August 6, 2009
Death of PopFly
Some of you probably know and have used Microsoft’s PopFly! I did and I think it was a pretty cool online service and above all it was pretty fun to use… (Although it also a bit useless too). PopFly was the Microsoft’s response to the Web 2.0 fever that struck the internet some time ago. For those of you who didn’t know PopFly, it was an online service that allowed users to create mashups by simply dragging and dropping the features you want and connecting them together. This mashups could be sites, games, simple web apps, etc…
Well, at first this seemed to be pretty cool… The truth is this was useless, because there were few contents that I could really export from their site and use as standalone… Nevertheless, we could see some really great works in the popfly site, some of which took obviously lots of time and expertise to create. So, what does Microsoft decided to do with that? Shutdown popfly and destroy every single content that could not be exported!
I was registered in PopFly (and I had to obtain an invitation to join this “elite” in the beginning) and I had some work there… And all of that is now lost. Microsoft, I want you to give me back the time you wasted from my life! Well, at least they warned the users with some funny message which states: “Thanks for stopping by. Unfortunately, on August 24th, 2009, the Popfly service will be discontinued, all resources will be taken down, and access to your Popfly account, including games and mashups, will cease.”. So, I just want to thank you, Microsoft, for valuing my work so much…
But now, lets think for a while… PopFly came out in 2007 and at the time you needed an invitation to work with that thing. Somewhere in 2008 I think, the invitation system was removed and anyone could login. And now, only 2 years after its birth, PopFly is getting killed… In my opinion, this reveals two things: The first is that it was an amazing failure in the Microsoft’s strategy and planning. Because this was obviously expensive to Microsoft. Also, as you couldn’t obtain anything that really matters from this service, it was quite obvious to me that it wouldn’t work… The second thing is that Microsoft must be desperate with something and is trying to reorganize or redraw its strategy… Shutting down a service, even if it is useless and obsolete, is not Microsoft’s style… So, either they are planning something big and need to focus their resources on that or they are trying to reduce costs… Desperately…
But PopFly is not the only thing that Microsoft is killing… Microsoft Money (Microsoft’s Management Software System) was also discontinued and it will no longer have technical support. When I heard of that I thought: “What the hell is Microsoft Money? Never heard of it…”. Apparently it really existed… But not any more!
My opinion is that Microsoft will be closing some more stuff soon. Probably not its social Live Network, as social networking is Microsoft’s main bet now, but I don’t expect a long life for Skydrive, XNA, Live Mesh and Silverlight. The first is quite useful but is very expensive because it requires a huge online storage space. XNA represents an enormous investment from Microsoft, was well received and it is very useful as a prototyping tool. But NEVER as a game creation platform as they intended, because it is way too slow to be able to compete with a C++ engine, for example. Live Mesh is a complete failure in its implementation as I’ve mentioned in this post. Finally, Silverlight was Microsoft’s idea to compete with Flash. However, people got used to Flash over so many years and they don’t want to learn something new that doesn’t bring any real advantage over Flash (although Microsoft invested a lot on saying otherwise, which obviously isn’t true, at least so far).
So, Microsoft seems to be in a very bad and dangerous path… Maybe they will get it someday, but for the moment I think they are just desperate and trying to patch up some mistakes they made in the past few years. This said, I leave you with a sentence that I saw somewhere a while ago:
“The day Microsoft makes something that doesn’t suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.”
July 6, 2009
About Microsoft’s Live Mesh
Not long ago I found out about this new Microsoft product called Live Mesh. The idea was appealing, if you have some data that you want to synchronize between your computers (PC or Mac) or even with your mobile phone, then you just had to install the Live Mesh client, sign in for a Windows Live ID account and it’s ready to use. Microsoft synchronized data among the computers and mobile phones and also with a Remote Desktop which is located somewhere in some Microsoft server and has a 5GB storage space.
At first this seemed like an amazing idea! Was it really? Of course not!
As soon as I heard about this Mesh thing, I installed the Live Mesh Client thing in both my desktop and my laptop. As I was working in a project that used a SVN repository, I wanted to synchronize the SVN local folder between my desktop and my laptop automatically to avoid having to do a SVN update on both computers every time I changed something. Live Mesh looked like a great option for that!
However, one beautiful day, the SVN just crashed in my laptop while updating. Then, as usual, the .svn folder became corrupted, the cleanup wouldn’t work and so, I had to delete the whole folder and perform a complete checkout again. Problem is, that when I deleted everything that was inside the folder, Live Mesh synchronized and deleted everything on both the Remote Live Desktop and in my desktop. Well, that kinda makes sense, because I actually wanted to delete the whole project, right? The problem comes when I do a new full project checkout… For some stupid reason, as the new files were being downloaded from the SVN, they were imediately deleted by Live Mesh! Why? Because it synchronized with the desktop and the Remote Live Desktop and decided that those files should definitely NOT be there… And this would happen everytime I did a checkout, so if I kept Live Mesh working I would have lost the entire project. Thank you Microsoft!
But you may say that this happened because this is a beta version! Oh c’mon, this is a problem that is too serious to be left undetected and released to the public! Either this reveals an amazing lack of testing or an amazing ammount of naiveness…
However, this is not the only problem… When you install the Live Mesh client, your computer is automatically open to Remote Desktop Connections (RDC). With a RDC you can control your computer over the internet and perform any action that you would do if you had physical access to the machine. Of course that this feature should only be enabled when its really necessary because it represents a serious security issue… But Mesh does not even ask! It just opens the RDC and controls it as it wishes… The access is locked to your Windows Live ID account, of course, but… What if your Windows Live ID is stolen/hacked?
Not only do you lose control of your MSN, Hotmail, etc. but also to your computers now! Every single one that is connected to the Live Mesh! This is too serious to be put aside, and as far as I know, I refuse to use Live Mesh until this is solved! Once again, thank you Microsoft for making me lose my time and work!
Tiago Fernandes 