10 ms·

Some HN'ers may not recall Microsoft's "sleeping giant awakes" moment with the Internet in the 90's. Speaking of tidal waves, hang on to your surfboards, it's g

Some HN'ers may not recall Microsoft's "sleeping giant awakes" moment with the Internet in the 90's. Speaking of tidal waves, hang on to your surfboards, it's going to be big and fast. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/internet-tidal-wave.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/internet-tidal-wave.htm...

notsony 12y ago
Tim Cook's too busy with Jonathan Ive and Angela Ahrendts, turning Apple into a luxury goods company, to even know what just hit him. Slowly but surely the best developers are going to leave the Mac platform leaving only consulting body-shops and corporates on iOS. Developing for the Mac and iOS is miserable. It wasn't always that way, but it is now. Developers* are sick of proprietary stacks, from the language (Swift), to the APIs (Cocoa/CoreX/iOS), to the conditions attached (iCloud SDK only available for Mac Apps sold through the Mac Store), to the penny-pinching (pay your $99 fee and 30% even though we're raising $billion in debt to buy-back shares and hand out dividends because we're too tight-fisted to repatriate overseas funds and pay taxes on it) to the still broken XCode which only runs on a Mac, which must run Yosemite which feels like a Fisher-Price toy rather than a workstation for developers. *Well, ok, I'm sick of it, but I'm sure a few people reading this are feeling the same way.
- hockeybias 12y ago
  Honestly, I find that XCode is exceedingly painful, almost laughable to work with relative to Visual Studio.
- pasta_2 12y ago
  2/10 troll
- karpodiem 12y ago
  thank you for pointing out the money part, I share the same sentiment as you do on this. I've been itching for someone to stick it to Apple since they're really being tight with money in some places (annual developer fee as you mentioned), and wasting it on share repurchases. It's time for someone to really compress Apple's margins.
- kaolinite 12y ago
  Do you have anything to back that up? Personally, I feel developing for Apple platforms has never been better. Companies are still, for the most part, launching on iOS first and I don't know who the developers you're talking about are, but there are a hell of a lot of great developers still in the platform: Panic, OmniGroup, etc. As for your comment on the 30% fee, that's industry standard and few serious developers complain. The $99 fee is nothing compared to the amount of time it takes to build and design a quality app.
  - notsony 12y ago
    Panic and OmniGroup were big 10 years ago. The fact that nobody has appeared on the scene, innovated and become a name that you or I can quote is quite telling. Where is the new blood? I personally know many long-time Mac developers who have sold their products to others to maintain, or have quietly slipped away and let sales slide. The 30% fee is not an industry standard that was debated and researched and rationalized. It's an abitrary number picked out by Apple first and then followed by others in order to maximize income from the work of third-party developers who are forced to pay or quit the platform. It's a de facto standard imposed by the platform gatekeepers. Calling it an "industry standard" sounds like it's an ISO recommendation :-) There is no reason at all to charge a $99 fee to developers given the vast income generated from the 30% and the overall health of the company. This is nickle'n'diming developers. Some people claim that "Apple Developer" is a cost-center, an independently run business silo that must generate a profit to justify its existence, that it's not a charity... i say no. It contributes to the overall well-being of Apple Inc as a whole, just like human resources and research and development does, it helps contributes to the overall profits of the company, so when we look at the company's overall financial health, in my mind, there is no doubt that developers are being taken for a ride because... ...they have nowhere else to go because their Apple centric skill-set is not transferable to other platforms.
    - adripop 12y ago
      Pixelmator team ?
      - 12y ago
- rbanffy 12y ago
  > Developers* are sick of proprietary stacks And Microsoft will rescue them... Yeah, right...
  - notsony 12y ago
    Is there any reason not to use .NET now that it has been open-sourced? What's wrong with C# and F#?
    - troels 12y ago
      embrace, extend, extinguish
    - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      We'll know in a decade. It's too soon to tell whether Microsoft has something up it's sleeve. (The open source stuff is always a version behind Microsoft's latest, maybe?) I've watched Microsoft since the 1980s. One year is way too soon for me to believe that they've changed their stripes. In particular, it's way too soon for me to want to tie myself to their platform.
    - SXX 12y ago
      At moment they only open-sourced core that only useful for running backends on non-Windows platforms which is useless on Mac as nobody run servers on it. Once their open source .Net would get most of Windows version features there may be some use for it with same drawbacks like you have with Java for example.
      - noelherrick 12y ago
        .NET Core is available on Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac, so you can use it for servers on Linux.[1] A lot of developers (such as myself) use Macs for their development machines, so it's very useful to have the same framework/runtime for both Mac and Linux. [1] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr#get-net-core https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr#get-net-core
    - snambi 12y ago
- joekim 12y ago
  I agree with the feeling. I'm very frustrated that Swift has not been open sourced into LLVM. Apple is in a position to take the wind out of Microsofts sails, but it feels that they're more focused on profits than on what their developers are asking for.
- ryanmarsh 12y ago
  If you think $99 is expensive just wait until you have to buy your first copy of MSDN.
- Sir_Substance 12y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly. My standpoint is that by developing on someones platform, I am doing them a favor. I'm happy for them to not roll out the red carpet, but there better not be a bouncer checking me at the door, either. If I have to sign up to used your SDK (unreal, unity), I'll just use something else.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  Oh, yeah. Everyone knows Apple is doomed.
- TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
  So you're complaining about the $99 fee for an Apple developer license, but not complaining about needing to buy either the $1,200 or the $6,000 Visual Studio license required to develop commercial software? Oh, and you want InstallShield? And MSDN? And a better widget library, like DevExpress? Am I taking crazy pills?! The situation is hardly comparable. For a SMALL team in a corporation, even with Select and discounts, this is an enormous expense. And developing native Windows applications with Microsoft's tools is still just as proprietary as anything on the OS X platform. The recent open-sourcing of the .NET web stack means nothing in this regard. Unless you're telling me that there's an open source C# compiler that can do the job now? I'm a couple weeks away from paying the Apple license, and starting to write my first iOS app, so I may not know all the costs and foibles of Apple development yet. I'm open to the fact that I may be ignorant of needing some basic things, like on Windows, to REALLY get the job done.
dvirsky 12y ago
There wasn't a Google then and Apple was much weaker. But I'll hang on to my surfboard nevertheless.
MCRed 12y ago
It is now just a month shy of 20 years since that letter was written. And what did Microsoft do? They bought a browser and gave it away for free, cutting off Netscape at the knees, til the company folded and become the Mozilla Foundation. They poured billions and billions of dollars into online initiatives from the Microsoft Network to Bing, including buying dozens and dozens of companies. None of those were big successes. None of those have been a "tidal wave" of innovation, or success, or money. At least that I can see. Internet Explorer became dominant, but mainly due to bundling and that has gone away. IIS was a popular web server for a long time and people have written web sites using microsoft technology, but .net which is just a renamed MFC, isn't really much more used outside the same types of shops that used it before 1995. Yes, the mono project brought it to linux and made C# a more viable language, but that wasn't Microsoft's doing. Maybe I'm missing something. Xbox and Xbox online are huge money sinks that I don't know if MSFT is ever going to recover the money from. The stock has been flat during that period while google, amazon and apple have been going like gangbusters. (And given the level of monetary inflation over the past 15 years flat means down.) Yes, it did boom during the bubble but that was %100 windows and office from the boom in companies putting computers on everyone's desk. And yes, it's grown the past couple of years after being flat from 2001-2011. But that's not a result of the 1995 "initiative". Microsoft, like Apple, unfortunately for both, doesn't quite get the internet. It doesn't get mobile (unlike Apple). The new CEO might change this, I don't know. But the "internet tidal wave" happened pretty much completely without microsoft. For the record, I worked for the company near the time of this letter, lived in Seattle during most of the intervening years and have been watching Microsoft closely for about 25 years.
- billforsternz 12y ago
  > .net which is just a renamed MFC I can't agree with this. MFC was a thin C++ encapsulation of the Windows API. It was a reasonably successful technology but was unloved largely because it was so thin - it didn't try to fix the ugly mess beneath and so left developers wrestling a large smelly octopus. .Net was more of a clean room attempt to provide developers with a clean, sane, consistent API built on a new virtual machine based architecture complete with a shiny new language (C#, basically Java++).

notsony 12y ago

Tim Cook's too busy with Jonathan Ive and Angela Ahrendts, turning Apple into a luxury goods company, to even know what just hit him. Slowly but surely the best developers are going to leave the Mac platform leaving only consulting body-shops and corporates on iOS. Developing for the Mac and iOS is miserable. It wasn't always that way, but it is now. Developers* are sick of proprietary stacks, from the language (Swift), to the APIs (Cocoa/CoreX/iOS), to the conditions attached (iCloud SDK only available for Mac Apps sold through the Mac Store), to the penny-pinching (pay your $99 fee and 30% even though we're raising $billion in debt to buy-back shares and hand out dividends because we're too tight-fisted to repatriate overseas funds and pay taxes on it) to the still broken XCode which only runs on a Mac, which must run Yosemite which feels like a Fisher-Price toy rather than a workstation for developers. *Well, ok, I'm sick of it, but I'm sure a few people reading this are feeling the same way.

hockeybias 12y ago
Honestly, I find that XCode is exceedingly painful, almost laughable to work with relative to Visual Studio.
pasta_2 12y ago
2/10 troll
karpodiem 12y ago
thank you for pointing out the money part, I share the same sentiment as you do on this. I've been itching for someone to stick it to Apple since they're really being tight with money in some places (annual developer fee as you mentioned), and wasting it on share repurchases. It's time for someone to really compress Apple's margins.
kaolinite 12y ago
Do you have anything to back that up? Personally, I feel developing for Apple platforms has never been better. Companies are still, for the most part, launching on iOS first and I don't know who the developers you're talking about are, but there are a hell of a lot of great developers still in the platform: Panic, OmniGroup, etc. As for your comment on the 30% fee, that's industry standard and few serious developers complain. The $99 fee is nothing compared to the amount of time it takes to build and design a quality app.
- notsony 12y ago
  Panic and OmniGroup were big 10 years ago. The fact that nobody has appeared on the scene, innovated and become a name that you or I can quote is quite telling. Where is the new blood? I personally know many long-time Mac developers who have sold their products to others to maintain, or have quietly slipped away and let sales slide. The 30% fee is not an industry standard that was debated and researched and rationalized. It's an abitrary number picked out by Apple first and then followed by others in order to maximize income from the work of third-party developers who are forced to pay or quit the platform. It's a de facto standard imposed by the platform gatekeepers. Calling it an "industry standard" sounds like it's an ISO recommendation :-) There is no reason at all to charge a $99 fee to developers given the vast income generated from the 30% and the overall health of the company. This is nickle'n'diming developers. Some people claim that "Apple Developer" is a cost-center, an independently run business silo that must generate a profit to justify its existence, that it's not a charity... i say no. It contributes to the overall well-being of Apple Inc as a whole, just like human resources and research and development does, it helps contributes to the overall profits of the company, so when we look at the company's overall financial health, in my mind, there is no doubt that developers are being taken for a ride because... ...they have nowhere else to go because their Apple centric skill-set is not transferable to other platforms.
  - adripop 12y ago
    Pixelmator team ?
    - 12y ago
rbanffy 12y ago
> Developers* are sick of proprietary stacks And Microsoft will rescue them... Yeah, right...
- notsony 12y ago
  Is there any reason not to use .NET now that it has been open-sourced? What's wrong with C# and F#?
  - troels 12y ago
    embrace, extend, extinguish
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    We'll know in a decade. It's too soon to tell whether Microsoft has something up it's sleeve. (The open source stuff is always a version behind Microsoft's latest, maybe?) I've watched Microsoft since the 1980s. One year is way too soon for me to believe that they've changed their stripes. In particular, it's way too soon for me to want to tie myself to their platform.
  - SXX 12y ago
    At moment they only open-sourced core that only useful for running backends on non-Windows platforms which is useless on Mac as nobody run servers on it. Once their open source .Net would get most of Windows version features there may be some use for it with same drawbacks like you have with Java for example.
    - noelherrick 12y ago
      .NET Core is available on Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac, so you can use it for servers on Linux.[1] A lot of developers (such as myself) use Macs for their development machines, so it's very useful to have the same framework/runtime for both Mac and Linux. [1] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr#get-net-core https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr#get-net-core
  - snambi 12y ago
joekim 12y ago
I agree with the feeling. I'm very frustrated that Swift has not been open sourced into LLVM. Apple is in a position to take the wind out of Microsofts sails, but it feels that they're more focused on profits than on what their developers are asking for.
ryanmarsh 12y ago
If you think $99 is expensive just wait until you have to buy your first copy of MSDN.
Sir_Substance 12y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. My standpoint is that by developing on someones platform, I am doing them a favor. I'm happy for them to not roll out the red carpet, but there better not be a bouncer checking me at the door, either. If I have to sign up to used your SDK (unreal, unity), I'll just use something else.
serve_yay 12y ago
Oh, yeah. Everyone knows Apple is doomed.
TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
So you're complaining about the $99 fee for an Apple developer license, but not complaining about needing to buy either the $1,200 or the $6,000 Visual Studio license required to develop commercial software? Oh, and you want InstallShield? And MSDN? And a better widget library, like DevExpress? Am I taking crazy pills?! The situation is hardly comparable. For a SMALL team in a corporation, even with Select and discounts, this is an enormous expense. And developing native Windows applications with Microsoft's tools is still just as proprietary as anything on the OS X platform. The recent open-sourcing of the .NET web stack means nothing in this regard. Unless you're telling me that there's an open source C# compiler that can do the job now? I'm a couple weeks away from paying the Apple license, and starting to write my first iOS app, so I may not know all the costs and foibles of Apple development yet. I'm open to the fact that I may be ignorant of needing some basic things, like on Windows, to REALLY get the job done.

dvirsky 12y ago

There wasn't a Google then and Apple was much weaker. But I'll hang on to my surfboard nevertheless.

MCRed 12y ago

It is now just a month shy of 20 years since that letter was written. And what did Microsoft do? They bought a browser and gave it away for free, cutting off Netscape at the knees, til the company folded and become the Mozilla Foundation. They poured billions and billions of dollars into online initiatives from the Microsoft Network to Bing, including buying dozens and dozens of companies. None of those were big successes. None of those have been a "tidal wave" of innovation, or success, or money. At least that I can see. Internet Explorer became dominant, but mainly due to bundling and that has gone away. IIS was a popular web server for a long time and people have written web sites using microsoft technology, but .net which is just a renamed MFC, isn't really much more used outside the same types of shops that used it before 1995. Yes, the mono project brought it to linux and made C# a more viable language, but that wasn't Microsoft's doing. Maybe I'm missing something. Xbox and Xbox online are huge money sinks that I don't know if MSFT is ever going to recover the money from. The stock has been flat during that period while google, amazon and apple have been going like gangbusters. (And given the level of monetary inflation over the past 15 years flat means down.) Yes, it did boom during the bubble but that was %100 windows and office from the boom in companies putting computers on everyone's desk. And yes, it's grown the past couple of years after being flat from 2001-2011. But that's not a result of the 1995 "initiative". Microsoft, like Apple, unfortunately for both, doesn't quite get the internet. It doesn't get mobile (unlike Apple). The new CEO might change this, I don't know. But the "internet tidal wave" happened pretty much completely without microsoft. For the record, I worked for the company near the time of this letter, lived in Seattle during most of the intervening years and have been watching Microsoft closely for about 25 years.

billforsternz 12y ago
> .net which is just a renamed MFC I can't agree with this. MFC was a thin C++ encapsulation of the Windows API. It was a reasonably successful technology but was unloved largely because it was so thin - it didn't try to fix the ugly mess beneath and so left developers wrestling a large smelly octopus. .Net was more of a clean room attempt to provide developers with a clean, sane, consistent API built on a new virtual machine based architecture complete with a shiny new language (C#, basically Java++).