There’s no other way to say it: when it come to street-level navigation, Microsoft’s Street Slide is a vast improvement over Google Maps. Microsoft needs to release this to the public pronto, period.

Am I the only one who feels like clicking up and down the street with Google Maps in the ’street view’ perspective is akin to a drunken stumble looking for an ATM? I’m limited to a series of shortsighted views, each of which regenerate individually. It’s clumsy, slow and ripe to be improved upon.

What if there were another sort of interim view that made it very easy to search several blocks quickly then flip right back into a view of a specific address or storefront?

Rather than lurching up and down virtual streets looking for something, Street Slide lets searchers navigate a whole street from a panorama, with signs and logos for businesses positioned below the view to facilitate the search. It’s intuitive and simple. The video below is amazing.

Microsoft has often been slow to move interesting, useful innovations out of the lab. It’s a shame to have the tech but not be smart or nimble enough on the business side to aggressively push things into the real world, a la Google’s constant and relentless ‘beta release’ model. I’m sure it’s really, really hard to release new tech, but It’s what businesses do, and if it’s prohibitively difficult for Microsoft then it has to be made easier. To often they do what Detroit does: show me concepts that pique my interest, then follow through much later, if at all. No doubt tooling up for release of an application is expensive, but it can’t compare to that for a new car model, and Microsoft is awash with money looking for good ideas.

Not only does Street Slide pose a real challenge to Google Maps and other online mapping applications, it would help redefine the company as a force for innovation in the minds of a public that has grown skeptical.

Simon Ince has an excellent, concise explanation on how to use Lambda Expressions, with code examples.

Microsoft isn’t done yet. Windows Phone 7 shows us that there are still new approaches to an OS for mobile devices that aren’t taking cues directly from iPhone. Check out the idea of navigating via horizontally scrolling built-in hubs to access People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office.

Microsoft’s head of research and strategy Craig Mundie is doing the “Microsoft College Tour 09″, and here he shows a demo of a user interface being developed by Microsoft that accepts input from voice and pen, but also can interpret gestures and even eye-tracking. This video shows how eye tracking could work on an array of hundreds of document thumbnails, and it quite impressive (though when it comes to search I think I’d rather track through fewer good quality search results than get lost in this many…).

Here he shows some gestural interactivity. It’s short but very cool.

Call me a contrarian, but in a week in which Microsoft reported significantly shrinking quarterly revenues, I thought it might be worthwhile to find a few articles that are optimistic about the prospects of Windows 7. It’s hard to overstate just how vital it is for Microsoft to have Windows 7 adoption be enthusiastic, or at least healthy.

Ten things you’re going to like.

It’s gonna be fast.

Apple fanboys won’t be able to tarnish this rollout.

As time goes on, the things people do with computers differentiates and fragments more and more: rapid adoption of mobile hardware, netbooks, still-increasing time spent on the internet. How many things do you do with the box that is your laptop or desktop computer, today? So many companies focus on and succeed at doing small parts of the User Experience well, and as this fragmentation continues it seems unreasonable to expect a company’s size to be an automatic recipe for success. We are so far now from simply running apps on standalone PCs, and that was the time of Microsoft’s dominance. This may be a story less about Microsoft blowing it than about the world changing.

Their server business is still strong relative to other parts of their business, but losses in their online division actually exceeded online revenues. I’m not yet clear what the Microsoft dominance that we have all taken for granted for the last 25 or so years will become. They have a huge pile of cash…

Can it be that the Redmond juggernaut has pulled off the unthinkable? Have you taken a look at Bing?

When was the last time you heard the words ‘impressive’ or ‘innovative’ in the same sentence with the word ‘Microsoft’? News about tech innovation seems to be all about companies like Google and Apple, to the point that one might wonder if new Microsoft offerings are looked at objectively. One has to be impressed with the trajectories of Google and Apple in the last 10-12 years, as companies and in terms of their products, but as consumers we can’t forget that we benefit from challenges to the status quo. I just wasn’t expecting such a viable challenge from Microsoft, in search.

Miguel over at RealSoftwareDevelopment.com has done an outstanding comparison of Google and Bing, and makes a very compelling case that Bing does a better job at search than Google in four areas: search results, interface/usability, image search and video search. I assume that the size of Google’s index is far superior to anyone else, but for everyday searches (of the non-longtail variety) that may not be too relevant. If Microsoft has packaged a bunch of compelling improvements to the user experience, it’s easy to imagine people looking seriously at Bing for search, and even an incremental reversal in Google’s growing market share would be an enormous turnaround for Microsoft.

Microsoft will be supporting PHP on Azure, their web application platform. Ted Dziuba is not impressed and has no problem saying so.
Agree or disagree with him, but damn this guy is funny.

If you are not completely clear on how the behavior of schemas changed in SQL Server 2005, or the implications of the separation of ownership from schemas, here’s a quick, concise summation on the subject from MSDN Library that should clear things up.
By the way, you might also be interested in Digital Media Minute’s own script on printing SQL Server Database Schema, by Jim Rutherford.

The World Wide Telescope is a project from Microsoft Research that made Robert Scoble cry, is now being featured on the latest round of TED Talks. This product looks truly amazing and will probably change the way we see our little spot in the universe. I can’t wait to give this a try with my 5 year old son when it is released this spring!

So I’ve started a new job today (will blog about that later) and my new employer has just sent me a brand new Windows laptop.  It’s been about 2 years since I last developed using a Windows machine, so am wondering what essential software I should be downloading to install?  What handy utilities and applications do you use in your day-to-day work?