Shebanator

Google to buy Adobe? Maybe its the other way around…

•07Dec06 • 4 Comments

John Milan has “written an article on Read/WriteWeb”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/changing_climates_microsoft_google.php where he discusses the future of applications and the implications for google and Microsoft. In Part II, he suggests that one way google could diversify its holdings would be to buy Adobe. Just in case this is true, I’d like to be the first to say that I welcome our new google overlords. 🙂

I do think he sells Adobe short in his analysis, though. HTML/CSS and .NET are not the only two execution environments that matter: the Flash Player is the most ubiquitous virtual machine-based operating environment in the world. Flash is doing well in the mobile world, and runs in cars and refrigerators as well. Flash has a one-click deployment story and Apollo makes that story even more powerful. Flex makes it easier for developers to target the Flash Player runtime. You get the idea…

Hey, maybe one day Adobe will buy google…you heard it here first.

Posted in Rich Internet Applications
Tags: Google

Is Office Open XML A One-Way Standard? Ask Microsoft

•07Dec06 • 9 Comments

Way back in October, Bob Sutor, IBM’s open standards guru, wrote a piece on his blog where he described the Office Open XML standard as a one way standard, because the format is so complex and so geared towards compatibility with legacy Office compatibility that it could never be implemented as a fully functional file format by any competing personal productivity applications (PPAs) like WordPerfect and OpenOffice. I agree with a lot of his points but didn’t feel compelled to write about it since the issue had been covered pretty comprehensively in the blogosphere.

Today, though, a couple of interesting things happened that made me want to write about this. The first is that ECMA approved the Office XML standard over IBM’s objections. That got me thinking about Bob’s original piece again. The other is that Rick Schaut of Microsoft’s Mac BU wrote an article explaining very eloquently why the Mac version of Office won’t support the Open XML file format until sometime next year. What struck me when I read the latter piece is that Rick absolutely, positively proves Bob Sutor’s point when he explains what it would take to create a file converter from scratch for Mac Word:

[…] a team of 5 developers will implement 25 handlers a week, which means that we’d have all the XML handlers written in 44 weeks. […] Nevertheless, we’ve taken a little less than a year to get the converters reading the new file format. We still aren’t writing the new file format, we have the RTF side of things to worry about, which is actually more complex than the XML side, and I’ve completely left out all of the design and coding for the intermediate representation of the file. The intermediate representation, itself, is at least 6 to 8 months worth of work.

Got that? It would take 5 developers a year to do a quarter of the work. That means the whole job is roughly 20 man-years of development time. That doesn’t include testing, documentation, or localization. That would probably double the number of man-years, at least. But it gets worse:

This is just for Word. We need additional teams for Excel and PowerPoint.

Back of the envelope, we’re now talking about 120 man-years. For Mac Office, Microsoft decided such an investment wasn’t practical, so instead they waited for Win32 Office to go final and are now porting the Win32 code to the Mac:

Lastly, can we port the Win Word converter? Well, actually, in a way, porting the Win Word converter is exactly what we have been doing, but we’re still faced with having to wait until Win Word ships before we have the final source code to merge into what we’ve already ported. Once that merge is done, then we still have to go through several months’ worth of testing and bug fixing before they’re ready for public use.

But it gets even worse! There is a lot of commonality between the in-memory data model for Win32 Office and Mac Office, since they share a lot of the same code, but doing converters for a competitive product that has a different in-memory data model would require more development time and more compatibility testing time.

Breaking out my envelope again, we’re now looking at 150 man years to do the job for a competitive PPA. How can competitors afford to make that level of investment? Novell says they will support import and export for Open XML with financial and technical help from Microsoft. Corel says they’ll do it too. Guess we’ll need to wait and see how successful they’ll be at maintaining fidelity and compatibility, though given what Rick has to say, I’m not super confident.

Posted in Document Formats, Openness
Tags: Microsoft

Expression, WPF, & WPF/E: The triumph of the developer over the designer?

•06Dec06 • 4 Comments

As anyone who reads digg, slashdot, and/or techmeme knows, yesterday Microsoft released new versions of the Expression tools and the first “CTP” of the WPF/E runtime.

One of the more interesting posts made about the announcement was Robert Scoble’s explanation of why “Microsoft targets Adobe”. In it, he talks about how in the early days of longhorn, the UI design folks created all kinds of whizzy demos in Director, and that this became a problem when those prototypes had to be turned into real code. Why was it a problem? Scoble says:

Why? Because executives bought into the Flash and Mirrors song and dance too. They thought what they were seeing was possible.

The problem was, developers weren’t involved. Only people who studied interaction, design, and Macromedia Director.

Problem is, anything you create in Director has to be thrown out and rewritten in C++ (if you work on the Windows team).

That meant a whole bunch of time is wasted, plus it’s very possible that what you are dreaming of is simply not possible. It’s also possible that development teams, that don’t understand interaction design, will change your “experiences” and totally munge things up.

So, could Flash ever be “force fit” to be the UI of Windows? Not according to the engineers who’ve studied the problem.

They needed a system that could be used to design real pieces of Windows, if not the entire UI, and handed off to a developer, or team of developers, without having to have the developers touch the UI at all.

What Robert Scoble is saying here is important, in that it demonstrates the fundamental weakness in Microsoft’s strategy: WPF, WPF/E and Expression Blend were all designed first and foremost to address the designer-developer workflow as practiced in the Windows group at Microsoft. And based on what Robert Scoble wrote above, and on what I saw when I worked at Microsoft, this is a workflow that is all about having designers fit in with how developers want things to work. That’s why they put so much focus on things like having Expression Blend use the same project format as Visual Studio, having it work with Visual Studio’s version control mechanism, and so forth. When was the last time you heard a designer put any of those things near the top of their wishlist?

By contrast, Adobe feels that designers developing modern, interactive applications (whether using Web 2.0/Ajax or RIA technologies) want to build workflows that are first and foremost about delivering great designs to your clients. Those clients may be developers, but they might also be a corporate marketing department, or an online or offline content publisher, or any one of a zillion different content consumers. Adobe has designed Creative Suite, Apollo, Flex, and so forth to enable all these workflows, in a way that lets designers focus on what they do best.

Personally, I think Adobe’s choices show that we have a better understanding of designer needs. Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t have lots of room to improve. I’d love to hear what real designers think, so please comment!

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Microsoft

Zune and Vista: compatibility is hard

•15Nov06 • Comments Off

I almost feel bad piling on, given how poor a reception the Zune is getting in the press: first CNN does their story on Zune which ends with the anchor and the reporter enthusing over how much cooler the anchor’s new iPod Shuffle is, then all the guff Microsoft is getting because the new Zune isn’t compatible with Windows Vista yet.

But my primary purpose in writing this isn’t to pile on, but to point out how difficult it is for developers to make their software compatible with Vista in a timely manner. Adobe just released Acrobat 8 a few weeks ago, and it too isn’t compatible with Vista or Office 2007. This isn’t because we don’t care about those platforms: rather, it shows how sometimes software release schedules make compatibility difficult. We could have delayed the Acrobat launch by a few months to wait for Vista and Office 2007 to go final, then do all of our testing and so forth, but doing so would have been risky. We didn’t really have any way of knowing that Vista and Office would really hit their RTM dates, and every day you delay shipping costs your company revenue. So it goes.

That probably won’t stop others from pointing at this lack of support as proof of incompetence or nefarious intent, though. (I’m actually surprised no one has accused the Zune team of omitting Vista incompatibility on purpose yet.)