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Microsoft Out of Favor With Young, Hip Developers
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's failures with the KIN phone (only two months on the market, less than 10,000 phones sold) are well-known to this community. Now the NY Times goes farther, quoting Tim O'Reilly: 'Microsoft is totally off the radar of the cool, hip, cutting-edge software developers.' Microsoft has acknowledged that they have lost young developers to the lures of free software. 'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,' acknowledged Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's business software group, in an interview last year. 'And then, when people, particularly younger people, wanted to build a start-up, and they were generally under-capitalized, the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them.' Microsoft's program to seed start-ups with its software for free requires the fledgling companies to meet certain guidelines and jump through hoops to receive software — while its free competitors simply allow anyone to download products off a website with the click of a button." Update: 07/07 13:21 GMT by T : Tim O'Reilly says that while he "[doesn't] disagree with all of his conclusions," he's not happy with it Ashlee Vance's piece, writing "I was not the source for the various comments that were attributed to me," including the bit about "totally off the radar." (Thanks to reader gbll.)
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
More, exotic fart apps is what we now expect from this new generation of HIP programmers.
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.
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.
The Zune wasn't/isn't a bad player. The problem is that to unseat the iPod, it had to be a fantastic player. And Apple kept moving the hardware/spec goal while MS kept aiming for last year's goal. By the time MS caught to the iPod Touch spec wise, Apple had built a 200,000 app store that extended the functionality of their players while MS has nothing in the near future.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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
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
The problem is that it doesn't really work anymore. Computers aren't just used for business anymore, -everyone- has a computer and knows how to use it. Back in the day, there were large differences between platforms, there were few cross-platform apps and computers weren't as user-friendly as they are today. Set someone who has never used Linux but has used Windows in front of a desktop made to look like Windows and they will have no problems navigating it because the majority of the apps used on Windows also have Linux ports with the exception of some Adobe/MS programs.
The learning curve is nearly non-existent now with GUIs.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
> The problem is that to unseat the iPod, it had to be a fantastic player.
No. To unseat the iPod it had to be perceived as a fantastically cool player. How well it actually worked was largely irrelevant.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
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!
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?
It also doesn't help that a lot of small companies, particularly tech ones, really don't need much of what MS is good at providing.
If you are business or institution, whose focus and skillset isn't primarily technical, that needs to roll out a whole bunch of desktops for word processing and assorted off-the-shelf applications, along with email and central logins and stuff, Microsoft can make you a relatively compelling offer. There will be some annoying issues of various sorts; but the off-the-shelf software will run on Windows clients(and the boxes will be cheap because HP and dell are always cutting each other's throats), Windows admins are fairly common and comparatively inexpensive, and things like Exchange and AD make it(comparatively) trivial to get a bunch of people running more or less homogenous desktop setttings, logging in on different machines, and scheduling boring meetings with each other.
If, on the other hand, you are some tiny techy startup, none of that is nearly as relevant or interesting, or worth the money.
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 :)
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
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 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 $2,000 for it?
Back in the late 90's, I developed for a Microsoft shop. By 2001, I was playing with linux, and by 2002 I made the switch. I haven't run into anything I couldn't do just as easily in Linux.
There's no place like
MS has so many problems with FOSS, some of them major.
1. FOSS is free as in beer. And it is eternally free. Software developers, with the possible exception of ($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.
Ok pop quiz, people. Is the above person a young hip developer, or a douchebag?
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).
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.
______
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
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.
... old, hippie developers.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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.