Microsoft Out of Favor With Young, Hip Developers 775
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's failures with the KIN phone (only two months on the market, less than 10,000 phones sold) are well-known to this community. Now the NY Times goes farther, quoting Tim O'Reilly: 'Microsoft is totally off the radar of the cool, hip, cutting-edge software developers.' Microsoft has acknowledged that they have lost young developers to the lures of free software. 'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,' acknowledged Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's business software group, in an interview last year. 'And then, when people, particularly younger people, wanted to build a start-up, and they were generally under-capitalized, the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them.' Microsoft's program to seed start-ups with its software for free requires the fledgling companies to meet certain guidelines and jump through hoops to receive software — while its free competitors simply allow anyone to download products off a website with the click of a button." Update: 07/07 13:21 GMT by T : Tim O'Reilly says that while he "[doesn't] disagree with all of his conclusions," he's not happy with it Ashlee Vance's piece, writing "I was not the source for the various comments that were attributed to me," including the bit about "totally off the radar." (Thanks to reader gbll.)
Re:The New York Times. (Score:3, Funny)
Lure of free software? (Score:5, Funny)
But all my Microsoft software was fr.... uh, nevermind
A more appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:5, Funny)
Developers, developers, developers, developers!
-Steve Ballmer
Re:The New York Times. (Score:3, Funny)
I guess their definition of "hip" isn't. Free software?
True homosexual hipsters use mac and iPhone.
All the cool kids just want one thing (Score:2, Funny)
A ZUNE! I've never seen one in the wild before. They MUST be awesome! Only 10K Kins in existence? Sounds like a very hard to find product headed straight to eBay. NOW I'm interested! Get out your Zunes and Kins, me Saddos! I'm going to fire up my Windows 95 server and meet up with MS Bob later. Balmer RULES!
Actually, MS does make a very nice product with that Windows XP. I've got one now and it seems pretty usable. Not going to replace my Mac with this thing, but for a work handout, it's decent.
Re:The New York Times. (Score:5, Funny)
True homosexual hipsters use mac and iPhone.
Hey, but I... oh.
Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's when they actually lost all the "young, hip developers".
Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:5, Funny)
"Microsoft needs new developers that are hip, not developers that need a new hip."
(An homage to my favorite joke on Home Improvement.)
Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:2, Funny)
Screw you guys, I'm go'n home!
-cartman
Re:Fine with me... (Score:3, Funny)
You should check out MonoTouch and Unity. Apparently, you're already close to being an iPhone dev.
I totally hear you and feel your pain. I'm a .NET dev, and I am a near pariah for even suggesting that it's a decent solution. I nearly got my head taken off for suggesting to other Linux-based devs that perhaps we can do some tools in Mono.
And I get to sit around and watch them spend countless hours trying to write a stable sockets server, or write string.Split, or figuring out how to encode in UTF-8.
I'm with you. I'm C# all the way, Mono or .NET stack. It's just a very decent language that is highly versatile.
Re:An appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:5, Funny)
Burma Shave (tm)
Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's when they actually lost all the "young, hip developers".
Not really. C# is the cleanest language I've ever coded in. It's the libraries that are fucked up: the .NET base libraries are basically the managed versions of the Win32 platform.
Compare Qt, which is built on C++ (their greatest flaw), but actually do magic along the nice library to make manual garbage collection look easy [nokia.com], and have an event system which is multithreaded by default [nokia.com]. With Qt, C++ looks more like a scripting language (with the byte-level stuff available if you need it), which is exactly what .NET would have needed to do.
What in the hell are you babbling about? How does a snarky comment about Ballmer's on-stage antics turn into anything regarding C#/.NET/C++/Qt?
Re:Too narrow (Score:5, Funny)
That's just insane. Did you really think about the risk of infecting all your porn files?
Re:The New York Times. (Score:1, Funny)
They must think it's like the 80's with that Huey Lewis and the News song "It's hip to throw chairs"
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
For my start-up, we just phoned our local MS sales rep and told him we were developing on Linux and were looking to build a interface layer to some MS servers, and what could they do? They sent us a full set of disks and license keys to a bunch of MS server apps, no questions asked.
Ultimately didn't help. Even with that 1st-rate support, it was still easier to just ditch the MS stuff entirely.
Re:Free (Score:5, Funny)
Most startups prefer to spend money on their core business instead of on Microsoft software...
90% of startups fail.
Buy from Microsoft!
if you know what's good for you
Re:An appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:5, Funny)
First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
First you copy this quote.
Then you paste it into the comment box.
Then you post the quote in any vaguely appropriate thread.
Then you get an instant +5 karma.
Also ... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:3, Funny)
> your IDE is defecating at all, I think that's a good sign you need to look around for a new one.
Suddenly "core dumped" has taken on an altogether more sinister meaning...
Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:5, Funny)
How does a snarky comment about Ballmer's on-stage antics turn into anything regarding C#/.NET/C++/Qt?
I was drunk last night, that's how.
Re:MSDN? Hello? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A more appropriate quote seems to be... (Score:4, Funny)
Try coding in ObjectiveC and Cocoa for a week, you'll learn what a really good library looks like.
No namespaces. More brackets than Lisp. Lame. ;)