Empowering Content Creators, Not Platforms With H.264

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time pitching h.264 lately and have ended up developing a stump speech (more of an elevator pitch really). If you’re in the same boat and are looking to develop or refine an h.264 pitch of your own I’ve made a generic version of mine available below (runs 1:45).


The obvious question is why is this necessary? The answer is twofold really. First, the various platform vendors (the big 3 specifically — Windows Media, QuickTime and Real) attempts to lock users into their proprietary stacks have made everyone extremely leery of video formats in general. Second, there just hasn’t been a vendor neutral codec / format capable of meeting the majority of the video use cases that exist. That’s why h.264 is such a game changer — it gives the power back to content creators and takes it out of the hands of vendors who seek market domination for their product stacks.

Adobe made an absolutely huge move by walking away from their own proprietary file format (FLV). Microsoft needs to do the same and walk away from their paper standard (VC-1). Make the business model align with the needs of the customer instead the forcing the customer to fit your needs — it’s that simple.

If you’ve got other arguments, counter arguments I’d love to hear them.

7 Comments

Can Microsoft Make WPF Successful?

new_wpf.png

Tim Sneath was surprisingly honest in his post covering Microsoft’s latest release of WPF. It’s been interesting to watch Microsoft’s struggle to approach the rich experience application market with WPF. It appears they fundamentally misunderstood the market, their developer base and their ability to drive adoption. At least that’s the way it looks to this armchair analyst.

Microsoft had an epiphany a few years back and decided to buy into the “experience matters” tagline Macromedia was pushing all over the web. Despite their best efforts to kill it, it was clear the cloud “might be” the next application platform and that extremely rich clients connected to the cloud were beginning to outpace the desktop. These rich clients could deliver completely custom branded experiences and rich interactions that often included animation (animation appears to be the holy grail for old school application platforms — maybe because it was such a pain in the ass for them, dunno really, but man are they hung up on it).

experience_matters.png

Now the folks up in Redmond aren’t idiots. They could see the writing on the wall and they needed to do something to stem the bleeding and make the desktop cool — it’s the cash cow and their entire empire is tied tightly to it. In their view they needed to dramatically remake the decidedly utilitarian Windows experience and the applications that run on top of it. Fight fire with fire was their thinking. Make the desktop compelling by bringing custom chrome and animations to it. Application builders would have no choice but to double down on the MS stack in order to take advantage of the new capabilities (if they didn’t their competitors would). Thus was born WPF.

In typical MS fashion they had grandiose ambitions and a marketing budget that exceeded those ambitions. We were to be treated to rich experiences in a way that would “shock and awe” us. The entire OS presentation tier was to be built on top of WPF (take your Cocoa and shove it Apple). The entire suite of consumer oriented applications that shipped with the OS was going to leverage WPF (My Apps not iApps). And just when you thought they might be forgetting about the cloud they announced their intent to repaint rich browser experiences in a Silverlight — a subset of WPF delivered as a browser plugin. A veritable Flash killer (gasp).

Microsoft primed its PR pump (wined and dined everyone you can imagine), rattled its saber and deployed its vanguard of tech journalists and evangelists, promptly chasing Macromedia under Adobe’s skirt (holy shit they’ve got Photoshop under here). There was one little problem though — they couldn’t execute. It turns out that WPF wasn’t peformant enough to run as the OS UI layer so scratch that. MS then announced it just wasn’t reasonable to rewrite all those consumer apps to leverage WPF so scratch that. That’s two pretty big gulps if you’re counting.

On the browser plugin front things weren’t exactly golden with the 1.0 release of Silverlight coming off more like a .5 release. It didn’t support the .Net languages that MS developers are well versed in and fanatical about, had no component framework and adoption was tepid. In general it was a pretty damn rough release (wait for 1.1, urr, 2.0 I mean).

Things weren’t rosy on the third party consumer application development front either. Third party WPF consumer apps are extremely scarce (they’re on the endangered species list for sure). One of the biggest problems is that platform penetration has been minimal. Microsoft promised quick, massive adoption of the framework. After all, Vista was coming and it would do all of the work (you hear the same argument about MSN’s Olympics coverage and Silverlight). Those left on XP would be able to download the framework through Windows Update and since the latest and greatest apps were going to leverage WPF consumers were going to be motivated. Hmm, turns out not so much.

Perhaps most surprising is how out of touch with its development base MS really is. It sure seems like most of the profitable consumer desktop apps written for Windows are C++ oriented. Its as if MS forgot that they essentially replaced the JVM with the .Net runtime and that Java and .Net have been mostly relegated to the server-side or behind the firewall enterprise apps. Desktop developers on Windows might be using Visual Studio, but its my guess they’re not typically using any flavor of the .Net runtime (MS has been trying to pull C++ out of the cold, dead hands of desktop developers for years). This isn’t all bad for MS, enterprise users are increasingly demanding the level of richness they’re accustomed to in the consumer market (lots of crossover / leakage these days) and MS has a ton of “impact weight” behind the firewall.

All of this leaves me wondering if Microsoft can make WPF successful at all? It’s not clear to me that WPF will ever be the desktop development platform of choice on Windows. It sort of seems like the product they have in hand is a total mismatch for the developer base they’ve gathered under their tent and the OS they have under the hood. I’m also not sure that for consumers 25 MB really matters — the pain is that you have still have a 25 MB VM to download on XP and it runs like a dog. However, it’s nice to see Microsoft acknowledge that Vista is such a flop that XP is now the only real shot that WPF has.

2 Comments

ActionScript is Cool — Yegge of Google Said So

Steve Yegge posted a must read transcription of a talk he gave at Stanford on dynamic languages. On the last question of the day he gives a great plug for Adobe’s Evolutionary Programming model and ECMAScript Edition 4 (ECMAScript Edition 4 was the basis for ActionScript 3, the language of the Flash Platform).

dynamic_static_hybrid.png

If you’re a language geek or just want some ammo for your “ActionScript isn’t just a toy” speech that you have to resort to periodically, you’ll want to read and reference this talk.

Add a comment

Twitter Yields First Fruits

Twitter has always seemed like one part silliness and two parts vanity. I’ve just never seen the value in it (I blame my advanced age). However, I’ve been more inclined to jump in as a listener of late. I don’t know what changed. Maybe my multitasking capabilities have just improved enough to add yet another signal into the comm channel. Maybe I’m just becoming a wannabe 30 something hipster. Anyways, I finally took the plunge last Friday night and quickly reeled in my first high value tweet from coworker / friend Betsy Weber who noted that, “Community Server used Jing to make screencast demos at their Hack-A-Thon event.”

2008-05-12_0148.png

Now, its possible at some point in the future I would have received an internal email from Betsy with this link, but timing is everything. I would not have written this post if I had not received the message when I did and had a bit of personal time to write (yep, I call midnight to 3 am ‘personal time’). The point is that it looks like Twitter can be a sort of early warning filter as well as a place for social banter, networking, etc.

Were there other reasons for my caving? I’ve noticed that some of the people I’ve listened to inside the Adobe channel are much more active inside of Twitter and this activity has been sustained.

jd_blogging_future2.png

Then there was the bomb shell from JD that he was thinking of abandoning blogging for Twitter. I’m actually pretty discouraged by this given his importance to the community as a voice, listener and filtered aggregator. I don’t believe the short form microblogging Twitter offers up or the awkward access to historical posts is an ideal narrative, but I guess I need to just get over it and roll with change.

6 Comments

Scaling Web Video / Services

Scaling is not my thing, but Greg Linden continues to be a great source to poach from. His post on Facebook’s database architecture included a link back to a video presentation of YouTube’s approach to scaling during their buildup.

There’s lots of good info here, but I was struck by a couple of things:

  • Small teams of talented people can accomplish amazing things in short amounts of time. In my mind the challenge for software development companies is to put together these types of teams and then figure out how to get out of their way. The amount of easily accessible info provided by the Internet has turned the world upside down in a way that mainstream software development hasn’t really figured out (information access = broader and deeper depth of knowledge for cross disciplinary teams).
  • Heat and pressure make diamonds. The YouTube team didn’t know what to expect or have all the answers in their pockets, but were willing to aggressively tackle the challenges. There’s a point where people fracture under pressure, but if you never put yourself in challenging positions you miss out on what you’re really capable of as an individual and a team.


dev_push_cycle.png

After watching, I was rifling through some of Greg’s past thoughts on scaling and found the nugget above about how often you should push code on the web. We’ve being playing around with an *agile* SCRUM development process at TechSmith, but there is a ton of discussion / disagreement about how frequently our web dev teams should be pushing code. Do you push during the course of the sprint, at the end of the sprint or quarterly?

Lots of questions arise if you’re pushing frequently. How do you ensure quality? Is it worth the risk? How do you market changes and upgrades to the site when change is constant? I’ve waffled a lot on this topic. My web dev roots tell me fast and furious updates, but after 2 1/2 years in the commercial software world I’ve gotten cautious and felt like a web product should only really make major pushes quarterly. It’s hard for the organization’s other pieces (support, marketing, sales) to keep pace when change is so frequent. The question is, have I become tainted by the long cycle feature slogs of desktop development and lost my way?

Add a comment

What Do Users Read / Hear / Comprehend? How Fast?

I was doing a bit of research into my typing speed (turns out I’m average) and the Wikipedia article yielded some surprising additional data (if you’re really a perceptual psychology nerd check out attentional blink and repetition blindness).

2008-05-08_0229.png

This data dovetails into a Jakob Nielsen article on how much text users read that one of the project managers at work, Blake Nyquist, pointed me to.

how_little_users_read.png

And of course there’s Kathy Sierra’s learning theory wisdom.

2008-05-08_0246.png

I’ve got a few questions running around in the ol’ noggin:

  • What’s the takeaway for social media?
  • What’s the right balance between rich media and words?
  • How many people actually want to watch videos / listen to audio in fast forward?
  • Are pages with images / video rewarded with higher click through rates? What monetization potential?

Seesmic obviously is trying to answer some of these questions in the video realm, but it’s an open question if these ideas really have legs.

2008-05-08_0256.png

More questions than answers which means I need more time to mull things over. If you’ve got insights I’d welcome them.

Add a comment

Man Crush Leads to Typing Test Addiction

I’ve got a bit of a man crush on Rands. I witnessed a very entertaining presentation he gave at SXSW and then was overwhelmed by the insight of his handbook and glossary. He seems to be a bigger geek, a better writer and more funny than me — your basic nightmare (it’s the funnier part that really hurts though).

basic_nightmare.png

My self-esteem had mostly recovered, but then was dealt a killing blow with his cool revelation that he can hammer out 90 words a minute when typing.

2008-05-08_0111.png

Now when I saw this I figured, “I’m a gifted windbag…urr, writer of long emails, maybe if I take a shot I can get this monkey off my back and get back a little bit of my mojo.”

65 words

Speed test

Hmph–pathetic. However, the test is addictive — I’ve got to get nerd points for admitting that don’t I? Feel free to let me know how badly you kick my ass.

1 Comment

Influencers and Social Media

I just stumbled upon this Edelman white paper on social media which touches some aspects from my last post. The paper essentially breaks down 5 questions:

  • How to appropriately gauge influence?
  • What are the different types of influencers (starters, spreaders, adapters, commentators, readers)?
  • Who do you market to - influencers or the readily influenced?
  • What’s the breakout of social media audiences (publishers, commenters, consumers)?
  • How do you communicate (controlled, open, conversational, collaborative)?

Recently I’ve been discussing communication in terms of passive broadcast and organic distribution, but the paper slices communication into subcategories of passive and participatory.

communication_quadrants.png

Edelman notes, communication is moving to the right hand side of the communication quadrant.

communication_quadrant_diagram.png

Edelman’s conclusion is that change is constant and new “centres of authority” are continually emerging. These new loci are in turn changing how we communicate, identify with and influence each other.

ever_changing_landscape_digital_media-1.png

As someone actively engaged in building content creation tools here are my takeaways:

Media content is a communication tool and software developers must identify and enable collaboration via the new loci emerging on the web. To do otherwise is to risk becoming irrelevant within a very short time frame (you can be a dominant force, miss one wave and be forgotten by the time the next wave arrives). Desktop apps are particularly vulnerable if they don’t embrace collaboration with the cloud inside and outside of their stacks.

Content creation apps need to think very carefully about their role in the user’s narrative. This needs to go beyond the user of the desktop app and extend to the content consumer. Everyone who has a brain will be focusing on enabling sharing / collaboration, but the ability to truly add to the narrative will be prized.

It’s not enough to just get content to destination sites. Apps and services must facilitate continued participation / collaboration between content creators, content and consumers. Seamless integration and interoperability will be heavily emphasized. Apps need to be aware of the additional conversation in the cloud (tags, metadata, etc.) and incorporate them.

It must be easy and fast! There’s so much information available from so many different sources that simplicity of content creation and deployment are essential. Another reason I’m so geeked about apps like Jing.

It must be free. Content creation and delivery is dominated by free apps and free hosting — software developers must find business models that fit around this (so far ads and tiered services rule the day).

If you aren’t open and transparent you’re not in the conversation. Again the risk of becoming completely irrelevant overnight is extremely high. It’s not just analysts and journalists that need openness and transparency, but consumers. People crave inclusion — we must build communities / processes that allow consumers to invest in our organization and the tools / services we provide. If we do this there’s an opportunity to create truly passionate users and leverage some of that social surplus everyone’s been talking about lately.

Blended marketing strategies are a must. Finding folks skilled at grass roots marketing and evangelism is critical. Once you’ve found them, everyone in your organization needs to learn from them and get involved in the conversation as both listeners and participants.

1 Comment

We Consume Information, But Where From?

I’m looking sideways at Tim Bray. Almost sounds dirty or sneaky, but its actually a reference to one of the most important aspects of communication on the web — the greatest value is often personal and organic. Individuals rather than professional organizations can offer the most credible insights and the message is typically delivered organically via the social networks we’ve established throughout our lives and linked together via the net.

bray_sources.png

The web is chalk full of information to the point that its overwhelming; which begs the question “where to look”? Do you settle on an aggregator or two or load up on a-listers? Tim is suggesting we “look sideways” instead and seek out credible individuals within the organizations that interest us the most and then rely on our social networks to pass us other meaty bits their unique angles offer up. There’s a safety in this approach that allows us to focus (who can keep up with the Internet news cycle after all) and bypass the misinformation created by eyeball pandering journalists who sometimes deliberately slant or misrepresent and often lack the technical acumen to provide meaningful insights even when they are being their dispassionate best.

social_conduits.png

As the snapshot from the New York Times above illustrates this phenomena is not confined to the geek class inside the tech industry, but is a broader trend that’s having an impact on how young people in the States are consuming political news. This leaves us with a couple of really big questions:

  • how are people getting their information?
  • how do you reach your audience if its got an organic cloaking device?

People are getting their information from all over — a combination of passive delivery via professional broadcast media, organic network references and self-initiated research (search) with the latter two being sourced from both individuals (sideways) and professionals (top-down). How this sourcing pie is sliced up will, of course, vary given the demographic and personal tastes of the individual. However, its clear that there’s a trend towards organic delivery of individual sources — passive broadcast, spin-handling, PR and professional journalists have jumped the shark.

kawasaki_influencers_networks.png

The more interesting question is how do you reach your target audience via the organic information stream? I’m inclined to agree with Guy Kawasaki’s suggestion to target the fat cross-section of moderate influencers rather than the a-list. Its more than a numbers game though — moderate influencers aren’t in it for the eyeballs; they’re both consumers and participants who are more interested in spreading good ideas than self-promotion (see Pistach.io or The Deck for alternate models).

Below are a few of my favorite sideways looks. There are a boatload of others in my aggregator representing companies big and small (more Adobe staffers and community members than I can reveal without blushing). I would love to check out some of your favorites — leave them in the comments!

2 Comments

A More Open Screen (Project)

Red Monk’s Michael Coté has the most comprehensive and deepest analysis of Adobe’s Open Screen Project to date, including a look at how it plays against the other gorillas in the pen — Sun, Microsoft, Apple and Google. Strangely there was no mention of Tamarin, Mozilla or ECMAScript. I’ve always thought that Adobe was making a long term play with ECMAScript adoption and the Tamarin donation (at the very least hedging their bets). If you have the same virtual machine running in the browser as you do in Flash Player it adds a whole new twist to the write once platform concept.

Coté really knows his stuff (he’s got development in his blood), but he overlooks what I view as the smoking gun — rich experiences. Adobe has design tools in spades and a base of designers / devigners who have a track record for delivering rich experiences that differentiate brands. I don’t see Java ever making inroads in this area and I’m a bit skeptical of Microsoft’s ability to get real traction — I know devigners Microsoft and your .Net kids are no devigners. There are lots of good people at Microsoft who really push the notion that they’re a changed animal, but even so its a stretch to imagine them giving up their OS franchise which is where playing in a truly cross platform sandbox gets them.

Everybody likes to play on the epic struggle for zero sum domination and TechCrunch is the king of this “its all about the eyeballs” hyperbole. In, Erick Schonfeld’s opinion it’s Microsoft Live Mesh vs AIR vs Google Gears.

techcrunch_mesh_vs_open_screen.png

Mesh is a yawner, but even if you’re geeked I fail to see how it competes with the “write once, run everywhere” platform that Adobe is trying to build. Mesh is mainly about data synchronization between apps — you still have to write the client pieces for all of those different platforms. Mesh does have an offline storage component similar to Gears, but unless I’m missing something that’s where the comparisons end.

I’m noticing that Adobe is putting more and more emphasis on the notion of ‘delivering applications’ rather than ‘taking web apps offline’. AIR certainly allows you to move web apps to the desktop, but I’ve always viewed it as a way for delivering rich connected clients rather than just local storage / offline use. Few apps need to run ‘close to the metal’ which means AIR is a pretty good choice for a good chunk of the desktop apps that need to be built. And lets face it, there’s not a lot of call for building enterprise software (the domain of .Net / Java) for mobile devices, but there is a premium on rich client-side experiences (look at the iPhone’s reception) which is right in Adobe’s wheelhouse. Sneaky Adobe, very sneaky.

1 Comment