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Interesting news from MIX2010, IE9, Zune’s Future and more!

Greetings Readers!

I meant to get this post up last week but because I was scrambling to get caught back up on homework after last week's trip to MIX 2010, it didn't happen.  Anyway, I have some very interesting tidbits from MIX that I thought I would pass along.  If you listened to this week's podcast, you likely already have heard most of them.  Anyway, here we go!

With Zune's functionality being a part of the Windows Phone 7 Series devices all the way down to using the same software to sync, I sought out to find out if the Zune still has a future.  The best answer I got came from Todd Brix, Senior Director for Mobile Platform Services Product Management at Microsoft.  Although I don't have the direct quote at this time, I was told that the Zune still has a future and that a new Zune device would be coming out in the relatively near future.  Zune HD 2 perhaps?  Who knows.

During my conversation with Brix, I also asked about what kind of developer restrictions there would be for the Windows Phone 7 Series devices.  Full details should be out in the spring, but I did get the answer that there would be no porn allowed and apps often used for illegal activity would most likely not make it into the app store as well.  So much for having a bittorrent client on the phone.  The approval process is being set up to be very transparent so developers know what is going on at all times and if an app is rejected, why it was rejected.  To me, this sounds like they want to be like Apple, just a little more transparent about why apps are rejected.

Speaking of the phone, the browser on the phone will be based on IE 7.   Also, I was told over a breakfast conversation by a Microsoft employee attending the event that pretty much all of the storage on the device other than your multimedia will be in the cloud as there will be no database on the phone like SQL-Lite or anything.  There were whispers that a 3rd party might bring something like that to the phone but the phone itself will only support storing information on the cloud out of the box.  Personally, I see this as a rather large drawback because you won't be able to access a lot of your data if you can't get on the network compared to something like the Android OS where SQL-Lite is part of the OS developers can store your information locally on your phone instead of only up to the cloud.

Speaking of the cloud, I got a chance to sit down with one of the PMs from the Internet Explorer team and got to have a fascinating discussion with them regarding everything from IE's market share numbers to how they handle reported vulnerabilities.  I found it somewhat interesting that market share, especially the amount of the market that other browsers have didn't seem to worry them at all.  As far as they are concerned, IE 8 has around 30% of the market share which is more than any other browser and they are proud of that.  As far as IE 9 goes, my conversation took place the day before the announcement so I am a little short on juicy details other than that I was told that it would be out when they are satisfied it is done and not before then since you can't rush something like a browser, especially when security is among the most important aspects.

I think that is pretty much all of the news that I found interesting that is getting little or no press, but if I think of more, I will definitely post it.