Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Launches Free Web Software Eco-System
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market. 10 open source CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery. Developers must agree to principles and can now submit their PHP or .NET application for inclusion. Once an application is in the gallery, Windows users use Microsoft Web Platform Installer, released in a keynote at MIX this week, which inspects the the local system, and installs and configures dependencies like the IIS webserver, PHP, URL re-writers, and file permissions. Screenshots show this to be quite easy for the typical computer user. This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes."
Real administrators don't use package managers, either. Real administrators know how to handle compiling from source for anything they want to install and spending two hours configuring it for their system.
Real Linux users don't use silly things like synaptic and apt-get and other such command line tools. Real Linux users use wget to get a tarball and compile from source, editing menus in gnome or kde by themselves (if they ever use gnome or kde, most of the time Real Linux Users just use lynx).
The point of a GUI is not necessarily just for "computer newbies." I imagine you are using a GUI to post, in fact, and not using Lynx.
That said, you're right, normally they'd know how to handle a shell; but just because some people like having automatic configurations for all the default stuff doesn't mean they are a newbie. Can they be? sure. But using a GUI or automatic configuration tool of some sort does not mean you ARE a newbie. Just, the computer can fill in a lot of blanks a lot faster than I can.
"And we shouldn't encourage those sort of people to run servers."
Perhaps servers shouldn't be so damned complicated to run. But then, I guess IT guys are kinda' like the RIAA... desperately doing whatever they can to hold onto their jobs...
I guess cars should be as easy to fix as building a car out of Lego. Anything less and it's the automotive people protecting mechanic's jobs.
By making things easier means you're pushing all the technical knowledge on fewer people (ie the ones building the system) and when it all falls apart you have to rely on the smaller group of people to fix it and by doing so protects a limited set of jobs even more while leaving servers more vulnerable all because some tit thinks he should be able to run a server without having to read the instructions.
the Geocities of our day.
Has it ever struck anyone else that aside from a mediocre Update center Microsofts software delivery mechanism is archaic, almost fundamentally useless? If this level of innovation wasn't systemic throughout our industry (and many others) they would have been laughed out of business a long time ago.
Quack, quack.
Yeah? So what? In Linux or BSD, do you get the nice user experience with a pretty icon to click to install the product? No? I didn't think so!
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers