Re: Re: Re: Justification request: Silverlight vs. Flex
Allow me to retort :)
The point of my overall post is, you can’t expect Microsoft to not only tell you the start of the story, but how it end as to do so will not only starve innovation for one and secondly removes the prototyping stage as you elegantly have outlined. Our purpose is to lay the tracks, it's up to you to figure out how you want to build the engine and where you want to drive the engine. We’ll provide guidance as best we can on how one should build them, or which direction to head and at the same time we’ll promote the technology so others can maybe even meet you half way, should the need arise. Yet, our goal is to platform, not own verticals that our customers dwell in – at times we enter the verticals to stimulate growth, but our core business is platforms + tools.
Adobe's pitch is "we coined RIA, therefore we own it", our pitch is "What you do with the UX Platform today, will define what RIA is tomorrow" in its simplest form, the hidden message there is You Define RIA.
I watch daily as folks struggle to define what RIA is, I hear from all walks of life on what they think RIA is our should be in the long term and what you appear to be pitching is how we determine the outcome or ways in which we settle on the said outcome.
As a Product Manager, I'm looking to shape and ensure that as you, the customer or prototype determine the next steps, I will in turn respond in kind by ensuring the products themselves have the appropriate level of pieces in place to accommodate your desires or needs.
Yes, we're a company and we’ll look at ways to monetize the said products that we implement, as this in turn will fund the next steps you uncover, as without funding, the technology research & development will starve. Features like Deep Zoom came from out of the box thinking and we’ve got more of this happening in the various teams now, some of which I’d love to talk about here on a public forum, but can’t just yet. As well, they’re still prototyping, figuring out what could work and where, and how the customers can then take that said piece and innovate further on top of it. Innovation is actually one of Microsoft’s core strengths, we take a few beatings here and there on this as sadly, most of the things we innovate hardly reach the surface and when they do, folks sometimes look past them for what we didn’t do?
That all being said, Adobe are a competitor in this space, so it would be great to work in harmony on a few pieces of the overall puzzle, but sadly they've made it abundantly clear that they not only have no intent to work with anything .NET but they've gone out of their way to remove all .NET pieces to their entire story.
What do we do in response? we can decide one of two things, firstly we could look to take an aggressive posture as well, but with that comes a large tax, the customer. As when two companies take an aggressive posture with one another, it's like two parents fighting - there is rarely any good that comes from it.
Instead, we'll look to fork innovation, let them focus on what they think their mission in life is, and we'll in turn go an alternative direction (Deep Zoom, Adaptive Streaming etc), as this in turn will give hopefully enough pieces for folks to build up from. This is the most palatable solution for us, as in the end we not only don't confuse or annoy our customers by taking an aggressive stance, we more importantly look to encourage alternative thinking, choice of different ways to attack the problem if you will.
We aren’t looking at our new features with a me to rubber stamp, it’s more how does this go beyond what’s available today, how can we provide an alternative view of how to solve this said problem or albeit provide the baseline foundation for which customers can then innovate without the existing constraints?
Which in turn, underpins your believe system that prototyping, looking at the patterns along the way to the result will determine new paths in not only solving future problems but identifying ways in which to solve the said problem. In turn, you define the outcome, we in turn are simply the enablers to help you along this path.
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Scott Barnes
Rich Platforms Product Manager
(WPF/Silverlight)
Microsoft.
blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/msmossyblog