Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’
Well well well, isn’t Microsoft getting clever!
Microsoft has long been the butt of many tech-jokes, especially from Apple/Linux fans. It’s not surprising. After all, it’s tough being the “king of the jungle”, especially when your operating systems keep crashing, you’re not the “cool” underdog, and user-friendliness is a concept you discovered late in 2005.
However, times are a-changing.
Over the past year or so we’ve seen some amazing things come out of Microsoft. Photosynth and the World Wide Telescope immediately come to mind. Conversely, Apple has been widely criticised for delaying the release of Leopard over and over (the very same thing they often accused Microsoft of in reference to Vista), of blunders with the new iPhone 3G, and of huge flaws with Mobile Me – the ‘upgrade’ to the .Mac service. (Read what Walt Mossberg has to say about it.)
And now, the coup de grace – The Mojave Experiment. Well, maybe not coup de grace exactly but it certainly seems to show that Microsoft is getting a little bit cleverer with its PR strategies.
MSFT Silverlight in 140 Characters
GapingVoid asks on Twitter “Can anyone tell me, in 140 characters or less, what is “THE BIG IDEA” behind MSFT Silverlight?”
Pretty good question I thought. What’s the big idea behind a company like Microsoft, who’s not really well known in the creative/desktop-publishing space, stepping into the highly competitive market of computer animation. A market where Adobe (formerly Macromedia) have been building a huge market share and “fan club” for a bit more than a decade.
Well, Microsoft is definitely a little bit better than Adobe at the programming side of things. And given their success with .net it is safe to assume there’s a huge framework ready to be tapped into by Silverlight. More importantly though, Silverlight is most likely going to be a huge asset to the millions of aesthetically-challenged Windows developers. Its provision of basic UI components that conform to basic interface and usability guidelines will up the standard of developers’ output and also make it several orders of magnitude easier for them to interact with designers since a lot of the presentation is abstracted out of the code itself.
Therefore, my answer to GapindVoid’s question was “Silverlight is Flash for MSFT Developers: Lets geeks make beautiful stuff and interact better with designers”
What do you think? Will Silverlight beat Adobe at the browser-animation game?
