Remix: what it was, with pictures
On Friday, May 23, the Moscow House of Unions opened its doors to several hundred web designers and developers gathered at the ReMIX conference held by the Russian office of Microsoft. The event became an analogue of the big MIX conference , which has been held in Las Vegas for 3 years in a row. The purpose of the event: to tell Internet industry professionals about the company's latest products and its vision of their place on the Web, receiving feedback from them. In addition, the highlight of the event was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who visited Moscow after a week-long tour of Eastern Europe. Petr Didenko, an expert on web technologies at Microsoft kip, told us about the background of ReMIX, its essence, content and public response, and of course about Steve Ballmer .
But first, a little about general impressions. The House of Unions is a masterpiece of architecture, within the walls of which for more than 200 years life has been in full swing in all its diversity: from party balls to fiery political speeches, from the famous nomenclature "Christmas Tree" to the fire of 1812. All the more interesting was the mixen proposal by Mikhail Chernomordikov “to remove American cities ... and insert Russians in their place”. True, it referred only to editing the code of the program for calculating the route of travel during the presentation of the Silverlight platform capabilities.
A loud statement already in the spirit of the modern political era was made by Dmitry Sotnikov. He urged the audience "not to click." The truth again was only the seriously expanded functionality of the PowerShell administration tool, which became so good that I no longer want to manage the server on the Win platform using the graphical interface. By the way, PS is now able to mimic under the Unix console.
Alexey Mogilevsky, who has long been speaking at various conferences in Russia with Internet Explorer 8 presentations and presentations, simply said beautifully (provocatively, but beautifully). Alex said, “No, because who then will continue to work on Firefox? ". And Microsoft loves competitors (“and knows how to cook them,” it swept through the hall).
We did not speak with Peter for long, but he managed to tell something.
Peter, do you think Microsoft needs a leader like Steve Ballmer? Expressive personality, even eccentric, what role does he play in the life of the company?
After Steve’s speech in Kiev, some blogger wrote that, they say, “Ballmer chatted, incendiary, interesting, and so what - he doesn’t solve anything.” So I want to say that this is not so. Two months later, Bill Gates will leave the leadership of Microsoft (as far as I know, he now almost does not participate in management), and then Ballmer will become the head of the company.
He, for example, recently called Windows Vista "work in progress." Has this changed anything in the company's course? Is it even possible to say that Balmer’s word is a law?
Opinions and comments on this subject have been published many times. In general, absolutely any person could say that. But I have been a Vista user for a very long time. And I'm fine, ready to swear on anything. The thing is that I have a standard laptop - Lenovo. The only thing he has 4 GB of memory is the truth ( smiles ).
Well, the word Ballmer is certainly not the law. He, I think, will not interfere in the decisions of professionals who know what they are doing.
Who came up with the idea to organize MIX in Russia?
When we were in Las Vegas with Anton Nosik, and watched the interview that Steve Ballmer gave on the stage of MIX Guy Kawasaki, I had a desire to do something similar in Russia. At this time, the idea came up here to make the Russian MIX. As a result, we had the opportunity, organizational and financial, to do something similar at this time in Moscow.
We had a WebDevCon conference. But in recent years, we did not conduct it, and then everything coincided - an opportunity, a desire to make a conference, and Ballmer arrived.
And where does this name come from? Why not RuMIX, for example?
In general, we even have an internal distribution group called RuMIX. But we decided to use the ReMIX brand, under which such conferences are held in many countries of the world.
And there were no difficulties in acquiring such a “tasty” domain - remix.ru?
We were able to agree ( laughs ).
The interest in the conference was what you expected?
Yes. Several hundred people came more than we planned at first (in all, a little more than 1 thousand people visited ReMIX - approx. Tigger ). We do not yet know the numbers for the number of people who watched our broadcast online, but when I last found out, it was about 10 thousand people. I also walked around partners, asked around - they are very satisfied. A huge number of people came to them whom they would like to see at their stands.
In the future, do you plan to hold such events regularly?
Yes, we love to hold large conferences. (Later, at the Round Table, Peter asked to raise the hands of those participants in the hall who had attended at least one major profile event where Microsoft speakers would not have spoken. Of course, there were none of these ) Well, as for ReMIX, at about the same time in a year we will repeat it. The idea here is that on MIX, all product divisions show their latest products. Accordingly, you can already take the finished and show - this will be relevant. Well, there are ready-made reports!
The idea of inviting celebrities will live on?
Yes. We also wanted to invite speakers from Redmond to this ReMIX, but they are now in great demand. And Ballmer: I will be glad if he still arrives. I really liked him. He is certainly very incendiary on stage, but I just saw him behind the scenes - and he ... you can’t say that he’s modest, because he has been traveling to Eastern Europe for five days now, where they throw eggs ( several eggs flew to the head of MS during his speech in front of students in Hungary ). I think he was just tired.
And what program does he have in Russia?
He speaks at two major conferences - ReMIX and “The State in the 21st Century” ( which took place on the same day at the Ritz Carlton Hotel ). And in the evening he meets with members of the Government and businessmen.
Collaboration with Zend began with such a delay for some technical reasons, or is there really a lot of politics in this matter?
Well, of course, a lot has changed in our worldview, which is why we started working with Zend. It began a year and a half ago. Then they had a module for IIS, which they almost sold for money. Well, then together we did what is now really working. And then we will continue to work with Apache.
Now people are already under the impression that Silverlight is "such a Flash from Microsoft." What do you think of it?
I don’t think anything about it - this will be the answer to your question. What is Silverlight - we took such a serious thing as the .Net Framework, made its microversion (in which, however, you can fully write in several languages), and stuffed it all into a tiny plugin. Thanks to him, you can write programs that work in the client’s browser. And to write not in some scripting language, which knows little. And the programs at the same time work with performance hundreds of times more than that of the same JavaScript.
And there is another very interesting community project called the Phalanger Project . This is essentially PHP.NET. And perhaps someday right in Silverlight you can write in PHP.
And regarding the comparison with Flash - you can compare. Something will not be in our favor, something will not be in their favor. But we released the plugin only in September, now we have already released the beta of the second version, let's see what happens. But we are very glad that there is Adobe and there is competition, we stimulate each other.
But there is no open competition between Silverlight and Flash yet. And we know how Microsoft can compete openly, at least take the Get the Facts campaign. Why is this so far?
We do not have an official position on this issue, but my personal opinion is that you first need to build up muscle, implementation experience, some kind of community. We have several hundred beautiful Silverlight application examples on the site. We are getting ready: we are creating development tools, we are getting our army of developers.
Does the community warmly welcome Silverlight?
I can’t say the numbers, but in general people are very interested. In general, there are far fewer fanatics than pragmatists. And pragmatists are interested in seeing everything, especially if it's easy to see. And Silverlight is a simple technology. They look, they ask questions, they enjoy watching webcasts, on the same Habré. Well, from time to time we give out development tools free of charge, so that we are even more interested ( smiles ).
In conclusion, I want to recall a couple of points from the performance of Ballmer. Firstly, as many have already mentioned, this person believes that a piracy rate of 25% for our country will be acceptable (by the way, by excluding business and government agencies in which piracy, according to Balmer, is not a place, private users can be sinned ) Steve considers services for small business and healthcare to be the most promising niches for creating a startup (which, unfortunately, is not so relevant for Russia so far). And they are competing with Flash, and there is still no discussion with Adobe about interoperability (apparently, the moment when Steve paints his face in battle colors and leads his people to attack is not so far away).
All in all - long live, ReMIX!
But first, a little about general impressions. The House of Unions is a masterpiece of architecture, within the walls of which for more than 200 years life has been in full swing in all its diversity: from party balls to fiery political speeches, from the famous nomenclature "Christmas Tree" to the fire of 1812. All the more interesting was the mixen proposal by Mikhail Chernomordikov “to remove American cities ... and insert Russians in their place”. True, it referred only to editing the code of the program for calculating the route of travel during the presentation of the Silverlight platform capabilities.
A loud statement already in the spirit of the modern political era was made by Dmitry Sotnikov. He urged the audience "not to click." The truth again was only the seriously expanded functionality of the PowerShell administration tool, which became so good that I no longer want to manage the server on the Win platform using the graphical interface. By the way, PS is now able to mimic under the Unix console.
Alexey Mogilevsky, who has long been speaking at various conferences in Russia with Internet Explorer 8 presentations and presentations, simply said beautifully (provocatively, but beautifully). Alex said, “No, because who then will continue to work on Firefox? ". And Microsoft loves competitors (“and knows how to cook them,” it swept through the hall).
We did not speak with Peter for long, but he managed to tell something.
Peter, do you think Microsoft needs a leader like Steve Ballmer? Expressive personality, even eccentric, what role does he play in the life of the company?
After Steve’s speech in Kiev, some blogger wrote that, they say, “Ballmer chatted, incendiary, interesting, and so what - he doesn’t solve anything.” So I want to say that this is not so. Two months later, Bill Gates will leave the leadership of Microsoft (as far as I know, he now almost does not participate in management), and then Ballmer will become the head of the company.
He, for example, recently called Windows Vista "work in progress." Has this changed anything in the company's course? Is it even possible to say that Balmer’s word is a law?Opinions and comments on this subject have been published many times. In general, absolutely any person could say that. But I have been a Vista user for a very long time. And I'm fine, ready to swear on anything. The thing is that I have a standard laptop - Lenovo. The only thing he has 4 GB of memory is the truth ( smiles ).
Well, the word Ballmer is certainly not the law. He, I think, will not interfere in the decisions of professionals who know what they are doing.
Who came up with the idea to organize MIX in Russia?
When we were in Las Vegas with Anton Nosik, and watched the interview that Steve Ballmer gave on the stage of MIX Guy Kawasaki, I had a desire to do something similar in Russia. At this time, the idea came up here to make the Russian MIX. As a result, we had the opportunity, organizational and financial, to do something similar at this time in Moscow.
We had a WebDevCon conference. But in recent years, we did not conduct it, and then everything coincided - an opportunity, a desire to make a conference, and Ballmer arrived.
And where does this name come from? Why not RuMIX, for example?
In general, we even have an internal distribution group called RuMIX. But we decided to use the ReMIX brand, under which such conferences are held in many countries of the world.
And there were no difficulties in acquiring such a “tasty” domain - remix.ru?
We were able to agree ( laughs ).
The interest in the conference was what you expected?
Yes. Several hundred people came more than we planned at first (in all, a little more than 1 thousand people visited ReMIX - approx. Tigger ). We do not yet know the numbers for the number of people who watched our broadcast online, but when I last found out, it was about 10 thousand people. I also walked around partners, asked around - they are very satisfied. A huge number of people came to them whom they would like to see at their stands.
In the future, do you plan to hold such events regularly?
Yes, we love to hold large conferences. (Later, at the Round Table, Peter asked to raise the hands of those participants in the hall who had attended at least one major profile event where Microsoft speakers would not have spoken. Of course, there were none of these ) Well, as for ReMIX, at about the same time in a year we will repeat it. The idea here is that on MIX, all product divisions show their latest products. Accordingly, you can already take the finished and show - this will be relevant. Well, there are ready-made reports!
The idea of inviting celebrities will live on?
Yes. We also wanted to invite speakers from Redmond to this ReMIX, but they are now in great demand. And Ballmer: I will be glad if he still arrives. I really liked him. He is certainly very incendiary on stage, but I just saw him behind the scenes - and he ... you can’t say that he’s modest, because he has been traveling to Eastern Europe for five days now, where they throw eggs ( several eggs flew to the head of MS during his speech in front of students in Hungary ). I think he was just tired.
And what program does he have in Russia?
He speaks at two major conferences - ReMIX and “The State in the 21st Century” ( which took place on the same day at the Ritz Carlton Hotel ). And in the evening he meets with members of the Government and businessmen.
Collaboration with Zend began with such a delay for some technical reasons, or is there really a lot of politics in this matter?
Well, of course, a lot has changed in our worldview, which is why we started working with Zend. It began a year and a half ago. Then they had a module for IIS, which they almost sold for money. Well, then together we did what is now really working. And then we will continue to work with Apache.
Now people are already under the impression that Silverlight is "such a Flash from Microsoft." What do you think of it?
I don’t think anything about it - this will be the answer to your question. What is Silverlight - we took such a serious thing as the .Net Framework, made its microversion (in which, however, you can fully write in several languages), and stuffed it all into a tiny plugin. Thanks to him, you can write programs that work in the client’s browser. And to write not in some scripting language, which knows little. And the programs at the same time work with performance hundreds of times more than that of the same JavaScript.
And there is another very interesting community project called the Phalanger Project . This is essentially PHP.NET. And perhaps someday right in Silverlight you can write in PHP.
And regarding the comparison with Flash - you can compare. Something will not be in our favor, something will not be in their favor. But we released the plugin only in September, now we have already released the beta of the second version, let's see what happens. But we are very glad that there is Adobe and there is competition, we stimulate each other.
But there is no open competition between Silverlight and Flash yet. And we know how Microsoft can compete openly, at least take the Get the Facts campaign. Why is this so far?
We do not have an official position on this issue, but my personal opinion is that you first need to build up muscle, implementation experience, some kind of community. We have several hundred beautiful Silverlight application examples on the site. We are getting ready: we are creating development tools, we are getting our army of developers.
Does the community warmly welcome Silverlight?
I can’t say the numbers, but in general people are very interested. In general, there are far fewer fanatics than pragmatists. And pragmatists are interested in seeing everything, especially if it's easy to see. And Silverlight is a simple technology. They look, they ask questions, they enjoy watching webcasts, on the same Habré. Well, from time to time we give out development tools free of charge, so that we are even more interested ( smiles ).
In conclusion, I want to recall a couple of points from the performance of Ballmer. Firstly, as many have already mentioned, this person believes that a piracy rate of 25% for our country will be acceptable (by the way, by excluding business and government agencies in which piracy, according to Balmer, is not a place, private users can be sinned ) Steve considers services for small business and healthcare to be the most promising niches for creating a startup (which, unfortunately, is not so relevant for Russia so far). And they are competing with Flash, and there is still no discussion with Adobe about interoperability (apparently, the moment when Steve paints his face in battle colors and leads his people to attack is not so far away).
All in all - long live, ReMIX!