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I'm saying that their mindshare has been shrinking constantly since the 90's. They really didn't have any serious competition back then, but they have so much c

I'm saying that their mindshare has been shrinking constantly since the 90's. They really didn't have any serious competition back then, but they have so much competition now, and they don't stand out anymore. Yes, their stuff is good and competent, and they're serving the needs of their existing customers and developers, but they don't make kids excited to fire up Visual Studio and crank out a Windows Phone app, the same way they made kids excited to fire up Visual Basic and crank out a windows exe back in the day. There aren't any success stories around the Microsoft ecosystem anymore. Who makes the quick bucks today? Phone game developers. Facebook game developers. That's what people are chasing, so that's what people are wanting to learn how to do on their own time. Who wants to learn how to make Windows Phone apps? Or Silverlight apps? Or Windows app store apps RT or whatever the hell they called that mess. Noone, except those already being paid to do it. There are lots of steady jobs there, but exciting ones? No.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Well, kids were excited to fire up Visual Studio and write XNA code for their XBox. They might be excited now to use DirectX in the same way, though the barrier there is much higher. Then what about F#, TypeScript...Kodu and Project Spark? All of this discussion is anecdotal, we have no hard evidence really what developers under 30 think about Microsoft. And kids are extremely dynamic and fickle anyways, they will quickly adopt any technology that helps them achieve their goals as things fall in and out of favor. So its not like there are hard external barriers to Microsoft winning back young dev mindshare, only internal cultural ones. We also seem to do much better in Asia (China, where I'm more familiar) in outreach than the west. Perhaps that is temporary and a result of startup/hacker culture not really taking hold here, but for the present we seem to be doing very well. > There aren't any success stories around the Microsoft ecosystem anymore. This is quite a weird statement. In the enterprise, there are plenty of success stories that even I can't understand, like Sharepoint. Perhaps you mean the lack of "sexy success stories"? I could agree with that.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

Well, kids were excited to fire up Visual Studio and write XNA code for their XBox. They might be excited now to use DirectX in the same way, though the barrier there is much higher. Then what about F#, TypeScript...Kodu and Project Spark? All of this discussion is anecdotal, we have no hard evidence really what developers under 30 think about Microsoft. And kids are extremely dynamic and fickle anyways, they will quickly adopt any technology that helps them achieve their goals as things fall in and out of favor. So its not like there are hard external barriers to Microsoft winning back young dev mindshare, only internal cultural ones. We also seem to do much better in Asia (China, where I'm more familiar) in outreach than the west. Perhaps that is temporary and a result of startup/hacker culture not really taking hold here, but for the present we seem to be doing very well. > There aren't any success stories around the Microsoft ecosystem anymore. This is quite a weird statement. In the enterprise, there are plenty of success stories that even I can't understand, like Sharepoint. Perhaps you mean the lack of "sexy success stories"? I could agree with that.