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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.)
More, exotic fart apps is what we now expect from this new generation of HIP programmers.
well... I can't believe thats really *all* you have to pay... If you build the next facebook, and in 2 years you need 30k servers... you better believe MS is going to come after you for valid actual fully paid licenses... I have no clue how much that would cost... Licensing a small 30 person law firm costs 30k just for 3 servers and MS office... I can't even begin to fathom how much a datacenter full of web servers and SQL server would cost... well into the hundreds of millions... and you can bet MS will keep coming year after year after year.... They'll want you to upgrade the OS every 3-4 years, upgrade SQL server every 2-3 years... each time taking hundreds of millions of dollars from your pocket... and for what?!? FOSS solved these problems and solved them better 10 years ago...
MS licensing would have killed facebook, twiiter, and google. Probably yahoo, and just about anyone else too. When these businesses started taking off they were still venture funded, and they were adding hundreds if not thousands of machines a month. With that kind of scaling the doubling in cost for MS licensing would have bankrupted all of them before they had a chance to find a business model. No one building to scale on the web would ever choose MS, its far too expensive when you're talking about thousands of nodes.
The only major web company I know of that runs MS is eBay... and besides going public in the .com boom, I have no clue how they managed to afford the doubling of their startup costs that using MS means. Maybe they got some sort of sweetheart deal... but MS is notorious for doing a sweetheart deal to start, only to ruin your life when the rubber actually hits the road, trusting them with your business is foolish. eBay shareholders would probably be really happy if the capex going to MS stayed on eBay's bottom line...
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.
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.
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.