So today I looked at the blogs I usually look at.
Fake Steve Jobs hadn’t added anything since yesterday.
Vista Sucks isn’t adding much regularly (maybe once a week; come on! I’m a bloggict, I need my fix once a day at the very least!)
Rory Neopoleon had some new content and some additional links.
This one looked interesting — Laura Foy — except, What The Hell is “Microsoft Silverlight“? Surely they’re not creating a “competitor” to flash? Or even to Youtube. Please don’t tell me they’re doing this because I hate the pain caused by broken ribs, and that’s exactly what will happen when I LMAO and fall onto the floor.
Well, you can see from the link, that I’ve found some information. Talk about missing the bloody boat.
Oh my aching sides.
Wassupitchalisafourpointoh -
“This one looked interesting — Laura Foy”
She really is – I like this whole female-in-the-traditionally-male-dominated-tech-world-kicking-ass-all-over-the-traditionally-dominant-males.
Her coworker – Tina Wood – is awesome, too. They have strengths that compliment each other.
Laura’s has the attitude-bad-girl thing going, and Tina has the more sophisticated let’s-do-business look. But they’re both nuts. The good kind of nuts. Not the I’m-going-to-give-you-a-root-canal-with-a-chainsaw nuts, but the… well, the good kind.
Tina, as I’ve said on my site, is an amazing writer. I’m jealous. For reals. Not just saying it to be nice. She is *good*. She’s the one who wrote the video I love no matter how many times I watch it: http://www.on10.net/blogs/tina/Life-At-Microsoft/
I wish I had been all right when I was on that team. Working there while going through outpatient rehab and mourning my grandmother was impossible. (still mourning – I don’t think I’m ever going to stop – maybe it’s more of a “missing,” but whatever it is, I think about her everyday and miss the holy sweet bejesus out of her).
If I had been as mentally “stable” as I am now (it’s all relative), I think I would have had a fantastic time. Not to say I want to go back – even if I did, I’m not ready to go back to work yet (at least not at MS). But… yeah. Things could’ve been different. I don’t regret leaving, though.
I just miss those people.
“except, What The Hell is ‘Microsoft Silverlight’? Surely they’re not creating a ‘competitor’ to flash?”
Youuuuuuu got it
But it’s not a bad thing. When I first heard about it, I was put off. Big time. I was still at MS, and I saw it as another attempt to dominate the web.
However, the technology itself is, for many purposes, vastly superior to Flash. Flash is one of the most frustrating design/development tools I’ve ever used. It doesn’t make sense until it’s broken you – until it’s won.
Silverlight comes with a lot of the most commonly needed functionality built-in and ready to go – you don’t have to put in much effort to make something nifty. There’s a learning curve, as there is with anything, but it’s nowhere as steep as Flash.
Silverlight also has advantages when it comes to integration at a deeper level with technology that drives MS-powered web sites. Microsoft screws up left and right with their products, but their software development tools are the best out there (although there are tons of people who’d dispute this – most of the time, and I truly feel comfortable saying this, they’re wrong – they make politically-motivated decisions rather than looking at the tech itself – while I can understand that they let their values drive their tech choices, it drives me nuts when they try to make technical justifications for those value choices – it gets SOOOOO messy – geeks can be really irritating).
Yeah. So, lots of MS stuff comes out wrong, but a lot of it comes out well, and Silverlight, I think, is something that has a lot of promise, though it *is* going to be a point of confusion for customers. Unfortunately, that’s one of the costs of competition in tech.
“Or even to Youtube.”
They tried, but it failed. The tech was better – the features were *way* better – but MS doesn’t do a good job of framing its online services in a way that would attract users. You have to give people *good* reasons to move away from what they’re already using.
Over the years, funnily enough, many of the most popular options among a sea of choices have been the *worst* of the bunch. How that happens is still a mystery.
Microsoft beat Apple in the early 80s even though Apple had vastly superior hardware and software.
MySpace beat out many other social networking sites despite being a higgeldy-piggeldy mess inside and out. They just knew how to peddle their wares, and I say hurrah – selling yourself is important.
In the mid 80s, Nintendo beat Sega in the home video game console market even though Sega’s Master System rocked the NES in all technical aspects.
Oh… and then there was the Amiga – an 80s computer that was drool-worthy. It did such beautiful things. I didn’t ever get to use one – they were practically mythological – but many, many years after they had disappeared, emulation software popped up on the net that let you “run” an Amiga under Windows or OS X or whatever. Even though the hardware of my machines make Amigas look like slide-rules, I spent a lot of time playing with the Amiga. It was that cool.
But, again, people chose DOS. Four color DOS. Cyan, magenta, one other color, and black.
Amiga was already producing photo-realistic graphics.
Yet DOS won… it’s amazing.
And, now, YouTube dominates the online video scene even though there’s far better technology out there. Ironically, Microsoft is now producing the better tech while losing to a lesser, but more popular platform. Things have come full circle.
I’ll stop writing about that
Got carried away as always…
“Please don’t tell me they’re doing this because I hate the pain caused by broken ribs, and that’s exactly what will happen when I LMAO and fall onto the floor.”
*That* put a smile on my face
I also laughed.
I didn’t get hurt.
But I did…
…laugh.
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