Shawn Baden » Microsoft

“Season of the Witch” – Another Windows Phone Ad

shawnbaden — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:52:39 +0000

Not quite as attention grabbing as Really but it’s still a fine commercial, which is saying something considering the *very* poor record of past Microsoft advertising campaigns. Microsoft has a point, “a phone to save us from our phones,” and they keep hammering it home. Well done.

Ray Ozzie: Dawn of a New Day

shawnbaden — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:18:11 +0000

Memo from Ray Ozzie titled ‘Dawn of New Day.’ A couple choice bits:

Success begets product requirements.

Complexity kills.

So true. It’s a fine line to listen and incorporate customer feedback versus letting it control the direction of your product.

Dave Newman is Leaving .NET

shawnbaden — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 03:43:15 +0000

Excellent point from Dave Newman on probably the biggest shortcoming of .NET:

The .net community operates in a non-collaborative vaccuum.

So why is this is the case?

There’s also Paul Cowan and the horn project. They’re trying to solve dependency management in .net. It’s a really hard problem and probably the largest barrier to real collaboration right now.

Having worked with other frameworks with dependency management like Java and Scala/Lift with Maven and Ruby with RubyGems, I have to emphatically agree. From compiling someone else’s code to going from your dev box to deploying a .NET solution, dependency management for .NET sucks. I blame Windows.

Bonus points for referencing Fight Club:

As Tyler Durden once said: You are not your programming language. You are not the web stack you’ve learned. You are not your text editor you write your code in. You are the all crafting, multilingual developer of the world!

Another Example of Microsoft Not Having a Unified Product Strategy

shawnbaden — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:26:04 +0000

From Peter Bright‘s Ars Technica piece titled Windows Live Sync is frustratingly bad. It could be awesome.

It’s fair to say that Microsoft’s product offerings are something of a mess. Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh overlap (the difference being that the former is PC-to-PC, the latter is PC-to-cloud), Live Mesh and My Phone overlap (they’re both device-to-cloud), and SkyDrive, Live Mesh, and My Phone all overlap (they all incorporate their own cloud storage).

At least with the latest beta they’ve partially fixed the problem by combining Live Mesh functionality into Live Sync and eliminating Live Mesh.

The new Live Sync offers the same PC-to-PC sharing that it’s always done, but it adds to this the ability to sync to SkyDrive. Live Mesh’s remote access features have also been rolled into the Windows Live Sync product. With Live Sync subsuming both remote access and cloud sync features, Live Mesh is no more.

“Year of Inspiration” inside J Allard’s team

shawnbaden — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 04:24:22 +0000

This is interesting coming on the heals of Allard’s departure.

My question is: when in the hell does this design make it into Microsoft’s products?

link