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As a recreational MS developer for over 20 years, I have always found MS incredibly helpful to developers. Almost all their development systems/environments are free. If you ask questions in their blogs and newsgroups, you will usually get a good answer.
As a recreational and semi-professional Android programmer, Android sucks as an development ecosystem and environment, and Google doesn't subsidise staff to assist developers (white papers, code samples, tutorials, newsgroups) the same way as MS has for its products. The Java/Eclipse/Android development environment is far clunkier and more primitive than C#/Visual Studio/Windows.
In a typical Windows app, you might spend 20% of your time fiddling around laying out your UI. On a phone, where it is one different window size for everybody, it can take 50% of your time. Fancy spending half your time looking at how your app looks on 20 different screen sizes and resolutions? Welcome to Android.
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Microsoft is transitioning from software to devices and services. This move is not easy. Success and failure are all possible. Apple in fact experienced a transition from computer to devices and services. It has been very successful.
TOMZ_KV
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When I ran my own company I would have loved to have "failed" as bad as Microsoft.
As for Enterprise, if you go Microsoft, you need to go all in and then it can be extremely powerful.
I would say, though, that Great Plains is a real turkey. Don't know if they fixed it with Microsoft Dynamics GP.
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The journalists write stuff that sells, not stuff that makes sense. Despite many mistakes (and every large tech corporation has tons of mistakes), Microsoft still makes billions in profit each year.
It's also none of our business who the new Microsoft CEO will be. There are tons of tech CEOs in the industry whose name I will never know nor care about, and whether or not they do a great job or a terrible job doesn't affect me much. Just because a mob of journalists start giving themselves carpal tunnel by obsessing over one or two CEO's doesn't change things.
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You are definitely right, journalists get paid for clicks + views, not intelligence. That said, you deserve rebuke and intellectual dis-assembly when you pass off specious arguments, illogical assumptions and sheer idiocy as rigorous analysis. And what good is a Soapbox, if not a place to express to anyone but your target audience, your displeasure at them or their actions? 
Regarding your views regarding CEOs, I DO think it is a relevant thing to many in IT because skills and talent are often specific to given platforms. Those responsible for said platforms are the ones who will either make said skills/talents worth developing and having, or make them utterly worthless. For me, it's several years of experience developing on the Microsoft stack, and if they run that into the ground, I could end up in the developer demographic who's top skills are now "legacy". It works for some, but I don't know many that thrive on or enjoy classic ASP coding. Despite also developing skills on other platforms with other frameworks, etc., you're still behind the guys in the job market who started on the "winning" stack and now have that much more experience in it than you do. So I think the CEOs DO make a big difference and we should care, at least when we use/rely on/depend on/are skilled on what they're shipping.
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Yes, if a new Microsoft CEO screws up so bad that they run the development tools division to the ground, then I would care a lot. I can work with other languages and technologies, but my .NET skills are what I have the most experience in and what employers care about the most.
With that being said, it would take years of horrible decisions (bordering upon malicious sabotage) to kill their development tools division, and I'd have plenty of forewarning if it was happening.
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jesarg wrote: it would take years of horrible decisions (bordering upon malicious sabotage) to
kill their development tools division, and I'd have plenty of forewarning if it
was happening
There's a positive feedback loop involved where companies start hiring for the non-MS-dependent technologies, and developers start to retool for them. MS has some control over the ramp-up of that feedback loop, and their recent decisions that piss off developers, and the press they're getting over it, is only accelerating the ramp-up.
When the loop gets going in earnest, MS technologies will become like Cobol, possible to stay employed with them as your exclusive skill set, but a shrinking pool of jobs for you to choose from.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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craigsaboe wrote: Am I the only one who keeps seeing these ridiculous articles about Microsoft
dying,
I see all sorts of ridiculous predictions about the future about all sort of things.
The only difference between the same things that occurred 30 years ago is that the internet makes it possible for many more people to spout these predictions.
The one thing that one can be sure about people that make predictions in writing is that if they are not super rich then one can ignore what they say. After all if they were able to make predictions with even a slight bit of an edge then they could be making money in some sort of investment strategy (versus writing which almost always pays almost nothing.)
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Very true... and it makes it possible for people, e.g. me, to be subjected to many more of them.
The problem is when asinine claims become some sort of "inherent truth" or "common knowledge", and anyone trying to sound intelligent spouts off the same thing whenever Apple, Android or Microsoft come up. Some people don't care, some pity the poor idiot, and some people like me react as if we just saw the ratings for "Duck Dynasty".
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 I agree with the (implicit) thesis in your post: MS is not dying. I do think it, like every other major player, is constantly changing and transforming: we, in the peanut-gallery, see the internal, psychodramatic, events, like Sinofsky's abrupt technocide, and Ballmer's death-by-365-cut's slower one, leap-out at us, as both fiction-myth, and reality: seismographs don't register the slow creep of tectonic plates.
And, I share your conviction that a solid future for the enterprise side of MS, along with MS Office, and SharePoint, .NET, SQL, etc. ... in some form ... is a good bet. I also think the "cluster" of MS stuff related to gaming including XBox, Kinect (?), DirectX, etc., kind of has a "life of its own." And, the whole Office suite, in my mind, has a strong base that spans enterprise, and consumer, space.
The interesting question, to me, is: to what extent can MS, as a whole, as it kind-of is, now, survive without a kind of marketplace synergy between consumer-side status, and enterprise-side status ?
I believe I am an active consumer of "news," and I believe to the extent I consciously choose "who" I attend to, I'm not in a passive role, as the use of the word "subjected" in one of the replies on this thread, implies.
But, in the arena of the workplace, you may, indeed, be "subjected" to the decisions of others that influence what type of hardware, OS, applications, development stack, etc., you must use. I'm out of that loop, permanently.
And, depending on the future of the hardware and software tools you use today ... which may be directly related to you and your family's financial future ... I do understand the vital importance of keeping "up to date."
I went through a real struggle about whether to switch my focus from WinForms to WPF a few years ago. The powerful vector-based graphics engine, and great binding facilities in WPF were like siren-songs calling to me, but my experience in trying development was a nest of miseries, and having to touch XAML seemed to me like reverting to making fire with sparks from flints. So, today, I'm glad I didn't switch to WPF, because its future still seems uncertain to me (I'm still waiting for the news that Pete O'Hanlon mentioned was going to break some months ago, about WPF's future). Of course, my personal decision about which MS development tool to use is about as important as a gnat on an elephant in terms of MS's future .
I imagine a herd of elephants stampeding in a confined space, while outside their enclosure professional touts sell predictions on which elephants will survive, and those predictions are then debated, ad nauseam, by a mob of technicians of elephant warfare, surrounded by a vast swarm of "the rest of us," as Steve Jobs liked to use that phrase.
The interesting thing, though, is the secret underground cables connected to everyone watching, and the elephants.
To the extent the swarm comes to believe in certain elephants increased odds of survival, and, to the extent the technicians then are swayed by the collective sentiments of the swarm: the elephants are fed more energy through the secret cables.
But ... there's a missing party at the stampede: imagine a certain rarefied class of people who sit in privileged high-platforms, far above the technicians, and the swarm. Some of them may have a background as technicians, many may not. This managerial class operates with a logic of its own, and are at the mercy of unseen forces emanating from "shareholders." And, these folks are equipped with high-powered elephant rifles that can easily kill the stampeding beast of their choice.
What happens if the managerial class is more influenced by the swarm than the technicians, or, at random, make their own choices ?
Further complicating the circus that surrounds the stampede, is the fact that paid shills working for individual elephants are moving through the crowds planting false rumors, handing out candy to the swarm, and trying hard to seduce the technicians, and continually delivering gifts, bribes, and various forms of seduction to the high-and-mighty up on the raised-platforms. And another type of shill, unseen in the crowd, is operating off the books trying to hack the software and hardware that computes and distributes the stream-of-beliefs harvested from all the groups outside the stampede, to tap into the hidden cables that connect to the elephants, and plant false signals, and warp existing signals.
What to do ? Buy some pop-corn, and watch ?
What to buy ?
bill
Google CEO, Erich Schmidt: "I keep asking for a product called Serendipity. This product would have access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user's tastes, friends and predilections." 2004, USA Today interview
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It does make me wonder what goes through the (presumably vacant) heads of people who loudly announce "Microsoft's profits are down to umpty-tum billions, this year, so they must be on the verge of bankruptcy!"
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Its headline grabbing no more.
I read an 8.1 review today (from the Code Project newsletter) where the reviewer was basically just trying to get readers, while imposing an unbelievably biased opinion.
I live in the hopes that one day reviewers/bloggers and general tech writers will stop pandering to to the lowest common denominator.
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I'm skipping the InfoWorld links in the newsletter, no value added.
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Agreed, it's like MS got obsessed with competing with Apple & Google, totally losing sight of what they HAVE in-hand.
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I disagree, see the BYOD movement, Apple gained foothood in the enterprise world through privately owned iThings.
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Yet, Microsoft's market share in Desktop/Laptop computing and enterprise servers are still almost at "monopoly levels".
And a significant portion of enterprise-level iOS applications connect to Microsoft servers. (Ours does)
Still they try so hard to be "trendy" that they are totally ignoring the needs of their massive desktop/laptop user base.
All I'm saying is that they should be focusing on playing on their strengths.
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Apple has nowhere to move UP from there though, in an enterprise setting... your execs can walk around on iCrap all day long, but even they (hopefully) aren't pushing to put Apple in your datacenter. Apple isn't making that push itself! Give them credit, they even decided to cut the xServe line + related, despite the fact there were some devoted fans out there, and focus solely on the consumer side.
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 No, I think they called out for pizza and ordered the PayPerView event.
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May be you didn't mention, but MS is dead at least 10 years. That your "enterprise" is just another market. But playing in enterprise doesn't mean you're invulnerable! Look at SUN - biggest guys after IBM, they f** up a whole business, disgracefully selling it to... who? Oracle! Ridiculous DBMS "self-world" manufacturer, unrecognizable until last 15 years. Now we see TWO anchors on the raft - java and oracle, both keeping Oracle behind.
Desktop was the biggest MS business (may be not by money, but STABILITY due to the mass of customers). Now desktop is stuck with the cloud pig and tablet hype. In 5 years all this cr@p will fly away, leaving MS with sh*ty Windows 8-9-10 and ridiculous Surface. RIP...
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Who knows ... but I do like the lawn comment 
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Is 31 too young to start on my "damn kids" rants?
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31 is plenty young for anything. Oh, wait, is that 0x31?
(I give: wtf is "0!0110!"?
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"0!0110!"... In my hysteria, I may have lapsed into binary for a moment there.
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craigsaboe wrote: Am I the only one who keeps seeing these ridiculous articles about Microsoft dying, and reading only blindered screeds about how Microsoft's CONSUMER efforts are an utter failure, and wanting to scream, "LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE MARKET, YOU MORONS!!!"?
They may not be messing up in the Enterprise market, but I can tell you - as an independent developer they're sure making it easy for me to lock down my tool set and not spend any more money on their stuff. The 2008 level products are about as far as I need go at this point. I develop for the desktop and web and nothing they're showing lately compels me to spend one red cent on upgrading.
-cb
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