Microsoft is showing its age yet again. Today microsoft demoed its latest creation "popfly". It's a web mashup tool for the laymen. That's all great and all but you've already got people in this space. You've got more efficient companies doing everything microsoft is trying to start in these days.  Microsoft you can talk all the talk you want but you are becoming more and more irrelevant.

Even better Steve Ballmer went on to discuss how google wasn't as good as they seemed and how great other companies that have grown up are. Sounds to me like that old IT guy who has been at a company too long telling me how I can't change things to make them more efficient because the status quo is how they do things.

Silverlight - a new plugin that hits home for me won't fail (Man I hope it does fail) because it isn't solid technology but because it got to the game so late. I'm sure they will shove it down peoples throat with an update for vista (which no one should install) to get the market penentration. By waiting so long to get into this game you have to start fresh with getting web developers to adopt. Adobe has a huge lead in this part and I don't know any flash developers that are looking for work...most are beating it away with a stick. The good ones are at least. Earlier I said I hope it fails because we as web developers already have hundreds of other choices for scripting and backend coding, which is a very bad thing. I'd love to just stick with one choice for animations on the web. If the development environment costs an extra fifty bucks that is fine with me. This is one category were I think competition is bad.

Another anti-microsoft thing happend to me recently. I got presented with a web platform that is built in ASP.NET and maintained by 100 or so developers (yes I said 100). Costs a couple of millions bucks a year to maintain. Plus they use a bunch of vendors for what seems to me to be standard platform functions. Give me half those resources and build it in java and you've got something so flexible and scalable that it would blow this platform out of the water. Real men code in Java!