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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.)
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']
But all my Microsoft software was fr.... uh, nevermind
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Developers, developers, developers, developers!
-Steve Ballmer
I am officially gone from
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.
True homosexual hipsters use mac and iPhone.
Hey, but I... oh.
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
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.
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.
As a recent CS grad, I agree 100% that the cost to get up and running for MS is a pretty huge deal.
But another big draw in the FOSS world (for me, at least) is the freedom to write code that isn't locked down to particular technology or other setup. I see Microsoft (and Apple, and a few others) as wanting to get us locked into their way of doing things, completely ignoring the possibility of 'change' that doesn't come from them.
I would much rather give life to some core idea and then see how people with other interests and thoughts can expand and evolve what I started.
WWGFD?
well... I can't believe thats really *all* you have to pay... If you build the next facebook, and in 2 years you need 30k servers... you better believe MS is going to come after you for valid actual fully paid licenses... I have no clue how much that would cost... Licensing a small 30 person law firm costs 30k just for 3 servers and MS office... I can't even begin to fathom how much a datacenter full of web servers and SQL server would cost... well into the hundreds of millions... and you can bet MS will keep coming year after year after year.... They'll want you to upgrade the OS every 3-4 years, upgrade SQL server every 2-3 years... each time taking hundreds of millions of dollars from your pocket... and for what?!? FOSS solved these problems and solved them better 10 years ago...
MS licensing would have killed facebook, twiiter, and google. Probably yahoo, and just about anyone else too. When these businesses started taking off they were still venture funded, and they were adding hundreds if not thousands of machines a month. With that kind of scaling the doubling in cost for MS licensing would have bankrupted all of them before they had a chance to find a business model. No one building to scale on the web would ever choose MS, its far too expensive when you're talking about thousands of nodes.
The only major web company I know of that runs MS is eBay... and besides going public in the .com boom, I have no clue how they managed to afford the doubling of their startup costs that using MS means. Maybe they got some sort of sweetheart deal... but MS is notorious for doing a sweetheart deal to start, only to ruin your life when the rubber actually hits the road, trusting them with your business is foolish. eBay shareholders would probably be really happy if the capex going to MS stayed on eBay's bottom line...
To be fair, the .NET SDK itself is 100% free, as are the Express editions: http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/
They also provide XNA for free, and it looks like Windows Phone 7 tools will be free as well.
It's not like one *has* to pay for Microsoft's developer stack. They are just charging you for the premium features of their IDE.
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
Ok pop quiz, people. Is the above person a young hip developer, or a douchebag?
Hoo, boy, I can just see the next wave of Microsoft ads:
Most startups prefer to spend money on their core business instead of on Microsoft software...
90% of startups fail.
Buy from Microsoft!
if you know what's good for you
______
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