Incremental Blogger

At the 2008 Government Leaders Forum Asia on May 9th Bill Gates shared some more of his enthusiasm for the Tablet PCs and more specifically Tablets in education.

“….I’ve got one last thing to show, and I previewed this earlier, and that’s related to the student Tablet. To me this is an important milestone, and Microsoft has been investing in this for a long time. We see lots of ways that we’re going to drive this into the mainstream. In fact, my own daughter goes to a school where she uses a Tablet PC, and it’s phenomenal to see how comfortable she is, how she learns better. She tries out her knowledge, she communicates with her teacher in a new way. It is completely digital. The Internet is there, the ability to create things is there.”

and on technology in schools:

“One of the things that I always share my enthusiasm for when I talk about the future of technology is the idea of students having a computer individually, and later today you’re going to hear from a teacher and a student who are experiencing that, and piloting what that’s like. Clearly that has to be a very robust machine that can last - you can drop it - it’s got to be inexpensive, it’s go to be powerful, but the hardware and software changes make it a question of when we can do that, not a question of if we can do that. Textbooks are on their way out. In some countries, that will happen in three or four years. In some it will be five or six, but I’ll be so bold as to say that over the next decade we’ll look at a textbook the same way we look at things like a paper-based encyclopedia today. And we look at it and we say, hey, it’s not rich enough, it’s not animated, it’s not inexpensive enough, it’s not flexible enough, it doesn’t give you the richness that the digital form of that can provide. And so these advances really make a huge difference.

One that I think is particularly interesting is that the way that we interact with these machines will change. We use the keyboard and the mouse today. On the mobile phone, we largely use the little keyboard, and it’s impressive how well people are able to use that small keyboard. But we should complement that with new approaches, and there’s a number of additional approaches that I refer to as natural interface. Speech input, where you talk and the system recognizes it. Pen, where you take a pen and you write ink, and it recognizes what you’ve written. Touch, where you can just point to things and move them around. A great example of this is that in the future the desk of a worker will be a touch-sensitive surface. The cost of that display and having the software that can see what you’re doing will be very, very low, and so you can take different documents, have them laid out there, point to one, expand it, have the sales data, or the survey data, or the quality data, or the calendar easily manipulable so you can navigate through it just by pointing at things, and then if you see something that surprises you, you can take your pen, write a little note, pick which colleague you think should take a look at that, click on that, and off it goes. And it’s very straightforward.

Likewise, your walls will be able to display information, because the cost of the screen will be very low, and they too will have a camera that can watch what you’re doing with the magic of software. And so your whiteboard, what was the chalkboard, will be intelligent. That will be true in the office, in the meeting room, in the classroom, at home. And so things like taking photos and organizing them, just very natural.

This is the kind of thing you’ve seen in science fiction movies, but in fact it’s now moving into the market, and moving into the market in very low cost. Our first product in this space is called Microsoft Surface. It’s a flat table. And just a few months ago that rolled out to the early customers and the response has been phenomenal that people love that natural capability of interacting.

Well now, with computer technology being so amazing, and so empowering to the individual, how do we get it so that we have broad benefit? Whenever we make scientific advances, we’re faced with this dilemma, and when we have new medicines, are they only for the rich? We go all the way back to look at reading, which of course in its early days only the very elites were literate, and it took hundreds of years before low cost printing, and government programs around libraries and schools got to the point where every country took a goal of saying that all the population deserves to the literate. And the world as a whole, most of the world, has done very, very well on that. Well now we have almost a new type of literacy, digital literacy, and making the computer accessible.”

(Emphasis is mine.)

As I read comments like this I jump inside with excitement. Who knows how long it’s going to take to achieve and whether it all comes out like we think it should, but is there any doubt that we’re going to figure out even more ways to make our lives more efficient, more connected, more enjoyable?

Word is spreading that Microsoft’s Ultra-Low Cost PCs (ULCPCs or ULPCs) pricing program will not support touch.

JKKMobile offers up some choice words/advice for Microsoft.

Let’s be clear though that we’re talking about unnamed, leaked sources here. Also, from what Microsoft mentioned publically earlier, they’re basically offering deep discounts for XP Home. By definition, this exludes Tablet bits (essentially) and domain join. For me, touch gets less interesting at this point. In fact, encouraging touch without Tablet could dilute the Tablet market, I guess. XP Home knocks out schools using these as Tablet PCs in any organized manner as well. I’ve already blogged about my thoughts on this. However, schools can always decide to pay a little extra for the Tablet bits and Vista and a machine that can run it reasonably well. This is just an incentive program.

And we’re really talking about a competitive nudge against Linux. That’s what’s motivating this. We’re not talking about where Microsoft’s heart is. We know no more or less whether Microsoft is committed to low-cost Tablet PCs or Tablet PCs in education.

Of course, the problem here is that in its battle against Linux, Microsoft is going to be discouraging Tablet sales and disouraging the notion that Tablet features should be everywhere. This collision course looks unavoidable. To me, it’s not a question whether Microsoft should be blocking touch on ULCPCs, it’s about whether they should be encouraging Tablets and Tablet features to be low cost. For us Tablet advocates, well, we’ve got more work cut out for us. Now, not only do we have the unwelcome $200+ premium for the digitizers, we have an additional price premium for the OS on the low-end.

Oh well, maybe these low-cost PCs will flop and we can all go back to $1500 UMPCs.

I’ve blogged several times about the over-the-top thinking going on with the TechMeme Leaderboard crowd when it comes to the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger. The sensationalism might have encouraged traffic, but much of it sure was borderline business advice. Now that the deal is undone, maybe we can all get back to talking about tech.

Of all the posts I’ve run across, Danny Sullivan gives some of the best perspective on the proposed deal and where things go from here.

I would say that in terms of where I’d like Microsoft to go from here is where I’ve wanted it to go all along. The first step I’d suggest for them is to work with its many MVPs and build an ad system they’d like to use. Start there. It’s simple enough and small enough to keep nimble. I realize that an approach like this doesn’t have the charm that the top 15%, but hey, that’s exactly the thinking that’s gotten Microsoft this far–so it’s time for a change.

I won’t repeat myself yet again why and how this would all work, but it seems so obvious to me.

I’d also recommend to Microsoft to think less in terms of search in the classic Google way, because I don’t even think Google is doing it anymore. There’s more to search than search. Microsoft should think in terms of helping people get to the information that they want to get to and to use it they way they want. I think this suggests more services than just search. Why can’t someone programmatically get to the definition of a word in Live Search? Why can’t they get acceptable hyphenation via a service call? Or just the source code sample on MSDN that use a particular function–again via a call? This type of approach would get a developer like me to use Live “Search.” Is Google really the best at providing reference material? I don’t think so. That’s why Wikipedia had an opening. Microsoft has the same opportunity here, especially if they provide easily reusable components and services, which is something Microsoft is good at.

Virtual Earth is a fairly good example of this. It’s not quite right though if you ask me. Would I point any of my GPS-enabled programmer/bicycling friends to it? No. Why? Because it doesn’t do what they want and to make it do what they want is too much work.

And what about something like math? There’s a reason why my Silverlight-based Math Tip points to Google and not Live Search for getting math results. Microsoft misses the boat here again and makes it too hard to try to even kludge something up. It’s possible, but why bother. Just use Google.

Live Mesh or not, there are tons of these little services that are ideal for Microsoft or Google or Yahoo to do. Maybe some day.

These kinds of articles from the New York Times and Wired about the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition really get to me. Why? They’re premise is all wrong. When it comes to whether Microsoft will acquire Yahoo, it’s not about winning and losing the deal. No matter what happens, the next day will come, and the next, and the next. And it’s what Microsoft does with these days that’s really at issue–whether with Yahoo or not.

The trouble signal is not whether Microsoft tries and fails, but whether they are hungry enough to do anything at all. Lack of hunger is the killer of most every tech enterprise I’ve been around. The engineers have to be hungry. The sales staff has to be hungry. The executives have to be hungry. You have to have the drive to try. You have to have the capacity to keep going despite all odds. Tomorrow’s success will quiet the fiercest fortunetelling naysayer.

What I see that’s so promising about all of this is that Yahoo is expressing their hunger right now as it tries to position itself better and Microsoft is expressing their hunger as they try to find the sweet spot on the web. I see losers in neither of them.

This weekend I don’t know how many times I was asked by friends and neighbors whether I thought the Micorosoft acquisition of Yahoo was going to go through. In particular, I was surprised at how many non-technical people are following the possible deal. The reality is though, I don’t have a clue what’s going to happen. No one does.

Like Mary Jo Foley, the Wall Street Journal and others I have heard rumblings about the proposed deal. Most tech people I know are against it. I’m not, but then again I’m often wrong, so I’m probably on the wrong side of this one. I accept it.

Why do I think a Microsoft-Yahoo mindmelt would be a good idea? It would give Yahoo market leverage and it would give Microsoft new blood–new thinking. The tricky part for both is that Microsoft needs to be careful not to go too overboard in its acquisition so that once if does go through, if ever, that it has the financial strength to leverage it. Likewise, it’s got to be careful not to discourage the Yahoo employees that it very well could benefit from. Same goes for Microsoft’s employees. I also nonsensically like the idea of Microsoft expanding its Bay Area focus. What can I say? I love California–Seattle, not so much.

No matter what happens though, I doubt it’ll have much impact on what I or many of the people I know use or do.

I remember when Microsoft purchased Hotmail. This was one acquisition I was against. The reputation for Hotmail email was terrible. Now, it’s not, even if the name is kind of 1995ish. It just goes to show how things adapt and change.

This article talks about the differences between developing for the Apple and Windows. Some of it I agree with, some of it I think is too simplistic.

For instance, the author claims that many Windows apps are poorly designed. Well, it’s not just Windows. It’s everywhere. Look at the “apps” on the web. Is Google’s Gmail really that well designed? What about Google Analytics?

Where Microsoft has gone wrong in my book is that they created a huge disparity between the Office look and feel and the Windows API for way too long. Well, actually the disparity is as large as ever at the Win32 level, but at least the .NET Framework is allowing .NET developers to get closer. This is an example of how I think the .NET Framework has essentially become the Windows API. Prior to the crowning of the .NET Framework I would have argued that MFC was the defacto Windows API (loosely), so this trend is nothing new.

Now in terms of the design issues within Windows development and design in general, I think this topic deserves a whole post. People are getting a bunch of issues muddled up. One point to keep in mind here is that many people are arguing about the current capabilities of the day. What do I mean? I’d argue much of the arguing about design has come forth precisely because we have better tools and technologies available today that enable us developers to “design” apps better. It’s not that one day we all woke up realizing that we had poorly designed apps and needed to make a change. It’s that one day we woke up and realized that the design tools and techniques were finally mass market. I realize that there’s more to it than this, but it’s an important point to realize. Down the road we will become more enlightened about other “bad” decisions that we’ve been making over the years too–and we’ll all look back and say “how could developers have made such a mess?”

A third issue the author brings up is about legacy. It’s important to realize that the minute a developer writes a drop of code, legacy begins. The minute a product begins testing legacy becomes a bigger issue. And so it goes as the product ships or gains market traction.

OS X has legacy issues like everything else. Try to write an ink-enabled app in OS X. You’ll most likely wind up having to work with two disjointed Mac Framewoks: Carbon and Cocoa. You’ll have to bridge the two because they weren’t designed to work equally together. It’s not terrible, but it’s a pain point–just like the Win32 API is and lets say WPF development.

Anyway, this post is longer than I planned it to be and much shorter than what I want to say, so I’ll leave it at this point and make a promise to go into each of these issues in greater detail later.

Daniel Dilger of RoughlyDrafted sure does a good job at defending Apple, whether it needs it or not. This time around he’s suggesting that Microsoft has now become the beleaguered Apple of 1996. Whatever similarilities he points to, he sure does miss the obvious. Microsoft is a huge and public target for all of us to point out their errors. Microsoft is going to make lots of errors. It’s a huge company.

But further, no matter how hard Microsoft tries to emulate Apple or how much people want to draw simularities between the two, Microsoft is no Apple. Sorry. The companies have two different DNAs.

This labelling arguement isn’t what I want to get into though. Instead, Daniel takes a couple swipes at Microsoft that I think deserve some responses. First, he talks of the “failure” of the Tablet PC and UMPC. Sure, both of these product areas have performed far less than they could or should have. Yes, Microsoft could have done better, though personally I’d lay even more responsibility on the shoulders of the OEMs. That’s just my take on it though. Anyway, how many billions of dollars does a market have to be before it’s not a “failure” anyway? Calculate it out yourself, a couple million Tablets times $1.5K or so a piece and you have a pretty good sum of money. Is a $3B market really a failure? Not to me. Again, a $6B market would be better, but let’s not close the coffin too early shall we?

Now onto another arguement Daniel makes in his post, “Microsoft has found it increasingly difficult to hire new talent because the company no longer offers any exciting future potential.” Yeah, Microsoft has a challenge here in communicating its value to some. I can see that. But come on. I don’t care if Apple or Microsoft have 10 or 10 million employees each, it all comes down to you and how much you can contribute in the organization. A great engineer in either place will still be a great engineer. Let’s be clear, both companies lose out on opportunities. Both do. Look at how Apple has missed out on Tablets–something you’d think it would be great at and would be welcomed by its customer base. I don’t care how bad of a business idea you may think it would be for Apple to make a Tablet, if you were an engineer wanting to get into the Tablet space, Apple hasn’t been the place to be. Likewise, if you’re an artistically minded Tablet developer within Microsoft you’d probably feel left out too. In both cases, it may make sense for the engineer to move on, but it also may make sense for them to put all they have into showing how great a product they can make as they see fit. Yes, in an established company–as both companies are–this can-do think is not often nourished, but it’s just as valuable as in any startup company. New ideas have to come from somewhere.

Yes, people will tire and burn out and may even come to realize that to do what they want they have to go elsewhere, but this is universal. It’s not specific to Microsoft. It’s not unheard of in Apple. It’s just the way it is.

It’s up to Apple and to Microsoft to communicate their value. In this respect–in terms of the public voice–I’d give the edge to Apple, but this is just one dimension of a multi-dimensional problem.

Let me go at this from another angle. Let’s say you’d like to see personal computers take the next evolutionary step–I mean something that does more to understand you than you having to conform to it. I’m thinking of a computer that interacts with you rather than you being forced to interact with it. Maybe it would be able to adjust to your needs by listening to what you do and say throughout the day–not just from your words, but your grunts, your sighs–all the things you vocally do to communicate. Let’s say it could also watch what you do and react accordingly. Or what about if the computer could better understand your context to make appropriate guesses at helping to minimize repetitive tasks. Let’s say the computer could do all of this and more, such as support rich multi-touch interaction or be able to read your handwritten scribbles. Sound interesting? Now which company would you think would be more likely to pursue even a portion of this vision? Apple? Microsoft? Based on what I’ve heard from many of Bill Gates’ recent speeches and what Microsoft is doing today with Tablets and Surface and its Robotics initiative, I’d say Microsoft hands down. Think Steve Jobs is more likely to pursue natural input methodologies? I don’t. Recall his comment about handwriting and how he see everyone moving to the keyboard? A computer that forces me to use the keyboard isn’t exactly my idea of an ultimate computer. Sorry.

Anyway, next time you think the engineering pad looks greener on the Apple side, take a real hard look and think about where opportunities really lie. To me, both companies have lots to offer. No reason to tear down one to pump up the other. Let’s skip this nonsense and get back to work creating something really, really cool…and useful.

On the heels of yesterday’s Microsoft/Yahoo post, Michael Arrignton is at it again–this time saying that Microsoft’s future depends on advertising. Can’t disagreee more. Yes, Microsoft can earn a lot of money from advertising, but that’s not all that it’s going to be. It’s still going to want to be a publisher and partner focused business.

Don’t for a minute think that publishing and advertising haven’t been friends for a long, long time. Go talk with magazine folks (both online an offline), or the movie industry, or the TV industry, and so on if you think otherwise. The same will be true for the software world. It will probably take a different form, but it will be a close partner in most things that are done. (Music publishers are struggling with the production/advertising balance as is the software world.)

There is one important point that needs to be made in all of this Google vs Microsoft competition: Google’s mission–as I see it–is different than Microsoft’s. Google is about getting access to the information that I want. This might be a document, a description of a medicine, a definition of a word, a mathematical result, a video, and even an advertisement. It also has a related mission of providing tools that eases the access to the information I want or want to make available to others. For instance, here we see GMail and Google Docs, and Google analytics, and so on. Microsoft’s mission–as I see it–comes from the other side. They are about creating tools, products, and services that people and partners can use to do what they want. That’s their foremost mission. A related mission is to give people access to what they want.

The difference may seem subtle, but it’s huge. Microsoft’s mission is derived from years as a classic software development house where people often would make money selling products to people that would use them in the hopes of getting benefit. In the early days especially, people would often over buy and software would sit on the shelves. The publishing houses didn’t care–outside of the fact that they weren’t getting the needed feedback to stay competitive. But I’ve seen plenty of it over the years. In fact, I’d say for many software businesses if you take away these sales, quite a few of the businesses would have been much less than they became.

In the web world, where it’s standard to have free or low-cost versions that people can build up to incrementally, there will be less of this. This is where Microsoft is going to feel the pinch, if you ask me. It’s the effortlessness for people to get at what they want, to communicate more easily and powerfully, to share and consume without significant setup and management issues. Advertising is a money maker, yes. Microsoft will surely be in this game as most publishers do. But where Microsoft has the greatest challenge is not in the advertising, as many are focusing on, it’s the balance between getting people what they want versus focusing on giving them the tools to do what they want with.

The key to success will be to climb the abstraction ladder and to focus on improving communication. Call it a network or social network focus, if you will, but from what I see this is where Microsoft can continue to do well. It’s just got to get out of that confining in-the-box-think. It’s making progress, but I think with Yahoo, it’ll get there faster. Call me silly, but I see the value. Personally, I don’t think it’s the advertising that’s the key to the deal. Yes, there’s the immediate money part, but Microsoft can benefit from the network-oriented-think, which it hasn’t quite caught onto yet. The trick will be not to get everyone so upset though in the process that this value evaporates when and if any agreement is reached. Now that would be quite unfortunate–no matter how much advertising revenue pays for the deal.

Are there lots of other ways for Microsoft to get there, than acquire Yahoo? You bet. It’s just that institutionally it’ll take some dramatic shifts to do so and that’s extremely hard for a large established organization to do. Either way, what might we expect? A new Microsoft in 10 to 20 years or so? Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. This is not a short term transition.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about where I’d like to see Windows to go down the road–particularly from a programmer’s perspective.

Although I’m still trying to think through precisely which APIs/SDKs I’d like to see, I have come to the conclusion that for all practical purposes the future of Windows’ API and the .NET Framework are woven together. It’s not just about what I’d like to see in Windows–it’s about what I’d like to see in Windows and the .NET Framework collectively.

As a long time C and C++ developer, I’ve grown to accept that I now live in a C# world. With this behind me, now it’s time to think about where I’d like to go with all of this.

Here’s my starting point: Whatever “it” is, I want to see higher and higher level SDKs. The web is a great illustrator of the value of this–something that was always true even on the desktop, but something no one quite had the time to get around to. The web reminded us of the importance of decoupling and how much more we can all get done if we choose the connection points right. Why is higher-level programming more “doable” on the web? It isn’t, but the connectivity makes it shine. That’s the motivator. That’s the facilitor.

Look at all the mashups–using classic think about how we could have written these on the desktop, would we have ever gotten there? I don’t think so. When it comes to graphics intensive apps, such as mapping tools, most efforts would have crumbled when it comes to low-level graphics implementations. Same goes for image handling. And then there’s the whole file system issue. And deployment decisions.

Anyway, back to Windows and the .NET Framework. It’s obvious to me that Windows development is never going to lead anymore–in the broader sense. There’s too much legacy stuff that Windows has to honor. Adding anything new is risky and I can appreciate the Windows team saying no to the latest new ideas. Rightly they’d doubt its real value. The result? Windows is very unlikely to have any new leading edge technologies within it. They have to be proven first. And then if they are “proven,” I can see the team arguing that “Hey look at how far you got without your great app or tools being merged into Windows, so why should we fold them in now because 1) you didn’t implement them the way we would have and 2) it would increase our testing like you cannot imagine. In other words the Windows gatekeepers are all about saying “No.” From a user’s perspective it’s for our own good. Sorry early adopters.

And this is where the .NET Framework comes in. It should become the future of the Microsoft API if you will. Notice I didn’t say Windows here, I’m referring to the future APIs collectively as something that Microsoft makes available for the browser, for Windows desktop apps, for cell phones, for MIDs, and yes, even for the Mac and so on.

For the future of the .NET platform I’d like to see more and more high-level APIs. For today’s world, there should be lots of RSS feed support, OPML mindedness, Facebook APIs, and so on. Yes, Microsoft is going this direction, which I think is the right path. But what about tomorrow? I’d like to see APIs for connecting apps, similar to OneNote’s shared session feature. I’d like to see vision SDKs, including face tracking, face recognition, and gesture reco. I’d like to see neural net APIs, text searching tools, dictionaries, grammar analysis of sentences, and on and on and on. Some of these could be desktop focused. Some could be web focused. Some could be both.

Why am I suggesting to expand the focus of the .NET Framework? Because as I described the other day in a post, the world is about connected devices and communication. And you can’t have effective, powerful communication, if everything is locked into one platform. Silverlight is beginning to pave the way here, but there’s so much more that’s possible and feasible.

Give a developer a vision SDK and they can do some clever things. Give them a framework where they can process 30 live video streams, stitching them together in real-time, indexing major events all automatically, generate thumbnails for quick and easy access, well now you’ve really changed the game. To pull this off there’s going to be huge infrastructure challenges, yes. But imagine what developers can do if you keep climbing the abstraction layer? With good connectivity and good processing power, there are so many exciting things that will become practical for let’s say one or two developers to do–which has always been a magic number in creating new, exciting solutions.

So where does Live fit into all of this? I see it as a component of .NET–at least the tools part–and then by definition the low-level functionality. Search, for instance, is a very high-level search API or query engine. Same goes for Virtual Earth, and on and on. Likewise, ad databases, page scraping, context analysis, tagging, semantic analysis, news threading, and so on all have primitives that would be part of the Microsoft Framework. Now all of these might have end user front ends–I guess that’s where the Live team fits in. It would take care of maintaining this portion. But everything else would be developer oriented. It would be about creating very high-level APIs.

Yes, the future is about connectivity and very high-level SDKs–at least for the majority of developers.

Michael Arrignton is getting concerned over the twists and turns in the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition. Fred Wilson is getting uneasy too. Both are getting quite a bit of attention on Techmeme. Funny thing is that Michael and Fred are concerned for exactly the opposite reasons.

Fred is concerned about companies after an acquisition. Is their value really preserved or maximized in the acquiring company. If not, maybe it’s time to look elsewhere. Michael is going the opposite direction and churning over whether it’s a wise move to hold out for more money when a company has made a bid to acquire it–particularly if the predicted path to increased value involves splitting up current products or services. What happens if it’s a bad decision?

What do I think? They are both right and wrong; you simply can’t predict the future.

One thing is for sure. If anyone–Yahoo included–follows their advice, there will blog posts that make it to the top of TechMeme that say how unsmart Yahoo is being. And if Yahoo doesn’t follow community advice, likewise there will be top TechMeme posts arguing that Yahoo should take this or that move as they’ve suggested all along.

Tuesday I went to a local “Silverlight 2″ presentation put on by AZGroups, a local developer/designer organization. I’m glad I went. It was top notch–especially for a free event. It was kind of like a Readers Digest version of Mix08–although without the party at Tao. Fine by me, I don’t drink.

Scott Guthrie, recently promoted to VP of “all things developer-oriented” at Microsoft was the main presenter–in fact, he gave two presentations. One on the Silverlight 2 Beta and another on the new MVC framework for ASP.NET. Both were easy to follow, well organized and well presented. I walked away with the impression that Silverlight is getting ready for prime time and now that ASP.NET has MVC support, it deserves even more respect too.

I particularly like where Silverlight is heading. You can now develop in it much like you can with WPF. No more clumbsy Javascript, unless you want to. No more struggling with conflicting names when embedding content. Even better performance. Great debugging support. And a developer friendly ability to create UserControls. If you have had any doubt about Silverlight, you’ll want to check out Silverlight 2. If you’re new to WPF, it might take some time to get up to speed, but it’ll be worth it.

In terms of the MVC model for ASP.NET, all I can say is finally. It’s not always needed, but this is a welcome addition to the platform–especially for those of us that like to build out unit tests.

As I sat listening to Scott talk, I started realizing something. And I know this may sound awkward, but for a VP, Scott sure does know his stuff. Further, he’s quite approachable. No entourage. No PR person filtering the conversation. During a break to stretch my back, I took an opportunity to chat with Scott for a few minutes about Silverlight. Again, I could tell he knows his stuff. And he didn’t seemed bothered in the least that I was asking him questions.

I kept thinking about this more and more and while driving home I kept coming back to how impressed I was with Scott. Here he is, giving some technical talks in Phoenix, when he could be back in Redmond, doing….well, VP things. Nope, he’s spending time with local developers and designers.

Between Scott’s excellent blogging and events like this, I can’t help but imagine what Microsoft would be like if more of the VPs were like him. Don’t get me wrong. Variety is good and there are many roles to play in a large company like Microsoft, but Scott’s down to earth nature is refreshing.

I’m so impressed, that I wouldn’t mind if one day Scott took over the whole shooting match–even Windows and Live and Office (it is essentially a dev platform after all). I’d like to see him become the future of Microsoft. That’s just my little take on it.

As much as I love the iPhone and admire the new SDK, this is why I usually wind up developing around Microsoft technologies. Will Apple ever learn?

I hope Microsoft’s Apple envy isn’t successful enough to wipe away its advantages.

Warner Crocker’s declaration that the MID market race is over now that the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK has been announced may be a bit provocative, but I think he’s onto something. What do I mean? For the near term the iPhone/iPod Touch is essentially going to lead the MID market in terms of price, availability, developer community, quality of user experience, and funding of its ecosystem.

For Microsoft, this doesn’t mean much, because Microsoft isn’t playing in this game per se. Yes, there’s XP and Vista for some beefier units and I guess “CE” is a choice too. But let’s be serious here, for the near term none of these reach the platform model of the iPhone/iPod Touch. Sorry.

There are some Linux distros that are pretty slick that I’ve seen on some MID prototypes (at CES), but I don’t see these as major contenders either. Why? Because they are fragmenting. There’s not one single way to do things. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Nice efforts in some cases, but for the immediate future they are not going to lead the industry. They won’t condense into an industry. Sorry.

Where I think the big issue is, is not particularly in the OS “wars,” but rather in how essentially Intel’s MID initiative is left without a software partner. If Microsoft isn’t going to do it–if Linux isn’t going to provide a cohesive answer–Intel’s view of the MID world is going to have a tough time competing with the iPhone/iPod Touch family.

Actually, for Intel it probably doesn’t matter. I’m sure Intel will be quite happy if Apple switches to its CPU family and takes over the MID market. It doesn’t need the Intel-named MIDs to “win.” However, since it’s unlikely that Apple will ever license their OS platform to others to build like-minded devices, Intel will lose out in the total market it could achieve. So I’m sure Intel is struggling to figure this out.

As I see it there’s one possible software partner left–for the near-term–that could come to Intel’s aid. And that’s one that’s been quite good at filling holes left by Microsoft–Google. I don’t think it’s likely–just possible. Google could rework its Android initiative to make it MID friendly and this together with Intel’s hardware partners could possibly create an ecosystem that might have a chance at broadening the MID market. A chance. A thin one. But one nonetheless. I’m partially in doubt because of Google’s boardroom ties with Apple and Google’s lack of prior experience in this area. Besides they are thinking “phones” rather than MIDs at this point.

Note that in all of this I’m talking near term. Three, five, ten years out anything could happen. However, for the next year and possibly two Apple is in the lead and will most likely stay that way.

For all of you that are thinking I’ve fallen victim to the hype, let me encourage you to do a few things: First, get an iPhone. Use it and then tell me that it’s connectivity and form-factor don’t draw you in. Second, play banker for a minute. Where would you place your bets? In an unproven, fairly fragmented software market geared around an unproven family of MID products from hardware-based Intel and its partners or with Apple and its “iPod” family including the recent iPhone device that’s done remarkably well for its first year? And third, if you’re a developer, check out the iPhone SDK. Tell me it doesn’t have many of the things we’ve all wanted as rich-app, mobile developers. We’ve seen similar things before and beyond as well. But have they been so well packaged before? If you’re still not convinced, watch the demos during Apple’s SDK announcement event. And if none of this convinces you, I bet you’re not shaken by near term events, so no problem. I agree with you that in time the world will reach equilibrium and all will be well. What’s a couple years here and there among friends?

Yes, several years out, things will most likely be much different. And no doubt, there will be plenty of room for niche players across the board in the meantime. And Microsoft’s and Intel’s coattails are big enough to carry several efforts along the way too. But for the Kliener Perkins level break away products, I’ll be looking in the iPhone/iPod Touch direction.

As a Tablet/UMPC enthusiast and developer, I’m not going to dump what I’ve been doing and radically change directions, but you can rest assured that I’m keeping my options open. Like with the OLPC and Eee PCs I see an evolution occurring here and I don’t want to be left behind.

Good technology and good implementations deserve respect. And I’m treating the iPhone with such. Doesn’t mean my competitive instincts aren’t kicking in. Just means I’m very mindful and doing my best to do my best.

That was a terrifically entertaining discussion between Guy Kawasaki, Steve Ballmer and the Mix08 audience. Too bad it didn’t go on longer. So many questions to ask.

So many favorite parts. A few of the best:

* Ballmer explains why IE got behind–considering how evolved .Net has become during the same time period. He says it was because IE got tied to Windows. Now they will incubate projects more.

* Guy promises Ballmer a discount on a Mac Air. Ballmer declines the offer and says his Toshiba is lighter and then gets on the ground with the Air looking for the DVD drive. Hilarious.

* “Web developers, web developers, web developers.”  Need I say more?

You have to check this video out. Lots of clips to choose from to make YouTube videos out of

The WorldWide Telescope project from Microsoft Research was announced yesterday at TED. Looks quite impressive. A download will be available in a couple months for free at http://worldwidetelescope.org/.

The app sounds like it’s going to be aimed at virtual tours of space, but I hope as it evolves it goes further. I’d really like to see the idea of “real-time” photos being merged in. So that as a lunar eclipse occurs (visible from wherever on earth) or as a comet passes by–I could jump to a program like this to watch rather than contemplate a 2 hour trip away from city lights to try to get a glimpse of it. I think this could also encourage a lot of amateur photographers if their photos could somehow be melted in too.

Robert Scoble promises a much better demo than the TED attendees got. I look forward to it.