4 ms·
I'm an unapologetic .NET lover, and the comments on the subreddit largely hold true. In the end, culture is the biggest differentiator. MS has excellent tooling
by drharris 13y ago
I'm an unapologetic .NET lover, and the comments on the subreddit largely hold true. In the end, culture is the biggest differentiator. MS has excellent tooling and support, but nobody knows about it. They have Bizspark, which is one of the best startup-focused programs I've seen (literally tons of free stuff for your runway), but once again nobody knows about it. Azure is probably the most innovative, stable, clearly-priced cloud platform in the industry, but nobody knows about it. If you want to write Javascript/Node with full IDE support, Microsoft has you covered, but nobody knows about it. F# is probably the best FP language in existence, but nobody... well, the point is made.
The only people that know about the new things MS comes out with are the few of us .NET developers also with a foothold in the Startup scene, and old enterprise companies who bought into the stack back in VB5/C++/MVC days.
The other uphill battle is young people's view on technology. Most of them would rather platform-hop in the same way people change churches (and for much the same reasons). New = better, and Microsoft = old, so no need to even see what they have to offer. Young people with ample free time have always driven the software industry, and young people want to use things built by startuppy or nonsensical names. "Microsoft? They actually have software in the name? No thanks!"
Finally, it's an issue of evangelism and online/community presence. Because enterprise is the bread and butter of MS, MS tends to target those kind of people more. It's not that they don't try to capture new minds, but when you attend an event where you're the lone startup guy among 50 enterprise people, how do you think presentations are going to be focused? When your community seems to be centralized on your corporate domain, are you really going to attract someone who isn't willing to type in "microsoft"? New platforms get popular not because they're actually better, but because they're cooler. Either cooler sounding, there's a new type of tutorial (to-dos and 5-minute-blogs are played out, people), or it's got a guy with weird hair promoting it, using Jobs-esque language like "beautiful" or "elegant". Of course it's elegant at version 0.9 before it really does anything. Look at Rails now that it actually does stuff.
Anyway, mini-rant over. I think MS deserves more attention than they get, but ultimately they dig their own grave by not investing more in capturing that next generation.
- kfk 13y agoI upgraded to Office 2013 recently, on Windows 7. The all thing got super slow and I am still fighting the ribbon, plus this flaty thing on Windows 7 is just odd. Yes my computer is 3 years old, yes some linux distros are worst, but when somebody gets this kind of experience over and over, when he has a choice, he goes for something else. Sorry, maybe they have super cool products, but I won't touch them even with a stick (plus they have a cost, or not?).
- drharris 13y agoI can't speak much to their OS/Office products. They allow me to do my work with minimal frustration, but it's not particularly enjoyable either (of course, neither is setting up a decent Linux distro). At home I prefer a Mac, when I use a non-iOS device at all. I'm mainly talking here about their development tools and platforms, which are really second to none.
- drzaiusapelord 13y agoI know about it, but licensing for 50 servers running IIS on Windows 2008 vs 50 servers running LAMP is a big price difference to even a medium-sized company, let alone a startup. I also wouldn't bet my company's success on whether mono is working correctly this version. Oh and if you start building on that infrastructure using AD, Exchange, etc you're in CAL licensing hell. Next thing you know you've spend the wages of two really good engineers on just MS licensing. How is that cost efficient? I'd rather have a 5 man team running linux than a 3 man team running MS. Not to mention, if I'm recruiting young talent, how many of them will have MS enterprise experience vs linux-based experience?
- dev360 13y agoNot only that, its a pain in the ass to maintain Microsoft boxes compared to *nix. I dont understand how anybody has patience dealing with guis that just get in your way of getting shit done.
- drharris 13y ago> patience dealing with command lines that just get in your way of getting shit done.
- Splendor 13y agoI agree with almost all of your points. The only issue I have is with Azure. I cannot for the life of me get them to take my money so I had to look elsewhere.
- drharris 13y agoI'd agree their billing leaves something to be desired, if that's what you're talking about. I think they're trying to centralize all their services into a single environment, but it is failing miserably. Xbox live and Azure services do not necessarily need the same billing platform.
- dfoolz 13y agoFree Open Source Software. End of discussion.
- drharris 13y agoI don't think that really ends any discussion. Some FOSS is good, a lot of it is horrible. Some of it I would use in production, the vast majority I would not.
- ScottWhigham 13y agoThere's so much "Yes!!!!" in your post, I wish I could upvote you 100 times. The only thing I'd add is that you've glossed over the cost a bit. If I want to use Python, for example, in production at my established 100+ person company, the cost is $0.00. If I want to use C#, the cost might be zero as long as I'm willing to put up with missing features (Express Edition, Sharp Develop). If I want the full IDE for with Visual Studio 2013, I have to pay $600 for a standalone copy, or $1800 for MSDN, etc. And guess what? In a year or two, the new version will come out and I'll only get a 25% discount to upgrade (VS2012 vs. VS2013). And those versions don't include lots of the team features - that's just the basic IDE. And don't get me started on the never ending stream of TLAs coming out of Redmond that get hyped for 3 years and then discontinued later for another TLA.
- drharris 13y agoIt should probably be clarified that you're talking primarily about start-up costs, and primarily about web applications. I think amortized over the long run, MS services can save you money (definitely at the enterprise level, less so with small teams). Not always, but I've seen many teams hack away on Python or Rails, and hit a giant wall about 80% of the way in. Enter a consultant to save the day (spoken as a past freelancer who charged pretty decent rates for this kind of work). Of course that can happen on the MS stack too, but you can get support from MS with MSDN. Volume MSDN licensing is not cheap (though, free with Bizspark), but considering you get a full suite of MS products it is a no-brainer when developing anything on the Microsoft stack. I think there's some debate left in regard to web applications, but when it comes to desktop software dev or SOA, there's not really a viable alternative. In the end, it costs good money, but you get really, really good development software. Also, I'd say that I'm more than willing to pay good money for VS, if it means not using Eclipse. I would easily lose $600 worth of time trying to get open source development tools to play well together. Microsoft's IDE technology is so far beyond anything in the FOSS world it's not even a debate anymore. Only mod it needs is Resharper. :)