How serious is Microsoft about HTML5?

A few weeks ago, Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer group, went on the record declaring the company's support for HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9. The Internet community generally applauded his remarks, although there was some consternation about his statement that IE9 will only support H.264 video. However, one point was generally ignored: IE9 will only be available for Vista and Windows 7, not for Windows XP, nor for any other desktop platform. It's not even clear that a full implementation of IE9 will be available for Windows Phone 7, which may well become a tablet platform in the future.

Microsoft claims that IE9 won't work on any platform besides Vista and Windows 7 because of the "magical" acceleration features they're using in the operating system. Bulls#!t. Firefox, Chrome and Opera are all cross-platform and all work much better than IE8. The reason that Microsoft will only support Vista and Windows 7 is that, as usual, they want to encourage upgrades to Windows 7. Thus, Microsoft is all for HTML5, but only if you buy Windows 7. If you're running another operating system, they won't support HTML5 at all.

Microsoft's corner of the universe keeps getting smaller and smaller, largely through the company's own actions.

Is Microsoft protecting the wrong thing?

For decades, Microsoft's strategy has been to protect sales of Windows and Office at all costs. Those are the company's revenue and profit centers, and Microsoft's inability to make money online or with its consumer electronic business has made protecting Windows and Office a self-fulfilling prophecy--they need to protect their cash cows because they can't build new ones.

I'm one of those people who's still running Windows XP, because Microsoft is basically requiring XP users to "forklift upgrade" if they want to go to Windows 7. I run Windows 7 on my netbook and it works fine, because I was able to start with a bare machine. I've used my current XP system for four years and shudder to think about buying a new system and reinstalling software from scratch.

There are a lot of people in the same boat, but Microsoft is showing all of us the friendly middle finger. The trend started with experimental products like Pivot--sorry, but they only work on Vista or 7. Yesterday, Microsoft made the Windows Phone 7 Series SDK available for free download, but even though the instructions say that it'll work on Windows XP, it doesn't. The installer demands Vista or better. Then, Microsoft released the preview version of IE 9, and again, it requires Vista or 7.

If I was so motivated to get a new system and reinstall all my software in order to use these new Microsoft products, I'd do it, but I'm not, and I don't see anything there that would justify spending either the money or the time. I'll happily continue working on Android on XP and the iPhone on my Mac. The Microsoft Office team was able to figure out how to get Office 2010 to work perfectly fine on XP. Microsoft should be looking forward to build new user bases and new businesses, not backward to protect Windows revenues at all costs.

Update: I've come up with a personal solution, which is to install Windows 7 under Parallels Desktop on my iMac. It seems ridiculous that my most economical solution to Microsoft's "push Windows 7" strategy is to run it on a Mac.

What's the right tablet operating system?

Yesterday, everyone who watched the Academy Awards in the U.S. saw the first TV commercial for the iPad. Today, Adobe and HP released a video showing Adobe Flash and Air running on HP's Windows 7-based tablet. Tablets haven't been this popular since Moses, but I have a sense that we may be going in the wrong direction.

This is turning into a "Goldilocks" situation: Scaling up the iPhone operating system for the iPad is too little, but scaling down Windows 7 for the HP Slate is too much. Both approaches have a big benefit, in that the hundreds of thousands of applications that work on the two respective operating systems will run on their respective tablets--just not well. In the case of the iPad, scaling up iPhone applications for the bigger screen will lead to some clumsy user interface compromises. As for Windows 7, it's going to be very tempting for software developers to add a flimsy tablet layer to their existing applications and call them tablet applications, again with severely compromised user interfaces.

So, what's my crazy tablet OS suggestion? A few weeks ago, I bought a Zune HD. (Let the snickering commence.) The Zune HD user interface is the basis for Windows Phone 7 Series, and it actually works very well with touch input. (The keyboard sucks, but I think that cramming an onscreen keyboard into the Zune HD took things a little too far.) The visual and kinesthetic metaphors in the Zune HD are worlds better than layering a touch interface onto Windows 7.

Microsoft's Courier concept may tie into this as well, but Courier is very heavily dependent on its two-screen design; many of its user interface metaphors wouldn't map well into a single-screen tablet. I'd be very excited to see a Zune HD-like user interface on a tablet, and I think that it would give Apple a serious run for its money.