

Mono: A cure for Microsoft monotheism - jstedfast
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/application-development/2011/08/11/mono-a-cure-for-microsoft-monotheism-40093649/

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vectorpush
Can someone explain to me why Microsoft doesn't embrace Mono (or at least its
ideal) outright? It seems to me like a stable and well supported multiplatform
C# could establish a long lasting .NET hegemony across the industry. Appears
to be a no-brainer.

~~~
TomOfTTB
One of my favorite Microsoft stories is of Windows for Pen Computing. A
company named GO had brought out a product based on Pen interfaces (this was
around the time of Windows 3.1). Microsoft feared they'd lose their monopoly
so they rushed out Windows for Pen Computing 1.0. It stunk and so it failed
pretty quickly.

In the book Barbarians at the Gate one of the co-creators of "Pen Windows"
tells the story of that failure and what he told his fellow co-creator. Here's
a quote from the book...

[Begin Quote]

"Greg, Look. This wasn't a thing about making money. This was all about 'Block
that Kick.' We were on the special team. We were preventing GO from running
away with the market. That was our job.

Look, your background is in applications, you have to ship the application. My
job is in systems. Systems, for much longer on, has been completely 'Don't let
anybody else steal DOS from us.' That's all we're doing. We weren't trying to
sell software, we were trying to prevent other people from selling software.

From my view, Pen Windows was a winner. We shut down GO. They spent $75
million pumping up this market, we spent $4 million shooting them down.
They're toast!"

[End Quote]

Sorry for the long winded post but I wanted to point out how old this strategy
is. .Net wasn't a product to make money it was a product to block Java. By
making it the default Windows development environment they were able to do so
without flushing money down the toilet (as was done in the example above)

So, as Miguel De Icaza says in the piece, Microsoft really doesn't love .Net
the way Xamarin does. They still want people developing for Windows alone.
Their developers just happened to create a great tool while management was
paying lipservice to cross platform development.

~~~
innes
I don't think an old anecdote about GO/WfP sheds much light on the birth of
.NET.

Microsoft wanted the goodness of a managed platform, while having the freedom
to evolve it and generally make it a) not suck as much as Java, and
specifically b) be better at interoperating with existing (Windows) software.
.NET clearly wasn't rushed out the door as a panic response to Java. .NET
arrived years after Java & J++. MS just realised that managed was the way to
go for a lot of development activities.

Java was and still is available for desktop programming, but by now C# has
clearly evolved to be a better language, and .NET a better platform for
developing (Windows) desktop apps.

~~~
saurik
The situation with Java is even stronger than "MS just realized": MS was
/forced/. Back then, MS thought Java was great, but looked at it as a language
and execution engine as opposed to a dream about "write once, run everywhere",
and so released J++, allowing developers of Java applications to use a
replacement toolkit that bound to native Win32 widgets. This caused them to
get sued, and the result of the case was that they lost their license to Java.
J++ 1.1 seriously came with a dialog when you ran it apologizing that they
were legally required to stop distributing the application, and that you
should look into alternatives. Thus, .NET was born.

~~~
innes
I don't see how your elaboration on the history contradicts anything I said.
This is all common knowledge. Totally understandable that Sun tried to lock MS
out of tailoring their platform to Windows, and totally understandable that MS
would want a good managed platform, instead of going with a flawed compromise
system they didn't control.

~~~
saurik
I do not feel like the goal of my comment was to contradict what you said,
only to clarify and strengthen it: the people you are arguing against believe
that Microsoft built .NET to damage Java, and demonstrating that not only did
they choose it because it was "the way to go" but that they were actually
/forced/ to do so, is a much stronger way to undermine that belief.

~~~
innes
Yep, to be honest I think we're agreeing.

~~~
saurik
(I have been trying to agree the whole time, such as to "clarify and
strengthen" your statement...)

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scottshea
I think once the IDE catches up to the level of Visual Studio or the Java
stalwarts Eclipse/IntelliJ it will really take off. I usually do my stuff
first in VS then bring it up in Monodevelop to finish it off and make sure I
am mono safe.

~~~
aninteger
The Visual Studio IDE has gotten much much worse.

I started with Visual Studio 6 (mostly using Visual C++, and VB6) and it was a
speedy. Visual Studio 2003 was a little slower but not bad, 2005-2008 about
the same. It was all bearable and acceptable.

Now Visual Studio 2010 is painful and awful. I've got a Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of
RAM and the interface is slow, you can see the GUI repaint sometimes. Clicking
on the interface causes frequent pauses that take close to 1 second to
respond.

~~~
nxn
Opposite experience for me. 2005 and 2008 were incredibly slow, painful, and
prone to locking up or flat out crashing. I don't think I've had one lock up
or crash since I switched over to 2010 about 4 or 5 months ago. Also, I can
have multiple instances of it open now without my whole computer gasping for
RAM. In fact, when I launch a second instance it comes up in a split second,
making me feel like the core parts are sharing common resources.

~~~
vyrotek
I have to agree with this. VS 2010 is by far the best so far on many different
levels as you've already pointed out.

