Less than a year ago, I was one of participants in the Microsoft Academic Day (MAD), a kind of meeting induced by Microsoft, which aims to present its products to the students of universities and to who begins to have a little knowledge in software development.
I must say that MAD was quite well-organized, it was held in a hall of PSUT, and was partially ordered by .net student clubs, which regroup a tiny number of our university students. I do not have anything against Microsoft (that's the contrary of what a lot of people think), but, first of all, I was somehow shocked by the aggressive responses of lecturers, in particular when some students tried to have an argument with them. I remember that one of Techno, responsible in .net club, denied rightly what a lecturer said; that an entire web site can be build up using Microsoft technologies in less than 15 minutes. The student told him it was practically impossible, and said that pages with ASP.NET components are not displayed correctly on Firefox browser. The lecturer answered by a number of insults to Firefox, Mozilla and non-IE browsers, and he laid blame on them for being non-standard (?). (A Yarmouk guy wearing a Firefox T-shirt was sitting first in line nearby Microsoft representatives; I don't think he was in agreement with him).
The presentation of Windows Vista was apparently exciting, (naturally, if you forget security threats… Microsoft personnel told us that security is a 'server-only' stuff). The look is extremely nice, and all the elements are well-designed, the solitaire icon is very cute (wow!), and the animation caused by pressing (ALT+TAB) moves between windows in an attractive fashion, -but I made a bet with a friend that the computer would have crashed :), however I admit the appearance of MAC OS X is better.
One point: Microsoft staff said the minimal requirements for Windows Vista are 1GB RAM and some 256 VGA card…!
The presentation of IE7 was to show a real life application of multiple forms of plagiarism; IE7 browser tags and RSS feeds were taken evidently from Firefox…
Another funny section was that of DirectX, with a student from BAU showing us his 3D project of Petra, very appreciated by Mr. Gates in his visit to Jordan.
Speakers from students asked why use DirectX since they find OpenGL better, the answers were not so convincing (and they nearly made a mockery of them); the same was when they spoke about PHP, Java, MySQL and other open source products, so nothing new… this is typical of Microsoft.

Labels: Personal, Technology