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Father of Wiki Quits MS, Moves to Eclipse
linumax writes "Microsoft has lost one of its high-profile hires to an open-source consortium. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, announced on Monday that Ward Cunningham is leaving Microsoft to join the staff of the open-source tool consortium. Cunningham's new title is Director of Committer Community Development.Cunningham, the father of the Wiki concept, joined Microsoft about two years ago. At Microsoft, he was not involved directly in social-networking-software development. Instead, Cunningham worked as an architect with the company's Patterns & Practices Team."
Not likely. Despite the exodus of high-profile indidivuals such as Cunningham, an organization such as Microsoft (or Apple or IBM, &c.) have constant turnover. In some cases it is from disgruntled employees, but in others it is simply a desire to expand one's horizons and move on to different things.
I suspect that there are more "former Microsoft employees" than there are "current Microsoft employees."
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
Wikipedia != wiki.
Ward invented the wiki idea in general.
This has already happened, about a year ago. Lasted for about an hour, and caused a helluva ruckus. Especially because at that time you could register IP addresses as a user name, hehe.
The summary states Microsoft has lost a unique asset, not sales of some generic product.
C17H21NO4
In fact, MS shareholders should be happier than ever since they just recently received a whopping dividend payment.
I don't know about that. I learned investing from my Father, who has literally made several million, just since his retirement. While dividends are nice, there are problems with them. They're taxed when they come out, whereas a rising stock price is only taxed when it is sold. So even if you use a DRIP so you never actually see the dividend, just the new shares it purchases, you still get a yearly tax. Dividends can be a big help if you are retired, or otherwise using dividend income as a primary source of support, but in terms of investing, they are not always as nice as a stock price that constantly goes up -- which is something MS Stock hasn't done much of for a while.
You're right -- it isn't a good idea for a long term investment, which is about the only kind I make. (I've found turnover can be fun, but after fees and taxes, long term investments generally do better once you see past the next year or two.)
I think that this post if a little off topic but I will reply anyway. One of the criteria for deciding what application stack to build from for decision makers in technology companies is the developer experience. The harder it is for developers to build in a particular application stack, the longer it will take or the more resources it will take to develop what is needed. When deciding between two application stacks of similar merit and assuming that either the existing staff is familiar with both or that there is no existing staff, the tie breaker just might be the tool.
I have been in ISVs in both camps. I can tell you from first hand experience that the J2EE stack is just as feature rich and architecturaly sound as the ASP.NET stack (though the actual details are profoundly different). For any company honestly considering which way to go, the choice boils down to VS.NET versus Eclipse (or Netbeans or IntelliJ, insert your favorite J2EE friendly IDE here).
This news was first posted on EclipseZone. There, you can find an article announcing the move that goes into a little more detail about what Ward will be doing at Eclipse. Please add this article link to your main post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham
I'm Freaking Out!
Since you mentioned Wikipedia yourself in the title of your post, why not take the step further?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham.
As a committer on the CDT Eclipse project, I can say right now that if you are doing doing win32 or MFC development, right now you'd be crazy to not use Visual Studio over Eclipse, unless you're willing to help work on the IDE support yourself.
Right now work is beginning in the CDT community on a prototypical debugger that uses the dbghelp APIs of Microsoft's free windows debugger (WinDbg). Work is also ongoing in the community on support for the Visual C++ compiler under CDT's Managed Build System. What's really needed right now is people to help out on these efforts, and someone to step up and make a windows resource editor (a la Eclipse's Visual Editor Project). We would love for CDT to be a serious (and free!) competitor to Visual Studio that required only the free debugger, compiler, and platform SDK downloads from Microsoft that are currently available... help us make it happen.
Note he didn't start Wikipedia, he came up with the idea of wiki. Ward's Wiki is the Portland Pattern repository which is always a very educational read for software practitioners.