Visual Studio kerfuffle: Is Microsoft suicidal or out of good options?

http://easyonme.com/blog/easyonme/call-in-the-game-theorists-is-microsoft-suicidal-or-simply-without-good-choices/

by tomcam • 14 years ago

9 13 14 years ago

leadola• 14 years ago

Suicidal maybe? It's asinine.

Increasingly, Microsoft and Apple are seeing developers as the enemy. Sure, on the one hand they need the outward appearance of a rich software ecosystem, but on the other they feel the need to control it ever more tightly. OS X won't even run non-Apple-approved software in the future and Windows will quickly follow suit.

This is all because both companies have realized something we developers haven't grasped yet: they will be making their money as gate keepers, not as innovators. In fact, innovation is frowned upon - nothing illustrates this better than the OS X Sandbox mechanism and the politics of the App Store. Microsoft, already grappling with the looming specter of irrelevance, will have to copy this. It seems that for OS vendors in this decade it's either "become an autocratic despot or die".

If this keeps up, computers will become seriously limited devices in the near future.

unimpressive2• 14 years ago

>If this keeps up, computers will become seriously limited devices in the near future.

I think the HN crowd has seen this coming a million miles away.

Now, what can we do about it?

cico713• 14 years ago

Probably nothing.

I strongly believe that Microsoft was already trying to become a gatekeeper a decade ago setting the stage with Hailstorm. Only the fear for anti-trust authorities blocked them IMO.

Now Apple cleared the way and Microsoft already has a much stronger infrastructure in place to become a gatekeeper. I'm pretty sure they will fail at becoming THE gatekeeper, but I think they will still become A pretty large gatekeeper.

People should have voted with their wallet back when the walled garden xbox and iphone were released. But we are talking about the huge mass of consumers that simply don't give a damn.

Consumers swallow pretty much everything, just think about DRM and e-books. We were lucky enough that the industry got caught pants down by Apple with music but they learnt immediately from that.

Besides, both Microsoft and Apple were smart enough to let people think that, after all devices, can't really be locked down. The first xbox was a joke with a very convenient place to insert mod chips and the iphone was immediately jail-broken. But we all know this can be fixed by their side.

Unless things changed, the xbox 360 has very limited hacks to run game backups, but can't run unsigned code (it certainly can't run XBMC which was the reason why I bought the original version).

Apple TV, if rumors materialize in something real, will be the next big appliance following this path. Then, when times will be mature, jail-breaking (hacks in general) will magically become useless and that's it.

Also: Apple has been a little bit more evil by tricking a whole generation of developers (and developers wannabee) that they can make the ultimate app and become uber-rich while we know from numbers that for the vast majority of them income is ridiculous.

As I said, I'm not sure something can be done by us. Of course states should be there to prevent exactly this kind of behaviors but we all know how it works with politics and lobbies.

tzs• 14 years ago

I'm confused, as I have not kept up with Windows development.

The original article states that VS 11 will require the professional version to build other than Metro applications. The free version will only build Metro applications.

However, VS 2010 free edition can be used, as the article notes. I don't see any confirmation that Microsoft is going to stop distribution of VS 2010 free edition.

Is it really a problem to use VS 2010 if you want to do non-Metro development?

johncoltrane• 14 years ago

I've only briefly used VS but I'd say that the risk for VS10 users could be that MS stops supporting it and that future versions of the Metro SDK or whatever may not work at all in VS10.

spobo• 14 years ago

This is bad news for windows 8 PC users. Expect a flood of metro apps that are touch friendly that you'll have to use with your regular ol' keyboard and mouse. Annoying!

spiredigital• 14 years ago

So has Microsoft been giving away their Visual Studio IDE for a while? I haven't used it in years, but back when I did it was a paid product...

rlbmore• 14 years ago

Apple charted the right course. Make development tools free or close to it and make it hard for developers to do the wrong thing.

Visual Studio kerfuffle: Is Microsoft suicidal or out of good options?

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