Robert Scoble: scobleizer

Robert does Avalon imagery

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:48:23 GMT

Folks with the PDC build of Longhorn might wanna check out Robert Wlodarczyk playing around with images in Avalon. He gives away the source and binaries so you can learn from his efforts.

Mary Jo talks about Linux

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:45:05 GMT

Mary Jo Foley: it's not all about Linux.

"Windows is cool again, thanks to all the excitement around Longhorn."

She also points to the new Services for Unix that was released this week.

A better task list for Outlook?

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:39:59 GMT

Robert McLaws also is raving about Tasklines, an add-on for Outlook 2003. I'll have to check this out. My task lists are getting longer lately.

How to fund community efforts?

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:38:52 GMT

Robert McLaws asks for help on how to fund a popular community site (Longhorn blogs). This is a common problem. It'll probably become a problem at some point for my blog. A year ago I only had a few hundred visitors a day. Yesterday I had 5400. In another year?

And Longhorn blogs had a lot more visits than I've been getting. Whew.

I'd rather the community figure this out, by the way, rather than Microsoft fund it. Why? Because that'll give the community a stronger voice and more independence (let's be honest, when you get money from any company, there are usually strings attached, and even if they aren't evil strings, there will be the perception that there are strings there). As of today Microsoft hasn't given a dollar to Longhorn blogs.

This isn't just a Microsoft issue, either. All companies have this issue if they have communities of users on the Web. So, this makes for an interesting discussion topic for all of us.

Welcome new readers

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:30:34 GMT

My traffic has doubled here lately. Yesterday had 5400 people show up. Welcome to all my new readers. You can see my referer page over to the right, so you can see who's pointing the most traffic to me.

Larry paints pictures with his Tablet PC.

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:27:35 GMT

Larry Larsen has been "painting" with his Tablet PC. I wish I were talented like that. I'll try to get him to talk about the software and technique he uses.

Bar management app

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:54:48 GMT

A friend, who owns a bar, sent me this video of "Scanabar" which is a drink-management system written in Windows.

Webcam+Tablet=Webcamnotes

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:53:36 GMT

Loren's WebcamNotes are cool. Can't wait to try those on my own TabletPC.

Microsoft VP Rudder to speak

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:52:39 GMT

Eric Rudder will be speaking in California on February 5, Niall Kennedy says.

John needs new hosting

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:51:38 GMT

John Robb is looking for new hosting for his blog (his blog is down for the count right now). Turns out putting pictures of Saddam on his blog got his hoster mad at him. Who has good hosting for low cost?

Bogdan on Avalon

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:49:50 GMT

Another MSDN/Longhorn link: Jeff Bogdan gives an overview of Avalon, the presentation subsystem in Longhorn.

Turn on your firewall

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:39:40 GMT

Today is Personal Firewall Day.

More team meetings

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:39:03 GMT

Yesterday I met with a few other teams. I met with Marcus Kwan from the Aero team. He's a world-class designer that just started working at Microsoft (he was working at the renowned Frog Design shop before). He's also designing the sharing features in Longhorn.

Second I met with Alex Malek and Rob Mauceri of the FrontPage team, and they gave me an excellent demo of FrontPage and Sharepoint -- they wanted to get my ideas on weblogging and RSS. Like all good demo'ers, they had personalized the demo. At one point they showed off an RSS-reading component that they made for Sharepoint (which really is an XML-reading component, but since RSS is XML, it works great). They dragged a control on a web page. Right clicked. Set the properties to my RSS feed. And they had my weblog coming in as part of their intranet site.

They obviously showed me a lot more too. Sharepoint comes with Windows Server 2003 now, so many people have it on their enterprise systems and they don't even know what it does. I didn't before I worked at Microsoft. It's a very nice way to build a very useful web site without needing to be a FrontPage or Dreamweaver jockey.

I used Sharepoint to do the resource card project for the PDC. I needed to work with 60 different teams, with a minimum of interaction. Sharepoint let all 60 team members visit a Web page and enter their information. Much like a wiki.

Tablet PC news

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:23:59 GMT

Lora has a bunch of Tablet PC news on her "Whatisnew.com" site.

Yasser on Indigo

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:22:20 GMT

Yasser Shohoud has a new article up on "Creating Indigo apps with the PDC release of Visual Studio .NET Whidbey." By the way, I've been catching up on my PDC video watching. Those are really great. Thanks MSDN!

Brad's asking about Longhorn SDK docs

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:19:47 GMT

Brad Abrams is asking "how do you find the WinFX documentation?"

Every OS Sucks -- hillarious!

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:18:06 GMT

These videos are funny! Thanks to Chris Anderson for linking to this site.

Behind the scenes at Microsoft.

Every OS Sucks.

IE blogger

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:07:17 GMT

Hmm, Jeff Dav is a developer on Internet Explorer and he has a weblog -- here he's talking about the pop-up blocker that's in XPSP2.

The IE conversation

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:04:05 GMT

Got lots of interesting conversations going on here. I was linked to by MetaFilter and the Web Standards Org.

One comment that I saw was "I doubt the Internet Explorer team is reading this." Nothing could be further from the truth.

One thing I've been interested in is to see how few comments I've actually gotten. Yeah, 100 on one thread and 60 on another is pretty good for me. But, for a product with more than 100,000,000 users? For something where MetaFilter and the Web Standards Org pointed at me? For a day when I had 4000 readers or so?

This is one problem with weblogs. The message is amplified cause it's online. And because it's individual people who took the time out to leave a comment. But, when I take this feedback to execs, they are gonna compare it to feedback they get from the CTO at Procter and Gamble, or GM, or our other customers. Folks who pay us big bucks. Then they'll compare it to feedback they get from our user testing labs. You know, mom and dad. I'll be honest. I've never had someone in an airport ask me "how come you guys can't make a standards-compliant browser." I have had tons of people ask me "how come you can't keep spyware from happening?"

See, that's how priorities on teams get set. And I sure can't argue with that approach, even though it occassionally frustrates the bejeebers out of me cause my feature requests are low on the list of things to do.

Some days I totally understand what it's like to be a campaign manager for a presidential candidate. You take the feedback from people and try to please everyone. Sometimes that job is impossible.

But, I'll keep trying. I want many of the same things my commenters want. You might have missed this, but I've been playing with CSS positioning and styles here as well and I'm just as frustrated as many of you are.

One thing I'm happy about is that Dean (the guy who runs the Internet Explorer team) is smart, passionate about the Web, and is very knowledgeable about the marketplace and what's going on in it.

The conversation has started. Now it'll be interesting to see where it goes.

IE conversation is great

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 18:10:24 GMT

Lots of really great comments about things you all want to see put into Internet Explorer. Some other things from yesterday. First, Dean's team is also still responsible for Outlook Express too. Second, Dean showed me his Tablet PC. On it he had every single competitive browser like Opera, Mozilla, as well as a bunch of Internet Explorer derivatives. I didn't even know about many of these. He pointed out IRider, in particular as a favorite of his. Oh, and he uses the Google toolbars (both of them).

One of the team members wrote me today with a followup question. One of the tough things that Microsoft's teams must face is whether to develop functionality themselves or rely on third-parties to do it. For instance, do we put in pop-up ad blocking, or do we just say "get the Google toolbar, cause it does it?" Keep in mind, that if we roll in new functionality, we'll hurt competitors and partners who innovated in those areas.

Along these lines, it's useful to think about Internet Explorer as two separate things. One is the engine underneath. This engine gets used all over the place inside Windows (and by other apps). It's what renders HTML inside Outlook Express, for instance. The second is the browser application. It's easier to change the application. Harder to change the engine. Why? Because so many things rely on it. Dean told me yesterday that when they release a patch, it needs to be tested in 400 different iterations. The support matrix is horrendous and something we, as users, never think about.

Another thing that the commenters generally aren't thinking of is "how to get adoption." I keep pointing out that if we fixed the CSS and PNG issues, you still wouldn't be able to use those for years. Why? Cause consumers (and companies) really don't care about those issues and won't download a new version just cause you fixed one or two issues.

As a good example, Dean gave me a few companies with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of desktops, that still are using IE 5.5, or older. The fear of upgrading is something that the team is working hard on too. But, that means slowing down a bit, and releasing a browser that really is compelling for people to use.

One last thing, I find it very interesting that none of the commenters talked about what they'd like to see the IE team do with RSS or Atom syndication formats. Every presidential campaign website/weblog has RSS now. Yet I don't think people are looking at RSS as something that the Web browser should deal with. Why is that?

Anyway, great ideas. Keep em coming.

See who subscribes to my feed

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 08:22:35 GMT

I love the new "Share your OPML" site. I've found so many great feeds. And, on that site you can see who subscribes to my RSS feed. If you're not listed, share your OPML already!

I've been adding a ton of feeds. Want me to add you to my list? Leave me a comment here.

New .NET blog -- TheServerSide.NET

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 08:10:04 GMT

Benjamin Mitchell writes about a cool new Website: TheServerSide.NET. This is a significant site, cause it's a .NET port of TheServerSide, which is a vibrant Java community. I got a sneak peak at the site the other day, thanks to Ted Neward, the new editor-in-chief, and they've done a nice job. I've subscribed.

Internet Explorer team lunch

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 08:04:02 GMT

So, Dean, the guy who runs the Internet Explorer team, invited me out to lunch today. It's not every day that you get invited out to lunch by the guy who runs the team that makes software that hundreds of millions of people use.

What did I learn?

First. There +IS+ an Internet Explorer team.

Second. They are working feverishly on fixing security, including the latest issue where a URL can spoof another site. Many team members were called off of their Christmas vacations to work on this issue. It's proving to be difficult, more on that in a second.

Third. The team's top priority is fixing security. Windows XP Service Pack 2 will deliver a ton of protection against spyware and other things.

Fourth. The team is looking to work with community members to improve Internet Explorer. That means blogs. That means taking harsh feedback. That means having a dialog about the future that's frank and as open as possible.

Fifth. I asked about features, but was asked to not blog about that part of the meeting. They are interested in hearing about what's important to do, though, and they read this, and other, blogs and are seeing all the feedback you give them.

Now, about the darn security fixes. These are tough. Tougher than it might seem on the outside. Why? Because Internet Explorer's engine is used in several different OS's. Dozens of different languages. Thousands of different applications. Changing one line of code in the inards of Windows means potentially breaking a large number of applications. That's unacceptable to the team. So, when they change things, they need to do it in a way that doesn't break things for customers.

I'm going to work with Dean to give everyone a more intimate look inside the IE team, but that'll take more time than just meeting for lunch and writing up a blog entry.

So, the door is open. What do you want from the Internet Explorer team? Keep in mind, when having a conversation with you, I'll be asking you to think like a Microsoft executive. Why? Because that'll get you to see some of the realities of deciding on feature sets for future versions. Dean's team really has a tough job, and I didn't appreciate it until he ran me through some of the implications of changing one minor little feature.

Thanks Dean for an interesting lunch. I hope to have many conversations with you and your team, both here on the blog, and in person in the future.

Mac Office first look

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 07:41:45 GMT

ZDNet UK takes a first look at Microsoft's Office 2004 for the Macintosh.

Hewitt wants a different kind of software

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 07:40:50 GMT

Joe Hewitt wants to be able to mix and match functionality and get rid of standalone applications. Actually, he was more specific: he wants to see the death of the standalone application. Interesting ideas. But I think he's coming at it from the wrong angle. Instead, I'd just like to see software that works together better. When Microsoft talks about "seamless computing" I think this is where we're going.

This is really tough, though, to do. Why? Because everyone has a different idea on how to answer a problem. Heck, look at today's RSS News Aggregators. This is a category of software that didn't exist five years ago. Yet there are already dozens of news aggregators. Many of which work quite a bit differently than the others. Look at Howard Dean's RSS aggregator. It's completely different than the News Gator that I use. And that's completely different from Bloglines, which many of my readers use.