3 ms·

This is an excellent point and to add to it I want to point out that Microsoft exacerbates this problem by not hiring the best web people to build their product

This is an excellent point and to add to it I want to point out that Microsoft exacerbates this problem by not hiring the best web people to build their products. They believe that they can put a bunch of smart people in a room and they'll come up with stuff people want to use, and this has largely been self fulfilling because of the dominance of Microsoft in the computing space. Now that dominance is fading away, you are seeing the problem with the strategy. When Microsoft wanted to come up with a web Development framework for Web Developers they came up with .NET (built by a bunch of smart people for web developers), but it was a top notch web developer ... DHH who came up with Ruby on Rails. I remember using Rails for the first time and going "wow ... this just solves all the problems I have as a web developer" ... .NET never gave me that feeling, but to be fair ... it was a nice change from ASP spaghetti code days. Why isn't Microsoft hiring the best Javascripters, CSS, html5, and backend web developers it can get its hands on? This is something that Google did like crazy when it started growing, and it has allowed them build badass web products like Google Maps, Google Calendar, Gmail etc ... while Microsoft is stuck playing catch up. Even in releasing new versions of IE you can see this problem rear its head. Instead of listening to Web developers who actually determine the direction the web moves in, the IE team tries to come up with new bullshit web standards and with no buy in from digerati, it fails. Microsoft is no longer calling the shots, and by the time they realize this, it might be too late ... which is a shame, when you think of all the good that would come from Google having some serious competition.

kenjackson 16y ago
This I think is a delusional myth. I fully expect MS has some of the best web devs out there. But even if MS has 100 of the top 500 web devs, there are still 400 web devs thta don't work at MS. And there are a million+ web devs after that. While you might argue that more innovation per capita, comes from the top web devs, it's still likely that the next innovation will come from someone you've never heard of. This is why most people in the tech field at the top of the game aren't afraid of their past-rivals, but more afraid of the guy in the garage they've never heard of. Odds are more likely that this is where the big innovation is going to come from.
rbanffy 16y ago
> Microsoft exacerbates this problem by not hiring the best web people to build their products. There is a problem here: the best web people will not work with MS tools and that's exactly what MS management will demand. > Why isn't Microsoft hiring the best Javascripters, CSS, html5 They can't even ship a browser with proper HTML5 support. How do you expect them to be able to hire the best Javascripters, CSSers and HTMLers on the market? They lack the tools to distinguish between them and the low-end of the spectrum.

kenjackson 16y ago

This I think is a delusional myth. I fully expect MS has some of the best web devs out there. But even if MS has 100 of the top 500 web devs, there are still 400 web devs thta don't work at MS. And there are a million+ web devs after that. While you might argue that more innovation per capita, comes from the top web devs, it's still likely that the next innovation will come from someone you've never heard of. This is why most people in the tech field at the top of the game aren't afraid of their past-rivals, but more afraid of the guy in the garage they've never heard of. Odds are more likely that this is where the big innovation is going to come from.

rbanffy 16y ago

> Microsoft exacerbates this problem by not hiring the best web people to build their products. There is a problem here: the best web people will not work with MS tools and that's exactly what MS management will demand. > Why isn't Microsoft hiring the best Javascripters, CSS, html5 They can't even ship a browser with proper HTML5 support. How do you expect them to be able to hire the best Javascripters, CSSers and HTMLers on the market? They lack the tools to distinguish between them and the low-end of the spectrum.