

Visual Studio kerfuffle: Is Microsoft suicidal or out of good options? - tomcam
http://easyonme.com/blog/easyonme/call-in-the-game-theorists-is-microsoft-suicidal-or-simply-without-good-choices/

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VanillaCoder
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.

~~~
unimpressive
>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?

~~~
cico71
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.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"People should have voted with their wallet back when the walled garden xbox
and iphone were released."

With very few exceptions, phones and video game consoles have always been
"walled gardens".

~~~
unimpressive
>With very few exceptions, phones and video game consoles have always been
"walled gardens".

True. The problem comes when people try to use them as general computing
devices. Or even, when manufacturers treat general computing devices like
phones and consoles.

~~~
cico71
I'm not sure what you mean here. Consoles and smartphones are general
computing devices and are clearly marketed as such. Consoles are not only used
for games/audio/video and smartphones are definitely not used for phone calls.

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tzs
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
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.

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spobo
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!

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spiredigital
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...

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

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leadola
Suicidal maybe? It's asinine.

