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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.)

20 of 775 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The New York Times. by Itninja · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.
  2. Lure of free software? by Dunbal · · Score: 5, Funny

    But all my Microsoft software was fr.... uh, nevermind

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    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  3. A more appropriate quote seems to be... by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Funny

    Developers, developers, developers, developers!

    -Steve Ballmer

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    I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
    1. Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... by NNKK · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's when they actually lost all the "young, hip developers".

    2. Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... by PRMan · · Score: 4, Funny

      "Microsoft needs new developers that are hip, not developers that need a new hip."

      (An homage to my favorite joke on Home Improvement.)

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
    3. Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Screw you guys, I'm go'n home!

      -cartman

    4. Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... by Darinbob · · Score: 2, Funny

      You mean that at one time they actually _had_ young hip developers?

    5. Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... by silentcoder · · Score: 2, Funny

      > your IDE is defecating at all, I think that's a good sign you need to look around for a new one.

      Suddenly "core dumped" has taken on an altogether more sinister meaning...

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      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
    6. Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... by Jurily · · Score: 5, Funny

      How does a snarky comment about Ballmer's on-stage antics turn into anything regarding C#/.NET/C++/Qt?

      I was drunk last night, that's how.

    7. Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Funny

      Try coding in ObjectiveC and Cocoa for a week, you'll learn what a really good library looks like.

      No namespaces. More brackets than Lisp. Lame. ;)

  4. Re:The New York Times. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I guess their definition of "hip" isn't. Free software?

    True homosexual hipsters use mac and iPhone.

  5. Re:The New York Times. by sirrunsalot · · Score: 5, Funny

    True homosexual hipsters use mac and iPhone.

    Hey, but I... oh.

  6. Re:Fine with me... by caywen · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

  7. Re:An appropriate quote seems to be... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Burma Shave (tm)

  8. Re:Too narrow by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I just reformat every two months, practice safe clicking, and have a separate, isolated machine dedicated to porn and Adobe products.

    That's just insane. Did you really think about the risk of infecting all your porn files?

  9. Re:Bullshit by BlueStraggler · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  10. Re:Free by maugle · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  11. Re:An appropriate quote seems to be... by jollyreaper · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  12. Also ... by PPH · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... old, hippie developers.

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    Have gnu, will travel.
  13. Re:MSDN? Hello? by itsdrewmiller · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Capitol" investment is paying off your congressmen to maintain your monopoly. I think you mean "capital". Pedant++