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| This is a personal blog of Yakov Fain My son's animations and music No BS IT podcast Америчка |
My Dell laptop is dying and I had to make a choice - which small screen laptop tp buy next. After having two issues with motherboards Dell is out, and I was choosing between Lenovo X60 (12") and MacBook Pro (13") with dual boot - OSX or Windows. As a professional enterprise developer I was inclined to stay with PC, and these couple of youtube videos have confirmed my decision - Wintel notebook.
But I'm still waiting till Lenovo will start shipping their notebooks with Windows Vista (today's the first official Vista day). That's why I decided to look at the Windows Vista home page . It shows a nice little presentation on Vista using...Flash Player from their rival Adobe. This is a clear indication that Flash Player is a de-facto standard when it comes to delivering multimedia. FLash Player's ubiquity forced Microsoft bite the bullet and use it instead of their Windows Media Player.That's why Adobe Flex and not WPF/E is a tool of choice for rich internet application development...at least for another couple of years.
Nice point, I wonder why microsoft doesn't build a flash clone since that
has been their primary strategy for ages. If there is a nice sucessfull
product build a clone! If microsoft can not control a tecnology they build
a clone and gave full support to their product, like developing their own
java which later anded up building of .net when sun did not let microsoft
to control java. Neither active x controls or media player can deliver
multimedia like flash does. So ;
1. they might not interested in delivering multimedia (I dont believe this,
they are producing mouse, keyboard and even webcams!. Any product related
with computers are their interest),
2. flash might be so de-facto standart that even microsoft doea not want
that challange (come on they are even trying to challange with playstation
with a pc based box)
3. they might think their products have equal functionality (they may be
but they are still using flash instead)
4. they are already building the clone (??)
For many years MS was in a position "We have more than enough customers
that do Windows only". This strategy was working for them in traditionally
MS IT shops, and on the Web it was also fine because plain HTML Web pages
did not care if the back end was programmed in ASP or JSP. They were fine
even with AJAX, because Microsoft was the company that introduced
XMLHTTPRequest object back in 1999 in IE5. Now all of a sudden, people need
rich media delivered over the Web, and guess what, some of the use Linux,
Unix, OSX, etc. MS needs to reach as many people as possible but Window
Media Player is not capable of doing so. Thats why Flash Player came into
picture. But MS is changing the strategy here and WPF/E (Windows
Presentation Foundation Everywhere) should be available for RIA on multiple
platforms, but it takes time...
After all, I've ordered Toshiba SATELLITE U200,12" monitor, 4LB, INTEL CORE
2 DUO, 1.66GHZ, 2GB RAM, 60GB hard disk, CD-RW/DVD for $1268 USD. I decided
to stay with Windows XP - do not want to deal with issues like printer
driver does not exist for Vista.
Lenovo X60 of the same configuration would cost another $400 or more.
