Russia Today? (RT)

Okay, so I got up early, drove over an hour in traffic to get to Microsoft Mountain View for an all-day "devcamp" on HTML5, thinking: cool, professional development, hands-on, cross-platform, hope the few hours I spent with the O'Reilly "Head First" book doesn't leave me too far behind classmates -- and the first thing they do is tell us we need to download IE9 and this stuff (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dorischen/archive/2011/08/12/html5-webcamp-lab-setup-instruction.aspx?PageIndex=2&wa=wsignin1.0) -- all Windows-only tools.

I was agog. Which turned to almost Baha-like levels of annoyance and rage.

First hour, updates on IE9 and IE10 and their "standards" features.

Second hour, browsing through Hunger Games and Tron web sites to show off special effects. I swear, this was an update of how they pitched past efforts such as ChromeEffects, Silverlight, etc.

The IE9 "F12" function? How is that not Firebug?

So, I left.

It's one thing if they want to promote a product. That's cool. If it'd been announced as "a day of intro training to MS's new ________ tool", it'd have been fine. But what was so cheap, cheesy, and marginally evil was that they didn't, and they're trying to teach the audience that this whole platform-agnostic, open-standards thing? Gotta get to it via Windows.

ddt

At this point, I guess it really would be too much to expect them to change their ways... evil is too systemically embedded into the process.

And I was really startled and weirded out to feel I was one of the smarter people in the room (with developers and other technical people); so many people were just "oooh, aahhh".

And, too: nobody else flinched when the speaker (a Ph.D.!) basically defined the semantic web as "you can make up your own tags". I do not think that's what Tim Berners-Lee meant.

ddt

DPBD: And I just saw a tweet from there that the speaker was saying that Safari doesn't support the canvas element or SVG.

You can see more (and my irritated tweets) at #devcamp


It's tough, being so righteous,

ddt

Zune is officially dead.

Actual time of death: sometime in 2009.

No, actually, this seems like a smart move for them. I can't speak about their music ecosystem and installed base (... like, does either really exist?), but in that article it mentioned migrating all music and video to Xbox, tablets, Windows phones, which seems to me to really be the place MS should be pitching for music consumption. The Xbox is an established media center for a lot of homes, and how many people listen to their iTunes primarily on their iPhones?

If MS could expand on the Xbox Marketplace and make it easy to move, discover, share, and purchase music and videos, and build a great music organzing and listening experience into Windows Phones (and what they've done so far with the OS suggests they could, barring DRM-like interference from labels), this move could be a huge boost not just for Windows phones and tablets, but MS.

ddt

http://www.mobileopportunity.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/fear-and-loathing-and-windows-8.html

Quote

Even the plain colorful graphics in Windows 8 that looked so cool when I first saw them are starting to look ominous to me, like the hotel decor in The Shining.

Heh.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2012 02:26PM by Tony Leggett.

TOOBER! TOOBER!

BELEAGUERED!!!

Man, it took me a minute to translate my own post from June 10. I don't even get my own jokes, it seems. That would help explain why nobody else does...

Um, yeah. What was "TOOBER" meant to be?

Windows 8... The Shining... REDRUM... TOOBER...

It was a logical progression for me at the time, but re-reading it cold confused me. Now I know how everybody else parses my comments.

Ah, "reboot" - got it.

Good thing I finally watched the shining a few weeks back...

Blame Ballmer.

How MS got introduced to IBM to make the OS deal could be a book on its own.

This passage stood out to me:

"The developer concluded that no young person would switch from AIM to MSN Messenger, which did not have the short-message feature. He spoke about the problem to his boss, a middle-aged man. The supervisor dismissed the developer’s concerns as silly. Why would young people care about putting up a few words? Anyone who wanted to tell friends what they were doing could write it on their profile page, he said. Meaning users would have to open the profile pages, one friend at a time, and search for a status message, if it was there at all."

This is a failure to understand user experience. And a structural failure not to have a user advocate in place and for management to listen.

You think that's just MS? In three job interviews in the last month, I've seen the same "I know what I want and haven't done my homework w/r/t users -- why?" attitude.

ddt



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/26/2012 05:49PM by ddt.

This is, ahem, textbook for almost any of the large, successful companies that have lost their way. Sure, some of the vocabulary is industry-specific, but the results and the general descriptions are the same.

Windows 8 was made available to MSDN subscribers today.

I just installed it.

Do. Not. Want. This is an abomination.

The closest comparison I can make is Mac OS X 10.0. Remember how bad the Classic environment was? How clumsily Apple grafted the two OSes together?

Windows 8 makes that look graceful.

This is two completely separate OSes that can't quite figure out how to fit together.

This is going to be a support disaster for enterprise customers.

That's what all the thoughtful reviews said. I've heard that it's the same on tablets; nice GUI on top, hideous old school windows a couple of layers down. Keep us posted if you keep playing with it.