Thursday, March 8, 2007

Not Religion, But Strategy

Update: After reading the comments to this post, it seems I didn't present my point as well as I thought I had, here is another try.

Oren mocked a part Nikola Toshev's post claiming "Microsoft" label on a technology makes it more decent, calling it "The Microsoft Religion".
I think it's a good strategy.

First of all, even if a new technology from MS is not "decent" at first, you can be sure they'll keep bringing out new versions till it is, because that's what MS does best.

And besides that, if Microsoft pushes something hard enough, you can bet it will become dominant, just ask Netscape....

Take C# for example. It had no killer advantage over existing languages when it came out, yet even Oren uses it today. I doubt another company could have made that happen.

Countries all over the world hold US Dollars not because the U.S. is a role-model, but because it's a powerful country.

People tend to bet on winners.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll have to disagree with you here. One uses a tool because it's useful *now*, not because it might be useful later, beta or otherwise.

Those who do TDD can cite the sample of Visual Studio's automated testing suite. It's completely useless, because Microsoft believes (and has no sign of doing otherwise) that TDD means making tests *after* coding.

And whatever happened to owners of Windows ME? They eventually had to shift to Windows 2000, not because it was the next step up (they were available at about the same time), but because ME totally sucked. That's a lot of wasted dollars on an OS that's useless.

Anonymous said...

And one more thing... could it be possible that people banked on C#, not because it was from Microsoft, but because it was spearheaded by Anders Hejlsberg?

I'm sure you know about this, since you've programmed in Delphi...

Anonymous said...

I have to disagree with you here as well.

Microsoft will always have a strong following with certain people, because for the majority of the .NET community that's all they know. They want a quick solution to a problem and lookie here! Microsoft has a tool to do that.

Now, those programmers that get sick of "work arounds" and hacks to get a piece of software to work, will go and see what else is out there.

A prime example, a couple of months ago I looked at both dlinq and nhibernate when adopting an ORM mapper to use. After looking at both technologies one can clearly see that nhibernate is very mature. dlinq on the other hand is just up and coming. Why would I use a tool that isn't officially released yet, versus one that has been around for significantly longer? Because Microsoft makes it? Excuse me for my sarcasm but I think this is just naive.