51–57 of 57 posts
What's the relation between this and LightSwitch? Both are from DevDiv and it seems like there's a good deal of overlap in goals. Is LightSwitch being de-emphasized (put on life support) because it doesn't fully encourage WinRT?
LightSwitch is going web-only, as far as I can tell, so this may simply be splitting off and rebranding the Win 8 side of things.
Looks nice. The problem with M$ is that over the years they've always offered simple tools for creating software, and then abandoning it somewhere along the way. Access is a great example.
Why do you think these tools aren't being used. I know a small company using Access to deliver business management applications and they are turning a $100k/year profit. And that's in a random, small, and crappy city in a third-world country.
Cool! We're catching up to Enterprise Object Framework from NeXT in 1994.[1] Skip to 23:00 for the demo of Steve Jobs building a database app in a few minutes. Yes, this is stuff we should have. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk
I liked at the 21:00 minute mark how he was telling us how awesome faxes were. Surely iOS could do more with faxes.
Looks nice. The problem with M$ is that over the years they've always offered simple tools for creating software, and then abandoning it somewhere along the way. Access is a great example.
This sort of stuff happens in the FOSS world all the time: projects grow, live, and die over the course of time. There is the argument that FOSS means "The Community" can take it over and maintain it if it wants, but consumers are not necessarily cut from the same cloth as producers, the skills don't necessarily translate.
I would actually like to see MS do it more often, release more things to the public at much earlier stages, because I think it's their primary differentiator over a company like Apple. Apple has dug themselves into an extremely R&D-intensive process that requires products be sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. Let's talk about the Newton, the Pippin, the iTunes Phone, the Apple TV, etc. When MS tries to do this (Zune, Windows Phone), they get mocked and people ignore their products, even though in many cases they are technically superior products. MS needs to understand that the tech culture views them as unhip and should stop spending money on trying to change that perception.
The anti-MS sentiment also seems to suggest a scenario in which a programmer would learn a particular programming language once, then live off of that for the rest of his life. We have an excellent example of where that leads, and it's called COBOL. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect programmers to learn how to learn. A particular MS or FOSS tech stalling out and dying is not going to be a huge impact on you if you're not betting the farm on one thing.
MS writes good software. You can't keep blaming the size and breadth of the company on anti-competitive behavior from the early 90s that they had already curbed by the time the DOJ tagged them for it. You can arm-chair quarterback and say that a particular example sucks compared to another particular thing, but in most of those cases it's missing the ecosystem and context of the times. Windows was the best home desktop operating system; it had its problems but every OS had problems back then. Internet Explorer really was better than Netscape Navigator (when IE6 was released in 2001, for the times it was good. The five year resting-on-laurels period was the mistake). At any period in time, regardless of how bad the latest version of Visual Studio has been, not comparing it against itself, it has been the best full-featured development IDE on the market (even the first VS.NET in 2002 was better than any non-VS product).
Then someone hired Ballmer to take over and he treated the company like a Detroit manufacturing behemoth. Any successes post-Ballmer were a result of R&D efforts that started before he took over that were too obviously going to succeed for even Ballmer to give them the axe.