Microsoft offers early peek at designer tools

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It's a plant...

Have you ever noticed those types? "Hi, my name is _____, and work for XYZ. Last week, ______ saved my company $$$$$$, and saved my job. Why, I bet...."

No self respecting Designer uses an MS product to design with, they just aren't made for the job. You can't replace Illustrator or Photoshop or Quark Express (or even Corel Draw or Photopaint) with Publisher or Word in a professional environment. Can't be done.

What you have here is an attempt by MS to get back in the game. They have dropped the ball, in terms of Rich Internet Application development, and are looking to get some of the market currently held by Flash, Flex and ColdFusion. Flash is very deeply entrenched. Flex will build swf files for it's interfaces. CF can extend and empower both Flash and Flex. And, oh yeah, they're all now owned by Adobe, since they purchased Macromedia.

Now, I'm not knocking MS. I think competition is great, and helps to invigorate the applications in competition. When IE was first coming up it only took a few versions for it to whoop the (*&^ out of Netscape, which quickly fell behind as it got slower and more bloated. But, then there is the flip side. How long has it been between the release of IE 6.1 and the current betas of 7?

See, corporations use MS Office, not because it's better but, because everyone uses MS Office, and corporations need to be able to share documents. They made a better product, at one point, than the competition. The competition fell off significantly and MS took over the market. Innovation became slow and incremental while program bloat became large with slower processing. But, who cares? Everybody's using it, right?

And then there's the other issue. See, Microsoft has to be willing to produce enterprise level production tools and sell them at a user level price. OK, what does that mean? That means they have to take tools used for designing high level Rich Internet Applications and design and sell them at the same price that they might sell one of the Office applications. Take an enterprise level application development program and sell it at the happy-home-owner price that they sell Publisher (a happy-home-owner level program). See, I could buy Visual Studio to program in ASP, but why would I? I don't need the other components of VS, and I can program ASP in the code view of Dreamweaver (and ColdFusion, and PHP, and javascript, and vbscript, and java, and c#, and...) Or, better yet, just download Eclipse and do the same thing, with less processing overhead, for free?

I'll watch it to see how it plays out, and I won't discount MS. They've trumped everyone else in the past when taking on a new market. But, I hope MS, and everyone else, will reflect on how poorly those markets have evolved under that dominance. Only now, years later, is MS beginning to innovate again with IE (because of Firefox) and Office (because of government screaming for ODF).

And Serpamac was right, stop listening to your 'rep', and do everyone a favor and start using enterprise level tools to do enterprise level work. Publisher is great for the local VFW newsletter in a one-stop-light town, but it blows for anything else.

Posted by: no.junk@...   Posted on: 01/25/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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