Microsoft Cancels Major Developers' Conference

Kurtz'sKompund writes "Microsoft has cancelled its autumn Professional Developers Conference, citing bad timing in light of the launch of important infrastructure and platform products. This isn't the first time they have cancelled a PDC, for similar reasons."

Comments

Re:Wouldn't that be when it's needed most?

[Anarchysoft]

Between the office's ribbon interface and the actual launch of Vista, you'd think that now would be the most important time to have a developers conference. With all the new challenges and the conference still several months away, wouldn't it be wiser to schedule the time now and make sure that critical issues are dealt with early? I totally agree. This is exactly when they should be promoting development on Vista including things like how to get the most out of Windows Presentation Framework with XAML, handle porting issues, the new security features, etc! A peek at how Apple hypes 10.5 to developers should illuminate the strategy.

I work with MS products.

[ushering05401]

VS2005 targeting Win 2000 through Vista to be exact. Nice product VS2005. I can write very nice apps with c# and the .NET framework.

I adopted MS because the shop I began working IT with served mostly MS customers, and now my shop does as well... just a reality of working in a niche market where MS has been the accesible OS for so many years.

Why, I ask, am I pulling my hair out every other week?

Does a properly run company cause a dedicated client to want to pull his already diminishing supply of hair from his head every time he reads their press releases?

Products that have been *both* delayed and had functionality removed in the last 8 months:
Vista
Viridian (virtualization)
Server 2008 (announced that a major incremental will be released in 2009 to replace the functionality if that actually happens... so who the fuck is going to upgrade in '08?)

I depend on this shit. Why? Because you formed a friggin monopoly and all of my potential customers use your products.

Get your shit together.

Regards.

Re:I work with MS products.

[ushering05401]

I agree.

Unfortunately, as I have posted on other threads here, most of my customers rely on multiple small applications to run their businesses. Porting them to OSS would be a massive undertaking and would require cash that most of them don't have, and applications that don't exist (take construction-specific management apps for instance).

I have defended MONO and it's developers on this site and others with the stated purpose of promoting an alternative to MS. The fact remains, however, that most of my customers do not have equal options on OSS platforms at the current time.

I would be unable to develop equal options considering the wide variety of applications that have developed in the MS ecosystem over the last 15 years or so, and that my customers depend upon.

I would walk away from MS, but that would involve abandoning my customers who are locked in, and with whom I share the common goal of feeding our families by running our own companies instead of working for others.

Regards.

Re:I work with MS products.

[secPM_MS]

You assume that customers upgrade to get major new feature sets. While new feature sets are great for marketing aimed at retail customers, who will in general use very few of the features (new or otherwise), enterprise / corporate markets tend to be much more conservative. In particular, they want MS to do as little damage as possible to their existing enterprise apps, many of which were written with little if any consideration for security or reliability. This legacy tail greatly complicates Microsoft's ability to ship products, as enormous amounts of effort have to be expended to minimize the app compat hit.

Microsoft executives pulled neat features from Vista (WinFS and others) because they were likely to consititute too much of a security risk. Other changes were made, despite app compat issues, to increase system security. Vista, far more than XP, allows a user to run as a normal user without any administrative credentials (If I have to do any administrative chore, I have to enter my machine administrator credentials, equivalent to su root). From my point of view, the increase in security associated with Vista compared to XP justifies it. I run with all the neat visuals turned off, so my screen is in "classic" mode. It speeds the system up.

Why do I run Windows? For the same reason as most users -- For the wide variety of apps that run on it (both commercial and shareware). Microsoft created an effective ecosystem. While the OSS community is trying, they are nowhere close -- just look at all the Linux distros, let alone the various BSD's. Over time, the OSS space will close the difference, but the Windows system is richer now. The security bulletin data suggests that the security push did have a significant impact, with high-impact security bulletins reduced by ~ 2X or more.

See MIX, TechEd US, TechEd Europe and others

[Anonymous Coward]

MS has multiple conferences aimed at developers. MIX just recently gave developers a chance to learn about Silverlight. TechEd has hundreds of sessions for developers, and there's a dedicated European version of TechEd in Barcelona. PDC is always focused on showing off future technology (~2 years down the road), and not training on the stuff available today. Given that Vista has only recently shipped, and that the new versions of Server, SQL and VisualStudio aren't shipping til next year, it's not surprising that no one wants to talk about the _next_ versions of those things yet.

Re:and 10,000 OSS developers....

[kryptkpr]

I really like NEdit, and so do many of the folks at work. A few holdouts do use Emacs but any appeal it may have is lost on me. The standard GNU Xemacs doesn't even have different open files show up in different tabs. My idea of a good programmers editor left the terminal window behind a long time ago, but emacs seems to still be stuck there.

Re:Gotta Fix 'Em All!

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to buy the UK edition for that. The reason is that by having it as a separate software that is "translated" in Ireland, it counts as being manufactured inside the EU and thus they don't have to pay customs/import taxes.