by Don Burnett
Reading Adobe designers and developers reads on Mix 08 has been interesting. Most people I have talked to think the products are getting closer to feature parity with each other. However, the Flash designers are not worried they are going to be out of a job anytime soon. Most of the keynote "cool demos" were cool for Microsoft developers but made a lot of the design folks (Adobe community) yawn.. What does Microsoft need to do to capture more in the next year? Well I have a couple of suggestions I am going to put out to the community and see what travels upstream..
1) Move Mix 09 to coexist with SXSW, don't even announce it at the Venetian. Microsoft should make the Mix conference part of the South by Southwest festival. The fact of the matter is the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference attracts the entire Web 2.0 community. The spill over of attendees would be great for Microsoft. This year Microsoft spaced Mix 08 a week before SXSW. This is just incredibly bad timing. Were there people at both? Yeah probably a lot, which one was over the top? Well SXSW.. At least have both conferences in the same general area and not so far apart. While I am sure SXSW probably wants to stay independent of Microsoft, a conference within a conference is a great idea. I know people who went to both and were exhausted and completely sick after that second week.
Microsoft would attract more community, if they were either just at SXSW or changed the timeframe of next year's Mix event. The general consensus from everyone that went to both is "never again". They probably will go to SXSW if they have to choose. This isn't to say Mix content isn't good, just SXSW appeals to those things in Interactive that brings people together as a community and Mix is more a Microsoft developer tech fest. Microsoft would have made huge strides with Mix, if the Web 2.0 folks that were there at SXSW spilled over into Mix making it a real mix and a real composite of the entire community.
2) Give us more designer goodness at Mix. Yes the UX track was very nifty to see them add, but the vast majority of people twittering (which I watched in Realtime, while sitting with my leg up in the air from the accident) said this was a Mix aimed at developer guys, not the Flash/Flex/Adobe community or interactive media folks. Most designers who went to Mix and SXSW were more interested in the web 2.0 stuff going on there (and I don't mean the "Zuck" Interview and the bazillion parties). Most of the 2.0 Silverlight stuff was aimed towards developers, and I think emphasis on Expression Studio could have been a lot greater with the content. It deserves a track onto itself not just user experience. Come on guys didn't you get enough UX training in school and in your job daily ? Guess not..
3) This one, I label , "What happens in Redmond stays in Redmond..". The demos at the keynote were cool, but I have seen much of these things already on other platforms over the years, while DeepZoom is nice, let's face it, you can't build an entire application around just it.. It amazes me that Microsoft spent all this money on technical reference samples like Slide.show, Video.Show, World Wide Telescope, and others and yet the only real sell going on in that keynote was really the Atlas Ad Manager stuff, and they really didn't show us anything new with WPF.
Well, they did announce (to show the progress Windows applications were making) to say that they were coming out sometime with a service pack around summer time (oh yeah aston-martin, memorable..). There is only so much time in a keynote, but it's obvious that the folks were just not totally in touch with the cool stuff like the fact that the smart client experiences starter kit could be a "market onto itself" should have had at least a session for those interested in creating publications with it. There is so much cool content that wasn't used at Mix 08 going on in the community they could have another conference just around that.. I won't do the laundry list here but you get the idea..Get these people out to community show them cool stuff that's being done and worked on. Don't make all this stuff internal "Microsoft folks" or just partner organizations.
4) Are you tired of going to a Microsoft design thing and it be all Microsoft employed folks talking? The whole thing lacks design community credibility. If you go to other vendors conferences you'll know right away and see people from outside the company talking and giving presentations for the company. It's time to let the community in, and this will build even bigger community for you.
The community is there now (you guys have done a nice job growing it), just give them the opportunity. I have to say my local group of folks have been treated great by Microsoft. We get to know things before they happen almost all the time, they give us nice goodies and encourage us to move forward with the support of the product. Two of the coolest demonstrations I have seen at a Microsoft conference in the past few years, was a presentation by the "Godfather of CSS", and the developer who did the Yahoo Messenger for WPF application. This drove attendance to events like mad.
I think more community participation (even directed participation) is a great thing. Microsoft got smart about it's Windows Server, Visual Studio, SQL Server 2008 launch and included the community in the entire launch. The event was even entitled "Heroes Happen Here".. It really shows some great planning on their part and I hope we see more planning like this from all of Microsoft presentations in the future. This totally rocked and is what everything should get modeled after.
(NUMBER 5- MY RANT OF THE DAY..)
5) All Cell Phones and Tweets should be banned from presentations (or used as part of the presentation).. Real-time twittering from the audience should be banned during presentations unless the speaker gets to see the feed from everyone present at the same time he is talking. I think twitter is a great way to have a running back-channel commentary, but sometimes it's harmful to speakers. SXSW is a good example of where backlash from such things going on while the presenter was talking and being asked questions. Yes I am talking about the "Zuck" interview. I really felt the Newsweek lady was disrespected. They really should have made it a different type of presentation, a "TWITTER town hall meeting" format. The sad part of this is everyone there twittering seemed to think they were more important (or out to get their 15 minutes of fame) than the interviewer or "Zuck" himself.
To me this whole issue is about politeness and respect. If you are in the audience be part of the audience. Your comments at that point *ARE NOT* as important as the person speaking. There should be more and better rules we used to call stuff like this "Netiquette".. Unless the twittering can be viewed by the presenter and is allowed as part of the presentation.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment