While I was reviewing the site a blog by the publisher, John L. Hawkins, caught my eye. It was titled, "How I Escaped From Windows Vista" and it expressed his frustration and disappointment with Vista and recounted his fall back to XP. It was a good read. The few comments expressed quite similar complaints, so I just had to chime in myself.
My comment can be found at the blog, but I thought I would fill in a couple of gaps. The Advisor Media's tech conferences I was involved with were largely Microsoft affairs, though once I spoke at an interoperation conference in Maui's Ritz Carleton (very, very nice). While I certainly did a lot of Microsoft stuff at the conferences, I also specialized in Oracle and did a day long project management post conference session.
As I mention in my comment to John's post, I last spoke for Advisor Media in Vegas in '05. I had a talk on Oracle, gSOAP and I did my post conference project management session. I showed up with my PowerBook and did my thing. When I needed Windows, I ran it under Virtual PC. I was a misfit for sure and some of my old conference acquaintances did not know what to make of me. How had I gone so wrong? I had some explaining to do, but I think I was seen more as a misguided curiosity than anything else. Besides, the talks were good and showing gSOAP's performance advantage over .NET SOAP services was a hit.
Trouble loomed at the end of the conference when the speakers and representatives from Microsoft formed an expert panel to take questions from the attendees. There were a lot of questions about Share Point, which was pretty new then, and Longhorn, which was delayed again. I really couldn't speak to either of these things. I had never used Share Point, still haven't and I think it would have been pointless, and bad form, to bring up Unix/Linux/OS X in response to a Windows operating system question. After all, these folks are probably pretty much stuck with the OS whether they like it or not. So I had very little to say.
Then an attendee asked the Microsoft representatives about the state of Access' Jet engine which hadn't been updated in years. Now, regardless of what you think about Access, or what I used to think about it, Access was very important to a lot of people. Rightly or wrongly, it put food on the table for a lot of software folks, myself included, and they were genuinely concerned by Microsoft's neglect of this product.
I don't recall exactly what the Microsoft reps said about updates, but I remember that the answer ticked me off because it wasn't really an answer and I felt I had to address this attendee's question about getting his hands on an adequate database. Panelists share a microphone and pass it around, so I called down for it. I got a couple of looks from the other panelists who thought the crazy uncle was about to recite his medical history over Thanksgiving dinner, maybe it was my imagination.
I said quite simply that there was no reason to wait for Microsoft to take care of a product that is obviously so important to their work, but was essentially a commodity, there were options. I mentioned Postgresql and MySQL and how they were more than adequate and were always being updated. Anyone who had worked with databases would have no problem working with these and they would be glad they did. I think I briefly related some of my own experiences. Essentially, I said that Microsoft had turned its back on developers and they should return the favor if they weren't happy.
The other panelists were not happy about what I had to say and they were quick to get the microphone away from me if I recall correctly. Since I was up on the stage I couldn't get a real read on the audience's reaction, so my thanks go to John for letting me know that it wasn't well received. I didn't say this to piss people off, I just felt that they deserved a better answer than the one given to them by Microsoft.
It was remarkable to me that things had come to this. This was around the time when a sweaty, chair chucking Steve Balmer stormed across a stage shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers!" At the time we were supposed to believe that he was telling developers how important they were to Microsoft, but I think he was aiming those chairs at them to shut them up for asking for better tools. To Microsoft, developers exist to sell licenses.
When they take away your cheap, though effective, tools like Access or start charging for Visual Studio, when they leave the operating system bereft of compilers, languages, interpreters, debuggers, build tools, version control or file management tools so that even the simplest things require the purchase of new software or enormous effort on your part, and when the hardware requirements continue to outpace the useful life of a computer then it should be plain for all to see that they don't give a shit about developers unless you're selling licenses and feeding beast.
If Microsoft really cared about its developers in the trenches, you'd be able to start programming real software as soon as the OS booted for the first time. A technology ecosystem that gives good tools to developers is the technology ecosystem that will be advanced by those developers. New and imaginative software will be created there. Think about that for a moment. When you've got a fresh install of any version of Windows, what can you do with it? Nothing. There's no shell, Perl, Python, C++ compiler, web server, web languages or application server. There's no way to simply manage directories full of *.bas or *.sql files. You can't diagram anything, you can't really edit anything but the crudest documents in the crudest way.
The dirth of tools for developers is probably the main reason that advances in computing have never occurred on Windows and likely never will.
On the other hand, the open source environment is built by and for developers. That's why all the things I mentioned above are available to you when you boot into a clean install, you may only need to issue a simple one line command to obtain them. The availability of these tools is the reason why open source operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD and OS X have eclipsed Windows in performance, features and security for several years. All the interesting work is being done there and has been for a very long time. There have been no significant developments coming out of Windows. Multi-user systems? Unix. Protected memory? Unix. True multiprocessing? Unix. Hardware abstraction? Virtualization? Unix. Application servers? Unix. World Wide Web? NeXT, Web Servers? Unix. Security? Started on and is still strongest in Unix. Film production? OS X. User interface advances? OS X and KDE. File management systems? Solaris and Linux. Garbage collection and managed code? Solaris. I could go on, but you get the idea.
I'd like to think that I spoke truth to power, but I didn't really. I certainly spoke the truth, but Microsoft really isn't powerful anymore. No one is really afraid of them. And those to whom software is important don't really think of Microsoft very often. Between the competition from Googel, Apple, Linux, sanctions from the EU, dismissal from standards bodies and their own incompetence they really don't matter very much at all. When I read that John has left everything behind except for Widows itself then I know something has changed - for the better.
Microsoft is like that drunken sorority sister who's had too much to drink and doesn't realize the party is over. She spent the evening dissing everyone, but now she's shouting for affection and looks as though she's about to pee on the rug. The only difference is that the girl is dressed and Microsoft has no clothes.
If Microsoft really cared about its developers in the trenches, you'd be able to start programming real software as soon as the OS booted for the first time. A technology ecosystem that gives good tools to developers is the technology ecosystem that will be advanced by those developers. New and imaginative software will be created there. Think about that for a moment. When you've got a fresh install of any version of Windows, what can you do with it? Nothing. There's no shell, Perl, Python, C++ compiler, web server, web languages or application server. There's no way to simply manage directories full of *.bas or *.sql files. You can't diagram anything, you can't really edit anything but the crudest documents in the crudest way.
The dirth of tools for developers is probably the main reason that advances in computing have never occurred on Windows and likely never will.
On the other hand, the open source environment is built by and for developers. That's why all the things I mentioned above are available to you when you boot into a clean install, you may only need to issue a simple one line command to obtain them. The availability of these tools is the reason why open source operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD and OS X have eclipsed Windows in performance, features and security for several years. All the interesting work is being done there and has been for a very long time. There have been no significant developments coming out of Windows. Multi-user systems? Unix. Protected memory? Unix. True multiprocessing? Unix. Hardware abstraction? Virtualization? Unix. Application servers? Unix. World Wide Web? NeXT, Web Servers? Unix. Security? Started on and is still strongest in Unix. Film production? OS X. User interface advances? OS X and KDE. File management systems? Solaris and Linux. Garbage collection and managed code? Solaris. I could go on, but you get the idea.
I'd like to think that I spoke truth to power, but I didn't really. I certainly spoke the truth, but Microsoft really isn't powerful anymore. No one is really afraid of them. And those to whom software is important don't really think of Microsoft very often. Between the competition from Googel, Apple, Linux, sanctions from the EU, dismissal from standards bodies and their own incompetence they really don't matter very much at all. When I read that John has left everything behind except for Widows itself then I know something has changed - for the better.
Microsoft is like that drunken sorority sister who's had too much to drink and doesn't realize the party is over. She spent the evening dissing everyone, but now she's shouting for affection and looks as though she's about to pee on the rug. The only difference is that the girl is dressed and Microsoft has no clothes.
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