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Microsoft Cancels Major Developers' Conference

Posted by kdawson on Tue May 29, 2007 04:39 PM
from the don't-distracte-me-from-Vista dept.
Microsoft
Kurtz'sKompund writes "Microsoft has cancelled its autumn Professional Developers Conference, citing bad timing in light of the launch of important infrastructure and platform products. This isn't the first time they have cancelled a PDC, for similar reasons."
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  • Gotta Fix 'Em All! (Score:4, Funny)

    by andrewd18 (989408) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @04:46PM (#19314829)

    from the don't-distracte-me-from-Vista dept.
    Sorry, no developer conference. We're still too busy working out all the typos.
  • By the way, who was chairing the conference?
    • FTFS (from the fine submission):

      This isn't the first time they have cancelled a PDC, for similar reasons."
      Translating into Ballmerese: "I'm going to fucking bury PDC, I have done it before and I will do it again. I'm going to FUCKING KILL PDC!"
    • Reminds me of that TMBG song "Thank You for Coming to the Show"

      "Thank you Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, thank you for chairing the show!"
    • Actually they had to cancel the conference because they couldn't 'squirt' it.

  • Wouldn't that be when it's needed most? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moderatorrater (1095745) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @04:50PM (#19314883)
    Between the office's ribbon interface and the actual launch of Vista, you'd think that now would be the most important time to have a developers conference. With all the new challenges and the conference still several months away, wouldn't it be wiser to schedule the time now and make sure that critical issues are dealt with early?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anarchysoft (1100393)

      Between the office's ribbon interface and the actual launch of Vista, you'd think that now would be the most important time to have a developers conference. With all the new challenges and the conference still several months away, wouldn't it be wiser to schedule the time now and make sure that critical issues are dealt with early?

      I totally agree. This is exactly when they should be promoting development on Vista including things like how to get the most out of Windows Presentation Framework with XAML, handle porting issues, the new security features, etc! A peek at how Apple hypes 10.5 to developers should illuminate the strategy.

    • As a developer I agree with you, but lets not forget that Vista was delayed, the Zune has been sucking ... MS shareholders don't care about "critical issues", they care about revenue for the current quarter and fiscal year. A developers conference, in the eyes of a shareholder, is a distraction and misalignment of priorities.

  • I work with MS products. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ushering05401 (1086795) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @05:02PM (#19315043)
    VS2005 targeting Win 2000 through Vista to be exact. Nice product VS2005. I can write very nice apps with c# and the .NET framework.

    I adopted MS because the shop I began working IT with served mostly MS customers, and now my shop does as well... just a reality of working in a niche market where MS has been the accesible OS for so many years.

    Why, I ask, am I pulling my hair out every other week?

    Does a properly run company cause a dedicated client to want to pull his already diminishing supply of hair from his head every time he reads their press releases?

    Products that have been *both* delayed and had functionality removed in the last 8 months:
    Vista
    Viridian (virtualization)
    Server 2008 (announced that a major incremental will be released in 2009 to replace the functionality if that actually happens... so who the fuck is going to upgrade in '08?)

    I depend on this shit. Why? Because you formed a friggin monopoly and all of my potential customers use your products.

    Get your shit together.

    Regards.

    • Re:I work with MS products. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian (840721) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @05:10PM (#19315117) Journal

      I depend on this shit. Why? Because you formed a friggin monopoly and all of my potential customers use your products.

      Get your shit together.
      They don't have to. As you said, they're a monopoly, and you (or your predecessors) and your customers (or their predecessors) are the ones that created this ugly beast. You have all reaped what you have sowed by sticking to a one-size-fits-all solution which most people have known for over fifteen years does not in fact fit all sizes. That they are a monopoly means that they are by and large protected from market forces that would long ago have left any other company that used the same questionable marketing and development tactics that you ascribe to Microsoft bankrupt and half forgotten.

      • Re:I work with MS products. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ushering05401 (1086795) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @05:17PM (#19315201)
        I agree.

        Unfortunately, as I have posted on other threads here, most of my customers rely on multiple small applications to run their businesses. Porting them to OSS would be a massive undertaking and would require cash that most of them don't have, and applications that don't exist (take construction-specific management apps for instance).

        I have defended MONO and it's developers on this site and others with the stated purpose of promoting an alternative to MS. The fact remains, however, that most of my customers do not have equal options on OSS platforms at the current time.

        I would be unable to develop equal options considering the wide variety of applications that have developed in the MS ecosystem over the last 15 years or so, and that my customers depend upon.

        I would walk away from MS, but that would involve abandoning my customers who are locked in, and with whom I share the common goal of feeding our families by running our own companies instead of working for others.

        Regards.
        • So, in a nutshell, those with the desire to change don't have the money, while those with the money don't desire change.
        • > I agree.

          No. You don't really. You like to bitch and moan once in awhile but you really don't mind taking it up the pooper whenever Microsoft wants to shaft you. Harsh? Yup. Happens to be true though, based on what you are writing.

          Because you have KNOWN exactly what Microsoft is and how your fortunes (and you customer, etc) are tied to Microsoft's whims for years (hell, decades now) and I didn't hear you mention the FIRST step towards an attempt to correct a situation you yourself realize is ultimately going to hurt you.

          Yes you are right, that you and your customers have become ensnared in Microsoft's trap of dependency. And you are at least toying with the first step of admitting you have a dependency problem. Now you need a plan to break the unhealthy addiction. You really needed to start years back to have a leg up on the smart competitors who already figured it out but perhaps it isn't too late for you to save yourself.

          Step one: When you are in a hole that is rapidly filling with water, the first step has to be to stop digging. That means make every effort to avoid adding any new dependencies on Microsoft technologies. That means don't touch Vista or any of any of it's new technologies or APIs. Same for Office 2007.

          Step two: Develop a roadmap that will lead you where you want to be tomorrow, not where Microsoft wants you to go. Many find the easy path to be web based apps, especially in this era of AJAX. Pitch your customers a client neutral web based version of the apps you currently push on them as .net IE/Windows only crap and see if they are receptive. Explore whether your existing stuff can be run under Wine and fix things until it does work. Then plant a bug in your customer's ear that you AREN'T one of those crappy little vertical vendors who only understands Microsoft. and that if they want to escape you won't be one of the vendors holding them back, that you can support other platforms. If everyone is a passive as you and waits for someone else to go first Microsoft wins.

          Step three: start finding and deploying alternatives whenever practical. OO.o instead of Office where it will work, Firefox instead of IE anywhere there isn't a lot of ActiveX BS to snarl things up. Outlook/Outlook Express should be trashed anywhere people aren't already addicted to Exchange stuff. The more of those dependencies you can break, both for yourself and your customers, the easier it will be to open up options down the road. Same for file/print servers. They can make a great first step and let you gain practical experience.

          Step four: Explore and experiment, learning what is out there is half the struggle. Microsoft crams their stuff down your craw, the free stuff is often waiting for you to go looking for it.

          Step five: Don't just look at Linux. Yes a Mac isn't any more RMS pure than Windows and they want the same power Microsoft has, but Microsoft is the threat to independent developers and users today. And a Mac can run Photoshop/etc.
          • And I have step four covered. I have tried various distros and even rolled my own Gentoo install. Not claiming to be a guru or anything.

            My issue is user adoption. My opinion is the opinion of only one of their providers.

            You are correct on most points, but like many others fail to address one thing. Users want the simplest solution. They are correct in believing that MS is the simplest solution. They don't mind sacrificing security, freedom, and mobility so that they can have something that is monocult

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by jmorris42 (1458) *
              > Users want the simplest solution.

              Of course, so do I.

              > They are correct in believing that MS is the simplest solution.

              They may be believe it but they would be wrong. Odds are as a developer in a vertical industry you are more computer literate than they are, but YOU believe it too so you can't correctly advise them.

              This is 2007, if there is a Windows victim left who hasn't been wiping and reinstalling (or using Ghost) end user machines at least annually I haven't met em. Add in the cost of the 'pro
              • This is 2007, if there is a Windows victim left who hasn't been wiping and reinstalling (or using Ghost) end user machines at least annually I haven't met em.

                You had me until this part. This is complete fscking hogwash. Since Windows 2000 (that's what, 7 years back now), regular reinstalls are a thing of the past. I maintain a good number of Windows end-user desktops apart from my own, including some used by complete newbies. I've told them how to avoid spyware and they run a decent anti-virus that is
              • Whatever the question, Windows is probably the wrong answer. The sole exception is a gamer who wants more than a Playstation/X-Box can offer.

                Holly fuck, surely that is why Dell, HP, Gateway, Lanix, PC-World, Best Buy and even the guy in the corner PC shop keep offering Windows XP/Windows Vista machines... and not only that *drumrolls*.... people keep buying it...

                If you haven't experienced a thin client or server hosted homes on a thick client you can't really understand the difference. In my world (with 100

            • Re:A fanatic troll (Score:4, Insightful)

              by jmorris42 (1458) * <jmorris.beau@org> on Wednesday May 30 2007, @03:07AM (#19318875) Homepage
              > My god, you really are a fanatic OSS troll,

              Guess you missed the part where I recommended Macs in certain scenarios. Longterm, yea I'm a Free Software believer. But mostly I think Windows is a menace and a disaster. Other than gamers I really don't know of a question where Windows is a good answer.

              But more importantly Microsoft is fast becoming a threat to the entire idea of 'personal computers.' I'm becoming convinced they intend, and have a fair chance of attaining, nothing less than the elimination of the general purpose computer, replacing it with something more akin to an X-Box that runs IE and Office. If we can't gain enough control to offer credible competition before they manange to buy a law requiring all unregulated hardware to enforce code signing and DRM we all lose bigtime. On that day all small independent software houses are going to be hosed.
    • Isnt it nice to be the squirrel with cement shoes when the 800 lbs. gorilla behind you starts to stumble?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by secPM_MS (1081961)
      You assume that customers upgrade to get major new feature sets. While new feature sets are great for marketing aimed at retail customers, who will in general use very few of the features (new or otherwise), enterprise / corporate markets tend to be much more conservative. In particular, they want MS to do as little damage as possible to their existing enterprise apps, many of which were written with little if any consideration for security or reliability. This legacy tail greatly complicates Microsoft's ab
    • I had to deal with the stress of Visual BASIC 5.0 and 6.0 and using OLE/DDE to control MS-Word 2000 objects, and when VB closed the Word document, it locked up the Word toolbar. My code did not do that, it was a bug with Office 2000. I removed the close command and the toolbar didn't lock up, but the user had to close the document by themselves. Microsoft was aware of the problem but said that SP1 or SP2 of Office 2000 might fix the problem, and my managers wanted it fixed right away so they could migrate f
    • I don't know what's wrong with MS but they have some serious problems producing software. Maybe it's trying to support legacy software all the time. Perhaps they should just bite the bullet and break all the old clunky programs that use undocumented APIs etc.. I'm actually pretty happy that they are bombing on everything though because I truly hate using Windows.
    • I depend on this shit. Why? Because you formed a friggin monopoly and all of my potential customers use your products.

      Sounds like your market is ripe for a disruptive technology.

      Do something on linux that's far-and-away better than what exists today - do it in AJAX - and they will come.

  • oops (Score:4, Funny)

    by mythar (1085839) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @05:11PM (#19315135) Journal
    just missed the allow button.

  • Translation... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aqua OS X (458522) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @05:19PM (#19315221) Homepage
    "As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones"

    Translation...

    "The things we wanted to show at the PDC are so far behind schedule that we would look like fools for even demoing the software."
  • Developers! Developers! Devel...never mind.
  • One said his wife was expecting, and the second was busy porting his game from the DirectX10 (codename 'Titanic') to OpenGL. The last said he was busy trying to get his Vista drivers working. He said all the UAC messages are slowing him down.

    Go Vista! Go straight into a hillside!
  • Not sure this is really news in the way that some might think it. A few reasons:

    PDC is not Microsoft's preeminent developer conference. Tech Ed 200X is [microsoft.com]. My understanding is that TE is Microsoft's biggest developer conference, and it's running next week, June 4-8 (or 3-8 if you registered for the pre-conference sessions.) Picture 10,0000+ geeks trying hard to make dinner conversation, cavernous convention halls, and (literally) dawn-to-dusk classes and sessions for six days. Quite an experience.

    Conference

  • Not sure if this matters anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SadGeekHermit (1077125) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @08:57PM (#19317047)
    Because my shop is a Windows shop (ugh) I have no choice but to develop on Windows. But we've all agreed to do our in-house Windows development using Java and Oracle tools rather than Microsoft tools. So for us, this is a non-event.

    Consider the benefits of this approach:

    1. We don't have to worry about porting our applications to Vista, because it's Sun's and Oracle's responsibility to make their platforms Vista-compatbile. All we have to do is copy files to a new server. So we can spend our time actually writing code, instead of worrying about porting issues.

    2. In the event we DON'T move to Vista, our stuff will work on Linux, or Mac OS/X, or anything else Oracle and Java run on. It's not likely we'll get a mainframe, but if we did, we'd STILL be able to copy our stuff onto it.

    3. Our skills have a long shelf-life. New versions of Java tend to ADD capabilities, but the language itself doesn't tend to change in ways that require re-writes. Oracle's the same way, mostly.

    Overall, I don't know why anyone still uses Microsoft tools, given the way they like to "churn" their environment. It seems kind of chaotic and random to me. Remember the switch from VB6 to VB.Net, and how people howled about that? Phew...

    • Remember the switch from VB6 to VB.Net

      Exactly what switch are you talking about? Do you mean that all the sudden VB6 compilers or runtimes stopped working when VB.NET came out?

      I work in a team that uses solely MS products. I haven't heard any "howling" when VB.NET came out. In fact I was writing VB6, VB.NET and C# code at the same time in different projects about a year ago. VB6 project which I was on was started on 1993 and it is still used and developed. Some of the oldest codes were rewritten in 1995

    • I love the idea of Java, but the implementation poor. I used to be a Java dev, but I've fully converted to the dark side since, essentially because I found Java's implementation just impractical. Things like VM versions (Java has countless varying versions (of which any number can be installed in varying locations), .Net has 4 - of which only 2 are particularly significant imo - 1.1 + 2.0), designing forms (I found a plug-in for Eclipse once that made it ever-so-slightly faster than coding it manually), and
    • "Port to Vista"? What exactly would your app do that makes it incompatible with Vista if it was written natively?
  • "Developers! Developers! Develop--oops, sorry, we've got some big launches coming up. You guys will have to come back later."

    Chris Mattern
  • of steve balmer lurking, hunched over, and furtively whispering, "developers.....developers....developers...develo p ers..."

    (OK, joking aside, though I rather dislike Ballmer, that was a really great video of a truly great attitude for him to have had and it's really unfair that gets slagged for it. It's especially unfair that he gets slagged for it on /., where so many of us are programmers. I hope he's ticked off about canceling the PDC, whatever the reason. And maybe I go to heck for making that joke).
  • ...in light of the launch of important infrastructure and platform products.

    Yep, Leopard and the iPhone. ;-)

  • I've been around too many broken windows servers when I see "PDC" and think "primary domain controller."
  • This all fits in perfectly with Microsoft's new company strategy, getting rid of them annoying developers and start hiring more lawyers! Why bother making better products than your competitors, if you can just sue them out of existence?

    • Re:and 10,000 OSS developers.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by ClosedSource (238333) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @04:50PM (#19314893)
      Unfortunately, they're all working on their own individual version of a ground-breaking text editor and extensible platform that will eclipse Eclipse.
      • individual version of a ground-breaking text editor

        They're re-doing notepad???
      • Eclipse Eclipse in terms of RAM usage? Is that even possible? Eclipse uses what, like > 100MBytes before even loading a project, doesn't it? LOL...

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by kryptkpr (180196)
          I really like NEdit [nedit.org], and so do many of the folks at work. A few holdouts do use Emacs but any appeal it may have is lost on me. The standard GNU Xemacs doesn't even have different open files show up in different tabs. My idea of a good programmers editor left the terminal window behind a long time ago, but emacs seems to still be stuck there.
        • There are a couple of glaring problems with Eclipse, I think. The first is that it's next to impossible to redistribute project files in any meaningful manner, last time I checked. All you get is a mess in your .workspace directory. The second, and most obvious, is that the GUI is based on sluggish Java garbage. Like Azureus, it's just excruciating to use. Which is a shame, because for editing Java code, it's unparalleled.

          Oh, and the One True Editor is Vim, you heathen scum.
    • Put down the chair Steve and come out with your hands up.
    • But do Microsoft really support their developers that well these days? I mean compare VS2005 (note the year folks) with what is coming out of eclipse (let alone the commercial extensions to eclipse) and its hard to justify the claim that VS is the "best" developer IDE, its just that VS folks haven't used the alternatives whereas the Java folks can switch like the wind. So IDE wise they aren't supporting their developers. Even things like the testing framework are an issue, most people use the open source

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