Posts by Nicholas Bedworth

Apple raises retail stakes against Microsoft

Retail redux...

This is another non-story. When Apple has actually done this, then there's news.

Guess the author of this article didn't read the earlier Register story about how Apple store sales are off almost 20% year to year, and that their SEC filings shows significant exposure to lease cancellation charges if they close a store. There's a quantitative fact for you.

Sounds like the usual PR bluff and bluster, uncritically reported as news.

Microsoft home entertainment, as in PC and XBox and 50" high-resolution monitor is a very strong offering, along with excellent integration to Netflix. Great stuff for retail. Talk to Sony about whether these products mean anything.

New Zune is outstanding. Plus they can show a huge range of vendors offering netbooks to workstations, all at a small fraction of the price of Apple gear, with longer warranties, Blu-Ray, etc.

The Apple notebooks are a generation back in terms of features, in most cases.

Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 delivers decent alternative to Adobe

Silverlight 3.0 big picture

Good to read a thoughtful, balanced, and practical review of the two technologies. Moronic fanboys aside, the community of user experience developers will benefit from evaluating the rapid evolution the SL platform is undergoing. The Net tends to keep moving on, doesn't it?

Some specific comments:

1. There's no need to involve .Net; Silverlight runs against a tiny CoreCLR. I see .Net as more of a WPF-related technology.

2. Works in most known browsers (FF, IE, SF, etc.) but not on pre-Intel Macs, as pointed out. Still, that's, what, 95% of running PCs and Mac can run SL today.

3. Opt-in install base of consumers is approaching 200 million, which is significant, and happening rather rapidly.

4. Rapidly improving designer tools. The performance and feature curve is pointing steeply upward.

5. Blockbuster has also moved to Silverlight

6. New York Times has increasing involvement with Silverlight; MS just released a set Silverlight controls to work with their API. NY Times is in the top 10 of world Web sites, I believe.

7. In an end-to-end content distribution business model, SL does offer TCO advantages.

8. Numerical calculation performance inside SL is excellent

9. Casting SL as a media player technology is reasonable, in terms of kicking off the discussion, as this is the main use of Flash, but my perspective is that the scope of SL is really much broader, and perhaps only starting to be understood by the community.

10. As one considers using SL for desktop style applications, the differences in scope with Flash/AIR begin to reveal themselves.