We have an XCoders meeting tomorrow, where we’re “dragging” Brent into the local spotlight again after his (relatively) recent transition back to a full time developer with the dudes from Newsgator. That ought to make for a good evening of chatting!
I’ve started playing again with a tablet PC – this time a Thinkpad X41, which I’ve got to say is a pretty nice piece of equipment. It has a good, compact design and it’s not a lead brick to carry around everywhere. I’ve been interested to try out One Note, since I’ve been reading Chris Pratley’s blog on and off for the past year or so.
And yes, of course I’ve been keeping track of the latest buzz from the folks in Redmond – the leaked internal memo from Gates, and the corresponding bits from Ray Ozzie are interesting reading. It is, to me, almost amusing that we’re reading Microsoft say “Oh shit, let’s make money from ADS!!!!”. I mean – wasn’t that the dream of all these dot-com crazies back in 1999?. Heh – and Google has just completely kicked their ass in that particular game too. Not that I’m writing them off, or that the game is even over – just that they succeeded where a LOT of other folks failed.
The most interesting piece in Ozzie’s bit is his statement : The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that ìjust workî. Services are a whole new game here, and while they’re reasonably decent at their services, I wouldn’t claim MS is the leader. I’d love to say something really smarmy like “MS can’t get it right”, but I think the truth is they’ll do a pretty darn good job at stabbing at it. If they can break out of this “lock in the MS technologies only” thing they have beating through their lifeblood, they might even get back to being amazing.
Rhonabwy 