Archives
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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"
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Proud to be Part of the 15th Fastest Growing Company in North America
Exciting times over here at Articulate:
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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.
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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.
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Udi: 3.0 is Meh
Udi thinks 3.0 isn't all that great. His response to my recent post is:
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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]
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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.
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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.
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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.