Scoble comments on FrontPage: “The thing that really killed FrontPage? Microsoft’s marketing team tested the name on a range of developers and Web designers/builders. They all derided it. The marketers learned there was no way they were going to be able to continue with the FrontPage brand. So they killed the brand. Does the code live on? Yes. Sorta. The Microsoft Expression Web product is really a continuation of FrontPage. But it’s been totally rebuilt.”
One thing that Robert forgot to mention is that some of the FrontPage functionality has been included in SharePoint designer as well, since FrontPage served as a template designer for SharePoint 2003. It is interesting to see developers and IT people cringe whenever the word FrontPage is mentioned- I’ve yet to see a positive reaction to that brand/product.
UPDATE- Looks like the SharePoint idea has been picked up in the comments on the post.
I just saw that Jon is going to start blogging here for a while as he makes the transition to Microsoft. Subscribed.
Robert McLaws: If you’re running Vista RTM on a Toshiba Tecra M4, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES upgrade your BIOS to either interim version 2.01 or the currently-released 3.1. Both versions are poorly designed, and will cause a catastrophic crash of the video card if you try to bring the system back from a reduced-power state. Your best bet is to stay on version 1.70 until Vista is available to consumers in January… and even then I’d recommend waiting.”
I’m not on the most up to date bios release and I haven’t seen the reports that Robert has mentioned but the Vista RTM roll outs are still underway (I just went RTM today on my main work machine- prior to that I’d been on RC1 for months). I’ll check in with some folks to see if I have any other data points that I can post on this one. Until then, I trust Robert enough to recommend that you be cautious until more data is available.
Is Vista the end of an era? Probably so in many respects. There is an interesting thread on Slashdot covering this topic. The commenters focus much more on the speed of change in computing and the Internet rather than just the Windows OS itself, which obviously needs to change as the computing paradigm does the same. I’ll be curious to see how this evolves over the next few years as it relates to Windows service packs and new OS features and planned releases.
Tim O’Reilly: “Chief among the future sources of lock in and competitive advantage will be data, whether through increasing returns from user-generated data (eBay, Amazon reviews, audioscrobbler info in last.fm, email/IM/phone traffic data as soon as someone who owns a lot of that data figures out that’s how to use it to enable social networking apps, GPS and other location data), through owning a namespace (Gracenote/CDDB, Network Solutions), or through proprietary file formats (Microsoft Office, iTunes). (“Data is the Intel Inside”)”
The users are pretty savvy and are all over this one already from what I’ve seen but I think Tim is ultimately right. For many applications that are moving to the Web or following this Web 2.0 paradigm ownership and portability of the data (or lack thereof) will drive the decisions from customers around which platforms lock-in users. This data lock-in may also provide a “moat” for vendors looking to hold on to customers or stave off competitors, at least for a while.
