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One thing that Windows (somewhat famously) gets is "developers! developers! developers!" Apple has a passionate, loyal developer community. Developers who crea

by sounds 10y ago

One thing that Windows (somewhat famously) gets is "developers! developers! developers!" Apple has a passionate, loyal developer community. Developers who create iOS apps use OS X machines to do it. They spend almost twice as much on an OS X machine (vs. a Windows machine) to get over the barrier to entry. Apple has never made anywhere close to the same investment in their developers that their developers have made in Apple. Their mindset can be summarized as (I think): 1. iOS and OS X are "easy to develop on" (so Apple thinks) so WWDC is sufficient as far as developer relations. Lately even WWDC is an empty shell. 2. Huge software failures don't seem to touch Apple's revenue stream (e.g. Maps, iCloud, security exploits), which over time makes Apple more and more deaf to the realities of software outside their company. 3. Apple execs are "courageous" and visionary. The company has a very top-down culture.

Eridrus 10y ago
I think Microsoft forgot about developers for a while. The Windows 8 timeframe wasn't a great time to be a Microsoft developer. They have been recovering mindshare lately, but it's the same back and forth. It's less clear that developer mindshare even matters as much these days when the web is the real desktop platform for most software.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  > I think Microsoft forgot about developers for a while. The Windows 8 timeframe wasn't a great time to be a Microsoft developer. Microsoft wasn't thinking much about web developers during their monopoly of Internet Explorer. Or, well, they might've had thoughts. But no love.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Depends on the developers you talk to. As someone whose Windows dev experience goes back to Windows 3.0, I was thrilled with WinRT, having Visual C++ finally catching up with C++ Builder and .NET finally going properly native as it should have been since .NET 1.0.
  - bostand 10y ago
    Yeah, but they also started a number of projects only to kill them later (eg Silverlight). This was very annoying for developers who had invested a lot of time. Hopefully things will be more stable now.
- alphaomegacode 10y ago
  One company I worked for, we architected on Microsoft with no looking back during the dotcom boom of the late 90s, early 2000s. Within about 3-4 years after that, the transition was made wholly to open source such as Python, Linux, PHP after a lot of little frustrations piled up such as the licensing models for our backend servers, dev tools and so forth.
yardie 10y ago
In what country do these cheap, professional developer machines exist? I'm shopping for a laptop now and to get a pro-grade (ie. no flex hinges), UHD screen, SSD, dGPU machine with enough battery life easily puts you into MBP prices. Now, you could do dev work on something cheaper just like you could do dev work on raspberrypi but no one asked for that.
alphaomegacode 10y ago
That first line was an excellent "quote" (the developers! developers! developers! line). Yes, Ballmer said that but with Nadella, Microsoft seems to have focused once again on developers as a main influencer and buying segment. Although it's probably fair to say that Microsoft has courted the dev community for quite a while with things like ActiveX, VBA, FrontPage (eek! lol) and other technologies built-in to their products. You're also probably quite accurate that devs loved Apple maybe even more than Apple loved devs. The UNIX underbelly of OSX was great for many developers and the build quality of their hardware and software. But with their purposeful neglect of Applescript and even browser engine choice on iOS, there are many small razor cuts that Apple seems to be ignoring. I still like the company and some of their products but the perception from the business press, developer community and maybe even users of mistakes in hardware and software are taking some of the shine off. And for a company seen as a standard-bearer in tech, that should be cause for concern for Apple execs.

by sounds 10y ago

Eridrus 10y ago

I think Microsoft forgot about developers for a while. The Windows 8 timeframe wasn't a great time to be a Microsoft developer. They have been recovering mindshare lately, but it's the same back and forth. It's less clear that developer mindshare even matters as much these days when the web is the real desktop platform for most software.

Fnoord 10y ago
> I think Microsoft forgot about developers for a while. The Windows 8 timeframe wasn't a great time to be a Microsoft developer. Microsoft wasn't thinking much about web developers during their monopoly of Internet Explorer. Or, well, they might've had thoughts. But no love.
pjmlp 10y ago
Depends on the developers you talk to. As someone whose Windows dev experience goes back to Windows 3.0, I was thrilled with WinRT, having Visual C++ finally catching up with C++ Builder and .NET finally going properly native as it should have been since .NET 1.0.
- bostand 10y ago
  Yeah, but they also started a number of projects only to kill them later (eg Silverlight). This was very annoying for developers who had invested a lot of time. Hopefully things will be more stable now.
alphaomegacode 10y ago
One company I worked for, we architected on Microsoft with no looking back during the dotcom boom of the late 90s, early 2000s. Within about 3-4 years after that, the transition was made wholly to open source such as Python, Linux, PHP after a lot of little frustrations piled up such as the licensing models for our backend servers, dev tools and so forth.

yardie 10y ago

In what country do these cheap, professional developer machines exist? I'm shopping for a laptop now and to get a pro-grade (ie. no flex hinges), UHD screen, SSD, dGPU machine with enough battery life easily puts you into MBP prices. Now, you could do dev work on something cheaper just like you could do dev work on raspberrypi but no one asked for that.

alphaomegacode 10y ago

That first line was an excellent "quote" (the developers! developers! developers! line). Yes, Ballmer said that but with Nadella, Microsoft seems to have focused once again on developers as a main influencer and buying segment. Although it's probably fair to say that Microsoft has courted the dev community for quite a while with things like ActiveX, VBA, FrontPage (eek! lol) and other technologies built-in to their products. You're also probably quite accurate that devs loved Apple maybe even more than Apple loved devs. The UNIX underbelly of OSX was great for many developers and the build quality of their hardware and software. But with their purposeful neglect of Applescript and even browser engine choice on iOS, there are many small razor cuts that Apple seems to be ignoring. I still like the company and some of their products but the perception from the business press, developer community and maybe even users of mistakes in hardware and software are taking some of the shine off. And for a company seen as a standard-bearer in tech, that should be cause for concern for Apple execs.