Google has one advantage, which is that they have a history of being mediocre at the business game but make great products. Microsoft was great in its heyday at the business game but makes mediocre products. This is an era of technology when a lot of the best things really are free (e.g. PostgreSQL, the best relational database, is open source) and Google is way better adapted to that environment.
It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb.
You are not going to convince anyone by making such a generalized comment about a huge company like MS. Moreover, the comment is just false Microsoft makes good products. C#, Windows 7, Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft SQL, etc.. Even Zune was a decent product that merely failed to find an audience Google makes bad products too; they just vanish when Goog starts cleaning up, while Windows Vista lingers in my CD spindle, like a bad code smell in code I wrote 5 years ago.
Active Directory and Outlook are supposed to be awful, but there is still nothing I see that I could replace them with. (I might be wrong, I haven't been looking at it lately)
I don't use Microsoft's products (100% Linux, Android, iOS and OSX), but I'm not blind to their charms.
I like Postgres, but when I see the tools people use with MSQL, not to mention Oracle, I feel jealous.
> Active Directory and Outlook are supposed to be awful, but there is still nothing I see that I could replace them with. (I might be wrong, I haven't been looking at it lately)
Things like Google apps and other web based mail and calendering services. Employees can accessed them from their Android and iOS devices. And IT people don't have to manage it all.
If you do a feature comparison between Gmail and a 1998 version of Outlook Express, OE wins handily. I've never used Outlook, but I imagine since it was developed by the same company with much of the same needs and it's a much bigger application that a Gmail comparison with Outlook would have the same result.
"It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb."
That's a retarded comment.
Don Syme invented F# while at MSR. When he first created it, it was basically OCaml.NET (well, a very small OCaml subset), just as a proof of concept.
Now (last I checked, which was well over a year ago) it's one of four first-class languages with a full team behind it in DevDiv, enjoying equal support in VS.NET and other dev tools as C#, VC++, and VB.NET.
F# isn't under anyone's thumb; it's a Microsoft product through-and-through.
I'm sure this comment will fall on deaf ears, but please, Michael, try to restrict your comments to things you know something about.
It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb.