That's not really the problem. Having a Mac toolkit isn't somehow going to magically bump them to 100,000 apps. If they want WP7 to succeed, they should focus on what they are supposedly currently focusing on: Selling as many WP7 devices as possible.
If the market is there, developers will buy the hardware. I bought a new $2000 MBP just to develop for iPhone. If WP7 had the same market size, I wouldn't hesitate to drop $1000 on a Windows laptop. I certainly wouldn't hesitate to fork over $199 for a Windows license for use in Parallels.
The real tragedy was the sheer short sightedness of the executive team. Windows Mobile went unchanged for 5 straight years. That management thought some hex-grid icon chooser thing would fix things was just mind bogglingly stupid. Kin just has the be mentioned and not explained. Even WP7 is having issues, but its chief problems are that it launched 2 years later than would be optimal, and Microsoft severely underestimating the complexity of updates. In truth, everything else looks pretty ok. It has a solid developer toolset, growing library of games and apps, and actual buy-in internally and from third parties.
It's going to be a real hard slog for Microsoft to gain big market share. But the antitrust shackles are coming off, and co-marketing opportunities with Windows 8 might give WP7 a badly needed boost.
How does stating a positive opinion about something make one a marketer of it? That's quite an accusation, I'm happy to prove you wrong in any reasonable fashion you see fit. But I suspect you're just quick to pull the trigger on it without actually stopping to address the points.
I'm going to go against the obvious grain here, where all the scathing comments earn obligatory karma.
I think the move to Metro looks promising. If they can clean up the visual design, it will be a very striking UI.
I think the tablet UI might have a lot of potential as it represents a break away from trying to shoehorn the Windows desktop onto a form factor that doesn't match.
I also wouldn't be surprised to see this performing quite well on the tablet hardware slated for mid-2011. They've given demos of Win7 on ARM running quite smoothly, and Qualcomm has already announced their next Snapdragon, which is supposed to be (relatively) blisteringly fast.
Finally, IE's new graphics acceleration should match quite well with tablet hardware, so I expect the sluggishness to disappear.
All in all, I'm actually pretty optimistic it'll be a pretty great Windows release. I think with Win7, they've ironed out a lot of crap in the Vista underpinnings and are spending a lot less time fixing and more time implementing new things.
Courier was a pretty good idea. I think Microsoft has plenty of ideas, but is still struggling with the engineering it takes to implement them.
I think ideas start out as, "here's a whole new UI paradigm" then quickly moves to "man, this is hard and requires a lot of teams to coordinate" to "how about we just put a new menu item in there?"
I agree. Blender is one of those apps where you won't just jump into it and figure out how to produce anything without some dedication and research. I've spent a great deal of time borrowing Blender books and watching endless YouTube tutorials (there's quite a few, highly recommended). You take what you learn and apply it as much as possible, and it becomes part of your vocabulary. Yes, it takes significant effort.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. Once you actually know your way around the tool, it has a way of becoming second nature and getting out of the way. Avid Blender users love it, and there's a reason. Blender 2.5 (soon to be 2.6 from what I've read) does not change that. It's incrementally easier, but it has also become very powerful. I look forward to the huge amount of Python add-ons that will follow as Blender developers take advantage of the far more consistent and powerful API's.
I never saw multitudes cry out for C# for mobile games development, either, but Unity appears to be a very successful product. You don't need people crying out for a product to make development worthwhile.
1. Keep the incentives high. 2. Stay cool. The only way to do this is release cool products. 3. Smart startup strategy
a. Stop stomping on startups lest you want to suffer Microsoft-itis
b. But, don't buy too many startups. You end up with people just making the deal to get rich and look good.
c. Engage startups, help them, and get them on your side. If they truly align, then buy them. If they flop, their good engineers will flock your way. 4. Stay #2 in size. You need Microsoft (and now Apple) to make you look like the underdog, even if you're not. Engineers often love working for the underdog. 5. Give me 1 million dollars. I will give you 5 more tips (including this one).
He's narrowed the definition of Startup to be "companies like mine." To your point, there is really no difference between starting a small business and starting a, well, startup. This is a person who mingles with like minded people, and thus has a very narrow view of the technology world, which is why he can't even get his terminology correct.
Funny, I communicate with Perl web developers quite well. I learn a little about Perl, they learn a little about.NET, and magic happens. Amazingly, those Perl developers happen to know (sometimes quite a fair bit) of C++. Amazingly, I happen to know some Perl. What a diverse world we live in! Welcome to it!
What really undermines your *point* is that you think that somehow studying Windows development undermines ones judgement. It's not a bad judgement to learn a technology that is required of you. I started out a Linux and Java developer. I needed to port to Windows because that's where the market is. In doing so, I learned some.NET technology. What judgement should I have exercised? Quit the job? I think the better judgement is to be open minded and meet the challenges you're faced by learning.
The basics of your point are OK, of course. If I'm running a shop based on Linux, I'd probably skip the Windows developer resumes wholesale. Not a problem. We get that. If, however, I'm running a shop that makes a popular Mac app, I might be quite interested in Mac developers who have Windows development experience if I'm at all interested in the possibility of targeting the other 90% of PC's.
You mean, like understanding the general design of.NET's CLR? Yeah, that must be so Microsoft-specific that it could never work on other platforms. COUGH - why am I coughing? Do I have Mono or something?
If Microsoft were to utterly disappear, something like.NET would quickly move in to replace it, and it would have many concepts resurrected from it. I wouldn't be surprised to see C# developers (both.NET and Mono developers) pick it up faster than anyone else. One just has to consider that the research Microsoft has done in things like LINQ, TPL, WPF, and other things aren't so different than what, say, Google would have done.
Bad for startups? You mean, like Unity, who based their product on Mono, and now has a game engine stack for like 5 different platforms, including Android?
This guy is an idiot. Most *good*.NET developers I know have a strong background in C, C++, and other lower level things. Most love tools like reflector, because they *are* concerned with things like how the network stack works, or the time complexity of the built in collections. He's just pissed that those same developers can whip up simple internal tools complete with GUI and multithreading by the time his C developers figure out why libXXXX isn't linking.
It wasn't just the poop brown. It was also being a half inch thick untapered sharp edged box with almost no peripheral support. There are better industrial designers in the UPS shipping supplies division.
They should shutter their business and release all their developers to go work on real projects that have a hope of succeeding. The only division worth keeping is the gaming division.
Ridiculous. If you owned the Windows and Office divisions, I seriously doubt you'd "shutter" them and concentrate on gaming. Those business make serious bucks, and shuttering a business is a bit more complicated than ranting about shortcomings of vision.
Well, unlike you, I want more. I want Google Maps to be fast and fluid. I also want the vast majority of browsers to have a lot of performance room to spare so that the *next* version of Google Maps will not only be phenomenal, but continues to be fast and fluid. Stability is good, but we are right to be demanding more.
It's always some overpaid bozo with a VP title who would sacrifice vision and strategy for higher profit margin. At the end of the day, such companies are left with a huge bag of expensive, unsold hardware that they have to hock for half price. By then, it's all over - they lost the buzz and now they look desparate.
In Samsung's case, it's over before it even started.
I honestly don't understand Samsung's, Motorola's, RIM's, and HP's pricing on these things. If you're going to spend $500-$800 on a tablet, you're 90% likely to go with the market leader who has not just the most mature product, but the one that is also among the absolute fastest and with the largest application and user base.
So, why not take advantage of the opportunity and start pricing these at $300? After 4 quarters, investors might be pissed at the capital loss of selling millions of units, but at least you'll have an ecosystem. Will there be a Galaxy Tab or Xoom ecosystem? One that is as rich as Apple's?
Are these other tablet makers really this short sighted? Forego the big win to make chump change?
Supply sufficiently large input set as a constraint to any problem with any complexity, and you can say the same argument. Bubble sort would suffer the same.
There's no doubt in my mind that the MBP is actually a great value compared to premium laptops out there. It simply kicks the asses of Sony, Dell, HP, and Acert in almost every aspect that matters: Performance, Battery Life, and Form Factor.
I do think it's silly, however, to even begin to compare the $399 laptops with the MBP. Until Apple makes a $399 laptop that kicks the asses of the PC laptops, I don't want to hear how much better a $2200 laptop. It doesn't do any service to the people who just can't afford to drop a mortgage payment on a computer, but need one. I would never recommend to my less affluent friends that they should buy the MBP - that would just be insulting.
Oh, but Windows 8 will indeed have huge UI improvements. For one thing, there will be more gradient fills. And, the desktop wallpapers now can have different transitions between them! And incredibly, the Start menu will now *slide* in. This is going to change your life, I'm telling you.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not really the problem. Having a Mac toolkit isn't somehow going to magically bump them to 100,000 apps. If they want WP7 to succeed, they should focus on what they are supposedly currently focusing on: Selling as many WP7 devices as possible.
If the market is there, developers will buy the hardware. I bought a new $2000 MBP just to develop for iPhone. If WP7 had the same market size, I wouldn't hesitate to drop $1000 on a Windows laptop. I certainly wouldn't hesitate to fork over $199 for a Windows license for use in Parallels.
The real tragedy was the sheer short sightedness of the executive team. Windows Mobile went unchanged for 5 straight years. That management thought some hex-grid icon chooser thing would fix things was just mind bogglingly stupid. Kin just has the be mentioned and not explained. Even WP7 is having issues, but its chief problems are that it launched 2 years later than would be optimal, and Microsoft severely underestimating the complexity of updates. In truth, everything else looks pretty ok. It has a solid developer toolset, growing library of games and apps, and actual buy-in internally and from third parties.
It's going to be a real hard slog for Microsoft to gain big market share. But the antitrust shackles are coming off, and co-marketing opportunities with Windows 8 might give WP7 a badly needed boost.
How does stating a positive opinion about something make one a marketer of it? That's quite an accusation, I'm happy to prove you wrong in any reasonable fashion you see fit. But I suspect you're just quick to pull the trigger on it without actually stopping to address the points.
I'm going to go against the obvious grain here, where all the scathing comments earn obligatory karma.
I think the move to Metro looks promising. If they can clean up the visual design, it will be a very striking UI.
I think the tablet UI might have a lot of potential as it represents a break away from trying to shoehorn the Windows desktop onto a form factor that doesn't match.
I also wouldn't be surprised to see this performing quite well on the tablet hardware slated for mid-2011. They've given demos of Win7 on ARM running quite smoothly, and Qualcomm has already announced their next Snapdragon, which is supposed to be (relatively) blisteringly fast.
Finally, IE's new graphics acceleration should match quite well with tablet hardware, so I expect the sluggishness to disappear.
All in all, I'm actually pretty optimistic it'll be a pretty great Windows release. I think with Win7, they've ironed out a lot of crap in the Vista underpinnings and are spending a lot less time fixing and more time implementing new things.
Have at it.
Yeah, that has me totally worried. My great-great-5,000,000-more-greats grandchildren, I totally worry about their future.
BTW, deficits do go away. In the end, they are just numbers.
Courier was a pretty good idea. I think Microsoft has plenty of ideas, but is still struggling with the engineering it takes to implement them.
I think ideas start out as, "here's a whole new UI paradigm" then quickly moves to "man, this is hard and requires a lot of teams to coordinate" to "how about we just put a new menu item in there?"
I agree. Blender is one of those apps where you won't just jump into it and figure out how to produce anything without some dedication and research. I've spent a great deal of time borrowing Blender books and watching endless YouTube tutorials (there's quite a few, highly recommended). You take what you learn and apply it as much as possible, and it becomes part of your vocabulary. Yes, it takes significant effort.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. Once you actually know your way around the tool, it has a way of becoming second nature and getting out of the way. Avid Blender users love it, and there's a reason. Blender 2.5 (soon to be 2.6 from what I've read) does not change that. It's incrementally easier, but it has also become very powerful. I look forward to the huge amount of Python add-ons that will follow as Blender developers take advantage of the far more consistent and powerful API's.
I never saw multitudes cry out for C# for mobile games development, either, but Unity appears to be a very successful product. You don't need people crying out for a product to make development worthwhile.
1. Keep the incentives high.
2. Stay cool. The only way to do this is release cool products.
3. Smart startup strategy
a. Stop stomping on startups lest you want to suffer Microsoft-itis
b. But, don't buy too many startups. You end up with people just making the deal to get rich and look good.
c. Engage startups, help them, and get them on your side. If they truly align, then buy them. If they flop, their good engineers will flock your way.
4. Stay #2 in size. You need Microsoft (and now Apple) to make you look like the underdog, even if you're not. Engineers often love working for the underdog.
5. Give me 1 million dollars. I will give you 5 more tips (including this one).
There's native sockets, with layered sockets on top. HttpWebRequest is layered on managed sockets.
So, that's, um, COUNTLESS layers! I get lost after 2.
Pay me, and I'll do more than write code...
He's narrowed the definition of Startup to be "companies like mine." To your point, there is really no difference between starting a small business and starting a, well, startup. This is a person who mingles with like minded people, and thus has a very narrow view of the technology world, which is why he can't even get his terminology correct.
Funny, I communicate with Perl web developers quite well. I learn a little about Perl, they learn a little about .NET, and magic happens. Amazingly, those Perl developers happen to know (sometimes quite a fair bit) of C++. Amazingly, I happen to know some Perl. What a diverse world we live in! Welcome to it!
What really undermines your *point* is that you think that somehow studying Windows development undermines ones judgement. It's not a bad judgement to learn a technology that is required of you. I started out a Linux and Java developer. I needed to port to Windows because that's where the market is. In doing so, I learned some .NET technology. What judgement should I have exercised? Quit the job? I think the better judgement is to be open minded and meet the challenges you're faced by learning.
The basics of your point are OK, of course. If I'm running a shop based on Linux, I'd probably skip the Windows developer resumes wholesale. Not a problem. We get that. If, however, I'm running a shop that makes a popular Mac app, I might be quite interested in Mac developers who have Windows development experience if I'm at all interested in the possibility of targeting the other 90% of PC's.
You mean, like understanding the general design of .NET's CLR? Yeah, that must be so Microsoft-specific that it could never work on other platforms. COUGH - why am I coughing? Do I have Mono or something?
If Microsoft were to utterly disappear, something like .NET would quickly move in to replace it, and it would have many concepts resurrected from it. I wouldn't be surprised to see C# developers (both .NET and Mono developers) pick it up faster than anyone else. One just has to consider that the research Microsoft has done in things like LINQ, TPL, WPF, and other things aren't so different than what, say, Google would have done.
Bad for startups? You mean, like Unity, who based their product on Mono, and now has a game engine stack for like 5 different platforms, including Android?
This guy is an idiot. Most *good* .NET developers I know have a strong background in C, C++, and other lower level things. Most love tools like reflector, because they *are* concerned with things like how the network stack works, or the time complexity of the built in collections. He's just pissed that those same developers can whip up simple internal tools complete with GUI and multithreading by the time his C developers figure out why libXXXX isn't linking.
It wasn't just the poop brown. It was also being a half inch thick untapered sharp edged box with almost no peripheral support. There are better industrial designers in the UPS shipping supplies division.
They should shutter their business and release all their developers to go work on real projects that have a hope of succeeding. The only division worth keeping is the gaming division.
Ridiculous. If you owned the Windows and Office divisions, I seriously doubt you'd "shutter" them and concentrate on gaming. Those business make serious bucks, and shuttering a business is a bit more complicated than ranting about shortcomings of vision.
Well, unlike you, I want more. I want Google Maps to be fast and fluid. I also want the vast majority of browsers to have a lot of performance room to spare so that the *next* version of Google Maps will not only be phenomenal, but continues to be fast and fluid. Stability is good, but we are right to be demanding more.
It's always some overpaid bozo with a VP title who would sacrifice vision and strategy for higher profit margin. At the end of the day, such companies are left with a huge bag of expensive, unsold hardware that they have to hock for half price. By then, it's all over - they lost the buzz and now they look desparate.
In Samsung's case, it's over before it even started.
I honestly don't understand Samsung's, Motorola's, RIM's, and HP's pricing on these things. If you're going to spend $500-$800 on a tablet, you're 90% likely to go with the market leader who has not just the most mature product, but the one that is also among the absolute fastest and with the largest application and user base.
So, why not take advantage of the opportunity and start pricing these at $300? After 4 quarters, investors might be pissed at the capital loss of selling millions of units, but at least you'll have an ecosystem. Will there be a Galaxy Tab or Xoom ecosystem? One that is as rich as Apple's?
Are these other tablet makers really this short sighted? Forego the big win to make chump change?
Supply sufficiently large input set as a constraint to any problem with any complexity, and you can say the same argument. Bubble sort would suffer the same.
There's no doubt in my mind that the MBP is actually a great value compared to premium laptops out there. It simply kicks the asses of Sony, Dell, HP, and Acert in almost every aspect that matters: Performance, Battery Life, and Form Factor.
I do think it's silly, however, to even begin to compare the $399 laptops with the MBP. Until Apple makes a $399 laptop that kicks the asses of the PC laptops, I don't want to hear how much better a $2200 laptop. It doesn't do any service to the people who just can't afford to drop a mortgage payment on a computer, but need one. I would never recommend to my less affluent friends that they should buy the MBP - that would just be insulting.
Oh, but Windows 8 will indeed have huge UI improvements. For one thing, there will be more gradient fills. And, the desktop wallpapers now can have different transitions between them! And incredibly, the Start menu will now *slide* in. This is going to change your life, I'm telling you.
Wait, how could we know something happened 330 years ago from something 11,000 light years away?