Microsoft Max and You

Important note: If you hate Microsoft, aren't a developer, etc, hit the next blog entry, nothing to see here.

Important note 2: I used to work for Microsoft, good comments, I'm an unpaid shill, bad comments I'm a sour grapes, ex-employee, feel free to pick either.

There is a fairly good love affair happening around Microsoft Max, the photo and newsreader application currently coming out of Redmond.  You can read the blog entry from the team here.

You can read Don Dodge's comments, Mark Evan's comments and Robert Scoble's to get the general view that the Max team deserves a hearty well done.

WIth respect to Don and Robert (who isn't with Redmond anymore), they missed the bigger picture about what you, geek and/or start up type should know about Max.

If you attended the past Microsoft PDC or the other web 2.0 conference thing Microsoft did, you were shown how to build Max in September of 2005. 

In fact, you were given a pile of CDs with code and tools, had access to videos which included a demo showing the newspaper view of Max and were able to get access to product code named Sparkle months before Max shipped. 

Ryan Stewart got it dead on with the "Windows Presentation Foundation in action"  title of his blog entry.   The reason? Microsoft Max is a great application that shows off what you can do. 

Yes, this has the appearance of Microsoft "rah rah" but hear me out.

1. The tools to build Max or his brother/sister/evil twin/step child are free to you today/now.

2. Microsoft is putting out Max along with other goodies which, hopefully, will get a critical mass of users  who have the core components already installed, thus giving you a target market.

3. "Nothing has changed" with respect to Microsoft and Developers, Developers, Developers except that super developer evangelists like Scoble and others (Vic) have left the building. Makes it a bit harder but the TechNet and MSDN teams are still plugging away to get you products/tools/events, etc, that are designed to help you be successful.

All of this spells opportunities for you to build great stuff. Applications, in my humble opinion, are not dead and there has never been a better time to build some great stuff.

[Personal Note]

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that when I see things like Microsoft Max, I miss the good old days when I was part of a small team of technical evangelists (the original Microsoft DRG) that would have had 150 developers out there doing 1000 products 10,000x better and out the door before Max ever saw beta.  That's not to take anything away from Max.  I've just been blessed with being exposed to developers around the world (see my ongoing love affair with TEO) and know that armed with the right tools, tons of great stuff can be produced. 

Let's see what you've created; operators/beta testers (me) are standing by. If you get really lucky, this will be you selling your product.

Comments

[Nicole Simon]

I was especially interested to see the combination mentioned with the media center.

And of course I am missing podcasting / videocasting in this mix. For the moment I hope.

In general even if you are not interested in MS Max - consider what effect this will have on you once MS rolles out the RSS reading thingy to the world ... ;)

[JosephCooney]

Robert Scoble super developer evangelist? Scoble never sold me on anything. He always seemed very out of his depth on the channel 9 videos, and the sycophantic cheer-leading got old very fast.

WPF is the bomb though (although you can probably ascertain that from my URL).

[Dennis Howlett]

Ummmm - I assume it only works on Windows?