No One Ever Got Fired For Buying Amazon

I have a new post over at CloudFeed

Transitive Epitaph For Microsoft

Despite their having a corporate motto of, "Evil only looks bad if you recognize the existence of good", I used to have a ton of respect for Microsoft and the people working there. People like David Cutler, Jim Grey, Paul Allen. And a guy who drops out of Harvard to move to the tech mecca of Alburquerque in pursuit of a career in personal computers at a time when saying people would own their own computers was like owning their own nuclear submarine, that guy and the company he built deserves my respect. Well, that respect phase started to run down a decade ago, although I didn't know it at the time. It took until today to let go of the fork I stuck in them sometime earlier this decade.

From the NY Times:

Live Blogging The Ballmer CES Keynote

PS I still have numerous good things to say about the XBox division (XBox Live, Live Arcade, Game Studio Express, Halo), but they're barely keeping from being buried under the rubble.

"I dunno what the hell's out there, but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is."

Living up in the foothills is generally awesome, but once in a blue moon I hear some bizarre sounds emanating from the hills, brush or canyons that make me rethink little decisions like, "I'll go for a run at 6 am, before sunrise." I was sitting in the big easy chair in the master bedroom, tinkering away on the Internet when I heard - emanating from somewhere within a hundred yards or so of my home - what sounded like the dogs in John Carpenter's The Thing a few seconds before they were eaten. Not the actual being eaten, dying part, but the fearful yelping of a pack of dogs in the night. I got up, went to the window, looked around, and noted that I now had a perfectly good reason for thinking it was too cold to go outside.

This Week's Sign That The Cloudocalypse Is Upon Us

New post by me over on Cloud Feed.

IE Market Share Downward Spiral

The latest numbers are - IMHO - tipping past "concerning to MSFT" to "bloodbath". Firefox over 20% for another month. Safari gaining fast. Chrome over 1% in a few months. The rising sentiment that Web developers can no longer develop solely for IE and ignore the other browsers is now simply a rule.

As for me, let me know when I can write hardware accelerated OpenGL code that runs cross-platform in 95% of browsers, in a Canvas tag, driven by JavaScript, using the default browser install, no plug-ins or Native Clients or whatnot. I'll check back some time late in the next decade.

PS Google Native Client is - for what it is - nicely packaged and fun to mess around with. Anyone who is proclaiming it a Flash/Flex killer probably hasn't actually downloaded NC and run it. It's a loooooong way from being a Flash irritant, let alone killer. It's at about the same stage of maturity that Firefox was the night Blake Ross decided to fork a Web browser instead of going clubbing on South Beach, except that Adobe is an able opponent in "rich clients", while Microsoft has been asleep at the wheel with IE.

Hello Blogosphere

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