So you are claiming that the average age of a Microsoft developer (one relying on the Microsoft ecosystem) is edging up rapidly? I would love to see some hard evidence about that, though its definitely plausible.
At least on hackernews, the number of Microsoft developers seems to be quite small (a poll would be interesting though).
Disclaimer: working for Microsoft, speaking for self.
I'm saying that their mindshare has been shrinking constantly since the 90's. They really didn't have any serious competition back then, but they have so much competition now, and they don't stand out anymore.
Yes, their stuff is good and competent, and they're serving the needs of their existing customers and developers, but they don't make kids excited to fire up Visual Studio and crank out a Windows Phone app, the same way they made kids excited to fire up Visual Basic and crank out a windows exe back in the day.
There aren't any success stories around the Microsoft ecosystem anymore. Who makes the quick bucks today? Phone game developers. Facebook game developers. That's what people are chasing, so that's what people are wanting to learn how to do on their own time.
Who wants to learn how to make Windows Phone apps? Or Silverlight apps? Or Windows app store apps RT or whatever the hell they called that mess. Noone, except those already being paid to do it. There are lots of steady jobs there, but exciting ones? No.
Well, kids were excited to fire up Visual Studio and write XNA code for their XBox. They might be excited now to use DirectX in the same way, though the barrier there is much higher. Then what about F#, TypeScript...Kodu and Project Spark?
All of this discussion is anecdotal, we have no hard evidence really what developers under 30 think about Microsoft. And kids are extremely dynamic and fickle anyways, they will quickly adopt any technology that helps them achieve their goals as things fall in and out of favor. So its not like there are hard external barriers to Microsoft winning back young dev mindshare, only internal cultural ones.
We also seem to do much better in Asia (China, where I'm more familiar) in outreach than the west. Perhaps that is temporary and a result of startup/hacker culture not really taking hold here, but for the present we seem to be doing very well.
> There aren't any success stories around the Microsoft ecosystem anymore.
This is quite a weird statement. In the enterprise, there are plenty of success stories that even I can't understand, like Sharepoint. Perhaps you mean the lack of "sexy success stories"? I could agree with that.
I think .net still has a very specific place in the world on internal intranet applications and tools. It's very easy to go in and make something good enough to provide the backbone web service layer between two departments, or to provide data entry and search services.
I don't think this advantage will go away overnight but at the same time the ease of entry and user friendliness of the open source tools is something that I've found Microsoft to be completely incapable of understanding. They/we would constantly talk about our superior tooling. But the fact that we required tooling at all when you could jump into roo or ror or cake or zf and issue a few commandline calls to produce 80 of the your site blows any of microsoft's tooling away.
Microsoft is fighting back and working to improve it's tooling. They have nice concept floating around to database versioning and javascript ide experiences, but in many ways they still seem to not get what the appeal of the open source competition is and i'm not completly sure if in the long run its an area they'll manage win back any mind share in.
I think on HN that's probably true but a lot of people here seem to forget that most programmers get jobs at a bank/insurance company etc. and spend all day coding in C#/VB or Java. I don't think being a MS developer is 'fashionable' but among young programmers who just want to do what they're told and bring home a pay check I'm sure it's still very common.
I don't get this holier than thou attitude. You mean you can't do innovative things in C# that you can do in Ruby?
How will LISP help an investment bank? How do the millions of CRUD apps in startups written in Ruby, PHP or Python change the world? What about F# being made a first class member of .NET?
An enterprise app in Ruby will be as boring as the one in C#. Its to do with a risk averse attitude instead of adopting the framework of the week. A robotics program written in C# or F# can change the world.
It breaks my heart to see an empty superiority complex at work here.
It's akin to carpenters feeling great about their choice of tools and insulting others choices rather than showing off their allegedly wonderful creations they built with the tools. For example, take StackOverflow, written in .NET and scaling much better than other web apps by using the right tools rather than getting caught up in partisan arguments.
Exactly where in my message is any specific technology mentioned? This post is about attitude. If young people cannot dream about more than a paycheck we are really doomed. If our young can only focus on what's currently demanded, who will build the tools for the future generations?
And why do people feel they need to hide behind throwaway nicknames before they can feel free to debate? Let me be perfectly clear I don't hunt down people who disagree with me. If there's something I avoid, it's yes-men.
So, people can't work for a bank or insurance company and still make a difference?
Why subscribe to such black and white thinking?
I'd argue that by doing so, you have an even better chance at affecting change than you would trying to do a startup, since startups tend to have a very low rate of success.
> So, people can't work for a bank or insurance company and still make a difference?
Of course they can, but if your focus is on earning a paycheck, it'll be much harder to make a difference because you may be unwilling to take the necessary risks.
If there is one thing I miss from my youth (apart from hair, perfect eyesight and the ability to fall without breaking bones) is my ability to throw everything up and start from scratch. I wouldn't trade that for my family, of course, and that is the whole point.
I wouldn't let it break your heart though. You can't expect every single young person to live up to your own unrealized ideals.
In any case, this really has nothing to do with Microsoft developers. Using open source tech doesn't automatically make one a great liberator or anything.
At least on hackernews, the number of Microsoft developers seems to be quite small (a poll would be interesting though).
Disclaimer: working for Microsoft, speaking for self.