Mix 08 - Day 1

I'm attending the Mix 08 keynote in Vegas right now.

Strategy

So far, nothing really new. Microsoft is basically playing catch-up with other industry leaders. MS seems to be focusing in 3 areas:

- Advertising platform (desperately trying to grab some of Google's insane market share)
- Device management unification (Zune/XBox/MediaCenter etc...)
- Virtualization and utility compupting both at the pltform level (trying to catch up with VMWare) and service level (Exchange Online, SQL Server Online) - trying to catchup with Amazon AWS offering. No news about an EC2 equivalent or licensing changes to accomodate for elastic comuting though.

IE 8

I can't believe after a 2 year wait we're expected to cheer for features like integrated debugger, CSS/DOM inspection, CSS 2.1 support and better Javascript performance. Other than web slices, IE 8 is just on par with Firefox and Safari. There's some support for HTML 5 and localstorage. Overall, it looks good, but it's 2 years late. This is what IE 7 should have been. Hugh... whatever.

SilverLight 2.0 / Expression Studio

Ver, very interesting news. SilverLight is offering some interesting advertising features, but the real big deal is DoubleClick announcing support for SilverLight. This could seriously speed up SilverLight market penetration, but it's also very intriguing since DoubleClick and Google are trying to merge, and the Google/MS war seems to be at its peak right now. No MS employee will even mention the G-word here. So what does this mean? Is there a deeper message in this announcement? What's DoubleClick incentive in supporting this very new technology?

MSN Video demo, showing Beijing Olympics video coverage. Looks really, really cool. Replay feature on live streams, picture-in-picture... awesome.

A couple of SilverLight marketing site demos (Hard Rock memorabilia and Aston Martin). This is hilarious. It reminds me of those good old Flash web sites that I thought had gone out of style years ago. Sure, bandwidth is better, processors are faster, so they look a bit better, but this is 1998 all over again. I guess they're trying to add some "wow" factor to this keynote because of the lack of breakthrough announcements, but come on... these are useless, useless apps. Haven't we learned anything over the past 10 years???

Cirque du Soleil was pretty cool. Nokia speech was mind numbing. MIXr is sooooo 2007. WeatherBug - whatever.

If I see one more SilverLight demo I'm going to get sick.

Conclusion

It's all about SilverLight. No mention of ASP.NET MVC. Scott Guthrie had promised a new release, but I've heard nothing. I have a list in front of me of all new software available to download, but it's all Expression Media / Studio and IE 8. Nothing about ASP.NET Ajax either.

Silverlight is pretty much Flex, with the advantage of supporting .Net programmirng languages and IDE, but worse animation features, and no audio/video capture or Flash Comm Server equivalent.

IE 8 is Firefox + web slices and offline storage (which probably won't be useful for another 2-3 years).

Oh yeah, and in 5 months we'll get a .Net 3.5 SP that'll add rippling effects to WPF. Great...

There you have it.