1. Apr 22nd, 2006

    MTS 2006: The disappointing parts

    [I had the honor of attending the Microsoft Technology Summit 2006. This post summarizes the disappointing parts of the three-day event.]

    Microsoft has some brilliant people working for it, any company would be lucky to have such amazing brains on tap.

    But whoever is writing Microsoft’s technology roadmap has configured Word to AutoCorrect “immitate” to “innovate”. With two notable exceptions — Microsoft Research where they get to invent the future, and Ray Ozzie’s team — Microsoft is mostly about the same old stuff. And if they don’t have enough of their own, they borrow from others.

    C#/.Net

    Readers of this blog know I have little respect for how Sun handles Java, including their legal dispute with Microsoft. Great companies don’t resort to courts, great companies out-innovate. But they did ask Microsoft to reinvent Java, and Microsoft complied. Brilliantly.

    That’s why C#/.Net made it to my list of exciting things about MTS, but also stars in my list of disappointing things. Forking is one reason. Microsoft scaling down CLR code in Vista is another one. And what happened to Visual Basic? Developers are asking for simpler languages, so why not focus on a VB.Net that doesn’t suck?

    But mostly, it all boils down to Microsoft’s open source myopia. Microsoft went to great lengths to match Sun’s J2EE blueprints feature for feature. We in the real world need to get work done, so we ignore those blueprints. We pick the stuff we like, then we toss in some Hibernate and Spring, sprinkle some Struts and Axis, wrap it up with Ant and Maven. And by the end of the year, we might have an open source alternative to Rails, so we won’t have to bother with JSF.

    Microsoft developers get none of that.

    Avalon

    It took more than a decade but Microsoft has finally managed to reinvent HTML, but without all the cool features. Talk about bad timing, Microsoft’s HTML doesn’t do mashups. It’s not in the browser. It’s a UI without the API. It’s the Web without the network effect.

    But all of this is good news for the walled gardens that wish Google was never invented, and I’m glad Microsoft is finally addressing the core problem of the AOLs of this world.

    Open source

    Nothing new. Moving on.

    OpenXML

    Talk about corporate double speak. Microsoft is absolutely not worried about OpenOffice, this dumbed down Office clone with its marginal market share. (Got to agree about dumbed down). But still considers ODF to be “disruptive” technology. Enter OpenXML, their anti-disruptive answer. Now, if we all just suspend disbelief we might even buy that an anti-disruptive answer to an open format can be as open as the original (the bridge comes for free).

    Microsoft takes pride in the fact that the OpenXML specification is a pair of hefty volumes. Just buy a new laser toner if you plan to print it out. Can something this complicated be useful? Now, of course there’s HTML. It does content, it does styling, it holds graphics and can do macros. It’s also widely supported, easy to index, and everywhere you go. Oh, and it’s old, but also the next best thing.

    But it doesn’t sell licenses of Office.

    Windows Mobile

    Quick quiz. Which of these two is 2005’s killer device and still going strong? Which of these two has an addiction and medical condition named after it? Which of these two is causing companies to deploy Exchange? Is it the Palm Treo or is it the BlackBerry?

    Now guess which device Microsoft is going after with their Windows Mobile?

    InfoCard

    How about an identity system that only works when everyone is using it? An enterprise approach repurposed for the Web? Blatantly ignoring the weakest link in every security system (hint: people)? Lightweight enough to only require five WS-DeathStar specs to accomplish the simplest task?

    Nothing is more telling than this short exchange between Tantek and the speaker. Speaker: “It will make it easy to access the NYT”. Tantek: “Have you heard of BugMeNot?”. Speaker: “No”.

    Sign. Talk about boiling the ocean.

    Factories

    What a let down. In mid-2005 I read about meta-programming and DSL on the Microsoft Web site. I bought into the idea and a few months later got to write my first DSL in Ruby. At MTS I met the author of a forthcoming book on Ruby and DSL. I find a new article about meta-programming almost every week. But a year later, all Microsoft has to show us are bullet point presentation and a lot of hot air.

    Longhorn

    Here’s Microsoft vision of the future. You incorporate features from Apache, sans mod_rewrite. You borrow some from Linux, sans bash because you can’t fix the security bugs. You throw in a free database for all the people who don’t know MySQL has a great (and free) GUI. Now package, brand and charge.

    Sign me up.

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