Tag: msft

What’s up Apples Sleeve at WWDC. More pain for Adobe?

There is a lot of chatter about Apples’s WWDC on 6/7/2010-6/11/2010. Most in the tech crowd feel that there won’t be much new news announced. An iPhone 4G was lost/leaked/stolen, etc. and a 2nd version turned up overseas giving us a little more insight into the case (perhaps).

One of the more interesting bits of speculation that has come out in the last couple of days is that a Microsoft presentation may be in the works. In fact, it may be part of the keynote. What I am hearing is that it has to do with Microsoft Visual Studio and would be considered pretty big news. According to the news, VisualStudio will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. This could be great for Microsoft and bad for… Adobe

A Slap in the Face to Adobe (ADBE)

My take on the backing of the VisualStudio platform has a lot to do with the battle with Adobe. Apple and Adobe aren’t exactly getting along. Steve Jobs has gone out of his way to disparage Flash and Adobe and even went so far as to call them ‘lazy’ for not working to improve Flash. For those who don’t know, it is a resource hog. By enlisting Microsoft to work on tools to develop for Apple’s platforms they are needling the current leader in the development space.

Adobe owns a couple of markets right now and one way to put another dagger in their heart (or back) would be to push into their market. The fact that Apple would consider doing this with Microsoft is a surprise. Imagine if Microsoft is able to move Visual Studio (or some variation of) toward becoming a product that web developers would consider in lieu of Adobe’s Creative Suite (Dreamweaver). That would put them back on their heels a bit more. As a developer, I would have to look long and hard (and probably wouldn’t waste the time to do so) after Microsoft’s past attempts to build tools for the web space. Microsoft’s Frontpage was an early leader in this area and lost the game due to the horrific code output and some of the non-standards compliant touches that Microsoft allowed in the product.

In the end, there is a chance that Apple is simply using Microsoft to tighten the screws on Adobe. After all, the cultures at Adobe and Apple are much closer than those at Apple and Microsoft.

Apple’s WWDC could be a big event, or it could simply be another one of their events that make you say “That is about what we thought they would come out with…”.

As always, time will tell!

Bing.com doing some things nicely

I must say that I rolled my eyes at the Bing announcement. However, there is a feature that is pretty useful. If you are ever in search of a video, you will find that their video preview is pretty nice. My son watches a lot of Nerf videos on Youtube.com. By going to bing.com he can watch everything in one place with the mouseover preview. Good job MSFT!

Take a look at the video results: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=nerf+gun&go=&form=QBVR

Parents, don’t let your kids do this unsupervised and please turn up the ‘safe search’ settings.

I also have to say that the Bird’s Eye view maps have been a must visit site for me when searching for real estate. The birds eye is a much nicer view than the satellite view from the other providers and provides a great overview of a neighborhood.

Keep it up Microsoft. You are certainly chasing the leader right now, but innovation will outweigh online loyalty every day.

Google Chrome, IE Killer, Nah. Firefox, look out

I am a web developer who uses IE and Firefox. Google Chrome will do more short term damage to Firefox than to IE.

I was very excited to hear about Google Chrome the other day (surprised). I downloaded as soon as it was available and began using. It has a couple of nice features. The import tool worked well and the page rendering was solid. The V8 Javascript engine that Google built certainly makes things faster on a couple of the sites that I visit on a daily basis. There are some simple features that let you modify a form on a web page to make the chore of filling things out a bit easier (You can resize a textarea box to make things more readable).

One of the biggest reasons that I jumped on Chrome was due to the fact that each tab is in its own process and can crash without crashing the entire browser. Of all things GMail doesn’t play nice with Firefox in my setup. It will crash the entire browser. If Chrome can eliminate this, it will make my day a little more productive.

Overall, things aren’t much different than what I am used to in Firefox. By midday, I found myself with Chrome and IE open. No Firefox. Other than the plug ins that I have installed with Firefox, I didn’t miss it. I still had IE open for various reasons but my expectation is that Chrome will replace Firefox once there are sufficient plug ins to make the browser as functional.

Short term, this could put Firefox out. My guess is that Firefox will see this occur and will jump into Google’s (GOOG) arms. Google will be oh so pleased to bring that development team in house.

Long term, Chrome should be able to get some footing when the price of a Windows PC is $70 more than the price of a Google PC. Heck, the $100 PC? Give away the razor to sell the blades (give away the PC to get the Searches)?

This is an interesting play and will force MSFT to once again jump through hoops. Will Bill make a triumphant return? Did he actually ever leave?

Chrome is nice. Not ready to drop IE yet (because Microsoft doesn’t play nice with standards). I expect that the browser market in the next year will be 70% IE, 10% chrome, 12% Firefox, 8% other. We’ll see how this one plays out.