9 ms·

I'll tell you the story of my friend Greg. Greg has been a believer in Microsoft. He went to all the Tech-Ed conferences, attended every MSDN event he could. C

by jeswin 13y ago

I'll tell you the story of my friend Greg. Greg has been a believer in Microsoft. He went to all the Tech-Ed conferences, attended every MSDN event he could. Conferences are grand stages that leave an impression. He drank all the cool-aid that was served at these conferences. Things were really good early on, this was the last decade. The computing scene at that time revolved around Microsoft like the many moons of Jupiter. Greg and his team built products with Silverlight, WPF, .Net, Windows Workflow, Biztalk, Remoting, and the like. Every conference offered something new, something exciting. The apps they built worked great, looked great. Fast forward to now. Greg is a decent programmer, but he wants a new job badly. The problem is that nobody wants to use all that stuff that he knows. People want to build on standards; apps that work on every device. Not just on Windows and not just on Internet Explorer. Greg still doesn't get it. He hasn't seen much of the world outside Microsoft, and still wonders why people don't want Silverlight. Still tells me how WPF is so much better that anything else out there. And running only on IE, why is that even a problem? Everybody has IE. Poor Greg, tough times. There may be many issues with Microsoft. But more than anything else, I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside. This probably wasn't intentional, they must have probably believed in what they told their developers. Even though so much has changed since their glory days, there's a part of Microsoft which still refuses to engage. There was a Steve Jobs interview from the late 90s in which he said, "The problem with Microsoft is that they have absolutely no taste". Jobs wasn't talking about aesthetics; it is true of pretty much everything from Microsoft. From UIs, to development frameworks, to tools, to shells and even APIs. Back then, having "no taste" was totally fine because people communicated far less. Now we have a whole bunch of people who are stuck using this stuff. And many of them don't really get it yet. Edit: I just saw that you work for Microsoft, and specifically Microsoft Research. You guys make awesome stuff. The above is mostly about the Windows platform.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
muglug 13y ago
Interesting take. At the moment, though, there's no "standard" for apps - just a variety of different platforms, of which Windows is one (with an ever-declining market share). Obviously there's the web-as-platform, but I wouldn't treat that the same as a native system.
fetbaffe 13y ago
Yes, because Apple always follow standards and have open implementations.
- CrankyPants 13y ago
  WebKit? ALAC? On top of that, Apple's done more than any other single player (except perhaps Adobe!) to move the industry away from Flash, to open alternatives. No, they don't always follow standards or always have open implementations, but their garden is arguably quite a bit less walled than the one in Redmond. Which makes your point a little confusing, at best. Also related: http://www.apple.com/opensource/ http://www.apple.com/opensource/
  - fetbaffe 13y ago
    Webkit was already open source before Apple started using it. ALAC was closed source until 2011. Microsoft has released open formats as well, like XPS. And Microsoft does open source today as well. That's how the industry works today. Sure flash is bad thing but if Sun had its way with the internet and Microsoft had not stopped them we be all doing Java applets by now. However that's all beside the point, the point is that complaining against Microsofts closed culture and in the same sentence referencing Steve Jobs is like taking a bath in koolaid, regardless of Microsofts closed culture. It's just double standards.
    - danieldk 13y ago
      Webkit was already open source before Apple started using it. Apple created Webkit. They were using/forked KHTML for that, but it quickly diverged.
      - fetbaffe 13y ago
        Sorry for the error, but yes they forked something already open source.
      - ddebernardy 13y ago
girvo 13y ago
Well, I run Elementary on my laptop, OS X on my iMac, have an iPhone, a Nexus 7, and a BlackBerry Playbook (quite an underrated tablet for it's time). I'm a developer, and build apps for all of those devices. And you know what? WPF _is_ nice. I _liked_ Silverlight (but am frustrated that it doesn't work under Linux, though not surprised). Microsoft make _good_ developer tools, in my personal humble opinion. The problem I see are they still make a large amount of missteps, and don't engage the "tastemakers" of tech anymore. Any goodwill they once had has been squandered, and if you look at Yahoo! you can see that it's super difficult to get it back. Now that Ballmer is leaving, it will be interesting to see what happens in the future -- will they get a CEO that isn't afraid to take big, bold risks? To cook the golden goose in the short-term, perhaps, to allow for growth into new markets? Somehow I doubt it, but I wish they would. Windows 8 has been really good to me; I've installed it (and Office 2013) on all the devices of my family and (ex)girlfriends, my ex has a Windows Phone on my recommendation. They all love it, and find it easier to use than anything in the past. Just today, I purchased a touch-screen HP All-In-One for my Grandfather, and he loves it (and is super excited about using the Kindle app while in his lean-back chair on the 22" screen, synced with his Kindle itself). When I was working at Harvey Norman, I sold $15 000 worth of Surface and Surface Pros to customers in one month; They were easy to sell as long as you knew how to appeal to the consumers _actual_ needs. They didn't suit everyone, but for those that did no other Tablet came close. Basically, they have more potential than nearly any other tech company out there. Something has been holding them back, and they've succeeded in spite of themselves. I hope that they can turn it around moving forward.
- shuzchen 13y ago
  I recently installed a new version of Office on my dad's machine and was shocked to see that you can start using Office pretty much right away, even while it's still installing. The more complicated features (e.g., making charts) are locked out, but will be available as those bits are streamed in. Basically it bootstraps a bare bones document reader and advanced features become available as they are downloaded. Awesome, but really brings to light how poorly MS handles advertising.
  - mwilcox 13y ago
EdwardDiego 13y ago
When I was trying to get into the developer game (I'm self-taught with no degree so couldn't follow the normal progression) the biggest market in my hometown was (and still is) for .NET developers. So, I joined a .NET user group, I installed VS, I started learning. Problem was, MS was churning out the "next great thing" faster than I could learn the last great thing. While I was getting my head around WinForms, WPF came out. I started using WPF, then Silverlight arrived, which was like WPF, just a subset of it, and therefore different enough to be problematic. But that wasn't too bad. It was the 'blessed' data layer stuff that threw me. When I started it was DataSets etc. Then it was LINQ-to-SQL, then it was very much not LINQ-to-SQL, but instead was Entity Framework. As a newbie who was trying to make myself marketable, it felt like a bit of a hamster wheel, but then through the user group, I met .NET pros who felt exactly the same way. And at the end of the day, the greatest irony was that when I finally broke into the market, it was a Java-based developer role on the basis of my JavaScript. So all my years of frantically spinning the .NET wheel was for naught. I still do love F# though. In hindsight, the thing that strikes me about .NET development is that most businesses using it really want the whole stack to be from one provider whom they trust - and as a result, third party alternatives never really get a look-in if an MS or MS blessed technology such as JSON.net (http://james.newtonking.com/json http://james.newtonking.com/json) can do the same job. That is a massive sweeping generalisation of course, and only applicable to the limits of my experience in a small city in a small country.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  I guess you also suffered from being a newbie into a myriad of technologies. WPF and Silverlight share almost the XAML stack with little differences. One just needs to know those differences. LINQ-to-SQL and Entity Framework are usually used together and also share common concepts. Other vendors also keep changing their stacks, it is the job of a developer to keep up with changes and learn to quickly pick up what is relevant for a given project.
  - skriticos2 13y ago
    I like the Unix / OpenGL way where you start with a sensible thing and then extend it, keeping the underlying architecture somewhat consistent.
Encosia 13y ago
If Greg is a real person, he's in great shape job-wise. There's incredible demand for .NET developers right now. Not so much in the West Coast startup world, but nearly everywhere in the corporate world.
- devrelm 13y ago
  This is my problem right now. I recently quit my corporate job doing asp.net mvc for the financial industry in NYC. I'd like to move into a startup on the west coast, but I'm having trouble finding anything that uses asp.net mvc. I'm applying to non-.net shops too, but I get the feeling that they throw my resume in the trash as soon as they notice the lack of node.js/ruby/python/java experience.
  - winfred 13y ago
    west coast can be hard to get into. They really like to know someone that knows you before pulling the trigger. Show up at a few meetings (ther's various hacker stuff going on) and get some names on your LinkedIn. I bet that'll fix it.
saryant 13y ago
One of my friends is starting a programming bootcamp. He and his assistant have been calling recruiters and tech companies all over the region, cataloguing available jobs and figuring out where the demand is. Their findings: PHP and .Net. That's what the vast majority of companies they spoke to are hiring for. My point is that there's a whole world of tech outside HN.
- brass9 13y ago
  Was the survey conducted in India, by any chance?
  - MortenK 13y ago
    Monster.com job listings in the US by keyword: .NET - 1000+ positions Java - 1000+ positions PHP - 454 positions Python - 295 positions Ruby - 280 positions Node.js - 55 positions Lisp, Haskell, Scheme - 0 positions
    - mercurial 13y ago
      It's not just the US (or India). Denmark is also, sadly, a Microsoft stronghold.
    - jeremiep 13y ago
      Quantity is not the same as Quality. I expect to find a larger percentage of competent programmers for the python/ruby jobs than for the .net/java jobs. Every job I've had so far seems to prove this true.
      - drharris 13y ago
        Personal examples hardly prove a point, but I'm a seasoned, nearly exclusive (11yr) .NET developer and I can probably code the pants off the average ruby/python developer off the street. As can many of my coworkers. See, we use this old-school knowledge of design patterns, MVC, and SOA instead of worrying about whether our code is clever enough. Do you sometimes have to interview people who learned a few buzzwords and somehow passed an MSCD test but don't understand what encapsulation means? Yes. Just like you get people in the Ruby world who opened a console and typed in "rails new" and now they have a new resume topic. Competent programmers exist in all types of jobs with all types of platforms. In fact, I would argue that those of us who don't jump to every new fad language that comes out may likely be more productive by default. Instead of worrying about what frameworks we're going to use to supplement our Node+Json+Rails+Bootstrap+Coffeescript+blergh security nightmare, we just start coding.
kayoone 13y ago
Whenever i hear somebody talking MS down for not going with "standards" i have to look at the keyboard layout of my mac and start to laugh. Seriously, this is my biggest pain when changing between OSes.
- Samuel_Michon 13y ago
  The Mac keyboard layout is older than the Windows keyboard layout, so yes, that is an example of Microsoft choosing to create its own standard.
  - calpaterson 13y ago
    Actually, IBM invented that keyboard layout (in 1981, which was a few years after the Apple II)
    - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
      You are correct, but I mentioned ‘Microsoft’ and the ‘Windows keyboard’ because the original IBM PC keyboards did not have a ‘Windows’ key. Original Macs did have a ‘command’ key. I suspect ‘Kayoone’ was referring to the functionality of the ‘alt’ and ‘ctrl’ keys on a Mac keyboard versus what those keys do in Windows. For example, in Windows, ‘ctrl-C‘ is used to copy, while on OS X, it’s done with ‘command-C’. The placement of the actual keys are quite similar between PCs and Macs. The Apple ][ keyboard didn’t have an ‘alt’ or ‘ctrl’ key. The Apple IIGS had both keys, and they were placed in the same arrangement as the original IBM PC keyboard (with the ‘ctrl’ key above the left ‘shift’ key.) On later Apple and IBM PC compatible keyboards, the ‘ctrl’ key was moved to the bottom row, to the left of the alt key.
      - kayoone 13y ago
        Not only the ctrl+command key but also the behavior for HOME/END/POS1 when selecting text etc. That makes it really hard for me to transition between Linux/Windows and OSX..if it werent for that i wouldnt really care which OS i use. I already changed to the US keyboard layout which makes this alot better, the standard german Mac Layout is just total garbage.
smanuel 13y ago
> Jobs wasn't talking about aesthetics; it is true of pretty much everything from Microsoft. From UIs, to development frameworks, to tools, to shells and even APIs. Back then, having "no taste" was totally fine because people communicated far less. I think that the main problem is the MS has always tried to make things appealing to a certain crowd known as "VB developers", "drag and drop developers", etc. I've heard too many times "You can do this with almost no code" with our cool new "Microsoft Foundation For Next Big Bullsh Blah Blah". And this is presented as a good practice. And the whole army of evangelists starts touting and praising the next BS framework. People start adopting it, other people start building other things on top of it, until everyone realizes it's BS and such practices, proclaiming "you'll write less code" lead to a pile of bad design decisions that you will later deeply regret.
jf22 13y ago
tl;dr Silverlight devs don't have homes.
stevecooperorg 13y ago
This story could be told of any developer who doesn't update his skills for seven years. You could tell this story for Java developers, Flash developers, PHP developers, etc. Anyone peddling skills from 2006 is going to be looking pretty dated, no matter what stack you're talking about. I also don't see this: "I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside." My daily experience is very different. If I start a new project, it'll almost certainly be on the open-source (Apache 2.0) ASP.NET MVC platform. That gives me Twitter Bootstrap, Knockout.js, OAuth2.0, etc. It's a neatly integrated patchwork of commonly-used, standards-happy, open-source frameworks and libraries, and it'll work happily on safari and chrome and on my phone. So I don't feel particularly isolated away from the rest of the development world. Summary is, I'm sure this vision was true years ago, but things seem to have moved on. I think that now, if I want to put together software using modern approach, there aren't approaches or technologies that the MS stack makes tricky. But I'm happy to be corrected; are there technologies or approaches I can't use fairly easily on the MS stack? Cloud computing? single page apps? continuous integration? BDD? etc. What am I missing?
abvdasker 13y ago
Cool story, but the last time I was looking for a programming job (six months ago) I remember seeing quite a few listings for .NET developers. Probably just as many as I saw for Rails, though maybe fewer than for PHP.
shmerl 13y ago
> I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside.This probably wasn't intentional, they must have probably believed in what they told their developers. No, this was very much intentional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...
rsynnott 13y ago
> Greg still doesn't get it. He hasn't seen much of the world outside Microsoft, and still wonders why people don't want Silverlight. Still tells me how WPF is so much better that anything else out there. Aren't both of those technologies, if not actually dead, certainly not the things that even _Microsoft_ wants people to be using these days?

by jeswin 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

muglug 13y ago

Interesting take. At the moment, though, there's no "standard" for apps - just a variety of different platforms, of which Windows is one (with an ever-declining market share). Obviously there's the web-as-platform, but I wouldn't treat that the same as a native system.

fetbaffe 13y ago

Yes, because Apple always follow standards and have open implementations.

CrankyPants 13y ago
WebKit? ALAC? On top of that, Apple's done more than any other single player (except perhaps Adobe!) to move the industry away from Flash, to open alternatives. No, they don't always follow standards or always have open implementations, but their garden is arguably quite a bit less walled than the one in Redmond. Which makes your point a little confusing, at best. Also related: http://www.apple.com/opensource/ http://www.apple.com/opensource/
- fetbaffe 13y ago
  Webkit was already open source before Apple started using it. ALAC was closed source until 2011. Microsoft has released open formats as well, like XPS. And Microsoft does open source today as well. That's how the industry works today. Sure flash is bad thing but if Sun had its way with the internet and Microsoft had not stopped them we be all doing Java applets by now. However that's all beside the point, the point is that complaining against Microsofts closed culture and in the same sentence referencing Steve Jobs is like taking a bath in koolaid, regardless of Microsofts closed culture. It's just double standards.
  - danieldk 13y ago
    Webkit was already open source before Apple started using it. Apple created Webkit. They were using/forked KHTML for that, but it quickly diverged.
    - fetbaffe 13y ago
      Sorry for the error, but yes they forked something already open source.
    - ddebernardy 13y ago

girvo 13y ago

Well, I run Elementary on my laptop, OS X on my iMac, have an iPhone, a Nexus 7, and a BlackBerry Playbook (quite an underrated tablet for it's time). I'm a developer, and build apps for all of those devices. And you know what? WPF _is_ nice. I _liked_ Silverlight (but am frustrated that it doesn't work under Linux, though not surprised). Microsoft make _good_ developer tools, in my personal humble opinion. The problem I see are they still make a large amount of missteps, and don't engage the "tastemakers" of tech anymore. Any goodwill they once had has been squandered, and if you look at Yahoo! you can see that it's super difficult to get it back. Now that Ballmer is leaving, it will be interesting to see what happens in the future -- will they get a CEO that isn't afraid to take big, bold risks? To cook the golden goose in the short-term, perhaps, to allow for growth into new markets? Somehow I doubt it, but I wish they would. Windows 8 has been really good to me; I've installed it (and Office 2013) on all the devices of my family and (ex)girlfriends, my ex has a Windows Phone on my recommendation. They all love it, and find it easier to use than anything in the past. Just today, I purchased a touch-screen HP All-In-One for my Grandfather, and he loves it (and is super excited about using the Kindle app while in his lean-back chair on the 22" screen, synced with his Kindle itself). When I was working at Harvey Norman, I sold $15 000 worth of Surface and Surface Pros to customers in one month; They were easy to sell as long as you knew how to appeal to the consumers _actual_ needs. They didn't suit everyone, but for those that did no other Tablet came close. Basically, they have more potential than nearly any other tech company out there. Something has been holding them back, and they've succeeded in spite of themselves. I hope that they can turn it around moving forward.

shuzchen 13y ago
I recently installed a new version of Office on my dad's machine and was shocked to see that you can start using Office pretty much right away, even while it's still installing. The more complicated features (e.g., making charts) are locked out, but will be available as those bits are streamed in. Basically it bootstraps a bare bones document reader and advanced features become available as they are downloaded. Awesome, but really brings to light how poorly MS handles advertising.
- mwilcox 13y ago

EdwardDiego 13y ago

When I was trying to get into the developer game (I'm self-taught with no degree so couldn't follow the normal progression) the biggest market in my hometown was (and still is) for .NET developers. So, I joined a .NET user group, I installed VS, I started learning. Problem was, MS was churning out the "next great thing" faster than I could learn the last great thing. While I was getting my head around WinForms, WPF came out. I started using WPF, then Silverlight arrived, which was like WPF, just a subset of it, and therefore different enough to be problematic. But that wasn't too bad. It was the 'blessed' data layer stuff that threw me. When I started it was DataSets etc. Then it was LINQ-to-SQL, then it was very much not LINQ-to-SQL, but instead was Entity Framework. As a newbie who was trying to make myself marketable, it felt like a bit of a hamster wheel, but then through the user group, I met .NET pros who felt exactly the same way. And at the end of the day, the greatest irony was that when I finally broke into the market, it was a Java-based developer role on the basis of my JavaScript. So all my years of frantically spinning the .NET wheel was for naught. I still do love F# though. In hindsight, the thing that strikes me about .NET development is that most businesses using it really want the whole stack to be from one provider whom they trust - and as a result, third party alternatives never really get a look-in if an MS or MS blessed technology such as JSON.net (http://james.newtonking.com/json http://james.newtonking.com/json) can do the same job. That is a massive sweeping generalisation of course, and only applicable to the limits of my experience in a small city in a small country.

pjmlp 13y ago
I guess you also suffered from being a newbie into a myriad of technologies. WPF and Silverlight share almost the XAML stack with little differences. One just needs to know those differences. LINQ-to-SQL and Entity Framework are usually used together and also share common concepts. Other vendors also keep changing their stacks, it is the job of a developer to keep up with changes and learn to quickly pick up what is relevant for a given project.
- skriticos2 13y ago
  I like the Unix / OpenGL way where you start with a sensible thing and then extend it, keeping the underlying architecture somewhat consistent.

Encosia 13y ago

If Greg is a real person, he's in great shape job-wise. There's incredible demand for .NET developers right now. Not so much in the West Coast startup world, but nearly everywhere in the corporate world.

devrelm 13y ago
This is my problem right now. I recently quit my corporate job doing asp.net mvc for the financial industry in NYC. I'd like to move into a startup on the west coast, but I'm having trouble finding anything that uses asp.net mvc. I'm applying to non-.net shops too, but I get the feeling that they throw my resume in the trash as soon as they notice the lack of node.js/ruby/python/java experience.
- winfred 13y ago
  west coast can be hard to get into. They really like to know someone that knows you before pulling the trigger. Show up at a few meetings (ther's various hacker stuff going on) and get some names on your LinkedIn. I bet that'll fix it.

saryant 13y ago

One of my friends is starting a programming bootcamp. He and his assistant have been calling recruiters and tech companies all over the region, cataloguing available jobs and figuring out where the demand is. Their findings: PHP and .Net. That's what the vast majority of companies they spoke to are hiring for. My point is that there's a whole world of tech outside HN.

brass9 13y ago
Was the survey conducted in India, by any chance?
- MortenK 13y ago
  Monster.com job listings in the US by keyword: .NET - 1000+ positions Java - 1000+ positions PHP - 454 positions Python - 295 positions Ruby - 280 positions Node.js - 55 positions Lisp, Haskell, Scheme - 0 positions
  - mercurial 13y ago
    It's not just the US (or India). Denmark is also, sadly, a Microsoft stronghold.
  - jeremiep 13y ago
    Quantity is not the same as Quality. I expect to find a larger percentage of competent programmers for the python/ruby jobs than for the .net/java jobs. Every job I've had so far seems to prove this true.
    - drharris 13y ago
      Personal examples hardly prove a point, but I'm a seasoned, nearly exclusive (11yr) .NET developer and I can probably code the pants off the average ruby/python developer off the street. As can many of my coworkers. See, we use this old-school knowledge of design patterns, MVC, and SOA instead of worrying about whether our code is clever enough. Do you sometimes have to interview people who learned a few buzzwords and somehow passed an MSCD test but don't understand what encapsulation means? Yes. Just like you get people in the Ruby world who opened a console and typed in "rails new" and now they have a new resume topic. Competent programmers exist in all types of jobs with all types of platforms. In fact, I would argue that those of us who don't jump to every new fad language that comes out may likely be more productive by default. Instead of worrying about what frameworks we're going to use to supplement our Node+Json+Rails+Bootstrap+Coffeescript+blergh security nightmare, we just start coding.

kayoone 13y ago

Whenever i hear somebody talking MS down for not going with "standards" i have to look at the keyboard layout of my mac and start to laugh. Seriously, this is my biggest pain when changing between OSes.

Samuel_Michon 13y ago
The Mac keyboard layout is older than the Windows keyboard layout, so yes, that is an example of Microsoft choosing to create its own standard.
- calpaterson 13y ago
  Actually, IBM invented that keyboard layout (in 1981, which was a few years after the Apple II)
  - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    You are correct, but I mentioned ‘Microsoft’ and the ‘Windows keyboard’ because the original IBM PC keyboards did not have a ‘Windows’ key. Original Macs did have a ‘command’ key. I suspect ‘Kayoone’ was referring to the functionality of the ‘alt’ and ‘ctrl’ keys on a Mac keyboard versus what those keys do in Windows. For example, in Windows, ‘ctrl-C‘ is used to copy, while on OS X, it’s done with ‘command-C’. The placement of the actual keys are quite similar between PCs and Macs. The Apple ][ keyboard didn’t have an ‘alt’ or ‘ctrl’ key. The Apple IIGS had both keys, and they were placed in the same arrangement as the original IBM PC keyboard (with the ‘ctrl’ key above the left ‘shift’ key.) On later Apple and IBM PC compatible keyboards, the ‘ctrl’ key was moved to the bottom row, to the left of the alt key.
    - kayoone 13y ago
      Not only the ctrl+command key but also the behavior for HOME/END/POS1 when selecting text etc. That makes it really hard for me to transition between Linux/Windows and OSX..if it werent for that i wouldnt really care which OS i use. I already changed to the US keyboard layout which makes this alot better, the standard german Mac Layout is just total garbage.

smanuel 13y ago

> Jobs wasn't talking about aesthetics; it is true of pretty much everything from Microsoft. From UIs, to development frameworks, to tools, to shells and even APIs. Back then, having "no taste" was totally fine because people communicated far less. I think that the main problem is the MS has always tried to make things appealing to a certain crowd known as "VB developers", "drag and drop developers", etc. I've heard too many times "You can do this with almost no code" with our cool new "Microsoft Foundation For Next Big Bullsh Blah Blah". And this is presented as a good practice. And the whole army of evangelists starts touting and praising the next BS framework. People start adopting it, other people start building other things on top of it, until everyone realizes it's BS and such practices, proclaiming "you'll write less code" lead to a pile of bad design decisions that you will later deeply regret.

jf22 13y ago

tl;dr Silverlight devs don't have homes.

stevecooperorg 13y ago

This story could be told of any developer who doesn't update his skills for seven years. You could tell this story for Java developers, Flash developers, PHP developers, etc. Anyone peddling skills from 2006 is going to be looking pretty dated, no matter what stack you're talking about. I also don't see this: "I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside." My daily experience is very different. If I start a new project, it'll almost certainly be on the open-source (Apache 2.0) ASP.NET MVC platform. That gives me Twitter Bootstrap, Knockout.js, OAuth2.0, etc. It's a neatly integrated patchwork of commonly-used, standards-happy, open-source frameworks and libraries, and it'll work happily on safari and chrome and on my phone. So I don't feel particularly isolated away from the rest of the development world. Summary is, I'm sure this vision was true years ago, but things seem to have moved on. I think that now, if I want to put together software using modern approach, there aren't approaches or technologies that the MS stack makes tricky. But I'm happy to be corrected; are there technologies or approaches I can't use fairly easily on the MS stack? Cloud computing? single page apps? continuous integration? BDD? etc. What am I missing?

abvdasker 13y ago

Cool story, but the last time I was looking for a programming job (six months ago) I remember seeing quite a few listings for .NET developers. Probably just as many as I saw for Rails, though maybe fewer than for PHP.

shmerl 13y ago

> I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside.This probably wasn't intentional, they must have probably believed in what they told their developers. No, this was very much intentional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...

rsynnott 13y ago

> Greg still doesn't get it. He hasn't seen much of the world outside Microsoft, and still wonders why people don't want Silverlight. Still tells me how WPF is so much better that anything else out there. Aren't both of those technologies, if not actually dead, certainly not the things that even _Microsoft_ wants people to be using these days?