Jesse Ezell Blog

Marc on Macromedia

"...here goes Macromedia again trying ot jump start their own ecosystem. Haven’t they learned by now? Nobody wants to hang out with slimeballs? Does anybody remember Grand Cenral or their earlier attempts at capturing and locking up a content distribution network? This latest attempt is just pathetic. Someone please tell Kevin Lynch to just go cash out his stock and buy a mansion and chill. They just don’t get the web or us. The technology and platform we handed to them (or one could say “stole”) is ALL they’re ever gonna innovate with. That juice ran out years ago. Just cause you’re called Adobe now - doesn’t mean all your problems go away. Throwing $100M at something doesn’t make it right. IMHO"

 [1] http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2006/10/disruptive-coincidences 

Proud to be Part of the 15th Fastest Growing Company in North America

Exciting times over here at Articulate: 

"Articulate has been ranked the 15th fastest growing company in North America on Deloitte's 2006 Technology Fast 500 Rising Star list. A special category, the Rising Star list ranks the top 25 companies based on percentage revenue growth over three years (2003 to 2005). Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 is a ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications and life sciences companies in North America. "

No signs of slowing down yet... next year should actually be another huge growth year with the recent release of Engage and a bunch of new products in the wings.

[1] http://blog.articulate.com/15th-fastest-growing-company-in-north-america/

[2] http://www.articulate.com/news_20061019.html

The Kid with the AK-47 Tries to Escape

Here's a newsheadline you probably won't hear anywhere else. Yesterday, a kid walked into a school in Joplin Missouri with an AK-47. He shot the ceiling, then his gun jammed and he couldn't kill anyone. The cops came and took him to jail and he was taken to the detention center. My old friend (and old roomate actually), Jared Martin happens to work there, and this kid is one of the ones he watches over. In any case, the kid tried to escape last night, but Jared stopped him. Maybe not the biggest news, but it was cool to hear.

Local newspaper article: http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/local_story_284112157.html

AJAX > Flash in 2007

"Ektron and SitePoint did a survey of 5,000 web developers over the US summer, and have just released  the results in a report entitled The State of Web Development 2006/2007. It's packed full of useful data, even in the 25-page preview (which is free). The bits that particularly interested me were the following two charts, on which web technologies developers and organizations are using now - and plan to use in future.

Interestingly AJAX is not that far behind Flash (which has been around for much longer). Blogs are well-used, while wikis not so - no real surprise there, as blogs are generally easier to use. Syndication / RSS at 36% is still a little low, but I predict it'll be much higher next year thanks to the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo bringing it into the mainstream.

I'm quite surprised that syndication is not being planned to use more, as to my mind RSS and syndication has only just scratched the surface of development opportunities. Custom search is another that I pick to be used more - yet it's slated to go down in this report! But other than that, most technologies will apparently be used more - in particular Ajax, which next year is predicted to surpass Flash for the first time. Microformats are probably a 'long bet', as it's still low on peoples radar according to this report..." [1]

Interesting... 

[1] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/32705855/the_state_of_web_development.php

Udi: 3.0 is Meh

Udi thinks 3.0 isn't all that great. His response to my recent post is: 

"...The whole 3.0 story, I've got to tell you, I'm pretty underwhelmed. Everybody seems to be jumping up and down about WPF, and yes, it's new and shiny, but there still the clunkety Windows message pump in the background. No real changes in how you're going to write multi-threaded UIs, which seem to be the real future given the rise in multi-core processing. The visual aspects of client side code in the systems I write run at around 5% of the overall effort. So the UI will look better, I dunno, 4D buttons and stuff, sorry for not falling over with enthusiasm..." [1]

Just to be clear, I am talking about the customer side of things, not the dev. benefits. Generics are great and I think they should have been in 1.0, but they don't make a difference in the customer experience and certainly don't make a huge difference in the way software is built. Yeah, it gives me some auto-complete and saves me some casting or some collection code-gen, but I can still build great software almost as fast without them.

The value proposition of WPF isn't all that great if you are the person that owns your UI. If you, being a developer, do all of your design work and your UI code is really just 5% of your apps, then WPF probably isn't going to do you much good, because you obviously don't care enough about your UI anyway. (or maybe your apps really need to be 95% backend, which is fine, but that's certainly not the type of apps we are building). We create tools for instructional designers. Since our apps live or die based based off of their UI, building the UI certainly is a hell of a lot more than 5% of the total effort. The more you work with professional designers to help refine the look and feel of your desktop apps, the more you will see why products like Expression are really going to revolutionize the way software is built. Personally, I'd love for designers to be even more involved with our product design, but it's a lot harder to make that happen when Photoshop is the best tool for the job.

In any case, sounds like we disagree on the benefits of 3.0, but that's fine. If you'll at least grant me that 2.0 to 3.0 is as good as 1.0 to 2.0, I think my argument still stands. It makes sense to me that the 3.0 adoption is going to take off rate that quickly overtakes the 2.0 numbers, so why not just wait out another extra year or two on the 1.1 Framework and then move to 3.0? Then, I'm not risking the loss of sales for distributing 2.0 applications that people can't use because of security lock downs and I get to take advantage of WPF's "4D buttons and stuff" in the not too distant future.

[1] http://udidahan.weblogs.us/archives/036964.html

Open Source: It Costs Too Much

Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock. Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat. We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700). Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore. [1]

Microsoft has been arguing the TCO part of the equation for a long time now. Are people finally starting to listen?     

[1] http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/04/0452244

Screw 2.0, I'm Going Straight to 3.0

Recently the discussion came up about using .NET 2.0 in some future products. I work on server products, and we've been using 2.0 there for a while. However, there is a bit of concern around deploying the 2.0 framework with our desktop apps. Our software is shipped ESD style and a lot of customers like to download the trial app before making the purchase. If they try to install the app, but can't because they need to be an administrator to install the .NET framework 2.0, we probably just lost out on the sale. I would venture to guess that a significant chunk of our customers fall into the non-administrator group, so this is a big problem.

So, we don't want to use .NET 2.0 unless the deployment is widespread enough... and as there seem to be no numbers available from anyone on what 1.1 or 2.0 adoption are, it's a big risk to require the 2.0 framework. So, if it's not safe enough to require 2.0 for a product release a year or two out from now, does it make sense to ever require the 2.0 framework?

The 2.0 framework doesn't really give you a massive amount of really new really cool features. There is one-click, which we probably wouldn't use anyway, generics (which are useful as a time saver, but don't really do much that you can't do without them), and some other little features... but the best part about the 2.0 framework is probably the IDE/dev experience, not what customers get out of it. However, 3.0 is a different story. WPF/WCF/WWF... all majorly cool and totally new. If you write your application UI on 2.0, you are probably going to want to rewrite it for 3.0 so that you can take advantage of WPF, and rewrites aren't the most fun or efficient way to spend your time. IMO, making the jump from 2.0 to 3.0 is almost as significant as the jump from MFC/VB6 to .NET 1.0.

Now, forget for a second that the .NET framework doesn't offer any "must have" features for our customers... will 3.0 adoption quickly outstripe 2.0 adoption anyway? The simple fact is that Vista is going to ship with 3.0. Anyone building Vista apps is probably going to want to use WPF. There are already a lot of apps in the pipes that will require WPF: Microsoft Max (http://www.microsoft.com/max), the entire Expression line (http://www.microsoft.com/expression), the NYT news reader (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/times_reader_screenshots.php), the BBC video app (http://blog.mix06.com/virtualmix/archive/2006/03/17/BBC_demo.aspx), XPS (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx), etc.

These are just a few of the early adopters, but it's safe to bet that once all the little ISVs around the globe start seeing what WPF is capable of, they are going to crap their pants and run off and try to build the next killer Vista app. As such, not only will you have Vista installs pushing the .NET framework 3.0 adoption rate much faster than any previous .NET framework release, but you'll also have a lot more people building apps that are designed for the 3.0 framework than the 2.0 framework. My guess, within a year or so, we will see more people with the 3.0 framework installed on their machines than have the 2.0 framework installed today. I might be overly optimistic here, but within 2-3 years, I wouldn't be suprised to see more 3.0 installs than we have 1.1 installs today.

So, why write for the 2.0 framework when 3.0 gives me a lot more bang for my buck and its adoption will quickly surpass 2.0 adoption anyway?

Macromedia Central: A Complete Failure?

It's been out for years now. Guess what, on the official central page, you can chose from a vast array of 22 central applications now (including the ones Macromedia released back in 2003), the last of which was made available over a year ago. This represents a total of 12 people who bought into the whole Central develpment thing. For a company as big as Macromedia, that is beyond sad. It's almost laughable. But, it's not suprising. I told you this would happen. Will Apollo fair any better? We'll just have to wait and see if they have a better licensing model this time around.

[1] http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/central/index.cfm#loc=en_us&view=appfinder&viewName=Application%20Finder&avm=1

Articulate Engage

It's official. We just shipped our first desktop product coded from the ground up on top of the .NET Framework: Engage (http://www.articulate.com/engage.html). Engage lets you create Flash based interactions. It's pretty slick for rapidly creating compelling training content. Check it out and let me know what you think.

[1] Engage Product Information
http://www.articulate.com/engage.html

[2] Rapid eLearning Studio Product Information
http://www.articulate.com/studio.html 

[3] Official Blog Post:
http://blog.articulate.com/create-interactive-content-for-elearning-courses/