Microsoft's Gargantuan #Fail

Its a headline title for a thread, but I fear that people in Redmond are still in a state of denial.

Thus far I have never in my life before witnessed a company cut off its nose to spite its face in so dramatic a manner. In these days of news travelling fast, tremendous damage can be (and has been) done to Microsofts image and brand. Microsoft have just had their worst ever year. Period!

Even if Windows 8 was released today, they will have far fewer developers on their new and shiny platform, because what they have just done is alienate their core developers, and noone is willing to invest in them anymore (without clarification from Soma, Zander and co).

I can see no reason for example, why I would not use Amazon's cloud services over Azure. Up to now, Azure would have been the default choice. Judging by my recent experience, I would recommend to anyone to use nHibernate, or PostgreSQL, or whatever, and in truth those products make for a far better investment than anythiing Microsoft have done in the last few years. Especially in terms of continued support and development.

I have been lucky enough to gain experience in open source projects like PostgreSQL, and I am sure that someone else will create an HTML 5 experience nowhere near as good as what Visual Studio might deliver in its first few releases, but that Mitigation now no longer exists. My TFS licenses, and Visual Studio 2010 licence fees are being rued by people who have make a financial investment, for something that is half finished.We planned our software for the next decade, Tim sneaths blogs and so on are all filled with posts saying" we are cntinuing to make significant investment...it turns out this was bull***t

I cannot find the words to explain my annoyance at recent developments, without this deteriorating into a post of expletives, but I will be civil. The longer this silence continues, the bigger the backlash will be at Build, and the more immovable the nails in "investing in Microsoft as a platform"'s coffin will be. Get your finest minds and lawyers to prepare the smokescreen prior to Build, because it is the Develoepr Division that makes Windows what it is, and not the other way around, Please pass this onto Steve S and Ms Larson-Green.

I see the problem differently. The problem is MS doing everything, I mean everything. And here becomes the problem. Everything evolves. This everything become free open source projects. And they gets better and better as it should. MS sees this and often offer its own free SQL Express, SQL Embeded, VS Express, and etc. However, those does not make money. They sell pro versions, but, often we don't need those pro features as well.

It is exactly the same with using Paint.Net for free instead of 500$ Photoshop. Just that CS people are easier to adapt cheaper alternative than a graphics designer, as CS people are supposed to adopt new technology regardless which technology they choose.

And that, becomes a problem for MS when more and more CS people looking for cheaper alternatives that offers enough functionalities.

So what is the rational basis for this speculative rant?

@magicalclick: We are not looking for cheaper alternatives as we have MSDN licenses.

What we are looking for in continued investment and development, in the platforms they Evangelise as investing in. They are not doing everything well, and most things very badly from a Developer and ISV perspective.

Fail# is #fail.

Just sayin'

19 minutes ago, exoteric wrote

So what is the rational basis for this speculative rant?

I think it's bad chili. I can't see anything rational behind that.

@exoteric:That is exactly the point.

If I pay £50 000 a year in MSDN licences and a further £10 000 in windows licenses, and untold amounts in building software products paying developers to learn and build WPF or Winforms products, I deserve better than being told, "it looks like WPF is as dead as a Dodo, but look pay some more, because what we told you to invest in, we now are not going to develop, pay some more for our new and completely alien platform".

If you are in the position of securing funding and most importantly excitement for the producs you intend to build, you do look at little foolish with rumor after rumor floating about, you have told people to invest in something.

Clarification required....

I thought there has been plenty of evidence to suggest that your investment in .NET is not in vain, and that .NET is growing in importance, not being minimized in Windows 8.

@Richard.Hein: I would be grateful if you could point me to any evidence about WPF as a platform on .NET?

I also don't want suggestions, tangible statements and official facts will suffice.

@vesuvius: Is there evidence to the contrary?

3 minutes ago, kettch wrote

@vesuvius: Is there evidence to the contrary?

"Let it be known that the earth is about to go up in flames - come September."

"You want proof?"

"Well, prove me wrong!"

It's just too nonsensical to be true vesuvius. That's all.

I suspect there are going to be some interesting developments around Silverlight at BUILD - positive ones. 

I guess I am an optimist.

I think WPF may die, but skills learned from it will be directly applicable to Jupiter/DirectUI/WIndows Runtime.

Who moved my cheese??

35 minutes ago, vesuvius wrote

@Richard.Hein: I would be grateful if you could point me to any evidence about WPF as a platform on .NET?

I also don't want suggestions, tangible statements and official facts will suffice.

In a bunch of the threads on Channel9 recently, there have been links to information about the Windows 8 milestones that have leaked, which show WPF/Silverlight support in what may be a different form ("XAML for the desktop"), as part of directui.dll.  Although the full picture isn't clear yet, those bits of information say that WPF in some form is alive.

more hints of copy/paste from Silverlight into Windows 8 DirectUI

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/27533-Win8-M3-(7989)-findings-relevant-to-Managed-.net-amp-WPF-SL-developers?p=451985&viewfull=1#post451985

So if we assume that Silverlight/WPF is going to die then it will reincarnate in Windows 8.

So far the only people getting riled-up over this tend to be the same ones who over-invested in Silverlight as a single-platform developer, including those who had a mistaken belief that Silverlight was in the future of the web and ever posed a challenge to Flash's dominance. That was a stupid move from the beginning and I have little sympathy for them. That said, Silverlight skills are entirely transferable to WPF, it will remain the platform of choice of WP7, and there is no evidence to suggest that WPF won't be supported under the "Immersive" windows API. It seems you're all just getting your panties in a twist because Silverlight isn't Microsoft's baby anymore. Did you ever have a reasonable expectation that it ever was? Storm in a teacup. I challenge you all to pick up something like Qt or GTK and stop putting all your eggs in one basket or you'll be reliving this imagined nightmare every 5 years when Microsoft "reinvents" GUI development for the nth time. EDIT: c9 devs, please fix post authoring on iPad, my paragraphs keep disappearing.

@vesuvius:

you mean you are just pissed about Vista Gadget 2.0 (XP Active Desktop 3.0) in Win8? If that's you problem, then, oh well, I have nothing to add about Vista Gadget 2.0.

2 hours ago, W3bbo wrote

So far the only people getting riled-up over this tend to be the same ones who over-invested in Silverlight as a single-platform developer, including those who had a mistaken belief that Silverlight was in the future of the web and ever posed a challenge to Flash's dominance.

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TODO: Add more +++++