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Channel 9 et al. Do these people have day jobs?

After hearing the “hype“ for weeks now (mostly from Scoble), Channel 9 has gone live. While I admit there was no baited breath waiting over at chez Mauss, I wandered over to the site like a moth drawn to the flame. I guess my first mistake was visiting the site with Firefox. All 4 or 5 videos on the front page started playing simultaneously. I had to scroll down to realize what was going on. Ehh...minor annoyance I guess.

After trying to figure out what exactly this site was supposed to be, and also trying to figure out who picked that color scheme (yuck!), I decided to listen to what seemed to be a somewhat inaugural video clip for the site called “The 9 Guys - Who We Are” which starts off with a quote being displayed that said, “We could get in trouble for saying this”. Now, let's pause the video right there. Is it just me, or are other people really tired of all that kind of speak coming out of the mouths of Redmond-ites? To me, that stuff falls under the same umbrella as:

  • “Oh, I'm under NDA so I can't (show you/tell you about) this really cool technology.”
  • “I might get in trouble for saying this...so it will have to wait.“
  • “TechnologyX is going to be one of the coolest things ever....you'll see in a couple years“

OK, folks, we get it already. You're super cool. You're “crescent fresh” as Sifl & Olly would say. You work at Microsoft and are privy to all kinds of uber-leet stuff months or years before the rest of us. In case you're not aware, most of the developer “community” you're trying to reach has known this for several years now. We know you “might get in trouble“, OK? Move on.

OK, press play again.

So as I'm listening to this video with these guys sitting around some wanna-be “The Man Show” set,  (where's the pool table guys?) I start wondering whether I'm going to want the 10 or 15 minutes of my life back (I don't know how long it was; I couldn't stomach watching the whole thing). After about 5 minutes, all I could think was, “Do these people have real jobs?”. What do these people do for a living? Here are some choice quotes from the video:

  • “That was the inspiration for Channel 9 in many ways ... I started thinking, how can we keep the party going?..How can the PDC live on..“

Yeah, you know, there really aren't enough Microsoft “parties” out there. Unless you include stuff like the MVP Summit, TechEd, TechFest, The PDC, DevDays, VSLive!, TechMentor and the entire gamut of MS sponsored bar fests that go year round. But yeah, we need more parties, I'm getting way too much work done and working way too many billable hours. Shame on me not being more of a community-oriented, err..I mean..party guy.

  • “It's not about the rock stars all the time“

You're kidding, right? The show is hosted by “rock stars” (Scoble, Sandquist, et al.) and just prior to saying this they mentioned the list of people they were going to talk with. Eric Gunnerson, Anders Hejlsberg, Chris Brumme, etc. Yeah..these book authors/conference speakers/highly-read-bloggers must be the the “non rock stars” they're talking about.

  • “The biggest failure to me ... would be to find out that people don't care.“

Sorry but, I think you're going to face failure then. Why don't we care what Chris Brumme does on the weekends? Because I just worked 60 hours this week on a project and I'd like to spend some time with my family and practice one of the 3 instruments I play or maybe get outside and exercise or do something not related to software. Like they said themselves on the show, I have a mortgage (and various other payments). I have obligations outside of the world of software. That's what reality is. Not living my life on Channel 9.

Now, maybe the guys at Channel 9 will prove me wrong and generate tons of interest and produce some really truly interesting stuff that will attract the masses (I'm sure they'd love that). If they do, I'll take this blog post, print it out, and eat it. However, my initial reaction is that of being underwhelmed.

8 Comments

  • Good... I'm not the only one! We might not "get it" for different reasons, but now that I read your perspective, it does kind of feel like a "look at me" effort while denying that it's "look at me" at all.



    That's the funny thing about blogs. They (for now anyway) create exposure for people that you might not otherwise be exposed to. That must have some kind of effect on people.



    But I'll leave it at that. I'm sure everyone has pure intentions at heart, but the execution of such intentions isn't always great.

  • Well, you persevered longer than I did. When the rendering fell to pieces on Firefox, I just closed it down. I stopped have patience with sites that requite me to switch my user agents some time ago.



    Like you, I’ll give it another shot when it either works on my computer, or I hear an overwhelming amount of praise from people I trust.

  • We tested it in Firefox and it worked here. We fixed several bugs we didn't catch today. You can email the entire development team (all five of us) at channel9@microsoft.com. Mozilla and Firefox are important to us and we are going to fix it so it works. Just report the bugs! Sorry for screwing it up.

  • Robert, you just did the exact thing that's wrong with Microsoft. Just create a page that's valid HTML (you current version has 353 errors in it), and don't worry about specific browsers. I mean, which is the home page title, Channel 9 or Channel9 Forums?

  • Jerry - I think what you're seeing over at Channel 9 is that they built it using VS.NET and ASP.NET. Now, if they had written the HTML by hand...writing XHTML wouldn't be too difficult. But they've been biten by their own tool (VS.NET) that doesn't create valid X(HTML) to begin with. It's their own fault. Maybe now they'll see what we've been complaining about all this time.

  • I'm stil finding it hard to believe that even VS.NET would put two <title> tags into the output. If it does then it needs some serious fixing (well, we all know it needs that), but that will not happen since we're all waiting for Whidbey and not using existing tools anymore, right? and if it doesn't then they have to write the HTML themselves (be it by hand, with a filter, master page, header control, whatever, the actual implementation is not that important) without knowing or caring what their code actually does, which again is typical for Microsoft. Maybe if I should shoot a video of myself reading this they'll listen and clean up their act ;)

  • Im am only 8 and i Want a Job i want to get paid and i want it Fast

  • I am only 8 and i want a job i want to get paid and i want it fast

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