I’ve got two items of note for web developers. One is good…one is evil. First the good news…
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It’s official Vista is was rushed to market. It’s been reported that playing an MP3 file will throttle network traffic to roughly 10% capacity. The reports vary in which network types are affected but there is no doubt that Microsoft officially throttled network capacity because they noticed that there was some distortion without the throttling. This has been confirmed through further analysis. Microsoft is working on a solutution at present. Continue Reading »

It was recently reported that Microsoft was discovered to have payed off companies to join the standards organization deciding OOXML. On the surface this is shady, but there are longer term consequences as well. Continue Reading »

The most frustrating marketing decision any company can make is forcing consumers to upgrade unnecessarily. Microsoft chose this path with Vista. In order to maintain Xbox and Vista sales, commonly referred to as hedging a bet, Microsoft decided that several of their games would only be compatible with Vista. Continue Reading »

It seems that Microsoft’s biggest critics, bloggers, are now being asked to write what ‘People-ready business’ means to them as a way to bolster the phrase and Microsoft’s association with business. This strikes me as a flailing attempt to garner support in people’s minds to think of Microsoft as a business software company. Yes, they own the Office productivity market. Yes, they own the OS market. No they are not ‘People-ready business’. (and no I am not going to link to their site!) Continue Reading »

Hello again and welcome to the Microsoft show, the greatest show on earth. Where the marketing department seems to have a bigger budget than the developers. It seems now that they aren’t pleased that so many people are waiting until the big bugs are worked out before upgrading to Vista. They are now about to launch a new marketing attack to coerce consumers that everything is ok, they don’t need to wait for the service packs. Do they really think that jedi mind tricks work on consumers?I won’t rehash the article but I would like to articulate why people are legitimately hesitant; no two people can agree on whether or not it is worth upgrading! Continue Reading »

It’s amazing to me that sites that rely on Flash for their main navigation have not taken the steps to eliminate the “Click to activate and use this control” messages from their sites. If you haven’t seen this message before you must be avoiding flash sites. To recap: Eolas has a patent dispute with Microsoft, forcing them to make activeX controls require users to click the “control” before they can interact with it. Annoying to say the least. If you want to read more go here. Needless to say this article was inspired because of the staggering number of sites I’ve run across in the last month that have not incorporated the JavaScript solutions that are available. Here are the favorites:

• Adobe’s Solution
• SWFobject Solution
• UFO Solution

If you own, or manage a site that uses Flash as a navigation element, fix this, please. Better yet…use CSS navigation instead. As much as I like Flash, does it have to be used for everything?

I could begin by sighting dozens of quotes from forums, but that would be too easy, and possibly miss the point. Instead I propose that the problem with Vista has less to do with the installation nightmares, lack of drivers, constant annoyances posing as security, and ridiculous hardware requirements just to run the base OS.

The problem with Vista is simple, why bother? Continue Reading »