Technical Evangelism
Just finished the first chapter from the forth coming book on technical evangelism at Microsoft. I wonder what Robert Scoble thinks of it.
The mission of Technical Evangelism at Microsoft is:
To accelerate the creation of a critical mass of leveraged support for a platform until it gains unstoppable momentum.
A platform is any technology that another technologist assumes the consumer will already have, for his own technology to operate. Read more
For more deep thoughts on Software Platforms and Business see the essays by Joel Spolsky and Ray Ozzie, but first let's look at another quote:
"Over the years, Microsoft’s platforms have had many competitors. Digital Research’s CP/M, IBM’s OS/2, Apple’s Macintosh, Netscape’s Navigator, Sun’s Java, and the Open Source movement’s Linux have all attempted (with mixed success) to replace Microsoft’s platforms with their own, as industry standards. This competition is healthy, and we welcome the challenge of defeating each new competitor." Read more.
This paragraph rings with the voice of a company filled with hubris and unaffected by anti-trust legislation. I have several friends at Microsoft and while I respect them immensely and believe they have the end user in mind, but they're filled with a 'killer instinct'.
It will be interesting to see what happens with Macromedia whose announced there intention to expand Flash into a full platform for rich client software development. (more details) Don't be mistaken this is a frontal attack and Microsoft has already registered the potential threat to their platform. If Macromedia gains any traction watch for the sleeping giant to wake and start f*cking thing up.
So how will Microsoft respond? We'll they could just buy Macromedia (there were rumors about this in the past), or just develop the own vector based UI format and animation apps and it looks like this is what they're doing. At the last CHI conference Microsoft recruiters were looking for PMs to staff a new app to make it easy to create lick-able interfaces in Visual Studio. I think they'll do well with the traditional VB/C# developers, but they may find courting the graphic designer audience more elusive. At CHI they kept talking the technical ceiling in Flash and how they wanted to make it much more powerful. I hope Microsoft hasn't forgotten about the power that comes from making things easier and more accessible.
5:43:08 PM 
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