Articles pour le mot-clé ‘microsoft’


Sencha - Ext JS is now SenchaQue fût ma surprise la semaine dernière en apprenant que 2 de mes projets HTML5 préférés, jQtouch, un framework javascript pour créer des applications web iPhone et, Raphael, un outil de dessin très puissant basé sur des technologies HTML5, avaient été acheté par Sencha (créateur de Ext JS).

Malheureusement cette acquisition causa plusieurs inquiétudes dans la communauté. En effet, Ext JS, une ‘branche’ de YUI (framework js pour créer des applications), était à la base complètement open source, puis un beau jour, la licence changea et le projet est devenu commercial. Pour utilisé Ext JS dans un projet dit ‘payant’ on devait maintenant acheter une licence. Qu’allait-il donc devenir de deux de mes projets préférés?

Heureusement Sencha a vite calmé le jeu, jQtouch et Raphael resteront sous la licence MIT. Même mieux, Sencha a mis à temps plein au moins 1 personne sur chaque projet, des projets qui étaient au départ personnels devenaient donc un travail à temps plein, parfait! Une chose ne faisait par contre aucune sens. Raphael je peux comprendre que la technologie sois gratuite et qu’elle aura un très grand rapport avec EXT JS, mais jQtouch, qu’avait-il a gagner à le laisser open source? Acheter un framework d’application iPhone et n’engendrer aucun revenu dessus ne faisait aucun sens.

Sencha introduit Sencha Touch

La réponse est venu 2 jours plus tard, Le créateur de jQtouch travaillait en secret sur un autre framework d’application web mobile. Sencha Touch, déjà disponible en béta, est un framework complet, compatible avec Iphone, Android, Ipad et autres tablettes, et bien sûr, il sera payant pour les projets commerciaux.

HTML5

Sencha Touch est très impressionnant, on voit que Sencha a mis tous les efforts possibles pour créer le framework mobile de l’avenir. Beaucoup plus complet que jQtouch celui-ci se positionne comme le framework des professionnels, tandis que jQtouch, restera pour les applications simples, et n’aura pas de version iPad.

Quoi qui l’en soit, ça brasse du coté HTML5. Petite note de bas de page, Microsoft a sortit un nouveau ‘preview’ de IE9, les tags vidéo, audio, et même canvas ont été implémentés, bien des personnes avaient peine à croire qu’un tel évènement se produirait. Ses technologies sont des compétiteurs directes avec sa technologie propriétaire, Silverlight (quoi que maintenant il semble plus se positionner pour les intranets).

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Microsoft étonne vraiment avec son Internet Explorer 9. On a droit à un Microsoft plus ouvert, qui veux redevenir compétitif dans tous les domaines du fureteur web. Chose inédite pour IE, on a déjà droit à des previews « build » de IE9 qu’on peut télécharger, de plus, une page est aussi disponible pour tester les nouvelles fonctionnalités du fureteur. Que du bon, CSS3 et HTML5 sont à l’honneur sur cette page. Il est clair que Microsoft a compris que être ouvert, c’est payant en terme de visibilité.

Un peu d’histoire

Ce n’est pas par hasard qu’arrive ce changement d’attitude, Internet Explorer se fait gruger une petite partie de son « market share » chaque mois depuis maintenant plusieurs années. Après avoir gagné sa dure bataille contre Netscape, Internet explorer était seul maitre de l’internet, et il semble que Microsoft a fermé la lumière dans les labs de IE et à laissé litéralement pourrir sa version 6.

Firefox change le marché

ff ie2 Microsoft veut renverser la vapeur avec son fureteur version 9La version 1 de Firefox a vraiment tout changé, avec une platforme plus ouverte, moins de bug, plus rapide et des outils plus performants pour les dévelopeurs web. Juste ce qu’il fallait pour faire une brèche dans le marché. Une lumière s’est alors ouverte dans les labs de Microsoft et ont a eu droit à IE7. Une version avec un peu moins de bug que IE6, pas vraiment plus performant, un petit ‘mashup’ quoi.

Depuis ce temps, Microsoft travaille d’arrache pied pour ratrapper son énorme retard… avec à peu près tous les fureteurs compétiteurs. Il y a une vraie guerre de vitesse en ce moment entre Google Chrome, Safari et Firefox. IE8 était un pas en avant, malheureusement il était déjà dépassé avant de sortir.

IE9 arrivera t’il juste à temps pour sauver le reste de ses parts de marché?

Internet Explorer 9 s’annonce très bien, extrêmement plus performant (revient vraiment dans la course), beaucoup plus de compatibilité avec CSS3 et HTML5. On peut vraiment dire que IE9 pourrait être le grand retour de Microsoft qui pourrait stopper son hémoragie au niveau du market share.

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google is evil5 300x270 A Day in Paris at LeWeb09 (2)Google is a constant source of criticism among the “technocracy” here at the conference. Last night’s dinner conversation remained critical of Google Books and how it will further Americanize the websphere. Europeans feel especially threatened by Google, as they “own” not only American, but also European online culture. I agree 100% that these are serious issues.  To quote the first president Roosevelt (not to be confused with FDR) “Yes to big business… Yes to big government.”

Alas, day two of the conference was the source of discussion that kept me thinking about business culture and global culture – both very interesting topics. Here are some inspiring quotes and my thoughts for the day: (Quotes are not verbatim. My comments in italics.)

Online merchandising that inspires

“Whatever you are thinking, think BIGGER…culture, customer service, clothing….we didn’t spend much on Adwords…viral is the best thing to do, as well as building the customer experience online and offline.”

(Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com)

Quite amazing really, from 2001 to 2008, Zappos’ revenues grew from 0$ to 1 billion. They focus on selling a culture. Almost all their employees are on Twitter, and active on other social network sites. They are extremely focused on their HR department, and ensuring employees are a good fit. Hsieh says they have offered employees $2000 to quit after one week if they thought they had made a mistake. They have two interviews with employees: one classic interview, and one focused on assessing cultural fit. “We want people who will be able to share our culture… the definition of happiness is different for every person.”

His speech was very inspiring. I am motivated to take more time for HR and get better support for recruitment ;-)

“Be there before the sale”…let users promote your product…you don’t have to sell directly…”

(Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs, Author, Trust Agents)

I agree; instead of spending thousands of dollars on PPC and Cos, it’s better to make good use of social networks. PPC is to online advertising what traditional ads were a few years ago. Everyone is spending on it but most don’t take the time to optimize it. Costs are rising as agencies are growing – it’s time to react and use social networks instead.

Let them build it for us

In response to market demand and nuances of banking regulations in different countries, Paypal is opening up its payment system. “We need programmers all over the world to work on the development of whatever remains to be done, focused on our use cases…”

(Osama Bedier, Vice President of PayPal Platform and Emerging Technology)

Smart. Paypal is letting programmers outside Paypal develop with Paypal’s APIs to accomplish their goals. I was saying this to my customers just a few weeks ago: invest more money on an API program instead of developing new features that will only be used by a few people.

…let others innovate for you…

Real-world Counter-Culture

(Danah Boyd, Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, Fellow at Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society)

Danah gave a brillant presentation. It was very likely my favorite one.

Danah Boyd does random word searches on Twitter to discover twittering outside her normal comfort zone. …from racist words on Twitter to youth video content… she looks at the power of visibility online, getting a true picture of the real world. Is it sometimes better to be stuck with televised network programming? Not a chance.

Grinda: ‘le retour du succès”

OLX is a new classified site, very popular locally… it focuses on the South-American and Russian markets. 10M$ revenues per year with ad sense only…”

(Fireside Chat with Fabrice Grinda, Co-CEO, OLX, Inc. and Loic Le Meur, Founder, Le Web)

Grinda says “Whatever you do, you have to be within the top 3 leading markets. This could include your local market, but its best to focus on your top three.” I agree but I also think you need to think outside the box…there are other markets besides the US and Europe. I remember UNYK in Quebec, they were number one in South-America! Finally, they were sold to Viadeo (in France).

Russia Roundtable: Emerging Markets: Focus on Russia

russiaday 071 A Day in Paris at LeWeb09 (2)Moderated by Jennifer L. Schenker, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Informilo.com

Sasha Galitsky, Almaz Capital Partners

Bernard Lukey, CEO, OZON.ru

Edward Shenderovich, Managing Director, Kite Ventures

Arkady Volozh, CEO, Yandex

Google is not a leader in Russia which is going to be the largest EU Internet market (Arkady Volozh, CEO, Yandex)

Amazon is not present at all in Russia and OZON  has taken the lead (Bernard Lukey, CEO, OZON.ru)

The blogosphere is not as well set-up as it is in the west…it’s more kitchen conversation. (Edward Shenderovich, Managing Director, Kite Ventures)

There is more US investment in the US. (Sasha Galitsky, Almaz Capital Partners)

I often wonder how it will all play out in Russia. Just like in Quebec, language can protect the market – that is why Russian companies have a lot of success – but it doesn’t last forever…just think of the Berlin Wall… it came down long before we thought it would…

Have a good week-end.

damien

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Ask web developers what they hate most about web technologies, chances are they will say javascript, and for some parts, they are right to do so. But to understand why Javascript is so much hated we need to go back in time. In the early years of Netscape, in 1995.

In the nineties, Netscape was flourishing with between 50% and 80% of the browsers’ market and was in a intense combat with Internet Explorer. A guy at Netscape, named Brendan Eich, was given a difficult task of creating a language to make Netscape interacting more dynamically with websites. And of course they wanted this language the day before they asked it . In the time Brendan had, he did the most he could, and created a versatile language that even script kids could pick up, Javascript, he also created the DOM (Document Object Model) on top of Javascript. Now the difference between Javascript and the DOM is simple. Javascript is the basic language you use to make sentence. But the DOM is what is understanding this sentence and makes it interact with the document the way you asked it.

Microsoft was not going to let that happen

Microsoft was certainly not going to let Netscape have « Javascript » and not them, they decided to reverse engineer and implement it in Internet Explorer. Now problems began. They, very unfortunately, did not do a very good job at this implementation. Which means that for doing one simple operation on Netscape and Internet explorer, you had to code 2 implementation for both of them, because the DOM was not understanding the same sentence for both. In fact javascript, the programming language is mostly fine, the biggest problem is the DOM API, some words means nothing to IE and some other means nothing to Firefox. This is what drives web developers crazy. You have to write code specifically to some browsers because they do not follow standards, you have no choice, Internet Explorer represent 67% of your user base, you have to do an implementation for them.

javascript Javascript, the most misunderstood coding language

You need to understand that this happened in 1995. The web did not had the same needs than today. Now web applications are vastly more complex. Some people had to step up and create cross browser API’s to deal with the DOM, and they did. Which means now you write one line, and some API dispatch the good implementation to each browser. This has make the life of web developers much easier.

There is currently 3 major « all round » Javascript libraries, jQuery, Mootools and Prototype

At w.illi.am, we decided to use the jQuery framework, which is now endorsed by a lot of major players, like Microsoft. Not only this is the most use Javascript framework in the world, this is the one we found the most powerful. Writing Javascript with jQuery enabled us to create more powerful web site than ever before and this tool is one of many that make us confident that we are ready for the future of the web.

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