Microsoft ReMIX07 Boston ~ the Rapidsea review of beaches, Seadragons, and Deepfish
How was I supposed to know that the Microsoft ReMIX07 event in Boston would be such a Rapidsea experience — so much so that I would want to spend the second morning of it blogging about the first instead of going to more sessions? All three of the keynote speeches and many of the breakout sessions were chock full of Rapidsea-friendly images and ideas, so this means that I get to write an actual review of the conference, which opened immediately with this fantastic “rising tide” slide from Brad Abrams, Group Program Manager:
Yup, the first thing they showed at the conference was a beach scene, and it wasn’t the only one (nor was the oceanfront effort coordinated).
You can watch Abrams’ full speech here. Basically, he showed us how Microsoft is working on solutions that are Windows programmer friendly that can be deployed flawlessly on all platforms. Abrams spent a significant amount of time on non-Windows machines showing how things work and why their .NET systems combined with the new Silverlight will make things much better.
Many of the developers in the room were happy to see how the designers’ work can be tied intricately to the background development work, linked together as part of the same project. I liken this .NET and Silverlight work to Microsoft creating the Star Trek translator that somehow takes MSBabble.NET and turns it into Fanboy and Cubist love poems.
On the flip side, some of the designers I spoke to were not so thrilled with some of the “designer-focused” points from the conference in which they were essentially told that they need to learn to work better with developers, which probably means that while Microsoft has gone to great lengths to NOT make the developers change out of their programming comfort zones, they expect the designers to get to work on changing the way that they work. It seemed a little lopsided to me.
At a minimum, they were giving away a copy of the $600 Expression Studio package to everyone in attendance along with a $120 gift certificate to the Microsoft online store, which takes away part of the issue for some of the small-shop designers who don’t want to invest in new software. But I’m guessing that the designers are still not sold on Silverlight and .NET like the developers were.
Silverlight is not necessarily an Adobe Flash killer. As far as I can tell, they’re really going to have to get market penetration before the designers jump on board. The economics of many of the designers’ practices don’t allow them the time and money to take off to get new software and training anymore than the developers want to abandon their preferred programming languages. I think that Silverlight will likely be used initially by the developers who are playing more of a design role. Whether or not they pull this off well will likely be up to the individual or company.
Overall, Abrams speech was very good, but I’m a little concerned about Microsoft if they are only now seeing “user experience” as a rising tide of necessity in their business model. That’s so five years ago. Things have already heated up. The full-on, Al-Gore-style flooding of user experience is upon us.
After the speech came some breakout sessions. My first guy was wearing an aloha shirt and spoke about how he missed the cooler weather. I guess he moved to Florida and realized that it’s rarely a real everyday paradise.
Then there was the break. Thanks to Microsoft angels, breaks were filled with Red Bull in the Halo 3 corner. What else?
The second keynote of the day was from Alex Daley, Senior Product Manager from Microsoft Live Labs. He pulled off a good speech (despite the fact that he apparently lost part of his tooth just before going up on stage, which he revealed in his breakout session). He showed us some previews of their mobile web browser Deepfish and their cool image organizer and preview software called Seadragon. See the logos:
Everything that he said about Deepfish struck me as visually similar to the iPhone Safari browser. They’re cringing as I type that statement, so I’ll add that the big difference is that the server is doing the bulk of the work in Deepfish. That could make a significant difference in load times and processing possibilities. This idea sounds great to me, but I’m not going to rely on AT&T’s servers. I’m also not sure about the name Deepfish.
Seadragon is an any-screen (source “agnostic” as they referred to it in the conference) technology that processes visual information in a very mathematical way to speed the display of information at any scale. Microsoft acquired Seadragon Software in February, so this one is not named by them per se. I think that this technology is really exciting because it takes into consideration that all the information that our brains receive is an illusion formed by pixels.
Your brain doesn’t care if an image is a kilobyte or a terabyte because your eyes’ field of vision is limited in receptors just as any screen is limited by pixels. Perhaps at some point, screens may be developed with more fluid non-pixel (and non-voxel — 3D pixel) technology, but our brains don’t really care at the moment. Just as they don’t care that a movie is made up of a 30ish still photos flashed in front of us in a second.
What’s interesting about Seadragon is that its technology is part of a new 3D “inherent social networking” product that Microsoft is developing called Photosynth. You can see a cool video demonstration here. Notice all the fantastic beach imagery in the demo. This software is FANTASTIC, and I would personally love to see a way to scrub a timeline to see the pictures of the place change throughout the days or seasons just has you can change them based on their physical location in the 3D model.
The last ocean picture of the day came during the final keynote by web standards guru Molly Holzschlag:
According to the ReMIX07 site:
Molly E. Holzschlag [is] a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author. Molly works with companies as well as standards bodies to develop, implement and use Web technologies in practical ways. The goal? Creating highly sustainable, maintainable, accessible, interactive and beautiful Web sites for the global community. Molly will be discussing The New Professionalism.
I liked her speech. It was entertaining and thoughtful. But if it was a speech about professionalism, why am I looking at an ocean? Are oceans professional? She is now officially a Rapidsea inductee. Her speech was energetic and fun, but I don’t really remember what she had to say beyond making everyone talk about their goofy job titles.
Moreover, I wouldn’t call the “professional” conundrum of designer/developers new. Architects, landscape architects, interior designers and others have been telling the world for years that they provide legitimate, essential services. As the lines between tech and design have their opacity reduced, developers are going to experience this frustration more and more.
Luckily, if you want to know more about what happened on the technical side of the event, you can read more at this blog:
This is a screen shot from the ReMIX07 Boston website. The web folks made a point of pulling the lighthouse picture off the blog site located here and putting it on the ReMIX page. Peter Laudati provides really great blog entries on more of the technical side of what happened. Please visit his site and read what he had to say.
The day ended with an introduction to Microsoft’s new agency/design collaboration site Phizzpop.com. I think that the idea of the site is really great and that many, many hours clearly went into building it. However, there’s a real visual error here: they appear to have copied Popsugar.com. The word “pop” and the logo star are both so similar. Not only that, but doesn’t Phizzpop sounds like a cheap knock off of the digestive aid AlkaSeltzer (plop + fizz = relief)? At least there is no gastrointestinal distress in paradise. And the squiggly shape layers of design that you can see on their website are a little like last year’s fads in t-shirts. Even worse, they were passing out what they referred to as “blue balls” to people at the conference who signed up for Phizzpop, which in turn got some semi-cached laughter in the room.
In the end, from what I can tell, the biggest threat to Microsoft is not their ability to evolve technologies into their business model. They’re good at that (and it occasionally gets them into monopolistic regulatory trouble). The problem, in part, is shown in the number of images that are thrown around without much thought about what they mean or where they came from. The Microsoft community may not really be seeing what we think we are seeing, as is witnessed from the many images and names at the conference that fall into the cliche ocean realm that we love here on Rapidsea. How can anybody design if they cannot see (excluding designing for the blind of course)?
Those people who are involved in web design who think that the spatial, visual, and temporal characteristics (read “user interface”) are some rising-tide trend are going to be blown out of the water. The linear-thinking, technical people who will remain in high demand in the coming decades are the ones who serve up technical tools to the creative people who think more spatially about graphical interfaces. Linear thinkers MUST start seeing in order to know how to work with the designers.
The design revolution has already happened. Designers, along with their colleagues who think spatially and temporally, are just waiting for linear types in the corporate and technical world to open their eyes and realize it.
And in a final note, did you hear that Microsoft bought Jellyfish.com, which I blogged about a few weeks ago here?
Can the continued acquisition of companies like Seadragon and Jellyfish work in perpetuity for companies, even if they have Deepfish pockets like Microsoft?
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Posted on October 9, 2007
Filed Under Business and Commerce, Fish, Sea and Oceans, Technology | 3 Comments
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