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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."
What if tonight, the evangelism war could be over? Isn't that work coding for? Isn't...that...worth...debugging for?
Vonal Declosion
Wow where to begin?
Well, for a start, they're not SCO...
There have been Macintosh evangelists for years, so don't worry, Microsoft isn't innovating.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
I wonder if Microsoft understands how motivating it is when people to learn it regards them as pawns? In the last couple years Microsoft has succeeded in motivating me to develop software for the Palm OS, and now for OS X...
is to open up your client software. That way you get your code ported to more platforms than you can count... for free.
It's difficult for a company that only really supports one platform to compete against s/w that's in widespread use everywhere.
Opening up netscape five years earlier would have killed IE before it even got started. Real may understand this now, I wonder if Macromedia does yet.
1. "This is another part of the evil plan by an evil company to use its evil monopoly for world domination."
2. "This is not new. Apple/BSD/ has done this for years. Another example of M$ just copying others and having no innovation."
3. "This is the end. As soon as customers hear about this, they will en masse migrate away and Bill will be a pauper by next year."
4. "(-1, Troll) Look, this is another example of how the great lord Bill is making things better for all of us!"
Mmmm.. Donuts
I don't get it. The sole reason Macromedia is the size it is, is simply because Windows has no option to permanently refuse a web download.
In the old days, when you hit a site that has flash content, and you don't have it installed, it would try to install Flash. The dialog box has no option to permanently refuse Flash, so sooner or later everybody just gives in.
This policy allowed Macr to reach critical mass. Now brosers ship with Flash. Now you're telling me Microsoft is against Macr?
From the article: An unconscious decision is ideal, from the platform vendorâ(TM)s perspective. When ISVs support a Microsoft platform without even realizing that they have made a decision, and rejected any alternatives, then we have truly won that platform battle.
The truth - the almost sinister truth - of that statement grips me at my soul.
The trick is that folks think they're making a choice to purchase a merely single item, be it a CD, and DVD, a software package, a computer, a vehicle, or a politician (with a vote or literally with a breifcase of money). The reson this is a trick is that by making that choice, the purchaser endorses the entire chain of policies and events that bring that product to the shelf. You're literally saying, "whatever happened to get this product in my hot little hands, it's okay by me because the price is right.
Until I read that line above, I hadn't thought of the entire hegemony that lurked behind a price sticker with the kind of laser precision that the author used to word it. And I always thought I was a reasonably self-aware guy. HOLY SHIT. His side won, and I didn't even realize I was in a battle.
I'm making that line my sig. Nothing woke me up with quite the same jolt that it did. Maybe I'm just dumber than I thought I am. Is it just me?
GMFTatsujin
> Even Linux Zealot switched to using macs
:
There's a typo, it should be
"Even Linux Zealot switched to using Emacs"
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
Saturday Night, Redmond Washington. Microsoft Exec: Yes!! Amen! I feel his spirit in me!! You know who I'm talking about. Who'm I talking about?? Microsoft employees: Bill! Exec: Say it again!! MS Drones: BILL!! Exec: Amen, Brothers and Sisters, Amen. Tonight I'm gonna preach from the book of Market Strategies. Chapter 6, Verse 12 Exec: And I saw, and behold a white Aeron chair and he that sat on him had the code; and a laywers was given unto him: and he went forth to conquer. Then cried he upon me, and spake unto me, saying, Behold, ye Leviathian of blue, shall use my code no longer, for have violated the oath set upon thee, and shall hence forth give unto repentance of 3 billion coins of silver...
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Find out.
Suck figs.
did MS engage in illegal anti-competitive practices which are bad for the consumer and bad for the market." I don't see you answering that question.
They have been convicted of doing just that. Everybody knows that.
SVG has one huge glaring problem :
No authoring environment.
Without a well designed, functional UI, how can SVG hope to compete against things like Flash? It's all well and good for the programming types to go : "Wow! SVG is great! I can write a few dozen lines of code and make a circle go from point a to point b!" but the bald fact of the matter is that programming types are not responsible, and will not be responsible, for doing the graphic design and animation. And for good reason : they usually suck at it (people like Maeda and the like aside). Designers are used to, and require, professional class UI and organizational tools (things like timelines, text tools, visual hierarchies, etc.) to do what they do in an efficient manner. Having a good GUI would help things, but Flash already does tons of things that SVG MIGHT do in a year or more.
And Flash is perfectly capable of handling XML and database-driven content, thank you. The fact of the matter is that as of today, SVG is an esoteric curiosity, nothing more... which may well change, as Adobe and Microsoft both are getting mighty anxious about Flash and it's capabilities.
Now, I'm all for Open Source, but come on -- I'm not going to get on the "If it's proprietary, it's EVIL" bandwagon. Macromedia has spent tons to develop Flash to the point where it is now, and has done so in a fundamentally benign manner, especially when compared to things like the GIF fiasco and the other various predatory business practices out there. They have a right to make money off their product, the Flash application itself.
First: Remember that the best defence is a good offense..
.net stuff - it's still m$ 0wned)
Developer-specific:
Open Source should make sure to set de-facto standards - release early, release often.
Define your data formats in something well-known like csv, sexp or xml so other open source programs can make use of them. Better yet, use a relational database backend with a public schema of views. It'll make most development easier, and all MS's best products do that, anyway. It's great (very convenient) for business use, and easy given the existence of postgres,mysql, sapdb sqllite, etc, etc.
At the same time, don't get too hung up on data format standards - MS has shown that so long as your next version reads them, that's good enough, your next version doesn't have to use the same data format as its native format, so long as it can read the old format.
MS has shown that what matters is to get a product out there, capturing mindshare - once a user has psychologically committed to your product, they'll probably stick with it, even if your next version is a ground-up rewrite so that it actually works. And if you release for windows, code to libSDL+OpenGL for games, and use cygwin, qt or gtk for utilities. NEVER use the Win32/.net directly API for new applications, even via WINE or Mono - that's one of the "proprietary standards" the chapter excerpt talks about (don't beleive the ECMA-standardisation
For general evangelism to non-technical audiences
Make sure that your desktop runs a window manager with a really snazzy theme and some flashy applications (xmms...) when anyone drops by. Current Linux WMs can outclass WinXP in flashiness stakes. Contrary to popular opinions, consistency doesn't seem to matter a great deal - if the program is flashy enough, it might be a consistency nightmare, but will impress the yokels (don't call them yokels). It doesn't hurt to have a speech synthesis program e.g. festival going to read the subject lines of incoming mails, or some other geek-gimmick. Appearance is everything to the non-geek (and geekiness is domain-specific, a DIY geek who sees straight through gimmicky power tools won't necessarily see through flashy computer GUI gimmicks)
Try not to get all philisophical on I.P. issues. Stick to "you have the right to change it or ask/pay someone other than the original manufacturer to change it for you. Like taking your car to a garage.". Anything more complex doesn't work for MS, it won't work for you. Yes, you may think I.P. is an absurdity. But most people are keyword-scanners. The message they'll get is that you're "anti-property". Yes, information is non-scarce and therefore you should't mindlessly apply scarcity-based property laws to it, yes, the very idea of information as property runs counter to the scientific method, but boring them by droning on about it won't help (I just droned on about it, and you damn-near switched-off, didn't you?)
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Micah Alpern raises some good points about MS's attention to vector based ui's. I think though that he's completely offbase when saying that Macromedia's announcement of Royal will ilicit any response from Redmond.
Flash won't be a threat to Microsoft as a "full platform". The primary reason is that Macromedia is great at marketing their products - but architecutally their product line lacks consistancy of vision and execution. Flash for example has, over the past three versions proved time and time again that it lacks a reliable, and easy to use programming environment, an absolute necessity for building truly sophisticated ui's and functionality.
Don't get me wrong - there is some amazing flash work out there. Kudo's to the design/developers that were able to produce such things. The road to such accomplishments however is frought with errors, head scratching and mysteries.
This is primarily because Macromedia seems to think that it's OK to produce API level functions that don't behave as expected so long as they are documented. See Macromedia 'Technotes' for further ammo er info. I think somewhere along the way someone at Macromedia misread "Test and Deploy" as "Deploy and Test". Most have to do with I/O such as load movie, getUrl, and loadVariables. Solid multi source I/O is an absolute necessity for building fully featured "rich client" applications. JavaScript is also not an acceptable language for building real applications. Especailly Macromedia's implementation which has a very loose object based approach to dealing with items in the movie. Flash is also slow. On machines who are not as "swift" as their high speed grand children - high complexity movies are sluggish and don't respond well.
What this all comes down to is the fact that from a technology perspective, Macromedia lacks a coherent architecture for accomplishing complex tasks that will be required to build "Royale" and there is a good chance that developers first taste of Royale will be a bitter one.