Bored of star world? Watched all of your DVD’s? Football doesn’t start for another six hours? Then it’s time fetch some popcorn relax in your easy chair and prove what a nerd you are by spending the afternoon watching programming lectures on Yahoo Video! 

Yahoo’s Front End Engineering Channel has a fantastic collection of video lectures from people such as Douglas Crockford and John Resig (creator of JQuery, author of Pro JavaScript). Watching these reminds me a lot of being back at college, the only difference being the lecturers’ are actually making sense and I haven’t got a dry mouth and the munchies (there may be a link there).

Paul Graham has published another on of his infamous essays on his website where he claims “Microsoft is dead”, the article can be read here. This essay has caused an absolute storm on sites such as Slashdot where comments to the article are now in the hundreds. So why is the statement that Microsoft is dead causing such a storm on Slashdot might you ask? Slashdot is hardly famed as the favourite hangout for Microsoft fanboys. The reason is not the what, but the why. His main reason for this summary is Microsoft’s failure in comparison to companies such as Google, to really take the new world of web based applications seriously.

Although Microsoft have knocked out some cool AJAX based web apps such as Visual Earth and Live Search, they are hardly innovative, as they just replicate what Google had already done years before. They also haven’t been actively acquiring, engaging or even challenging Web 2.0 start-ups with the same single mindedness and determination that Google have. According to Graham web apps are the future, and that as a result of Microsoft “living in their own world” as he puts it, they will likely not be a big part of that future.

More interesting than the article itself are the comments on Slashdot in response to the article. The web app debate is now starting to evolve into a new monster. Before it was all about one side saying AJAX type techniques had been around for years and nothing would change, whilst the other side claimed it was the new dawn. That debate has now ended, and even the most die hard AJAX haters now accept that these techniques have changed the way in which we approach any web based application and there is no going back from the fundamental change. The argument now has moved on to web app vs desktop software, and this is the argument I touched on in my previous article. Although I think that saying desktop software is dead, is taking it way too far, and jumping the gun by at least a decade, I still believe the writing is on the wall for desktop applications.