As Steve Martin announced last week, the beta of BizTalk Server 2009 is now available (download here). BizTalk continues to be one of those great unknowns in the developer space it seems – even with an installed base of over 10,000 customers globally – and releases like this often slip under the radar. However, my reason for posting here isn’t to alert you to BizTalk the product (read...
…seems to be slowing. Figures released last week show that for the first time, iPhone sales have been higher than Windows Mobile based phone sales. Gartner reports that Apple took a 12.9% stake in the market in Q3, ahead of Microsoft with 11.1%. Both Nokia and Blackberry were ahead with 49.8% and 15.9% respectively. Canalys report similar trends, although slightly different numbers (Apple with...
Microsoft has noted that times are tough, and indicated revenue figures are flattening out (although there may be some hope in the Server and Tools Business). No real surprised there. Tough times call for prudent analysis. They’ve still been hiring, albeit at reduced rates, but are reducing budgets for the coming year. This of course falls in line with what we’ve been seeing across the...
Not sure if this is a good thing… depends on who you are I guess.
According to this weird post on the Netflix corporate blog, they are letting go of 50 technical specialists in January due to the success of their Silverlight based player – customer service issues are way down.
Providing more with less. That’s progress.
(via Joseph Tartakoff at SeattlePI)
Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Netflix
Microsoft released Oxite last week, and it garnered a lot of press (most of it enthusiastic). The Oxite story is pretty nice, as it delivers a very simple CMS/blogging tool, and as bonus it is ASP.NET MVC based, giving .NET developers a good chance to get into understanding MVC in a useful sample manner. However, you need to be aware that this is a beta version at best, and not to be rushing it...
As Mashable and TechCrunch report, Microsoft is testing the waters with the iPhone App market, releasing a a little app: Seadragon Mobile (here’s the official announcement on the Live Labs blog). The app (available for free on iTunes App Store, allows you to browse Deep Zoom images effortlessly. Check out the simple 42 second demo on the blog. And for more on Seadragon itself, check this out...
I’ve always liked how the Team System team work hard to provide details on what they’re up to. This is becoming more the norm on Microsoft assets (just check out the great job Beth Massi has been doing on the VSTO site for example), and so I shouldn’t be surprised to see just how serious they see simple things like content management to be. as Jeff Beehler notes, the Team System team have...
I’ve been using Chrome a fair bit lately. Why? It’s fast. And although people point to its lack of basic features, plug-in architecture (although that is in the works), cross platform support and it’s lack of market share, I for one don’t care, as long as it is fast for browsing. I use Firefox when I need the other stuff. Anyway, Chrome came out of Beta yesterday. Download it here. Love...
Nick Ellery’s post alerted me to the incredible Facebook statistics (about half way down the article) that are (probably) driving them into the ground. Here’s a taste: 300,000 images are uploaded to Facebook every second. How do you pay for the infrastructure that supports that? Or a trillion page views per year. That’s serious load. How do you finance it? Advertising? Yeah, right. Whilst...
Any blog that has 4 Ps in its title is worth reading in my book. That aside, I’ve been reading Phil Factor’s Phrenetic Phoughts (oh hang on, that’s only 3 Ps – you tricked me with that clever similar sounding thing Phil) for years now. It’s always a classic read. And for managers like me, his tips are gold. Take his series on hints for aspiring IT managers. If I happen to find myself...