Supporting developers means making their lives easy by giving them streamlined systems and frameworks, not throwing a hodge-podge of of command line utilities at them or exposing them to the messy bazaar of the FOSS world.
I'd say Microsoft has been been more pro-developer than most and I'm super glad that I chose to live primarily in their ecosystem because they make my life easy compared to the mess I have to put up with in Unix-land.
There are two worlds in desktop software development – the "open-source-unix-y" world, and the "Microsoft" world. The former has typically meant having a broad range of excellent tooling; it's certainly been a bit messy, but that's mostly because of the ease with which things have been able to change and develop. Even development in the Apple sphere has always involved the same basic tools.
On the other hand, development using the Microsoft platform has traditionally been an entirely different process and toolset. It's cleaner, in the sense that there's less diversity and a greater focus on compatibility (to some extent). But the tradeoff there is that it's often been slow to keep up with developments in the rest of the industry, and did not allow users access to open, standard tooling that other developers had.
That is changing now, and we'll start to see the best of the traditionally locked-away Microsoft platform make its way into open-source platforms, and vice versa. That's not a bad thing, but I think it's pretty foolish to consider their past stance as 'developer-friendly', especially considering the number of frameworks and toolkits they've pushed and abandoned over the past decade. Hopefully, that is changing.
The dichotomy has long been "large number of single-purpose tools that can be combined" versus "single monolith that could theoretically be scripted but rarely is". The monolithic system doesn't have to worry about mismatches, seams and fragmentation, but is also brittle.
Not at all - go ask any devops/IT group running in small, medium and large businesses to replace their Microsoft tools with a competitor's (if you can find one) or FOSS tools and they'll laugh in your face because of how easy Microsoft makes things for them.
> But the tradeoff there is that it's often been slow to keep up with developments in the rest of the industry...
Considering that Microsoft kicked off Web 2.0 with the invention of XMLHTTPRequest and the iframe, I'd have to disagree.
Your whole argument is closed == bad and that's simply not true.
Not at all - go ask any devops/IT group running in small, medium and large businesses to replace their Microsoft tools with a competitor's (if you can find one) or FOSS tools and they'll laugh in your face because of how easy Microsoft makes things for them.
IT is a bit of an outlier. But I must admit, I've never encountered any self-described 'DevOps' who uses anything but Unix. Different spheres, perhaps.
Considering that Microsoft kicked off Web 2.0 with the invention of XMLHTTPRequest and the iframe, I'd have to disagree.
That's a bit shallow – every technology company has developed some tools and techniques that were ahead of the curve. It doesn't mean that their entire platform is.
Your whole argument is closed == bad and that's simply not true.
No, my argument is that closed has a very large downside, and that if you don't bear that in mind it's going to harm you later.
I don't think of IT as an outlier here because every IT department I've dealt with for a long while either contains programmers (usually in small/medium sized companies) or works closely with groups of programmers to keep their apps running. That's what I call devops, maybe I have the wrong definition though.
The argument about Ajax coming from Microsoft is a bit shallow. (Sorry that's all the effort I felt like putting into it at the moment.) Here are a couple other thoughts along the same vein:
1. Microsoft has done extensive research into many areas of tech that are just now blooming, such as mobile and tablet computing. They had a general purpose mobile OS with multiple third party app-stores before any of the modern industry players. They had tablets. I think the industry caught up to Microsoft while they were busy making money elsewhere.
2. Look how quickly Microsoft can pivot into doing the kinds of things that Amazon AWS, Google and Apple are doing. I think it's a testament to how "there" their platform is already.
> ...closed has a very large downside...
It can be a huge upside too. Developers have been making lots of money off of tightly controlled, closed software platforms like iOS and Windows for a long time.
The web is the only completely free open source "platform" that I can think of that is a huge hit with programmers and that people generally use. However, in my opinion - programming it sucks compared to the closed, native systems.
I appreciate the courage of posting what seems like an unpopular opinion, but I can't agree with you. The messy bazaar of the FOSS world has been overlapping with the Windows ecosystem for some time, even high profile projects from Microsoft like ASP.NET MVC have been open source for years now.
I'd say Microsoft has been been more pro-developer than most and I'm super glad that I chose to live primarily in their ecosystem because they make my life easy compared to the mess I have to put up with in Unix-land.