It is my premise that, despite its monopolistic practices, Microsoft has succeeded by winning the minds of software developers. The Windows API, OLE/COM, the Win32 API, the distributed systems architecture, ODBC, .NET – these are all examples of API provided by Microsoft that have had tremendous impact on the industry. Even as developers decry their…

Let me start out by admitting that I haven’t done a whole lot of client-side scripting. I’ve written a few DHTML scripts in vbscript and in jscript, but I haven’t written a hard core Ajax application. That said, the RIA (Rich Internet Application) technology has always seemed terribly crude to me compared to what’s available…

We’re performing another round of usability testing at Likewise. This is something that’s been critical to our success and, now that our products are getting more complex, it’s time to do it again. I don’t remember exactly when usability testing came into vogue. I remember doing it way back in the early 1980s when I…