I’d like to publicly welcome John Carmichael to the NewsGator Technologies management team, as Director, Business Development. John comes from a strong marketing and business development background, and we’re very excited to have him!
John’s first day was today, and his white board is already filled. :-) I’m sure he can’t wait to see what will happen tomorrow!
I’ll post a link to his weblog as soon as he’s ready to be a public figure…within the next week or two, I would suspect.
Omar writes about Apple’s laptops:
Apple has always made superior laptops. They just work, aren’t ugly with dozens of panels, protruding pieces of plastic and boneheaded design placement like my microphone that is located right near my loud fan.
[shahine.com/omar/]
I had a new iBook for a week or so for the recent demo we did at the Consumer Electronics show. I have to agree – it looked good, and it felt good. Apple knows how to design hardware.
However, it did take me at least 5 minutes (no, I’m not kidding) to figure out how to plug the power cord extension into the power adapter. Apparently their target demographic knows to poke and pick at every seam in the plastic, waiting for some kind of cover to pop off?
That was my only complaint though, and only because it made me feel stupid!
This is so cool. A while back, I posted something about my friend Justin Mette, who runs an independent game studio. Their claim to fame, so far, is Orbz – it was even listed as one of the best games of 2003 (amidst very good company, like Halo and Madden) in PC Magazine.
Well, pretty soon we’re all going to kiss our quarters goodbye:
Today, 21-6 is thrilled to announce that we have signed a deal with TLC Industries to put Orbz in the Arcade! The arcade version will contain a new mode of play with the focus on cumulative scoring across many levels. If all goes well, Orbz will be in the arcades by summer. [21-6 Productions News]
Ok, Gordon posted this about 3 weeks ago – so I’m a little behind. Very cool, though – he’s using the ability of NewsGator to map custom RSS extensions to columns in Outlook:
NewsGator can render custom columns. This allows you to sort a folder by your custom field; price, in this case.In order to support this, you can download and import custom field mappings. In the Options dialog, on the Rendering pane. Press the “Column Mappings” button, then “Import”, and select the field mappings file you downloaded.
This is so cool. Since the first release of NewsGator for Outlook, you’ve been able to right-click on a feed link in Internet Explorer and select “Subscribe in NewsGator”.
Now you can do the same thing in Firefox – many thanks to Stuart Hamilton for putting this together!
A recent post on javageek.org says that Reinacker & Associates, Inc. and NewsGator Technologies are giving customer email addresses to spammers.
Just to clear things up, this is absolutely NOT TRUE. We don’t share ANY private customer information with any third party. For that matter, we almost never even use these email addresses ourselves, except to reply to specific inquiries; all customer communication is done via RSS.
I’m not sure what could have happened in this particular case, but we will investigate it as soon as I can get in touch with the author of the above post.
UPDATE: they posted a retraction here. It turns out the javageek.org guy posted a comment here on my weblog with his email address, which was published with the post, and obviously scraped off the page by spammers.
So there’s obviously been a TON of blogging in the last week over Microsoft’s decision to delay Whidbey until 2005. Dan Fernandez posted some details about this early this morning, and he actually raises some interesting questions about giving developers early code.
Now, keep in mind I have a slightly different perspective than many of the bloggers who have commented on this – my perspective is as an ISV.
My take on the delay? Ship it when it’s ready. I can wait. Sure, I’m annoyed by certain things in VS.NET that will be changed in Whidbey. But it’s just a tool. I can wait. And for the next version of the Framework? Hmm.
For NewsGator for Outlook, honestly, I’d rather have as few versions of the .NET Framework in existence as possible – because every version that’s released multiplies the size of the test matrix. “Backwards compatibility” looks great on marketing materials, but pointing to a glossy doesn’t cut it for final testing of a product prior to release.
For web development, for example NewsGator Online Services, it’s a totally different story. We control the environment completely…so new framework releases aren’t a big deal. We can choose to upgrade whenever we like.
So after reading Dan’s post, Frans Bouma gets a little fired up – both on his own blog and in Dan’s comments. Dan says that there are numerous hotfixes available for the .NET framework or VS.NET, and Frans doesn’t like that answer:
Say there is a bug [in .NET] which I need fixing for my own software to work correctly. Am I helped with a fix from PSS? NO! My own install perhaps works, but my customers who will use my software have to call PSS as well! An ISV can’t rely on that: “To get this piece of software working, you first have to call Microsoft for a fix”. Most customers don’t want to install hotfixes, they want service packs. That’s why a hotfix is nice for an internal application, however for ISV’s it’s absolutely nonsense: they can’t ship the software with the patch, the customers have to call MS themselves.
Well, Frans, I don’t think that’s quite true in the general case. We had a show-stopper bug in the .NET 1.1 framework, which would pretty much grind NewsGator to a halt on certain (fairly rare) configurations. This problem was costing us dearly, in a measurable way. Working with PSS, they issued a hotfix for the problem, which solved it nicely.
We then worked with Microsoft to get a limited redistribution license. The bottom line? We can distribute the fix to our customers who need it. It took a little paperwork, but it made sense for everyone.
I’ve had my share of PSS pain, like everyone else. I remember once, at another job, we had a memory leak problem with COM on W2K. I built a test case in about 50 lines of code, and I could reproduce it on every machine we had at the time. Started with PSS, and the problem got escalated quickly (the problem was serious enough that we would have considered switching platforms at the time). The engineers were having problems reliably reproducing it – so I remember taking a whole machine out there and carrying it myself to the engineer’s desk. Lol. Only to find out later that the problem was “too big to fix in a service pack” and would hopefully be fixed in the next version of Windows. Yikes!
But even then, their engineers worked with us to eventually come up with a workaround.
In the end, whenever we’ve had a reproducible show-stopper bug, Microsoft has always worked with us in one way or another to meet our needs. Kudos.
Most folks will agree…a lot of business gets done on the golf course. Balls are lost, but relationships are formed and deals are made.
Jeff Sandquist recently posted about getting folks together to play Links 2004 on XBOX Live, and I thought, “fun idea”. It wasn’t until I talked with Jeff later that I realized the power behind such a simple idea. Not only are you playing the game, but you’re chatting with the players in your group. A friendly game of golf, between folks from Microsoft and ISV’s. Friendly banter. Competition on the course. Relationships are made, which are the foundation of a successful business.
I wish I had thought of it. Count me in.
For the most part, I’m in this business to pay the bills. Not that I don’t love it — I do — but as I have said before, there are other things I’d love to do too, like spend more time racing cars. But every now and then, you hear something very cool:
The faster we can figure that out, and enable our partners to build cool stuff, the better off we’ll both be. That’s why I like .NET so much. It helps our partners build cool stuff (like the NewsGator news aggregator that has completely changed my life). [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
Building software that changes people’s lives – that’s something I’m excited about. Thanks, Robert. I’m glad you like it. :-)
A great review of NewsGator 2.0 and NewsGator Online Services in PC Magazine. I can’t decide what to quote from it, so I’ll just leave it to you to click through and read it. :-)