Platform Evangelism

An anonymous submitter writes "James Plamondon, a former Microsoft employee is writing a book on Technological Evangelism at Microsoft. He's posted the first chapter, "Evangelism is War." Robert Scoble, a current Microsoft Evangelist doesn't like the metaphor, but Micah Alpern is concerned Microsoft could use similar strategies against Macromedia Flash."

Comments

Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone

[someguy42]

Actually, Macromedia is a big enough (and incredibly well established) company that their destruction by Microsoft actually would be a big surprise. Macromedia already produces most of their products for Macintosh, as well as some of their product (barely functional ColdFusion server) for Linux. Microsoft would have to fight pretty hard to take Macromedia down.

Mozilla Firebird Plug

[MyHair]

Mozilla Firebird (Phoenix) has a "Flash click to play" extension. I used to not install the Flash plugin in a Mozilla browser and just switch to IE when I actually wanted flash, but now I get a blank box that says "flash click to play...". Sweet.

Does CrazyBrowser or Opera do something similar?

Re:Mozilla Firebird Plug

[SkewlD00d]

I think there's a java-based flash plugin from macromed... it should be more controllable if you added some ACL / fine-grained SecurityManager to the applet/jvm. like disable taking over the whole fricking screen, or ask before writing stupid flash ads over the page.

Evangelism

[The Bungi]

The words "evangelism" and "evangelist" are all wrong. They have an obvious religious overtone that conveys the wrong message. The job should have neither military (as in this case) or religious tones of any type. They're software products, for fsck's sake.

I remember during the Team OS/2 vs. ClubWin wars on USENET there was a drive within Microsoft to rename the position to "Technical Advocate". It failed because some product managers (not project managers) argued that "advocate" wasn't an agressive enough term. Sigh.

By and large though, Microsoft evangelists tend to be nice people (like Scoble, who used to organize the Fawcette industry conferences for a long time). Much different from sales drones and even most enterprise support reps.

Parts of Flash are open.

[BitwizeGHC]

SWF is an open file format; while the Flash application itself may not be open source, its ultimate product can be read and produced by open source applications.

This gives Flash, or at least the SWF format, some serious leverage.

Anyone catch the statement in the footnotes ??

[AlabamaMike]

From the footnotes:
*snip*
[2] Recently, our competitors have added âoepoliticalâ to this list. Political actions result in law, which is backed up by force. They may come to regret educating us of the power of political means. */snip*
I guess this means that MS has decided to start playing the political game wich it's own panache now. I believe the recent settlement with the government is only outcome #1 we'll see from this new activity. I wouldn't be surprised if they had some legislation brewing that would grant them some type of legalized monopoly. After all, if he who pays the piper calls the tune MS is in a position to control the Congressional Playlist for many years to come ...
-A.M.

oh come on

[SweetAndSourJesus]

I've seen hundreds of database driven Flash sites. It's fairly simple to do.

I agree that Flash is evil, but that doesn't justify skewing facts.

Re:Flash is dead

[sehryan]

Flash is an open format...there are many non-Macromedia apps that can create Flash files. In fact, Adobe even had a full featured compeditor to the Flash application before it decided to throw its weight behind SVG. Flash supports database-driven content fairly easily, and has for a long time. Flash can parse XML files fairly easily. XML is pretty easy to manipulate and generate, but creating the type of animations you see with Flash in SVG is a pain. And contrary to popular belief, there are more reasons to use Flash than to make toons or annoying ads. Example: I imported a two minute, 126MB avi that I created for a project into Flash. I added some custom controls for the video, as well as some "Pop-Up Video" points to highlight certain moments in the video. The Flash file came out to be no more than 7MB large. That's still big for dial-up users, but the video would have been impossible to present to them in the original avi format.

I am not saying SVG doesn't have it's points. But don't knock Flash. I hate to burst your bubble, but Flash is far from dead.

OpenSWF Link

[MyHair]

The SWF specification.

I'm fairly sure there's an open source viewer and some open source creation tools. I've read about some on-the-fly generated SWF like for charts and graphs. The links should on the site somewhere.

This is one of those things I'll figure I'll get around to playing with someday.

Re:Fight Club

[Dan-DAFC]

Find out.

Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone

[Dalcius]

Don't confuse negative moderation with disagreement. Many pro-MS comments get modded down not because they are pro-MS, but because they are poorly founded and/or lack basic logic.

I'm a Linux user myself, and I've modded down my share of pro-MS comments, but on the basis that they either 1) have no clue what they're talking about, or 2) are highly logic impaired. I'm talking about basic logic, not judgements on opinions.

There are many pro-MS comments that I agree with. Unlike some of the zealots (most who will get over it, eventually), I understand that Windows has its place and advocate Windows to anyone who doesn't:
1) Dislike Microsoft solutions
2) Want to explore their computer
3) Want to configure everything in detail