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Microsoft Out of Favor With Young, Hip Developers
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's failures with the KIN phone (only two months on the market, less than 10,000 phones sold) are well-known to this community. Now the NY Times goes farther, quoting Tim O'Reilly: 'Microsoft is totally off the radar of the cool, hip, cutting-edge software developers.' Microsoft has acknowledged that they have lost young developers to the lures of free software. 'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,' acknowledged Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's business software group, in an interview last year. 'And then, when people, particularly younger people, wanted to build a start-up, and they were generally under-capitalized, the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them.' Microsoft's program to seed start-ups with its software for free requires the fledgling companies to meet certain guidelines and jump through hoops to receive software — while its free competitors simply allow anyone to download products off a website with the click of a button." Update: 07/07 13:21 GMT by T : Tim O'Reilly says that while he "[doesn't] disagree with all of his conclusions," he's not happy with it Ashlee Vance's piece, writing "I was not the source for the various comments that were attributed to me," including the bit about "totally off the radar." (Thanks to reader gbll.)
A qualified judge of what young, hip people are interested in.
First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
-- Ghandi.
Developers don't avoid Microsoft products because of cost. Open source has nothing to do with the frantic embrace of alternatives. Come on. Raise your hand if you've been burned by MSDN and are still stuck on VC6.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
The microsoft software stack is designed so that service providers can siphon money off at the point of delivery. Antivirus is a good example. Yeah we sold you an OS but you need this extra thing to make it secure, didn't you know that?
So its a great way to make money if you stay with their targeted solutions. But if you want to do something totally new the benefits of using microsoft aren't really there so developers look elsewhere.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You mean a startup would rather spend it's money on its core business then on bloated software. Especial when a free version does all they need.
No need to develope for an OS as the Internet is a better delivery system. iPhone is part of the Internet ecosysem
But all my Microsoft software was fr.... uh, nevermind
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Developers, developers, developers, developers!
-Steve Ballmer
I am officially gone from
Microsoft's Bizspark program for startups requires you to fill out a form to get free software. OK, Almost free. At the end of two years, you have to pay them $200. I wouldn't call that "jumping through hoops". I didn't need any double-super secret intros from investors either. I got the info from the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs - an organization open to anybody.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It's even worse with Windows Mobile / Phone / CE / Whatever-they-call-it-today. First they gave away the tools to write apps for Windows CE and Windows Mobile for free with a CE-tailored version of Visual C++ 6 that was free to download and use (although you still had to pay if you wanted to do anything serious with Platform Builder.) Then they introduced C# to Windows Mobile with Visual Studio 2003, but you could still get a free copy if you applied. And now they charge the big bucks with Visual Studio 2007 and 2010, and have dropped support for the older C/C++ runtimes. And they wonder why nobody develops apps for Windows Mobile any longer? Dead platform + expensive tools == no developer interest.
...even for us old farts.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
More, exotic fart apps is what we now expect from this new generation of HIP programmers.
A ZUNE! I've never seen one in the wild before. They MUST be awesome! Only 10K Kins in existence? Sounds like a very hard to find product headed straight to eBay. NOW I'm interested! Get out your Zunes and Kins, me Saddos! I'm going to fire up my Windows 95 server and meet up with MS Bob later. Balmer RULES!
Actually, MS does make a very nice product with that Windows XP. I've got one now and it seems pretty usable. Not going to replace my Mac with this thing, but for a work handout, it's decent.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Microsoft's program to seed start-ups with its software for free requires the fledgling companies to meet certain guidelines and jump through hoops to receive software — while its free competitors simply allow anyone to download products off a website with the click of a button.
This assumes that cost is the only factor that start-ups are weighing when determining software. Some of them may legitimately pick open source because it's better or that MS doesn't offer a certain software. For many, they may go to cheaper solutions like OpenOffice instead of MS Office purely on cost. But they may use Apache instead of IIS for performance reasons.
If cost is the only reason, wouldn't it be likely that once these start-ups are established, they may not like having to pay full price and may turn to competitors for cheaper alternatives?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Well this certainly isn't anywhere Microsoft is going to visit, and as a young, hip developer myself, I'd sure like to point out a good reason as to why they aren't doing so hot with my demographic.
The issue isn't that you aren't "accessing" post secondary students. I learned all about VB, .NET, and I used Visual Studio, and I made some pretty amazing Win32 apps. All in all, my experience with the product was good. VB, once you understand programming theory, is as easy to write as Java or C++, its mostly just a syntax thing. All in all I found Visual Studio easier to layout and work with GUI's than Eclipse was with Java. So, you don't need to worry about that, Microsoft.
But you did hit ONE big nail right on the head.
And then, when people, particularly younger people, wanted to build a start-up, and they were generally under-capitalized, the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them.
Yes, yes it was a big problem for me. Currently the latest version, with the PRO edition (not even the ultimate edition) is $729 dollars - which is more than most kids with student loan debts can afford. And then you made the "Express" tools which are completely and utterly crippled in that I can't do half the stuff that made visual studio so appealing to use.
As such, when my school taught me how to use the no-cost solutions, you can imagine how much more we prefer to work with them as a hobby, because as young, hip, students we don't have any money to just fling around.
Not to mention that .NET seems to be losing some speed - I don't know if I want to keep writing for it.
What Microsoft still doesn't seem to understand is that the lure of FOSS goes beyond what's "hip", and also goes beyond the price.
And I love these quotes: "We did not get access to kids as they were going through college" Translation: "We did not infiltrate schools enough to make sure they had no exposure to anything but our stuff".
And: "Microsoft's program to seed start-ups with its software for free requires the fledgling companies to meet certain guidelines and jump through hoops to receive [free/discounted] software" Translation: "We should have worked harder to make it even easier to get people/companies hooked on our proprietary solutions".
Oh well.
We did not get access to kids as they were going through college
Anybody else find that just a LITTLE creepy? "Getting access" sounds like something a Catholic priest and/or a cult leader would say. Perhaps employing clueless marketroids like Bob might have something to do with the problem as well.
Microsoft quite simply is too slow. They build nice tools, but they do so slowly. Far too slowly for the pace of the Internet. If they were an innovative company that might not be a problem, but Microsoft is now chasing at about a 2-4 year disadvantage.
It has nothing to do with "cool". I don't use COBOL not because it isn't "cool". I don't use COBOL because it doesn't have useful hooks into the libraries I need to use on a day to day basis. Same with Microsoft tech.
Really? Isn't "hip developer" an oxymoron? Or do they literally mean "one who develops for hips", in which case the language of choice is clearly "Limp".
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Not less than 10K, but fewer than 10K.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
This must be one of the most embarrassing developments under Steve Ballmer's watch. To that end I say furniture must have flown at the realization that KIN was not doing well at all after spending several hundred million dollars.
On my part, I feel sorry for Microsoft and if I were to advise, I would recommend that Microsoft returns to its MS Exchange business suite which worked so well for them earlier this decade.
The trouble on this front is that at the moment, Zimbra and Google both want a piece of the pie, though I believe Microsoft is better armed to win the battle.
I don't think their major problem is that opensource is free. I think their major problem is that their development environment is oppressive and they change it every couple of years. Who wants to spend their time learning a new bug ridden API every two years that doesn't do anything different than the last version?
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
"Microsoft Accepted by Old/Curmudgeonly"
Like 15 years ago I had to buy a compiler. Back then that was Borland C++ 4.0. Then later I was worried about all software-licenses fees and I switched to GNU/Linux.
Besides to my familiy that was one of the best things that happened to me ever. Thanks microsoft for pushing me in the right direction by not giving me any of your crap for free!
I am a young(er? 29) developer and I do most of my development on the .NET stack. No, it's not as "cool" as being an iPhone dev, but at least Ballmer doesn't tell me I can't compile my code without forking him $100/yr...and he doesn't take 30% percent of whatever I might make selling my code.
.NET (and maybe I am?)...but when it comes to choosing what platform to learn and code in, I'm pretty happy with Microsoft in general. It's a lot easier for me to find a job doing .NET than it is for them in Ruby/Rails...and in 5 years they'll have to throw out everything they learned about Ruby/Rails because the fanboyism that drives their community will have moved on to the next "big shiny thing" (Scala?)...I'll still be writing code in C#...Does that make me a sellout? Maybe, but I'll take more money for less work and less drama any day of the week.
I work in a mixed shop where most of the other devs are Ruby/Rails guys...they all see me as a "sellout" for using
I would venture a guess that the biggest problem Microsoft is probably facing is that most development for a given start up is probably going to be some snazzy web service, and probably on some LAMP variant, with say, lighttpd in place of apache for cool Comet stuff.
When you're doing TCO calculations for a startup, Linux/Apache makes sense for your back end, which is probably going to be one of your biggest purchasing decisions.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Really, has Microsoft had a trend-setting new product (not an update or sequel) since Steve Ballmer took the helm? Everything new product line they've come up with since 2000, from Xbox to the Kin, has been an attempt catch-up with someone, rather than blaze new trails.
"We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,"
He makes a good point here - one of the sole reasons why I'm a linux guy today is because the college that I went to (Loyola Marymount University) had a strong FOSS ideology in their computer science department. Had I been exposed to any line of Microsoft products during that time, I'd venture to say that I'd be a MS guy today. College students, despite their outcry to be individuals and unique, are very easy to be moulded into the product of your choice.
It has zero to do with not being "hip" or young or in college.
.NET...but it's hard enough to sell people on Python or Ruby instead of PHP and they run on almost the same stack...you try convincing a client their hosting should cost $100 USD / month instead of $50 when the whole project is 5-10k because you want to use ASP.NET instead of PHP.
I think the main issue that is loosing them emerging developers in the web. Almost all startups are web based these days and Windows hosting always costs more than Linux, usually a lot more because Windows Server SKUs are minimum $800 USD. Bad enough when your starting up, worse if you are successful and need 30 servers.
There is also a gigantic ecosystem of freelance / small company folk who do contract web work that can't use
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/grammartiplessorfewer
Less is also used with numbers when they are on their own and with expressions of measurement or time, e.g.:
His weight fell from 18 stone to less than 12.
Their marriage lasted less than two years.
Heath Square is less than four miles away from Dublin city centre
And since you're in marketing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
"'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,'"
What? With all the free MS software giveaways, special campus prices and events for students, and near-bribery of CS departments with loads of no-cost or low-cost MS software licenses if they or the whole university go exclusively with MS products, and you're telling me Microsoft didn't have access? No way.
What happened was much worse than they imply. They DID have extensive access, but many students still didn't want to drink the kool-aid. Or students tasted it and they were repulsed.
Microsoft's business is almost entirely targetted at corporate software users. They never gave a rats ass about individual users. They jump into bed with the RIAA and MPAA, they continue to build lock-in and avoid using existing open standards, and their products suck ass for usability because they treat users like retards.
No wonder consumers don't trust them and avoid their products.
The amount of .net developer jobs out there is insane. Almost EVERYTHING is now .net, iphone development is kinda "hip" but it's not exactly a money maker at this point for anyone. I"m still stuck on old c/c++ development but that brings in the biggest and longest software contracts compared to the 3 week "do this iphone app for me" jobs.
did you forget to take your meds?
They are missing the point that:
a) PC's are now a mature technology, and there's little new/innovative going on with them. At best a slow evolution and a marketplace for developers that is saturated.
b) Growth areas in software development are happening where Microsoft is not a presence worth a second look. People go where the jobs are, and Microsoft isn't where that is.
c) Their recent attempts at reinventing themselves have been major crash and burns. No one likes jumping on the back of a crashing and burning vehicle.
Anyhow, one day they will wake up and realize they've painted themselves into a corner and have no clue how to get out. Who knew they were going to be a chunky niche player.
Wait, there's such a thing as a hip developer?
I'll take an older and more experienced developer over "young and hip" any day of the week.
File this story under "A fail that counts as a win"
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
In the very early 90s we were using Unix in my computer science program and many undergraduate and graduate students complained at a student/faculty meeting that there were no classes in programming MS Windows. It was not that many considered Windows "cool" but that many felt some Windows experience was necessary to be viable in the job market. So yes, students were once highly interested in Windows.
In the early days it looked like .net might evolve to take on Java in that it was solving all those little coding nuggets that you have to otherwise grind out such as getting files from web servers. But then it turned into marketing for all their other products and the surface area of the whole .net thing grew out of control. But horribly enough I was still having to turn to ActiveX era programming to accomplish anything really cool.
.net crap. .Net
Then I discovered QT and a whole new world was opened to me. After a year I realized that the only Microsoft product I was still using was Windows and that was seriously getting in my way. That was years ago and MS has not offered me a single geeky reason to go back.
PHP is better than any
Apache is better than IIS
Linux is better than MS Server
MySQL is better than SQL Server
C++ QT is better than
Eclipse is better than Visual Studio for multiple languages
Git is better than VSS
Mac OS X is better than Windows for programming
Anything is better than IE
So I have been able to nearly completely leave MS behind yet am able to release my desktop software with little effort for both Mac and Windows because of QT. I don't see an easy way for MS to get me back.
But there is a hard way. They could toss the present windows foundation and make Windows 9 based upon BSD. Make Visual Studio compile to a zillion platforms like Mac and Linux all the while opening it up to other languages like PHP. All the while beating away their marketing department who would want to do forced tie-ins to existing products. Then from this new foundation they could let their developers loose to make everything way better. Then, depending on pricing, they might get me back; maybe.
Any "developer" who is a fanboy and will code only in their favoured language isn't worthy of the title of developer. They are a hack, or a code monkey, not a developer. A real developer will learn to understand how a computer works, at a fundamental level, and look at programming languages as different ways to solve a problem. They'll understand that there is not a best language because there is not one kind of problem. Some are better for certain things.
Also a good developer will probably learn how to develop for multiple platforms. After all while Linux is used a whole lot in the web world, MS rules on the desktop so it would be to one's advantage to be able to code on both platforms. Further more, it would be to their advantage to do so in the tools that generate the best programs. For Windows, that is Visual Studio, for Linux it is (obviously) not.
So no, you aren't a sellout. I would say that if you focus only on .NET development you are being a bit too narrow, but learning it is a good thing. There is a lot of work for .NET devs. Companies want shiny GUIs for Windows things and .NET is a good way to deliver. The other "developers" will find that whining to the company and claiming they shouldn't do that won't work. Most companies are accustomed to telling you what you are going to do, not the other way around.
I have a friend who's a contract developer and he uses languages of all sorts. If you want something done in Windows, he defaults to .NET (using C# usually) since that works well on that platform. In Linux, it is PERL quite often since nearly every Linux distro ships with it. However if you wanted something speed critical, it'd probably be C++. He sees languages as tools to solve problems, and tries to choose the right one for the job. That doesn't mean he uses any and every language, of course, he's got ones he prefers, just that he has a bag with more than one tool in it and he tries to select the correct one.
Personally I have little to no respect from code hacks that want to trumpet The One True Language as the one they use. That think is solves EVERY problem, that won't learn anything else. What it tells me is that they don't really understand programming. They've learned the syntax and grammar of a language without understanding the underpinnings. That is not a good situation and leads to bad code, shitty apps, and the kind of person who will say "That can't be done," to anything they don't understand how to do.
'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,' acknowledged Bob Muglia
Windows has maintained over 90% market share on desktops for over a decade. If a kid had a computer in the house growing up, the overwhelming odds are that it ran Windows. So have you not had access to college kids, or did you squander the opportunity you've had for years and now you're passing the buck?
The obvious fact is, that Lord Bill's nightmare came true. He was afraid that web browser would make the operating system irrelevant, and that's exactly what happened. Think about it. When was the last time someone said, "Hey check this out! Go download this application..." Almost never. All the really exciting is happening on the web. That's because the web has matured to the point that developers are leveraging Internet scale data. Not only that, but web based apps are preferred by users because they work everywhere. I still use a standalone application for email, but I'm in the minority. This hasn't just made Microsoft unhip, but frankly irrelevant. As I told a friend of mine who said how he despised Microsoft, "Isn't hating Microsoft, a bit like still hating Prussia?" What does Microsoft have that's relevant? Sure they still have their Windows and Office, but that software is commodified. I can access the web with any OS, so Windows simply doesn't matter. With interoperability. no one really needs Office. For me, Apple's Pages and Numbers work pretty well, although I still prefer Excel for its ability to allow me to write custom functions (albeit in VB).
Now here's the irony, Microsoft Research is supercool. They do all sorts of groundbreaking stuff. Photosynth, Surface, along with work in collaboration and personal information management, just to name a few areas. MSR is great, and there really aren't that many places that do that work, let alone at with the both the breadth and depth of MSR. Microsoft doesn't really have too many peers in that respect, and that makes Microsoft very hip. Of course, MSR isn't for everyone, but for those people that like to do research, its great place to work.
'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,'
Complete and utter bullshit. When I was in school at a fairly well-known south-eastern engineering school, you couldn't walk from Skiles to the Library Fountain without tripping over 7 Microsoft recruiters. Granted, it was over a decade ago, but still...
What makes MS unattractive is the huge bloated corporate culture that has 10 levels of bureaucracy for every level of productivity, and thousands of pages of process documents that new recruits spend half their working time trying to remember, and the other half trying to forget when the "new" process comes out.
It doesn't help that, on top of it all, they expect you to show up and, you know, WORK for your paycheck...
... personal users: how can you get people wanting to develop for your OS/ecosystem if you charge them a LOT of money for the toolchain/msdn/...?
I can see how a software house should have to pay for MSDN/VC++/etc. for their devs (since they after all make money) but personal developers should be able to have the full version of the toolchain (with full msdn, not 'limited' versions) in order to compete with os/x (xcode etc., all free) or linux/unix/FOSS (gcc/emacs/... all free). I really do not think the income MS makes from enthusiasts buying msdn/vc++ access is worth the loss in mental market share in terms of all the devs migrating to other platforms where they don't have to "pay to play".
-- the cake is a lie
"Microsoft is totally off the radar of the cool, hip, cutting-edge software developers"
I have been a software developer for many years and this is the first time I have heard us called "cool" and "hip". What did we do to deserve such insults?
This makes me feel old, but there really is nothing cutting-edge in software development. Everything that is considered new, is really old and just re-discovered again -- it is like fashion. Software development is exciting, without having to be cutting-edge.
These people he describes don't exist. Maybe that is why they don't care about Microsoft.
I'm older than dirt, about as unhip as you can get, work for a company that has more money than god and we STILL won't use MS technologies for new projects. Explain that one, MS.
And btw I don't use COBOL or Fortran for that matter/p?
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
This may be true in term of single-system size, but for sheer market penetration & visibility, iPhone/Android & apps are way beyond what people do with Desktops now.
Business applications abound for .NET, but this is not as visible at home. O'Reilly is watching where the new development for home users is going: smart devices
It'll take ten years, but eventually the smart device platform will make enough inroads to replace some of the business market. Ask anyone with a Blackberry or laptop. This article is a clone of similar from the early 90's where both of those devices were derided as too slow/expensive/cumbersome for business use.
That language! Not "college students were not broadly exposed to our products", or "our outreach efforts fell short", bur rather "...get access to kids...". MS has always been a cathedral, but sheesh, now they're even sounding like priests.
Anybody want a peanut?
Mirage and Monkeedude are the horse's mouth. Look at their slashdot ID's and you can tell they are new entrants to this rat race.
I suspect the 'locking down to technology' is a pretty serious issue, along with the cost of the sophisticated development environment. And, speaking of development environment, the new graduates are going to be very comfortable with the social networking side of the FOSS world. When there is a problem with a tool, or if they need help with an esoteric problem, the help is ready, willing, and able to help without the condescension you often find in the Microsoft help forums.
The more committed young developers will probably enjoy the FOSS workspace better than the MS world. More satisfaction.
Best regards.
Being an ex Windows mobile developer, the problem lies with how Microsoft is pushing Windows Mobile 7. .Net Apps for Wince -> Windows 6 will apparenly not work on Windows 7. (So we hve more market fragmentation, Windows Mobile/Wince != Windows Mobile 7
1) Microsoft is working quickly towards an app store, just like Apple, but with far more expense passed on to the developer to host these apps.
2) Older
3) Developing for older WinCE / Windows Mobile Phones was relatively easy, with the exception of the amount of fragmentation out there.
Forgetting that Some devices had touch screens, some didnt, some had mice, some had keyboards, most didnt, some had large amounts of ram, some didnt,
Screen sizes could range from anything as small as 224x200, and could be large as 1024x800.
Couple that with the fact that if you were going to do anything serious (Business App), you needed SQLCE, which came in so many different flavours, that just finding a WinCE version that ran with the windows mobile / WinCE version you had on the device, was a mission in itself.
4) To develop for Windows Mobile 7, I need the latest version of Visual Studio, which means I also need Windows Vista, Windows 7.
Thats a lot of money to fork out for essentially an OS that on paper appears to be inferior to Windows Mobile 6.5, and an O that has yet to ship on a single device.
This is part of the reason why I m not interest in Developing for the iPhone. I need a Mac (Which I have, collecting dust somewhere),
The above, plus much much more is why I wont even bother developing for Symbian.
Now take Android.
I can develop on WIndows XP, or Linux (Yay!!!), or a Mac.
The SDK is a free download.
The IDE (Eclipse) is free.
And finally, we are begining to see some Android phones ship that have bleeding edge hardware.
I am not an Android developer yet, but that to me seems like it is only a matter of time.
Look, Microsoft, I like you, I really do. I use windows XP on my workstation and it seems to work pretty damn well for everything I ever ask of it. You do a lot of research, that's really cool. Bill, you're a cool guy, donating all kinds of money to charity and whatnot; awesome.
But here is the thing, MS, I can download F/OSS stuff for *free*, find out if I like it, and if I do I just keep using it. I don't have to fork over any money, I don't have to register for anything or tell anybody , or do *anything* other than navigate over to sourceforge or wherever else, click download, click install, and then start working.
Your products are not that much better, they just aren't, and as a broke-ass kid, it doesn't make sense for me to spend money on them. I'd rather use the money to buy hardware.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Almost EVERYTHING is now .net
I've not seen the same thing (and I watch job postings daily and have for years). I'm seeing less .Net jobs than I used to, while I'm seeing more jobs looking for a wide variety of open source skills. While most mention a desire for certain language skills (i.e. PHP, Java, Python, C/C++), they are more focused on skills in specific middleware products (i.e. DBMS, AppServer, etc), a large percentage of which are open source.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
This article takes MS failing with the Kin and extrapolates it to "Microsoft is going down the shitter because no one wants to develop for it."
I don't see how they got from one to the other. I have a very strong gut feeling that this is story has been spun so far that it doesn't represent reality.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
MS is throwing out the current partner-friendly partner program. All the e-mail that I have received so far is pushing partner, hardware VAR's mostly, toward working with competitors, which sounds fine until you realize that the beneficiary is MS, not its partners. We also are being pressured to purchase "program benefits" that many of us either don't need or don't want. MS seems to be apporoaching the precipice and may not see it. Lost programmers that now use OSS is one thing. Lose partners that sell products preloaded with MS software is another and will be the icing on the cake. They don't know what the hell they are doing anymore.
...young developers are really hip!
This old man of 43 about to try his hand at going it alone recoils at the thought of a several thousand dollar outlay for OS's, dev tools, servers... most of which (not all!) are of lower quality than their free counterparts.
Seiously, why should I pay for those things when I can get just as good if not better for free?
And, the ROI for iPhone and Android is incredibly small because people don't want to pay anything for the apps. In fact most, if not all, of the apps in both stores are less than $10.00.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Why is it that no one has a beef that Autodesk gets to make money selling 3D tools, that Adobe gets to make money selling imaging tools, but when it comes to Microsoft making money off coding tools, SLASHDOT SMASH!! GRAA!!
I am a young(er? 29) developer and I do most of my development on the .NET stack. No, it's not as "cool" as being an iPhone dev, but at least Ballmer doesn't tell me I can't compile my code without forking him $100/yr...
Oh really, see if you can say that again if you want to deploy anything to the WIndows 7 App Store.
The Apple development tools are also free if you don't want to deploy to the store... And anyone for who $100/year is too steep simply jailbreaks and develops that way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The amount of .net developer jobs out there is insane.
It really depends on where one lives.
I'm what you might call a linux zealot. I couldnt find a school which offered any sort of IT program that wasnt a microsoft partner and pushed microsoft entirely. So it's a pretty big lie at least for my city that microsoft isnt getting access to students. Ya I got onto dreamspark, msdn and technet for free; but I think that's exactly the issue people have. Developers want free at every point. Free as in freedom and more importantly free as in beer. The hip and cool devs cant afford to be paying microsoft licensing so they cant go.
Microsoft still in favour with paid developers and their superiors.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The problem with the word "hip" is that the act of using it is the very opposite of its definition; nobody has seriously used this word for what it means for decades, and the people who try signal that they are very out of touch with the subject they're trying to talk about. Use this word and you automatically damage the credibility of anything you say.
Excellent! Let's keep it this way. In the 1990's, Microsoft was a key factor in the emergence of todays IT industry, but their systemic lack of vision ("We only know how to compete") and overall uninspired engineering is, IMHO, increasingly blocking social progress through their still-large market share.
I welcome Microsoft's diminished relevance with open arms.
Schools have plenty of access to MS software... every district I know of is stocked with Office and Windows. And even the universities have plenty of access to MS environments at dramatically reduced cost.
So the excuse of "We did not get access to kids as they were going through college" is BS.
Their platforms are old and a pain to develop for in many cases. Their new technology does not bring anything to the table and their devices intended to foster the ecosystem have been largely failures in the marketplace. I've had a Win Mobile phone and it was crap. Why would I spend my time developing for it?
You can't put the cart before the horse... make proper devices that people want and watch the apps follow. But as far as I am concerned MS is misfiring on all cylinders... and I AM a MS dev for the last 10 years... who is putting more and more effort into other platforms these days for that very reason.
And it isn't locked into a particular platform. You know, those crazy ideas that are come from those new-fangled fads all the crazy kids are into, with their bell-bottom jeans and their "Yeah yeah yeah".
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
"You know, those crazy ideas that are come from those new-fangled fads all the crazy kids are into, with their bell-bottom jeans and their "Yeah yeah yeah"."
Preview is my friend....although "are come" is technically accurate too, for other reasons having to do with young studly developers.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Dear Microsoft,
Today you sit and rue the face that you have lost the developer base and to
feel better about it, you label them as 'young and hip'. Here is some news:
Very few developers actually enjoy writing for windows. People have been
writing code on microsoft platforms since there are a huge number of people
who use microsoft products and ignoring the windows platform amounts to
ignoring a huge customer base which the developer could not afford to do.
We, as developers never really enjoyed developing for windows -- it is just
that we did not have a choice.
Today however, the scene has been changing.
1. A large number of GUI-based applications have moved into the browser.
2. Windows servers are not really used in large technology companies
They still are a dominant force in small to medium company's IT
infrastructures. That is all exchange and sharepoint. Any sane startup will
not consider windows to host their servers.
3. Developers now are used to and are aware of desktop platforms which
work well and also are very good programming platforms. Macs have a robust
BSD backbone and Linux is well, Linux. So everybody now have platforms
on which they can hack code and also play their movies.
4. Java provides for a development environment which can make pretty windows
without having to use developer studio.
So you have a scenario where where Microsoft is not the only viable
desktop/laptop OS. Also, it is a terrible programming environment. So any
self-respecting developer will not run windows on his personal machine and
as a result will want to push it out of his workplace too. The process
started a long time back. You guys are feeling it now.
So we come to the next question: Why do we hate writing code for windows ?
I will not cite the BSOD. The "windows crashes" and "windows is not stable"
are old arguments.
Windows is much much more stable than it used to be. In all honesty it has
been ages since I last saw a BSOD. We hate writing code for the windows
platform is because it sucks as a development platform.
1. The design is not based on any implementation of UNIX. That makes any CS
student uncomfortable. I am not saying that that the developer is
uncomfortable because windows has a bad programming interface (which btw it
is ). I am saying that it makes him uncomfortable because he cannot
recognize patterns he used to learn his computer science. He cannot refer to
the kernel source when he runs into a thorny problem, he cannot go online to
get a real educated answer to his problems. It is unfamiliar and since he is
not used to the paradigm. The developer finds it inelegant.
2. The second point is that it IS a bad programming interface. Till very
recently did not have a scripting interface worth its salt, has an extremely
convoluted device driver infrastructure and has that terrible thing called
the registry.
3. The development environment is not free as in beer and as in speech. It
is a closed heavily controlled environment in which the developer has no say
and is an interface which changes very frequently. You can get away with
changing rapidly and being open ( which linux does ) but you cannot get away
by being closed and also changing every 2 years. It drives the developer
mad.
4. Emacs and Vim do not integrate well with visual studio :)
I used to write Windows software. Not commercially, just for fun.
I'm now working full-time on a game for the Android platform, and it's going well so I recently looked in to the possibility of writing it for Windows at some point in future.
I was astonished by the current price of Visual Studio. It was around £100 when I used it around 10 years ago, and now it's well over £500! Too much. Way, way too much.
If the time does come when I want to develop the game for Windows, I'll be using a non-Microsoft solution.
What are you darned kids using these days? Last I knew it was "phat", and that's when I stopped paying attention, and refused to go beyond "cool" thank you very much.
Isn't it more a problem that Microsoft isn't competitive in the markets where "young, hip developers" are doing things? They don't have a competitive smartphone OS right now, and likely won't anytime soon. That's where the exciting development is happening. So they're not a player.
If you're a developer looking to do smartphone apps, are you really going to target Windows Mobile? If so, which version? The obsolete one, or the one that isn't out yet? It's not a serious option at this point. So to say they lost developers for some reason is kind of silly, since it's not a problem with their developer outreach or their tools. They haven't given people something to develop FOR.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Voltaire can suck on my balls! -- Paul Finch
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
What is all this bitching about the price of tools, with MSDN out there for almost nothing? Frankly, if you dont have $2K for an Enterprise MSDN licensing, you really have no business doing a start up, do you? Beyond that, knowing Microsoft, if you have a good idea, you hardly pay for anything, ever. (Disclaimer, I'm a former MS employee) When I did my startup, having access to the tools as an MS Partner cost me practically nothing. Where there is a will, there is a way.....
As someone who is currently trying to marry .net and C++/COM, I can tell you that I have never felt more hatred for Microsof and their crap. I can't believe I yearn for the simpler days of the Win32 API with all their associated baggage left over from trying to keep compatible with the Win-freaking-16 API, which I remember swearing at then too (MFC only hid the "big" APIs, but anything non-GUI related meant you were likely to pull out the MSDN library discs).
Having worked with Linux/Unix in C/C++ the joy is knowing that the API is *stable*; malloc() hasn't changed in what, 30+ years?? I can pull out programming books bought at second-hand stores from the 80s and still make use of the code and concepts.
I would not recommend, at this point, willingly starting any new project on Windows unless there was an absolute need to somehow tie in with Office directly (and if all you need to do is create office docs, I'd go with Java's Poi library instead).
i wish microsoft only did what they do best, keyboards... and all startups could buy microsoft keyboards and run debian on their machines :)
If you want to write a C++ app in Visual Studio, the location of the additional directories for #includes is at the top of the C++ options. In the linker, the same option is somewhere towards the bottom. Why? Sounds small, but I'm already under the gun to get the code written and working, not futzing around with build settings.
Or how about, starting in either VS2005 or 2008 (can't remember which one), I opened up a project written in VC++6 and freaked when I suddenly started seeing hundred and hundreds of warnings, telling me that functions like strncat() (strncat!) were "unsafe" and I should use something like _strnscat or something like that, which supposedly was "more" safe at the cost of being totally Microsoft-specific. The problem was that you couldn't turn off these warnings in the general options, only per-project, which meant that I had to make stupid changes to stdafx.h just to turn off the warnings so that other developers wouldn't freak as well.
How about the auto-hide windows that seem to randomly decide to suddenly be pinned or to suddenly appear during unrelated actions?
When working with C#, the compiler and editor will give you a red squiggle under code it can't compile, but gives you know way to know where or how many places in the file they are (contrast: Eclipse puts a red box on the side for every line that is in error, which makes it very easy to find them).
Look, I'm a fan of Intellisense and all (when running on a powerful enough machine), but while VS2010 is "faster" than previous versions (almost as fast as VC++6), it purports to be a "rich" IDE that gets surprisingly sparse in places, and downright weird in others.
Visual Studio reminds me of guys who put racing stripes and thin tires and big mufflers on their Honda Civics and somehow convince themselves they've got a "race car".
for any company who abuses their position to extract unreasonable profits from their customers. People will only put up with it until there are viable alternatives, and by that point, it is far too late; nothing will be able to offset the accumulated hostility.
Other companies that appear to be following this path are Oracle and Apple. You simply can't jerk people around forever without consequence.
I my not be hip, but I'm 27, and I enjoy .net programming immensely. C#, unlike Java, favors practicality over ideology. Partial classes, lambda functions, anonymous delegates, and extension methods are an anethema to OOP, but they're practical and, dare I say it, kind of fun. Java is a lumbering retarded beast, python has scalability issues, and perl is illegible. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of FOSS software, but MS has done a good job with its dev tools.
Not really. C# is the cleanest language I've ever coded in.
oh, so you are new to programming. got it. ;)
I work at a 100% Linux company, but was thrust into the world of MSFT for one day today with some business partners. The one partner was busy trying to deal with a dead Exchange server; he'll be driving straight to the customer site and rebuilding it from scratch... a long night ahead.
The other partner was also having Exchange server hiccups. And one person's laptop got in a snit and refused to work. A reboot elicited about a dozen scary warnings about missing DLLs until finally it booted to the point where it could limp along.
And I realized that our on-the-cheap FOSS infrastructure is not only way cheaper than MSFT, but vastly more stable and reliable. I'd really hate to be stuck in the Windows world for more than a day; the nimble FOSS users are going to be the death knell for uncompetitive companies still stuck on MSFT.
That's just not true! *I* like Microsoft!
Ok, I'm not that young--I'm 47. And I'm not that hip either.
For mobile, it doesn't help that Microsoft has been all over the map in regards to the Windows Phone 7 SDK.
Want to know when the Beta SDK is coming out or any idea of our roadmap? Too bad.
Want dev hardware? Post a video of your app and someone might contact you. "We're not going to carpet bomb phones [like Google]"
Want to use the compass? Not this time.
Want to leverage your C++ code? Nope, sorry.
Want to get video from the camera? Again, not this time.
Want to use pixel shaders? Nope.
You installed the latest version of Expression Blend? Ohh, sorry, the Windows Phone SDK doesn't support it yet. Soon. We promise. Really.
Microsoft has one of the best development environments available, but at least in mobile, they have lost their way badly.
It's a magical and revolutionary flatulence platform!
MS has so many problems with FOSS, some of them major.
1. FOSS is free as in beer. And it is eternally free. Software developers, with the possible exception of ($LANGUAGE developers), aren't stupid - there is some IQ floor involved in software development. Even if you give crippleware away, developers know that if they use your stuff it is going to eventually cost them. And if they can get something of near equivalent functionality that is FOSS, they don't have to deal with ever paying the piper. That's more margin for you and yours.
This helps if you are a startup, if you just want to experiment, or if you want to sneak something in at work and not have to ask to spend money. Strange but true - it's orders of magnitude easier to get money from a boss in the form of time to work on something than it is to get authorization to spend equivalent actual dollars on it.
2. FOSS is open source by definition. If you come across some future unanticipated problem, there is potential to hack it until it does if you have the skills.
3. Most FOSS has no vendor lock in (other than stuff like MySQL). Meaning, your development platform can't jerk the rug out from under you by deciding that you are now going to use DAO or ADO, or .NET, or however they've decided to screw you over by obsoleting the work you've done. No vendor lock-in also means they can't dangle you upside down and see how much money falls out.
4. FOSS is often good, and keeps getting better because people keep contributing to it. Once you have used a bit of FOSS, you are often astounded by the quality and that encourages you to use more of it. And that experience leads a person to totally dispense with the "free = crap" heuristic. It's like drinking water from some unspoiled rainforest stream - it is both free and better than the commercial alternative. After a while your own heuristic becomes - "1. Search the FOSS world first. 2. If the best of what you find works well, stop looking."
5. FOSS has a passionate community. If you want help and can google, there is usually a good community around whatever FOSS it is you are interested in. In a genuine community, there is rarely a conflict between the creator of the software and the interests of the community. With a commercial solution, there is always that conflict - users want to pay less money, vendors need money to live.
6. FOSS is hassle free - you want to try it or use it, you just download it. You still have to learn how to use it, but that is no different from a proprietary solution.
7. FOSS OS (and non-MS OS) are renowned for being more stable, secure, powerful and easier to install than Windows once you know how. These attributes suit developers. Running FOSS on top of a FOSS OS is usually easier to install and use, better integrated, and more powerful. There is a virtuous circle going on there.
8. FOSS is trustworthy - you can see the code yourself, and fork it if you want. You may never do this but you know you can, and so do other people.
Why else does MS have a problem? Because university students WILL be exposed to some FOSS software if they do anything related to software. They will use commercial stuff too, but very likely they will learn many of the lessons above. At that point they've already swallowed the red pill. Even if they don't get exposure there their guru friends probably use FOSS.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Please... He is Gandhi not Ghandi (I cannot understand why most Americans use this spelling though).
I've noticed a new blog and twitter meme of people publicly rage quitting .NET. Most of it seems to surround the fact that MS will create their own subpar implimentation of a popular .NET open source project instead of putting their weight behind it (Creating Entity Framework instead of support NHibernate, Creating ASP.NET MVC instead of supporting Rails on Iron Ruby, creating Razor instead of supporting Spark).
"the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them." problematic for most people. I dont like paying $400 for Word (and 3 other programs I might not use, ever). When I can just use Abiword.
- -= Napalm means serious BBQ =-
During my degree in computer science, for third year we were all turning up at computing expo's and fairs looking for an industrial placement year but when we spoke to Microsoft they were arrogant and rude. The said basically not to bother applying, the odds of getting something are so remote you would have to be beyond amazing and we don't think you are, same goes for any post graduation placements. Needless to say, we applied to companies that actually wanted to work some of the next generation of software developers instead.
That is so not how to do it. They should learn from drug dealers: "Hey kid. First hit is free." :P
After all, who would want to *plan* to use expensive, crappy malware for a college degree and a profession AND fill out endless forms with possible gotchas? Perhaps a future BP manager [they do use MSFT extensively too]? (imagined ad: "You too can use our software to destroy a chunk of the planet"}
According to Tim O'Reilly, who is quoted heavily in the article, he didn't say hardly anything attributed to him.
http://www.google.com/buzz/timoreilly/j61qZ42h6rB/Frustrated-by-flamebait-NY-reporting-in-Microsoft
(Which, if you've had any interaction with him you probably already knew or at least suspected.)
There is nothing new under the sun and every story that could ever be told already has.
______
Those of you who know me in even the most casual way may be shocked to hear me say: I want to do some programming in Windows.
One would think that one would simply go out and download a compiler and an SDK (a bit fat wad of compiler headers, link libraries, and documentation) -- or perhaps buy a CD-ROM containing same -- and you'd be completely set to develop any kind of Windows application.
You'd be wrong.
What's available is a hopelessly confusing mashup of tools to develop native applications, VisualBASIC applications, .NET virtual machine applications, Web applications (for IIS only, natch), database-driven applications and, if you're very nice and pay lots of money, Microsoft Office plugins. And, just to make it hard, all these tools are hidden underneath a cutesy Integrated Development Environment which passively-aggressively makes it as cumbersome as possible to figure out what's actually going on under the hood -- you know, the sorts of things a professional programmer would want to know.
Okay, fine, just give me the tools and docs to develop native C/C++ apps. "Oh, no no no," says Microsoft, twirling its moustache, "You have to pick one of our product packages." Packages? "Oh, yes, there's Visual Studio Express, Visual Studio Standard, Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio Team System, and Visual Studio Grand Marquess with Truffles and Cherries."
After looking at the six-dimensional bullet chart of features, I think that Visual Studio Express may get the job done, since it comes with a C/C++ compiler and will compile native apps. "Quite so," says Microsoft whilst placing a postage stamp on a foreclosure notice, "provided you're only writing console apps -- you know, programs that run in a command window. If you want to develop full Windows GUI apps, then you'll need additional libraries which aren't necessarily included with Visual Studio Express."
Ah, so VS Express will only let me develop "toy" applications and, if I want to do anything more advanced, I should download and install the complete Windows SDK which, amazingly, is free. "Well, you could do that," says Microsoft after tying Nell to the sawmill. "But the SDK doesn't really integrate very well with the IDE. And there's still some link libraries which only ship with Visual Studio Standard or better."
Fine. I'll look at buying Visual Studio Standard. And then maybe I can get to improving this device driver. "Device driver!?" says Microsoft, blotting the blood spatters off its hat. "Heavens, no, that's not included with anything. You need to download and install the Driver Development Kit for that. And you may or may not need the DDK for each version of Windows you intend to support. Not to worry, however; they're all free downloads..."
*fume* And people wonder why I've avoided this clusterfuck for the last 25 years. Ever since the Visual Studio 6 days, I've been smacked in the face with this braindamage every time I've tried doing the slightest exploration of Windows development.
So: Can anyone with modest Windows development experience tell me what Visual Studio flavor to get and which addons to download if I want to:
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Is MS losing money ?
"Microsoft reports first YoY revenue slide in company history" ...so I guess that would be a "yes".
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/04/24/microsoft-reports-first-yoy-revenue-slide-in-company-history/
no longer the biggest software company in the world ?
As of close on Tuesday 6 Jul 2010:
Microsoft market cap: 208.75B
Apple market cap:226.24B
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?d=v1&s=MSFT,AAPL ...so I'm guessing that one's a "yes", too...
retrenching ?
Well, you got me on this one. I guess if they were actually retrenching, they wouldn't be reporting losses in revenue or be only the second largest software company in the world. So that one's a "no".
Possibly they should get off their butts, and instead of throwing the chair they were sitting on, they should actually retrench.
-- Terry
Aren't the "Young" and "Hip" developers usually the douchebags who collect a check until they complete whatever it is they are personally working on and then they quit and create a shitty startup company whose entire purpose is to be bought out by Microsoft/Google/Apple so they can retire early?
Young, Hip does not necessarily mean good.
Don't get me wrong, msft has it's strengths, but hip? Msft might have been considered more "hip" than IBM, as recently as 1983 - maybe.
Msft products are like business supplies. Msft sells a lot of very ordinary software - and that is something to be proud of - but msft was never really "hip."
Precisely. Microsoft lost on two counts, both self-imposed, and they are getting what they deserve.
They emphasized crap to lock users in instead of real cutting edge development, which is not fun for developers or users, and which generates crap code, twisted beyond comprehension, byzantine, ugly. IBM had this same problem as a result of their anti-trust shenanigans, and apparently Microsoft chose to repeat history.
Microsoft also emphasized control freakery beyond all reason, in addition to the twiddly feature lockin, what with siccing the BSA on "pirates", horrible copy protection, license verification requiring internet access to run, on and on, making use of their software more and more hassle. The message was clear -- go somewhere else.
People would put up with either of these to some extent, but the combination made them simply not worth the hassle. Crap products which make life difficult are dead products.
All they had to do was stay bleeding edge, drop the lockin featuritis, and compete on quality. They'd have the market sewn up.
Infuriate left and right
There are lots of cool things to do as desktop applications. But the easy and useful ones have been done.
Want to write a better word processor? Users will expect it to be at least as good as OpenOffice even if you give it away. If you want to charge for it, it needs to be better than Word.
How about a 3D animation program? Big job. Yours has to be at least as good as Blender, and if you want to sell it, up there with Maya.
CAD? You're competing with SolidWorks, Inventor, and ProEngineer. Yes, there are small startups in CAD; check out OpenMind, makers of HyperMill. That's how good a new desktop program has to do to make it today.
Nobody is going to buy your IRC chat client as a desktop app.
"We did not get access to kids as they were going through college"
At any university I've ever been, any university student or faculty can effectively get Microsoft software for free. Microsoft reps and speakers visit campuses frequently. There are Microsoft ads everywhere. What kind of access do they think they "didn't get"?
If students aren't choosing their products, it's not for lack of access or lack of money.
Your developer is shitty in many languages, and has mastered none. A jack of all trades who does nothing really well.
If you want to know why the Kin failed, go look here at engadget. It's a far more interesting read and you might actually learn something about office politics at companies as large as Microsoft. I'm all for hating on [Insert large tech company] but I expect more out of Slashdot than reporting on some tool of an article.
Okay, I fucked up. And you know, I learned something today: Pepsi is the choice of a new generation.
... old, hippie developers.
Have gnu, will travel.
I see Microsoft (and Apple, and a few others) as wanting to get us locked into their way of doing things
That's true of Microsoft, but not of Apple. That's why Apple can succeed in the long run. You look at something like the iPhone development platform, and see only lockdown and lock-in. But you are totally overlooking the fact that Apple is a major contributor to Webkit (which almost everyone uses), they are a major factor in advancing HTML 5, they install Apache on every OS X box, along with all of the UNIX tools.
You should consider the whole of what a company contributes to the greater computing community. It makes a ton of sense to use FOSS on the server side and even some desktop use, but consider supporting Apple (and companies like them) to some degree because open software and for-profit companies can greatly benefit each other.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
oh wait, 99% of job's ask for .net experience.
honestly some people will sit there and tell you the sky is purple when it's clearly blue....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
> moved on to the next "big shiny thing"
Do you think that MS doesn't move to 'the next "big shiny thing"' ?
Microsoft pushed: BASIC, COBOL (1978-198?), Pascal (1980-198?), GWBASIC, C (after they bought Lattice C), C++, Visual BASIC, MS Java (with extensions), and now C#.
They probably alreay have some new language ready to push out when (a) developers tire of C#, and/or (b) there are several implementations that don't require Windows.
In other news, young, hip developers are having a hard time finding work in corporate America.
I don't mean that NYT was talking about a shift to Apple development. I mean that Apple recognized the growing apathy towards MS.
MS has been seen to be tired, unimaginative and lacking innovation to developers for the last decade or so. They have shown innovation in lobbying, litigation, and a sense of fairplay that would be an Uraguay defender blush; but those only score marks in the douchebag category.
Apple leaped on this with its ads, hoping to capture both fed up users, and instill a sense of cachet towards its brand. I think it did a pretty good job with that. Its hard to see how the "I'm a douchebag and Windows 7 was my idea" will have any reverberation; but some people still think that 2-for-1 is a bargain (Miller, before he became an outright douchebag, quipped "If they really wanted to fuck you, they would make you take 3") so what do I know.
Windows Viagra, I mean Windows 8, is just around the corner...
WINDOW REFLECTION: So! Heading toward work?
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: Uh, yeah! [nods head a little incredulously, as if his reflection really has nerve taunting him]
WINDOW REFLECTION: You going to ask them this time?
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: About what?
WINDOW REFLECTION: Our dysfunctional operating system!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: Ssssh, no! I don't want to talk about it!
WINDOW REFLECTION: Look, you're not alone. Millions of Windows users have complained to their bosses!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: [skeptically] I don't know.
WINDOW REFLECTION: We can do this!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: [pauses... then nods and smiles] OK.
Boss dramatization... followed by developer giving reflection a high-five.
Talking to your boss about Windows may be the last thing you want to do. But it's definitely a conversation worth having. Zillions of people have had their Windows talk. When you're ready for yours, you'll find helpful tips for complaining to your boss about Windows, on the Internet. Ask your doctor if you're healthy enough for Linux. Do not use Linux if you don't know what you're doing as kernel panics may result from an unsafe kernel recompilation. Side effects may include headache, patching, purchasing expensive Macs, and spending hours into the night talking to geeks on abnormal web sites. To avoid long term bricking, seek immediate help on the Internet for a reboot that lasts longer than four hours. Stop using Linux and buy a sleek silver MacBook right away if you experience a sudden decrease or loss of sex appeal. Talk to your boss today and ask if Linux is right for you!
[New Linux developer looks at reflection, smiling and nodding asynchronously]
"PHP is better than any .net crap."
ASP.NET is better than PHP. Write it down.
I don't know anything about desktop software. Last desktop app i wrote was for a big telecom company. Looked like crap. Was probably supposed to so I can't judge QT.
I can, however use my knowledge of your previous completely retarded statement to determine that the rest of your post is garbage.
Do you know what Linq to SQL is? If you don't then the next time a discussion about .NET do us a favor and shut the fuck up. The topic of this story is .NET - not the sub-par half-baked free solutions you are so fond of.
Linq to SQL lets you write SQL database code in free-form c#. It is the most useful thing to ever stand between a developer and a database. None of the free stuff has anything close to as useful. Believe me when I say that ASP.NET, C#, SQL are worth the licensing costs.
...the more young developers will slip through your fingers.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
What is wrong with the rest of us not so young and hip? Us older developers can run rings around the young hip developers and write better quality code with more features and faster and as few security flaws as possible.
Yes we do FOSS as well, but will write for Microsoft if they stop this stupid stuff that only the young and hip can write software for their "copycat" cell phone technology, etc. :)
Heck us older developers can mentor the young and hip ones to become better and do what we do, without making all the mistakes we made as young and hip developers 10 or 20 years ago. Why is it that only the hipe and young developers get the grants, loans, and investment money to start up software companies and they are usually 20 something men fresh out of college that learned the theories but lack real world experience, common sense, learning form our mistakes, and the knowledge of at lears 37 to 49 different programming languages and the patterns of analysis and design an research and we can adapt to any computer platform, any language, and any framework and 20 something code monkeys would rather sit at a computer all day and troll the Internet instead of working harder and smarter like us older developers. Also why does Microsoft and Apple only target male developers and forget about the female ones out there also needing grants, loans, and investment money for their own software companies? Women can program just as much as men can, and the young hip 20 something men make fun of women and say negative things about them (we never did at that age) and then whine about not being able to date a woman and never having sex. Shoot just stop the female trolling and bashing and treat women as equals and not sex objects and as human beings and maybe you'll meet the right woman some day. But honestly this younger generation has more technology and opportunities that we older developers had at their age. But they waste it with stuff that don't even matter in the real world. Don't get me started, alright?
P.S. Get off my lawn you young punks! :)
P.P.S. Hey hey you you get off of my cloud computing!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
comes around, as they say.
When trying to lock people in to your products and culture you must be careful so as not isolate yourself and lock yourself out of the rest of the community. Seems MS has been so tightly focused on product and student lock-in (the latter should probably be called "student hijacking") for a very long time now and now they've looked up and opened their eyes and suddenly noticed, "shit, where is everyone??". They've discovered that they've locked themselves in all alone... fallen prey to their own agenda you might say.
I don't know if that's why their losing ground but it seems like every day I run into some little annoyance or another that MS has INTENTIONALLY placed there as a form of lock in. None of them are big deals individually but there's a cumulative effect at work. I mean, I run into plenty of problems in the Free Software world as well but I don't usually get the feeling like someone is actively trying to make my life harder than it has to be.
We tried this via the Dotcom era of the 1990's and it bit us all on the butt and burst the Dotcom bubble as the young and hip developers got their businesses and lacked a business plan.
Laurel & Hardy - Another Fine Mess no doubt they are too young to get the reference of Laurel and Hardy Dotcom business plans and business management many young and hip developers use to run businesses.
"Well this is another fine mess you've gotten us into! Hrrrrmmmphm!" -Ollie
"I'm sorry Ollie, all I wanted was to take shortcuts in learning programming and then earn a living writing code that was 'good enough' to compile without any errors. I didn't mean to crash any servers or workstations, I didn't mean to write bloated code, I only did what IT managers and vice presidents like you told me to do anyway. But now I got laid off and replaced with H1b Visa Workers who earn minimum wage and do an even worse job than me." -Stan
"Well Stan now the shareholders are pissed off at me due to all the loss in value of stock, and now they discovered that I cooked the books and I'm about to get indicted. But watch as I pull an Enron and escape to the Cayman Islands where I moved all my money to an anonymous bank account there. I'd take you with me, but I left forged documents putting all the blame on you and many others. The customers are all pissed off as nothing works right and is slow and crashes too often. But as David Wong said 'What is the difference between legally gotten gains and ill-gotten gains?' nothing really as the company was just another one of my Ponzi schemes. Plus I made so much money with trading carbon credits I printed up myself. Nice knowing you Stan, don't drop the soap in the federal prison showers." -Ollie
"What did I do to deserve this Ollie? You promised me I'd get rich if I only did what you told me to do. Why can't you take me with you?" -Stan
"Well Stan, you are the fall guy for my crimes, a scape goat. The public needs someone to blame, might as well be you. Besides not like the public really knows what is going on or that I rehired you and promoted you to CIO at the last minute and you never did those things and I and Marice Strong and Dick Cheney did them all and blamed you for it. Enjoy The Great Collapse of the world economy and world civilization as I buy up a small island and live like an emperor for the rest of my life as most of the planet suffers." -Ollie
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
It's not just the awkward technology, lack of attention to detail, or cost of its software that makes people dislike Microsoft. People and organizations are resentful of needing to purchase fixes for features that were advertised. Bug fixes shouldn't need to occur but if they do, why should organizations and individuals pay again to make systems operate as advertised? People willingly pay for innovation but will move on if taken advantage of, regardless of the cost. Even business and government are running from MS or making plans to do so. Microsoft's stock performance over the last 10 years is a good indicator of its increasing irrelevence.
Microsoft's development tools are worth the price.
$2000? That's a bargain. I made myself a ton of money this year with that software. Sure, I pirated my home copy but I can think of several companies whose legally purchased copies of Visual Studio write whatever software they needed.
If I start a business, I'll ask M$ for the $300 copy of all their super expensive and incredibly useful sofware. A guy I know in real life actually managed to get that deal. Took a few phone calls, turning in to a real company with a real website etc.. but he did it without much trouble at all.
Microsoft software development tools are worth the money.
What about me? I'm an old, hip developer (40's), and they lost me about 15 years ago, about the time the great and powerful (most powerful operating system microsoft had ever created at the time) Windows 95(tm) came out. Why it beat everything that ever came before it! Everyone (except me) jumped aboard! I had seen AmigaDos 10 years earlier, and was spoiled by the (relative) stability I had seen earlier. OS/2 was maximally stable and rock solid, but seriously dominated by IBM. Free Software was stable, powerful, and not a walled garden (Hello Apple, IBM, Microsoft ...oh and lets give a shout to Sony too). I'm not surprised that young developers are going the way they are. Microsoft was hiring outside the US and offering H1B's ten years ago. They found it was cheaper to set up shop in India. Maharaja Gates complained that it was getting hard to get H1B's in the US 10 years ago. About that time, Ballmer got all sweaty and chanted Developers, Developers, Developers (etc.). Later, he threw a chair.
Since when is having revenue that is less than last year but still positive considered "losing money"?
Ever since publicly held companies have been valued in terms of earnings per share and profit per employee. The second you can do something about short term by firing people (this is what Word Perfect, Inc. did right before the acquisition by Novell, Inc., to inflate the offering price: cut all R&D and fire everyone not contributing to the short term bottom line). The first you can deal with maybe once by trading cash on hand for a stock buyback, or by doing a reverse split... after that, you are out of ammunition and in the same boat two quarters later. If your value is going down by either of those measures, then your stock price will shortly follow it down.
Or if you want a more cynical answer, ever since RIAA and MPAA started claiming that their decreased revenues were from piracy rather than market saturation and/or their products sucking, and declared they were "losing money to pirates".
-- Terry
Talking about too many version of everything, They keep coming out with new versions of .Net even before most companies have the chance to move to the latest version and with each new version they want you to do everything differently.
.Net 3.5 which was 1 year ago, now 4.0 is out and it is deprecated, now you are supposed to use their entity framework.
The most ridiculous example is LINQ to SQL, it came out with
There is also the central contact storage in Vista and Windows 7 and 6 months after the original programming interface came out it was deprecated. I haven't been able to figure out if they've replaced the interface with another API, or if the contact storage is just there for "Legacy" support. Personally I thought that was one of the few properly thought out things in Vista.
The other problem is that the developer tools are not really cheap, sure if you want this limited functionality it isn't bad, but every 2-3 years they have a new version of Visual Studio out. Microsoft has already said they want to go to a yearly subscription where you are forced to use the latest of their products, but I've already commented on how are you supposed to build a house on quicksand.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Reason, shoddy APIs, protocols which were undocumented for tales for more than a decade, screwing them over with IE for 10 years until the pain become almost unbearable, screwing their own dev houses over by discontinuing popular product lines or making them entirely incompatible etc...
I still wonder why there still are people happiliy using their stuff in the dev world, seems sort of like masochism to me (I want to use Microsoft software because I feel happy to be screwed backwards every 5-6 years and I love the enduring pain IE induces)
So, I joined a startup about 2002, and we decided to grow organically. Growth has been solid and almost swift: 25%-70% per year. When we started, cash was crazy tight, since I was working after work hours and on weekends and funding everything myself. So, I got the cheapest thing I could find that would qualify as "our server" (a 1U PIV with generic parts) and got everything else for free with the Linux ISO. LAPP (Postgres/PHP) and we are good to go, with no worries about growth or licenses down the road.
So now, here we are, 8 years later. The company is now working towards its 2nd million in value, and the growth ratio is starting to get a bit crazy - after rapid growth in the beginning and a few years of weak growth, our curve is picking up again sharply. And now, the licensing savings are really starting to pay off.
I can take a disk image of any of our production servers, reload the database(s) and tweak a few settings (like IP address and/or host name) to roll out another system. Hassle? No. I can build an image just by re-enabling Raid 1 on an otherwise active partition and have my new server up, pre-configured. Total time per system might be 1 or 2 hours, without incurring any downtime, licensing costs, or (possibly most importantly) any licensing headaches.
And all this, for software that confidently works reliably, 24x7/365 with less than 0.05% downtime per server per year with reasonable quality hardware. Only an idiot would think this is anything less than a very, very good idea.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
So, just use PyQt. The bindings are mature and a joy to use - they even allow you to apply some Pythonic idioms, instead of having to conform to the rigid underlying C++ type system.
Or use Qt4-QtRuby.
require 'Qt4'
app = Qt::Application.new ARGV
button = Qt::PushButton.new '&Close Me'
Qt::Object.connect button, SIGNAL('clicked()'), button, SLOT( 'close()' )
button.show
app.exec
Worse, they killed off one of the best and longest running games franchises ever. Flight Sim X was a disaster, but canning it was a worse mistake - all that development talent scattered....and that's after trying to milk it. FS2004 had a kiosk mode for use in museums and displays. FSX removed it and had a license that didn't allow such use. Says a lot about what's been happening in Microsoft.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Yes, call me old fashioned, but developing is about the creation of solution to software problems using tools that are best for the job - if you want "young and hip" then go join a rock band or something...
There are two major problems with the younger generation today:
1. Everything has to be fashionable in order to impress one's peers, and
2. Everything has to be "interactive" - what the f*** is so wrong with just sitting down and ***LISTENING*** to a piece of music without having to mess about with it?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
You're joking, but it's true: "pirated" software competes with free software, which is why companies like Microsoft would rather you pirate their software than use someone else's software.
That implies that we need more free mass culture (counterculture if you will), especially music and movies, to loosen the stranglehold various industry associations have on our freedom.
The champions of hackerdom in this century will be the CC authors. Hooray for Indies!
And where is all the money these days? Not in open source development. Large companies don't want to step into the legal pitfalls introduced by open source code -- many are having to re-evaluate their use of open source products (BusyBox, I'm looking at you) because some fanatic, raving open source developers are sending the attack dogs after companies that they perceive may be using their software inappropriately, even if that company follows the letter and spirit of the open source licenses their products use. When you buy a tool from Microsoft, or any other large vendor, you at least know that you'll be able to release your product without somebody coming to you years later, begging for a handout that flies in the face of the license you agreed to use the software under in the first place.
(Disclaimer: I'm an embedded Linux developer, so I have experience with these issues first hand. Linux, especially in the embedded world, has its place, but I wouldn't touch it, or any other open source software, for higher level development.)
Slahsdot commentary on this story is like Fox News commentary on Democrats - "Fair and Balanced".
this is where "sudden outbreak of common sense" tag should be used
Im a 20 year old .NET developer, and I can assure you, there is no such thing as a "young, hip developer."
What with all the business lost by Microsoft to the legit open source and free software vendors, it's a sure bet that Microsoft will again send out it's pushers to pass out free candy and dope (copies of windoze and developer tools/suites/whatever) to all the young kids, get them hooked on windoze stuff then start charging them for it. That's what happened years ago during the Win3.xx dayz. Ruined a lot of lives, left a lot of programmers with bitter and broken spirits, a lot of good apps went bad, a lot of people suffered with crapware, standards and users were violated, and a lot of money was wasted.
As a recovered, former Windoze programmer, I say that the youth of today should save their health and sanity, and Just Say No!
me. --a by-product of public education
Never.
What Microsoft and Apple do is their version of a growing market niche. Devs who have been around for awhile can rehash the thousands of broken "The Next Version of Windows will have..." promises and probably dust off a couple of mp3 players that were years earlier than the iPod. They advertise their "new" product pretending they invented the niche. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Apple's innovators/developers are crushed.
Today's lesson: Microsoft and Apple will gladly steal their developers lunch money (that's your livelihood) AND lock you out of the market segment should the young developer's market niche grow large enough. Most young devs haven't learned this lesson yet, but they get a sense of it when working with Microsoft and Apple tools.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
A few years ago I was building a team to build a system (Pando, http://www.pando.com/ that needed to be efficient and small on both Mac and Windows (i.e. C++ code), plus a Java server side. I talked to plenty of recent graduates of CS programs, and it was easy to staff the server side work (Java, PHP), and at least find people who wanted to learn Mac development (ObjC), but nobody knew anything about C++/Win32 or was even willing to learn it. Luckily I found a fantastic old-school developer who did a great job, but it was quite an eye opener to find that schools weren't training CS students anything about what I thought was Microsoft's core asset (Win32).
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
All I and I am not alone here, the employees are only caring about their promotions, Career Stage Profiles is all we care about, why? Because if we do not get a promotion in the standard curve time, WE GET FIRED.
Fuck the product fuck the company, promote me, I just dance about in front of my manaager to get a freakin promotion. You really think I care about the product or corp? wise up. I take their money and run to the bank, and dance for my promotions.
I am not shitting you, it is true.
Microsoft is about promotions, not the product.
HIP? Never heard of that language. Another Java clone?
Reply to That ||
Ok pop quiz, people. Is the above person a young hip developer, or a douchebag?
Anyone who actually believes they're hip is, ipso facto, a douchebag.
People with real lives are too busy actually doing things to worry if they're "hip" or not.
Hip developers? HIP? HAAAAAA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! WOOOOO-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh stoppit yer killin me!
how is that news? was there ever even a *moment* where microsoft was "cool"? I misread the headline as "Microsoft Out of Favor With Hung Developers", which made just as little sense and would have been just as little newsworthy. so please give me back the 5 seconds it took me to read it and the 15 minutes it took me to type up this response!
XNA Game Studio is Free. VPL, Free. DirectX, Free. What are they talking about?
Um, no, it's really not like being pregnant at all. Being pregnant truly is a yes/no proposition - you are or you aren't. The cost of something, however, is not binary - it's a continuous variable. And demand for products varies pretty smoothly with price per Econ 101. Sure, free is marginally cooler than $.01. $.01 is marginally cooler than $.02. But it's certainly not the case that free == totally cool and $.01 == totally uncool.
As to the specifics here: if a startup really has so little money that they can't come up with $200 after two years in operation, they might as well throw in the towel. I'm entirely onboard with the idea that you shouldn't spend money for something if you don't need to, but come on - this really is essentially free. How is a company with finances that tight making payroll?
Microsoft's program to seed start-ups with its software for free requires the fledgling companies to meet certain guidelines and jump through hoops to receive software
Could there possibly be a better way to kill off innovation?
We must have presence in all startups.
Why?
Because that's where new original thinking outside the box happens!
Well, how do we do that?
First, we make them conform...
Game over, man!
Give me a *nix command line over .net shit any day
Java development? There's Eclipse or NetBeans or etc.
Free software offers many quality choices that in general play nicely with one another.
Microsoft is designed to play only with itself and it barely does that successfully.
Microsoft's embedding into the business community has set business back 10 years.
It's time for MS to die. There's 100 better OSs than Microsoft can build.
And on and on /diatribe
Process for other players: 1) get music into your computer 2) plug in device 3) drag files to device. Process for iPod: 1) get music into your computer 2) plug in device 3) There is no step 3. If you only want certain songs on the iPod, you do have the extra step of making a playlist, but that's no harder than selecting and dragging files into folders on other devices.
There are some legit criticisms of the Apple method of doing this - but you've got to admit that it's not any HARDER to get music on and off an iPod than any other device. In fact, I can't imagine how it could be any easier.
these days most 'young' 'cool, hip' developers actually understand about debugging and testing.
a decent version of visual studio, with proper debugging, profiling and testing support costs $1400 AU
which is probably $1800 US.
These features are not even in the 'professional' version of visual studio.
This attitude, that professionals don't need to test, debug, or profile their code, explains why Windows is the way it is.
They lost developers with the murder of Visual Basic 6 and the creation of that "dot net" bloated crap. AND, at the same time they tried to make developers into "partners" which are nothing more than Microsoft salespeople. Developers ARE NOT sales people and will never be.