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I was reading the why micoformats site when i discovered that the hCard implementation at yahoo was done quietly by a developer. This is interesting, as i would consider from what i have heard (which is by no means authoritative) that yahoo is very forward thinking.
Talking about this in the microformats chat room, and asking about how the politics is where people work i realized how many people do things which i would consider wrong because they are forced to by the company they are working for.
An example from the room, was about doing presentations about standards and microformats. For this presentation they were using Microsoft power point, purely because they were as Microsoft reseller. I found that this is called “eating your own dog food”. Eating your own dog food refers to using your own software for means of testing and for have the same user experience as the client. it also shows confidence in the software or service.
In this situation, i would feel morally confused about the requirement to use power point, when S5 (the simple standards-based slideshow) was more suitable for the situation, and the person who i was talking to i think agreed. The reason why i would use S5 in this situation is that, S5 is a great example of breaking the mold of how people perceive the internet and hopefully this would make the talk more memorable, nothing like starting a presentation with demolishing old concepts.
As a talk on microformats which i believe was going to be made publicly avaliabe, the advantage of using S5 is also a technical one. Easy online implementation, no extra work or data replication.
These things got me thinking. How much pressure would it take to introduce microfromats to a large organization? How should new ideas and concepts be introduced to the cooperate environment.
In defense of eating their own dog food, i can see how this helps development, and i am not questioning how this effects the development of a product, but surely, when doing a presentation about a subject, using that subject as the means for you presentation would be really advocating its use.
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