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The Microsoft Empire Reboots

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Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#41

Post by personZ »

x0x0 wrote: post #6

(I think) it's not hard to understand where microsoft went wrong. Ballmer just doesn't seem to get where the industry is going. As evidence, this quote from the article: Indeed, Ballmer seemed to have no intention of leaving when he announced a massive reorganization of the entire company in July 2013. Behind the scenes he had also begun negotiating an acquisition that was meant to transform Microsoft. He had become…

Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung.

How is Apple differentiated? To a user that wants a smartphone to send emails, visit websites, play fantasy football, take pictures, etc, Apple is every bit in competition with Xiaomi as Samsung is. To many, many users, smartphones are effectively a commodity now.

Which is why Apple devices feature some of the best screens, the best cameras, the best processors. Any illusions that Apple isn't fighting the competitive fight, and hard, is just contrived nonsense. They are fighting damn hard to make a compelling case for their devices, and doing a good job at it.

whereas Apple doesn't need (or want!) the bottom

Apple still makes and sells the iPhone 4S, a three year old device. You can get this in the $200-ish range. Further most of Apple's pricing has been contingent upon the scam that are cell phone contracts, where right now you can get the iPhone 5, for instance, for "$0". That is, by most definitions, the "low end".

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#42

Post by vinceguidry »

personZ wrote: post #41
x0x0 wrote: post #6

(I think) it's not hard to understand where microsoft went wrong. Ballmer just doesn't seem to get where the industry is going. As evidence, this quote from the article: Indeed, Ballmer seemed to have no intention of leaving when he announced a massive reorganization of the entire company in July 2013. Behind the scenes he had also begun negotiating an acquisition that was meant to transform Microsoft. He had become…

Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung. How is Apple differentiated? To a user that wants a smartphone to send emails, visit websites, play fantasy football, take pictures, etc, Apple is every bit in competition with Xiaomi as Samsung is. To many, many users, smartphones are effectively a commodity now. Which is why Apple devices feat…

> Apple still makes and sells the iPhone 4S, a three year old device. You can get this in the $200-ish range. Further most of Apple's pricing has been contingent upon the scam that are cell phone contracts, where right now you can get the iPhone 5, for instance, for "$0". That is, by most definitions, the "low end".

No, the consumers on the real low end of the cell phone market can't afford or can't get approved to have a contract. Most phone makers chase this market in some way, Apple doesn't.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#43

Post by woah »

david927 wrote: post #19
Nitramp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.

Weird to see people complaining about the web all the time. The fact that it can do things ranging from typesetting to form applications, to marketing sites, to full blown games is pretty amazing. If you feel that you would like to make a SaaS providing a SQL backed drag and drop form editor, you can do this on the web. The fact that nothing like VB exists any more is a reflection of the fact that the market simply does not find these things useful.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#44

Post by Shamanmuni »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #16
Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

Well, I'm a Qt fanboy, but I think a Linux distro + Qt5 + KDE5 will probably be quite close to what you want. Take a look at Qt Quick and especially QML, which is being used for developing KDE 5.

QML is basically a Javascript-based declarative language for building user interfaces in which you can use full Javascript to augment them. It has its own IDE (Qt Creator) with a visual designer and it's pretty easy to learn, and Javascript is not a hard language at all for newbies. You can even use C++ to extend your applications. KDE 5 is not ready yet, but Qt5 is mature and improving with every release.

I would recommend that combination to a young aspiring programmer without a doubt.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#45

Post by demallien »

Immortalin wrote: post #27
david927 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.

I concur, the combination of css + js + html is an nightmare especially if you are are trying to design a simple database-backed website for your startup. Webforms might have been hard to maintain for some, but at least it worked well. There was no need to figure out all the background stuff if you are not a professional developer. If I need a fancier website based on mvc, I would have hired a fullstack django develo…

Yup, and if you are trying to do the full stack, you had better toss in some node.js or Ruby on Rails, plus SQL. Web development is really hard for non-developers to grok.

I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that project I knew nothing about Access or VB, and yet in two days I had a bunch of forms and tables that allowed managers to get a quick feel for what their staff were up to. The thing ran over the LAN, and could handle 10 simultaneous connections without any dramas. If I were to try the same thing in the web world, I might lose myself in getting just one table view working correctly for a week. Getting an http server configured and up and running, and talking to a db server would be at least two days. And there would be many potential roadblocks just waiting to trip me up along the way.

These days, rather than dealing with that mess, many companies just go for an off-the-shelf hosted solution that sort of fits their needs, such as Basecamp, or Jira, or Igloo. The existence of these products is a sign that we've gone off in the wrong direction somewhere - the sorts of products they make are very similar to that online apps you could make with Access 20 years ago.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#46

Post by WorldWideWayne »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #37
Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I hear ya about VB6, I think that making it incompatible with VB.Net was a mistake. But ASP.NET webforms? Ugh. I maintain a slightly older website using webforms, and it feels like I'm in the web development dark ages. Its a literal ghetto of tech that is used no where else.

Have you ever been to corporate america? ASP.NET webforms is used heavily everywhere including but definitely not limited to marketing agencies, the financial sector (investment and banking down on through collection agencies), healthcare, call centers, etc etc etc.

If you approach a lot of those places and show them something like AngularJS they'll be like "where are all of the high-level tags and rich components that I can just drag and drop"? And then you'll realize that you're not actually in the ghetto.

There's a reason that webforms didn't die when Microsoft introduced MVC, but instead they started bringing MVC features into webforms because so many people use it.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#47

Post by melling »

outside1234 wrote: post #39
melling wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft was busy copying the Macintosh in 1985. Late in the year Windows 1.0 was released. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0

I can tell they brainwashed you well in Cupertino. ;) They probably left out the part where Jobs borrowed the ideas for the Mac from Xerox I suspect too. More accurately, there is probably a Mac here because they were building Office for it.

Nah. All the cool kids in the 80's wanted the Amiga. The Mac was a toy. The story of Jobs' visit to Xerox Parc is well documented. They paid a million dollars for the visits.

http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-tesler...

http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-jobs/

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#48

Post by dragonwriter »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #16
Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

AFAICT, what displaced plain VB for much of its commercially-significant use wasn't VB.NET, or anything web-based, but -- and this was happening when VB was still current -- Excel (with VBScript), which was and is in many ways superior to VB as a visual rapid-application-development platform because you could do more without context-shifting out of the visual paradigm.

Of course, VB programmers may look down on Excel the same way lots of other programmers looked down on VB.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#49

Post by ptx »

Joeri wrote: post #21
gurkendoktor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

The irony is that the present day version of delphi is the best it has ever been, and competitive feature wise with other platforms, but because it has a non-trivial price tag everyone pretends it's defunct. The reality is that the only programming languages which remain are either open source, or the default solution for a mass market OS, and all of them are free. You can't build an entry level dev solution like cla…

There is Free Pascal[0] and their Lazarus IDE[1], which are free, open source, cross-platform and largely Delphi-compatible – but they still don't seem to be taking the world by storm.

[0] http://www.freepascal.org/

[1] http://lazarus.freepascal.org/

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#50

Post by dragonwriter »

Nitramp wrote: post #17
gurkendoktor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

> I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

A lot of the internal desktop LOB application development that used to happen in VB or Delphi still is done on the desktop, but happens in Excel with VBScript. That trend was very much visible when VB (pre-VB.NET) was still current.

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