Northern Voice, enthusiasts in charge

Blogger to English Tranlastions:

"The enthusiasts are in charge" becomes "the loudest-mouth best-linked most-popular bloggers are in charge".

And Enthusiasts is just another marketingesed-up word for rabid fan-boy. Mainly tossed around by Microsoft, on the eve of any big 'song and dance' influence-junket, such as Mobius or etc. They try and spin "enthusiast" as neutral, when more than half are MVPs or have established relationships, or are on the entitlement freebie gravy-train.

Folksonomies, oh dear me. Once again, "folksonomies" = "fauxonomies". As a LOC purist, I cringe just upon hearing "folksonomies". Folksonomy is pure chaos, Tower of Babel style, no one speaking or meaning quite the same thing ever.

Christopher: glad to see you're demonstrating absolutely no clue. You know I've been to about 20 conferences and haven't seen you at even one of them. So, how would you have a clue about what goes on there and who or who doesn't have a voice?

Hope you got to talk with Mack about his upcoming software Robert.

Was that mention in his post (btw - he's way ahead of you - he was blogging constantly yesterday, but that may be newsgator which tends to delay putting some posts though) of a Vista August release ?!?

I'm worried about an anti-climax effect for early testers. There's a lot of great stuff in Vista (including invisible stuff under the hood that you need to watch C9 to really appreciate), but there's a danger of nothing seeming new anymore (from now until release) to the blogger/developer/enthusiast that's had a play with it for some time - one of the dangers of everyone having access to it so early on.

Don't get me wrong; there's a ton of stuff, but it could take a while for it to sink in and for people to see the benefits of rich client technologies such as WPF, WCF & WWF (the latter 2 having a go-live license now - yeh!).

I hope people see Vista as more than a release of "stuff it's about time MS released, but we're so much into web 2.0 that rich client seems a bit late to the party"...

P.S. Enjoying the book

colin: there's still a lot of new stuff coming in Vista. I didn't demo any of the coolest stuff. The speech recognition. The handwriting recognition. The media center stuff for your living room. The photo editing apps. The games. The music. And other stuff. Yet this audience was definitely impressed and wanted to see more.

See, this is the problem with the little blog world. We assume everyone is like us. Explain why our CES booth was mobbed.

No clue eh? So order to "get it" and "have a clue" I have to join the "cult", then and only then I will be able to fully "understand". It's all the same stuff anyways, birds of a feather, and plus easy enough to retranslate the buzzworded code words. They are all the same things anyways, preaching to the choir, 50 million times over, Demo here, Emerging Tech there, Blog Conference here, there, everywhere. Blah, blah, blah.

Plus "Enthusiasts", like "Evangelists", is largely a Microsoft practice, marketing goons trying to hatch, what on the surface looks like a grassroots groundswell, but in reality is a whole backchannel gameplan. I know the game, I know the code-words and the clues, as I was in on the cruft. Maybe you don't think so, but guess we will have to agree to disagree.

PS - had to take issue with this piece of bad logic...

Explain why our CES booth was mobbed.

Umm, every major booth player could claim, "mobbed" and be deadly accurate. Even little booths that gave away freebies, could say "mobbed". There is no direct relationship between "mobbed at CES" and product quality, or even interest in said product.

See, this is the problem with the little blog world. We assume everyone is like us.

Yup, here's the exact same thing, said many many moons ago, by that person you so very much hate...

“This is a characteristic of the giddy kind of people who define themselves through computer-mediated relationships. They get terribly excited about people just like themselves using the same software, when all that bounces back from these dead phosphorous LCD screens is something that approximates their own reflection, and isolation. Bits and bytes are useful - but they're not where real power is exercised.”

I've seen the new SDK stuff for Media Center using WPF and that looks cool. Speech recognition has the same bad press as virtual reality - bit of a white elephant start, so it's gonna take a lot to blow people away - perhaps a C9 video in the works?

I must just be getting greedy for more features during the long wait ahead towards release, though being a CTO I appreciate the need to get feature complete and thrash out all the bugs.

Thanks for the link Robert and the props Colin!

I guess my post wasn't entirely clear - RTM around August (which is what Microsoft and watchers have been saying for a while) which means end users will see it for Christmas time. This is a lot like Windows XP with RTM'd in August and was available to users in October.

Check out the Channel 9 videos, and you'll gain a better appreciation for the changes in Vista (there's much more than just the UI).

I wish I could have seen some of the new tablet stuff...