imply. Gates is still the largest single shareholder, owning about 4.5 percent of the company, but he is set to reduce his stake to zero by 2018.

It's hard to know what "new strategies" Gates might be blocking. Microsoft, lest one forget, is a company that became powerful on the back of selling perpetual software licenses to hardware companies, enterprises, and end users.

Over the last decade or so, this traditional model has been joined by numerous others: subscription-based Software-as-a-Service (Office 365), usage-based Infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service (Azure), advertising (Bing), consumer-oriented living room hardware (Xbox), limited consulting and enterprise support (Enterprise Services), and vertically integrated hardware offerings (Surface, and imminently, Nokia).

There's no strategy that Microsoft hasn't tried, and while not every approach has been an overnight success (the Surface write-down was embarrassing, and while Bing is heading in the right direction, it's still not profitable), the claim that there's some substantial impediment to implementing new strategies seems ill-supported. This is true even when those new strategies risk upsetting existing businesses (Office 365 could jeopardize sales of Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync) or existing partners (Surface and the Nokia purchase may well displease the hardware OEMs).

At the risk of sounding cynical about the nature of corporate investors, one might think that the problem is not a lack of willingness to engage in new strategies but rather a lack of willingness to engage in an old one: selling off bits of the company. There have been observers calling for Microsoft to, for example, sell off Bing (in spite of its large and increasing strategic importance to Windows and Windows Phone), sell off Xbox, and give up entirely on the consumer market (in spite of such companies as Apple and, er, Microsoft using the consumer market as their entry into the enterprise market in the first place).

Such sell-offs are designed to improve the next quarter's results and bump up the share price, at which point the investor can safely dump the shares and then sit back and watch as the company's strategic plans are wholly derailed and long-term irrelevance assured.

But of course, the bright minds of Wall Street would never push for such a thing, would they?

Courtesy: arstechnica

By: Unknown On 11:59 AM

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Microsoft: “System processing” takes up 10 percent of Xbox One GPU time

Game developers will be able to use that GPU time in the future, though. 

by Kyle Orland

The Xbox One's ability to run up to four apps in the background (or on the side via Snap mode) during gameplay and to switch from a game to those apps almost instantaneously obviously comes at some cost to the system's maximum theoretical gaming performance. Now, thanks to an interview with Xbox technical fellow Andrew Goossen over at Digital Foundry we have some idea of the scale of that performance cost.

"Xbox One has a conservative 10 percent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing," Goossen told the site. "This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode."

It's important to note that additional processing time for the next-generation Kinect sensor is included in that 10 percent number. Still, setting aside nearly a tenth of the GPU's processing time to support background execution of non-gaming apps is a bit surprising.

During a recent demonstration of the Xbox One interface, Microsoft Director of Product Planning Albert Penello showed me how running multiple apps on the side or behind a concurrent game didn't lead to any noticeable degradation in gaming performance. Indeed, setting aside a good chunk of GPU processing to explicitly handle nongaming apps ensures that gaming performance doesn't bounce up and down depending on what may or may not be running in the background.

The downside, of course, is that developers are unable to use that reserved chunk of processing power. Not to worry, though; Goossen says that Microsoft plans to open up this power to developers in the future in a way that doesn't impact the system's background functions.

"The GPU hardware scheduler is designed to maximize throughput and automatically fills 'holes' in the high-priority processing," Goossen said. "This can allow the system rendering to make use of the ROPs for fill, for example, while the title is simultaneously doing synchronous compute operations on the compute units."

Sony's PlayStation 4 also allows for non-gaming apps to run in the background while games are playing and for instant switching between these apps, but the company has not gone into detail about what kind of impact this functionality has on the system's processing load.

Digital Foundry also has more from a wide-ranging interview with Goossen and Xbox hardware architect Nick Baker, touching on everything from RAM bandwidth and pixel shading to compute units and clock speed. It's well worth a read for anyone looking for a deep dive into the raw hardware power of Microsoft's next system.

Courtesy: arstechnica

By: Unknown On 10:16 AM

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Microsoft touts browser gaming with Web-based relaunch of Win95’s Hover

Nostalgic revamp shows power of games built for Web standards. 

by Kyle Orland

Microsoft is using a bit of Windows-95-era nostalgia to try to once again convince Web users and developers that gaming inside of a browser can be performance-competitive with native applications. The company today released a browser-based update to Hover, the hovercraft capture-the-flag game that was hidden in the "Fun Stuff" folder included on the original Windows 95 CDs (along with videos for Weezer's "Buddy Holly" and the trailer for the movie Rob Roy).

The new game plays almost exactly like the classic freebie that has maintained something of a cult following among players to this day, with stages that match the original right down to wall and item placement. New features include a selection of four different hovercraft, each with different movement and strength statistics, and an online multiplayer mode that allows up to eight people to compete by passing around a standard URL.

READ MORE: Web Marketplace Listia Raises $9 Million

But more than an effort to revive a largely defunct gaming brand, the new Hover is part of Microsoft's efforts to create "real-world sites that are trying to showcase what the Web can be," according to Roger Capriotti, head of product marketing for Internet Explorer.

"Tablet browsing today has taken a back seat to apps," Capriotti said. "Think of the last time someone came up to you with an iPad or an Android device saying, 'Hey guys, you have to look at this site.' Most likely they're showing you an app instead." This is despite the fact that most of the time spent on PCs and tablets these days is spent in a browser window," Capriotti said. "Hover is a great way to show to the consumer that you can have this great performance in a website that you'd usually think of as an app."

Microsoft isn't alone in this effort. Both Mozilla and Chrome have developed numerous experimentsshowing that their browsers can run capable games without plug-ins like Flash or the Unity Web player. And Microsoft itself has worked with other developers on Web ports of games like Contre Jourand Atari Arcade to show off Internet Explorer's Web gaming chops.

Capriotti sees IE's efforts in this space as more serious and long-lasting than the competition. "I don't think of this as an experiment," he said. "Not to take a shot at the folks at Chrome, but it's more than a proof of concept," he said. "It's a playable game. It's more than a science project, it's much more of a real-world site. One of the ways to get consumers excited about what a browser can be and what a website can be is to show them a site they'll come back to again and again, as opposed to a one-and-done [site]."

READ MORE: Apple: iMessage problems to be fixed in upcoming iOS 7 update

Of course, using open Web standards like HTML5 means that Hover works in any modern browser, not just the Internet Explorer that Microsoft is trying to show off. Still, Capriotti says the experience shines brightest on IE, especially in a tablet environment.

"There's nothing we do specifically [to make it work better in IE], but particularly if you play this on a tablet or a touch device, you'll see how fluid it is when you're using it with touch, and that's kind of the easiest way to distinguish us," he said. "'Touch' is becoming the new 'fast,' so to speak, because people haven't had the fast, fluid, stick-to-your-finger performance on an Android device, even running chrome."

While browser games bring easy cross-platform compatibility and ease-of-access without a download, they have historically come at a performance cost that's apparent on the higher end of the gaming spectrum. That's getting less and less true these days, Capriotti said, with modern browsers that can make full use of hardware acceleration and WebGL standards, a fact that Hover is meant to demonstrate to other developers.

Hover does indeed run quite smoothly on both my gaming desktop rig and on an Windows 8 tablet, but even with a new coat of paint since Windows 95, the polygons and textures being pushed aren't exactly taxing for a decent modern device (unlike, say Epic's browser port of Unreal Engine 3 that runs in pure HTML5 and Javascript). I also found it worrisome that the game only runs in a small section of the browser window, with no full-screen option, though Capriotti says this was a Web design decision and had nothing to do with improving graphics performance by limiting the display area.

"Hover is easily something that could be developed as a Windows application in the Windows store one day," Capriotti said. "The more interesting thing for us today is to showcase what you can do through the browser with modern Web standards. Folks today think that kind of performance, that kind of experience is solely available to apps... at the end of the day, there's an opportunity to have both."

Courtesy: arstechnica

By: Unknown On 7:25 AM

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