4 ms·

Microsoft has too many developers and not enough innovation. They encourage a design attitude that everything has to operate like the flight deck of a 747. Thei

Microsoft has too many developers and not enough innovation. They encourage a design attitude that everything has to operate like the flight deck of a 747. Their culture has been incestuous so long that any change is terribly unlikely. There are some really, really sharp guys at Microsoft. Not only does the community deserve better products from such a great company, the developers in many cases have an very unpleasant work experience. Google is not too far behind. I think they're pushing a lot of the things they are simply to keep momentum building. In another 20 years, unless they start building time machines, it'll catch up to them, too. Apple is a strange case. They passed the "I wouldn't work for them for a million bucks" point many years ago, but they're just better at slapping a better marketing image on it than the rest of them. Having said all of that, I like .NET, and I think combining it with Mono makes probably the most full-featured free platform for development anywhere in the world. The effective targeting of the business market by .NET may be waning, but the platform is nowhere near dying off.

martijn_himself 14y ago
>They encourage a design attitude that everything has to operate like the flight deck of a 747 I agree. If you have ever done any development using SharePoint or Dynamics CRM API's and SDK's you will know how much of an overengineered mess these applications are. The unnecessary complexity of these applications does however create demand for thousands of developers to untangle the mess.
- DanielBMarkham 14y ago
  I feel very sorry for my friends who are actively writing projects in the latest .NET Whiz-Bangedness. They're all so optimistic, with regurgitated Microsoft marketing-speak about how this bell or whistle is going to magically solve this or that problem, and how easy everything is to do now. They've been eagerly awaiting a new customer to try this stuff out on. Then, sometimes just within days, I start hearing the pain. It's always the same -- the damned development ecosystem is a freaking nightmare and some little gotcha somewhere is killing hours (or days) of time. I used to teach .NET. Everything is awesome as long as you go down 7 or 8 pre-defined paths. But nothing ever works like that in the real world. There's nothing like watching a new developer drag a control onto a form, take a look a the properties page with it's 40-thousand item madness, and be utterly and completely at sea. Lost. Bewildered and rendered ineffectual. Their stuff is full of experiences like that.
  - martijn_himself 14y ago
    Absolutely spot on, and I have exactly the same experience. What completely baffled me when I did quite a bit of SharePoint development of late is, that you are essentially doing web application development, except everything you know about web development is somehow not valid anymore because it has been buried under layers and layers of abstraction. So you have to go on at least one SharePoint development course, to re-learn web development as you know it.
    - DanielBMarkham 14y ago
      Several years back I had a friend with a small business who wanted to do some SharePoint stuff, so I picked up 3 or 4 books on it and read them all. Oh. My. God. That tool will solve world hunger, land a fighter on a carrier deck at night in a storm, and compute the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It does frickin' everything. So it also does nothing. You end up having to digest a huge learning curve, creating all these specialty libraries to handle workflows, understanding that you need a view for this, a link for that. It's like having to learn Klingon just to get a cup of water. Whenever I hear SharePoint any more, I just smile. It's a great tool, and it can do an incredible ton of stuff. I just know the pain that's involved with it, and unless I have no choice I want no part in it -- except for maybe using it as a document repository, and even then Dropbox does all I want with zero learning curve. Microsoft is constantly distracting me with the coolness of their tools instead of enabling me to quickly solve somebody else's problem. The developer has become the market for them -- and that's really bad for both developers and end users.
      - martijn_himself 14y ago
        Thank you very much, those comments made my day :). I very much share the sentiment. I am developing in SharePoint and I am sometimes impressed at what it can do; however lately I have been thinking of jumping ship and start developing small business applications (in Golang) that solve user problems quickly and iteratively.
drharris 14y ago
Microsoft is so hit or miss. They're incredibly innovative in the research department, but business tools are definitely overcomplicated (Dynamics, SharePoint). I use C#.NET daily, and it is the programming tool I'm most in love with. There is no easier way to make business desktop apps, and with the new MVC and Entity Framework libraries, there aren't many easier ways to make significant web applications (i.e. beyond a to-do list or blog). Azure level of functionality makes other cloud companies look almost archaic. I think where they're losing is that they've stopped communicating. With customers, with developers, even internally. They are proceeding down paths they imagined to be important. Some of them are, some of them aren't, and thus the hit-or-miss nature of their current business. I think a lot of this is Ballmer. He's trying to be a Jobs and failing miserably, when all he needs to do is allow his people to actually communicate with the community. Another part of it is that they can't do anything these days without a bunch of FUD from the media and Anti-MS sheep. I actually like Windows 8 and appreciate the innovation even if there are some hiccups to take care of. .NET is great, and I hope they make it easier to move forward and migrate existing apps to whatever they do next. Will they die anytime soon? Probably not. But if they don't start communicating soon and often, they'll lose some market share for sure.

martijn_himself 14y ago

>They encourage a design attitude that everything has to operate like the flight deck of a 747 I agree. If you have ever done any development using SharePoint or Dynamics CRM API's and SDK's you will know how much of an overengineered mess these applications are. The unnecessary complexity of these applications does however create demand for thousands of developers to untangle the mess.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I feel very sorry for my friends who are actively writing projects in the latest .NET Whiz-Bangedness. They're all so optimistic, with regurgitated Microsoft marketing-speak about how this bell or whistle is going to magically solve this or that problem, and how easy everything is to do now. They've been eagerly awaiting a new customer to try this stuff out on. Then, sometimes just within days, I start hearing the pain. It's always the same -- the damned development ecosystem is a freaking nightmare and some little gotcha somewhere is killing hours (or days) of time. I used to teach .NET. Everything is awesome as long as you go down 7 or 8 pre-defined paths. But nothing ever works like that in the real world. There's nothing like watching a new developer drag a control onto a form, take a look a the properties page with it's 40-thousand item madness, and be utterly and completely at sea. Lost. Bewildered and rendered ineffectual. Their stuff is full of experiences like that.
- martijn_himself 14y ago
  Absolutely spot on, and I have exactly the same experience. What completely baffled me when I did quite a bit of SharePoint development of late is, that you are essentially doing web application development, except everything you know about web development is somehow not valid anymore because it has been buried under layers and layers of abstraction. So you have to go on at least one SharePoint development course, to re-learn web development as you know it.
  - DanielBMarkham 14y ago
    Several years back I had a friend with a small business who wanted to do some SharePoint stuff, so I picked up 3 or 4 books on it and read them all. Oh. My. God. That tool will solve world hunger, land a fighter on a carrier deck at night in a storm, and compute the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It does frickin' everything. So it also does nothing. You end up having to digest a huge learning curve, creating all these specialty libraries to handle workflows, understanding that you need a view for this, a link for that. It's like having to learn Klingon just to get a cup of water. Whenever I hear SharePoint any more, I just smile. It's a great tool, and it can do an incredible ton of stuff. I just know the pain that's involved with it, and unless I have no choice I want no part in it -- except for maybe using it as a document repository, and even then Dropbox does all I want with zero learning curve. Microsoft is constantly distracting me with the coolness of their tools instead of enabling me to quickly solve somebody else's problem. The developer has become the market for them -- and that's really bad for both developers and end users.
    - martijn_himself 14y ago
      Thank you very much, those comments made my day :). I very much share the sentiment. I am developing in SharePoint and I am sometimes impressed at what it can do; however lately I have been thinking of jumping ship and start developing small business applications (in Golang) that solve user problems quickly and iteratively.

drharris 14y ago

Microsoft is so hit or miss. They're incredibly innovative in the research department, but business tools are definitely overcomplicated (Dynamics, SharePoint). I use C#.NET daily, and it is the programming tool I'm most in love with. There is no easier way to make business desktop apps, and with the new MVC and Entity Framework libraries, there aren't many easier ways to make significant web applications (i.e. beyond a to-do list or blog). Azure level of functionality makes other cloud companies look almost archaic. I think where they're losing is that they've stopped communicating. With customers, with developers, even internally. They are proceeding down paths they imagined to be important. Some of them are, some of them aren't, and thus the hit-or-miss nature of their current business. I think a lot of this is Ballmer. He's trying to be a Jobs and failing miserably, when all he needs to do is allow his people to actually communicate with the community. Another part of it is that they can't do anything these days without a bunch of FUD from the media and Anti-MS sheep. I actually like Windows 8 and appreciate the innovation even if there are some hiccups to take care of. .NET is great, and I hope they make it easier to move forward and migrate existing apps to whatever they do next. Will they die anytime soon? Probably not. But if they don't start communicating soon and often, they'll lose some market share for sure.