21–30 of 116 posts
The business community is now openly doubting the future relevance of the Windows platform!
Essentially ... "Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead. Firstly the kids out of the colleges know the platform agnostic stuff well. Secondly when half the computers leaving factories either run iOS or Android (that is are smart-phones) nobody sensible will write in a way that does not allow easy porting to these platforms."
Under-thirty checking in as a user of Microsoft developer tools. There is still little out there that can beat C# all-around. There still is no alternative for Visual Basic.NET. XNA is still a quite popular game development framework. Kids out of college know what their college specialized in. This is either Java or Visual Studio, and chances are when they graduate they'll get jobs at a company making corporate deskt…
Whether one agrees or not with the facts and reasoning of the author (a successful hedge-fund manager with a widely followed blog), this blog post is important in and of itself because of what it represents: a tectonic shift in the business community's perception of Microsoft. The business community is now openly doubting the future relevance of the Windows platform!
So long as they need it they'll pay. And, unfortunately, business needs whatever is backwards compatible with Windows XP.
I see most people saying he is wrong here, though I can't think why.
Are there people who thing A. writing software for windows? B. are targeting the windows phone? C. deploying to a cloud (private or public) using Windows servers?
If you are targeting a phone, it is most def either iOS or Android, probably both. If MS, a distant third (and at that point you'll probably be using PhoneGap, Titanium or HTML5).
The number of people actively developing new desktop apps for Windows has to be tiny. Maybe even smaller than tiny.
And if you are deploying to anything other than Ubuntu, you're crazy (and potentially fiscally irresponsible...BizSpark not withstanding).
I get that some people might be using the dev tools, though I would wager (no numbers on this, just gut) that the number of MS Web Devs is far, far fewer than the same open source web devs (PHP, Ruby, Python, NodeJS, Clojure etc).
So, I don't get why people say he is off base.
Frankly, the only people I can see still using MS stuff are the big corporates. IMO, MS is riding the long tail into obscurity. Though, with their financials, it would still be a long, long tail.
I'm not too confident in his ability to assess technology though, and I think he may be a bit premature on this MSFT call.
I do believe that Windows 8 is a mistake made out of desperation. Given that the change in interface will confuse a lot of people, I think enterprise will be wary of making the switch because of all the massive retraining it will require. Any type of little change in enterprise environments will always require retraining, so I think enterprise adoption will be very slow to adopt. Maybe MSFT will wake up and change the interface back and have some sort of switch to change back-and-forth before it ships a final version though.
Essentially ... "Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead. Firstly the kids out of the colleges know the platform agnostic stuff well. Secondly when half the computers leaving factories either run iOS or Android (that is are smart-phones) nobody sensible will write in a way that does not allow easy porting to these platforms."
Under-thirty checking in as a user of Microsoft developer tools. There is still little out there that can beat C# all-around. There still is no alternative for Visual Basic.NET. XNA is still a quite popular game development framework. Kids out of college know what their college specialized in. This is either Java or Visual Studio, and chances are when they graduate they'll get jobs at a company making corporate deskt…
Whether one agrees or not with the facts and reasoning of the author (a successful hedge-fund manager with a widely followed blog), this blog post is important in and of itself because of what it represents: a tectonic shift in the business community's perception of Microsoft. The business community is now openly doubting the future relevance of the Windows platform!
Windows ME sucked. Windows XP was great. Windows Vista sucked. Windows 7 was great.
At least that was the perception. Reality is more nuanced, of course.
And business is very conservative, they never upgrade immediately.
For business, the alternative to Windows 8 is Windows 7 or Windows XP. It isn't OS X or Linux or Android. Microsoft does better if they switch to 8, but they don't lose if they don't.
I deal with a lot of small-medium businesses in the UK, and the reality is as follows:
Chunks of VBA plumbing between Project, Excel, Word, Outlook powering lots of businesses, humming away on 2-3 year old Dell desktops under dusty desks in offices, written by people who don't understand or give a shit about "the cloud", "features" and "touch". A few of these places have a "server" (another dell wedged in a corner) or a few "servers" (3-4 dells or HP's possibly with exchange wedged under a desk and managed by a 3rd party). Most of this junk runs on hodge-podges of Windows XP, Vista and 7 with the odd Windows 2003 server. There are a few bespoke applications floating around but they are mainly knocked up in Access or VB6 and there are a couple of ASP.Net WebForms on internal servers with SQL Server or SQL Express. A couple of people have iPads (usually execs). Everyone has one or two phones. Work phones are mainly Android and Windows phones (CE and 7.5). Personal phones are all pretty much iPhones or Nokia feature phones.
A few things you don't see:
* Linux. Anywhere. Apart from a few of the cheaper organisations hosting it and their POP3 on a £2.99 a month hosting plan. They don't even know that as their "web design" company deals with all that.
* Office 365. People just don't trust it or complain it's too expensive or don't know it exists.
* Mac desktops or laptops. Never seen a single one, apart from one running Windows.
* Amazon or EC2. That's where we get our books from...
* Google apps. Nope not one.
That's the real world and they'll quite happily buy Windows 8 and use it as they have for the last N versions.
Whether one agrees or not with the facts and reasoning of the author (a successful hedge-fund manager with a widely followed blog), this blog post is important in and of itself because of what it represents: a tectonic shift in the business community's perception of Microsoft. The business community is now openly doubting the future relevance of the Windows platform!
What else can run those business softwares? Not just Excel, but the legacy stuff. So long as they need it they'll pay. And, unfortunately, business needs whatever is backwards compatible with Windows XP.
I agree with most of the article, but the "The Ubuntu Unity failure" was only a temporary one. The author says it got better, but in reality Unity already overtook Windows' UI and it will overtake Apples UI with one of its next iterations. As a younger (though not that young) developer I have to agree that using MS developer tools is the wrong way of doing things for most new software, not all of them though, it sure…
The great thing about propietary software and one OS (Windows specifically, OS X too though) is people using those operating systems expect to pay for their software. I'd love to come out with a Linux version of my software, but I'd then be competing with 10 free versions, and worse, a mindset that expects everything to be free. I gotta eat!
You would certainly have limited luck trying sell a C compiler or package manager to Linux users for sure, but there are certainly areas (including some developer tools)where there could be a market.
If you released (say) an image editor for Windows and Mac you are competing with Photoshop as well as countless other programs, whereas if you release for Linux you may have less potential users (although there are still an estimated 30 million) but you are competing with The Gimp.
There is a subset of Linux users who would never consider any commercial software, but this is pretty small percentage, at least that is certainly what Valve is banking on.
Mac users do expect to pay for software sure, but Windows users? Not so much since Windows seems to be the platform with the highest piracy as well as countless horrible "freeware" programs.