Monthly Archives: August 2013

A Great Read – A Biography of Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer

If you are up for reading a fairly long article – this biography of Marissa Mayer is worth reading.

http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8

What I found most interesting about this article was how it exposed the inner workings of Silicon Valley – how its this exclusive club of tech guys and money guys.  Also worth reading is the part that deals with Mayer’s first days at Yahoo and how she leads and changes Yahoo’s culture.

As I wrote in a previous post – I think  Mayer will succeed at Yahoo – after reading this bio I am more confident that she was a good hire, and that she is the best option to try to lead this company forward.

Steve Ballmer’s Departure From Microsoft

It’s no big surprise that Steve Ballmer has either chose to leave Microsoft or was asked to leave Microsoft – I think the writing has been on the wall for awhile now.  What I find interesting is the timing of the announcement.

Some people may attribute the timing to this recent article about an activist investor group gaining support from Microsoft shareholders.  There may be something to that, but that has been ongoing for several months.  Why would the announcement come approximately 1 month after reporting full year results?  Wouldn’t it made more sense to at least announce they are discussing a succession plan as part of the year end report (Microsoft’s year end is on June 30th) and at least hint of a potential change?

My theory is some really bad sales numbers came in – proving to the CEO that there is no turn around in sight.  This could be something like shrinking phone market share, poor Xbox projections or drop in Enterprise sales.  Perhaps realizing the ship is sinking, the time to move on was now.

The announcement of Steve Ballmer’s departure caused Microsoft stock to surge over 7%.  If my theory is correct, and you are a holder of Microsoft stock, this would be the time to sell.  No CEO will be able to turn this around in the short term – and Microsoft has dug itself a pretty big hole to get out of as it looks to re-position itself as a device and services company.  Microsoft is entering markets with formidable competitors.  It will be interesting to watch who is picked to try to reboot Microsoft.

 

 

The Console Battle Heats Up

This fall will be all out war on the console gaming front as the new versions of Microsoft XBox and Sony PlayStation will duke it out for market share.

This article introduces us to a probably new combatant in  the console war this fall – Amazon.  Supposedly Amazon will have an Android based gaming platform likely much cheaper than the established consoles.

Google might also be a long term contender – probably not this year  but in coming years it looks like Google Glass could be an intriguing platform for Multiplayer gaming:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/10234260/Google-Glass-the-next-big-gaming-platform.html

I think the market will be shrinking for living room gaming consoles – I think there are too many alternative platforms.  Serious games will migrate to playing games on PC’s, casual gamers will use their tablets.  However if Microsoft can get game developers to develop games that use the Kinect effectively, that may allow it to build out a stronghold in the living room.  But so far, the Kinect has yet to be an effective piece of gaming hardware.

So this fall will be worth watching to see how these large companies fight for the battle of the living room, and how the future of online gaming evolves.

Javascript Under Fire

I have a love / hate relationship with Javascript – when I first started working in Javascript it was a crude language that lacked the debugging tools and suffered browser incompatibilities. So for the last several years I have focused on server side coding.  While I was focusing on the server, Javascript has  taken hold  thanks largely to Javascript libraries.  Web development has evolved (devolved?) to be browser intensive processing – breathing new life into the client server battles waged since the 80’s.

Of late I have been tinkering again with client side programming – and have tinkering with various javascript libraries. JQuery  brings javascript to a new level, providing much better structure to javascript development.  TinyMCE provides an great out-of-the-box rich text editor for Javascript, amazingly easy to plug into sites (My only complaint would be a lack of a decent image gallery manager – so I had to write my own).  Did I mention these libraries are all free and well supported?  Geeks love to share code, and the internet has driven the cost of software libraries to zero.

Now the next evolution of web development is on the horizon.  Most techies would agree that Javascript is a weak language to base an architecture around, so new languages are being developed to replace Javascript.

CoffeeScript and Google Dart are the most interesting developments.  These are languges that are a higher level than Javascript, but can be compiled down to Javascript.  In the case of Google Dart, when a page running in the Chrome browser is viewed,  it could run natively in Dart, however if the same page is viewed in IE or Safari, it could run a javascript version of the same Dart code.   Pretty cool.  In theory, you can write in the same language for coding on the server and the browser.

Here is a link to a great panel discussion on the merits of Coffeescript and Dart.  A pretty heavy duty discussion but worth reading if you are thinking of picking up a new language.

And for a great comparison between CoffeeScript, Dart and JQuery, check out this post.

My hope is these languages will be the answer to the big problem in development right now – the cost of developing  apps for the various mobile platforms. I dare to dream that Icould write code in one language that compiles to run in the different phone operating systems.

Its early in this evolution, but it will be interesting to see it play out.  If you are a javascript Guru – it may be time to start tinkering with one of these languages.