Category: Microsoft

Michael Arrington kisses Microsoft’s butt

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/01/take-time-to-understand-silverlight-its-important/

I agree that Silverlight is important, but Mr. Arrington gave such a content-light, gushing, oh-my-gawd report of it, that all my BS meters went off. Then they went off the charts when it turns out that HE WAS PART OF THE PRESENTATION, ON THE STAGE INTERVIEWING THE DEVELOPERS.

The comments have more meat, but of course there is the usual MS-bashing lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.

Here was my post in the comments:

Something that seems lost in the original post and in the comments is the business angle on this.

Microsoft is a platform company.

They have consistently made business decisions on attacks to the platform. IE was a repsonse to Netscape, Windows Media was a response to Real, .Net was a response to Java, etc… Now that Flash/Flex is becoming a platform in its own right that is diminishing the importance of the operating system that it runs on, MS unveils silverlight. MS may talk about how cross-platform silverlight is, but if it isn’t going to sell more copies of Windows it would never make it out the door. This announcement is just another in a series from MS (see the above list and remember MS’s commitment to cross-platform on those) where the other shoe will drop eventually. Maybe this will be like IE or Real where MS comes out with Mac versions only to drop them after they have achieved dominance or maybe this is like .Net where there is a head-fake to cross-platform, but that was really just FUD.

It isn’t this announcement to watch, it is the follow-on ones.

Flex goes Open Source

Flex:Open Source – Adobe Labs

this is freaky awesome news. I work at Adobe and I didn’t even know about it. This will totally open up the tool chain and allow lots of cool authoring apps addressing the different needs of Flex developers. I won’t jump the gun and declare Expression or WPF/e dead, but in the minds of web developers, who are the kinds of people who actually care about this stuff, this makes the decision a no-brainer.

talk about burning bridges

[via Mary Jo Foley]

David Bennet, a dev on the Vista Parental Controls team is leaving Microsoft and he decided to take some pot shots on the way out.

“I just accepted a position to work at Google up in Kirkland, so still in Seattle. I will be starting there on the 30th of April, so not long now. My first week will be down in Mountain View doing a orientation thingy. So those people down in San Francisco, be nice to meet up again.

“I think this will be a good change and a fun job, I was a little peeved without how Microsoft dealt with the team I was on, I did the parental controls feature of vista which has got some of the best airplay/talk about of any of the features associated with vista. In response Microsoft reorged us first into a group that hated us and then into a group that had nothing to do with Parental Controls and broke the whole team up. I liked working with the old group of people and I liked the feature, I don’t like where I am now or the product I am working on.

“Hopefully I will end up working on the Google TV product, which would be fun.”

You gotta be pretty pissed off to post that in a public forum. It looks like he removed the post from his blog after it got noticed, and it looks like he posted yesterday, so I guess he hasn’t been fired. yet.

Review of blend from an Interaction Designer

SB.com: –Engage!

After all this, I realized that MS made a really powerful tool for really expert users. It seems that after all is said and done that it is a tool not for interaction designers, but for interactive designers and thus its real promise is lost because interactive designers don’t design or engineer applications but rather sites, and experiences. Interaction designers do both, and quite honestly are more skilled and experienced in designing complex interactivity than those who come to all this from interactive design. I know I’m going to get burned from that statement, but while interactive designers are really great and knowledgeable, they don’t know a heck of a lot about UX, cog psy, HCI, usability, etc. It just isn’t part of what they do. They concentrate mostly on implementing the presentation layer without much attention to the context of use, without using user centered research models, etc.

First of all, I didn’t know there was a major difference between Interaction Designer and Interactive Designer, although I guess it makes sense that you would want to distinguish between the two different disciplines. I usually hear User Experience vs developer, or something like that.

That aside, it is a very interesting take. It actually makes blend a bit more appealing to me, because I’m more a programmer than designer, but the interface seems pretty screwy relative even to Flex, so I don’t know…

Flex, WPF/e and the new war for developer hearts and minds

Scoble starts a discussion (Why do a reader only for one publication? (Adobe vs. Microsoft for developers)) and Ryan Stewart picks it up (How Adobe started winning developers)

I think we’ve got some fun coming on and we developers are going to be in the catbird seat as Adobe and Microsoft fight it out for our loyalty.

disclaimer: I worked for Microsoft for 8 years and I’ve been working for Adobe now for 3 years, but not directly on any of the technologies I’m writing about.

C# was first launched when I was at Microsoft and I was pretty skeptical because it seemed such an obvious attack on Java and at the time I wasn’t that interested in Java. Real Developers write in C++.

Then I left Microsoft for a start-up where our chief architect convinced us to write our system in Java, and I learned it, and I found it pretty powerful for some things. My development team was able to build a fairly complex system very quickly with few bugs by taking advantage of the richness of the language and supporting libraries like JUnit. It reminded me of Common Lisp. When you got used to writing in Java: if you needed some functionality, your first impulse was to look for it in the language itself instead of writing it from scratch. Most often it was there.

Then, I left that start-up for another start-up founded by a former softy like myself where we embraced .Net 1.0 ’cause we were using all other MS technologies and we were writing a grid-type app. I liked .Net and C# even more than Java because it was so integrated with the OS (as long as the OS was windows, which it was in our case).

Now, I’ve taken a Flex class and I have to say that I’m really impressed. It really does for RIA what C# and Java did for server-side programming. Also, it is nice to finally have a more programmer-oriented approach for developing SWFs with a real IDE! I think that C# was also really good for rapid application development and prototyping as well, but Flex is much obviously better. As someone who works on both Macs and Windows, I definitely dig that cross-platformness and symmetry.

WPF/e is really interesting, but I haven’t gone into depth with it. Why not? Well, at home I have macs only now, and at work I have my actual job to do (in C++, natch). After looking through the docs and stuff, I can’t really see how you’ll be able to author cross-platform stuff with it since it seems so crippled on other platforms. I have to say that the strategy seems pretty much like “protect the windows platform by making the tools for windows only and the experience crappy on other platforms while still talking up how we are cross-platform.” Kinda similar to the original .Net story.

I’m also concerned that this stuff could get dropped or have less contribution if MS ever does (or doesn’t) win out. (Blackbird, Windows Media Player for Mac, IE before FireFox, etc…)

The one good thing is that the competition will push both Microsoft and Adobe to continue to develop better tools and that makes us developers the absolute winners here.

iPhone debate: I’m a Mac vs. Bill Gates – 10 Zen Monkeys a webzine

iPhone debate: I’m a Mac vs. Bill Gates – 10 Zen Monkeys a webzine

A very, very nice fictional conversation between the guy who plays a mac on tv and Bill Gates.

Bill GatesI’m sick to death of people touting regional anomalies as some harbinger of the future. They should make an ad where there’s three actors representing devices — a Mac, a PC, and a teenaged Japanese girl representing the ability to send text messages on a Hello Kitty cellphone.

Universal and Sony prohibit Zune sharing for certain artists

Universal and Sony prohibit Zune sharing for certain artists [via Engadget]

So, Microsoft keeps screwing over their customers to appease the major labels. After agreeing to pay Universal a bounty on each Zune sold (setting a chilling precident for the industry), and crippling their main differentiating feature (sharing music wirelessly) so much as to make it worthless, now they make the whole thing worse. Making your Zune lamer after you bought it. Now they are restricting which artists you can not-really-share.