Daily Investigations

This is some really cool technology but it does have it limiations.  The most excellent aspect is the ability to imitate the view of a full pan/tilt/zoom camera but you are recording all directions all the time with one camera.   That in itself is some of the coolest stuff ever.  I really like that the some of the most impressive software was completed in Flash, I hate when it only runs in a certain IE version with some proprietary active X control.

I would recommend anyone dealing with video management systems to take a close look at this technology as it will certainly make a huge splash in the near future when people try to do more with less.

This is the first day of the MIX07 event in Las Vegas and Microsoft has called on a lot of impressive speakers and has released several new products.

The keynote speaker was Ray Ozzie (3 of 5), you know him as the l Lotus Notes guy. He is very impressive and clearly has a wealth of knowledge. The thing I imagined from his direction Microsoft may be doing less with open standards than ever before, this is just my opinion. I have done some Lotus Notes coding and I have also tried to integrate with Lotus Notes, one is easy and the other is not so easy.  

Ray then introduced one of the technical guys and I did not get his name, but he was very code centric. I appreciated his efforts to hold off on getting to technical for a keynote speech but you could tell he wanted to let it rip, I like him.

The thing I was getting confused about, not being a Microsoft centric coder, was there seemed to be a lot of products to duplicate what Flash gave you in one product.

Products that were used as part of the demo:

1. Studio - of course
2. Video Encoder - preps the video for use on the web
3. Expression Designer
4. Blend II - alpha Blend I is beta and can be downloaded
   
5. Expression Web 2
6. SilverLight - Beta 1.0 the"Flex" Flash like product (runs on a Mac, runs on a Mac, runs on a Mac) I heard that phrase a few times. The small quick download is 4.3Mb and it includes the .Net framework to run cross platform. Interesting stuff, will discuss later.

Now to discuss the SilverLight download and the inclusion of .Net. I originally thought this was another Microsoft taking advantage of being a big player and trying to squash the little guy, javascript. I know it is hard to debug, especially with IE's (object expected detailed error message), but it is what it is and it does the job. They were crucifying javascript and that upset me somewhat, but when thinking about what they were saying it is the same as the Flash player. Flash has actionscript and they have just made a version that runs faster than previous versions but all of there comparisions were made to itself and not to javascript. They both are doing the same thing, I applaud Microsoft for including this, it is still an imitation not innovation, but it was a very smart move on their part. The size is not what I call small but 4.3Mb is becoming smaller and smaller all the time.

Anyway, sorry for the rant.

Then came the Netflix demo (3 of 5), this was a very cool demo on how to use the Microsoft suite to duplicate "youtube" or "dailymotion" but for movies. It was impressive just not as original as it was presented. This was done in a 3 week period and that is impressive, but having to design something and create it is something different. I just mean to imitate something, and I steal or borrow whenever I see a good idea, and doing that compared to having to create something original is two totally different things.

Then came Wayne Smith (4 of 5) , a designer at Microsoft, he was very entertaining and showed some very cool to be features not what was. I liked him and would subscribe to his blog if I knew he had one.

Now came out the President and General Manager of CBS, Jonathon Leess (3 of 5). He was an old school speaker, loud, confident and dared anyone to question his statements. The AV kid from CBS doing his slide presentation, messed up once and said "Please forgive me". I got a chuckle out of that. CBS demoed what they could use it for, collaborative news. Normal people submit news, the audience watches it and votes and the tv stations play the highest rated news. I like the idea when it was called "American Funniest Home Videos", just kidding, I think it very bold just not as visionary as presented.

The next guy, from a company called "Top Banana" was a really funny guy, Beau Anbur (4 of 5). I did keep waiting for him to screan "well, you can do that when you live in a van down by the river", he looked and talked like Chris Farley when he did the motivational speaker skit.  Honestly if you need something to make your company stand out and you have some money give this guy a call. I think he would rather die than not give you the latest and greatest. In addition, the cool video editor he built is free for download and Microsoft is doing free hosting of up to 10 minute videos for anyone wanting to start using their tools for video. Watch out "youtube" here comes Microsoft.

Now sports, Pres and CEO of MBL.com Advanced Media, Bob Bowman (reminded me of Kevin Coster in "For the Love of the Game"). Sharp dresser, confident, good dresser, loves the sport but stuff is passing him by. He called in a basketball player to talk about what they were doing. He was not a basketball player but "Justin Schaffer" (6'8" and 4of5) did the majority of the demo. They also showed they are implementing mlb.com on mobile devices and that impressed me. MLB.com, not going to pay $15 bucks a month for your service but a very impressive presentation. I like satellite radio for my sports away from home listening pleasure.

Microsoft came back on stage and starting doing more code and talked about how they support mulitple languages. They have embraced Python and Ruby, to Microsoft as Iron Ruby and Iron Python, this is very cool stuff. I do not understand the concept totally here so I really have no thoughts on this subject. If I was a Python developer and now I can buy .Net so i can run something that is free? I sure there are very good reasons, I just for the life of me can't figure out what they are.

To recap the overall impression:

1. Outstanding presentation ability that Microsoft has - they can really sell.
2. I take it the developer community has taken the Microsoft approach and not embraced many open source frameworks because many of the thing people were clapping for have existed for many moons now.
3. Man can they sell, upper management does not have a chance if these guys set their scopes.
4. I would come to a Microsoft event if it was on basically nothing because they can really put on a nice shin dig.
   
5. They are making very nice enhancements to there product line but it is a catch up by imitation not a step ahead with innovation.

If you are a Microsoft shop this is a very impressive tool set, just do not know the price, as everything is now free and it is also in beta. If I was a core Microsoft developer and had not developed with tools that already had this capability I was be very excited about what I can do that I have seen on the web for the last few years.

Attending the Microsoft product launch yesterday, I finally realized what the Apple t-shirts meant "Apple: Windows 95 since 84".

I got to see some nice product enhancements, like vector graphics - I am serious, they showed the resizing of a basic form like 10 times, like that was new.  Then it was a Flash bash party, the question was raised, has anyone ever tried to implement a web service into Flash, pause, it is almost impossible.   I was holding back with everything I had to say it is really simple with Flex, you know what you took and called XAML (MXML) or WPF - Flash.  They promised WPFe was coming soon, and they said they had run it on an apple (intel machine) under Safari.  Don't get me wrong this is good looking stuff, but it is was not jaw dropping innovative tehnology.

To their credit, they are starting to make ends to open up office documents 2007, with openXML standards, thanks to Open Office implementing it first.  I really believe if they go to proprietary on this version of office it could have really hurt them.  Office documents no longer need to be soley a client side application.  It needs to integrate with backend systems and have the data inputted go into a database so information its information can be accessed.

I would really like to see Coldfusion 8 come out with some wicked easy implementation for excel, word would be nice and power point if they can.   I think Excel is a very powerful interface and can open up development bottlenecks by letting the customer basically developing the user interfaces and let a coldfusion developer easily organize, store and report on this data. 

I really do not care about an office replacement as much as I would like to see an office integration solution.  I love Google Spreadsheets & Docs and I marvel at how they are doing what they are doing, but it still it is not Excel.  Microsoft is starting this but the infrastructure costs apprears to be outrageous.  I really think this white space has not been touched and could have tremendous benefits for the one who comes up with the answer.

Congrats to Microsoft for changing windows kernal to have the graphics portion seperate to help eliminate the all to common blue screens of death.  When I can afford to run a server at my house to run Vista with all the cool features I will definitely think about upgrading.