Microsoft Max on Channel 9

it's like the antithesis of Mini Microsoft - Microsoft Max! :D

Robert, This may seem like a bit of a rant but I wished to post a few thoughts on Max and Microsoft. “Sadly” Max look’s great. Why sadly ? Well it seems to me that Microsoft is really starting to bite the hands that feed them, and it’s getting annoying. How? IMHO a company such as Microsoft that produces an OS and one of the most widely adopted development platforms in the industry should not compete with those that adopt their platforms. Microsoft seems to be dabbling in every industry known to man. This leaves little room for the little guy’s to get a piece of the action.

On one side of the coin Microsoft wants open up and not be “Evil” on the other side they develop products using their new development platform before said platform even gets to market.

Microsoft has a significant advantage over their own ecosystem and seem to be competing directly with that which made them what they are today.

Go to a PDC and hear/see all the garbage about how you the developer can succeed with our tool’s, while behind closed doors Microsoft is, and has been developing markets and products for just about every industry using the internal builds that a regular development company’s do not even have access too. Seems like a considerable unfair advantage don’t you think? Microsoft say’s developers of the world can develop wonderful stuff with our platform, the world is their oyster. However they should say don’t do anything significant as we are all ready working on it, and have been for a over a year now. Do you realize how many small startup’s that are using MS platform products will be put out of business just by Microsoft Max? At least a few.

Max seems to be a total document management, sharing, and collaboration platform. Where does that leave the startup’s in that workspace that invested in Microsoft platforms? This is like Adobe competing against graphics artists for those Vista icon projects or biding on Flash web site development.

Would you not consider this to be unethical on the part of Microsoft?
Should Microsoft not be working, and investing in getting “bug free” OS’s and platforms out “on Time” instead of competing with their own eco system?
Isn’t Microsoft already dispersed enough?

Microsoft has too much marketing, production, and financial clout to compete against. So many developers that want to innovate yet for some reason can never get the same play advantage that Microsoft has, and has always had.

Anyway end rant. It just seems Microsoft is playing with a double edged sword, and I don’t see Microsoft having a improvement in perceived ethics until Microsoft becomes a little more ethical.

Jason

I'd love to try out Max, but it doesn't run on current software! It needs the old version of .Net 1.1 and also an old version of WinFX. So despite being called by the marketing guys as "next-generation", it only runs on a "previous-generation" platform... :-)

You may love the *team*, Scoble, heck a lot of the Microsoft employees are good people, but what about the *product*? I tried Max out awhile back and while it was impressive visually, there were a few user challenges and the EULA has/had some bizarre restrictions, see: http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20051203/2692

Why can't benchmark results be published to third parties "without Microsoft's written approval"? Somebody from legal needs to be slapped if this wasn't just a huge oversight.

Has any of this changed? I'm heading over to the Channel 9 video which will hopefully have more answers on the product evolotion.

lol, evolution that is, although from my last look the product could use a lotion or two.

"Starting with their name. It isn’t some boring descriptive name".

That's because it's a code-name. It says it right their on the page you link to and on their official page!

http://www.microsoft.com/max/

Umm, it's a code name, and lot my stores got damaged, beta I guess. And the UI is confusing, pretty, but sound like it wasn't vetted.

Photo-sharing and p2p hits, on a bloated client (complicated install) app with a photo-posting service as the the eventual goal, trying to move all such webby stuff (read Flickr and ilk) back to the client. It won't fly, even if they include it in Vista, it will be just another Microsoft virtual island.

Hahahahha...

At this time Max does not support newer versions of the WinFX Runtime Components or the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

Max hits the nail on the head. Photo web sites have got it wrong. I don't want to post my personal photos, etc. on the web. They go from my camera to my machine with gigs and gigs of storage and a huge always-on broadband pipe. Why should I spend the time, effort and money to move and manage those on a web site somewhere in hyperspace?

"Max" breaks the rules as a name? Two words:

Microsoft Bob.

;-)

James, there are TONS of photo management and pro digital asset management tools that are less buggy and work far far better job than Max (and are actually installable), ACDSee Pro and Corel for two. But the eventual idea of Max, is to own the web FROM the client, see? And what GOOD is a photo sharing site if no one can look at it? The web is a natural repository for such, not a good manager perhaps, but then most people don't need all the features of ACDSee Pro or similar.

Max is just a quickie small team formed to make sure Microsoft gets a foot in the photo sites boom (hoping to future cash in after the bust). But tons of them out there, and most will falter, Flickr, Walmart and MySpace only photo sharing sites with much activity, Hello sorta. Granted Myspace isn't only about pictures, but more trading and sharing goes on there than other places.

Why should you spend the time and effort? Photo sharing is social, people close you want to know, or it's a way of advertising and showing off how hip you are and etc. It's passing the photo album around to thousands.

Max's goal: Client app ----> Web photo sharing site connected to the Client. So Microsoft gets a Web service, but client based. Look thru the smokescreen to big picture, it's not just about the Client, it's about the Client owning the web, or their attempt at least.

Making it run with current tech, should be ummm, default. And it crashed tooooo much for my tastes before, and not jumping thru hoops to make it work again. Wake me up when it's viable. But the bitter taste is already there, but then OneNote beta's sure shored up, so maybe Max can too. But it will take a huge effort to get me to poke around again, that's the downside of doing public beta releases, burns people, even when they product is good, people go back to first experiences.