MIX06 Reactions From Day One

I’m here in Vegas for Mix06. It all started with Bill Gates’ keynote in the morning, and it soon became clear that I was in a different world. I was in not in my world, I was in MicrosoftLand, where everyone has unlimited resources to build web products for everyone else and then build a special IE-only one. Better yet, a Vista-only experience using the Windows Presentation Foundation (for a platform that hasn’t been released yet).\
Windows Presentation Foundation should make Macromedia very nervous. It’s a Flash-killer baked right into Windows. It looks like it has a lot of really cool features that will suck advertisers in. If I were them, I’d start coming up with some marketing about Flash’s install base and cross-browser/cross-platform attributes.\
They showed off Atlas, their new Javascript framework that smells a lot like Dojo. That whole presentation, and a lot of the others, felt disingenuous to me. They touted them as innovations when other products have been there first and Microsoft is just taking that work and adding a special Microsoft twist on it. That twist may be innovative, but the ideas aren’t new.\
There wasn’t enough detail about what’s coming after IE7. IE7 is now layout complete, so if you haven’t gotten the latest beta, go get it. We can be pretty confident that the layout problems we see in the latest build will be the layout problems we see in the final version of IE7, for better or worse. I went to the future of IE panel and got very little new information. It was too generic, too little new info. I want a roadmap for IE that shows when we can expect what new standards support features. I don’t even want dates, because I know that dates are like handcuffs. I just want to know what’s coming. If the IE team doesn’t know yet, tell us.\
It’s weird being here, at a one-company conference. I’m used to the kind of friendly competitive tension of other conferences. Here? It’s all Kool-Aid all the time, well, except for Marc Canter. Somehow, the guy is the first to ask question (or something that’s more like a rant but might contain a question in it somewhere) in any panel he’s in. Not sure how he does it, or why… but he does.\
There were some highlights. The new Expression web site creator is very very slick. It creates standards-compliant code and has some amazing CSS refactoring features that should allow relative novices to create really interesting sites fairly easily.