Expression Studio 2 Is a Small Boost for Microsoft Web Developers

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Expression Studio is Microsoft's competitor to Adobe's Creative Suite, but in terms of features, functionality and maturity of tool sets, there's really no competition: Adobe trounces the Microsoft design and Web development suite across the board.

But just because Microsoft Expression Studio can't currently take down the reigning of king of design and Web development suites doesn't mean it's without merit. While I've found some of the tools in Expression Studio to be very basic and lacking in advanced functionality, I've also found some very well-implemented tools for building rich Web sites and applications.

And with the recent release of Expression Studio 2, Microsoft has slowly but steadily improved the core tools of its suite. These tools are Expression Web 2, designed for the authoring and editing of Web sites and a direct competitor of Adobe Dreamweaver; Expression Blend 2, a development tool for creating Web animations and rich Internet applications including those based on Silverlight 1.0; Expression Design 2, a graphics and image design tool; Expression Media 2, a simple but well-designed personal digital asset management tool; and Expression Encoder 2, a newcomer to the suite used for encoding media files for use in Web sites and rich Internet applications.

Open Source as a Survival Strategy

Recently, I had a meeting with a technology worker and we were discussing the state of the enterprise testing tools market. We remarked on how many of the major players, such as Mercury Interactive, had been acquired by large companies such as Hewlett-Packard.

We also discussed the tough road that the few small independent testing tool vendors faced going forward, as they were now competing against giant technology vendors that could combine their acquired testing tools with broader software suites and solutions. To a large degree it seems as if these companies' only hope for survival is to also get acquired.

But there is another option that could be much more attractive: They could take their products and rerelease them as open-source solutions. In a software market like the one for testing tools, where prices are often very high and where open-source options are pretty limited, if open-sourced these vendors' tools would quickly become very popular. And companies like Red Hat and MySQL have shown that an open-source company can be successful and profitable by providing support and services for its applications.

Stop the GTA 4 Hypocrisy

With the release of the videogame "Grand Theft Auto 4" we are starting to see a wave of media and politicians condemning the game as an amoral destroyer of our culture, and in many cases calling for a ban of the game. And aside from their hatred of the game and any game like it, most of these people have another thing in common: They have never played the game and, outside of Solitaire and online Scrabble games, they don't play videogames at all.

As a technology enthusiast I am used to people who don't know anything about technology criticizing it and, in the worst cases, trying to pass stupid laws that hinder technological progression. But when it comes to videogames we see more attacks and criticisms by those with no first-hand experience than in any other area of technology.

Personally, I love videogames. The main reason I have a powerful cutting-edge system at home is to play the latest and greatest games. In general if the choice is TV or a game I'll almost always choose the game. And, for the record, this 40-year-old male has played and enjoyed the first three GTA games.

Now, I think everyone has a right to criticize games they don't like. But when you do this you should have some first-hand experience and you shouldn't be a hypocrite.

Browsers: The OS for SAAS

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Yours is a typical modern company.

You have sales and customer management systems, advanced project management tools, extensive network and system security infrastructures, collaboration tools, and a heavily customized enterprise content management system.

What's not so typical now--but will be in the near future--is that none of these applications is run in-house. All of these core applications are delivered over the Web in a SAAS (software-as-a-service) model. As such, the applications are accessed via a Web browser that is basically acting as the operating system. There's nothing wrong with that. Right? Right?!

The idea of the browser as the operating system has been around since the early days of the Web. In fact, it is generally accepted that Microsoft went after Netscape so hard because it feared that the Netscape browser would become more important than the operating system it ran on.

That fear may have been unfounded at the time, but we are much closer now to being able to access everything--from e-mail to office applications to image editing to essential enterprise business applications--from the confines of the humble Web browser.

This means that businesses should start to take a much closer look at the Web browsers on which they standardize, especially in the areas of compatibility, adaptability and security.

The 6 Phases of a Technology Flop

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Get a group of people together to talk about technology and inevitably the conversation will turn to classic technology flops. Whether it was a technology that disappointed, failed to deliver or was just out-and-out hated, people like to talk about technologies that failed as much, or maybe even more, than technologies that succeeded.

But the interesting thing about technology flops is that none of them started out as failures. In fact, it is quite the opposite: In nearly all cases, classic technology flops started out as very promising and highly touted innovations.

So how does a promising technology go from burgeoning star to tossed-aside has-been? In most cases they follow a clear path on their journey to the technology garbage heap.

I call this path the Six Phases of a Technology Flop. In this list I detail the six phases and as an example I've used one of the most classic cases of a promising technology that became a major flop, Push technology.

So read my list and let me know what you think.

Fighting Botnets with Botnets

When it comes to defending technology assets against malicious hackers and other bad guys, I've always been a firm believer in understanding and even using the tools and tactics of the enemy.

In most cases, this means having familiarity and even a working knowledge of the tools and methods that are used to scan and compromise networks and systems. But I've also been in favor of more proactive means of protection, from the use of tarpits and honey pots to the use of good worms to seek out and patch systems with holes that could be exploited by attackers and worms.

So it should be understandable that I was very, very interested in a paper that was presented at the recent USENIX Symposium. This paper, by several researchers at the University of Washington, advocates the creation and use of friendly botnets in order to slow down and even stop the evil botnets that are used to attack and bring down Web sites and servers.

Zoho CRM Goes Enterprise

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The recent release of Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is a step toward making the software-as-a-service application a good choice for handling sales and customers for a business.

A few of the key features added in this release include SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) security, the ability to manage access and security based on customized user roles, and integration with the Zoho Sheet spreadsheet application.

I was able to take a quick first look at the Enterprise Edition of Zoho CRM and came away impressed with its usability and core feature set. While it may not compete with Salesforce.com and other applications in high-end requirements or the ability to run very large companies, Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition looks to be a valid option for many small and midsize businesses.

Berkman Center for Internet & Society Turns 10

The Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is about to celebrate its tenth anniversary. What, you don't know about the Berkman Center?

Well, if you don't know about the Berkman Center itself you almost certainly know about some of the major technology initiatives that have sprung from the center, such as Creative Commons and Chilling Effects. And there's also a good chance that you know of some of their noted alumni and current staff, including Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain.

I recently had a chance to speak with John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center, law professor at the Harvard Law School and himself a noted cyber law expert (Palfrey is currently finishing up a book on digital natives or what is also called the millennial generation).

We had a chance to speak about some of the past accomplishments of the Center and also look forward to what they think the key issues of the Internet will be in the next ten years.

WordPress 2.5 Is Top Choice for Blogging

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With the recent release of WordPress 2.5, the popular open-source blogging application has greatly improved its already good administration and blogging management interface and has made it much easier for bloggers to add widgets and do extensive customizations of their blogs. That's right, the best blogging platform just got better.

WordPress 2.5 represents the first major overhaul of the administration interface in a long time and while I never hated the old interface, I have to admit that this new one is a major improvement. Based on the improvements in this release, on top of the already very strong capabilities of WordPress, it's become even clearer that for anyone planning to start a new blog or looking to change platforms, WordPress should be the first choice.

To test WordPress 2.5 I launched brand new blogs and also upgraded existing WordPress installations to the new version. For clean installations everything went very smoothly and the blogging platform continued to live up to the promise of its 5-minute installation process.

Searching for More Traffic?

There's a saying in baseball circles that a good manager doesn't win games, but a bad manager can lose games. The idea being that a good manager lays the groundwork to give the players the chance to win, but a bad manager's poor decisions can lead directly to a loss.

Whether you believe this or not, it is still an interesting idea and one that often can be seen in places outside of sports. In fact, there's one thing that I've been covering a lot lately--that definitely hurts when done poorly but can only take you so far when done very well.

This is search engine optimization, or SEO. The main idea behind SEO is that by following certain practices and procedures, a Web site can become highly rated by popular search engines such as Google. This increased search engine visibility will lead to increased Web traffic and increased product sales or advertising revenue.