Changing My Mind On Microsoft

&#62; My personal gripe was how poorly Microsoft thought about and handled security issues. My Linux computer is <i>as far as I know virus free</i>.<p>He is comparing Windows 95 to Ubuntu 11.04 (if you follow the link in that sentence)!<p>&#62; They [devs] did not bother developing for other platforms because those platforms were economically irrelevant and the Microsoft developer tools worked.<p>Then he doesn't even make the connection to virus writers targeting Windows between 199x-200x.<p>&#62; Windows security issues are everywhere and it did not need to be so.<p>Sorry, but that's mostly due to the desktop market size and Windows' share of it.<p>Everything after Windows XP had security at its core.<p>Blame the users who are clueless, that are emailing viruses to all their contacts, download Trojans and warez with backdoors, etc.<p>And again, he is comparing decades old MS OSs to latest versions of Linux and OS X.<p>&#62; Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead.<p>Completely false statement.

&#62; <i>Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead.</i><p>I'm 29 now, switched to mostly doing C# two years ago, and I <i>love</i> it. Its mix of pragmatism, familiarity and modern constructs is unparalleled, and no other truly modern language has this good IDE support.<p>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.

I read Bronte Capital all the time. He is a hedge fund manager in Australia, and it very good at sniffing out fraudulent stocks or short-worthy stocks and shorting them.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>The <i>business</i> community is now openly doubting the future relevance of the Windows platform!

&#62; Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead.<p>Hmmm.... i am 29, i write C# and .NET for a living... there are a few lads in the office that are .NET Dev, under 30... I must be in a black hole then...

His attack on using developer tools was harsh, but I'm over 30 so it didn't apply :)<p>But seriously, I'm afraid he is close to the truth. As a career Windows programmer, I have great fear for the future after having tried the 2012 preview -- I've never felt so lost on a computer in my life. For my own selfish sake, I keep praying they'll make some changes before final release.

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

Essentially ...<p>"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."

&#62; Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead.<p>I see most people saying he is wrong here, though I can't think why.<p>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?<p>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).<p>The number of people actively developing new desktop apps for Windows has to be tiny. Maybe even smaller than tiny.<p>And if you are deploying to anything other than Ubuntu, you're crazy (and potentially fiscally irresponsible...BizSpark not withstanding).<p>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).<p>So, I don't get why people say he is off base.<p>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 made the decision to jump ship from Microsoft developer products about five years ago. I could already see the writing on the wall. I swapped the remaining proprietary tools I was using on Windows XP over to open source alternatives and jumped from VB6 and .NET over to Python. Then, when it was time to replace my PC, I installed Ubuntu 8.10 instead of Vista. Never looked back.

&#62; Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead<p>The gamedev community is very MS centered. There are a few people doing handheld stuff, or homebrew console hacking, but the majority use Windows and Direct X. A lot of people use C#, or even develop for the Xbox 360.

Say what you want about Microsoft, and acknowledging the past decade has been a real disappointment, I wouldn't count them out just yet...<p>If I compare Microsoft's handling of the OEM PC industry of the 1990s to Google's handling of the Android ecosystem, the latter is utterly laughable in comparison <i>cough</i> Nexus 7 Screen issues <i>cough</i>. That alone is reason enough for me to think they could return. They just need the right leadership. And if you think such a transition is impossible, compare the Apple of today to the Apple before Steve Jobs returned...

<i>&#62; In the late 1990s Windows developed huge market power. Whilst not strictly a monopoly the company had plenty of monopoly characteristics. Sure you could buy a Macintosh - but that market was so small that people did not develop software for Macs and hence Macs were for people who did not need a wide range of software.</i><p>So is this, in addition to careful attention to typography, the explanation for why Macs were big with designers? (Many designers do the vast majority of their work in a handful of programs, and one in particular.)

Platform agnostic tools have hardly done anything on the desktop or mobile. If you're writing a mac app without Cocoa or a Windows app without .NET (or other various Microsoft technologies) you're going to have a bad time.<p>Python and Ruby might be first class languages on the web, but they're never going to be on the desktop/mobile. (Yes I know about things like RubyMotion)<p>No devs under 30 work on Microsoft stuff? Even if you take that to mean "No dev under 30 <i>wants</i> to work on Microsoft stuff", that is ridiculous.

To my mind, Microsoft ought to be putting all of their corporate weight behind Mono. CLR, F#, C# are all technically superior to JVM, Scala and Java IMHO and many others. But what holds alot of people back from .Net in the enterprise is that they want Linux in the server room, not Windows. If Microsoft really put their weight behind Mono then I think lots of enterprise customers would ditch Java in favour of .Net

How can I say this gently.. Windows 8 looks like ass. I don't know a single person running it today. Things do not look good for Microsoft in this release cycle. I don't think the following one will be any better.

<i>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.</i>...<i>The company has got rid of the desktop computers entirely (sorry Dell and HP)</i><p>What? How are they accessing these virtual machines? Mind meld? In most cases where companies use VDIs the desktop machines are the standard old Dells and HPs because they actually cost less than "dumb terminals" (aka thin-clients). And that's accepting the questionable notion that VDIs are the future.<p><i>Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead</i><p>We have been on a hiring binge lately and it is very difficult to find candidates who know anything <i>but</i> Microsoft tools. Sure they might know github, but there is a very substantial part of the workforce that stills crawls into Microsoft's bosom.<p>In general this blog post is completely detached from reality. There is the "startup" culture, of course, where everyone runs an iMac and develops iOS and Ruby/MongoDB apps for their EC2 cluster, and then there's the many magnitudes bigger general computing world that holds zero similarities.

I agree with most of the article, but the "The Ubuntu Unity failure" was only a temporary one.<p>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.<p>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 has its uses. But I am strongly against proprietary software that only runs on one OS as that will only lose you business. Even the game platform Steam seems to have gotten to that point, a Linux port is on its way.

Wait, so he's saying that he's moving from MSFT to AAPL because AAPL has better lock-in? Personally, I'm staying with MSFT because MSFT has already learned the follies of relying on lock-in and is moving on where AAPL is repeating MSFT of the 90's mistakes.