Steve Jobs interviewed just before returning to Apple (by pelmerdewitt)
- First, make it easier to bring in Salesforce data into its own ecosystem.
- Second, consolidate all its numerous Live services so that one account can connect to all of them. Try using Live Mesh, Skydrive, and Hotmail for any length of time and you’ll see what we mean.
- Come out with extensions to Silverlight and Visual Studio that make it the easiest and happiest place on the planet to build Force.com apps. He with the best tools wins developer mindshare.
- Finally, play nice in the HTML5 leagues and stop trying to set the agenda here. We don’t want a replay of the Netscape scenario back when HTML was young. Accept the fact that Microsoft is just one player of many, and not in the lead here.
3. I’ve been on a Twitter break for over a week because I’m trying to wean myself off the recorded life, and because I always seem to end up feeling stressed and grumpy after reading tweets. I’ve painted myself into a corner by following a lot of groups of mates, and the politics – not to mention armchair philosophising – has become too much. It’s not Twitter’s fault. I’m just bored. Bored with clicking reload – I don’t want to keep feeling I should be reading these things. Bored with me – I don’t want to keep saying these things. I’m bored with the culture of it all.
Via Steve Dale on Google+ (Original link: A Teacher’s Guide To Web 2.0 at School)
Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt Keynote (by salesforce)
This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it.
The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot:
Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph:
Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?
Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.
Macworld Boston 1997-The Microsoft Deal (by peestandingup)
Inside Google+: Bradley Horowitz talks with Tim O’Reilly (by OreillyMedia)
ex-Redmonker Cote’s first impressions of Dell (by DellVlog)
