Lazycoder

Recent Geek dinner

Continuing the theme of the recent geek dinner I attended. I’ll try to document who all attended that one.

Jack Bell
Anita Rowland
Jeremy Wright
JunFeng – of the Fusion team. (he had, inadvertantly, helped me before)
Robert Scoble
Walt Ritscher
Andy Edmonds

Jeremy made his “outrageous” statement “I don’t use Firefox“. Of course as probably the only Windows based developer sitting at the table with an iBook in his bag I couldn’t really argue with his reasoning. He uses what works for him. We talked some about how hard it is to get a test version of the Tablet PC (We recently tried to get Toshiba to send us a demo model for testing and development for my project at work but were unable to.) We also talked about, of course, where and why Microsoft is getting their butts kicked. At least in the press if not at the cash register. My thinking is that all of the recent Google applications have been a big middle finger towards the smart client marketing blitz that MS has had going since Longhorn was announced. Without explicitly saying it, they are saying “You can either upgrade your entire system to yet another Microsoft system(or Apple for that matter) or you can use our applications with the system you have now.”

We futzed around with peoples phones and Tablet PCs. I noted with some amusement that they were having a hard time getting a sustaining a WiFi connection. I was amused because I see this often in meetings. I’ll have the only Apple laptop in a room full of Dell and IBM laptops. I watch as they type furiously and hit refresh while I just open my iBook and select the SSID from the list in the top right hand corner of my toolbar. I’ve dealt with Windows WiFi before so I was sympathetic.

We talked some about the Google toolbar, most of the reactions seemed pretty predictable. Most people were agen’ it, at least the autolink feature. It didn’t bother me because I’m hardly ever in IE and the Google toolbar is IE only. I was more excited about the new Yahoo toolbar for FireFox release. That marks the first time that one of the big players had released a browser toolbar for a browser other than IE. At least officially, Andy had worked on the Googlebar for Firefox back in his previous life as a Firefox dev.

We also discussed the Microsoft “message” as it stands today. I said that Microsoft didn’t really have a cohesive message, it seemed to have a bunch of different product groups saying we should use their products without really telling me why. I said I thought that Apple had a much better message. Their products are for your life. Meaning YOUR personal life. They have a product for each facet of your digital life. Microsoft seems to say “We provide you with the best quality lumber and the best woodworking tools so that you can build your own furniture.” A lot of people don’t want to build their own furniture, it’s too hard. They want a pre-built chair and they use it for sitting on. They don’t need a chair that doubles as a bookshelf. Look at Apples product line, iLife, the iPod line, iWork. Each application or piece of hardware has a specific function. It’s obvious from the iPod ads what purpose they serve. The recent Grimes piece in Doctor Dobbs Journal shows that even developers haven’t quite gotten the message about the .NET framework and it’s been out for two years. You’ve got a Microsoft MVP saying “Microsoft isn’t using .NET for anything important” two days after Don Box says “Indigo is written in C#”.

All in all it was an interesting geek dinner. The smaller ones are always more interesting to me. If everyone can fit at one table the exchange of ideas happens more freely.