Failure to suck
Jan. 5th, 2006 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurI've long observed that Marvel Comics, as a rule, is a fad-driven company. Some Big Idea comes along, and they decide that it's the secret to greatly improving their sales. Sometimes it's multiple "collectible" covers, sometimes it's a particular art style, sometimes it's mega-crossovers. So a few years ago, I was pleased to discover that their latest fad was choosing people who actually knew how to write. After a number of years of basically swearing off Marvel, this was the change that finally drew me back in, as the likes of Bendis and Ellis (not to mention JMS) started to make their comics interesting again.
I was put in mind of that yesterday, while we were watching the latest presentation from Microsoft's PDC last year. This was on Monad, their new administrative environment -- basically, the replacement for the command shell. It was, frankly, jaw-dropping. Based on what I'd seen so far, I was expecting something like a Unix shell but a little better (which would have been a huge leap over the Windows command shell by itself). But instead, Monad turns out to be a fairly principled rethink of the underlying ideas: an environment where programs can publish cooperative commandlets and data, and which makes it remarkably easy for admins to stitch those together, using the same pieces for interactive command line, scripts and GUIs. It's a major leap ahead, adding a lot of very good ideas to the stew.
(A brief summary: Monad is a .NET environment. It's very easy to build "commandlets", which are fully object-oriented filters; these can be either freestanding, or -- I believe -- exposed by running programs. More importantly, though, you can build "providers", which expose hierarchical data as if they were filesystems; the Monad shell then allows you to explore it exactly as if it was a filesystem. There's all sorts of magic under the hood, allowing the system to match up semi-heterogeneous data by name as you feed it through the filters and automatically converting between all the major data types, so writing powerful filters and stitching them together is much easier than it has traditionally been.)
In our brief postmortem, several of us were struck by the fact that Microsoft has been releasing programming tools fast and thick in recent months, and they have shared a common quality of not sucking. Those who have worked in the Windows environment for some years will understand how remarkable that is -- Microsoft has always followed the pack in the past, usually putting out tools that have been half-assed and annoying. But the generation of tools being released now is getting decently state of the art, and the next wave that is currently in alpha and beta seems to be leapfrogging everyone else. I can't say they do everything right (for instance, their "agile programming" tools are the laughingstock of the development community), but they seem to be making a concerted effort to advance the programming field where they can.
And as far as I can tell, it's more or less the same situation as at Marvel. Sometime in recent years, Microsoft started hiring a lot of very smart people to lead their architectural teams -- and what's remarkable is that they seem to be actually *listening* to those people. As a result, the new stuff coming out, especially the more radical and central projects like Monad and LINQ, are eschewing the traditional shovelware hackery in favor of elegant and clever architectures.
Mind, they're still evil monopolists. But they seem to be turning into *competent* evil monopolists. Whether this is a good thing or not is very much a matter of point of view...
I was put in mind of that yesterday, while we were watching the latest presentation from Microsoft's PDC last year. This was on Monad, their new administrative environment -- basically, the replacement for the command shell. It was, frankly, jaw-dropping. Based on what I'd seen so far, I was expecting something like a Unix shell but a little better (which would have been a huge leap over the Windows command shell by itself). But instead, Monad turns out to be a fairly principled rethink of the underlying ideas: an environment where programs can publish cooperative commandlets and data, and which makes it remarkably easy for admins to stitch those together, using the same pieces for interactive command line, scripts and GUIs. It's a major leap ahead, adding a lot of very good ideas to the stew.
(A brief summary: Monad is a .NET environment. It's very easy to build "commandlets", which are fully object-oriented filters; these can be either freestanding, or -- I believe -- exposed by running programs. More importantly, though, you can build "providers", which expose hierarchical data as if they were filesystems; the Monad shell then allows you to explore it exactly as if it was a filesystem. There's all sorts of magic under the hood, allowing the system to match up semi-heterogeneous data by name as you feed it through the filters and automatically converting between all the major data types, so writing powerful filters and stitching them together is much easier than it has traditionally been.)
In our brief postmortem, several of us were struck by the fact that Microsoft has been releasing programming tools fast and thick in recent months, and they have shared a common quality of not sucking. Those who have worked in the Windows environment for some years will understand how remarkable that is -- Microsoft has always followed the pack in the past, usually putting out tools that have been half-assed and annoying. But the generation of tools being released now is getting decently state of the art, and the next wave that is currently in alpha and beta seems to be leapfrogging everyone else. I can't say they do everything right (for instance, their "agile programming" tools are the laughingstock of the development community), but they seem to be making a concerted effort to advance the programming field where they can.
And as far as I can tell, it's more or less the same situation as at Marvel. Sometime in recent years, Microsoft started hiring a lot of very smart people to lead their architectural teams -- and what's remarkable is that they seem to be actually *listening* to those people. As a result, the new stuff coming out, especially the more radical and central projects like Monad and LINQ, are eschewing the traditional shovelware hackery in favor of elegant and clever architectures.
Mind, they're still evil monopolists. But they seem to be turning into *competent* evil monopolists. Whether this is a good thing or not is very much a matter of point of view...
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-05 06:18 pm (UTC)I do applaud their foresight to stock up on smart people well in advance of when they were needed.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-05 06:54 pm (UTC)Speaking of Marvel...
Date: 2006-01-05 07:10 pm (UTC)Make Mine Marvel?
Date: 2006-01-05 09:34 pm (UTC)Though I haven't been able to afford the spare money for comic books for months, I ceased reading Marvel between early 1995 and mid-1997 because, well, not only did the writing suck, but the artistry went out the window too. But it did open the door to the indie books for me, like Billy Tucci's "Shi" series (didn't hurt that Mr. Tucci was a 'home boy' from Long Island, and I knew most of the places being described in the background of those books), and David Mack's "Kabuki". Both were interesting in their own right, but nowhere near the level of popularity of the mainstream books like the X-books, whose lure attracted one classmate to be "coffee boy" in the X-Men dept to the likes of Andy Kubert... while I did actual work putting pre-press work together, in the Bullpen, with artists whose names some fans may or may not know.
Marvel's done a good job of pulling it's tail out of the fire so far, and the movies they've been producing haven't hurt the industry at all. Artists like Salvatore now grace the pages, and I believe even Whedon's been involved here and there. They may be an "evil monopolist" up there with DC, but at the least, they've become a cornerstone of the industry, and have a place in American popular history. :)
Re: Make Mine Marvel?
Date: 2006-01-05 10:10 pm (UTC)I don't remember precisely when I mostly dropped Marvel, but it was sometime around the same time. I've always been a big indie fan, and DC was picking up steam at that point, so I just sort of let Marvel drop off my list. I didn't start again until writers I'm fond of started working there. (Yes, Whedon's done a little work, most notably his run of Astonishing X-Men, one of the better X titles of recent years.)
Excelsior.
I was placed under the care of Joe Kaufman, graphic designer for the Trade Paperback dept. When I was sent there by the dept. chairman of the Art Dept at LIU Post, he made sure Joe knew what he was dealing with... a lovely mark on the top of my credentials in his own handwriting, "space cadet" - probably not meant for me to see, but I caught sight of it anyway.
My job entailed putting together pre-press mechanicals, or paste-ups, in the pre-press dept... aka The Bullpen. For my first month or so, I didn't have a desk, and back in 1994, they didn't have the computer stations in yet. This was when they were over on 387 Park Ave South, in NYC - a visit some years later to inquire about my contacts there uncovered that they had moved, and additionally, all those contacts had left in April of 1995, after the restructuring. Joe was among the first to jump ship.
But for the time I was there, I got to rub elbows with Silvia Massa, Michele, Steve Bunce, and others - the picture of the group I worked with is actually up in my online Scribal Folio in Photobucket (KayleighMcWhyte) - look for the girl wearing all denim. The job was great, except, of course, for that one time when Virginia Romita (John Romita Jr's wife and art director for the bullpen) walked up to me in the bullpen, and demanded to know who I was, and why I was there. Silvia and the others were gawking, since I'd already been there for nearly 2 months.... I boggled too, pointing to Joe's office, and explaining I was his intern. The next day, I had my own desk, finally, just in front of Silvia. :)
The internship didn't pay anything other than a bundle of comics for free every week (nothing over the value of $5 and no special collectors editions), but I did get to see how things work on the inside, and got a few free Alex Ross posters out of it (how I got hooked on his work, too), besides helping to set up splash pages for the likes of Best of Marvel 1994, and "Nobody Gets Out Alive!". It was fun, it had its moments, and I was sorry I wasn't able to get a job back in there after that.
Who knows what the place is like now, staff-wise, other than what we see in the books....
The term Monad...
Date: 2006-01-06 05:16 pm (UTC)Monad, in the sense of "ultimate, indivisible unit," appears very early in the history of Greek philosophy. In the ancient accounts of the doctrines of Pythagoras, it occurs as the name of the unity from which, as from a principle (arche), all number and multiplicity are derived. In the Platonic "Dialogues" it is used in the plural (monades) as a synonym for the Ideas. In Aristotle's "Metaphysics" it occurs as the principle (arche) of number, itself being devoid of quantity, indivisible and unchangeable. The word monad is used by the neo-Platonists to signify the One; for instance, in the letters of the Christian Platonist Synesius, God is described as the Monad of Monads. It occurs both in ancient and medieval philosophy as a synonym for atom, and is a favourite term with such writers as Giordano Bruno, who speak in a rather indefinite manner of the minima, or minutely small substances which constitute all reality.