Daily Investigations

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.