Microsoft, users hail product launches

SAN FRANCISCO — While Microsoft executives and customers lauded the company’s new products at a launch event on Monday, Microsoft officials acknowledged no software release is perfect and that some developers still yearn for changes.

The company formally launched its Visual Studio 2005 toolset, SQL Server 2005 database, and BizTalk Server 2006 business process software at a dog-and-pony show here. With the feature sets of these products having been revealed exhaustively during the past several years, Microsoft’s primary themes at the event were: readiness to play in large enterprises, customer applications, and reaching out to customers at all levels.

The viability of Microsoft’s software as a deployment option for high-volume enterprise applications has been viewed as an Achilles heel for Microsoft in some circles. But Microsoft officials believe those days are in the past.

“Today, we should be able to completely convince you that there is no job that is too big to run entirely on the Windows [and] Microsoft platform,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.

Officials at bookseller Barnes & Noble spoke of a large-scale data warehousing application developed on SQL Server and Visual Studio. Previously, the company only used Microsoft products for small-scale, departmental usage.

“Some people thought we were crazy” when selecting the Microsoft platform for the application, which requires a four-terabyte database, said Christopher Troia, Barnes & Noble CIO. The application allows Barnes & Noble to track historical inventory, calculate sales rates and make better decisions, he added.

The popular Linux platform was never considered, he said. “We would never look at Linux for something like this. It just doesn’t scale to these levels.”

British music retailer HMV is using a Microsoft application to sell music online. HMV is pleased with the price-performance, said David Cameron, head of software development at HMV Digital. The Windows system permits easy scaling, he said.

Cameron acknowledged that the ubiquity of Windows systems as a customer interface to its digital service weighed into the decision, but it was not the only factor.

“It’s not just the Windows platform that the customers are using, it’s all the DRM [digital rights management] technology … it’s the whole environment that we’re talking about here,” Cameron said.

Microsoft also has been more accommodating in providing access to its handheld technologies than Apple has been with the iPod, according to Cameron.

While Microsoft paraded happy customers at the launch, officials acknowledged some dissatisfaction. “The issues that have been raised are ones that we’ll look at super closely” said David Treadwell, corporate vice president for the U.S. .Net developer platform at Microsoft.

“There’s no such thing as a large software project that’s perfect,” Treadwell said.

A service pack to amend Visual Studio 2005 will be released at some point, but that is part of the normal product release process, according to Microsoft.

One person has raised concerns about a hanging IDE. Microsoft is evaluating the situation, Treadwell said. But John Montgomery, director of product management for Microsoft’s developer division, said the hanging IDE resulted from an improper de-installation of a beta version of Visual Studio 2005.

Rather than griping that Visual Studio 2005 was going out prematurely, some developers have instead chastised Microsoft for excessively withholding the new release, according to Montgomery.

For the next release of Visual Studio, codenamed “Orcas,” Microsoft expects to add support for the planned Windows Vista OS and Office 12 office suite, which are due out in 2006, Treadwell said.

“We’re hoping to make [Orcas] a small release that follows on Vista and Office 12 as quickly as we can,” Treadwell said.

Another feature expected in Orcas is something some bloggers have requested. This feature, nested master pages, provides a mechanism for more easily changing subsections of Web sites, Montgomery said