Microsoft has definitely earned their hatred in both the consumer and development communities. They rode their monopoly as far as they could, and they are going to pay for it very dearly. Literally noone I have met in the past 10 years is developing Windows software anymore. Sure, some people use .Net to develop web applications, but it sure seems that nobody develops Windows-only software. So Microsoft, has already lost, and they are on borrowed time. Mobile and Web won, they lost, and it's only a matter of time before this dinosaur finally goes away, like everyone wants them to.
That sounds like a function of the people you've met tbh. Looking at job postings around these parts, the most widespread platform remains .NET.
Whilst the non-existent adoption amongst startups doesn't necessarily bode well for MSFT's future, there is still a huge amount of .NET development going on worldwide.
I like to think that my job of writing software with .NET to control deep sea robots is interesting. How many ruby/python developers could you say the same thing about though? I mean, most web apps are simple CRUD things, which are not interesting or cutting edge. That's an invariant across all programmers.
No kidding. I mean, I don't work on deep sea robots, but I really dig making games with .NET and find it awfully interesting.
If you read HN enough, you'll find that rbanffy's posts generally seem to come from a worldview where credit due to Microsoft, or even to those who use Microsoft products, is close to untenable. In other fora I've seen similar people referred to as ABMers - Anything But Microsoft. I mean, I'm pretty much a Linux/Unix guy (Macs and Linux alike), but I use .NET because it's the most portable option worth working with for my stuff. It's good for that. Sometimes even--gasp--Microsoft comes up with something worthwhile, and outside of the universes perpetuated by folks like rbanffy, many Microsoft products are even liked.
The thing about adoption in start ups is that Visual Studio 2010 Pro is so expensive. If Microsoft really wants to stay relevant they have to release Pro for free. They have to compete on price with the Eclipse or VIM/command line world. Until then, they will slowly die off. (The express versions are a joke, don't even get me started).
You only pay for licenses over 4 OS and 2 SQL Server (or outright new ones) after graduating BizSpark. 2 SQL Servers (OS licenses are chump change by comparison) go a loooong way* too, as you're presumably scaling up rather than out.
Through the grapevine I hear the "review" process (for more free licenses at graduation) is extraordinarily accommodating, though I'd guess if you're spinning up a box per customer or something insane you'd get denied.
Lots of people get this wrong, I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't carved this correction into a mountain somewhere...
May i ask what's a joke about VS Express? IMO they are very much capable. At least for windows forms and web-applications, never tried the c++ version. In fact it beats any other IDE i've tried anyway.
Only thing i really miss from pro is plugins, version control-integration and code contracts, the last being a thing that probably justifies a price tag anyway.
You can't unit test with them out of the box. To get unit test integration is a rather large effort. If you want to carve a project into a web layer and into the business assembly, you have to jump between editors (web and C#). These two make the tools rather worthless for anything complex and web based.
Now their WinForms ability might be great, but there are few start ups out there at are actually doing anything with desktop development.
I don't want Microsoft to go away: what they are doing with Asp.net MVC is absolutely amazing and is catching up with the Ruby on Rails framework.
Their focus has to switch from software to web and mobile, like everybody else (Apple for example), and I think they are doing it well, late, but well.
> Microsoft has definitely earned their hatred in both the consumer and development communities.
Mostly from clueless people. Link baiters. And fools who get off on blaming and attacking others (it's a group/mob thing).
The other 5%-10% is valid criticism.
> Literally noone I have met in the past 10 years is developing Windows software anymore.
You're living in your own cornered off world.
Microsoft has 90% of the desktop market, rave reviews of their new mobile platform, 60 billion in the bank, absolutely fantastic developer tools that are not matched by anything else, full integration in the stack.
> absolutely fantastic developer tools that are not matched by anything else
I bought Windows 2000 and MSVC 2003 with the first money I ever made through terrible teenager webdev. I was a huge VS fan until I first touched an iBook G4, and even now, I really wish I found a reason to get a Lumia 800. Windows 7 is georgous for consumers.
Still, after five years on Apple and Unix, I find it absolutely impossible to go back to Windows development. And it's definitely a group thing, none of my friends really knows how to work on Windows either. They appreciate what Microsoft is doing lately, but they shrug and stay in their corner of the computing universe.
I think you underestimate the brain drain (= SANE people) out of the Microsoft camp, especially during the Vista years.
