The weather was spectacular, and it was a perfect night for trick-or-treating. My 2 1/2 year old and my 7 month old son were dressed as cow-girl and cow-boy respectively (cow-person), with wonderful getups put together by my wonderful wife, and we did a little tour of the neighbourhood. A great time was had by all, and there was a wonderful turnout in my neighbourhood.
Well that's only partly true - our house actually only sees a couple of stragglers. There's a circumvention street that goes around behind us, and it always seens some great participation. On my little strip of about 9 homes, only two of us actually turn on our lights and actively welcome the trick-or-treaters...so no one journeys down here. A bit of a shame as it's a wonderful event.
Today's big announcement from Microsoft, among some other tidbits, was the demo and public release of a beta of Microsoft Live, which you can of course read Scoble busting a vein about. I would love to say that it's remarkable, but it doesn't seem to be - At first glance it barely differs from the whole Excite @ Home portal concept that hit the floor with a thud 6 years ago. It looks like Excite (@) Home + a greatly scaled down version of Konfabulator in a limited, IE-only, heavyweight shell.
Portals are dead, and if this is the great revolution Microsoft can deliver, then Microsoft truly is in serious trouble. Microsoft has done some amazing things, and they have a lot of amazing people, so when they're doing a supposedly huge strategy shift to take on Google it should be extraordinary. It shouldn't leave you searching around trying to find where the good stuff is hidden. Weak excuses that they "can't show the best stuff yet...you just wait!" rightfully raises the B.S. detectors of most grizzled software development vets (because we've used that lame excuse when we've under-delivered)
Of course, as is standard for these sorts of things, Microsoft is also trying to get the community to create the content via a cheap-labour contest (which Google has been a great exploiter of) - Expend the effort and trouble to add to their somewhat weak launch list of "gadgets" and you too could be entered into a draw to win an XBox 360! Woo! I'm always amazed at how cheap such firms can be about an element of their strategy that is so enormously critical.
Microsoft biggest announcement today was vapour, and "coming soon" betas. What a disaster (it isn't that it's a terrible solution that they've built, but rather that it's just so underwhelming coming from the largest, most powerful software company in the world. Expectations are so much higher, especially given the emphasis put on this strategy). I'll reiterate that 2006 won't be the year for Microsoft (and I'm a Microdroid by some accounts).
Ross Mayfield tells us in a blog entry that Microsoft is about to announce a major Software-As-A-Service strategy, and that this will represent a "break from the past" (with his entry titled Turn on a Dime).
I faintly recall Microsoft talking about this before. In fact, various factions of Microsoft have been pushing this idea since at least back in 1998. Software as a service is pretty much an obvious dream of all software vendors.
(Bill Gates speech from 2001 includes the statement "There is just no doubt that having Microsoft viewed as a company that can provide operational excellence is critical to our shift to software as a service, and we're putting in place the infrastructure and the team to make sure that that happens.")
Of course having a pie-in-the-sky idea is one thing, but actually making it materialize as a viable, continuing business is quite another. Just look at Sun's rentable grid computing experiment - a year on, and not a single customer. Microsoft has actually been at the forefront of a lot of business ideas, but it generally gets drowned out by the overwhelming success of their core, traditional products, to the point that people forget they were doing it.
Couple that with the fact that Microsoft's service strategy has some problems. For instance MapPoint Web Services was in the web service mapping game long before Google maps, but it was made irrelevant by the high cost of entry.
A JoelOnSoftware post from a few days ago led me to a recent Jakob Nielson piece on weblog usability. Jakob, as you probably know, is considered a usability expert, and his works are often used to buttress and justify design and user interface choices (such as what Joel did for his redesign). Of course Jakob has his detractors too: Those who believe that he's preaching the obvious, doing so from a pretty shoddy soapboax no less.
Personally I've enjoyed reading Jakob's work. Even when they're painfully obvious it helps bring usability to forefront.
One of his weblog usability points I'm not so sure about, though - 2. No Author Photo (I'd link to the specific point but Jakob doesn't use internal anchors). The reason I'm on the fence about it isn't that I fear my ghastly image getting out (in fact I've posted it before. That one is a couple of years old), but rather that I think it is too vulnerable to people's innate tendency to stereotype - I can say firsthand that I've gone to a couple of blogs and have put the author's words into the voice of a certain strata of society and personality types based upon their picture, usually based on former coworkers or schoolmates. I know I should be reading the words for what they are, along with the proven history of the author, but instead I'm subconsciously imagining someone abrasively going against the grain just to be trouble, because that's what I remember about someone they resemble.
It just seems like an irrelevant piece of information that does more harm than good.
So I put it to you, fair readers: Are pictures-of-the-author on blogs beneficial or detrimental?