brainwagon

Robert Scoble thoughtfully provided a list of all the revolutionary stuff he thinks is being introduced at PDC. To his credit, he includes links to at least on detractor as well as a couple of cheerleaders.

I said last week that I’d probably not be all that enthused about anything that they were releasing, and Scoble said for me to wait. Well, I thought I’d work through his list and tell you what I think about it.

• Office 12 demonstrated publicly for the first time. Tons of new features and UI.
  I don’t use Office. In previous years, it was simply too expensive for me to justify for personal use, now open source alternatives are at least credible and, well, they are free. I have used individual applications in Office from time to time, and I think they are quite good on the whole, but it takes more than shiny new buttons to enthuse me about applications in this arena.
• Windows Vista features demonstrated publicly, including new search integration, new performance enhancements, new sidebar.
  Get back to me when it ships.
• LINQ (Language INtegrated Query). Cool database stuff for .NET developers. This does sound like a good deal to me, it’s a pity that I don’t like to lock myself into proprietary platforms when designing applications.
• Windows Presentation Foundation/E. “E” is for everywhere. I’d be more impressed by improvements to IE that would fix their broken implementation of the box model. That truly would allow web pages to be viewed everywhere.
• Start.com updates released. What’s start.com? Oh, portal. Gotcha. Yawn.
• Atlas (our AJAX Web development toolkit) demoed for the first time.
  This does sound like a good deal to me, it’s a pity that I don’t like to lock myself into proprietary platforms when designing applications.
• Microsoft Max. A new photo sharing and display application. Yawn.
• Digital Locker. A new place to find, try and buy software. Double yawn.
• New sidebar and gadgets and new Microsoftgadget site. Hey! We have these new things called gadgets! Aren’t we innovative. No, they don’t look like something our competitors created. No, really.

Okay, to be fair, I’m one of those long haired hippy freak Open Source/Unix hacker/communists, so it really would have been difficult for Microsoft to wow me. But really, none of this is all that inspiring. It’s not that I don’t like new eyecandy, or sharing photos, or good internet portals. It’s just that while providing candy, Microsoft isn’t providing the meal. What I’d like to see…

1. Security. Number one. No eyecandy will make me happy when I can’t hook my computer to the internet for fear of spyware, adware and viruses.
2. Browsing technology with exemplary adherence to web standards. Focus on technologies that support users, rather than support companies trying to annoy users.
3. Add value. While most desktop versions of linux are admittedly a little bit rough around the edges, they are improving quickly, and come bundled with many options that are extra cost items in the Windows world. This includes word processing, network apps, audio and video, and web servers.
4. Performance. Deliver the raw performance of the box to the user. My experience with XP and its predecessors is that they simply don’t. Applications require more memory and more processing power to reach acceptable performance levels than their open source conterparts.
5. Simplify. Developing for the Microsoft platform (and I’ve done it off and on since the days of 3.1) has increasingly become like decoding Chinese with only a single small pocket dictionary. It’s all about the API du jour, some of which are obsoleted by the time your product hits the market.

Well, that’s enough of a rant for the morning. Time to shower and go work to pay the bills.