Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft

[David Farber <dfarber () cs cmu edu>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Date: February 10, 2008 11:58:56 PM EST
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft


Slipstream
Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft

By JOHN MARKOFF
The New York Times
February 10, 2008

REDMOND, Wash. - TUCKED away in a building on this forested corporate
campus, John Montgomery and his team of 17 programmers might be more
at home in Silicon Valley than at Microsoft.

Compared with its tenacious Internet competitors like Google and
Yahoo, Microsoft is generally still viewed as being more of the
shrink-wrapped software generation than the Web 2.0 world.

In Silicon Valley today, software is increasingly delivered as a Web
service, it is often put together by teams of programmers who might
be scattered on three continents, it's often free to users, and Web
surfers usually do the testing soon after the first prototype is
complete.

By contrast, Microsoft has long been a software engineering culture
in which huge projects like Windows Vista are developed and tested by
teams of hundreds, and whose completion time is measured in a large
fraction of decades.

Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some
people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold.

Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a
computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just
might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.

Last fall, his team introduced an intriguing software Web service
called Popfly that is intended to make it possible for nonprogrammers
to plug together Web components and data sources quickly to create
useful new Web services. For example, news feeds could be added to
digital images, or data lists to maps.

...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/business/10slipstream.html?ex=1360299600&en=007ac336a7c8bcae&ei=5090



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