dhpeterson

Old news! I've been using Linux since 1993, been involved in startups since 1999, and about the last time that I paid any attention to Microsoft was when they launched .NET (around 2003). In fact, the .NET implementation (a belated catch-up in many ways to Java) was about the only semi-innovative development effort I have seen come out of MS in the last 10 years. Even so, it was little more than a tarted-up virtual machine, a cleaned-up set of Java-equivalent programming APIs, and a couple of cool features like crypto-signed DLLs, a global assembly cache (hmm - where do you put all your JAR files, then?!) and the ability to mix and match programming languages in a single application (though only one target language per DLL, or more strictly, per .NET "assembly").

Then, Miguel and the gang came along and wrote Mono, and pretty much re-implemented everything of value from .NET, without the licencing overheads of running in a windoze only environment. That basically took the wind out of the sails for Microsoft, and they've been floating around, almost impassive, pretty much just watching the emergence of ASP/SaaS computing, web 2.0, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, blogging, wikipedia, bittorrent, skype, asterisk and everything else from the sidelines ever since.

I think the real problem comes back to people. It's a bit like Paul's articles on Great Hackers and what motivates them. I know plenty of great hackers (and I would like think that a couple of startups later I am at least a good one! - though I find myself more and more on the business side in recent times, growing our company and developing our people - good young hackers themselves). I even used to know a few guys at Microsoft (Australia and Singapore). The last "good" person that I knew who went to Microsoft (from a PhD programme at Melbourne Uni) joined in 2002. Since then, nobody I know even went near the place. If you can't attract great people, then you won't build great products, and everything else is a forgone conclusion. Microsoft has built great cash-cow businesses, and great fortunes for its founders, but I don't believe it will ever be a player again.