There appears to be a shift taking place in the PC industry: the move from 32-bit to 64-bit PCs.

We've been tracking the change by looking at the percentage of 64-bit PCs connecting to Windows Update, and have seen a dramatic increase in recent months. The installed base of 64-bit Windows Vista PCs, as a percentage of all Windows Vista systems, has more than tripled in the U.S. in the last three months, while worldwide adoption has more than doubled during the same period.  Another view shows that 20% of new Windows Vista PCs in the U.S. connecting to Windows Update in June were 64-bit PCs, up from just 3% in March. Put more simply, usage of 64-bit Windows Vista is growing much more rapidly than 32-bit. Based on current trends, this growth will accelerate as the retail channel shifts to supplying a rapidly increasing assortment of 64-bit desktops and laptops.

64-bit PCs running 64-bit editions of Windows Vista typically have 4GB of memory or more. Compared to 32-bit systems, which top out at around 3GB of memory, 64-bit PCs can offer added responsiveness when running a lot of applications at the same time and have the potential for greater performance and new experiences as next-generations applications are written to take advantage of this new platform.

What started out as a gradual (some would say "glacial") movement toward 64-bit PCs, driven primarily by technology enthusiasts, seems to have turned into a swift transition, likely fueled by the falling cost of memory and consumers' desire to get the most out of their PCs.

This change begs a few questions:

Is the 64 bit market ready to go mainstream?

Will consumers realize the benefits from larger chips and 4GB or more of memory?

The answer to both of these questions is yes - but a qualified yes.

Preconfigured 64-bit PCs obtained from retailers or PC manufacturers should work quite well.  This is in stark contrast to the experience of many technology enthusiasts who built their 64-bit PC from scratch and may have had to scour the Web looking for drivers.  So, unless you really love to tinker with your PC, we suggest you buy a pre-built 64-bit PC at retail or directly from a PC manufacturer.

Beyond the box, you also need to consider the hardware peripherals and software programs you plan on using with your new PC. Any hardware or software product displaying the ‘Works with Windows Vista' or ‘Certified for Windows Vista' logo must be compatible with both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista in order to warrant the use of the logo. If you don't see the logo, visit the Windows Vista Compatibility Center and check the 64-bit compatibility status. Hardware and software vendors continue to test and improve their products. Please note that the Windows Vista Compatibility Center is currently in beta. In some cases it is possible that a device may be marked as not compatible when in fact it is. I recommend that you also check with the device manufacturer to see if the compatibility status of your desired device has changed.

On the performance front, 64-bit PCs can provide a more responsive experience when running many applications simultaneously. Websites such as Bit.Tech.Net and Tom's Hardware have published performance benchmarks detailing some of the improvements realized from running the 64-bit PCs. In addition, PC Accelerators built into Windows Vista, such as Windows SuperFetch, improve performance by keeping commonly used programs in memory, even when the program is closed. More memory capacity on 64-bit PCs allows SuperFetch to do its job more efficiently.  

But if you only use your PC for a few tasks, and rarely do them at the same time, then you're unlikely to realize a measurable performance benefit today.  Of course, buying extra capacity for your future, unplanned needs is always worth considering.

In the future, we expect both compatibility and performance of 64-bit PCs to continue to improve. Most hardware devices have 64-bit drivers today and most software products work unmodified because of the 32-bit emulation technology in 64-bit Windows Vista (called WOW64). But there are some gaps, especially in the long tail of the market, but we expect rapid improvement now that 64-bit PCs are getting so popular.

Over time we'll see more 64-bit-optimized programs hit the market, which promise dramatic performance and experience improvements. A few key ones, like Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop and Sony Vegas Pro video editing software, are due to be released this fall. If you're a software or hardware developer, visit our 64-bit readiness page to learn more about 64-bit compatibility and optimization.

This week has been all about the bodies at b5. Director of Branded Content, Darren O, forgot his age for a brief intoxicated moment, and twisted his ankle in a football match on Friday night (see awesome photo).

In other news, in a recent Skype conversation about BWE, Gab said she could probably beat Darcie in an arm wrestling match. We’ll see….

Today we’re releasing an update to the Live Search home page that received positive feedback from customers in trials last month. The new design features background images that will change frequently, augmented with what we call “hotspots.” These interactive areas highlight parts of the image and help you explore search results related to the highlighted area. Users who have tested this new home page have found it both engaging and a great place to start a search.

New images and hotspots

In our release last spring we laid the foundation for this page. In this home page release we’ve added background home page images that we’ll change regularly and hotspots that click through to great search results. Hotspots gleam to the user when the page first loads then fade into the image. Users can discover them again by moving their mouse over them, revealing details about the image and a link to a related search result. To ensure that users can start a search immediately, our base page loads first with the images and hotspots loading quickly afterward. Users on a broadband connection may not notice the two steps. Today we’re releasing the new home page in the U.S. only, with more markets to follow in the future.

A great place to start a search

Our goal for the home page is to find the best way to enhance users’ sense of discovery, surprise, and delight while balancing engineering realities for a great user experience.

Extensive user research and exploration of many concepts with our customers pointed us in the direction for this design. We want the page to be a great place to start a search and also to intrigue and inform as well. We think hotspots will help users discover parts of Live Search they might not know while not distracting from the core purpose of the page â€” searching.

We think the new design is a great start, but there’s more to come, with lots of interesting directions that we’ll be exploring in our next releases of the home page.

Chris Rayner, Senior Product Manager, and Zach Gutt, Senior Program Manager
Live Search User Experience team

Last week we showed a video of the Mojave Experiment to a small group of folks here on campus.  Today we are excited to share the results with the public.

For those new to the Mojave Experiment, it's a focus group effort we initiated a few weeks ago. We interviewed and polled 120 participants in San Francisco, in hopes of better understanding everyday users' perceptions of Windows Vista and seeing whether there really is a gap between perception and reality. We wanted to see how people reacted to Windows Vista when they were not aware they were seeing Windows Vista. We recorded our discussions, and today you can see them for yourself.

Some other facts about the research: 

• The focus group took place over three days in San Francisco and was conducted earlier this month.
• All participants were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista. Respondents were chosen from the focus group organizer's database, called at random, but then selected based on having a low perception of Vista (<5 rating on a scale of 1-10).
• The participants were given a demo by a trained retail salesperson - geared towards the experiences they seemed most interested in following a series of interviews. While the retail salesperson drove the demo, it was geared by the interests and direction of the participant.
• We did not use some geeked out or custom built PC. We used an HP Pavilion DV2500. It had 2GB of RAM and was running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz. The OS was a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate.
• Of the 120 respondents polled, on a scale of 1:10 where 10 was the highest rating, the average pre-rating for Windows Vista was 4.4. After they saw the demo, respondents rated Mojave an average of 8.5.

Finally, some people have asked if Mojave is the big marketing project we're working on - it's not. The Mojave Experiment is just that: an experiment we conducted on the fly that yielded interesting results. We're publishing the video today because we think you'll also find it interesting.

 

This week Forrester Research analyst Thomas Mendel published a report that claims that Windows Vista has been "rejected" in the enterprise and suggests to his customers that they should re-evaluate their Windows Vista deployments and consider waiting for Windows 7.  Not surprisingly, this is something that we, our millions of enterprise customers, and a bunch of pesky statistics don't agree with.  Heck, even Forrester doesn't agree with Forrester!  Let me explain:

First, this report doesn't reflect the normal enterprise OS adoption cycle. Enterprise adoption of OSes has always been much slower than consumer adoption.   After all, upgrading the PC in your living room is easy, but upgrading an entire front and back end infrastructure to thousands of users without downtime is much more complex, and that takes time.  Computerworld contributing author (and Microsoft partner) David Feng just wrote an article about this, too.  Mendel's report, however, simply skims over this common knowledge.

What is even more puzzling is that Mr. Mendel's report directly contradicts another Forrester report titled, "Building the Business Case for Windows Vista," which was written by fellow analyst Ben Gray.  This report outlines the five main reasons why enterprises should start their company's migration to Windows Vista now.  You can read it for yourself here.  Mendel's report also goes against other industry analyst reports that show that Windows Vista adoption is progressing faster, or at the very least, just as fast, as Windows XP adoption did when it first launched.

It's also important to note that we've sold 180 million copies of Windows Vista so far, 40 million of which were in the last quarter alone, and that there are thousands of enterprise customers deploying Windows Vista by the thousands of seats on a weekly basis, including heavy hitters like The United States Air Force, PPG Industries, and Cerner. 

Given that there's a mountain of evidence to refute this report - including multiple reports from Forrester and other top-tier analysts - this appears to be more focused on making sensationalist statements, rather than offering a thoughtful industry perspective, based on conversations with IT operations professionals or deep knowledge of enterprise deployment cycles. How is this useful guidance to customers?  It's disappointing to see such a respected organization like Forrester take this approach. 

- Chris

Well, Brian and Mark just left and we all cried a little. Their days were mostly filled with tech meetings, but their evenings were full of fun and games. Tuesday night, the whole team had dinner at Jack Astors. Some memorable moments include Darren O arm wrestling Darcie and almost losing (no one was surprised). Once the team was done creating a mess and scaring away the other customers, they moved on to Grace O’Maley’s down the street where they were kicked out of shortly after. There were several expletives used. A retaliation was had that Ed will benefit from, but cannot be mentionned here for fear that a certain new employee could be jailed.

After the Gracies carnage was done, whoever was still standing headed out for some kareoke. Franca took one for the team and flirted with the kareoke guy so that we could get our songs played. Well, that’s what she said anyway. We were the only people in the bar, so her flitation was pretty needless.

Needless to say, Wednesday was a little slow for all of us.

We finished Wednesday off by playing Rock Band for 3 hours. Fun times.

Thursday was another day of meetings and chinese for lunch. Salim was really mean to Darcie and just about made her cry. Other than that, it was a preety quiet day.

Bye MarkJaquith and Brian! Please come again!

Brian Layman and Mark Jaquith are currently up in the Toronto office. Mark got here on time. Brian, well, not so much.

They are both still the same as they were when we all saw them at SXSW in March. Brian hasn’t shaved yet. Mark is still uber-cool. If I had to describe them in three adjectives, they would be:

Mark- Cool, tall, happy

Brian- Nice, tall, happy (even after his 215746331 hour flight here).

You may have heard in passing the comments about Salim and his “wife” and I thought I would explain that a little further. We’ve met most of the b5 spouses…either when they stop in to bring a forgetful husband some lunch, or they join their spouses on an away trip to a conference. We’ve met some of the spouses that don’t even live in the same city as us. However, Salim’s “wife” never seems to materialize. We ask questions about her all the time…and Salim keeps promising she’ll come by “next week”. Salim has been with us since the end of October…and still no wife.

It has become a long-standing theory that she does not exist outside of Salim’s mind.

Occasionally, Salim will come in with his good blazer on and will eat lunch out of the office, or will need to take an hour long coffee break. We’ve come to realize that this is when he interviews women to act as his wife at the next company function. Just so he can bring someone so he doesn’t look like a liar.

He claims he had a baby in March. On one of his first days with b5, he said “By the way, sometime in March, I’m going to need to take a few weeks off cause my wife is having a baby.” We all believe that he carefully thought this out…he was planning a 2 week vacation in the Caribbean, but didn’t want to seem like a slacker in his first year with the company, so he invented a wife and children.

To make us think differently, he made Jon drive him home after a late meeting the other day. Jon’s fatal mistake was not waiting to see if Salim actually went into the house he claimed as his own. I wonder if Salim would be able to pick the same house out again if Jon drove him “home” or if he plans on “moving” by the time someone has to drive him home again.

Does Salim himself really exist? I’m beginning to wonder. It seems that usually when Jeremy is here, Salim is not. I think they are the same person trying to get two paychecks. I should call a meeting with both of them and see if they both show up.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company.

Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.

More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

We’re buying Powerset first and foremost because we’re impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset â€” Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan â€” we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.

That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.

We know today that roughly a third of searches don’t get answered on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. Two specific problems are the most common reasons for this:

• Differences in phrasing or context between a user’s search and the way the same information is expressed on webpages. Search engines don’t understand today that “shrub” and “tree” are similar concepts. We don’t understand that “cancer” sometimes refers to a disease and sometimes refers to a horoscope and when a query or a webpage refers to which.
  


• Lack of clarity in the descriptions for each webpage in the search results. Sometimes a result looks relevant from its short description on the results page but turns out to be not so relevant when you visit the actual page. As a result, searchers frequently click results and then rapidly click back when they realize they aren’t what they’re looking for.

These problems exist because search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a webpage. We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a webpage. Doing so, we can innovate in the quality of the search results, in the flexibility with which searchers can phrase their queries, and in the search user experience. We will use knowledge extracted from webpages to improve the result descriptions and provide new tools to help customers search better.

Working with our existing Search team and other Microsoft teams that focus on natural language, Powerset will help us address all of those problems and opportunities.

We’re looking to add even more talented engineers to the San Francisco team to accelerate our shared progress. If you’re interested in joining the team, drop us a line.

We’ll have more to say about the things we’re doing in understanding searches and webpages through natural language technology in the coming months. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Powerset to Microsoft!

Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising

See also: Microsoft to acquire Powerset