Herfried K. Wagner said:
Doug,
Is that really what /Microsoft/ wants?
You'd think not. By allowing the .Net framework to run anywhere, they make
the OS a commodity. Then, nobody will have to run a Microsoft OS to run a
..Net application. Right?
But, don't think this will happen. Microsoft is too smart for that. They
build in classes that take advantage of the Microsoft OS Flavor of the Month
and, when you use these classes to make your programming easier, you are
tied to the Microsoft OS with NO PORTABILITY to other OSs - not even to
other Microsoft OSs.
Pity they weren't as smart about the whole software-as-a-service model
(which is the real reason the whole .Net fiasco exists in the first place).
If you make applications run on servers and spit out HTML, you will make the
desktop a commodity - and BAM there goes the Microsoft cash cow that has
made them the giant monopoly that they are!
But, let's take a closer look.... At first, the .Net framework was made to
put out HTML from ASP servers. Brilliant really.... They got a lot of
people to buy into the whole idea that Microsoft was playing nice and would
let you create web-based apps that would run in any HTML compliant browser.
Now, that they've got their hooks in you, they pull the rug out from under
you by announcing Avalon as the next (and only) gui engine in the .Net
framework. Not a problem until you realize that Avalon will only be
available on Longhorn systems. NO BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY AT ALL. NO
BROWSER COMPATIBILITY. And, they've neatly sewn up the world into another
Microsoft only technology.
This time, though, they have done what nobody thought they could pull off.
They have taken over the internet. They have made it their own, and it's
users their slaves to do with as they please.
Brilliant plan! I'm happy for them.....really. I'm just really, really sad
for us.
From
www.joelonsoftware.com...
"But here's the thing. If you have a million line code base that's mission
critical, as many companies do, and VB suddenly changes, as it did, you have
a choice: keep using VB 6 or spend a lot of time (=money) upgrading to
VB.NET. If you keep using VB 6, eventually new things will come out that
will not be supported from VB 6, and you'll be stuck using the yucky old VB
6 IDE until the end of time. Already most of the big component vendors are
doing all the new components as .NET components, not OCXes.
If you spend the money to upgrade to VB.NET, well, you just spent a lot of
money to stand still. And companies don't like to spend a lot of money to
stand still, so while you're spending the money, it probably makes sense to
consider the alternatives that you can port to that won't put you at the
mercy of a single vendor and won't be as likely to change arbitrarily in the
future. So as soon as people with large code bases start hearing that
they're going to have to work to port their apps from VB to VB.NET with
WinForms, and then they start hearing that WinForms isn't really the future,
the future is really this Avalon thing nobody has yet, they start wondering
whether it isn't time to find another development platform."
One more quote from Joel......"
Microsoft Lost the Backwards Compatibility Religion
Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle.
The first big win was making Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with
VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you
bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you
had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the
first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using
the previous version of a product.
And the sky didn't seem to fall, not inside Microsoft. VB6 developers were
up in arms, but they were disappearing anyway, because most of them were
corporate developers who were migrating to web development anyway. The real
long term damage was hidden.
With this major victory under their belts, the MSDN Magazine Camp took over.
Suddenly it was OK to change things. IIS 6.0 came out with a different
threading model that broke some old applications. I was shocked to discover
that our customers with Windows Server 2003 were having trouble running
FogBugz. Then .NET 1.1 was not perfectly backwards compatible with 1.0. And
now that the cat was out of the bag, the OS team got into the spirit and
decided that instead of adding features to the Windows API, they were going
to completely replace it. Instead of Win32, we are told, we should now start
getting ready for WinFX: the next generation Windows API. All different.
Based on .NET with managed code. XAML. Avalon. Yes, vastly superior to
Win32, I admit it. But not an upgrade: a break with the past.
Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of
Windows development, have defected from the Microsoft platform en-masse and
are now developing for the web. Paul Graham, who created Yahoo! Stores in
the early days of the dotcom boom, summarized it eloquently: "There is all
the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because
writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write
desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and
working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that
takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for
Microsoft."
Microsoft got big enough, with too many developers, and they were too
addicted to upgrade revenues, so they suddenly decided that reinventing
everything was not too big a project. Heck, we can do it twice. The old
Microsoft, the Microsoft of Raymond Chen, might have implemented things like
Avalon, the new graphics system, as a series of DLLs that can run on any
version of Windows and which could be bundled with applications that need
them. There's no technical reason not to do this. But Microsoft needs to
give you a reason to buy Longhorn, and what they're trying to pull off is a
sea change, similar to the sea change that occurred when Windows replaced
DOS. The trouble is that Longhorn is not a very big advance over Windows XP;
not nearly as big as Windows was over DOS. It probably won't be compelling
enough to get people to buy all new computers and applications like they did
for Windows. Well, maybe it will, Microsoft certainly needs it to be, but
what I've seen so far is not very convincing. A lot of the bets Microsoft
made are the wrong ones. For example, WinFS, advertised as a way to make
searching work by making the file system be a relational database, ignores
the fact that the real way to make searching work is by making searching
work. Don't make me type metadata for all my files that I can search using a
query language. Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive,
quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other
technologies that were boring in 1973."
Microsoft does not have the best interest of the customers in mind. Not
that this is a bad thing....for a corporation, it's a good thing.
Corporations are supposed to have their investor's best interests at heart.
But, doesn't putting the customer's goals and ambitions first actually
accomplish the goal of taking care of the investors? In my experience,
taking care of the customer is the ONLY way to take care of the investors.
Jim Hubbard
Come on in,