A few years ago my company bought a large number of server licenses from
Macromedia. Some client (CF Studio, Flash, DW) licenses, too. A couple of years
later when VS Studio.NET first came out, Microsoft sent a fully licensed copy
of VS Studio.NET Architect edition addressed to me at my office. The retail
value of that package at the time was around $2,300, if I recall correctly.
Coincidence? I think not. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I would be
willing to wager that the large volume license purchasers of CF got the same
deal I did.
You have to admire MSFT as a competitor. They are totally relentless.
As for the net effect? We've all certainly heard of shops that have dropped CF
in favor of .NET, but we have also seen a lot of new entrants into the CF
market, esp. since CFMX came out.
I am amazed at the vigorousness and seriousness of the CFMX programming
community these days. Frameworks, serious debates on the value of MVC, Ajax,
CFFORM-based RIAs- we are seeing a new wave of really, really cool stuff built
around ColdFusion.
What gets me going the most is when I see young software developers who are
serious about their craft building advanced stuff in CF. It's great!
>From a business standpoint, MSFT has done a great job convincing corporate
>managers to go with .NET, but what about developers? All I see is open .NET
>jobs going unfilled because people don't have the skills. And unlike Java,
>C/C++, PHP, Perl, and CF, you have to run Windows to run .NET, and I believe
>that has locked out a lot of developers from countries like India and China.
>Developers who want to learn CF can download CFEclipse (they probably already
>have the Eclipse platform), download a developer copy of CFMX server, and go
>to town. If I had any advice to give to MACR, it would be to encourage that
>kind of behavior as much as possible, because developers in Asia (with 50% of
>the world's population) are the market for sustained future growth.
As to the search term thing, MSFT has great lawyers. They might argue that
ColdFusion is a valid search term for them to advertise precisely because it is
a competing product in their space.
I did a bunch of other Google searches for languages. ColdFusion pulled up the
VS Studio ad. So did JSP. Other searches- Java, Perl, PHP, J2EE, Python- turned
up nothing special. Clearly there is no profit to be had in beating up on free
competitors like PHP and Perl, and J2EE seems to have missed the cut because
MSFT is targeting people searching for the language, not the platform. The
scripting wars continue.
> While skimming through the lists I noticed an ad. Now this is not news
> to anyone as there are ads on all of the pages in a nice, not so
> forceful manner. What was interesting about this ad was the text. The
> title was simply "Coldfusion". The text for the ad:
> "Order Visual Studio 2005 Kit. Simplify software development."
> And who was the ad by? www.microsoft.com
>
> Now you have to understand how adsense works (beyond reading the
> articles we have on it in Fusion Authority). When there is a really
> high paying ad, it will 'force' out the lower paying ones. This means
> that if there are 2 high paying ads, then only those 2 will be shown.
> When there is only one ad, then that ad is either very high paying or
> there just isn't any other ads for the page (never a problem on House
> of Fusion).
> So when Microsoft has the only ad on a page and the page content is
> purely ColdFusion, you know they want us.
>
> Now I wonder if Visual Studio 2005 has ColdFusion editing capabilities
> or are they just using the trademarked word ColdFusion to target us?
> Weren't there just some lawsuits won about using search terms that
> have nothing to do with the actual ad and where the display term was a
> trademark? Looks like more fun to come. :)
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