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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.)

4 of 775 comments (clear)

  1. Re:An appropriate quote seems to be... by c6gunner · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    " We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do, only we believe that they would best serve these interests, which are as dear to us as to them, by advocating the purity of all races, and not one alone. We believe also that the white race of South Africa should be the predominating race."

        -- Ghandhi

  2. Re:Erm do any of you work in the software business by DaveV1.0 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    but for sheer market penetration & visibility, iPhone/Android & apps are way beyond what people do with Desktops now

    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.

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  3. Re:Fine with me... by DaveV1.0 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You act like people are getting rich writing apps for the iPhone and Android, but everything I have read says people are lucky to break even writing for either one or both.

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  4. Re:Misses the point by jgagnon · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I highly doubt desktops will die within 20 years (at least). People have been publicizing the death of books for decades and they'll still be around long after everyone currently reading Slashdot dies. Sometimes you just want to sit across a room and look at a big screen instead of sitting there fiddling with a little screen. Not everyone wants to stare at a tiny screen for hours. Seriously.

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