Within one week after Mix and an intensive study of Silverlight and some thought about its implications, I did two things:
1. I partnered with Alex Horovitz, (formerly of Apple and Next ) and my co-author of Programming .NET 3 to form Silverlight Consulting, LLC and…
2. I bought a Mac Powerbook 17″ and, most important, Parallels Desktop for Mac along with the book Switching to the Mac The Missing Manual by David Pogue.
[Editorial note: It is actually a MacBookPro 17, as is pointed out in a friendly comment below]
Here’s what it is like to buy your first Mac.
1. The number of purchase decisions are far fewer
2. It arrives in a beautiful box. You slip it out of the box, set the instructions aside as unnecessary, plug it in, turn it on. The machine is very beautiful. It asks you your name. The fonts are very beautiful.
Then it works.
Mac people laugh at you if you buy a book about how to use it; the culture is; use it, poke around.
Parallels lets you run XP and/or Vista on your Mac in a window or full screen; it is one of the easiest, fastest and nicest VM software packages I’ve seen.
I plugged my 500Gig external hard disk into the mac, formatted it and it worked (3 minutes). I plugged my two button optical wireless mouse in, worked great. I plugged my monitor from my Dell laptop in, worked instantly. I plugged my network in, worked perfectly, instantly and with zero setup.
The kicker was that setting up XP through Parallels on the Mac was faster and an order of magnitude easier than it was on my Dell. Cracked me up; the Mac answered all the questions for me; I just sat back and watched it work.
I hear the Mac folks are afraid that Microsoft is selling Silverlight as cross-platform today but might “walk away”from the Mac at “any moment.” But I just don’t buy it; the Mac is too much fun, and once a lot of Vista and XP users get our hands on it, using Silverlight applications that run both on Vista and on the Mac — well, I wonder if Silverlight won’t eventually sell more Macs than it does Dell machines.
Niftiest program so far: video conferencing through AIM; there is something very nice about seeing the person you’re talking to, for free, with very solid full motion video. Yes, it takes a very big pipe, but FIOS is cheap these days, and the Mac makes it painless.
Meanwhile, the more I program with Silverlight, the more impressed I am.
[Followup 6/2]
I took my Mac to Milwaukee to give a presentation about Silverlight and .NET 3. The great news was that Keynote (PowerPoint for the Mac but faster, easier, better in every way) worked great, and it wowed them. The even better news was that Vista running under Parallels, with ORCAS and .NET 3 worked like a charm (though, I admit a bit slower than on my dedicated Dell. On the other hand my dedicated Dell now has 4 Gig of RAM, 4 Gig of ReadyBurst, and an upgraded video card with 1/2 gig on board memory).
What was most fun was the unending grumbling about my using a Mac to make a Windows presentation. It is a brave new world.
One humbling thing I learned and it is important to keep in mind is that most of the folks there (and these were all business folks who signed up out of personal interest) are working in companies who are still working in .NET 1.1, and just beginning to transition to 2.0; the challenge for Microsoft, clearly, will be convincing folks that 3.0 (which is a very big step) is worth taking any time soon.
-jesse
Jesse,
I'm having lots of fun working with Silverlight as well. For me, the programming model is very straightforward and makes it possible to do some pretty cool stuff in my favorite language, XSLT.
Jesse,
I'm having lots of fun working with Silverlight as well. For me, the programming model is very straightforward and makes it possible to do some pretty cool stuff in my favorite language, XSLT.
Michael
You didn't buy a Powerbook 17", you bought a Macbook Pro. Powerbooks were PowerPC-based. If you did buy a Powerbook, you didn't run Parallels on it.
You say: "I hear the Mac folks are afraid that Microsoft is selling Silverlight as cross-platform today but might "walk away"from the Mac at "any moment" but I just don't buy it; the Mac is too much fun"
This flies in the face of reason and history. Microsoft doesn't make products for "Fun". They make products for profit (and to monopolize markets, from time to time. Hey, they've even been convicted for it). The current legal threats against Linux are yet another example of the kind of "fun" Microsoft has.
Microsoft also so steadfastly "supports" Rotor and Mac Office because Macs are fun, eh?
Silverlight is merely another Microsoft attempt to knock off the established leader (in this case, Flash). First they claim, and even may release preliminary cross-platform versions to show how "open" they are. Once they get that niche, they then abandon non-Windows platforms and laugh their way to the bank.
No thanks, I'll bet on a company that doesn't have an established track record of screw tactics.
Your baseless comment that Silverlight will sell more Macs was the best laugh I've had all week. Thanks.
Mr. Non Buyer,
Yup, I called it a Powerbook; take it as a sign of how much of a Mac ignoramus I really am. You are right, I bought a Macbook Pro (not nearly as good a name).
"Microsoft doesn't make products for "Fun". They make products for profit" - Yes, of course they do, that is their corporate responsibility. But you misunderstand me; I meant that I think their users and developers will be having too much fun, and thus the demand will be there and thus the profit will be there.
"Silverlight is merely another Microsoft attempt to knock off the established leader (in this case, Flash"
I'm not sure what you mean by "knock off" but if you mean "compete with" then I heartily agree with you, though I think you have the product wrong; at a minimum Silverlight will compete with Flex/Apollo, but I personally believe it will go well beyond that. But what is wrong with setting out to compete with established products? They did so with Excel and it beat out Lotus because it was better. Other times they won because their suite was better overall, or their pricing was better, or they allegedly cheated, or they out-marketed; but in principle, competing with the market leader is what they are supposed to do, no? The good news is that others compete with them, and that makes for better and cheaper products for consumers (usually, when things work out according to plan)
"First they claim, and even may release preliminary cross-platform versions to show how "open" they are. Once they get that niche, they then abandon non-Windows platforms and laugh their way to the bank." -- To what advantage? If Silverlight can run on the Mac, and if that represents a market advantage, why would they abandon it?
If it turns out that it costs a lot to keep up the cross platform support and they're not making enough money on it, I'd expect them to drop it, but since Silverlight is a browser plug in, I'd be very surprised if the incremental cost wasn't overwhelmed by the profit of creating products that can be delivered with little extra effort on both platforms. Besides, I think you're missing the point. It isn't that they want to pull back to Windows, it is (in my opinion) that they want to go well beyond Windows or the Mac, leaping off the desktop onto PDAs, telephones, and then to your TV and ultimately your toaster.
"No thanks, I'll bet on a company that doesn't have an established track record of screw tactics."
Ah, wish I had read that sentence first; now I get it. The evil empire. Sorry, I don't fight religious wars. I just write code, tinker with things I know only a little about and try to stay out of the way when people start talking about how Betamax was better than VHS.
Take care.
-jesse
Hey Jesse, welcome to the Mac fold. You're going to love it. (I see you do already, but it just gets better.)
You never explained your titles statement.
How is silverlight going to sell more Macs?
Also you bought an over priced laptop to put windows right back on it. Are you retarded? A Mac Pro runs $2,799.00.
You could of bought like 3 dell laptops for that price.
I cann't wait until this whole Mac bull crap fad goes away again.
People are getting ripped off by Apple and all this Mac fandom.
Also Sliverlight is the shit and will probably take the place of flash.
Microsoft does not support Rotor; in fact it is distinctly unsupported.
Some of the best features of Outlook and Office are not supported in the Mac version. If they would just get SharePoint integration to work in Office 2008 I'd be a very happy man.
I suspect that MS will keep Silverlight around working on as many platforms as possible. But the development tools will only run on Windows...
>>How is Silverlight going to sell more Macs?>Also you bought an over priced laptop to put windows right back on it. Are you retarded?
This just gets funnier and funnier. I went to give my presentation in Milwaukee on .NET 3/Silverlight, and so I brought my new Mac. They were rather annoyed that the slides were in Keynote ("we can't print slides from a Mac!")
They assumed, without question, that I would bring slides (first of all) and that they would be in PowerPoint. They *freaked* at the idea of Keynote. Okay, fair enough, I have no idea what the market penetration of Keynote is, but what cracked me up was that having owned a Mac for all of 3 days I knew that there would be a solution, and it took me 5 minutes to find it. "No problem, would you like these exported to PowerPoint or to PDF?"
Their projector worked. Their mouse worked. They really were annoyed at how well the Mac worked, and they couldn't stop grumbling that they hired me to talk about Windows software and I showed up with a Mac, but that was the point.
Maybe I'm the only one who thinks it significant that Silverlight runs on the Mac, but I think it is hugely important. Why? Not because of the Mac - there are only about 50 macs out there in the real world (okay, have I ticked off enough people yet?). But if it can run on the Mac, then it can run on my phone, and on my watch, and on my car's Navigator, and on my refrigerator. And that is the point.
The interesting questions about Silverlight are not questions anyone can answer yet, but it is time to tart making a list. See my next blog post. :-)
This just gets funnier and funnier. I went to give my presentation in Milwaukee on .NET 3/Silverlight, and so I brought my new Mac. They were rather annoyed that the slides were in Keynote ("we can't print slides from a Mac!")
They assumed, without question, that I would bring slides (first of all) and that they would be in PowerPoint. They *freaked* at the idea of Keynote. Okay, fair enough, I have no idea what the market penetration of Keynote is, but what cracked me up was that having owned a Mac for all of 3 days I knew that there would be a solution, and it took me 5 minutes to find it. "No problem, would you like these exported to PowerPoint or to PDF?"
Their projector worked. Their mouse worked. They really were annoyed at how well the Mac worked, and they couldn't stop grumbling that they hired me to talk about Windows software and I showed up with a Mac, but that was the point.
Maybe I'm the only one who thinks it significant that Silverlight runs on the Mac, but I think it is hugely important. Why? Not because of the Mac - there are only about 50 macs out there in the real world (okay, have I ticked off enough people yet?). But if it can run on the Mac, then it can run on my phone, and on my watch, and on my car's Navigator, and on my refrigerator. And that is the point.
The interesting questions about Silverlight are not questions anyone can answer yet, but it is time to tart making a list. See my next blog post. :-)