Slashdot Mirror
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.)
Are you kidding? Just last week the NYT had an entire column dedicated to using the Google to keep kids off ones lawn.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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
I guess their definition of "hip" isn't. Free software?
True homosexual hipsters use mac and iPhone.
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?
True homosexual hipsters use mac and iPhone.
Hey, but I... oh.
You should check out MonoTouch and Unity. Apparently, you're already close to being an iPhone dev.
I totally hear you and feel your pain. I'm a .NET dev, and I am a near pariah for even suggesting that it's a decent solution. I nearly got my head taken off for suggesting to other Linux-based devs that perhaps we can do some tools in Mono.
And I get to sit around and watch them spend countless hours trying to write a stable sockets server, or write string.Split, or figuring out how to encode in UTF-8.
I'm with you. I'm C# all the way, Mono or .NET stack. It's just a very decent language that is highly versatile.
Burma Shave (tm)
That's just insane. Did you really think about the risk of infecting all your porn files?
They must think it's like the 80's with that Huey Lewis and the News song "It's hip to throw chairs"
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
For my start-up, we just phoned our local MS sales rep and told him we were developing on Linux and were looking to build a interface layer to some MS servers, and what could they do? They sent us a full set of disks and license keys to a bunch of MS server apps, no questions asked.
Ultimately didn't help. Even with that 1st-rate support, it was still easier to just ditch the MS stuff entirely.
Hoo, boy, I can just see the next wave of Microsoft ads:
Most startups prefer to spend money on their core business instead of on Microsoft software...
90% of startups fail.
Buy from Microsoft!
if you know what's good for you
First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
First you copy this quote.
Then you paste it into the comment box.
Then you post the quote in any vaguely appropriate thread.
Then you get an instant +5 karma.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... old, hippie developers.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Capitol" investment is paying off your congressmen to maintain your monopoly. I think you mean "capital". Pedant++