Where MSFT jumped onto the couch with Oprah
We have all done it. Or wake up sweating we did it. I only recently quit having the "Missed the final" dream, 20 years later. (Thanks Tech.) "The moment" that changes everything. There are only 7 in your life, hope you still have a few left. Ballmer lost one in the past 5 years.
Ballmer has certainly thrown his share of chairs, bananas, and done a number of aquisitions to keep MSFT at the forefront. Did they capture the "digital living room"? Not yet, the internet TIVO and the ipod are way up there. The MSFT "entertainment center PC" (bad name. My mom does not want another PC. She will buy a tivo, or other appliances with PCs in them....) at $1,300 to do.....what? Customers don't know.
But I digress. The big miss? MSFT had 80% of the developers out there in studio. Academia coming on strong. Then they took a little to much of their "Rolling obsolescence" approach, and forced everyone into the .NET pool. ASP , .NET, J2EE development is harder than the old "optional declarations" VB studio. The bell-curve of programmers is not making the jump. Not the fat part of the curve, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free...
Add the Intel "Our 64bit won't run 32bit apps" planned obsolescence, the Windows "who wants 64 bits?", and "dual cores, who needs em" mis-steps, and you have "the gang of 3" (intel, dell, windows) all making a big mistake at the same time. (dropping studio, double mistakes for redmond, but with a company that big, maybe two is what it takes)
If these all did not happen in roughly the same time, or overlap, the opportunity would not have arisen. But it has. Enter AMD with 64bit CPUs that run 32bit apps at speed. Enter Linux. Enter LAMP apps, PHP, perl, anywhere a programmer can hang out and not have to learn all of .NET in minutes. Enter Java. Enter free software models, from open office to eclipse. Enter "Service and support" is all you can sell, and you can't force people into new versions of hardware, OS, development platforms. We are tired of re-writing applicaitons and layers everytime MSFT-Intel-Dell need to jump start a new wave of upgrades.
But the big jump on the couch was dropping studio. That huge part of the bell curve is not learning .NET fast enough, and may never will. Perhaps 5 years from now, when the abstractions get easier. Till then, they lost a lot of momentum. Got people thinking about options. The dyed in the wool MSFT coders, and hordes of em, started looking at options, .NET was so damn hard (and perhaps inherently so, J2EE is no day camp) they began to consider things.
Oh, and I have always been C, then Java biased in the language bigot arguements. So its not the programmer in me talking. Its the "wow I can't believe they did this" in me.
Ballmer has certainly thrown his share of chairs, bananas, and done a number of aquisitions to keep MSFT at the forefront. Did they capture the "digital living room"? Not yet, the internet TIVO and the ipod are way up there. The MSFT "entertainment center PC" (bad name. My mom does not want another PC. She will buy a tivo, or other appliances with PCs in them....) at $1,300 to do.....what? Customers don't know.
But I digress. The big miss? MSFT had 80% of the developers out there in studio. Academia coming on strong. Then they took a little to much of their "Rolling obsolescence" approach, and forced everyone into the .NET pool. ASP , .NET, J2EE development is harder than the old "optional declarations" VB studio. The bell-curve of programmers is not making the jump. Not the fat part of the curve, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free...
Add the Intel "Our 64bit won't run 32bit apps" planned obsolescence, the Windows "who wants 64 bits?", and "dual cores, who needs em" mis-steps, and you have "the gang of 3" (intel, dell, windows) all making a big mistake at the same time. (dropping studio, double mistakes for redmond, but with a company that big, maybe two is what it takes)
If these all did not happen in roughly the same time, or overlap, the opportunity would not have arisen. But it has. Enter AMD with 64bit CPUs that run 32bit apps at speed. Enter Linux. Enter LAMP apps, PHP, perl, anywhere a programmer can hang out and not have to learn all of .NET in minutes. Enter Java. Enter free software models, from open office to eclipse. Enter "Service and support" is all you can sell, and you can't force people into new versions of hardware, OS, development platforms. We are tired of re-writing applicaitons and layers everytime MSFT-Intel-Dell need to jump start a new wave of upgrades.
But the big jump on the couch was dropping studio. That huge part of the bell curve is not learning .NET fast enough, and may never will. Perhaps 5 years from now, when the abstractions get easier. Till then, they lost a lot of momentum. Got people thinking about options. The dyed in the wool MSFT coders, and hordes of em, started looking at options, .NET was so damn hard (and perhaps inherently so, J2EE is no day camp) they began to consider things.
Oh, and I have always been C, then Java biased in the language bigot arguements. So its not the programmer in me talking. Its the "wow I can't believe they did this" in me.
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