machine501

Here’s a quick list of blog posts about the Microsoft Technology Summit 2008 from people who were there. If you have a link to one please send it to me.

Paul Jones:
Don’t pitch me, bro!

The Real Adam’s impression of Open Source at MS:
http://therealadam.com/archive/2008/03/27/open-source-and-research-at-microsoft/

Luis Villa, who managed to quickly dismiss me and others who care about open source by saying “almost everyone was in some way a user or developer of open source technologies (the rest were flash/adobe people)“. Nice way to form alliances.

http://tieguy.org/blog/2008/03/29/microsoft-technology-summit-mts08/

The company I run is built on open source technologies, for both commercial and philosophical reasons. I use flash because it’s the best way to deliver the service to my costumers. The rest is python, mysql, php, apache, jabber, java, django, bsd and lots of other things. But, I shouldn’t have to list my open-source creds to be legit.

This reminds me about another thing I noticed at the summit: some people who are extremely passionate about their respective domain are, as my best friend often labels me, “ANTI”. You’re in the belly of the beast, in the borg! And you have the borg’s ear. Rather than showing how indignant you feel about M$ and what a shitty, enslaving, conniving, greedy, dense, stupid company you think it is, how about finding some common ground and seeing how you can work for the common good? If I missed some adjectives regarding M$ please send those to me, they will be promptly appended to the previous list.

And also, like I mentioned in my previous post: from what I saw, Microsoft Research is Research with a big “R”. That’s academic type research. The reason there is no iterative process or user engagement is because such research is not typically amenable to iterative process and user engagement; in other words, it’s not Product Testing. Some areas of study, like social computing, HCI, user interface design, cultural effects on user experience, and stuff having to do with people will have limited user engagement, typically called debriefing, after testing theories with experiments. Because you are trying to find out one thing, you control for many factors, much as in academic research. So, you can’t have the same free-form, back-and-forth user-feedback-loop that you should when developing and product testing. The way Research works is you first come up with a theory. For example, that green buttons are easier to click on. Then you create an experiment where you control for all sorts of stuff so that the only variable that changes is the green button. Then you have people click on the green button, and then you report your findings about how that one variable proved or disproved your theory. Then you provide some potential reasons why your hypothesis is true or false, sometimes pointing to previous Research. Some time, later in the future, maybe years into the future, the results of that research are used inside a product. At that point, you might, if you want your product to be good, engage in iterative development and user feedback.

Often I heard the question: “Why should I care?” Why should I care that, say, ASP.NET MVC, exists when I already use Rails? Why should I care that Silverlight exists when I use Flex? I have the same visceral reaction when listening to the Silverlight talk, but that’s just my initial reaction because I’m invested in what I’m already using. After thinking about it for a minute, I can come up with a few reasons why I should care a little more, and why I shouldn’t feel indignant about the fact that M$ is building a clone. As The Real Adam pointed out in his post “Important Ideas in ASP.NET MVC“:

The most promising thing about this tool, to me, is that MS is guiding people down the unit testing path by default

What about Silverlight? It might be a better tool for a client or product, but not yet. Hey, choice is great sometimes. These are purely pragmatic reasons. And if a programmer learns to do testing in one language then she’ll be at an advantage if sometime in the future she has to develop something in Rails and she’s already familiar with unit testing thanks to her having learned it first in ASP.NET MVC. Note to microsoft, drop the .net thing =s Skills transfer is an important thing that M$ cannot control. I learned to program on the C64, then on Borland’s Turbo Pascal, then on Borland’s C/C++, then on Microsoft’s C++ compiler. Then, I magically transfered all my programming skills that I learned in close-source commercial implementations to GCC, python, ruby, PHP, using vim or emacs. Lock-in is not so all-consuming on the developer skills end as it is on the product usage end.

Some thoughts on “presentation fu”: I had ample notice from M$ about this summit. So I was disappointed when some of the presenters seemed to have recycled product pitches and tech talks created specifically for audiences already receptive to and interested in the M$ pitch. This could have been a chance for those presenters to really think about their work in relation to OS, Rails fanboys, Apple Fanboys, Flash Fanboys, etc, basically, to the audience. They could really have thought about how their work fits with the current trends in the online sphere. Maybe I was mistaken about the purpose of the summit? Anyway, there was plenty of time to at least drop a couple of slides addressing these issues. I’d get the summit managers to see how the talks fit in with the summit next time. I heard John Lam praised in the few discussions I had with other attendees about this particular topic. You’ll see his name in some of the posts on the above blogs. He certainly had the presentation zen, or whatever, while talking about IronRuby and the Dynamic Language Runtime. He put it nicely when he showed a slide with MS/APPLE/The Penguin at the bottom, IE/SAFARI/FF (where’s opera? nudge, wink), above that, and the stuff that really makes the web tick, the services and things people build for it, above all that. He said, and I agree, that the browser and the os are uninteresting; they’re just fancy rendering engines. He also said that people are interested in the source for frameworks, not for browsers. How true. I’ve often heard the question asked during Flex conferences why the Flash players is not open source? First, you probably will not download it and recompile it yourself. If you will, you will have exactly one user. Second, there are so many licenses to sub-components of the player that it would be plenty difficult to get lawyer$ to let you open source it. The same applies to the browser and maybe the os. I care more about why DRM is in the player, clear and consistent policies on spyware, adware, and user privacy while using that player. Anyway, John Lam even managed to keep me wondering if the presentation was done in Apple’s slidemaking thingy until he alt-tabbed out of it into vista. Still, he was running Vista on an Apple (i heard my nascent apple fanboy side say). What? No open office?

BTW, I saw zero GNU/Linux laptops at this summit; I left mine at the office.  I stand corrected on this point; thanks to Paul Jones for pointing out that Luis Villa was using one.

Personally, I’m glad for the opportunity to come and engage with so many smart people, both attendees and presenters. Special thanks to The Real Adam who was thoughtful and engaging when discussing our reactions to the summit while there.

Oh yeah. Just to be fully transparent here: M$ paid for my travel, stay, and food.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Software Design, mts2008, opensource, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.