idisposable.net: a blog about web 2.0, search, Microsoft, Google, and other fun stuff

Microsoft’s Web 2.0 Developer Program Scores Points, but read the fine print

May 7, 2008 – 10:02 am

According to this headline, Microsoft has “edged” Google in Web 2.0 services for developers.  The report being discussed is from Evans Data, a technology research group.

Microsoft  and eBay score unexpectedly high marks with developers, according to Evans.

You decide, the  report can be found here.   But I can’t quite grasp what sort of survey panel they used that didn’t have Amazon, with AWS - arguably the most robust and uniquely used Web 2.0 service framework yet, and Facebook - with the highest profile and most accelerating and deftly used developer program in the short history of Web 2.0 in its Facebook Apps program, blowing everyone away.

But then I read Evans Data’s client list, revealing both eBay and Microsoft as customers.

John Andrews, president of Evans Data, shills for Microsoft here:

“Microsoft has much more experience in developer programs and it shows”

Now this has traditionally been true, heck my company was a Microsoft shop for years because of the quality of their developer programs in a sea of almost non-existing offerings from the players of the day (Sun, Oracle, IBM, and the like).  But today?  I think that putting up MSN widgets against Facebook and Amazon just shows how little the offering is.  Google is an upstart and already commands high marks in this area, despite not being an Evans Data Advisory Panel member or client.

It would be pretty cool if someone wrote a Web 2.0 survey/rating system for Web 2.0 development programs.  I would trust the community at large more than a sample group programmed by a private analyst group that may very well be paid by the entities it is reviewing.

By ed | Posted in amazon, cloud, ebay, facebook, google, microsoft | Comments (0)

Bill Gates goes out on a limb, claims internet will change in next 10 years

May 7, 2008 – 12:09 am

Bill,

Please run Microsoft again.  It needs you.

I think you may need it too.   Your recent comments are not very helpful.

I was kind of hoping for something more profound and insightful than  “We can expect that the variety and quality of software will accelerate in the years ahead.”

You used to say cool stuff like “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.”   Now you sound like an article from the in-flight magazine, from 1996.

Your brainchild’s most threatening competitor, Google, has a CEO too.  Eric Schmidt is definitely in tune with the future of the web. His recent interview in Wired was revealing and revealed the visionary aspect of being a CEO of a major force in web technology,

Steve Ballmer is awesome. His videos are great.  He eats hippie CEO’s like Jerry Yang for breakfast.  However, Microsoft needs someone at the helm for all the software stuff that you were good at for all those years.  No, it wasn’t perfect.  But it sure was popular and effective.  The question really is, what does Microsoft look like in 10 years?  Because the Internets aren’t waiting for it to catch up.

Best,

Ed

By ed | Posted in cloud, google, microsoft | Comments (0)

More Doom and Gloom for Microsoft

April 18, 2008 – 5:01 pm

According to Gartner and some industry folks that are “in the know,” Microsoft is in for some dire straights ahead because of the failure for Vista to take off as expected and the way things are unfolding in the internet and application development space.

Kind of like I’ve be saying for the past few months (here and especially here), Microsoft has a serious challenge ahead of them. Cloud computing is becoming more popular. Almost every new project that I’ve been working on relies on some sort of cloud based system.

By ed | Posted in cloud, microsoft | Comments (2)

Do you miss ASP.NET? Try the Acts as ASP.NET Rails Pluging

April 4, 2008 – 3:23 pm

Hilarious code comedy from Rails Jedi

My favorite:

“Viewstate is back. Now new and improved on top of Rails. acts_as_aspdotnet overrides form_tag to put a hidden variable that contains loads of crucial processing data on every postback that will fill your server pipes with more glorious bandwidth.”

By ed | Posted in .net, microsoft, rails, ruby | Comments (0)

Another big move by Google. Offline Docs. Word.

March 31, 2008 – 5:39 pm

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/03/bringing-cloud-with-you.html

Google has been rocking lately with updates to Google Apps.  Every week there seems to be more news coming out of Mountain View.  The latest news, hot of the press from Google’s Official Blog, is more evidence that this technology might just turn out to be as disruptive to Microsoft as anything else happening right now:

Now I can create, edit, publish, and fly on an airplane without loading up any Microsoft programs.

By ed | Posted in google apps, google gears, microsoft | Comments (0)

More gloom for Microsoft? Brand in decline says researcher

March 28, 2008 – 11:41 pm

I picked this up from Slashdot today.

I am still a huge Microsoft fan, I think that they blazed the trail for personal computing in a way that has helped thousands of developers and millions of users in the early ’90’s through the start of the “Web 2.0″ era.

However, as I mentioned in my post about Microsoft’s decline  at  the  hands of innovators like Google, I think that the clock is ticking for Redmond unless they make big changes.

But they can’t take my XBox 360 away…

By ed | Posted in microsoft | Comments (0)

Go Giants

February 3, 2008 – 2:40 am

I’m a Jets fan, but the NJ Giants are big in my neck of the woods - and the only team I dislike more than the Red Sox is the Patriots (sorry to my pals in Boston but this is football… :).

By ed | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Prediction: Google will out flank, disrupt, and split Microsoft apart

December 17, 2007 – 1:16 pm

I am seeing things in the marketplace that make me believe that Google will in fact out flank Office and disrupt Microsoft to a degree that few expected just a year ago.

First of all, there is a drum beating in the media for an epic battle between Mister Softie and Google. The article this weekend in the New York Times ( Google Gets Ready to Rumble ) has been the subject of much discussion on the Interwebs.

From the article:

[...] Google introduced a package of online software offerings, called Google Apps, that includes e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, word processing and spreadsheets. They are simpler versions of the pricey programs that make up Microsoft’s lucrative Office business, and Google is offering them free to consumers.

Second, we work with Google Apps everyday - our firm, LTech Consulting, is a Google Enterprise Partner. The pace that we have seen requests for migrations from Exchange to Google Apps has accellerated to the point that we are now opening new offices, hiring more people, and otherwise busier than we’ve been in a long time. Our experience is just one small slice - mere anecdotal evidence that Google is truly disrupting Microsoft. We also work with Microsoft tools like Sharepoint and the Office suite. For every 10 projects that we see that are Apps related, we see 1 Microsoft Office specific project. Does that reflect the reality of the entire marketplace? No. But it has to mean something.

Third, Google is not merely attacking Microsoft with Apps. It is attacking IE with its support of Firefox. It is attacking the server platform with its nascent, yet powerful, GData APIs. Along with Amazon, APIs and Web Services are become the foundation of the next-web - not Web 3.0, but a whole other beast altogether. And on the platform front, Apple is helping to erode market share of Windows.

But what does it all mean? In what way will Microsoft be disrupted other than a slowdown in revenue growth over a long period of time? What is the answer for Microsoft? Well, I have a sweet spot in my heart for Gates & Co. and I want to see them succeed. I owe the formative years of my career to the powerful, easy to use, and well-supported development environment of Visual Studio. Here is what I think (hope) will happen.
Microsoft will split into 5 companies that can openly work with or compete with one another.

If Billy G is still involved, it might look like this:

Microsoft will organize itself into 5 openly competitive business units.

Here is how it might look:

  1. OS Company: Sells operating systems for devices, workstations, home computers, and servers
  2. Development Tools Company: Sells IDE’s, development tools, development platforms. .NET becomes truly multi-OS compatible (absorbs Mono project)
  3. Productivity and Collaboration Tools Company: Office, web office, SharePoint, etc. Develops full featured collaboration tools for any platform, including Web.
  4. Web Services Company: MSN, Search, Live, etc. Starts incubating new ideas again (see Expedia)
  5. Gaming Company: Let’s face it - save for XBox, Microsoft really hasn’t had any hits lately. The next generation of XBox services get decoupled from the mothership and continue to provide innovative online play and adult-oriented gaming.

What do you think?

By ed | Posted in .net, google apps, microsoft | Comments (0)

soap4r vs. Rails: Uninitialized constant when using 1.5.8 with Rails

December 3, 2007 – 12:56 pm

If the soap4r gem (version 1.5) is breaking your workstation or servers, it might be because there are conflicts between Rails and soap4r both in source code, and in the community. We’ll discuss the source code fix first:

If you are getting this error:

Uninitialized constant when using 1.5.8 with Rails

When running your Rails server (happens with mongrel on my setup), you’ll need to patch a file in the soap gem.

Find the file ns.rb in the soap gem. On OS X, the path should be something like this:

/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/ns.rb

At around line 19, you should be able to make the following change:


# the dudes who wrote soap4r and the rails folks are battling it out. in the meantime
# you have to apply this patch to prevent soap4r from breaking all of your other projects
# (from http://dev.ctor.org/soap4r/ticket/433)

#KNOWN_TAG = XSD::NS::KNOWN_TAG.dup.update(
#  SOAP::EnvelopeNamespace => 'env'
#)

KNOWN_TAG = {

XSD::Namespace => 'xsd', XSD::InstanceNamespace => 'xsi', SOAP::EnvelopeNamespace => 'env'

}

Viola! You are done. You should apply this to all workstations and servers that have soap4r installed. The alternative is to add:

require 'rubygems'
gem 'soap4r'

to every project that is on your workstation or server. To me, this is an untenable resolution and brings me to the community issues I mentioned above.

If you read the thread here you’ll get a good sense of the nature of the conflict in the community.

Now, I am a relatively new to the Rails scene. I’ve been impressed so far with the professionalism of the community. However, the above issue demonstrates some serious problems.. There is the possibility to completely disable production applications, or interrupt the flow of developers trying to use their local workstations with patches like this.

To start, gem developers like the good people working on soap4r need to ensure compatibility, and make sure that their installation does not essentially break working, fit applications.

This comment on the issue thread says it well:

This is a pretty serious problem for the Ruby community… anyone coming in right now trying out Ruby for the first time in an enterprise context (more likely than not by way of Rails) is going to walk away in frustration.

Beyond that though, what sort of tools can be built it to ensure compatibility? I am no gem expert, but perhaps if there were environment-wide integration tests that would be expected to pass before a gem is installed, these types of frustrating problems would not come up.

By ed | Posted in rails, ruby, soap4r | Comments (0)

Funny: Ruby vs. NET

October 30, 2007 – 10:13 am

These guys crack me up. Good stuff…

Ruby vs. .NET Video

By ed | Posted in .net, ruby | Comments (0)