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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.)
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
More, exotic fart apps is what we now expect from this new generation of HIP programmers.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's when they actually lost all the "young, hip developers".
Not really. C# is the cleanest language I've ever coded in. It's the libraries that are fucked up: the .NET base libraries are basically the managed versions of the Win32 platform.
Compare Qt, which is built on C++ (their greatest flaw), but actually do magic along the nice library to make manual garbage collection look easy, and have an event system which is multithreaded by default. With Qt, C++ looks more like a scripting language (with the byte-level stuff available if you need it), which is exactly what .NET would have needed to do.
As much as I dislike MS, this is a case of "never blame malice for what can adequately be blamed on stupidity".
Microsoft designed a single user OS with no in built security in a time where networks were rare and have been forced to continue on with it by their customer base. All security ended up being tacked on because MS cant afford to kill legacy applications. I really don't think anyone at MS wants Windows to be insecure, it just happened that way and now they have to live with it.
This, the entire article is not news and I think this sums it up nicely. For a long time now the innovative people have used OSS whilst the people who just want to bring product X to market used MS.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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
Win32 makes me want to gouge my eyes out where as .NET libraries cause no such adverse reaction.
Told you C# was a cleaner language :)
But seriously, try coding a week in Qt/C++. You'll learn what a decent library should look like. As for Qt's worst weakness: you'll have to deal with templates and the resulting error messages your compiler generates. (And $DEITY help you if you mess up in something 'moc' will generate code from).
Interestingly, Qt may be for most cases actually better than managed environments: `deleteLater()` only fires when the event loop finishes: implicitly, when the CPU is idle (of course the .NET gc may do the same thing, but it's not guaranteed). Of course this requires you know what you're doing, but that's C++ for you.
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.
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.
It's not just about having good polished development tools, it also about vendor lock-in and cross-platform ability. Lots of companies are moving over to Linux and .NET doesn't exactly play well there. There is Mono of course but there are potentially serious legal issues and I suspect many companies are quite dubious about using it.
.NET platform is very nice indeed. The Generics in .NET put Java's to shame. If Microsoft had actually open-sourced .NET it would probably have blown Java out of the water. But they didn't and they probably won't. When it comes to the mobile phone arena and its numerous operating systems, the lack of cross-platform ability becomes even more of a problem. Microsoft has never been into making their tools cross-platform because their real interest is in promoting their own platform. As long as they continue down that route, I think the user base of their development tools will continue to dwindle.
C# and much of the
And again I have to point out, MOST =/= ALL, Microsoft's version of 'Open' =/= Open.
Just read their EULA's - Only for use as a reference, can't make your own implementation, you can't sue them if you read the source code and find out they use your patents. If they sue you for the same reason (patents) and you counterclaim with your own, your license ends right there.
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