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Changing My Mind On Microsoft

brontecapital.blogspot.com

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Re: Changing My Mind On Microsoft

#31

Post by brudgers »

cs702 wrote: post #21

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 the post represents is one small stock holder's opinion about a minor position [1], with a link bait title, and echoing popular opinions of the blogging echo chamber.

He has never been particularly bullish on Microsoft. He wrote about his "new" concerns nearly two years ago. [2]

[1] http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2010/08/microsoft-accounti...

[2] http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2010/09/microsoft-laid-bar...

Re: Changing My Mind On Microsoft

#32

Post by jgeralnik »

fingerprinter wrote: post #24

> Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead. 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, prob…

(Anecdotal counterpoint) For the vast majority of the students at my university, visual studio is the reach-to solution for any problem. They would much rather figure out how to write ASP.NET because visual studio is "awesome" than go around running node.js (what's that?) from a command line.

Re: Changing My Mind On Microsoft

#33

Post by Tloewald »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #27
cs702 wrote: post #21

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!

No, this is historically very typical for Microsoft. 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…

I agree that Microsoft has several chances to get Windows 8 (I.e. the tablet plus computer OS) right, so this is just strike 1.

That said, Windows is already a minority computing platform (in terms of new devices sold) so perhaps it cannot be as complacent as it has been in the past. If Windows 8 flops monumentally, when Windows 9 ships in 2014 we may all be docking our pads or phones to a keyboard and/or 2160p wallscreen to use virtualized Windows (when we have to) running legacy software and ten year old microsoft licenses.

Re: Changing My Mind On Microsoft

#35

Post by brudgers »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #27
cs702 wrote: post #21

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!

No, this is historically very typical for Microsoft. 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…

>"Reality is more nuanced, of course."

Yes, there were Windows NT and 2000.

And an entire line of server products.

And applications, games, hardware, and a search search engine.

Not to mention enterprise services, etc.

The article is all about repeating the standard narrative.

Re: Changing My Mind On Microsoft

#36

Post by jiggy2011 »

The "nobody under 30 writes MS" statement is obviously false at it's core but perhaps it means something slightly different?

I imagine most of the under-30 devs working on MS software are being hired by established companies to work on enterprise type software or for consultancies building websites using ASP.net etc.

What about people under 30 who are starting their own businesses from scratch? For example startups, they tend to be using stuff like Ruby/Python/JS etc.

So the question is , what happens when the old guard start to retire? How many will stick with MS because that is what they have used to that point , or will there be interest in switching to newer tools to build newer systems?

Re: Changing My Mind On Microsoft

#37

Post by mtgx »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #27
cs702 wrote: post #21

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!

No, this is historically very typical for Microsoft. 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…

There are 2 main differences this time, though:

1) Windows 8 is changing Windows in pretty fundamental ways (being touch first, leaving the "PC" behind), and I can't foresee anything but minor changes in Windows 9 to this direction. I doubt they will try to go back to making Windows 9 a true successor of Windows 7. That seems very unlikely to me now. Microsoft is all-in with this tile-based version of Windows. Even their logo has changed to reflect that. So businesses who don't want to stay on Windows 7 forever, should take into account alternatives.

2) Even if you hated Windows Vista, there was nowhere to turn in 2005 but Windows XP. Now there are some pretty good alternatives, and people are getting used to using different operating systems than Windows, which I think is a huge deal, because it's usually very hard to convince users to use another OS.

Re: Changing My Mind On Microsoft

#38

Post by 127001brewer »

huggyface wrote: post #3

All internal computer now run as virtual machines (not desktops) running on two mondo-powerful Linux servers. The virtualization platform is Citrix. Nobody has a functional box under their desk any more. ... The company has got rid of the desktop computers entirely (sorry Dell and HP) What? How are they accessing these virtual machines? Mind meld? In most cases where companies use VDIs the desktop machines are the st…

... it is very difficult to find candidates who know anything but Microsoft tools.

This may depend on a variety of things, such as the job location and desired skill level, but this blanket statement is false. For example, it seems that a significant number of Hacker News participants - who are developers - develop in other languages and platforms.

... completely detached from reality.

My personal opinion is that developers who don't learn other languages, platforms, and tools are completely detached from reality. There will always be (perhaps seemingly a majority of) people where being a developer is just a "job" and learning new things isn't necessary. But, again my personal opinion, this ultimately harms yourself.

Finding good people is hard. Many others have written about this, but don't be discouraged that there's only Microsoft developers out there.

Re: Changing My Mind On Microsoft

#39

Post by skrebbel »

> Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead.

I'm 29 now, switched to mostly doing C# two years ago, and I love it. Its mix of pragmatism, familiarity and modern constructs is unparalleled, and no other truly modern language has this good IDE support.

The only thing I don't love about it is the vendor lock-in, but in reality this is a smaller problem for many applications than it seems.

Re: Changing My Mind On Microsoft

#40

Post by topbanana »

jobu wrote: post #26
freehunter wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He's over-generalizing with that statement, but I would definitely agree that most start-ups are using RoR or LAMP, and not anything from Microsoft.

Most software isn't written at start-ups, of course.
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