drylight

This is not the first programming language that Microsoft have created that's made for kids. Visual Basic was the first.

Scoble: And if you thought I was your usual flame baiter. No. MS does some cool stuff too. It's not all bad. VS.NET 2005 is an awesome dev. tool!

I used to be a Borland developer through and through. But they've lost the race and I've left their dev. tools.

Scoble: 500kbps? Hmm I may have spoken too soon. If my memory serves me, I was only getting 47kbps (for a downloaded file). I will double check and retract my rant if the problem is on my end. Never afraid to admit being wrong.

Hi guys,

I like the new look to the site. But why are the videos so chunky?

I download 70meg files for a video where it's like looking through a door's grease smeared peep hole. I have to increase the video's size until I end up with a pixelated image which makes the people look like they're made of Lego blocks. This is 2005, come on, release better quality videos.

Why not also include QuickTime H.264 codec video files for download? I know it's from Apple, but it's a better codec. You'll end up with smaller files which are beter quality. Windows Media just doesn't cut it.

Diego.

Is this ever going to work with Safari? At the moment it doesn't work. It's slow, contains errors and what does work is unresponsive. All this is seriously hyped and it doesn't even work. Check out the following site on how to do something that works across most browsers and operating systems: http://maps.google.com/ Seriously, if MS are going to release public items like this on to the internet, maybe there should be a sub-domain on the internet where MS/IE only stuff can be found. Other agnostic and standard friendly web sites can live in the rest of the web.

Isn't Avalanche a "maybe" project? It's something in the research labs of MS (in the UK?) but it doesn't mean it will ever see the light of day? More info would be good.

Longhorn seems to be a very big ship which is hard to steer, with releases taking many years, with infrequent updates. By the time it comes out others will have moved on to other things. For a lot of the things coming out they seem to be reactionary. When a competitor announces something in their product, you hear the MS guys saying, "yeah sure we got that in Longhorn". And if they actually don't have it in there, the release is so far away they could squeeze it in by then. Highly innovative? Because it builds on something new? Unseen? They are playing catch up. For example, they fell asleep with IE and now have ramped up development on it again. What else besides tabs and RSS are they doing? Anything new? When I see people using IE these days I always think "you're still using that?!?". Why people persits with it amazes me. Use Firefox (or Safari) for five minutes and you should be sold on it and dump IE, unless you need to visit some IE-only friendly web site.

We may be looking at two slightly different angles here. I guess I am thinking about this more from an end-user point of view, not from a developer's. And that's not to say that I am completely closed to MS's innovations. I am a C# developer, and I like the language and .NET framework a lot. I certainly think they did a better job of creating a new language and managed/garbage collected, etc. development environment than what Sun did with Java. So I'm not completely anti-MS.

That's MS's job (to innovate), not mine. It just seems like this RSS in IE7 and Longhorn (due next year) is all over the bloggersphere when it's really nothing new. MS have not created something new, something cool, there is no "wow" factor in this. Others are already placing RSS in the software (or OS). RSS in IE7 (not yet available), already done by others. Searching accross all your files on your machine (due in Longhorn), already done. Tabs in IE7 (not yet available), already done. MS's products aren't exciting.

MS discovers RSS (late) and it's a big deal? This has already been done by others. IE7 is due soon, Longhorn in 2006? Others are way ahead of the game when it comes to RSS. MS is not innovative, has nothing new or exciting, there are other players which have already done this stuff. Show us something new, don't copy, try to innovate.