The Longhorn Dream Reborn

gbjbaanb writes "Early this month, Microsoft dropped something of a bombshell on Windows developers: the new Windows 8 touch-friendly immersive style would use a developer platform not based on .NET. Cue howls of outrage from .NET developers everywhere, but here Ars Technica describes what's more likely to have been going on and why Microsoft is finally getting its act together for developers."

Comments

Re:So then,

[RightSaidFred99]

They're not dropping Silverlight or .NET. Try to pay attention. Nobody with any sense ever thought they were going to, but the usual suspects took every opportunity to make a "Durr hurr, Microsoft screwing over developers" thing out of it when there was no indication whatsoever this would happen.

Nobody sane wants to develop large applications in fucking native JS and HTML5, and Microsoft knows that.

Re:Standard modus operandi

[bmajik]

I am a Microsoft employee in DevDiv.

(PS: Buy Visual Studio LightSwitch when it comes out! It rocks!)

I will not comment on the accuracy of what is in the ars article, other than to say: I know the answers to some of the questions they are worried about, and the answers do not worry me and shouldn't worry you either (unless you're a competing non-MS technology, perhaps :))

Regarding your post: I don't see how you'd conclude that .net is going anywhere from the article you supposedly read.

First and foremost, you would need to be specific about what you mean by ".net" for your statement to even make sense. Are you claiming that C#, the language, is on an EOL path? Or the .NET runtime will no longer be a supported way of writing userland apps?

Your claim that we intentionally obsolete developer technologies as some sort of money making scheme is hillarious. Have you worked in the commercial software industry before? Let me explain how it works.

1) we spend a ginormous amount of money paying engineers to make something that we hope developers use.
2) we figure out if its something we can even charge money for, or if we need to give it away so more people will develop for our huge money making platforms (Windows, SQL, Office, Sharepoint)
3) when we have something we can give away / sell for a pittance, we start doing so
4) this is when we might actually start getting money for our efforts.

Now then, if our strategy was to make money at any cost, you'd think that we'd fire all of the engineers and keep selling licenses at the same price indefinitely.

But as you've noted, our engineering staff moves on to new things and eventually the old things get phased out.

We don't start working on new platforms because we need to figure out how to get more money out of existing customers. We work on new platforms because we think they'll be better than the old ones; that customers will like them more; that they'll provide more value to everyone. There are all kinds of features and products we'd LIKE to put out there in the real world but they all cost us more money to do. And as you've noted, everything we release causes someone to get upset if we want to stop supporting years later. For every one of these developer technologies we ship, we end up supporting it for years after we're not selling it (and thus not getting new revenue). Our support life cycle is a hell of a lot longer than Apples, or any of the for-pay Linux distros, for instance.

Finally, regarding what a huge revenue stream deveopers tools are for us... I've never come across anyone in Windows or Office who is worried their project is going to be killed and their staff moved onto a _real_ money making project like the F# compiler :)

Sure, DevDiv does great revenue compared to a lot of entire companies. But look who we're competing against. I'm not sure we've ever sold 300 million seats ever, counting everything we do. Windows does that _every release_.

(nothing against the F# compiler guys. I just picked something :))