What’s the Deal With Microsoft and Online Comics? (Updated) (Updated Again)
by Joey Manley
When people in the comics world heard that there was a panel about “the future of online comics” going on at Microsoft’s developer conference this week, they got kind of buzzy and interested. Rightly so. Microsoft is a big deal. What’s going on?
Microsoft has posted the full video from that panel session online, so you can go see for yourself. Good luck getting through, though. The server is being slammed.
My take? They wanted to show off the multimedia capabilities of their new Silverfish development environment for web applications, and they mocked up a webcomic site to do so. Not a big deal in one sense (no, Microsoft will not be entering the webcomics portal business — or, at least, this panel session wouldn’t be an indication of that — not surprising, since this is Microsoft’s developer/programmer outreach conference, not their consumer services conference). But it is tangentially a big deal, just as an indication that webcomics have become so entrenched in the mainstream that it would even occur to a company as big as Microsoft to use a webcomic site to show off one of their most important new products for developers — a product that, literally, the future of their entire business depends upon.
T Campbell was the first on this story.
Update: unsurprisingly, you will have to use Internet Explorer to view the page where the video is hosted. Doesn’t appear to work in Firefox, anyway. Here’s a link to the Windows Media file:
http://sessions.visitmix.com/silverlight/v1/videos/XB003.wmv
Update Number Two: apparently this demo was created by a third party company founded by some Microsoft ex-employees, named Identity Mine. Their niche seems to be in developing multimedia “viewing applications” and back-end content management systems for large publishers’ websites (when you hear “viewing application,” think “fancy website with lots of special features”). They’ve done one for the New York Times, for example. From some of the slides, and some of the tangential remarks during the presentation (which I’ve finally been able to view now) I’m going to guess that this comic book reading application was developed for a client — maybe Marvel or DC — or, at least, with a potential client in mind, and that we may actually see this interface appear on a large publisher’s site at some point in the future. More tentative guess: DC.
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:15 am
The two prospective clients were DC Comics and IDW; IDW seems to be the client that showed the most enthisuasm, since their one of their 24 comics is used in the demonstration.
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:16 am
(Whopps — one too many “their”s, there.)
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:17 am
“Whopps”? Thank you folks, I’ll be here all week.
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:53 am
[...] (Above, top: scanlated sequence from Hiroyuki’s Doujin Work, as seen in “two-page manga mode” — that is, two visible pages arranged with the first page on the right — in the Comix reader program for Linux; art ©Hiroyuki. Above, other images: screen captures from the presentation video under discussion, demonstrating both reader and creator software, ©2007 IdentityMine; images from the IDW comics series 24 ©2007 Fox. Link trail: Joey Manley ← T Campbell.) [...]
May 4th, 2007 at 10:13 am
The browser wars are going about as well as the war on drugs. I’m tired of it. I wonder if these “viewing applications” will require Active X controls and other proprietary nonsense?
May 4th, 2007 at 10:15 am
The new Windows Presentation Foundation is a plug-in, using old-school Netscape plug-in technology, supposedly available for Firefox and Safari and etc., as well as IE. But, yeah, it’s a plug-in. Which begs the question: what can this comics interface do that couldn’t have been done in Flash? I don’t know. I never got very deep into the programming aspects of Flash. Me, I’m sticking to AJAX for my next-gen CMS right now. I will be watching this, though.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
The strategy behind this, is content portal. They might convince Marvel or the NY Times to use it. You know, places that have teams of people to work on stuff. Honestly, it doesn’t matter how cool it looks, what matters is how the ‘artist’ uses the system being proposed. You know as well as anyone, there is no money in making comics, or news articles. The money is selling the service that provide and displays ads around the army of people who create your content for free.
Like you said, flash already does this, but HTML is tough enough for most people creating comics. Okay, so the argument is this fancy application makes movement and transitions a snap… but why would you want them to begin with? Force the user to click NEXT 500 times back and forth??? I’m not sure how it’s actually different than what Marvel had 4yrs ago. It was actually annoying.
I got to the 35 minute mark, and I can’t take it anymore. This video sucks. This technology is going nowhere.
May 5th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Just FYI: I make less than $60/month in advertising from all my sites combined, including the freely-hosted comics on WCN.