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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 has coding tools?
What is all this bitching about the price of tools, with MSDN out there for almost nothing? Frankly, if you dont have $2K for an Enterprise MSDN licensing, you really have no business doing a start up, do you? Beyond that, knowing Microsoft, if you have a good idea, you hardly pay for anything, ever. (Disclaimer, I'm a former MS employee) When I did my startup, having access to the tools as an MS Partner cost me practically nothing. Where there is a will, there is a way.....
"However, the way you get music on is a royal PITA. I mean, seriously, you have a closed, proprietary system, with strangely named files/folders."
Oh come on. They seem perfectly intelligible to me. I have no trouble navigating the filesystem to find a track, should that be necessary.
You'd have a point if iTunes arranged your files into a hierarchy of UUID-named items like you see in the Windows Registry, or something along those lines, rather than artist name, album name, etc.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
After all, who would want to *plan* to use expensive, crappy malware for a college degree and a profession AND fill out endless forms with possible gotchas? Perhaps a future BP manager [they do use MSFT extensively too]? (imagined ad: "You too can use our software to destroy a chunk of the planet"}
Open source. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.