They're going the wrong way.

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/07/31 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/31/10044476.aspx

Like some of you (many of you?), I read TechCrunch from time to time.

Not religiously, mind you. Since it usually doesn't cover anything that is relevant to me, and rarely covers anything truly important/interesting to me. this is not a flaw in them, they just don't have me in their target demographic.

dditionally, I tend to generally skip the posts by MG Siegler.

I mean I don't hate the man, I can't. I don't even know him.

But one has naught but to read 10-15 random posts of his to conclude that if iPhones and iPads were personally programmed by Steve Jobs to have their antennas electrocute every member of MG's family and all of MG's friends, that MG would have some kind of pro-Apple spin on the matter. It just doesn't feel to me like anything approaching journalism, which seems (to me) to conflict a bit with TechCrunch's stated purposes.

Now I am not a member of the I Hate MG Siegler Facebook group or anything like that, but skipping his posts in most cases just seems like better time management.

But in his hilarious Decoding Microsoft’s Fantastic Passive-Agressive Numbers Post that a colleague pointed me to, there was a fun line I really liked:

24%
Linux Server market share in 2005.

33%
Predicted Linux Server market share for 2007 (made in 2005).

21.2%
Actual Linux Server market share, Q4 2009.

What he really means: Remember when everyone was saying Linux was going to take over the market? They’re going the wrong way.

Now the part that caught my eye was not the full quote, it was that last bit.

The They're going the wrong way bit.

I thought of it when someone pointed out to me the Plan for multilingual sites (SharePoint Server 2010) article on TechNet, published on May 12, 2010.

In particular, this note:

Um.

Now it turns out the reason for this is that in SharePoint 2010 they made an explicit move to use WCF (the Windows Communication Foundation).

And although WCF is

a part of the .NET Framework that provides a unified programming model for rapidly building service-oriented applications that communicate across the web and the enterprise

it turns out that perhaps one of the ways it was allowing such a rapid method for doing all that work was by not supporting International Domain Names.

Oops.

Amazing how rapid one can be when one sticks to ASCII!

Now I look forward to some point in the future where I can excitedly point out that WCF is on the right track, and that SharePoint is back on the right track. I really am.

But for now, unlike MG Siegler, I am not a fanboy of the company at the center of my professional life (Microsoft, in my case; Apple in his). And because of this, I call bugs BUGS, mistakes MISTAKES, and design flaws DESIGN FLAWS. It is how I believe things can be made better (and people who read here can be made aware of problems in the meantime). Whatever credibility I have rests on my honesty, in this regard. And I take that pretty seriously.

With all that in mind....

You know how WCF can help one to "...communicate across the web and the enterprise" ?

Well, make sure to not include a world wide in front of the word web here, at the moment. Because every day from now until they fix this flaw in their design, there will be more and more sites created, builyt, and promulgated that cannot use WCF. Or the latest version of SharePoint.

Because (unlike most of the rest of Microsoft), They're going the wrong way.

Marc Brooks on 31 Jul 2010 1:28 PM:

referenced by

go to newer or older post, or back to index or month or day