3 ms·

I have 15 years of professional experience on the Microsoft platform. I'll tell you why people are pissed. Especially among MS developers, there are many peopl

by jeswin 11y ago

I have 15 years of professional experience on the Microsoft platform. I'll tell you why people are pissed. Especially among MS developers, there are many people who don't read read HN or any other tech industry site. They rely or depend on MS to provide them with career advancing technical advice, but for the last eight years they have been consistently let down. Microsoft's preferred flavor changes every two years; Win Forms, SilverLight, WPF, Html5, now Universal Windows Apps. Add Metro-flavors of some of these. This isn't working, at least for Business Users. Customers are switching from their Native Windows apps (often Win Forms, rarely WPF) to HTML, iOS and Android. Businesses will not build another Windows platform Native app; although some consumer apps might be written. Developers are seeing their hard-learned technology go down the drain. That was time they could have learnt something new or spent with family. Developers who are in IT/Software for just the job/money find in relatively difficult to just go and learn the web. Many of them could have done it 10 years back (when they were younger), they can't do that so easily now. The last time MS' advice helped was when they had an iron hold on the industry (aka the Monopoly). Here's some advice for MS: Build on HTML, perhaps partner with Mozilla. See if you can get it to work as fluidly as Native. They still have perhaps the most formidable research team out there among Software Companies. Closed, Windows Native apps are over.

StevePerkins 11y ago
> Especially among MS developers, there are many people who > don't read read HN or any other tech industry site. They > rely or depend on MS to provide them with career advancing > technical advice, but for the last eight years they have been > consistently let down. Microsoft's preferred flavor changes > every two years... Ahh... thanks, this makes sense. Things are somewhat similar on the Java side with Oracle, but not quite. In my opinion, the biggest contributing factor to the strength of Java's ecosystem is that the community has a healthy level of distrust toward Oracle. Oracle promotes new things all the time. Sometimes they catch on and get widely adopted. Sometimes the community by and large completely ignores them, and uses another third-party framework instead (e.g. Spring). Oracle is begrudgingly respected, but I wouldn't say that their word rises to the level of "default" in the Java community. Microsoft guys seem to have much tighter bond with the mothership, and put a great deal more trust in Redmond's agenda. They are much less likely to explore alternatives that come from outside of Microsoft (e.g. I see a lot small microservices for which Nancy makes a lot of sense, but which are still built on ASP.NET "just because"). This causes the wider ecosystem of alternatives to be much weaker than that of Java and other common stacks. I'm very excited about the future, as C# is a much better language than Java, and Microsoft is at least saying all the right things lately about wanting to see more innovation from the community and less blind reliance on Microsoft. It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft can attract enough newcomers like me to offset the alienated longstanding crowd.

by jeswin 11y ago

StevePerkins 11y ago

> Especially among MS developers, there are many people who > don't read read HN or any other tech industry site. They > rely or depend on MS to provide them with career advancing > technical advice, but for the last eight years they have been > consistently let down. Microsoft's preferred flavor changes > every two years... Ahh... thanks, this makes sense. Things are somewhat similar on the Java side with Oracle, but not quite. In my opinion, the biggest contributing factor to the strength of Java's ecosystem is that the community has a healthy level of distrust toward Oracle. Oracle promotes new things all the time. Sometimes they catch on and get widely adopted. Sometimes the community by and large completely ignores them, and uses another third-party framework instead (e.g. Spring). Oracle is begrudgingly respected, but I wouldn't say that their word rises to the level of "default" in the Java community. Microsoft guys seem to have much tighter bond with the mothership, and put a great deal more trust in Redmond's agenda. They are much less likely to explore alternatives that come from outside of Microsoft (e.g. I see a lot small microservices for which Nancy makes a lot of sense, but which are still built on ASP.NET "just because"). This causes the wider ecosystem of alternatives to be much weaker than that of Java and other common stacks. I'm very excited about the future, as C# is a much better language than Java, and Microsoft is at least saying all the right things lately about wanting to see more innovation from the community and less blind reliance on Microsoft. It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft can attract enough newcomers like me to offset the alienated longstanding crowd.