Slashdot Mirror
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.)
A qualified judge of what young, hip people are interested in.
First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
-- Ghandi.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
The microsoft software stack is designed so that service providers can siphon money off at the point of delivery. Antivirus is a good example. Yeah we sold you an OS but you need this extra thing to make it secure, didn't you know that?
So its a great way to make money if you stay with their targeted solutions. But if you want to do something totally new the benefits of using microsoft aren't really there so developers look elsewhere.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You mean a startup would rather spend it's money on its core business then on bloated software. Especial when a free version does all they need.
But all my Microsoft software was fr.... uh, nevermind
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Frankly I think smart phones, tablet computing and the like are going to substantially shake up the landscape. It certainly is making me consider mine, at least as far as web development and the like. The tools that better allow me to write portable apps that are not chained to an operating system, screen type and the like are going to become much more attractive. This will extend, inevitably, towards native apps. Microsoft may have controlled the desktop, but in the newer platforms coming out, it is woefully behind the times.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Developers, developers, developers, developers!
-Steve Ballmer
I am officially gone from
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
...even for us old farts.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
More, exotic fart apps is what we now expect from this new generation of HIP programmers.
A ZUNE! I've never seen one in the wild before. They MUST be awesome! Only 10K Kins in existence? Sounds like a very hard to find product headed straight to eBay. NOW I'm interested! Get out your Zunes and Kins, me Saddos! I'm going to fire up my Windows 95 server and meet up with MS Bob later. Balmer RULES!
Actually, MS does make a very nice product with that Windows XP. I've got one now and it seems pretty usable. Not going to replace my Mac with this thing, but for a work handout, it's decent.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
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.
This assumes that cost is the only factor that start-ups are weighing when determining software. Some of them may legitimately pick open source because it's better or that MS doesn't offer a certain software. For many, they may go to cheaper solutions like OpenOffice instead of MS Office purely on cost. But they may use Apache instead of IIS for performance reasons.
If cost is the only reason, wouldn't it be likely that once these start-ups are established, they may not like having to pay full price and may turn to competitors for cheaper alternatives?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Well this certainly isn't anywhere Microsoft is going to visit, and as a young, hip developer myself, I'd sure like to point out a good reason as to why they aren't doing so hot with my demographic.
The issue isn't that you aren't "accessing" post secondary students. I learned all about VB, .NET, and I used Visual Studio, and I made some pretty amazing Win32 apps. All in all, my experience with the product was good. VB, once you understand programming theory, is as easy to write as Java or C++, its mostly just a syntax thing. All in all I found Visual Studio easier to layout and work with GUI's than Eclipse was with Java. So, you don't need to worry about that, Microsoft.
But you did hit ONE big nail right on the head.
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.
Yes, yes it was a big problem for me. Currently the latest version, with the PRO edition (not even the ultimate edition) is $729 dollars - which is more than most kids with student loan debts can afford. And then you made the "Express" tools which are completely and utterly crippled in that I can't do half the stuff that made visual studio so appealing to use.
As such, when my school taught me how to use the no-cost solutions, you can imagine how much more we prefer to work with them as a hobby, because as young, hip, students we don't have any money to just fling around.
Not to mention that .NET seems to be losing some speed - I don't know if I want to keep writing for it.
What Microsoft still doesn't seem to understand is that the lure of FOSS goes beyond what's "hip", and also goes beyond the price.
And I love these quotes: "We did not get access to kids as they were going through college" Translation: "We did not infiltrate schools enough to make sure they had no exposure to anything but our stuff".
And: "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 [free/discounted] software" Translation: "We should have worked harder to make it even easier to get people/companies hooked on our proprietary solutions".
Oh well.
We did not get access to kids as they were going through college
Anybody else find that just a LITTLE creepy? "Getting access" sounds like something a Catholic priest and/or a cult leader would say. Perhaps employing clueless marketroids like Bob might have something to do with the problem as well.
Microsoft quite simply is too slow. They build nice tools, but they do so slowly. Far too slowly for the pace of the Internet. If they were an innovative company that might not be a problem, but Microsoft is now chasing at about a 2-4 year disadvantage.
It has nothing to do with "cool". I don't use COBOL not because it isn't "cool". I don't use COBOL because it doesn't have useful hooks into the libraries I need to use on a day to day basis. Same with Microsoft tech.
Really? Isn't "hip developer" an oxymoron? Or do they literally mean "one who develops for hips", in which case the language of choice is clearly "Limp".
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Not less than 10K, but fewer than 10K.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
This must be one of the most embarrassing developments under Steve Ballmer's watch. To that end I say furniture must have flown at the realization that KIN was not doing well at all after spending several hundred million dollars.
On my part, I feel sorry for Microsoft and if I were to advise, I would recommend that Microsoft returns to its MS Exchange business suite which worked so well for them earlier this decade.
The trouble on this front is that at the moment, Zimbra and Google both want a piece of the pie, though I believe Microsoft is better armed to win the battle.
I don't think their major problem is that opensource is free. I think their major problem is that their development environment is oppressive and they change it every couple of years. Who wants to spend their time learning a new bug ridden API every two years that doesn't do anything different than the last version?
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
"Microsoft Accepted by Old/Curmudgeonly"
I am a young(er? 29) developer and I do most of my development on the .NET stack. No, it's not as "cool" as being an iPhone dev, but at least Ballmer doesn't tell me I can't compile my code without forking him $100/yr...and he doesn't take 30% percent of whatever I might make selling my code.
.NET (and maybe I am?)...but when it comes to choosing what platform to learn and code in, I'm pretty happy with Microsoft in general. It's a lot easier for me to find a job doing .NET than it is for them in Ruby/Rails...and in 5 years they'll have to throw out everything they learned about Ruby/Rails because the fanboyism that drives their community will have moved on to the next "big shiny thing" (Scala?)...I'll still be writing code in C#...Does that make me a sellout? Maybe, but I'll take more money for less work and less drama any day of the week.
I work in a mixed shop where most of the other devs are Ruby/Rails guys...they all see me as a "sellout" for using
I would venture a guess that the biggest problem Microsoft is probably facing is that most development for a given start up is probably going to be some snazzy web service, and probably on some LAMP variant, with say, lighttpd in place of apache for cool Comet stuff.
When you're doing TCO calculations for a startup, Linux/Apache makes sense for your back end, which is probably going to be one of your biggest purchasing decisions.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Really, has Microsoft had a trend-setting new product (not an update or sequel) since Steve Ballmer took the helm? Everything new product line they've come up with since 2000, from Xbox to the Kin, has been an attempt catch-up with someone, rather than blaze new trails.
"We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,"
He makes a good point here - one of the sole reasons why I'm a linux guy today is because the college that I went to (Loyola Marymount University) had a strong FOSS ideology in their computer science department. Had I been exposed to any line of Microsoft products during that time, I'd venture to say that I'd be a MS guy today. College students, despite their outcry to be individuals and unique, are very easy to be moulded into the product of your choice.
It has zero to do with not being "hip" or young or in college.
.NET...but it's hard enough to sell people on Python or Ruby instead of PHP and they run on almost the same stack...you try convincing a client their hosting should cost $100 USD / month instead of $50 when the whole project is 5-10k because you want to use ASP.NET instead of PHP.
I think the main issue that is loosing them emerging developers in the web. Almost all startups are web based these days and Windows hosting always costs more than Linux, usually a lot more because Windows Server SKUs are minimum $800 USD. Bad enough when your starting up, worse if you are successful and need 30 servers.
There is also a gigantic ecosystem of freelance / small company folk who do contract web work that can't use
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/grammartiplessorfewer
Less is also used with numbers when they are on their own and with expressions of measurement or time, e.g.:
His weight fell from 18 stone to less than 12.
Their marriage lasted less than two years.
Heath Square is less than four miles away from Dublin city centre
And since you're in marketing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
"'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,'"
What? With all the free MS software giveaways, special campus prices and events for students, and near-bribery of CS departments with loads of no-cost or low-cost MS software licenses if they or the whole university go exclusively with MS products, and you're telling me Microsoft didn't have access? No way.
What happened was much worse than they imply. They DID have extensive access, but many students still didn't want to drink the kool-aid. Or students tasted it and they were repulsed.
I'm wondering if all those devices are replacing desktops, or complementing them. I personally have 2 desktops as pretty much always; a smartphone has recently replaced my trusty PalmTX, and I'm thinking of getting a tablet and/or laptop... but the 2 PCs are staying. They may soon be running Linux instead of Windows though, and are already running OOo instead of MS Office... not that I ever had to buy it, with work licenses.
I'm still very leery of The Cloud though, I much prefer to have local apps, data, and backups.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Microsoft's business is almost entirely targetted at corporate software users. They never gave a rats ass about individual users. They jump into bed with the RIAA and MPAA, they continue to build lock-in and avoid using existing open standards, and their products suck ass for usability because they treat users like retards.
No wonder consumers don't trust them and avoid their products.
The amount of .net developer jobs out there is insane. Almost EVERYTHING is now .net, iphone development is kinda "hip" but it's not exactly a money maker at this point for anyone. I"m still stuck on old c/c++ development but that brings in the biggest and longest software contracts compared to the 3 week "do this iphone app for me" jobs.
did you forget to take your meds?
They are missing the point that:
a) PC's are now a mature technology, and there's little new/innovative going on with them. At best a slow evolution and a marketplace for developers that is saturated.
b) Growth areas in software development are happening where Microsoft is not a presence worth a second look. People go where the jobs are, and Microsoft isn't where that is.
c) Their recent attempts at reinventing themselves have been major crash and burns. No one likes jumping on the back of a crashing and burning vehicle.
Anyhow, one day they will wake up and realize they've painted themselves into a corner and have no clue how to get out. Who knew they were going to be a chunky niche player.
I'll take an older and more experienced developer over "young and hip" any day of the week.
File this story under "A fail that counts as a win"
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
In the very early 90s we were using Unix in my computer science program and many undergraduate and graduate students complained at a student/faculty meeting that there were no classes in programming MS Windows. It was not that many considered Windows "cool" but that many felt some Windows experience was necessary to be viable in the job market. So yes, students were once highly interested in Windows.
In the early days it looked like .net might evolve to take on Java in that it was solving all those little coding nuggets that you have to otherwise grind out such as getting files from web servers. But then it turned into marketing for all their other products and the surface area of the whole .net thing grew out of control. But horribly enough I was still having to turn to ActiveX era programming to accomplish anything really cool.
.net crap. .Net
Then I discovered QT and a whole new world was opened to me. After a year I realized that the only Microsoft product I was still using was Windows and that was seriously getting in my way. That was years ago and MS has not offered me a single geeky reason to go back.
PHP is better than any
Apache is better than IIS
Linux is better than MS Server
MySQL is better than SQL Server
C++ QT is better than
Eclipse is better than Visual Studio for multiple languages
Git is better than VSS
Mac OS X is better than Windows for programming
Anything is better than IE
So I have been able to nearly completely leave MS behind yet am able to release my desktop software with little effort for both Mac and Windows because of QT. I don't see an easy way for MS to get me back.
But there is a hard way. They could toss the present windows foundation and make Windows 9 based upon BSD. Make Visual Studio compile to a zillion platforms like Mac and Linux all the while opening it up to other languages like PHP. All the while beating away their marketing department who would want to do forced tie-ins to existing products. Then from this new foundation they could let their developers loose to make everything way better. Then, depending on pricing, they might get me back; maybe.
Any "developer" who is a fanboy and will code only in their favoured language isn't worthy of the title of developer. They are a hack, or a code monkey, not a developer. A real developer will learn to understand how a computer works, at a fundamental level, and look at programming languages as different ways to solve a problem. They'll understand that there is not a best language because there is not one kind of problem. Some are better for certain things.
Also a good developer will probably learn how to develop for multiple platforms. After all while Linux is used a whole lot in the web world, MS rules on the desktop so it would be to one's advantage to be able to code on both platforms. Further more, it would be to their advantage to do so in the tools that generate the best programs. For Windows, that is Visual Studio, for Linux it is (obviously) not.
So no, you aren't a sellout. I would say that if you focus only on .NET development you are being a bit too narrow, but learning it is a good thing. There is a lot of work for .NET devs. Companies want shiny GUIs for Windows things and .NET is a good way to deliver. The other "developers" will find that whining to the company and claiming they shouldn't do that won't work. Most companies are accustomed to telling you what you are going to do, not the other way around.
I have a friend who's a contract developer and he uses languages of all sorts. If you want something done in Windows, he defaults to .NET (using C# usually) since that works well on that platform. In Linux, it is PERL quite often since nearly every Linux distro ships with it. However if you wanted something speed critical, it'd probably be C++. He sees languages as tools to solve problems, and tries to choose the right one for the job. That doesn't mean he uses any and every language, of course, he's got ones he prefers, just that he has a bag with more than one tool in it and he tries to select the correct one.
Personally I have little to no respect from code hacks that want to trumpet The One True Language as the one they use. That think is solves EVERY problem, that won't learn anything else. What it tells me is that they don't really understand programming. They've learned the syntax and grammar of a language without understanding the underpinnings. That is not a good situation and leads to bad code, shitty apps, and the kind of person who will say "That can't be done," to anything they don't understand how to do.
tools that better allow me to write portable apps that are not chained to an operating system, screen type and the like are going to become much more attractive.
Sounds very good to me but is that really what's happening? iPhone has its SDK, Android has its own SDK etc. etc. Sadly the newer platforms appear to be as much "walled gardens" as the old ones.
The obvious fact is, that Lord Bill's nightmare came true. He was afraid that web browser would make the operating system irrelevant, and that's exactly what happened. Think about it. When was the last time someone said, "Hey check this out! Go download this application..." Almost never. All the really exciting is happening on the web. That's because the web has matured to the point that developers are leveraging Internet scale data. Not only that, but web based apps are preferred by users because they work everywhere. I still use a standalone application for email, but I'm in the minority. This hasn't just made Microsoft unhip, but frankly irrelevant. As I told a friend of mine who said how he despised Microsoft, "Isn't hating Microsoft, a bit like still hating Prussia?" What does Microsoft have that's relevant? Sure they still have their Windows and Office, but that software is commodified. I can access the web with any OS, so Windows simply doesn't matter. With interoperability. no one really needs Office. For me, Apple's Pages and Numbers work pretty well, although I still prefer Excel for its ability to allow me to write custom functions (albeit in VB).
Now here's the irony, Microsoft Research is supercool. They do all sorts of groundbreaking stuff. Photosynth, Surface, along with work in collaboration and personal information management, just to name a few areas. MSR is great, and there really aren't that many places that do that work, let alone at with the both the breadth and depth of MSR. Microsoft doesn't really have too many peers in that respect, and that makes Microsoft very hip. Of course, MSR isn't for everyone, but for those people that like to do research, its great place to work.
Android SDK is built on GNU, Eclipse and other open source software and is fully open source.
It's also the fastest growing mobile platform and what all the hip groovy cats are into.
Not exactly a walled garden.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,'
Complete and utter bullshit. When I was in school at a fairly well-known south-eastern engineering school, you couldn't walk from Skiles to the Library Fountain without tripping over 7 Microsoft recruiters. Granted, it was over a decade ago, but still...
What makes MS unattractive is the huge bloated corporate culture that has 10 levels of bureaucracy for every level of productivity, and thousands of pages of process documents that new recruits spend half their working time trying to remember, and the other half trying to forget when the "new" process comes out.
It doesn't help that, on top of it all, they expect you to show up and, you know, WORK for your paycheck...
Meaning Flash, Silverlight, and / or HTML5?
It still comes down to tools. On that basis, if Apple doesn't improve Xcode drastically, they will slowly lose market share. I don't know what they will do about Objective-C, though.
My guess is that in a few years, Android and possibly Windows Mobile 7+ will be dominant, just because the tools and languages are so much better than what Apple has to offer at the moment. Flame away, those who are so inclined, but I have never heard anyone say they would prefer to program in Objective-C over Java, C++, Python, or the .Net languages.
I don't know what the Rim tools are like, or what HP will do with Palm, so those could be contenders, too. Right now Apple is riding on the appeal of their hardware, but the development environment and codebase for their devices leaves a lot to be desired compared other platforms. Eventually the mass of developers will move to the more productive platforms, IMHO. YMMV.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
... personal users: how can you get people wanting to develop for your OS/ecosystem if you charge them a LOT of money for the toolchain/msdn/...?
I can see how a software house should have to pay for MSDN/VC++/etc. for their devs (since they after all make money) but personal developers should be able to have the full version of the toolchain (with full msdn, not 'limited' versions) in order to compete with os/x (xcode etc., all free) or linux/unix/FOSS (gcc/emacs/... all free). I really do not think the income MS makes from enthusiasts buying msdn/vc++ access is worth the loss in mental market share in terms of all the devs migrating to other platforms where they don't have to "pay to play".
-- the cake is a lie
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
This may be true in term of single-system size, but for sheer market penetration & visibility, iPhone/Android & apps are way beyond what people do with Desktops now.
Business applications abound for .NET, but this is not as visible at home. O'Reilly is watching where the new development for home users is going: smart devices
It'll take ten years, but eventually the smart device platform will make enough inroads to replace some of the business market. Ask anyone with a Blackberry or laptop. This article is a clone of similar from the early 90's where both of those devices were derided as too slow/expensive/cumbersome for business use.
That language! Not "college students were not broadly exposed to our products", or "our outreach efforts fell short", bur rather "...get access to kids...". MS has always been a cathedral, but sheesh, now they're even sounding like priests.
Anybody want a peanut?
This has changed for Windows Phone 7 - there is a free VS Express edition for that.
Mirage and Monkeedude are the horse's mouth. Look at their slashdot ID's and you can tell they are new entrants to this rat race.
I suspect the 'locking down to technology' is a pretty serious issue, along with the cost of the sophisticated development environment. And, speaking of development environment, the new graduates are going to be very comfortable with the social networking side of the FOSS world. When there is a problem with a tool, or if they need help with an esoteric problem, the help is ready, willing, and able to help without the condescension you often find in the Microsoft help forums.
The more committed young developers will probably enjoy the FOSS workspace better than the MS world. More satisfaction.
Best regards.
In the long term, desktops will definitely be phased out of general-purpose uses. Most people use desktops as glorified typewriters and as web browsers. If there is a reason that desktops will continue to be the most efficient way for your average person to perform their everyday tasks, I fail to see it.
Look, Microsoft, I like you, I really do. I use windows XP on my workstation and it seems to work pretty damn well for everything I ever ask of it. You do a lot of research, that's really cool. Bill, you're a cool guy, donating all kinds of money to charity and whatnot; awesome.
But here is the thing, MS, I can download F/OSS stuff for *free*, find out if I like it, and if I do I just keep using it. I don't have to fork over any money, I don't have to register for anything or tell anybody , or do *anything* other than navigate over to sourceforge or wherever else, click download, click install, and then start working.
Your products are not that much better, they just aren't, and as a broke-ass kid, it doesn't make sense for me to spend money on them. I'd rather use the money to buy hardware.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Almost EVERYTHING is now .net
I've not seen the same thing (and I watch job postings daily and have for years). I'm seeing less .Net jobs than I used to, while I'm seeing more jobs looking for a wide variety of open source skills. While most mention a desire for certain language skills (i.e. PHP, Java, Python, C/C++), they are more focused on skills in specific middleware products (i.e. DBMS, AppServer, etc), a large percentage of which are open source.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
This article takes MS failing with the Kin and extrapolates it to "Microsoft is going down the shitter because no one wants to develop for it."
I don't see how they got from one to the other. I have a very strong gut feeling that this is story has been spun so far that it doesn't represent reality.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I'm still very leery of The Cloud though, I much prefer to have local apps, data, and backups.
Age perhaps? I'm 27, and grew up on Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. All my music and data is stored in S3. Backups are still a must, but having all your data available anywhere there is a reliable internet connection is a powerful thing. I've used Gmail via an Inmarsat satellite in the middle of the Atlantic. Trying doing that with Thunderbird and a local mail file (yes, yes, I know about IMAP).
Why is it that no one has a beef that Autodesk gets to make money selling 3D tools, that Adobe gets to make money selling imaging tools, but when it comes to Microsoft making money off coding tools, SLASHDOT SMASH!! GRAA!!
I am a young(er? 29) developer and I do most of my development on the .NET stack. No, it's not as "cool" as being an iPhone dev, but at least Ballmer doesn't tell me I can't compile my code without forking him $100/yr...
Oh really, see if you can say that again if you want to deploy anything to the WIndows 7 App Store.
The Apple development tools are also free if you don't want to deploy to the store... And anyone for who $100/year is too steep simply jailbreaks and develops that way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
screen size and resolution.
The amount of .net developer jobs out there is insane.
It really depends on where one lives.
I'm what you might call a linux zealot. I couldnt find a school which offered any sort of IT program that wasnt a microsoft partner and pushed microsoft entirely. So it's a pretty big lie at least for my city that microsoft isnt getting access to students. Ya I got onto dreamspark, msdn and technet for free; but I think that's exactly the issue people have. Developers want free at every point. Free as in freedom and more importantly free as in beer. The hip and cool devs cant afford to be paying microsoft licensing so they cant go.
The problem with the word "hip" is that the act of using it is the very opposite of its definition; nobody has seriously used this word for what it means for decades, and the people who try signal that they are very out of touch with the subject they're trying to talk about. Use this word and you automatically damage the credibility of anything you say.
And it isn't locked into a particular platform. You know, those crazy ideas that are come from those new-fangled fads all the crazy kids are into, with their bell-bottom jeans and their "Yeah yeah yeah".
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
"You know, those crazy ideas that are come from those new-fangled fads all the crazy kids are into, with their bell-bottom jeans and their "Yeah yeah yeah"."
Preview is my friend....although "are come" is technically accurate too, for other reasons having to do with young studly developers.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Dear Microsoft,
Today you sit and rue the face that you have lost the developer base and to
feel better about it, you label them as 'young and hip'. Here is some news:
Very few developers actually enjoy writing for windows. People have been
writing code on microsoft platforms since there are a huge number of people
who use microsoft products and ignoring the windows platform amounts to
ignoring a huge customer base which the developer could not afford to do.
We, as developers never really enjoyed developing for windows -- it is just
that we did not have a choice.
Today however, the scene has been changing.
1. A large number of GUI-based applications have moved into the browser.
2. Windows servers are not really used in large technology companies
They still are a dominant force in small to medium company's IT
infrastructures. That is all exchange and sharepoint. Any sane startup will
not consider windows to host their servers.
3. Developers now are used to and are aware of desktop platforms which
work well and also are very good programming platforms. Macs have a robust
BSD backbone and Linux is well, Linux. So everybody now have platforms
on which they can hack code and also play their movies.
4. Java provides for a development environment which can make pretty windows
without having to use developer studio.
So you have a scenario where where Microsoft is not the only viable
desktop/laptop OS. Also, it is a terrible programming environment. So any
self-respecting developer will not run windows on his personal machine and
as a result will want to push it out of his workplace too. The process
started a long time back. You guys are feeling it now.
So we come to the next question: Why do we hate writing code for windows ?
I will not cite the BSOD. The "windows crashes" and "windows is not stable"
are old arguments.
Windows is much much more stable than it used to be. In all honesty it has
been ages since I last saw a BSOD. We hate writing code for the windows
platform is because it sucks as a development platform.
1. The design is not based on any implementation of UNIX. That makes any CS
student uncomfortable. I am not saying that that the developer is
uncomfortable because windows has a bad programming interface (which btw it
is ). I am saying that it makes him uncomfortable because he cannot
recognize patterns he used to learn his computer science. He cannot refer to
the kernel source when he runs into a thorny problem, he cannot go online to
get a real educated answer to his problems. It is unfamiliar and since he is
not used to the paradigm. The developer finds it inelegant.
2. The second point is that it IS a bad programming interface. Till very
recently did not have a scripting interface worth its salt, has an extremely
convoluted device driver infrastructure and has that terrible thing called
the registry.
3. The development environment is not free as in beer and as in speech. It
is a closed heavily controlled environment in which the developer has no say
and is an interface which changes very frequently. You can get away with
changing rapidly and being open ( which linux does ) but you cannot get away
by being closed and also changing every 2 years. It drives the developer
mad.
4. Emacs and Vim do not integrate well with visual studio :)
Microsoft still in favour with some paid developers and their superiors.
FTFY. And, of course, I know this. It's just amusing (and encouraging) to see Microsoft whinging that they're having a hard time indoctrinating students into dependence on their tools.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
I'm all for synching between different devices, and a fallback web access. Pure cloud, or even cloud + local backup, is not enough for me. Taking your gmail example, I'd much rather have a local store, read and compose my emails offline, and connect for a minute a few times a day instead of having to pay for much more online time and do everything directly off the web.
The key to me is my ASS: Availability, Safety, Security. Local seems much better of all 3 cheeks.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I used to write Windows software. Not commercially, just for fun.
I'm now working full-time on a game for the Android platform, and it's going well so I recently looked in to the possibility of writing it for Windows at some point in future.
I was astonished by the current price of Visual Studio. It was around £100 when I used it around 10 years ago, and now it's well over £500! Too much. Way, way too much.
If the time does come when I want to develop the game for Windows, I'll be using a non-Microsoft solution.
I get unlimited online time, at home, at work, and via my Android phone. That may be part of it. Also, very little of my email, photos, music, etc. would be what I consider "sensitive" data. Availability > Safety + Security when the data has very little value.
What are you darned kids using these days? Last I knew it was "phat", and that's when I stopped paying attention, and refused to go beyond "cool" thank you very much.
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
Voltaire can suck on my balls! -- Paul Finch
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
For what though? Movies and games perhaps, but I can't help thinking that those two applications are better suited to appliances designed for them... I'd really like to know!
As someone who is currently trying to marry .net and C++/COM, I can tell you that I have never felt more hatred for Microsof and their crap. I can't believe I yearn for the simpler days of the Win32 API with all their associated baggage left over from trying to keep compatible with the Win-freaking-16 API, which I remember swearing at then too (MFC only hid the "big" APIs, but anything non-GUI related meant you were likely to pull out the MSDN library discs).
Having worked with Linux/Unix in C/C++ the joy is knowing that the API is *stable*; malloc() hasn't changed in what, 30+ years?? I can pull out programming books bought at second-hand stores from the 80s and still make use of the code and concepts.
I would not recommend, at this point, willingly starting any new project on Windows unless there was an absolute need to somehow tie in with Office directly (and if all you need to do is create office docs, I'd go with Java's Poi library instead).
This isn't MS whinging, this is some idiot at the NYT whinging.
MS's MO is to indoctrinate people at the business level not the developer level as it's the business people who sign pay cheques. It may appear that MS is having a hard time wooing developers when MS spends all its time and effort wooing MBA's.
This is also why all the innovative work is done in F/OSS. You cant schedule new idea's into a project.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If you want to write a C++ app in Visual Studio, the location of the additional directories for #includes is at the top of the C++ options. In the linker, the same option is somewhere towards the bottom. Why? Sounds small, but I'm already under the gun to get the code written and working, not futzing around with build settings.
Or how about, starting in either VS2005 or 2008 (can't remember which one), I opened up a project written in VC++6 and freaked when I suddenly started seeing hundred and hundreds of warnings, telling me that functions like strncat() (strncat!) were "unsafe" and I should use something like _strnscat or something like that, which supposedly was "more" safe at the cost of being totally Microsoft-specific. The problem was that you couldn't turn off these warnings in the general options, only per-project, which meant that I had to make stupid changes to stdafx.h just to turn off the warnings so that other developers wouldn't freak as well.
How about the auto-hide windows that seem to randomly decide to suddenly be pinned or to suddenly appear during unrelated actions?
When working with C#, the compiler and editor will give you a red squiggle under code it can't compile, but gives you know way to know where or how many places in the file they are (contrast: Eclipse puts a red box on the side for every line that is in error, which makes it very easy to find them).
Look, I'm a fan of Intellisense and all (when running on a powerful enough machine), but while VS2010 is "faster" than previous versions (almost as fast as VC++6), it purports to be a "rich" IDE that gets surprisingly sparse in places, and downright weird in others.
Visual Studio reminds me of guys who put racing stripes and thin tires and big mufflers on their Honda Civics and somehow convince themselves they've got a "race car".
I'd rather have one relatively versatile box than 5 specialized ones, the same way I bought an HD2 with a huge screen and removable battery instead of an MP3 player + ebook reader + PDA + mobile phone.
I don't want to clutter my appartment with a console, a TV, a stereo, a desktop, a monitor, an HTPC...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I would have loved to have a spare $2K when I was writing shareware at 17.
Using a service like Dropbox (which uses S3) that fully encrypts (SSL) all transactions both ways AND encrypts everything stored on their servers is a very safe way to go and I would argue it is safer than the overwhelming majority of computing devices out there. Most people don't think security and with something like that you get it for free and still don't have to think about it.
Availability of Internet access is almost a moot point these days, especially if you have a data ready phone.
As for "safety", I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Share any piece of data with anyone and you've lost your safety as far as that data goes. If it touches the Internet then you have no idea where the information is going. You gain a certain level of safety with proper use of encryption but even that isn't guaranteed for long.
Remember to maintain your supply of
for any company who abuses their position to extract unreasonable profits from their customers. People will only put up with it until there are viable alternatives, and by that point, it is far too late; nothing will be able to offset the accumulated hostility.
Other companies that appear to be following this path are Oracle and Apple. You simply can't jerk people around forever without consequence.
I my not be hip, but I'm 27, and I enjoy .net programming immensely. C#, unlike Java, favors practicality over ideology. Partial classes, lambda functions, anonymous delegates, and extension methods are an anethema to OOP, but they're practical and, dare I say it, kind of fun. Java is a lumbering retarded beast, python has scalability issues, and perl is illegible. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of FOSS software, but MS has done a good job with its dev tools.
"Frankly, if you dont have $2K for an Enterprise MSDN licensing, you really have no business doing a start up, do you?"
Frankly, if you put your money out of the objective of achieving revenue -like spending even if only one single dollar on unneeded licenses, you really have no business doing a start up, do 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.
"Flame away, those who are so inclined, but I have never heard anyone say they would prefer to program in Objective-C over Java, C++, Python, or the .Net languages."
I'm one who prefers Objective-C to Java, C++, Python, or .Net languages.
Good lord, learning Objective-C is easy. Learning any language is easy. It's the frameworks and libraries and idioms that are the hard part. A programmer who resists learning a language as easy as Objective-C is like a child who refuses to try any food other than their staple chicken nuggets and spaghettios.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
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?
The point of starting a company is to make money. Money for you, and money for the investors. Lighting a pile of money on fire just to get access to development tools is throwing away money that could be in your pocket or your investors.
If you can do something for free, why would you choose to pay $2,000 for it?
Back in the late 90's, I developed for a Microsoft shop. By 2001, I was playing with linux, and by 2002 I made the switch. I haven't run into anything I couldn't do just as easily in Linux.
There's no place like
"Most people use desktops as glorified typewriters and as web browsers. If there is a reason that desktops will continue to be the most efficient way for your average person to perform their everyday tasks, I fail to see it."
Glorified typewriters. That means big and robust enough keyboard and big enough screen.
Web browsers. That means big enough screen.
Big and robust enough keyboard and big enough screen means desktops are not going anywhere any time soon (while maybe they'll metamorph to virtual desktops or bay-based devices ala iPod).
It's a magical and revolutionary flatulence platform!
MS has so many problems with FOSS, some of them major.
1. FOSS is free as in beer. And it is eternally free. Software developers, with the possible exception of ($LANGUAGE developers), aren't stupid - there is some IQ floor involved in software development. Even if you give crippleware away, developers know that if they use your stuff it is going to eventually cost them. And if they can get something of near equivalent functionality that is FOSS, they don't have to deal with ever paying the piper. That's more margin for you and yours.
This helps if you are a startup, if you just want to experiment, or if you want to sneak something in at work and not have to ask to spend money. Strange but true - it's orders of magnitude easier to get money from a boss in the form of time to work on something than it is to get authorization to spend equivalent actual dollars on it.
2. FOSS is open source by definition. If you come across some future unanticipated problem, there is potential to hack it until it does if you have the skills.
3. Most FOSS has no vendor lock in (other than stuff like MySQL). Meaning, your development platform can't jerk the rug out from under you by deciding that you are now going to use DAO or ADO, or .NET, or however they've decided to screw you over by obsoleting the work you've done. No vendor lock-in also means they can't dangle you upside down and see how much money falls out.
4. FOSS is often good, and keeps getting better because people keep contributing to it. Once you have used a bit of FOSS, you are often astounded by the quality and that encourages you to use more of it. And that experience leads a person to totally dispense with the "free = crap" heuristic. It's like drinking water from some unspoiled rainforest stream - it is both free and better than the commercial alternative. After a while your own heuristic becomes - "1. Search the FOSS world first. 2. If the best of what you find works well, stop looking."
5. FOSS has a passionate community. If you want help and can google, there is usually a good community around whatever FOSS it is you are interested in. In a genuine community, there is rarely a conflict between the creator of the software and the interests of the community. With a commercial solution, there is always that conflict - users want to pay less money, vendors need money to live.
6. FOSS is hassle free - you want to try it or use it, you just download it. You still have to learn how to use it, but that is no different from a proprietary solution.
7. FOSS OS (and non-MS OS) are renowned for being more stable, secure, powerful and easier to install than Windows once you know how. These attributes suit developers. Running FOSS on top of a FOSS OS is usually easier to install and use, better integrated, and more powerful. There is a virtuous circle going on there.
8. FOSS is trustworthy - you can see the code yourself, and fork it if you want. You may never do this but you know you can, and so do other people.
Why else does MS have a problem? Because university students WILL be exposed to some FOSS software if they do anything related to software. They will use commercial stuff too, but very likely they will learn many of the lessons above. At that point they've already swallowed the red pill. Even if they don't get exposure there their guru friends probably use FOSS.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
"MS's MO is to indoctrinate people at the business level not the developer level"
Well, maybe. It's only a pity all their acts in the last two decades seem otherwise.
They started on the desktop. Then their developer tools (namely, visual basic) allowed for a lot of niche apps to flourish which meant a strong lock-in for the platform (a *lot* of SoHo and short size companies could go, say, to Linux tomorrow and overnight were it *not* for the myriad of niche applications that lock them to the Microsoft platform). Then from desktop plus niche apps they were to the network; local first, then the Internet and they had played the developers game from then on.
Microsoft really know it is the miriad of in-house and/or non-portable developments what really enforces their lock-in strategy: from IE6-only intranets (or even worse: ActiveX intranets) to Access apps to forms upon Exchange and now Sharepoint. This is what leads everything else: once you have the apps you'll need the sysadmins; the more the sysadmins put into Microsoft platforms the less they'll want to go anywhere else.
Microsoft certainly will take very seriously losing its grip on the developer's side.
So rather than spend that $2K on advertising, you'd rather spend it on tools when you have the option of free? I'd say it's you who have no business sense, and no business in a start up.
Ok pop quiz, people. Is the above person a young hip developer, or a douchebag?
Ummm...
.Net software, demand is created for .Net developers. It doesn't work the other way around and MS knows this which is why the majority of their marketing efforts are directed at the Exec and C level.
Which Microsoft have you been watching for the last few decades?
MS always targets business leaders first. CIO's make the decision that X company is going to be an MS house, wants
This makes no sense. Developers and sysamins have been pushing for a move away from MS for over a decade now but managers keep throwing back terms like TCO and the old favourite "Who will we sue if it all goes wrong" (like you didn't give up that right when I pressed F8). MS knows that in order to keep itself in the market, developers don't really matter as much as the C level execs.
But that's not happening, mainly because MS is not losing it's grip on the managers side, hence jobs are created for MS technologies.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I've noticed a new blog and twitter meme of people publicly rage quitting .NET. Most of it seems to surround the fact that MS will create their own subpar implimentation of a popular .NET open source project instead of putting their weight behind it (Creating Entity Framework instead of support NHibernate, Creating ASP.NET MVC instead of supporting Rails on Iron Ruby, creating Razor instead of supporting Spark).
"the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them." problematic for most people. I dont like paying $400 for Word (and 3 other programs I might not use, ever). When I can just use Abiword.
- -= Napalm means serious BBQ =-
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.
The point is, why jump even through those hoops when you don't have to? Why even shell out that $2,000 when it can go to something more valuable than lining Microsoft's pockets? That and the Microsoft penchant for vendor lock-in I suspect is what is really driving developers away.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
That is so not how to do it. They should learn from drug dealers: "Hey kid. First hit is free." :P
safety means backups, backups and more backups :-p
I must be unlucky: I don't have good web access everywhere. Not on planes, not in fast trains, not really at my parents' house deep in the country (they get spotty mobile signals). My web access is several orders of magnitude more problematic than my devices' reliability.
As far as trusting a provider's security, I'm not sure. there have been plenty of breaches at banks, which one would assume to be fairly security-oriented, and you never really know what goes on inside, what 3rd world country's subcontractor's trainee does have the means to hack into their servers.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
You're not a startup at 17, dipshit.
Yes, except for the fact that it's the exact definition of one.
When Bill Gates co-founded Traff-O-Data at 17 you should have told him it wasn't a startup and to go away.
According to Tim O'Reilly, who is quoted heavily in the article, he didn't say hardly anything attributed to him.
http://www.google.com/buzz/timoreilly/j61qZ42h6rB/Frustrated-by-flamebait-NY-reporting-in-Microsoft
(Which, if you've had any interaction with him you probably already knew or at least suspected.)
The issue with Microsoft on startups is that their licensing doesn't scale well. You simply couldn't start up and then pay for all the licensing of something like Twitter.... it hasn't even been around for a whole "licensing term" yet, and the cost of their setup would be far more than they take in as revenue quite quickly. Microsoft licensing is not adaptable or flexible enough for startups, it's the first thing you learn in college CS/CIS programs.
I find the whole "we didn't have access to college kids..." as bullocks. Most college programs are heavily based in Microsoft products... college IT is just like business IT where Microsoft is crammed down your throat at every step.... people CHOOSE to reject Microsoft because Microsoft IS "the man".
______
Those of you who know me in even the most casual way may be shocked to hear me say: I want to do some programming in Windows.
One would think that one would simply go out and download a compiler and an SDK (a bit fat wad of compiler headers, link libraries, and documentation) -- or perhaps buy a CD-ROM containing same -- and you'd be completely set to develop any kind of Windows application.
You'd be wrong.
What's available is a hopelessly confusing mashup of tools to develop native applications, VisualBASIC applications, .NET virtual machine applications, Web applications (for IIS only, natch), database-driven applications and, if you're very nice and pay lots of money, Microsoft Office plugins. And, just to make it hard, all these tools are hidden underneath a cutesy Integrated Development Environment which passively-aggressively makes it as cumbersome as possible to figure out what's actually going on under the hood -- you know, the sorts of things a professional programmer would want to know.
Okay, fine, just give me the tools and docs to develop native C/C++ apps. "Oh, no no no," says Microsoft, twirling its moustache, "You have to pick one of our product packages." Packages? "Oh, yes, there's Visual Studio Express, Visual Studio Standard, Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio Team System, and Visual Studio Grand Marquess with Truffles and Cherries."
After looking at the six-dimensional bullet chart of features, I think that Visual Studio Express may get the job done, since it comes with a C/C++ compiler and will compile native apps. "Quite so," says Microsoft whilst placing a postage stamp on a foreclosure notice, "provided you're only writing console apps -- you know, programs that run in a command window. If you want to develop full Windows GUI apps, then you'll need additional libraries which aren't necessarily included with Visual Studio Express."
Ah, so VS Express will only let me develop "toy" applications and, if I want to do anything more advanced, I should download and install the complete Windows SDK which, amazingly, is free. "Well, you could do that," says Microsoft after tying Nell to the sawmill. "But the SDK doesn't really integrate very well with the IDE. And there's still some link libraries which only ship with Visual Studio Standard or better."
Fine. I'll look at buying Visual Studio Standard. And then maybe I can get to improving this device driver. "Device driver!?" says Microsoft, blotting the blood spatters off its hat. "Heavens, no, that's not included with anything. You need to download and install the Driver Development Kit for that. And you may or may not need the DDK for each version of Windows you intend to support. Not to worry, however; they're all free downloads..."
*fume* And people wonder why I've avoided this clusterfuck for the last 25 years. Ever since the Visual Studio 6 days, I've been smacked in the face with this braindamage every time I've tried doing the slightest exploration of Windows development.
So: Can anyone with modest Windows development experience tell me what Visual Studio flavor to get and which addons to download if I want to:
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Is MS losing money ?
"Microsoft reports first YoY revenue slide in company history" ...so I guess that would be a "yes".
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/04/24/microsoft-reports-first-yoy-revenue-slide-in-company-history/
no longer the biggest software company in the world ?
As of close on Tuesday 6 Jul 2010:
Microsoft market cap: 208.75B
Apple market cap:226.24B
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?d=v1&s=MSFT,AAPL ...so I'm guessing that one's a "yes", too...
retrenching ?
Well, you got me on this one. I guess if they were actually retrenching, they wouldn't be reporting losses in revenue or be only the second largest software company in the world. So that one's a "no".
Possibly they should get off their butts, and instead of throwing the chair they were sitting on, they should actually retrench.
-- Terry
Now ... we'll just tell them all backwards.
I mean for instance, what is more efficient between what most people do with their desktops now as opposed to a (stylized) vt100? Or even the electric typewriter (with a larger screen)? What drives a person to type on a desktop more than a netbook, for average use? It is safe to say that most people type little more than emails or short messages. How is "the web" as we know it better than specialized information retrieval devices?
As a programmer, I know the desktop will serve me well into the future. But I don't see the appeal for the average user.
You would "rather have one relatively versatile box," but would most people? If you don't need a desktop, those devices combined do not more fill an apartment than a desk + desktop + monitor + keyboard+ mouse + webcam + etc... I know as a developer I will continue to need a desktop for a long time, but I do not see why the average user would need one.
Aren't the "Young" and "Hip" developers usually the douchebags who collect a check until they complete whatever it is they are personally working on and then they quit and create a shitty startup company whose entire purpose is to be bought out by Microsoft/Google/Apple so they can retire early?
Don't get me wrong, msft has it's strengths, but hip? Msft might have been considered more "hip" than IBM, as recently as 1983 - maybe.
Msft products are like business supplies. Msft sells a lot of very ordinary software - and that is something to be proud of - but msft was never really "hip."
Precisely. Microsoft lost on two counts, both self-imposed, and they are getting what they deserve.
They emphasized crap to lock users in instead of real cutting edge development, which is not fun for developers or users, and which generates crap code, twisted beyond comprehension, byzantine, ugly. IBM had this same problem as a result of their anti-trust shenanigans, and apparently Microsoft chose to repeat history.
Microsoft also emphasized control freakery beyond all reason, in addition to the twiddly feature lockin, what with siccing the BSA on "pirates", horrible copy protection, license verification requiring internet access to run, on and on, making use of their software more and more hassle. The message was clear -- go somewhere else.
People would put up with either of these to some extent, but the combination made them simply not worth the hassle. Crap products which make life difficult are dead products.
All they had to do was stay bleeding edge, drop the lockin featuritis, and compete on quality. They'd have the market sewn up.
Infuriate left and right
There are lots of cool things to do as desktop applications. But the easy and useful ones have been done.
Want to write a better word processor? Users will expect it to be at least as good as OpenOffice even if you give it away. If you want to charge for it, it needs to be better than Word.
How about a 3D animation program? Big job. Yours has to be at least as good as Blender, and if you want to sell it, up there with Maya.
CAD? You're competing with SolidWorks, Inventor, and ProEngineer. Yes, there are small startups in CAD; check out OpenMind, makers of HyperMill. That's how good a new desktop program has to do to make it today.
Nobody is going to buy your IRC chat client as a desktop app.
Because the web is as enjoyable on my android phone as it s on my desktop.... NOT!
ignoring the cost factors in supporting a mobile computing existence you mean.
I prefer Objective-C to Python, .NET or C++.
I don't mind Java, though.
(In particular, Objective-C is so much better than C++ that it's really tragic that C++ became the dominant OO extension of C.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
So rather than spend that $2K on advertising, you'd rather spend it on tools when you have the option of free? I'd say it's you who have no business sense, and no business in a start up.
If you assume that the tools and the documentation for them are of equal quality, then what you say is true. (Or if you assume your time is worthless.)
The documentation in particular is something that's almost always ass on the FOSS side. (Yes, it's also sometimes ass on the unfree software side.) Can you waste $2000 worth of time dealing with missing, misleading, or out-of-date documentation? Depending on the project, that might or might not be possible.
"We did not get access to kids as they were going through college"
At any university I've ever been, any university student or faculty can effectively get Microsoft software for free. Microsoft reps and speakers visit campuses frequently. There are Microsoft ads everywhere. What kind of access do they think they "didn't get"?
If students aren't choosing their products, it's not for lack of access or lack of money.
Has anyone in here heard of bizspark. I used it and I like it. Really does give you an opportunity to use just about every dev tool MS has and addresses the issue of laying out a lot of money to try out tools and dev platforms. amorphous-codeworks.com
If you want to know why the Kin failed, go look here at engadget. It's a far more interesting read and you might actually learn something about office politics at companies as large as Microsoft. I'm all for hating on [Insert large tech company] but I expect more out of Slashdot than reporting on some tool of an article.
Okay, I fucked up. And you know, I learned something today: Pepsi is the choice of a new generation.
... old, hippie developers.
Have gnu, will travel.
I see Microsoft (and Apple, and a few others) as wanting to get us locked into their way of doing things
That's true of Microsoft, but not of Apple. That's why Apple can succeed in the long run. You look at something like the iPhone development platform, and see only lockdown and lock-in. But you are totally overlooking the fact that Apple is a major contributor to Webkit (which almost everyone uses), they are a major factor in advancing HTML 5, they install Apache on every OS X box, along with all of the UNIX tools.
You should consider the whole of what a company contributes to the greater computing community. It makes a ton of sense to use FOSS on the server side and even some desktop use, but consider supporting Apple (and companies like them) to some degree because open software and for-profit companies can greatly benefit each other.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Age perhaps? I'm 27, and grew up on Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.
You have a funny definition of "growing up". I'm 27 as well, and I was fully grown by the time any Google services started getting popular.
Face it bro... we ain't so young anymore! :p
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The tablet computers, smartphones and other personal electronic devices will complement the main desktop that people have, because people want a large screen for certain tasks. Not everything can be done on a 4.3" screen. However, the increasing prevalence of smartphones and other complements to the main desktop means that users will expect their applications and data to transition relatively seamlessly from one platform to another. This is where Microsoft gets into trouble. Soon users are going to demand the ability to at least view their data on a wide variety of platforms. Visual Studio and the rest of Microsoft's development tools make it very difficult to ensure that.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I did a start up for less and by the way when you are starting up is when you have the least amount of money.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
The big thing that desktop and full-size laptops have that these complements do not is a full size physical keyboard. True, most people use them as glorified typewriters, but a significant number of those people also know how to touch-type. People will stick with traditional computers for document creation and processing until a touchscreen can give them the same level of haptic feedback that a physical keyboard does.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
If "the web" as we know it is around in 10 years, I would feel like we as the tech community had slacked off.
I agree with you. My stance is that the average user is not a person who must type frequently and at length. I don't know; it's just conjecture.
No, not mobility. Just specialization whether it's mobile or not.
I think that is an argument for the death of desktops. I really don't see why people's lives will continue to evolve around "the desktop;" I really think people will continue to live mostly as they always have and that technology will evolve to suit peoples' lives, instead of the other way around, as we have now, while we still push a 40 year old paradigm of computer, the desktop being after all, merely a mainframe of yore (plus a killer graphics card) that sits on a desk.
;)
Desktop tech now is merely the 80-column card ad nauseum
2005 is my earliest Gmail message. True, I was 22 and "grown up" by that point. My point was that if someone uses a technology and integrates it into their life between 20-30, it's easier to adapt than between 30-40 or 40-50.
Damn, I'm old.
hipster: Hello, I'm a mac.
douchebag: And I'm a PC.
ballmer: douchebags! douchebags! douchebags!
Its nice that NYT has uncovered the trend that Apples advertising staff figured out so long ago.
Ya, the message could have been made in a non-inflammatory tone. But agree with the overall message. Regardless of what "start-up" you plan on launching, it will still require a small amount of fuel to spark ignition. That's called Capitol Investment. It may be used to purchase rent, electricity, employees, and yes...licensing if that's a requirement to achieving your goal.
Life is not for the lazy.
I don't mean that NYT was talking about a shift to Apple development. I mean that Apple recognized the growing apathy towards MS.
MS has been seen to be tired, unimaginative and lacking innovation to developers for the last decade or so. They have shown innovation in lobbying, litigation, and a sense of fairplay that would be an Uraguay defender blush; but those only score marks in the douchebag category.
Apple leaped on this with its ads, hoping to capture both fed up users, and instill a sense of cachet towards its brand. I think it did a pretty good job with that. Its hard to see how the "I'm a douchebag and Windows 7 was my idea" will have any reverberation; but some people still think that 2-for-1 is a bargain (Miller, before he became an outright douchebag, quipped "If they really wanted to fuck you, they would make you take 3") so what do I know.
Several things:
- Having $2K is one thing, spending it on MSDN is a whole different thing, and basically a stupid thing to do. Say you scrapped a $20K budget (quite a bit for a startup before an investment, sometimes that's even what the first angel investor will give), that's 10% of your budget for a development environment that's licensed to a single person.
- MSDN Enterprise has been dead for years. A top end subscription will now cost you over $10,000. Granted you don't need to go for that.
But, on the other hand, there's no particular need to pay anything for development tools, since Visual Studio Express is free and the MSDN library is, too. All you need to develop on Windows is a Windows license.
Completely agree. Starting developers go to where they can make a difference. It's hard to make a big different on Windows, but on new platforms there's space for an individual to make his mark without spending years of development.
Windows Viagra, I mean Windows 8, is just around the corner...
WINDOW REFLECTION: So! Heading toward work?
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: Uh, yeah! [nods head a little incredulously, as if his reflection really has nerve taunting him]
WINDOW REFLECTION: You going to ask them this time?
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: About what?
WINDOW REFLECTION: Our dysfunctional operating system!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: Ssssh, no! I don't want to talk about it!
WINDOW REFLECTION: Look, you're not alone. Millions of Windows users have complained to their bosses!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: [skeptically] I don't know.
WINDOW REFLECTION: We can do this!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: [pauses... then nods and smiles] OK.
Boss dramatization... followed by developer giving reflection a high-five.
Talking to your boss about Windows may be the last thing you want to do. But it's definitely a conversation worth having. Zillions of people have had their Windows talk. When you're ready for yours, you'll find helpful tips for complaining to your boss about Windows, on the Internet. Ask your doctor if you're healthy enough for Linux. Do not use Linux if you don't know what you're doing as kernel panics may result from an unsafe kernel recompilation. Side effects may include headache, patching, purchasing expensive Macs, and spending hours into the night talking to geeks on abnormal web sites. To avoid long term bricking, seek immediate help on the Internet for a reboot that lasts longer than four hours. Stop using Linux and buy a sleek silver MacBook right away if you experience a sudden decrease or loss of sex appeal. Talk to your boss today and ask if Linux is right for you!
[New Linux developer looks at reflection, smiling and nodding asynchronously]
"PHP is better than any .net crap."
ASP.NET is better than PHP. Write it down.
I don't know anything about desktop software. Last desktop app i wrote was for a big telecom company. Looked like crap. Was probably supposed to so I can't judge QT.
I can, however use my knowledge of your previous completely retarded statement to determine that the rest of your post is garbage.
Do you know what Linq to SQL is? If you don't then the next time a discussion about .NET do us a favor and shut the fuck up. The topic of this story is .NET - not the sub-par half-baked free solutions you are so fond of.
Linq to SQL lets you write SQL database code in free-form c#. It is the most useful thing to ever stand between a developer and a database. None of the free stuff has anything close to as useful. Believe me when I say that ASP.NET, C#, SQL are worth the licensing costs.
tl;dr
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We had some family over for the 4th of July weekend including a bunch of teens and pre-teens. I noticed lots of texting, quite a bit of social media, and a fair bit of web browsing on my and my wife's Droids but only once did anybody ask to use my computer and that was just because they saw me editing some of the photos I'd taken the day before and wanted a closer look. I got the distinct impression that for that generation PCs just arn't as important as they are to mine.
...the more young developers will slip through your fingers.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
What is wrong with the rest of us not so young and hip? Us older developers can run rings around the young hip developers and write better quality code with more features and faster and as few security flaws as possible.
Yes we do FOSS as well, but will write for Microsoft if they stop this stupid stuff that only the young and hip can write software for their "copycat" cell phone technology, etc. :)
Heck us older developers can mentor the young and hip ones to become better and do what we do, without making all the mistakes we made as young and hip developers 10 or 20 years ago. Why is it that only the hipe and young developers get the grants, loans, and investment money to start up software companies and they are usually 20 something men fresh out of college that learned the theories but lack real world experience, common sense, learning form our mistakes, and the knowledge of at lears 37 to 49 different programming languages and the patterns of analysis and design an research and we can adapt to any computer platform, any language, and any framework and 20 something code monkeys would rather sit at a computer all day and troll the Internet instead of working harder and smarter like us older developers. Also why does Microsoft and Apple only target male developers and forget about the female ones out there also needing grants, loans, and investment money for their own software companies? Women can program just as much as men can, and the young hip 20 something men make fun of women and say negative things about them (we never did at that age) and then whine about not being able to date a woman and never having sex. Shoot just stop the female trolling and bashing and treat women as equals and not sex objects and as human beings and maybe you'll meet the right woman some day. But honestly this younger generation has more technology and opportunities that we older developers had at their age. But they waste it with stuff that don't even matter in the real world. Don't get me started, alright?
P.S. Get off my lawn you young punks! :)
P.P.S. Hey hey you you get off of my cloud computing!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
comes around, as they say.
When trying to lock people in to your products and culture you must be careful so as not isolate yourself and lock yourself out of the rest of the community. Seems MS has been so tightly focused on product and student lock-in (the latter should probably be called "student hijacking") for a very long time now and now they've looked up and opened their eyes and suddenly noticed, "shit, where is everyone??". They've discovered that they've locked themselves in all alone... fallen prey to their own agenda you might say.
I don't know if that's why their losing ground but it seems like every day I run into some little annoyance or another that MS has INTENTIONALLY placed there as a form of lock in. None of them are big deals individually but there's a cumulative effect at work. I mean, I run into plenty of problems in the Free Software world as well but I don't usually get the feeling like someone is actively trying to make my life harder than it has to be.
Yet there are plenty of situations in which a desktop is far superior to a laptop, a tablet or a cellphone-like device. I'd like to see you do serious graphics work on a 15" laptop, or even a 17" (yes, most artists have portable devices as well but for most these are not their main tool, merely something they need to have as well, in my experience these devices are mainly used to showcase work to employers (it's easier to bring your data to them than it is to try and download it to one of their locked down corporate desktops and then display it when the only 3rd party software on the machine is some IBM terminal emulator for the customer service system). And please don't link some iPhone/Android fingerpainting app pictures, comparing that to the output you can achieve with a good desktop machine + good large monitor + wacom tablet is laughable...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
We tried this via the Dotcom era of the 1990's and it bit us all on the butt and burst the Dotcom bubble as the young and hip developers got their businesses and lacked a business plan.
Laurel & Hardy - Another Fine Mess no doubt they are too young to get the reference of Laurel and Hardy Dotcom business plans and business management many young and hip developers use to run businesses.
"Well this is another fine mess you've gotten us into! Hrrrrmmmphm!" -Ollie
"I'm sorry Ollie, all I wanted was to take shortcuts in learning programming and then earn a living writing code that was 'good enough' to compile without any errors. I didn't mean to crash any servers or workstations, I didn't mean to write bloated code, I only did what IT managers and vice presidents like you told me to do anyway. But now I got laid off and replaced with H1b Visa Workers who earn minimum wage and do an even worse job than me." -Stan
"Well Stan now the shareholders are pissed off at me due to all the loss in value of stock, and now they discovered that I cooked the books and I'm about to get indicted. But watch as I pull an Enron and escape to the Cayman Islands where I moved all my money to an anonymous bank account there. I'd take you with me, but I left forged documents putting all the blame on you and many others. The customers are all pissed off as nothing works right and is slow and crashes too often. But as David Wong said 'What is the difference between legally gotten gains and ill-gotten gains?' nothing really as the company was just another one of my Ponzi schemes. Plus I made so much money with trading carbon credits I printed up myself. Nice knowing you Stan, don't drop the soap in the federal prison showers." -Ollie
"What did I do to deserve this Ollie? You promised me I'd get rich if I only did what you told me to do. Why can't you take me with you?" -Stan
"Well Stan, you are the fall guy for my crimes, a scape goat. The public needs someone to blame, might as well be you. Besides not like the public really knows what is going on or that I rehired you and promoted you to CIO at the last minute and you never did those things and I and Marice Strong and Dick Cheney did them all and blamed you for it. Enjoy The Great Collapse of the world economy and world civilization as I buy up a small island and live like an emperor for the rest of my life as most of the planet suffers." -Ollie
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Microsoft's development tools are worth the price.
$2000? That's a bargain. I made myself a ton of money this year with that software. Sure, I pirated my home copy but I can think of several companies whose legally purchased copies of Visual Studio write whatever software they needed.
If I start a business, I'll ask M$ for the $300 copy of all their super expensive and incredibly useful sofware. A guy I know in real life actually managed to get that deal. Took a few phone calls, turning in to a real company with a real website etc.. but he did it without much trouble at all.
Microsoft software development tools are worth the money.
You must have matured slowly, myself I grew up using SV-BASIC on an SVI-328, then Commodore Amigas, a few years running MS/PC-DOS before switching over to Linux in the mid-90s and then around 1997 this little startup named Google showed up. But then I'm slightly older than you are (not much though, I find it strange that you wouldn't remember a world without Google).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
"Frankly, if you dont have $2K for an Enterprise MSDN licensing, you really have no business doing a start up, do you? "
Why can't I choose to spend the $2K on rental costs, eletricity, or just hardware?
Since when is having revenue that is less than last year but still positive considered "losing money"?
Ever since publicly held companies have been valued in terms of earnings per share and profit per employee. The second you can do something about short term by firing people (this is what Word Perfect, Inc. did right before the acquisition by Novell, Inc., to inflate the offering price: cut all R&D and fire everyone not contributing to the short term bottom line). The first you can deal with maybe once by trading cash on hand for a stock buyback, or by doing a reverse split... after that, you are out of ammunition and in the same boat two quarters later. If your value is going down by either of those measures, then your stock price will shortly follow it down.
Or if you want a more cynical answer, ever since RIAA and MPAA started claiming that their decreased revenues were from piracy rather than market saturation and/or their products sucking, and declared they were "losing money to pirates".
-- Terry
Talking about too many version of everything, They keep coming out with new versions of .Net even before most companies have the chance to move to the latest version and with each new version they want you to do everything differently.
.Net 3.5 which was 1 year ago, now 4.0 is out and it is deprecated, now you are supposed to use their entity framework.
The most ridiculous example is LINQ to SQL, it came out with
There is also the central contact storage in Vista and Windows 7 and 6 months after the original programming interface came out it was deprecated. I haven't been able to figure out if they've replaced the interface with another API, or if the contact storage is just there for "Legacy" support. Personally I thought that was one of the few properly thought out things in Vista.
The other problem is that the developer tools are not really cheap, sure if you want this limited functionality it isn't bad, but every 2-3 years they have a new version of Visual Studio out. Microsoft has already said they want to go to a yearly subscription where you are forced to use the latest of their products, but I've already commented on how are you supposed to build a house on quicksand.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
I was.
I was cashed out the day before my 18th birthday.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
Reason, shoddy APIs, protocols which were undocumented for tales for more than a decade, screwing them over with IE for 10 years until the pain become almost unbearable, screwing their own dev houses over by discontinuing popular product lines or making them entirely incompatible etc...
I still wonder why there still are people happiliy using their stuff in the dev world, seems sort of like masochism to me (I want to use Microsoft software because I feel happy to be screwed backwards every 5-6 years and I love the enduring pain IE induces)
So, I joined a startup about 2002, and we decided to grow organically. Growth has been solid and almost swift: 25%-70% per year. When we started, cash was crazy tight, since I was working after work hours and on weekends and funding everything myself. So, I got the cheapest thing I could find that would qualify as "our server" (a 1U PIV with generic parts) and got everything else for free with the Linux ISO. LAPP (Postgres/PHP) and we are good to go, with no worries about growth or licenses down the road.
So now, here we are, 8 years later. The company is now working towards its 2nd million in value, and the growth ratio is starting to get a bit crazy - after rapid growth in the beginning and a few years of weak growth, our curve is picking up again sharply. And now, the licensing savings are really starting to pay off.
I can take a disk image of any of our production servers, reload the database(s) and tweak a few settings (like IP address and/or host name) to roll out another system. Hassle? No. I can build an image just by re-enabling Raid 1 on an otherwise active partition and have my new server up, pre-configured. Total time per system might be 1 or 2 hours, without incurring any downtime, licensing costs, or (possibly most importantly) any licensing headaches.
And all this, for software that confidently works reliably, 24x7/365 with less than 0.05% downtime per server per year with reasonable quality hardware. Only an idiot would think this is anything less than a very, very good idea.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
i use a keyboard with integrated touchpad, and monitor with integrated webcam ... but Marilyn Monroe agrees with you... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21B3NRhxmeE
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
So, just use PyQt. The bindings are mature and a joy to use - they even allow you to apply some Pythonic idioms, instead of having to conform to the rigid underlying C++ type system.
Or use Qt4-QtRuby.
require 'Qt4'
app = Qt::Application.new ARGV
button = Qt::PushButton.new '&Close Me'
Qt::Object.connect button, SIGNAL('clicked()'), button, SLOT( 'close()' )
button.show
app.exec
Worse, they killed off one of the best and longest running games franchises ever. Flight Sim X was a disaster, but canning it was a worse mistake - all that development talent scattered....and that's after trying to milk it. FS2004 had a kiosk mode for use in museums and displays. FSX removed it and had a license that didn't allow such use. Says a lot about what's been happening in Microsoft.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Yes, call me old fashioned, but developing is about the creation of solution to software problems using tools that are best for the job - if you want "young and hip" then go join a rock band or something...
There are two major problems with the younger generation today:
1. Everything has to be fashionable in order to impress one's peers, and
2. Everything has to be "interactive" - what the f*** is so wrong with just sitting down and ***LISTENING*** to a piece of music without having to mess about with it?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Frankly, if you dont have $2K for an Enterprise MSDN licensing, you really have no business doing a start up, do you?
Nah. I'd rather not spend $2k on my self-made start up. I'm doing this on my own, for fun. If it gets big cool, if not, I'm not out $2k on Microsoft stuff.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
First, your post was a not a troll. Second, that $2k could go into advertising or ISP costs for a year (assuming a low volume website) or Adobe Creative Suite. I mention Adobe only because the OSS alternatives don't compare. If they did, that'd be another great way to save $1k. Throwing $2k around here and there would cripple most 1 man startups particularly when you're trying to create something from nothing. A whole lotta people are starting from nothing these days.
Camping on quad since 1996.
$2000? Looks like $11,899 for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/ultimate
Insane.
What M$ needs to realize is that hip and cool developers are much like real world hip and cool artists. They are young and poor. They are not affiliated with a mega corporation, and they certainly aren't working on any M$ based product. They're doing web, or mobile, or free software. At worst they are developing for the iPhone and have paid out a whopping $100 annual fee to Apple in order to provision their iPhone with the app they're working on, and submit it to the Apple's app store.
Microsoft has priced itself out of cool. And no army of lawyers, marketing morons, or MBA's at M$ is going to be able to lure them in without making Visual Studio 2010's availability as simple as "You can use it for free if you download it. There is no catch."
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
I have seen companies start up with no employees, a whole lot of spare time and a $80/month dedicated server by people who have expenses like families with Children.
$2000 is a lot of money in many cases.
From my limited research (Texas public universities), most college programs are based on Java coursework. Maybe Microsoft software runs the PCs in the labs, but the only MS-centric field of study I'm aware of is the management information systems track, which is in the business schools.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I rejected Microsoft primarily because it's too easy to write complete garbage code on a MS platform. Anyone who's had to dissect/revise/resurrect/secure/support anything running on Windows machines (and isn't on their third cup of powder blue Kool-Aid) can readily produce horror stories about the nightmare that is Microsoft.
Microsoft is PAIN.
They might not go away in the foreseeable future, but if their products continue to deprive devs, designers, admins, and lowly server monkeys of valuable sleep and sanity, alternatives will continue to be sought, until alternatives dominate the marketplace.
Although the new Windows stuff (7 & 2008) is pretty good. Maybe they'll learn their lesson, and wouldn't that just be delightful?
I prefer to program in Objective-C over Java, C++, Python, or the .Net languages. (luckly, you left Ruby out of that list :) I'm not quite sure what the gripes about Xcode are, I've heard them multiple times already, though. I personally love Xcode, it's supporting me very well in my development efforts.
Most of the people complaining about Xcode I've talked to actually tried to use it for C++ or Java. It works, but that's not what it was designed for, and so there are many shortcomings that don't exist for Objective-C (in the area of autocompletion for example).
I've used Eclipse for Java development, and it comes nowhere near the ease-of-use of Xcode for Objective-C, still many people rave on about how great Eclipse is. I don't quite get it. (Oh, and Visual Studio without Visual Assist for C++ is completely awful. I don't know how anybody can actually use it.)
I'm afraid it's too little too late... For lot's of cool apps i've been waiting for a good Windows Mobile version (like Last.fm, Sugarsync, and numerous messaging apps), while the Android, iPhone and even Symbian and others are at the umpteenth version they haven't even bothered to release a proper beta for Windows Mobile... The platform seems to be dying, sadly...
It depends where you go to college. My university's CS computer labs all ran Linux, about a third of the computers dual-booted Windows (but defaulted to Linux). Almost all work was easier to do on Linux (software already installed, etc).
A friend went to Reading University, in the same city as Microsoft's UK offices, and they seemed to use MS software for everything.
Xcode is great, I don't know what you're talking about... I actually like Objective-C.
When it comes to writing games I'll still do the majority of my programming in C++.
For anything UI related however, Objective-C + Cocoa + Xcode is amazingly useful.
Slahsdot commentary on this story is like Fox News commentary on Democrats - "Fair and Balanced".
In a large conventional business, the head of IT (probably an MBA) will be wooed by Microsoft and its partners. In a startup, someone really technical has the choice instead and is going to go with what they know. Once the product is launched, MS is out of the equation, it hardly is going to get rebuilt in .net at that stage.
this is where "sudden outbreak of common sense" tag should be used
MS's MO is to indoctrinate people at the business level not the developer level
"Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers".
MS MO is to hook devs into the MS-only technologies, as then there is a large number of MS-only applications, and a lot of MS-only employees. Business users don't understand the difference MS, Linux and a potato but they understand the cost implications of a market that has a predominance of MS-only employees, tools, and developer mindshare. That's why Ballmer went bonkers telling everyone why developers were so essential to MS's success (even if he didn't understand the difference between Linux and a potato)
True, the innovative work is done elsewhere - but MS has deep enough pockets, thanks to the above spread over many years, to buy the innovation and cripple it.
Im a 20 year old .NET developer, and I can assure you, there is no such thing as a "young, hip developer."
Replacing. The general populace sees the untethering of their data from a local device as a huge benefit. No more worries about data transfer, backups, etc.
Even in my (techie nerd) case the iPad has replaced my laptop far more than I thought it would. Instead of just being used for occasional web browsing and email and some fun apps, it fast became my dominate computing platform outside of work. The only things I still use my laptop for are coding and transcoding. Everything else, from casual browsing to reading documentation to email to videos to netflix to crazy apps I didn't even know existed (seriously, I can hold my iPad up to the night sky and it will show me what astronomical features I'm gazing at as I pan it around): all iPad. It's a little mind boggling how my almost brand new laptop quickly started to feel like an antiquated piece of computing. Like booting up an old computer: fun and useful, but only to a point.
Sure, but that is a specialized application. The average user is not a graphic designer.
What with all the business lost by Microsoft to the legit open source and free software vendors, it's a sure bet that Microsoft will again send out it's pushers to pass out free candy and dope (copies of windoze and developer tools/suites/whatever) to all the young kids, get them hooked on windoze stuff then start charging them for it. That's what happened years ago during the Win3.xx dayz. Ruined a lot of lives, left a lot of programmers with bitter and broken spirits, a lot of good apps went bad, a lot of people suffered with crapware, standards and users were violated, and a lot of money was wasted.
As a recovered, former Windoze programmer, I say that the youth of today should save their health and sanity, and Just Say No!
me. --a by-product of public education
I had a boss once that thought like you.
The Licensing for MSDN does not give you the ability to set up your business using all the products! The products are licensed for DEVELOPMENT ONLY.
My boss thought that he could buy the MSDN for everyone and that would cover the desktop, office, outlook, MS Access, domain controllers, etc, etc. Now they are out of business because of Microsoft!
I worked for a start-up. They had to license MSDN but then when they went live they had to buy licenses for their production servers. Maybe that changed since 2003-2006 now, or the guy in charge of software licensing was a dummy.... But either way if I was going to do a start-up, I'd install Linux for free, and then write the software in Java/Python and PostgreSQL. Then I'd be ahead probably a good 10,000 on licensing costs.... Depending upon the burn rate, that I could be a whole month for a one/two person startup....
Then we reboot them, only this time make them "darker and grittier".
"Capitol" investment is paying off your congressmen to maintain your monopoly. I think you mean "capital". Pedant++
Never.
What Microsoft and Apple do is their version of a growing market niche. Devs who have been around for awhile can rehash the thousands of broken "The Next Version of Windows will have..." promises and probably dust off a couple of mp3 players that were years earlier than the iPod. They advertise their "new" product pretending they invented the niche. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Apple's innovators/developers are crushed.
Today's lesson: Microsoft and Apple will gladly steal their developers lunch money (that's your livelihood) AND lock you out of the market segment should the young developer's market niche grow large enough. Most young devs haven't learned this lesson yet, but they get a sense of it when working with Microsoft and Apple tools.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
A few years ago I was building a team to build a system (Pando, http://www.pando.com/ that needed to be efficient and small on both Mac and Windows (i.e. C++ code), plus a Java server side. I talked to plenty of recent graduates of CS programs, and it was easy to staff the server side work (Java, PHP), and at least find people who wanted to learn Mac development (ObjC), but nobody knew anything about C++/Win32 or was even willing to learn it. Luckily I found a fantastic old-school developer who did a great job, but it was quite an eye opener to find that schools weren't training CS students anything about what I thought was Microsoft's core asset (Win32).
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
HIP? Never heard of that language. Another Java clone?
Reply to That ||
For lot's of cool apps i've been waiting for a good Windows Mobile version (like Last.fm, Sugarsync, and numerous messaging apps), while the Android, iPhone and even Symbian and others are at the umpteenth version they haven't even bothered to release a proper beta for Windows Mobile... The platform seems to be dying, sadly...
WinMo, yes. Windows Phone is a completely different platform from it, however, at least as far as users and application developers are concerned.
Actually neither. I'm a RETIRED developer, because of the investments I made in education, my own startup & and the tools I needed to do to serve my client base, which was Microsoft-oriented. If that makes me a douchebag, I'll take it. Its 10am in the morning. I'm going surfing. What are YOU doing this morning?
Hip developers? HIP? HAAAAAA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! WOOOOO-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh stoppit yer killin me!
how is that news? was there ever even a *moment* where microsoft was "cool"? I misread the headline as "Microsoft Out of Favor With Hung Developers", which made just as little sense and would have been just as little newsworthy. so please give me back the 5 seconds it took me to read it and the 15 minutes it took me to type up this response!
XNA Game Studio is Free. VPL, Free. DirectX, Free. What are they talking about?
It is not at all hard to master one (or even several) languages, while also being versed in many more. Indeed, most multilingual people I know are in the "better than average" category in their major language(s), while most people who're scared of anything outside their C++/Java/VB/whatever sandbox are mediocre at best.
Um, no, it's really not like being pregnant at all. Being pregnant truly is a yes/no proposition - you are or you aren't. The cost of something, however, is not binary - it's a continuous variable. And demand for products varies pretty smoothly with price per Econ 101. Sure, free is marginally cooler than $.01. $.01 is marginally cooler than $.02. But it's certainly not the case that free == totally cool and $.01 == totally uncool.
As to the specifics here: if a startup really has so little money that they can't come up with $200 after two years in operation, they might as well throw in the towel. I'm entirely onboard with the idea that you shouldn't spend money for something if you don't need to, but come on - this really is essentially free. How is a company with finances that tight making payroll?
There is no replacement for gaming on a big screen. I'll admit that a laptop can feed a big screen pretty well, but a big CPU/GPU combo can do a lot more. This is not a specialized application.
Remember to maintain your supply of
"Which Microsoft have you been watching for the last few decades?"
The very Microsoft that didn't even have corporate/campus licenses till the NT 3.5 days, about 1995 if my memory doesn't fool me.
"MS always targets business leaders first."
That can be true for the very, very begining. And I mean by this the IBM bussiness leaders that signed the contract on DOS. But then, Ms DOS came "built it" on the PCs, no bussiness leader involved. Windows 3.1 (the first popular PC GUI from Microsoft) came pushed by the users (CIOs where on UNIX and mainframes and VT100 terminals) as did first Office versions (i.e. against Word Perfect).
Visual Basic and Access "databases" where a "bottom up" issue to the point of being not only not pushed by CIOs (or otherwise high rank bussiness people) but their very nightmare (they were seen as information discontrol and leakeage). Going from DOS to Windows to Windows for Workgroups to NT "classic" domains (3.5, 3.51 and 4.0) was not even an issue where high rank bussiness people were involved at all since its market adoption came basically from growing companies and internal departments, again, *against* top-down policies. As it were the case with "internet presence" on the Frontpage days.
The case is that almost always Microsoft is not a company with solutions to the "big guys" but pushed from the bottom up from the trenches to the point that only when Microsoft got a firm grasp on the desktop it started to offer "server" products.
"Developers and sysamins have been pushing for a move away from MS for over a decade"
You don't know so many sysadmins or developers, do you? One thing that Microsoft does admirabily is "dumbing down" tech people to the point that most of them are not sysadmins but system operators (they know which button to push without deep knowledge of its consecuences or why does it work the way it does) nor developers but mild code wizard executioners. Those are the people Microsoft talks about on their "bussiness cases" (Unix/Linux people are more scarce and expensive than their Windows counterparts -do you think they are talking about "top notch" technicians there?) and those are the people that would never allow non-Microsoft products in the environments they control for fear to the unkown and fear of not being good enough for those "other" products (i.e. look how many windows-only sysadmins can "talk", say, POP or SMTP on a telnet session to debug a network problem versus how many linux sysadmins can do it).
When sysadmins and developers are *really* pushing alternatives they manage to find their place just exactly in the same way Microsoft started: from the trenches, down up. Here a LAMP box, there a Samba fileserver or a workgroup mail relay, etc.
"CIO's make the decision that X company is going to be an MS house"
That's true *now*, my youngster, but that was not the origins. And such CIO/CTO point of view isn't even a dumb one. Other thing that Microsoft knows well is to develop (with the aid of internal "glue code" and niche apps -which in turn goes back to the problem about losing grip on developers) quite entrenched "solution blocks" where Access can only "grow up" with Ms SQL, Ms Outlook only shines when working against Ms Exchange, Ms Office's full potential only appears coupled to Ms Sharepoint, your glue code for all those apps and supporting processes is only effectively doable using Ms Visual Studio. Then couple this fact with the one that due to the abuse of "false" standards (Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos, anyone? or CIFS weapon race where almost each Ms patch "casually" breaks Samba compatibility) and closed formats the reverse is true too: only Microsoft products can "talk" effectively to Microsoft products and you will have that while starting to go Microsoft maybe is not quite a savvy decision, once Microsoft entrenches policying "Microsoft for everything" becomes quite a sensible decision, specially when seen from high altitude and specially thinking short/mid term (where m
Why do you need a spare 2K? Microsoft will give you all the tools, including WIndows Server, for free.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
No there isn't. But it does not follow that that screen will continue (?) to be most popularly found on a desktop PC than on a home media console. I couldn't confirm with a bit of Googling, but haven't PC gaming sales been on the decline for years? I'm not arguing for or against the merits of PC gaming vs console gaming, but I do wonder if the general populace hasn't spoken somewhat on that issue already (and they decide what hardware to buy).I really don't know, but that's the way I see it.
Give me a *nix command line over .net shit any day
Java development? There's Eclipse or NetBeans or etc.
Free software offers many quality choices that in general play nicely with one another.
Microsoft is designed to play only with itself and it barely does that successfully.
Microsoft's embedding into the business community has set business back 10 years.
It's time for MS to die. There's 100 better OSs than Microsoft can build.
And on and on /diatribe
While the OS is open source, many of the key applications are not, and need to be licensed. For instance, the Android Marketplace. While ann android without the marketplace isn't as useless as an iPhone with the AppStore, it makes it much less convenient.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Right. $2000 can pay for tens of thousands or even millions of ads depending on the ad rate. Even better if you go pay per click.
Even better than that, actually, would be to pay $1000 to a well-connected PR person who can call up a friend in a major (or medium) newspaper who'll write an article about your startup.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Process for other players: 1) get music into your computer 2) plug in device 3) drag files to device. Process for iPod: 1) get music into your computer 2) plug in device 3) There is no step 3. If you only want certain songs on the iPod, you do have the extra step of making a playlist, but that's no harder than selecting and dragging files into folders on other devices.
There are some legit criticisms of the Apple method of doing this - but you've got to admit that it's not any HARDER to get music on and off an iPod than any other device. In fact, I can't imagine how it could be any easier.
There are open source alternatives to the marketplace.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I have seen companies start up with no employees, a whole lot of spare time and a $80/month dedicated server by people who have expenses like families with Children.
Lies! People with children never have a whole lot of spare time.
What's the difference?
I learned C first. I learned Java in college and programmed in that for years. Then I learned Objective-C. Then I tried the Android SDK. Then I tried the iPhone SDK. Then I just tried the Android SDK again.
My conclusions as of last week (when I tried the Android SDK)
1) I prefer Obj-C over Java for the flexibility and readability. It's just simply easier and at least as powerful. I get stuff done faster in Obj-C despite having more years of Java experience.
2) Xcode has bugs. Gee, what a surprise.
3) iPhone SDK is really easy to use for a mobile dev platform.
4) iPhone SDK provisioning (loading a cert to be able to sign and run on a device is a pain in the ass, but they just fixed that recently)
5) The Android SDK / Eclipse feels like being thrown back into the stone age.
All in all, I'd so much rather program in Obj-C than Java. And the Android SDK needs some serious help in order to compete with iPhone.
I'd even be inclined to say I'd probably rather even use older conventions to program for OpenStep/GnuStep when it comes to multiplatform GUI apps, but honestly, I haven't tried GnuStep yet. So I can't be sure.
Sure, using Java is nice to have crossplatform compatibility from the start. And I'm definitely inclined to do crossplatform dev because I used to use Windows, OSX, Linux and Solaris. But I've found that getting something built faster and tested is more important than getting something built for a bunch of platforms.