The old saying used to go: No one ever got fired for recommending IBM.
But more recently, I think the working mantra has been: No one ever lost their
job for being too cynical about Microsoft.
So I'm surprised, frankly, at how far Microsoft seems to have come in light
of its recent moves to open up and interoperate a range of solutions and platforms.
From the release
of the .NET Framework source code, to the recent decision to make IE 8 more
standards-savvy, to the ongoing push to promote
its Office Open XML (OOXML) file format as an industry standard, it's getting
difficult to ignore the growing body of work by Redmond.
More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/18/20081 comments
I've always been a big fan of the law of unintended consequences. Whether it's
Henry Ford's invention threatening to melt the polar ice caps or Ray Kroc's
innovative fast-food business helping transform America into the most obese
nation on earth, it seems that even great ideas can have terrible consequences.
Ask Ray Tomlinson. He knows. The man who invented e-mail back in 1971 was interviewed
this week by the Times Online and said he had no idea how huge his
innovation would become and the threat it might unleash.
More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/13/20082 comments
A tip of the hat to Mary Jo Foley, who's
blogging
about an issue
that's earned our attention. That is, the spate of Microsoft
announcements, initiatives and policy changes that all seem to point toward
a more open and standards-compliant stance from Redmond. I
wrote
about this
in the March 4 issue of the Redmond Developer Newsletter.
More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/11/20080 comments
RDN
Senior Editor Kathleen Richards is out in Las Vegas, attending the
Microsoft MIX08 conference. The confab, now in its third year, focuses on Web
development and design, and has emerged as a launching pad for key Microsoft
products like Silverlight, the Microsoft Expression suite and Internet Explorer
8.
As Kathleen reports,
MIX08 has produced a flurry of important developer-related releases, including
the first public downloads of beta versions of Silverlight 2 and Internet Explorer
8. There's also a preview of Visual Studio tooling for Silverlight 2, an Expression
Blend 2 beta and an ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) preview.
More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/06/20081 comments
The
WorldWide Telescope (WWT) project
is an ambitious effort to create a Web-accessible, digital map of the entire
sky. Based on a database of high-resolution photos from telescopes across the
globe, WWT hopes to become the Google Earth of the night sky.
It's an intriguing idea that could inspire a new generation of people to explore
the cosmos. Microsoft hopes to launch WWT, currently in private alpha, some
time in the spring.
More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/06/20081 comments
File this under the "Microsoft Finally Gets It" department: Yesterday,
Microsoft
announced
that Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) would ditch the proposed "Super-Standards
Mode," which would have made full compliance with public Web standards
in the browser an opt-in option. By default, IE 8 had been poised to support
implementations proprietary to the current IE 7 browser. Now, Microsoft says
IE 8 will comply with current Web standards out of the box.
More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/04/20080 comments
Microsoft's decision to
change
course on IE 8
comes less than two weeks after Redmond had announced it
was
opening
access
to key APIs and communication protocols.
That move, which seems designed in part to clear regulatory hurdles and to
woo developers to Microsoft platforms, follows similar changes in other areas.
In January, for example, Microsoft released
source code libraries for .NET Framework 3.5. And the company continues
to work to get its XML-based Office file formats approved as an ISO standard.
You can read more about this long-running drama here.
More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/04/20080 comments
Michael Desmond, founding editor of Redmond Developer News and Desmond
File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him this week is John Waters,
contributing editor of RDN.
All this openness at Microsoft is coming just as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates
goes into semi-retirement, so it's probably worth giving props to new Chief
Software Architect Ray Ozzie for what promises to be a smart move for the company,
long-term. Ozzie was reportedly the force behind a 2006 open source project
to create a translation
bridge between Microsoft OOXML and the ODF standard.
More
Posted on 02/28/20081 comments
Michael Desmond, founding editor of Redmond Developer News and Desmond
File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him this week is John Waters,
contributing editor of RDN.
Few will feel the impact of Microsoft's
pledge to document the APIs and communication protocols used by Vista, Server
2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, Office SharePoint
Server 2007 and the .NET Framework more directly than third-party developers.
More
Posted on 02/28/20080 comments
Michael Desmond, founding editor of Redmond Developer News and Desmond
File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him this week is John Waters,
contributing editor of RDN.
Meanwhile, the folks across the pond have launched
a new investigation that focuses on whether Microsoft violated antitrust
laws by too-aggressively pushing for adoption of its Open Office XML (OOXML)
as a global standard. As the standards geeks in the audience know, OOXML is
the Microsoft-developed, XML-aware document format implemented in Microsoft
Office 2007. It became an Ecma International Technical Committee standard in
2006.
More
Posted on 02/28/20081 comments
Michael Desmond, founding editor of Redmond Developer News and Desmond
File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him this week is John Waters,
contributing editor of RDN.
When you're focused on software development in and for the enterprise, it's
easy to forget about game developers. That would be a mistake. In this day and
age, when enhancing the "end user experience" has emerged as a genuine
priority -- even (maybe especially) for biz apps -- enterprise developers could
learn a lot from their gamer siblings.
More
Posted on 02/26/20080 comments
Michael Desmond, founding editor of Redmond Developer News and Desmond
File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him today is Kathleen Richards,
senior editor of RDN. You can reach her at [email protected].
Capturing the hearts and minds of today's youth, as Apple Inc. has so aptly
discovered, can literally make your brand sing.
More
Posted on 02/21/20080 comments