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Lots of .NET stories in the news today and yesterday; it's a total coincidence that Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot. BrendanL79 writes: "Peter Wright at Salon.com contributes to public awareness of Microsoft's .NET with this exuberant piece. The praise borders on sycophancy ("Gutenberg ... Babbage ... now Gates") with no apparent tongue in his cheek. Comments?" Reader vw writes: "Active State has just released Visual Perl 1.2, Visual Python 1.2, and Visual XSLT 1.2 as plugins for Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET. Wonder how long it will take for a Mono hack." Numerous readers pointed to several stories about a buffer overflow problem in Visual Studio .NET which was supposed to be immune to buffer overflows - but it had passed Microsoft's stringent new security audit.
Although I distrust Microsoft, they have made one of the greatest contributions to software industry. Bill and Steve's innovation is they recognized people aren't willing to wait forever for a perfect system and that incrementally improving bad software until it becomes good is a good way to run a business. If the building perfect system were more desireable, than Apple and MacOS would been king today. Bill and steve were willing to do what hardcore engineers wouldn't do, release software that is known to be buggy and poorly tested. It's taken them a long time to get to the stability of win2K, but fact that windows is the dominant desktop OS shows that they know marketing. Sure people know Gates isn't an engineer, nor does he care about software quality, but he knows business. Now if only some one would do the same for open source (besides IBM), linux would have a really good chance of becoming a dominant player.