Mix 07

April 30, 2007

For the next couple of days, at Visit Mix07, Microsoft is broadcasting the Mix conference from Vegas. They’re spending a lot of time demonstrating and talking about things in Silverlight, Expression Studio, Visual Studio Orcas, etc. I’ve been watching the news about these things for quite a while with a mixture of skepticism and excitement. After watching some of this stuff, most of my skepticism has gone away. That’s a big deal, for me.

At this point, I can’t wait to see how Adobe and Microsoft will compete over these similar programs and technologies. I’ve never experienced a season in web technology like this, where two companies are essentially vying for the attention of designers and developers.

I think often about the choice between .Net, PHP, Rails, ColdFusion, etc. as I try to figure out where my career will head, and I’m beginning to think that these next few months will help me decide. Adobe is going to do amazing things with Apollo, and with Flex, and of course Creative Suite 3, and I think they’ll also do some awesome things with ColdFusion in its next release. Microsoft, though, is showing that they’ll do awesome things with .Net, Silverlight, and the Expression Studio/Visual Studio combination.

So on that note, I hope to learn a lot about these various things in the next few months, and make an intelligent decision. It would be easier to make one based on emotions. “Microsoft sucks. Use Adobe.” “Adobe sucks. Use GIMP and Ajax and LAMP.” And so on. Everyone can make arguments based on emotions.

The struggle is in figuring out what the best decision is, and how it lines up with the core of who I am and what I want to accomplish.