Review: Windows: The Official Magazine Launch Issue

This is the first of several 'resource' reviews that will be appearing as part of my Week with Windows 8 series of blog posts. The week will officially kick off as soon as my new Dell hardware gets delivered (Dell say today, but....)

Background Information

The Week of Windows 8 Challenge

As a (recently disillusioned) developer in the Microsoft world I've been unimpressed with what I've seen of Windows 8 and have not not wanted to waste any time on something I perceive to be 'another Windows Vista - but worse!'. However I've accepted a challenge from journalist Tim Anderson to try Windows 8 EXCLUSIVELY for a week and give it a second chance. I'm not going to be using it in terms of developing specifically for the platform (that would require more time and a bigger learning curve), but in terms of switching to using it as the main Operating System for my day-to-day work.

I'm interested in approaching it as I think most of my application end users would rather than with my 'developer' hat on. After all if end users don't get a good experience then they'll likely migrate elsewhere (or avoid migrating altogether) and there won't be any clients for Windows 8 specific development anyway.

Why 'Windows: The Offical Magazine?'

I think Google/Bing and blogs have become a waste of time for learning new mainstream stuff like this. It seems like the only people who blog are those who like working at the 'bleeding edge', and experience has taught me that you google stuff like 'Windows 8' and end up with a bunch of outdated and inaccurate information based on early preview releases where the author has forgotten to point out that it was based on an early preview rather than what actually ended up shipping.

By the time a product goes 'RTM' the bleeding edge crowd have moved on to the latest alpha or beta product so nobody's blogging about the stuff people actually use day to day. For the man in the street the usual recourse is to pick up a 'starter' publication like this (with a cover promoting 'Windows 8 is here') or two of the other titles I hope to review before my week's up: The PC Pro Ultimate Guide to Windows which is a 'fat magazine' format available at many newsagents, and Windows 8 Step-by-Step a Microsoft Press book which I had to order from Amazon because for the first time I can remember local book stores don't seem to be selling Windows 8 books, at least if the large Waterstones in Southampton City Centre is typical. This is disappointing because several titles are already available.

To be honest, I would have preferred to have started with the PC Pro guide, but it doesn't seem right to review that until I can compare it with a typical book offering, and I'm still waiting on Amazon to deliver the Step-by-Step book. Windows: The Official Magazine is easier to review whilst I'm waiting for my new hardware to arrive because it's a 'standalone' product and the first issue of a monthly magazine that will be focussed entirely on Windows 8. The magazine title might lead you to believe it also covers Windows 7 and earlier releases, but it doesn't, if this first issue is anything to go by.

Full Disclosure

I have some 'prior history' with this publication (or more accurately, its predecessor, since this seems mainly to be a relaunch of the old Windows magazine, timed to coincide with the public launch of Windows 8).

A few years ago when I was 'between contracts' Craig Murphy forwarded me a request from Future Publishing for a reader to go to their offices in Bath to do a review comparison of four consumer video cameras. As the 'go to' guy for London-based user group video with some time on his hands Craig thought I might be interested. There was no money available, just expenses - ie the train fare and lunch. I never got the train fare because it took Future Publishing over a week to get the admin sorted to send me the tickets which arrived the day after they needed me on site. Promises to refund the money I had paid for the tickets never materialised despite several emails promising it would get sorted. I was kept waiting an hour in reception for reasons that were never really made clear and when I finally got access to the magazine's offices (actually an open plan area hosting many different Future Publishing magazines) at midday it turned out that one of the cameras for review had been 'lost' and they'd forgotten to actually charge the batteries for one of the others, so we had to wait until after lunch to start the 'full day' review. Lunch was a sandwich from the local Marks and Spencers so that was a bit disappointing too. An hour spent mostly posing with different cameras just outside the company offices with a freelance photographer who had to cope with endless rain, meant that I had about half an hour to sum up my findings and declare a 'winner' despite not having time to seriously analyse any of the footage I'd managed to get with the three cameras or to read through the user manuals that came with the cameras.

After that experience I started to understand why reviews in magazines rarely seem to reflect reality, and Future Publishing titles in particular are infamous for being 'thin' on editorial content (although their Total Film magazine is excellent, being the exception which proves the rule). I got the impression on my visit that most Future Magazine titles in the building effectively employed three or four school leavers on very low salaries who spent their working day surfing the web for content, with one of the computer gaming titles being an exception in that they had a big plasma TV where games were noisily being played all day!

There is a funny postscript to this 'full disclosure' backstory. When I recounted my experience to a friend at the BBC she shook her head. 'We used to have to deal with them for some of our magazines years ago. The outfit down at Bath, yes? They were terrible and shambolic. Always have been. I'm amazed they're still around to be honest'

Suffice to say, my expectations going in were set to 'low'.

Target Audience

To be fair, I'm not the target audience. This is a magazine for the casual buyer looking for something to read on a flight or train ride. The emphasis is on being a light, easy read. The launch issue seems to be aimed at people looking to buy a new PC as it proudly boasts '33 pages of new gear', with the main splash being 'Windows 8 is here'.

What do you get for the money?

£5 gets you 116 very nicely designed glossy pages with an overall 'Metro' theme that reflects the look and feel of Windows 8 itself. 21 of these pages are adverts.

The advert breakdown is interesting in that 7 of the pages are 'Get More Out of Life' adverts encouraging you to subscribe to the magazine in different formats (digital, Zinio, paper trial subscription etc), whilst another 4 are for sister publications (T3, Nikon Photo, PC Gamer and an Xmas special offer on all Future Publishing titles). There are no big double-spread ads from the big PC makers here, with Dell just taking out a single page ad for the AlienWare X51. There are ads from FastHosts, Tesco (buy your Windows 8 retail box from us) and HMV (vote for our awards). The low advert page count comes despite the 'official magazine' tag which suggests to me the title will struggle to survive long term unless Microsoft are subsidising it to some extent.

Most of the reviews are just a few sentences and even when the hardware reviews get a full page or two the detail is extremely lacking. Most two page reviews are of the 'double-spread photo with just a small paragraph of type' variety. This makes the magazine look attractive and professional, but mean that it comes across more like a brochure than a proper magazine. I doubt it would take anybody more than half an hour at most to read the entire editorial content, and frankly it's hard to distinguish between the editorial and bland advertising copy. Look at the screenshot below and judge for yourself if this is a one page article about tech style and design or a paid for ad by Nokia (the page shown is the complete 'article').

Diving into the 'reviews' there's little to see here other than a very crude basic feature list. None of the laptop reviews, for example, mention the screen resolution and there's an inconsistency of style (other than general vagueness) and quality of appraisal across the reviews! This is fluffy light brochure-ware rather than real editorial, despite the presence of a 'Verdict' box on each of the main laptop reviews. I found it hard to match up the verdicts, separated out with a star rating and a one-sentence summary, with the associated written main review. All of the PCs bar one get four out of five star verdicts, with many getting no real criticism at all! And yet the one five star review that appears criticises the unit (you'll have to go buy the mag to find out which unit it is) for its high price compared to its competition, before going on to complain about how it shows up fingerprints, has a 'dated design' and a 'cramped design and bulkier tablet'. Go figure!

Aside from the main reviews there are a lot of Windows 'introduction' articles along the lines of 'Here's a Metro screen overview', 'Here's a two page summary of the gestures you can use' etc which will be useful to those new to Windows 8. A three-page overview of the Bing Weather app is also of interest, if only for the fact it manages to make so little go such a long way. The longest article is '10 Ways to Become an overnight wine expert' which in truth could have been written for any smart phone or PC, or even no PC at all since it focusses on books as well as web sites.

Final Verdict

I'm not the intended audience, but I can't help feeling that for the asking price there isn't a big audience out there for this. It feels like a very glossy brochure advertising the Windows 8 ecosystem that should be given out at Windows launch events rather than something you should buy at a news-stand. I appreciate that home users want a general purpose magazine, but if I compare this to an equivalent like Mac Format from the same publisher, that magazine has much better editorial despite the 'lightness of touch' mandate, and is sufficiently interesting each month to make me subscribe to it. I can't say the same for this, although clearly it's very early days for Windows 8 and the 'new' magazine itself. For me, although I liked the slick, professional design and layout, the title lived down to my low expectations. If you've got money burning a hole in your pocket and a long journey ahead or a bit of time to kill, by all means pick it up and make up your own mind, but if you want to get to learn something useful about Windows 8 my advice would be to save your money for one of the other titles I'll be reviewing later this week.

Build 2012, Stockholm Syndrome and (upcoming!) A Week of Windows 8

Microsoft's annual developer conference Build (formerly PDC aka Professional Developers Conference) kicks off today.

One Year On

It's a year since I posted about waking up and seeing the light, and not falling for the Windows 8 hype.

I announced, in a 'Reboot' blog entry, that I'd decided to focus my learning efforts elsewhere after more than 15 years as a developer dedicated exclusively to Microsoft technologies, most recently Silverlight.

Looking back, the truth is that when I wrote that blog post, after 15 years of endless unpaid hours outside of those I was paid to work for clients, spent learning and working on Microsoft rushed-to-market 'tactical' products in a world where the term 'legacy' is used to describe anything that's 3 months old, I was burnt out. Wiped out. Depressed.

Totally burnt out!

I won't say anymore on that subject but suggest you go Google 'Scott Hanselman' and 'burn out' for more on how prevalent this is in our industry. I would just add (as ever) to be a little careful with taking on board everything that you read there. There's something kind of ironic about someone complaining about the false 'drama' people create in our industry, while simultaneously tweeting endless snippy comments about products made by a rival company to the one that pays your salary!

So, it's a year since I promised to post about my 'reboot' experiences with iOS and HTML5 here. It's a promise I didn't keep because shortly after making those blog posts (in some all-too-familiar serious unpaid 'down time but work time' between Silverlight-based contracts) I started an intensive six month contract at a software start-up that needed Silverlight expertise to finish a demo product that was going to get the startup's first potential customer to sign on the dotted line (alas, for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with what was developed, still not signed at the time of writing, a full year later :-( )

We all know what start-ups are like: spare time to study and blog is never there because resources are limited and fires have to be put out on ridiculously short timescales in the name of survival. That last Silverlight contract was an exhillerating, if ultimately futile, six months of 'work' where I had a good time and learned to fall in love with my day job again. Good people. Fun work. Work that felt real instead of being yet another pointless vanity project or prototype for some big, bureucratic enterprise whose big chief had mandated the use of a very specific technology without doing even the most basic checks around that technology or how they could deliver the demands of his business (Silverlight on an iPad - yeah of course that works!)

Sadly, six months in, the startup realised the error of their ways in having selected Silverlight as the technology on which to base their vision (it's not like I hadn't told them at my interview!) and decided to go the route I'd told myself (and you) I would take six months earlier: adopting an HTML5 and iOS-based approach to client-side development (whilst sticking with Microsoft on the server side).

In truth, the iOS development path and learning curve has not been as easy as I had hoped. Not that iOS is bad - just that it's different. It's like being a toddler all over again because most of the training material has to walk you through complicated IDEs and software that you don't understand through lack of familiarity. IDEs and software that typically have already moved on from when the 'just do this without understanding it for now' training material was produced. As a toddler you have none of the usual tricks available to get you out of the lack of understanding and mess you find yourself in. I found myself hitting one brick wall after another and in a world of 'agile' where the word documentation is a nasty word to be sneered at, it's only forums that have gotten me out of some really tough scrapes. Plus I'm in my mid-50s now. Enthusiasm and the best will in the world aside, learning new stuff just isn't as easy as it was when I started out in this industry in the late 70s (as an IBM CICS mainframe programmer!)

More on that particular 'reboot' topic another day! In the meantime bills have to be paid and money earnt. Which can be tough when all you really have to sell that the market's interested in is a CV boasting of your existing Microsoft expertise. After all, we can't ALL just go and join Telerik ;-) Even the 'living on borrowed time' Microsoft option means having to keep your mouth shut when some naive Stockholm Syndrome sufferer at a big bank tells you at interview for a new contract that a complex Silverlight 4 enterprise application can simply be recompiled to run under Windows 8 as a C# XAML application. Obviously, where this particular scenario is concerned, I failed at the 'keeping my mouth shut' part, which is why I'm at home writing this blog post instead of earning silly money at a big plush office in Canary Wharf!

One year on from my long series of ranty posts about the fakeness of all the 'rah! rah! rah!' Build 2011 nonsense from the usual suspects (MVPs and those desperate to brown-nose Microsoft to ensure their MVP renewals or lucrative 'partnership' deals), it seems apt to do a quick review of the technologies that got over-hyped at the Build conference this time last year, if only so that people (including me!) don't fall for the same tricks this year.

Let's have a look at the current state of play, shall we?!...

Microsoft 'Truth at Build' Scorecard

Silverlight 5

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Last year was the beginning of the end and the recognition (finally) from the 'Microsoft echo chamber' aka 'circle jerk' aka 'community' crowd that maybe those saying Silverlight was a 'dead man walking' had been right all along. In fact the launch around Build time was so low key nobody really noticed.

One year on nobody even mentions Silverlight any more, except to make bad jokes about Microsoft's new tablet supporting its main rival (Flash) but not its own product having originally used the Flash weaknesses to explain why it was killing off Silverlight on Windows 8, the RT variant. Kudos to Microsoft - this shows the power of announcing you have a 'new release' (Silverlight 5) at the eye of the backlash storm, even if you don't have anybody actually working on it when the press start to move in with those 'They're killing it off and have screwed you all' scare stories. It still makes those who pointed out what was happening at the time 'haters' though, right?! (all together now: 'Yeah. Haters! Burn them. Burn them. They turned me into a cynic' (It's OK. I'm inflammable ;-))

Windows Phone

Two years ago this was going to kill the iPhone and Android phones etc. A year on it had failed miserably with pitiful sales and lack of any kind of consumer awareness. But this time last year there was nothing to worry about because after a year of incompetence and zero sales Nokia were announcing their sexy new Lumia 800 phones and it was going to trash all the competition and have all the marketing Microsoft couldn't be arsed to do the year before behind it which would make everybody see the light. A real iOS and Android killer at last. Hoorah! (echo to rapidly diminishing fade: Rah! Rah!) The usual echo chamber devotees happily ignored all the basics (like the fact the new hardware spec was a good two years behind what the competitors were currently offering), and promoted it as proof there was still life left (and a migration path for developers) in that old dead horse, Silverlight upon which Windows Phone 7 was based. Hoorah! Ignore the haters. Developers! Developers! Developers! Say no to negativity and cynicism! Hoorah!

One year on, those phones are already obsolete. Not that they were much cop in the first place, having suffered a whole ton of problems around rushed design and release and terrible battery life. With Windows Phone 8 announced just a few months after their release, and offically launched yesterday, it became clear that the new 'version' of the phone operating system requires completely new hardware with no upgrade path for those who bought into the lies. I'm sorry, but I refuse to call it 'marketing' any more - it's lies and deception, pure and simple, and was and always has been deliberate on Microsoft's part. Microsoft don't care how much time and money their 'customers' waste on development of 'tactical' solutions whilst they lumber from one strategic and PR marketing disaster to another. Why should they? They're not the ones paying the cost! In a repeat of the Silverlight 5 'let's stop the bad press by making an announcement about a new release for those who bought into this Windows 7 Silverlight-based development crap and are now angry' story Microsoft attempted to placate angry developers and the media with the 'We have a new release for those who believed what we said a few months ago and committed to the hardware story: Windows Phone 7.8'.

This 'new release' (snort!) promised some enhancements to the now 'dead in the water' Windows Phone 7 software and hardware. So there's no need to panic folks. Please ignore those 'haters' pointing out it's the same old smoke and mirrors always pulled out of the hat when the company gets caught in a boatful of spin. By the time the reality hits they'll have forgotten what we promised.

At yesterday's launch of 'the new Windows Phone' not a single mention was made of Windows Phone 7.8. Was anybody surprised? Really? My guess is that the intern who gave up working on Blend for Silverlight 5 and left it in 'Preview Release' mode for a year is the guy who's now been assigned to do that Windows 7.8 stuff, assuming there's anyone at all doing it now that the smoke screen appears to have done its job! Too cynical? Let's wait and see!

In the meantime Nokia have announced their shiny new Windows Phone 8 hardware in the form of the Lumia 920, and in a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome the usual suspects spent weeks after the initial announcement shouting about how this kills Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones before any devices are even on sale. Honestly, life in the Microsoft developer world feels like a continual re-run of Groundhog day! All that needs pointing out here is that Nokia were so confident in this new hardware that they used professional Red camera gear to shoot video that they then pretended originated from their phone, and did something similar with their still photo's too. But heh, if you're suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome that constitutes being a member of Microsoft 'community' now what does that matter? Ignore history, make a wisecrack about how a fifth row of icons on a phone is hardly 'innovation' and maybe nobody will notice, eh? More cash/MVP awards/special favours please Microsoft. Job done. I'm earning a great living here.

Early reports have indicated that there is little to no mention of Windows Phone 8 sessions at the Build conference that kicks off today. Surely they haven't given up on it already?!!

Microsoft's Surface Tablet

Ah yes, the 'iPad killer'. It lets you run Office! Hoorah! 'Microsoft gets its mojo back with slick hardware and killer apps'. Hoorah! (Rah! Rah!)

Except there aren't many apps and the hardware performance is almost universally being described as 'laggy'. Over the weekend my Twitter stream has been chock-full of UK Stockholm Syndrome sufferers complaining that the ordering process has been a disaster and nobody in the UK knows when they'll get their new toys. These are people who got excited even before the battery life and pricing (the same price as an iPad - for something that has no apps and is clearly an early beta product? You're joking, right?!) were revealed so I have little sympathy.

But over the weekend the first reviews appeared and guess what?! The performance sucks! It's described in review after review as 'laggy'. Even the Stockholm Syndrome sufferes are complaining that video and audio stutter. Nobody's quite sure if it's the hardware or rushed-to-market Windows 8 software. Can't be the software because Microsoft have decades of experience with that, right?!

But at least it's got Office!

Ah yes, Office ... and in partcular Word. The product that had one MVP publicly blogging (isn't negative blogging about Microsoft products a sackable offence for an MVP?) about returning his Surface tablet because the words he tried to type were taking several seconds before they appeared on screen, with video attached to the blog post to prove it. It's subsequently been claimed that it was the MVP's fault because he foolishly hadn't worked out a last minute (as in 'the day the hardware went on sale') hard-to-find update that wasn't automatically loaded was needed to paper over the cracks of this early beta release. Oh dear! The Microsoft software update facility sure doesn't sound like 'iPad killer' functionality to me. Does it to you?

The Surface is the same 'iPad killer' design that forgets most of us are right-handed not left-handed, has a power connection lead that is a nightmare to fit, and a 'home' button that can't be reached with your thumbs because the tablet's too long.

But it's 'amazing', 'awesome' and 'superbly designed' according to... Steve Ballmer and Steve Sinofsky. So that's alright then. My carping aside, it's sold out so I doubt they care. Is now a good time to point out that the phrase 'sold out' is completely meaningless without any figures indicating how many units were actually made (Heh! I want to know how many Stockholm Syndrome sufferers there are out there in the world ;-))

Windows 8

Ah. The biggie. The one that really needs to make up for all the disasters since Apple first introduced the iPhone and started on its path that has changed the entire industry. My views on Windows 8 are well known: I think it's a Frankenstein's monster of an operating system. Two competing, completely disparate, operating systems trying to pretend they're one and marry desktop and tablet worlds, continually throwing you from one world to the next, seemingly at random: a complete nightmare that I've advised any and all friends and family to studiously avoid. I'm not prepared to deal with all the 'Help' falllout phone calls!

Windows 8 has officially launched now as a product you can buy. The reviews have been mixed but not terrible. They are certainly no worse than the Vista reviews were at the time of its release (funny how history's rewritten that launch as a failure when in fact it was heralded as a good release at the time, before real users got hold of it and started to express their opinions).

Not that you'd notice it's been officially released. I went into my local Waterstones on the day of release. In previous Windows launches there's been big stands promoting the new books to cover the new operating system. On Friday: nothing. The titles are there (on Amazon) but the stores know nobody's rushing to buy them so aren't stocking them.

The harsh reality is that nobody cares! Nobody (if my friends and family are typical) even knows. Aside from a 'launch' on the BBC flaghship 6 o'clock news which essentially pointed out that Microsoft had screwed up for the last 5 years, there's been none of the usual brouha in the mainstream press. Oh dear! Just bear that in mind as you attend this year's Build conference and get the usual lies - sorry I mean marketing spin - about how there are hundreds of millions of PCs out there running this stuff waiting for you to pour hours, days, weeks into development to make a pile of cash (the same pile of cash you were promised for your Windows Phone 7 development?).

The truth is it's only Stockholm Syndrome sufferers who've rushed to buy and install Windows 8. It turns out that most of Joe Public aren't as stupid as the average Microsoft developer after all. Who knew?!

OK, the above is pretty harsh, but entirely born out by the facts, and if nothing else this post is an attempt to say to all my fellow Stockholm Syndrome sufferers "when Microsoft talk about 'haters' and negativity and cynicism at this year's Build Conference (as they undoubtedly will), just try looking at the facts and reality of the last few years" before swallowing total bullshit as fact! Remember what Microsoft have said at each previous conference or launch event of the last few years and then compare it to the reality of what actually happened!

OK. I'll Try and be more objective

I do have one nagging doubt about what I've written above about Windows 8

A couple of people that I really admire and respect (and really it is only a couple - how sad a statment is that on the current state of Microsoft 'community'?!) seem to like Windows 8.

They tell me that it's a good quality product, albeit a flawed one, and one that needs time invested in it to prove itself.

One of those people is journalist Tim Anderson. Tim is one of those few journalists who doesn't give in to PR and spin and 'tells it like it is'.

And he's a Windows 8 fan (also a Windows Phone fan too - yikes! Actually I would be too if it were out of beta and the hardware were a lot better)

Earlier this week on Twitter Tim challenged me to 'try Windows 8 exclusively for a week' before I rushed to dismiss it. There was a hidden implication that I would be convinced of the error of my ways if I spent a week using the O.S. all day every day instead of 'evaluating' it in isolation.

Needless to say, I'm sceptical, but the tagline on this blog is 'Brutal but honest' and whilst I doubt anybody reading this would question the veractiy of the first part of that tagline, many inside and outside Microsoft are publicly questioning the last part, like I have some weird sort of vested interest in Microsoft failing, when actually the opposite is true.

The Windows 8 development story alone has me shouting 'alpha product, missing APIs, a world of pain and 2 years of hell until Windows 9 fixes things when it will be too late because the competition will have moved the goalposts even further'. And that's before we even get into the Application Store story.

But in truth, the developer story is kind of irrelvant where Windows 8 and Microsoft survival is concerned.

It's the 'end user' story that will make or break Microsoft.

I respect Tim enough to question my early dismissal of Windows 8, based on a few days playing with the preview and looking at the Windows RT APIs, reading between the lines on endless blog posts and tweets from those dealing with the pain as part of their 'partnership' agreement with Microsoft on which they're totally reliant, and over a decade of specialising in Microsoft technologies.

I owe it to myself and others to take up Tim's challenge and see if I am being as objective as I think I am, instead of succumbing to rage about five years of what I see as deliberate lies, deciet and utter incompetence from Microsoft. It is possible that I'm dismissing it unfairly, based solely on my previous experience with Microsoft and limited Windows 8 exposure.

At the weekend (when the Build rah! rah! rah! conference nonsense is over) I will dedicate a week to using 'Windows 8 exclusively' to see if Tim's right and I'm wrong. I'm accepting his challenge!

I'll give Windows 8 a fighting chance by doing so on hardware that's preconfigured to show the best of Windows 8 (a Dell XPS One which, by common consent, is currently the best Windows 8 offering out there, with a big touch monitor, very high resolution, a beefy CPU and plenty of RAM). And I'll post here on my experience at the end of it, if not daily on how I'm getting on.

Stay tuned!

Good Stuff #2: Pluralsight Training

A Phone Call From A Friend

In September last year - around the time I launched this blog with a series of posts around the Windows 8 announcements at the Microsoft Build conference - a programming community friend who had worked with me on some presentations to the Silverlight UK User Group and who runs his own training business got in touch with me.

He'd been so impressed with the 'presentation' style and content of the Daily Report material I was producing around Windows 8 he contacted me with a suggestion that maybe we could work together to launch a new subscription-based online training venture oriented around Microsoft technologies.

His on-site business was struggling, and it was clear to him, as it had always been to me, that online training was the future. On the surface it seemed like a timely offer - I was looking for work after a disasterous experience in Switzerland, emigrating for a job that was supposed to last for 2 years but crashed and burned after just 3 months.

I think he was quite surprised when I laughed and said we didn't have a hope of succeeding, and I wasn't interested!

The bulk of my 'negative' arguments against doing something was that there was no way we could possibly hope to compete with a company already excelling in that area. A company that already had a huge back catalogue of excellent courses. A company that was already in partnership with Microsoft and heavily involved with the Microsoft community. A company that had access to people at the highest level to such an extent that excellent new online training courses were being added on an almost weekly basis.

That company was, of course Plurasight, and in the 9 months since we had that conversation they've just got better and better!

How could a couple of guys, already working full time as freelancers in order to pay the bills and put food on the table, possibly hope to compete?

Some Lessons Learnt From A Job as a Full Time Instructor

A few years ago I'd set up a new company, RIA View Mirror (I thought it was a clever name for a company focussed on online training of the 'I show you, now you do it' variety, but admittedly it works better when spoken!) specifically to do what the friend who called me last year was suggesting. It didn't take me long to realise what an impossible task I'd set myself.

I de-registered the company last year!

In a former life (as a mainframe systems programmer, specialising in the IBM CICS TP monitoring system), I'd spent two years working as a full-time instructor for Amdahl's Education Services, having transitioned within the company from a role as a Marketing Systems Engineer (MSE). What I'd liked about my job as an MSE was the technical work and presentation/mentoring work, often to new, extremely sceptical, potential customers. What I hadn't liked about the job, which was essentially to be a 'techie' who supported a mainframe salesman, was I had a couple of large customers where the job mostly seemed to involve schmoozing in the pub listening to managers who seemed oblivious (contemptuous even) of the strengths of the developers and engineers they had working for them. I've never suffered fools gladly, and there seemed to be quite a few fools who'd elevated to the position of 'key purchase decision maker'. Unfortunately I've never been very good at pretending to be best buddies with people I don't have much respect for.

Moving to Education for two years seemed like a good move - embracing the strengths of the MSE role I'd mostly enjoyed, whilst removing the parts of the job I hadn't enjoyed. Win-win!

In those two years as a full-time instructor I mainly taught courses written by other people. These courses were typically delivered just a few days before I had to deliver them because they were purchased from the American parent company, who in turn had commissioned an external third party to write them. We only got the material when we knew we had enough people booked to justify going ahead, and decisions on this always ran very close to the wire.

Delivery of these courses mostly relied on my ability to improvise and fill out what was often weak, dull 'read the slide out loud' material where the length of the course in days was based on the assumption that they were being delivered at an American location near Disney World that could get away with late starts and very early finishes and a lot more coffee breaks than we Brits are used to. When I questioned the amount of material vs the length of the course with an American colleague teaching the same material he explained that the material was thin because course attendees weren't the ones paying for the courses (their bosses were) and in the States the philosophy was much more one of 'give the employee a course as a reward for good work because we can't commit to a salary increase', rather than a requirement for new training per se. Most attendees, my American colleague assured me, just want a good time away from the office, which is easy when DisneyWorld and sunny weather is on your doorstep, but not so easy when you're stuck out at Heathrow with typical British rainy weather and the expectations are rather different!

I survived two years of delivering those courses, partly by telling lots of anecdotes based around more than 10 years of 'real world' experience in a system that hadn't changed much over the years, but mostly by smiling a lot and basically doing a theatrical 'smoke and mirrors' stand-up act that diverted attention from the poor course content and instead screamed 'Like me! Like me!' at the captive audience.
It was an approach that seemed to work. The ratings were invariably excellent, even when I myself knew that the course I'd delivered was sub-par, bordering on poor. In fact my biggest problem was persuading my boss to let me rewrite any of the courses since the student critique marks were skewing much higher than other curriculum delivered by my colleagues.

My worst week as an instructor came when I had to deliver a 'new' 5-day course to a group of people that had already had exactly the same course a few weeks earlier - the course writer had just seen fit to give the exact same material two different titles (one titled 'for programmers' the other titled 'design') and not seen fit to explain this until the material arrived a couple of days before I was due to deliver it! I guess it says something for my ability to 'rewrite on the fly' that the attendee critiques for the second 'repeat' version of the course actually came in slightly higher than the first time (and had already been excellent) but it was definitely the longest week of my life!

I did eventually get permission to write a new, rather basic, 2-day introduction course replacement from scratch. I had a week to do it, but in reality took 2 weeks of crazy long days and weekends to write it to the quality I thought was required. The course was different from others in our curriculum in that in the days of overhead projectors it used full-colour acetate 'foils' (Who remembers Corel Draw in the days when the software alone justified the purchase of a CD-ROM drive?!) that mainly consisted of diagrams and pictures, instead of never-ending streams of black and white words on an acetate, and it comprised an additional course manual: an instructor's manual that gave details of those 'ad hoc' white board anecdote 'real world' scenarios I would typically deliver to pad out the old course material. This way the students got some quality reference material in the form of a student manual, while we held back some good stuff and had enough added value to encourage their colleagues to actually pay out to attend the course rather than just photocopy the student manual previous attendees might have received.

The initial feedback on the course from other instructors around the world was phenomenal. They loved the new material and I received nothing but praise for the 'dramatic improvement in quality' over the previous version of the course that had been written by an outside party.

I couldn't wait to personally deliver the course and see the course ratings go through the roof!

When I did deliver the course, the student feedback was very good - but actually turned out to be slightly lower than the previous, poor version of the course had been!

It taught me a valuable lesson about training: quality of the actual material delivered and the course content is actually not what's important. What's more important is that people feel they had a good time and enjoyed themselves.

When delivering the first version of the course, I was on an adrenaline-fuelled mission to hide the 'smoke and mirrors' of the poor course material. When delivering the much improved version of the course I thought the material would carry itself and its brilliance would be automatically recognised. I was probably more relaxed and less frenetic as a result. The improvement in quality was recognised by my peers - but not by the students themselves.

These days I rarely pay for onsite training. Invariably when I do I find it extremely poor value for money, presumably because instructors face the same issues I did when I was an instructor: poor material delivered just days before it has to be delivered, insufficient time to prepare, with an audience who for the most part have no idea how much money this training is costing their employer and a 'rating' process that has to be completed long before they can possibly know if what they were taught was correct or not. And, to be quite frank, the vast majority of instructors I've seen don't have the experience to 'fill out' the material with real world experience and 'off the cuff' examples the way I was able to when teaching was my full-time job and I had 10 years of experience to back it up.

Why Online Training Is Even More Difficult

Online training is a very different proposition from onsite training. The material can be viewed and reviewed multiple times in great detail.

If I thought it was tough writing a two day course to be delivered in person to a room full of 20 people, it's a whole different ball game writing material that can be scrutinised multiple times by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people.

Writing good online material is a time-consuming, and prohibitively expensive proposition unless you can cash in on the whole 'Me! Me! Me!' 'rock star' culture where good people will produce good material for free (or as near to free as makes no difference) just for the recognition it gets them. I don't have the contacts, or willpower, to try that 'cash in' approach, even assuming it can be made to work.

Which is why I laughed at the idea my friend had that we could simply produce a mass of courses that people would pay good money for, when we had a competitor who already had many courses, that were, from what I'd seen, top notch. The only way I could see us being able to compete was perhaps on quality of the presentation collateral itself. I felt this could be improved in two areas: the slides themselves: where most Pluralsight training courses comprise slides of the tedious Powerpoint 'read the bullet-point out aloud' format that seem to dominate the whole of the Microsoft ecosphere; and by providing a transcript of the video material because nobody has time to go and revisit a 40 hour video course a few months later when they're trying to remember what they thought they'd learnt.

On balance, with such slim potential advantages, I told my friend that there was no way we could compete with Pluralsight.

Why We Couldn't Have Competed with Pluralsight

Collateral issues aside (which they've since improved - eg they now provide transcripts for many of their courses), there was no way a new startup without significant venture capital funding could possibly compete with a company that had such high quality offerings, and at such a ridiculously low price, and with such high visibility in the world of Microsoft community through their partnership deals and user group sponsorships. It would be like Microsoft and Windows 8 trying to play catch up with Apple and the iPad. Much too little, much too late.

When I first looked at Pluralsight training a few years ago, I recall that the premium membership that included downloadable exercise code cost between 2000 and 3000 UKP a year, and the company had a much smaller range of courses than they have today. We could maybe have competed with them back then.

Why Pluralsight is a bargain

But today, could we compete with them? No way! Here's why:

• They have a plethora of 'rock star' instructors, seemingly recruited through their innate ability (unlike Microsoft with their MVP program) to weed out the poseurs from those who really know their stuff and how to teach it.
• They produce new courses on a seemingly endless basis (weekly!)
• Their customer support is superlative, and it's not the 'lip service' that you get from other organisations (After I tweeted about a bad experience with Microsoft online training for WPF a couple of years ago I was mobbed by Microsoft employees wanting to help. Impressive, you might think. So I spent a weekend putting together a detailed critique of why the material was so bad and not 'fit for purpose'. Six months later I still hadn't had any feedback, and when I pointed out that 'support' appeard to be just 'lip service' was told 'The course was done by an outside partner - they haven't responded' which says all you need to know about what Microsoft understand about customer service vs what Pluralsight understand by it. Needless to say when I had some problems with iPad offline downloading of some courses, the Pluralsight approach was VERY different from Microsoft's and they dealt with the problem quickly and efficiently. They made me feel that I wasn't 'whinging' but had genuinely helped them and were thankful for raising the issue).
• They offer their entire online training catalogue at a price point that means it's a complete steal. About 300 UKP a year for far more training than you could possibly hope to consume. It's a bargain, trust me on this!
• Their material is individually optimised for all the different bits of hardware that are out there. PC, you'd expect, but you want to run offline with an iPad or iPhone or an Android device? They can deal with that too.

The price vs value of what's offered is so ridiculous that if I were in the recruitment business I would seriously question hiring a freelance contractor who was too mean to pay for a year's subscription.
Yes, the company's offering is that good, and the only real problem with Pluralsight is that there just aren't enough hours in the day to consume everything they make available to their subscribers.

OK, so is there any alternative to Pluralsight?

If you're interested in Microsoft technlogy-focussed training, I'd say if there is I haven't found it. Pluralsight is a company that doesn't sit on its laurels and say 'We're the best'. Its seemingly one that continually asks itself 'How can we improve this?' and then actions the answers it receives. Whenever I've contacted support I've always had a timely response, usually followed by a fix that shows my issue has been taken seriously and dealt with as a matter of urgency. That's impressive!

In some areas, notably the more 'open source' areas around basic HTML, CSS and jQuery, there are some better online courses out there (I'll be covering a company specialising in the Adobe space in next blog post later this week). I recently took advantage of the Code School 'free weekend' where it was clear their material was far less dry and more involving, including interactive testing at the end of each course module to make sure you'd fully absorbed the material presented. But the number of courses offered is infinitely smaller for a fee that is essentially the same, and the focus is a LOT narrower than that of Pluralsight.

Some Specific Course Recommendations

I should probably wrap up this 'way too long' post with some specific courses that for me have been highlights of the whole Pluralsight curriculum.

When learning LINQ I must have purchased every available book on the subject. I found almost all of them dry and uninvolving, clearly written by people who weren't natural teachers. To be brutally honest I didn't really 'get' LINQ (I'm old with a failing memory, sue me!) Pluralsight's course on the same subject from Scott Allen was like a breath of fresh air compared to these books. So many light bulbs lit up I became a strong advocate overnight. I can't recommend his course highly enough. I was so impressed with it I wasted weekends transcribing it so I had a handy reference guide I could use - it was that good!

More recently I've completed Billy Hollis' 'User Experience' course and Shawn Wildermuth's 'LESS and SASS for CSS' courses. Both are solid courses, aimed squarely at the Microsoft developer, which are fun, involving and for me also included several 'lightbulb' moments. They more than warrant the time spent on taking them and the cost of a Pluralsight subscription.
Yesterday I started on Scott Allen's 'Mobile jQuery' course, and the introduction alone did more to enthuse me than any number of books and long, dull blog posts on the same subject. It's another course written by someone with a deep undersanding of the technology, who knows how to condense and compress it into the essentials for developers who are time-pressed and struggling to stay up-to-date.

Bottom line: If you're a professional developer working in the Microsoft ecosystem, you really owe it to yourself to take out a Pluralsight subscription. There really is no excuse for not doing so!

Good Stuff #1: TemplateMonster

A few years ago when I was first starting out with Microsoft's Silverlight technology, good examples (other than tedious 'hello world' drag and drop demo-like nonsense which was at a very superficial level) was very hard to find.

Silverlight, to me, was about two things: "writing .NET code that could run in the browser" but, perhaps more importantly, about "adding 'the sexy' to user interfaces".

The problem was that it was very hard to find well documented 'sexy' examples where full source code was available.

In my search for good quality design-oriented examples I discovered the wonderful TemplateMonster.com who, even as recently as last week, were continuing to produce interesting Silverlight designs for typical industry marketing web sites.

If you're a developer who doesn't 'get' design (but knows he needs it to 'sell' his product) TemplateMonster.com is a GREAT resource. And no, I don't just mean for 'dead man walking' Silverlight.

It's also a brilliant resource for learning the latest HTML5, JavaScript and jQuery tips and tricks. It appears to offer a 'best practice' set of framework code that designers who've worked with this stuff day-in, day-out have put together - at least if the few samples I've purchased are typical.

In theory, the site is there to provide templates or starter packs for web sites for different industry market sectors: "templates" that for the most part are intended to be used 'as is' or can be customised for an additional fee. But for developers they're a great way of finding great animation effects and cool new user experience designs. Designs that are clearly documented and include all source code, even down to the original layered Photoshop files for all icons and photos used. For the asking price of around 60 USD they're a steal - as a starter for your own web sites, or as a training vehicle for the newer web technologies!

If Silverlight is a 'dead man walking' you may wonder why I'm enthusing about TemplateMonster templates now. The thing is TemplateMonster.com don't just do Silverlight. They do HTML5 and what they call 'animated JavaScript' sites (as well as Facebook, Wordpress, Drupal, Flash and a whole host of templates for other stuff too).

They provide beautiful creations that are there for you to use as a starting point to learn the new technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 and responsive designs, for a very acceptable price.

The pricing model can appear a little strange for newcomers. You basically pay around USD60 for the source code for a given template that you purchase under a 'non exclusive' deal. This 'non exclusive' deal means others can purchase the same template at the same price. Or you can pay a lot more (typically around USD3000 - USD4000) to say 'I want this to be my new industry sector website. Don't sell it to anyone else.'

Just one warning if you decide to purchase. The company has recently taken to automatically adding the 'customise with my logo' option at around USD50 when you decide to purchase a template so don't get caught out like I did and end up paying double what you need to. Make sure you untick that option before purchase if you know how to edit HTML (and if you don't I'm not sure why you're reading this blog post!) otherwise you're going to end up paying double the price you thought you were going to pay.

As a learning resource for some of the coolest effects, animations and designs around I think the USD60 asking price for each template is a good deal, with most incorporating cool but subtle animation and sound effects for things like menu navigation, page transitions and other animated tricks.

If you sign up for the daily newsletter you get a daily email with the latest additions (typically there are 12 to 15 new templates a day!) and an extra 5% discount for that day's deals on top.

More importantly you get sent links to interesting blog post articles geared towards web designers that don't get posted elsewhere. For example this recent blog post on 'Painless techniques to implement CSS3 Latest Tricks' is a 'Must Read', comprising 30 of the best tutorials on sensational CSS3 effects that I've seen.

Customer support is excellent and if, like me, you're somewhat artistically challenged, a TemplateMonster template can make a great starting point for a sexy 'fast and fluid' new web site that makes it look like you have great design skills on top of your development skills too. Use new images and text in the existing source code and add new pages to the basic hierarchy you've given and people will never know your site was sourced from one of these templates. I strongly recommend checking the company out.

And yes, the new Fast and Fluid company web site which at the moment is an embarrassingly poor placeholder web site, is going to be replaced very soon - based on a sexy 'fast and fluid' design from the folks at TemplateMonster.com. I'll post the details here when it's launched after I've integrated it into ASP.NET MVC 4.

Apology: I've only just discovered there were a bunch of replies (five) to my 'Reboot!' blog post from last week. Replies here are moderated to avoid spam (NOT to censure!) so apologies to those who took the time and trouble to make a comment that it's taken me so long to publish your comment. I'm trying to sort out why the auto-comment emails are not getting through. Thanks for your patience.

Microsoft Windows 8 TechDay

Walking home from Microsoft's Windows 8 TechDays event, held in London last Friday, in the glorious sunshine (I left an hour before the end) I was thinking about how I could best blog about it without going into my 'default position' of posting yet another rant which attempted to explain the importance of learning the very basics around good presentation.

You'd think by now that Microsoft staff would not need a grandmother to tell them how to suck eggs. After all, it's not like Microsoft's own Scott Hanselman hasn't tweeted several times over the weekend about the availability of his own excellent The Art of Speaking video course that is available, and was made availble free over the weekend through a 'free pass' offer from training company TekPub.

A developer launch event like this ('the biggest changes since we introduced Windows') is about the importance of invigorating your audience. It's about doing the basic prep work and understanding and knowing the slide deck you're about to present. It's about enthusing your audience to do the work needed to get ready for launch. It's about NOT boring everyone to death by just reading each slide or web site SDK sample out aloud.

Sadly, this event was not about any of these things, and was, as a result, a big fail on Microsoft's part.

I wish I could say I was surprised. But I've been to enough of these things now to know better. I really shouldn't have wasted the day in attending.

On the walk home I had decided it was probably best to just ignore the event and do my 'Sunday morning blog post' as the first in a kickoff to a quick series of short, sharp blog posts about stuff that I really CAN get excited about (that will appear later today :-)). The usual post-Microsoft event 'Brutal but honest' moans get rather monotonous for readers (especially Microsoft employees) and this writer after a while. And, after all, if Microsoft were going to change they'd have done so long before now. It's not like I haven't been carping on about the same basic 'easy to fix' things for months, years, even decades now!

But then I saw Microsoft re-tweet a tweet from one attendee (one out of over a hundred) saying this was the 'best Microsoft event' he'd been to.

To say I was staggered is an understatement. It was, of course, like red rag to a bull. So please accept my apologies if you're one of those readers waiting for a world of 'non-Microsoft' positivity blog posts from me: You'll have to wait just a few more hours yet.

Presumably the attendee who thought this was the 'best' presentation event had only been to one other Microsoft event (one that was even worse than this)? Either that or he is in a job he hates so much that any day out of the office that he still gets paid for is a good thing and he wanted his bosses to see his tweet so he could get another day out the next time another similar event rolls along? But to see Microsoft staff re-tweeting it as if it were fact and this had been a great event... I thought 'How can people delude themselves so much? Or is it perhaps that I am the one deluding myself at thinking how boring, dull, completely ineffectual and extremely amateur this event was?' A quick conversation with the Development Director at my current main client and a couple of other developers indicated, (phew!) that it was not me who was the one being self-delusional.

Yes, I know it really is time for me to move on and blog about stuff that fills me with enthusiasm rather than the endless 'Meh!' that is Microsoft Mediocrity in all its many shapes and forms. Mediocrity that these days it seems to me is there in every nook, cranny and fibre of the company's being. But, sorry folks, I'm afraid that 'best Microsoft presentation' tweet presented as if it were fact to the outside world means I couldn't resist one last quick post to 'correct' false impressions being given to those that weren't actually at the event.

You can blame this entire blog post on that one ridiculous re-tweet!

By the way, as an aside on the subject of Microsoft = Mediocrity, they say a picture speaks a thousand words so here's a picture of an otherwise impressive big video display promoting Windows Phone that was in the foyer area where all the event attendees congregated for coffee.

(What the picture doesn't show is the 'Windows has not been activated' warning also appearing at the bottom of the massive display)

OK. So your job is to launch Windows 8 to the developer community and get them excited. I've worked in marketing for a computer company before. Windows 8 is not a hard sell if you concentrate on the positive, and ignore all the negative (mainly Metro vs Desktop schizophrenia and lack of quality control) We all know presenting to developers as an audience can be tough, but for the love of God at least make SOME effort when you've asked over a hundred people to take a day off work to learn about the 'biggest changes since we launched Windows'.

Putting your best, most respected, 'rock star' speaker on at the beginning (instead of the end so people can leave on a high note) and then just giving him the very basic overview stuff to cover is a nonsense. Use him for what he's best at - the detailed stuff that developers are interested in and need to be told about. Get him to cover the difficult stuff in the way audiences are used to, with clarity, comprehension and understanding. Don't waste him on the stuff an intern with a day's experience could do.

To follow that with a developer who has been given a set of designer-oriented slides intended for a different audience and which he seemingly hasn't had time to look at beforehand, and have him simply try and read the very few words on them out aloud as he progresses, because he doesn't really 'get' this funny UX stuff so can't speak passionately about it is just insulting your audience and wasting their time.

To follow that with a 'proper' developer presentation that started off so well but clearly had to be delivered when only the first third had been written added insult to injury, especially when the speaker suddenly realised he didn't have a clue what slides were coming next and had to start complaining he'd missed lunch as if that somehow explained the total confusion and endless audience yawns that inevitably resulted after what had been a good start. If I give a presentation to six people I make sure I know my slide deck and I rehearse. To not do so with an audience of over a hundred at what should be a major launch event is beyond being amateur - it's insulting!

But next up was the real clincher - the one that made me so angry (actually I'm at a point now where I just laughed, this sort of thing is so commonplace with Microsoft stuff) I left at the next break, an hour before the end of the event. The audience got an example that actually made me silently go "Yes! I was SO right to get out of this client-side crap from Microsoft and look elsewhere to a world of far less pain. A world where I can take some pride in what I do and not have to continually face end-client incredulity'....

The presenter complained that a new Windows 8 input textbox control (used on the Windows 8 SDK demo site, which was being used for demonstration purposes) kept moving the cursor away from where he was actually typing. There was no visual indication of where the text he was trying to input would appear. The mouse was consistently several characters away from where he was typing. He was trying to correct a typo and it was like trying to play a complicated maze game whilst drunk.

The presenter explained that he found this 'mouse isn't where I'm typing' behaviour 'annoying'! To which the ONLY intelligent response can be 'YOU find it annoying, and yet you expect your developer audience of millions to take this s***, use it in real world apps and have happy customers at the end?!?! WTF is in that Kool-Aid you're drinking?'. FFS. This is TOTALLY unacceptable. Just fix the f***ing thing already! How hard can it be? IT'S A SIMPLE TEXTBOX CONTROL!'.

I swear to God you couldn't make this stuff up! I kept pinching myself, expecting to wake up and find it all a bizarre, horrible dream. But no. No tweets about how nasty the control is and it MUST be fixed before release. No comment at all on how broken it is. Instead I see Microsoft re-tweeting a message from one attendee saying it was the best Microsoft event he'd attended.

Forgive my language - but this is un-f***ing-believable.

Look, I know it's nice to get a cool t-shirt for free. And the 'brown bag' lunch provided (also free) was nice too. And there were some nice attendee raffle prizes. But you (or, more likely, your boss) just lost a day's pay on this lazy, medicocre nonsense. What value did you really get out of it? Events like this should not be about the 'free stuff' - that's just the trimmings. From Microsoft's point of view the event should have been about invigorating their existing and potential new customers. It should certainly not have been about having so many of them complaining about how 'boring' the event was or leaving early, as so many seemed to be doing at the time when I left (early).

In fairness, I'm not sure what the Microsoft UK problem is - whether it's people who've been too long in the same job getting lazy, or just people stretched too thin because they're having too much to do without proper support or resources. It may be a problem where their feedback about quality (that shockingly bad textbox example) is ignored because of the American 'not invented here' syndrome. But I am pretty sure it will be the last Microsoft event I attend. Life's too short to put up with such mediocre s*** that would be so easy to fix, but which Microsoft over and over and over again have so frequently proved they're incapable of fixing. That 'best Microsoft presentation' tweet nonsense suggests that not only are the UK arm of the company incapable of fixing the problem, their way of dealing with it is just to deny it exists. Which is really, really sad and depressing.

(Good Stuff #1 will be posted later today to counteract all the negativity that Microsoft just seem to generate these days).

Reboot (but first some parting shots ;-))

It's four months since my last post. Yikes!

My last post was (again!) another rant around the directions and poor decision-making Microsoft were demonstrating with the killing off of Silverlight. A killing which Microsoft and their army of MVP (or MVP-wannabe) shill supporters were still publicly denying. I would add at this stage that I've worked exclusively with Microsoft technologies for over 16 years, so my rants are not those of a confused newbie.

However, whilst taking continual flack for pointing out that 'Silverlight is dead' I was actually still drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid. The Microsoft shills I've upset over the last couple of years may scoff at the idea of this, but I think the name of my 'reboot' company makes it clear I was still addicted. 'Fast and Fluid' was the winner of the 'keyword bingo' phrase most used at the Microsoft 'Build' Conference keynote which launched Windows 8. My subsequent launch of 'The Daily Report' highlighting and promoting the best new articles around the early preview release of Metro and Windows 8 show that like a drug addict looking for his next fix I was still hooked on the marketing drugs I was being given, even whilst publicly criticising them. My bad!

Once an addict, always an addict I guess, and Microsoft and their 'community' of 'rock star' supporters sure make it hard to break the addiction, or even stop for a minute to think and realise that 'actually, the Emporer's got no clothes', even when all the evidence around you is screaming 'He's completely naked'.

Simple maths showed the time and effort needed to research 'The Daily Report' was simply not worthwhile given the number of daily hits. Higher profile bloggers would Direct Message me congratulating me on the blog which was flattering, but never publicly doing the same or even revealing its existence (Jeremy Likness is probably the sole exception that proves the rule). Even with my thick skin I realised that my involvement in the whole 'Silverlight is dead and they're not telling you the truth' controversy meant I was suddenly the 'fart in the space suit' of Microsoft community - apparently a 'loose cannon' that couldn't be relied on to carry the 'correct' message.

So this blog quietly went dark while I concentrated on finding work that paid good money and resulted in less controversy and lower blood pressure instead!

Thankfully I found a new client that involved working with an interesting, worthwhile and 'real' project written in Silverlight after two years of tedious, vanity 'proof of concept' Silverlight applications for different organisations that should never have been written in Silverlight in the first place: projects that highlighted out-of-control IT departments squandering business money to play with shiny new toys instead of delivering what the business wanted and needed and was paying for. Projects that did nothing to make me feel good about the work I was doing. Things seemed to be back on track at last, but given the short-term nature of the work (the client quickly realised that they would be better off using a platform that had more 'reach' than Silverlight had) I quietly started re-evaluating my 16 years working exclusively with Microsoft tech. The problem is that although it's a great technology Silverlight is terrible at 'reach' even if it did start off life with promises that it would be "WPF/EVERYWHERE".

The WPF "Everywhere" marketing bullshit, at a time when one person was trying to make initial guesses at what it might be, is indicative of the problem I have with Microsoft. A problem that might politely be described as being somewhat flexible with regards to defining what the word 'truth' actually means. There have been countless other examples of this problem over the years, although I am continually surprised at how quickly people forget. Am I really the only living person who remembers all those Visual Interdev/Visual Studio keynote launches where Scott Guthrie or some other poor fool would get up and announce 'We have JavaScript debugging working in our new release' to great rounds of applause... only to have to announce the exact same thing the next release round... and again the release after it. Or the 'We've fixed the XAML designer in Visual Studio so it actually works' as a more modern variant of the pattern. The most obvious example of the problem of course is that decades old chestnut 'We now have proper W3C standard support in our browser' (check the HTML5 feature compatibility charts, people - it's not rocket science to see which browser is the WORST, even in its '12 months before public release shiny new tech preview' version!) These are just simple examples of the sort of 'truth' Microsoft is happy to put out in the lead up to product launches. Claims that unfortunately in today's world of social networking get amplified as fact a million times over in the circle-jerk that is sold as 'Microsoft community'. It's not like the lessons and evidence aren't there for anyone to find and reveal! But we live in a lazy 'follow the sheep and don't question anything' world, and it's easy to get hooked on the Microsoft Kool-Aid marketing drugs when the message is so loudly and often repeated on blogs and Twitter that it seems like the whole world is speaking with one true voice. Everyone's saying it, so it must be the truth, right?!

Three years ago I sparked outrage in a pub conversation following a user group meeting when I said that the phrase 'user group' was now a meaningless term that described a strategic alliance between Microsoft and a partner company, usually one wanting special favours and thinking it would get them by taking on the burden of organising a promotional group, pre-announcing its formation, rather than genuine users getting together to try and improve products, raise awareness and feedback common sense. I was told I was being 'paranoid' and 'hysterical' in suggesting that such user groups were not as altruistic as they should be. The disappearance of so many Microsoft-oriented London user groups over the last 18 months simply because Microsoft cut off its funding shows that my 'hysterical' warnings that these were not real, sustainable user groups or genuine communities but instead a strategic controlling of 'community' by Microsoft prove my point I think!

But people forget the history lessons, and Microsoft seem happy for them to do so. It enables them to keep repeating the mistakes of the past, which until now they have been able to get away with because their monopoly position and the abundant supply of gullible new recruits ready to fall for it hook, line and sinker has enabled them to do so. The trouble is that in the era of the iPhone and the tablet (aka the iPad) those gullible new recruits are not growing at the same rate they used to. Microsoft fell behind quite some time ago, and each new decision they make seems to put them further and further behind in the desperate rush to play 'catch up' with a competitor who seems to outpace them at every turn.

One high profile blogger pointed out at the end of last year that I seemed 'bitter' where Microsoft and the way it had 'shat on' its Silverlight developers were concerned (sorry for the language, but there really is no other way to describe what they did, using lies and obfuscation every step of the way: from pretending Chief Technical Architect and Silverlight champion Ray Ozzie had simply moved division when they knew he'd left, to suggesting Bob Muglia had spoken out of turn when he told a journalist about the Silverlight 'change of emphasis', to promising to reveal what the future of Silverlight was at Build (and then refusing to do so). The blogger had a point - but in my defence, it's hard not to be bitter when you've spent so much unpaid time and effort based on Microsoft lies about their 'strategic' direction, only to continually have them refuse to come clean about their real intent long after it's been publicly exposed. How many useless, broken, rushed-to-market, world-of-pain 'shiny new toy' technologies do you have to endure, repeating this endless unpaid learning curve cycle, before you realise you're being screwed and working untold hours for free just to help Microsoft sell stuff that's just not fit for purpose?! In my case, with 16 years of Microsoft experience behind me, far too many. And I've really got nobody to blame but myself for believing shills and self-aggrandising charlatans calling themselves 'community leaders' instead of trusting to gut instinct based on experience and the available facts. In one sense I suppose I should be grateful for the 'Silverlight is not dead' bullshit and the mess that is Windows 8 that helped me realise the depth of my self-delusion, or I might still be stuck in the same exasperating version of 'Microsoft Groundhog Day' that signifies burn-out and continual disappointment as the reality vs hype gulf of unbelievably mediocre products gets continually re-exposed.

Another high profile MVP said on a couple of occasions last year that he didn't understand why I didn't just abandon Microsoft as I clearly hated them so much. Apparently at the age of 54 switching a 16 year career of experience in Microsoft-centric enterprise development and finding gainful employment elsewhere should be as simple as writing on my CV 'I've got no real world experience in xxxx, but I've been playing with it in my spare time and want to switch away from Microsoft so please pay me enough to pay all my bills'. Yeah, right! I mean I know Microsoft MVPs have ther own reality distortion fields, but come on! It's my own fault of course - if only I was prepared to compromise and sell my soul to earn my 30 pieces of silver living as a Microsoft 'partner' working on showcase 'demo' nonsense for new shiny toys every few months, instead of trying to earn a living doing real work in the real world for real clients paying considerable sums of money, life would obviously be so much easier!

All the 'hater' and 'whiner' name-calling I've received for pointing out quite obvious lies ('Silverlight is not dead', 'We've been working on Windows 8 and Metro for three years', 'Silverlight is installed on 60% of all internet-connected devices', 'Windows Phone 7 is selling well', 'Windows 8 is awesome') would be mildly amusing if the shills doing the name-calling weren't being so utterly hypocritical. How many of those Silverlight MVPs so strongly insisting 'Silverlight is not dead' 6 months ago have done anything other than write fresh blog posts, training and conference talks on Silverlight's main 'rival' HTML5 technologies? I can count those still blogging on Silverlight, the sole subject for their output for the previous two years before the 'Silverlight is dead' furour went public, on the finger of one.... finger (Thanks for keeping the faith Jeremy!) But heh, Silverlight's not dead. No, honestly. Come back. It's not dead. Really! Trust me on this (whispers: can I have my MVP renewal and any other goodies you've got now, Microsoft?)

An apology of some sort from those 'community leaders' who've so wilfully denied the facts and led 'community' down a blind alley of wasted expense and pain should surely be in order? But no, they keep schtum, hoping that nobody will notice that the 'haters' and 'whiners' insisting Silverlight was being killed off were right all along. After all, people remember who were the 'whiners' and 'haters' more than they remember what it was they were hating or whining about, or who subsequently was proved to be right or wrong! And there's plenty more pieces of silver to be made by travelling along with the Microsoft marketing gravy train - at least until it runs totally dry. Walk this way folks, we've got Windows 8 and Metro to be promoted and there's lots of new gravy to go round!

Let me be quite clear on this: Windows 8 is an immature world of pain. More importantly, it's a schizophrenic mess of an operating system that makes Vista look like a shining beacon of light and end users will hate it as they get endlessly thrown around from 'Metro' mode to 'desktop' mode and back again. It's a Frankenstein's monster of an operating system. The rush to cannibalise iOS and compete with the iPad whilst still carrying Windows users forwards has over-ridden common sense, so more fool you if you're wasting hours and hours of unpaid time helping Microsoft sell their 'new' rushed-to-market and incomplete Windows 8 and underlying Windows RT API as if it were in any way ready for prime time. Good luck with all those missing APIs and the 'everything's asynchronous' world that means everything you wrote and which is 'easily converted' (if you've got hours, days, weeks of free time to spare) works completely differently from the way it used to work. This mug's played this game one time too often, and the toys may be pretty in the same way a turd with varnish on looks shiny, and the marketing drug may be addictive, but deep-down we all know how this mess will end up. Expect Windows 9 to be 'rushed' out in 18 months to 2 years time to magically 'fix the problems' and prove 'totally awesome' and a 'Google/Apple/Adobe -beater'. It's all so tedious and predictable, based on past performance!

Next week I'm going to a Microsoft TechDays event promoting Windows 8! You're probably thinking "WTF? After all you've just written?" Unfortunately, the reality of day-to-day business means the bills get paid by pretending that sometimes shit is not TOO far away from gold (heck, they're the same sort of colour, kinda!), or at the very least be up-to-speed on what the marketing messages being dished out are. But the reality is that three years too late I'm trying to jump onto other gravy trains - trains where there's real demand and attempts at achieving real quality especially in the user experience department, and real conviction instead of endless, mindless shill fabrication and twisting of facts. Hopefully they're not gravy trains that require endless unpaid hours trying to get just the most basic stuff doing what it's supposed to do. Fingers crossed, and maybe I'm deluding myself, but the initial signs are good!

So this blog is being rebooted as of today, and it's going to see a change of direction. I'm NOT going to be blogging about Windows 8 because, quite frankly, none of my clients seem to care about it and none of them appear to believe the hype that Microsoft are putting out. While shills keep talking about Enterprise 'still being on XP' and 'always slow to adapt new technologies', my Enterprise clients have been working with iPads and iPhones and rushing into new technology at a far quicker pace than used to be the case four or five years ago. They see no future in a weaker, copycat 'jam tomorrow' product over better products that have been in the marketplace for a few years, especially one that's so obviously been rushed to market as a too-late knee-jerk reaction to a competitor's success.

I AM going to be blogging about learning new technologies. My early tentative steps with HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and JavaScript technologies have been a real eye-opener (they've moved on - a LOT since I last worked with them) and got me excited about programming again, in a way I haven't been for years. Finally!

My first experiments with Objective C and iOS programming have got me even more excited. Talking to other developers who've made the switch from .NET to iOS all I hear is 'I wish I'd done this earlier.' Admittedly it's early days, and it's like going back to school again. But I feel more positive about my career and the industry I work in than I have since I left the mainframe environment 20 years ago (where the word 'legacy' was used to refer to technologies that were DECADES old, not WEEKS old as tends to be the case with anything Microsoft). If you're still not convinced, ask yourself this question: what other company could pat itself on the back and brag over and over again about the death of one of its own products, the way Microsoft has with Internet Explorer 6?!

I'll be using this blog to document my steps and learning experience as I branch out. I can't promise it will be in-depth or deeply technical at this early stage. But I can promise that it will be honest and independent, to the point of being positively brutal if it needs to be. When was the last time you could say that about ANYTHING written by a Microsoft MVP blogger? Enough said!

So. In summary (finally!) welcome to the reboot! It's time to put all the negativity around Microsoft behind me and move on to fresh pastures. For those who started following this blog because of an interest in Windows 8 and Metro: I hope you stick along with me for the ride. There's a world of exciting opportunities out there, and they don't all involve having to park your brain at the door and simply swallow whatever marketing crap you're being given by Microsoft and its shills! I hope you'll stick around.

Daily Review #15: Windows Phone, Nokia World... and Business Ethics

Photo © Bidouze Stéphane | Dreamstime.com

Revisiting Windows Phone

If you're wondering where I've been for the last week or so, I've had my head buried in Windows Phone.

I know, I know... I've often said I regard the whole Windows Phone thing as a huge failure, that Windows Phone is something that nobody apart from a few Microsoft Silverlight shills and MVPs with vested interests care about. The product is a classic example of 'Microsoft silo' development and tactical thinking: Over promise, Under deliver, and Deliver late.

The classic Microsoft approach meant we got a 'strategic' product launch that mainly consisted of blind panic and under-achievement, without even the basics of common sense, planning or even a basic consistent marketing vision statement ('Its a product specifically for the consumer market.... (beat)... but it's for business too') being put in place.

But when there are bills to be paid and, as one recruitment agency recently put it to me, "You're a Silverlight developer - and that market completely died four weeks ago. There's nothing out there!" what's a guy to do?! Windows Phone uses Silverlight.... kinda, and maybe there's Phone work available out there that's real as opposed to 'partner' work for Microsoft marketing?!

Windows Phone developers are, as one agent told me back in May, "rarer than rocking horse shit" and were able to command a ridiculously high daily rate IF THEY COULD SHOW THEY HAD PROVEN EXPERIENCE.

Five months on, and that agent's story has changed. "There's no interest at all at the moment. All the mobile work is ios and Android. The market for Windows Phone developers seems to have gone the same way as that for Silverlight: There is zero interest. Na-da. The market's dead!"

So why would I be considering moving from one dead end (Silverlight) to another (Windows Phone), and looking at putting yet more hours of my own unpaid time training up on Microsoft short-term fixes like Windows Phone 7 (we all know that a rewrite based on Windows RT is coming, right?!)? Well, like I said, bills need to be paid, Windows 8 and real Metro apps are more than a year away, and with a general absence of Windows Phone developers, Silverlight developers are apparently the next best thing if you are a company that's decided for some reason that they need to do Windows Phone development.

The contract I was asked to tender for was for a fleet delivery management company, and despite my concerns over the Windows Phone aspect, it had a few obvious advantages (although primarily one of being able to pay the bills!)

It offered the advantage of being able to work largely from home (a must, given that the client was in the middle of nowhere with an expensive taxi ride from the nearest station on top of long and expensive rail and tube journeys, and great for my new 'go to the gym and get more exercise' regimen!) It also offered the opportunity to work with shiny new stuff like DevExpress controls (I am so tired of trying to defend Telerik controls when other developers and the business get upset about how buggy and awful they are because the client just assumed they were the only choice).

The contract work also included development of a new desktop WinForms application in .NET 4 using LINQ, SQL Server 2008 and a simple ORM AutoMapper that I haven't worked with before too.

I saw this as essentially a chance to build up 'non-silverlight' expertise on a project that was going to be real, rather than some silly short-term vanity project for a company with more money than sense who were using Silverlight inappropriately for what the real business requirements were (which, sadly, has been the case for most of my Silverlight contract work). How could I resist?

Some alarm bells did go off at the start of the interview process to win the business though. The worst part of any contract negotation, and the common gripe of most self-employed developers, is having to deal with recruitment agencies to find the work. These agencies act as the interface between client and supplier but seem to do nothing but get in the way of a business they don't understand, whilst commanding a big fat percentage of earnings for the duration of the contract for having done little other than get in the way. In this instance, I hate that former clients get hassled for references before even the passing on of a CV to a potential client will take place, and I normally refuse to allow this, but in the current economic climate beggars can't be choosers.

This contacting of referees is not a good or even professional approach, and it risks the goodwill of people who get no direct benefit from being hassled. If it happens more than once, as it will do if agencies all insist they have to do it before even submitting a CV, they will typically turn around and refuse to help in future, but what can you do?! In this instance I agreed to bend my own rules, referees were contacted, and I was then awarded an interview with the agency itself before the CV could be submitted to the client.

This time around, the first interview in the contract negotiation process consisted of me travelling across London 'suited and booted' to brief an enthusiastic young recruitment agency consultant from another office than was actually dealing with the contract on what was new in Windows 8, but heh, at least I got a day out, right?! And, to be honest, I'm always impressed when an agency actually takes the time to meet a supplier and interview them before passing on their details to an end-client, even if it represents additional time and cost on my part.

When I got to interview with the client themselves they were friendly and enthusiastic. The sort of people I could easily work with and enjoy working with. They were going Windows Phone because... well they wanted to work with WCF Services because the existing code that the phone would be talking to used it, and so Windows Phone seemed like the sensible option. In trying to find out a little about the existing application (still about to go live after a year's work by contractors rewriting a very old application fraught with issues - no agile, frequent iteration, releases here!) the statement that interface-based development had been a mistake and a late change to use base classes instead, seemingly because of some problems with AutoMapper, set off the first alarm bell. Another was the otherwise knowledgeable technical lead's complete belief in domain driven development but confession that he'd never heard of the CQRS pattern.

The final little alarm bell was the fact that the company had won, and was now servicing, a major contract with a big household name recovery service which had been won based on the fact they already had a traffic management system in place. This was the same traffic management system that I was going to need to write from scratch as quickly as possible because the household name now wanted to see it. I found this a little worrying in the 'business ethics' department. But it does seem that's the way most businesses operate these days . Presumably I should have gone to the interview bragging of non-existent Windows Phone contracts and experience I'd got to ensure I got the business that was being offered!

So I've been buried in two big fat Windows Phone books (good stuff from Charles Petzold and Adam Nathan) as well as some excellent Windows Phone courses by Pluralsight (I can't recommend subscribing to their online training highly enough - it's a steal at the asking price). I've also been rushing to put together in my own time, and at my own cost, a crude prototype of the delivery system the company needed 'yesterday'. Hence no 'Daily Report' updates over the last week (I HAVE been collecting and reviewing Windows 8 -oriented links, so there will be a 'catch-up' daily report later in the week)

Last Friday morning I was sent the draft contract to start paid work on Monday, and I spent most of the day faffing around with all the usual requested paperwork, insurance, company formation documents, VAT registration etc before getting a call at 4.30pm on Friday requesting that the referees who'd been contacted by the agent now call the client directly to recommend me again, and that I prepare an urgent email explaining why my company really was the company to do the job.

It turns out that the agency hadn't had exclusive supply, as they'd been lead to believe, and that on Friday morning, after asking for the paperwork to be raised for my Monday start, the client had interviewed another supplier and now couldn't make up their mind who to go with.

I could write pages and pages on the 'business ethics' of the approach taken, and would defend the agency involved were it not for the fact that after making me jump through hoops on Friday afternoon and evening, there has been a deafening silence since. (Update: late Wednesday after getting hold of the agency rep who'd promised to call on Monday they're apparently not getting their calls returned by the end client so have nothing new to report).

Anyway, I digress with this talk of business ethics and agency handling. The point I wanted to make in this post is that I've had to revisit Windows Phone, and it's not been a bad time to do it with the release of Mango just a week or two ago (aka Windows 7.5, or if you're a developer using Visual Studio: Windows Phone Tools 7.1 - yup, Microsoft really can't organise a piss-up in a version naming brewery can they?!)

Windows 8 and the whole Metro look and feel comes from Windows Phone so it's been interesting to 'catch up' after initial interest in the marketing that kicked off early last year, but quickly evaporated once the reality of what Microsoft were doing set in around June last year.

Last night I attended the first Windows Phone User Group meeting I've attended since their inaugral meeting over a year ago. That meeting, co-incidentally, was what made me go out and upgrade my Apple iPhone 3 to an iPhone 4 the very next morning rather than wait for Windows Phone as it was hosted by Microsoft marketeers twisting the big vision of 'It's a consumer device' with additions like '... but it's for business too' and telling us all how open the new Microsoft was, whilst also telling us we couldn't tweet or blog about such bland 'secrets' as how long they were hoping to make the turnaround time in the App store, or what the demo phone (already posted all over the internet by Microsoft employees in the States) looked like!

As an interesting aside, I tweeted about the Microsoft 'secrecy' nonsense (I say 'nonsense' because I believe it's a deliberate marketing trick Microsoft use to make 'partners' feel 'special' - and it's really, really lame!) with a 'rolls eyes' comment. Remember that this was a so-called 'independent user group' inaugral meeting for which nobody had signed any non-disclosure statements. As a result of my sarcastic tweets about how 'open' the 'new Microsoft' were proving themselves to be, the UK's phone evangelist tweeted me next day, saying it sounded like we needed to talk and he'd be in London the next week: Could we meet? I said sure, but since I was about to launch a new video podcast, could we make the meet an interview on camera about Windows Phone? I think you can guess what the response was (answer: deafening silence and no meeting!)

One of the other things that had really put me off the Windows Phone at that initial user group meet were the user demo's of apps for the app store which Microsoft said would certainly get approved. Of the five applications demo'ed by their developers one (from a Microsoft partner) was very slick and professional, the others were like bad hobbyist apps from the late 70's - complete with a microcomputer-like user interface. What happened to the 'superior UX' that was the whole raison d'être of the new phone?

A large part of the problem of course was the lack of the crucial pivot and pan controls at the time (which eventually showed up long after the original Visual Studio Tools add-in for phone development, not very long before product launch). But the confirmation that simple Microsoft greed meant that these apps would get approved for the App Store just to be able to boast as large a number as possible of apps, regardless of quality or cost or consistency showed that the whole Windows Phone 'consistent UX' vision was now completely lost. The enthusiasm I had for the new OS at those first demo's in February/March last year (at last! something that isn't an Apple iPhone rip-off!) completely evaporated in minutes.

No vision, no consistent marketing message, no free phones for developers to work with (even for those of us who coughed up 3 grand to get to MIX on the promise of one) - Microsoft were taking the piss, and when you've been as burnt as I have by all the drag and drop marketing lies over the years, experience indicated it was most definitely time to walk away. I think Ballmer's own admission 18 months on that the phone sales have been much lower than expected, together with the low profits developers who rushed to get apps into the App Store have made because of its pitifully low take-up, shows who in the user group room that night was right, and who was wrong!
:-P.

Last night's more informal meeting in the basement of a pub was far more encouraging, even though the main presenter was the same Microsoft evangelist who spoke at the inaugral meeting, and one got the impression that there really are still just less than a handful of people doing anything real with the phone with the evangelist on first name terms with all of them. It does look like Mango has provided the basics for what should have been there from day one, and the two apps demonstrated looked far more like real apps than the nonsense I'd been shown a year before. There was even talk of having some basic phones available for developers who wanted to develop for the phone but didn't have the cash to pay for a real device. It seems that after the huge failure of the phone over the last 18 months (despite all those shills and MVPs over-promoting it for all they're worth, together with some pretty good reviews from the genuinely independent media who really don't have any particular axe to grind) Microsoft appears to have at least lost the arrogance it displayed at that inaugral user group meeting with all its insistence about what could or couldn't be tweeted or blogged, and that can only be a good thing.

But the main message I took away from the meeting and my own research of available hardware the day before, was that Windows Phone hardware is still some way away from being ready for prime time so far as the general public are concerned (Nokia's phones announced today at Nokia World are claiming to change that - which I'll comment on in a moment) and I find it astonishing that only one piece of hardware available in the UK (the brick-like HTC Titan) actually has the gyroscope that was being much touted for future app usage at last night's meeting - a fact that is consistently avoided in any of the hardware marketing, spec sheets or Windows Phone product reviews I've seen.

More interestingly, in three separate conversations with different self-employed developers I heard the same story - of developers struggling to 'find a strategy as quickly as possible for exiting Microsoft development whilst still paying the bills with contract work that requires proven experience with a technology'. It seems I'm not alone in my position and long-term view of where Microsoft are headed!

This morning, with the keynote launch of the two-day Nokia World here in London, we got news of the two new Nokia Windows phones, already widely leaked last week. The shills would have us believe that these will (just like Mango was supposed to!) turn everything around for Windows Phone.

In all honesty, I don't know if the two new phones will help, although certainly the Nokia support after Dell and the Three network jumped ship, will help raise the profile. Certainly the top-of-the-range model, The Lumia 800 is the first Windows smartphone that even attempts to compete with the likes of Apple and Android hardware. And the marketing from Nokia has been superb - the sort of marketing that Microsoft should have had in place over a year ago. It's impressive that most of the main online stores and carriers, as well as Nokia themselves, have marketing material up and are taking pre-orders for the phone (due 16th November) within hours of the official announcement.

But will the Nokia name be enough? I actually like the phone O.S. - especially now that it's Silverlight 4 in its Mango form, rather than the hacked version of Silverlight 3 with some bits taken out, some bits from Silverlight 4 hacked in, and some new bits just for phone added in too, that it was in its original incarnation. But the hardware needs to be sexy if the O.S. is to have wide take-up, and while the new Lumia 800 certainly looks sexy (it should - it's a complete steal of the Apple iPod Nano!) it is fundamentally flawed in two ways: it has no front-facing camera (forget the poor quality typically associated with second camera's on a phone - yoof don't care about picture quality - they just want to take pictures of themselves and their mates for Facebook and be able to pre-viz and frame them correctly) and it has a pitiful 16GB memory (more like 12GB when you subtract what's used by the O.S.) with no expansion facilities at all. 12GB in a world where people want to carry around their music and video collections is woefully inadequate!

And none of the Nokia phones will be available in the States until some time next year (Europe effectively becomes a trial market for the real one in case the phones stiff!)

So, overall even after Nokia's big announcements Windows Phone remains a bit of a "Meh!" from me. Will I waste any more time on this 'stopgap to Windows RT' version of the phone O.S. as a result of what Nokia revealed today? Sadly not. And that's the big missed opportunity in my view.

And, yet again, it's an example of 'too little too late' with Microsoft running out of time with generation -1 products while their competition are already preparing generation+1 products.