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Microsoft just sponsored Daring Fireball
- ryanolsonx 14y agoWe're going to slowly start seeing his posts lean more and more heavily towards Windows and Windows Phone, while they silently slip him money ;D hahah
- mchiang 14y agoAt the very least, he was upfront about it.
- Anechoic 14y agoDF regularly makes an end-of-week post thanking the RSS feed sponsors, it's part of the sponsership package: http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ see: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/30/ http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/30/ http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/22/ http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/22/ http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/09/ http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/09/ etc
- baby 14y ago8500$/week. Just with his blog. It's just crazy. I don't think there is another blog out there that earns even half of what Gruber is here. I just can't understand that.
- mehrzad 14y agoOne of the few cool things of the Mac/iOS community is how active everyone is. iOS users download/buy/actually use apps even if they're niche. Readers of marco.org and daringfireball pay attention to these sponsorship posts, I'd assume.
- kerbs 14y agoApple dev/Mac fanboy. I can affirm we eat up the stuff he promotes. Dark Sky, Pixelmator, Fantasical. I heard them all first on DF and bought each (and more). He's usually spot on in the things he promotes to (I don't think he accepts sponsors for products he doesn't think are great). Paying for ads on his site I believe are totally worth it.
- podperson 14y agoAs a long time DF reader, I treat Gruber's software endorsements with more than a grain of salt (even his apparently unsponsored ones). I can't remember the name of the product, but one Ui editing program he endorsed was unbelievably bad.
- mikestew 14y agoYeah, same here, from someone who's a fan otherwise. He's had some dogs, but the one that stood out to me was some weather app (not Dark Sky, which is excellent) a year or so ago. It was pretty, which I image is what caught his eye. Too bad it was crap for predicting the weather, or even getting the local temperature right for that matter. I really wondered if he ever used it for its intended purpose.
- EGreg 14y agoWait, how is he able to make $8500 a week from the blog? And how do you know that? Wait, he has paid membership too? Membership in what? His blog?
- matwood 14y agoSponsorships are listed on the site along with pricing: http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
- citricsquid 14y agoHe has a huge following, he is considered one of the more important voices by a large number of people and he's been around for a relatively long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daring_Fireball http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daring_Fireball. People trust him, which gives him commercial value.
- EGreg 14y agoBut the site hardly has any articles published, just mostly links, and what is the membership for?
- tricolon 14y agoHere are the articles: http://daringfireball.net/archive/ http://daringfireball.net/archive/
- statictype 14y agoHis blog's crowning achievement may have been when Steve Jobs replied to a controversy by just telling the journalist to read the article on Daring Fireball.
- samg 14y agoHe makes more than $8500 a week. That's just for the post sponsorship. He also makes money from the Deck network ad on the side.
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- GHFigs 14y agoIt might be more helpful for this audience to think of it as "just with ten years of work".
- patio11 14y agoI know a little birdie or three who would have interesting comments to make on that figure but they wouldn't appreciate the publicity. All of them run real honest-to-God businesses which just happen to resemble a blog in form-factor when you squint a bit. Incidentally: blogging is still a terrible way to make money for the vast majority of bloggers. The really successful ones generally use it as a friendcatcher for related business. It isn't even the most efficient friendcatcher, either.
- m_mueller 14y agoMS might have figured out that cloud services are a big weakness within the iOS plattform and that they're in a prime position to get iOS users to use their offerings.
- brandynwhite 14y agoLooks like someone took today a bit too seriously
- MaxGabriel 14y agoAre people using Azure Mobile Services happy with it? I watched the first NSScreencast on it, and it just seemed to introduce so much complexity. If I wanted to manually configure SQL tables, I'd make my own backend. Parse on the other hand was extremely well documented and required 0 server or database knowledge. Edit: Personally I don't find Azure marketing all that interesting, but they have been doing a great outreach effort. In addition to DF, they've two sponsored NSScreencasts and the latest iOS dev weekly newsletter. http://nsscreencast.com/episodes/59-windows-azure-mobile-services http://nsscreencast.com/episodes/59-windows-azure-mobile-ser... http://iosdevweekly.com/issues/90/?utm_source=iOS+Dev+Weekly&utm_campaign=75c2d6c937-iOS_Dev_Weekly_Issue_90&utm_medium=email http://iosdevweekly.com/issues/90/?utm_source=iOS+Dev+Weekly...
- bdcravens 14y agoHe's advertising their cloud development platform. If it was AWS, not much different, as the Kindle Fire's a direct competitor to Apple. Years ago, when the MS hatred was a bit more intense on places like Slashdot, I amused myself with capturing screenshots of Microsoft ads on their site. Here's a few from my old blog: http://web.archive.org/web/20020929185648/http://www.mr-bill.net/ http://web.archive.org/web/20020929185648/http://www.mr-bill... (Today that's no big deal since ads are served based on your browsing history if you don't block, but in 2002, I think that was less likely)
- latch 14y agoMy experience with Microsoft is that they still fundamentally don't understand that everything has changed around them. They believe they are right because they are Microsoft and poor sales, poor reviews and poor stock performance is really just an unfair world set against them. What else could it be? We are Microsoft! When I tried to engage Microsoft about better supporting indie game developers on Windows Mobile phone, the sense that I got was that XBox was successful brand and that adding Xbox-like services to Windows Phone could jeopardize this brand. How could they offer a free achievement system for indie developers and still justify charging $50K for similar services on Xbox? (source: I'm the creator of mogade.com) You really get the sense that the comical org-chart representation of MS is accurate: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1OeWV6O5BzM/TmjGWNGlO7I/AAAAAAAAAAY/nuTfUZ0E-Q0/s1600/org%2Bcharts.bmp http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1OeWV6O5BzM/TmjGWNGlO7I/AAAAAAAAAA... How does this relate? I'm not surprised to see that the Azure team is attempting this whereas the Windows Phone team never did. It's obvious now, looking back at it, but I should have engaged the Azure team, not the Windows Phone team, for any truly progressive thoughts on mobile development.
- ziadbc 14y agoDoes everyone forget that the U.S. government brought an antitrust case against Microsoft and nearly broke them up? That experience certainly cooled them off a bit. They've slowly aligned themselves in the background with Facebook, Yahoo, and even Apple against Google. They just inked another licensing deal with Foxconn for use of Android and Chrome OS of all things.
- jmspring 14y agoI can't speak to the company or your experience, but I recall MSFT doing a bunch of outreach a couple of years ago for Windows Phone - free devices, etc. Large companies often have silos with their own focus - getting one to adopt the practices of the other may be difficult. Maybe reengaging or conversing with one of the WP dev evangelists might make additional progress - maybe not immediately, but establishing a relationship, comtinual dialogue, and persistence can sometimes help turn a large ship.
- Moto7451 14y ago
- jmspring 14y agoSurprised? If you look in the iTunes store, MSFT has a number of apps, a number well reviewed. Much of the commentary after MSFT released numbers last week was about the diversity of their offerings -- yes Windows and Office are still the big fish, but diversity can be a good thing. MS Office for Mac and an investment in Apple when it was in a tough spot show a history for the company having a broader view than just the Windows ecosystem (that's not saying, that isn't the MAIN focus).
- jeffehobbs 14y agoGreat to see the triumphant return of "Jackass of the Week."
- Xyzodiac 14y agoSlow news day?
- laureny 14y agoGruber must be having a hard time finding sponsors if he decided to accept money from Microsoft, probably the second company he hates most (the first one being Google, obviously).
- anextio 14y agoI’m not John Gruber, but having read the blog for many years I feel I can safely say that the guy does not hate Microsoft, nor does he hate Google.
- karlshea 14y agoI would have to second this. I can see how one would get that impression if the only exposure to him is an article or two that gets linked from somewhere else, but if you read him regularly he posts a lot of very even handed articles and gives credit where it's due.
- laureny 14y agoA lot of his posts are completely underhanded or dripping with sarcasm. Look at the number of negative news about Google or Android that he reported and his only comment was "Shocker" or "Android is winning".
- hrktb 14y agoMicrosoft have been a player in the mac ecosystem for long, and most of people's complaint was that they didn't do enough (no new versions of IE, Office suite lagging after a while, the windows phone app coming later, etc) The Core Intuition podcast also got sponsored by azure, and one of the host was joking "it's as if they thought it out to be used by developpers". If anything, microsoft will be more than welcomed I think if they put efforts to have OSX/iOS devices as first class citizens in their platforms.