Was it a case of bad planning, low expectations or just a complete oversight? Did anyone think about how popular Microsoft’s Photosynth application from Microsoft Live Labs was actually going to be?

When I talked about Photosynth back in May I barely gave it any thought at all.

Perhaps the most famous of them is the Photosynth application. This takes a collection of images from the same place and stitches them together into a sort of 3D virtual image of the location.

I thought the technology itself sounded like it would be interesting, but I didn’t really think it would gain much traction with users. Which brings us back to the original question, what was the deal with Microsoft being prepared for the launch.

The Photosynth examples on the website sure make the technology look pretty good. I can imagine this becoming really popular in an organized fashion. I’m thinking of realtors that would use it for virtual house tours and tourist destinations and buildings.

Jason Kincaid covered the failure of Microsoft to be prepared for the popularity of the Photosynth site on TechCrunch.

We see similar optimistic responses to server failure all the time from startups. Except they’re startups. Imagine if Apple had responded to the iPhone’s server registration outage by proclaiming that it was overjoyed by the overwhelming response. It’s understandable that Microsoft is happy to have made a product people like, but let’s save the celebrations until the program actually works.

This comment just refreshes my perception that it doesn’t matter what Microsoft does, people are just going to be haters. They over prepare and someone calls them cocky for thinking their product is awesome and might compete in the market. Or, they just throw something out there and see what happens then they get berated for not having everything polished and presentable. They’re this behemoth of a software company and evil and who knows what lurks behind the walls of the corporation. Or, they show some transparency from their development teams on their blogs and again get persecuted for it in the tech community.

I say keep up the good work and continue doing what you’re doing. Be prepared and be ready to respond when something you have takes off.

Post from: EveryJoe

Oops…Photosynth. You like it! You really like it!

After surfing through the Microsoft Live Labs website some more I’ve learned about a few different apps that are in the labs and being worked on as we speak.

Perhaps the most famous of them is the Photosynth application. This takes a collection of images from the same place and stitches them together into a sort of 3D virtual image of the location.

Another promising application appeared to be the Seadragon app. The goal behind this app is to be able to display information on any screen, clearly and almost effortlessly regardless of the screen size.

If this sounds a little vague, consider the following four “promises” of Seadragon:

1. Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
2. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
3. Transitions are smooth as butter.
4. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

The other couple of apps didn’t seem like too much to get me that interested in them aside from Volta, which promises to develop into a valuable developer tool to allow the splitting of application code across development languages. I’m just cutting my chops on .NET and VB so my ability to really soak up all that’s available there is a little skechy at best.

One thing I did think about when looking at this website of apps, there’s just too few right now. I’m sure with all the employees working for Microsoft, there’s got to be some pretty slick ideas in the heads of people. Does the Google method of allowing 20% of your time to be devoted to your side project really make the difference? If you could take 1-day a week and work on your own “idea”; what would it be?

Images: Microsoft Live Labs

Post from: EveryJoe

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