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.
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.