> > On Apr 10, 2009, at 12:17 PM, Stephen Russell wrote: > > > In our industry you have to take change for what it is worth. IT > > pushes the envelope to do things faster and better. > > I believe that his point, and those of many others, is that > Microsoft > pushes the envelope to maximize revenue, not to do things faster and > better. >
When people want primarily faster and better, and not quick and easy, then companies focused on maximizing profits will shift their efforts to faster and better. Bob's Theory of Why Software Computing Is Not Yet A True Engineering Discipline: "Not enough people die from bad software." That's changing though, so take heart, a few hundred thousand dead from now, software will be a real engineering discipline. The day is coming. Microsoft, whatever can be said about them in the past, has been focusing on faster and better a lot lately, and changed how they do internal development to be more open and transparent. But still a sizeable part of the population wants quick and easy, not to mention free, so companies focused on maximizing profits (i.e., those who want to stay in business without Obama becoming their CEO-in-chief and telling their boards of directors what to do) will still have to try to make even the lazy bums who buy only crappy software happy. Personally, I distrust Windows but I love .NET---I am very impressed with the quality of the .NET runtime and libraries. But I also love Java, and Adobe, and all the other technologies and computer programming languages emerging lately. Mac is an awesome platform. It's a great time to be a technophile, even as the rest of the world, particularly our politics, is going to hell and hand basket. My focus is languages and platforms for distributed concurrent programming, and there is a lot of good technologies to choose from these days, and yes, even some of Microsoft's is in that category. BTW, unless I missed one of the emails on the subject of Adobe AIR, one thing that has not yet been noted about AIR's database-related capability is that AIR is tied hermetically at the hip to SQLite for local data storage, but provides lots of HTTP/XML-centric strategies for manipulating data over the web. It's actually quite easy to create web-based desktop apps with disconnected storage abilities using Adobe AIR, which is why it's Adobe's "RIA" offering. - Bob > > -- Ed _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
