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If some person seriously wants to dedicate their life to building something high quality and long lasting in the software world (1), they're probably interested

If some person seriously wants to dedicate their life to building something high quality and long lasting in the software world (1), they're probably interested in building and contributing to open source, open standards, open interfaces, publishing papers etc. This might mean they would not want to dedicate their efforts to working on Windows. Same would hold for things like iOS as well. To me, architecturally, they seem dead ends that have to be completely binned at some point, leaving little useful legacy. Would you like to really put your life work into something like that, if there are alternatives? I think this must affect the culture, and the people they can hire. I have no idea how "open" Windows is nowadays, I haven't really used it in 8 years. 1: not necessarily building software directly, it can be algorithms, books, philosophies, languages etc.

pjc50 11y ago
If some person seriously wants to dedicate their life to building something high quality and long lasting in the software world (1), they're probably interested in building and contributing to open source, open standards, open interfaces, publishing papers etc. "Interested in" and "can get paid for" are two very different things. Microsoft have a big reliable revenue stream. The weird thing is that there are clearly some people inside Microsoft that "get it". There's a big open push from the C#/Roslyn team. F# is pretty sophisticated. Microsoft Research are the Xerox Parc of our time: lots of great ideas few of which make it into production. But the Win8/8.1/10 cycle has so clearly been driven by panic over tablets and phones that it's produced strange chimerical half-solutions.