Steve Jones - SSC Editor (7/22/2013)
stefano.bozzoni (7/22/2013)
I totally agree. I guess that the reason why Microsoft is like that is because they have to please shareholders more then clients. Shareholders are amazed and can understand only profits, no technological stuff.I am a software developer and Microsoft has often filled their languages with useless stuff while has left out more important things, like, for example, supporting more about database components. Other software houses, like borland, even if it copes with smaller market, have done it better in my opinion. Microsoft has a better marketing vision and that's why it is a big firm.
I guess. This is why, to a large extent, I hate when founders leave businesses. They become less of a business/company and more of just an investment.
The change in Microsoft happened long before BG left. If I remember correctly, he was full-time at MS until some time in 2006.
When MS was a technology company, it wrote compilers for all sorts of platforms - for example AppleSoft Basic was Microsoft's Basic for the mac, licensed to Apple for peanuts, released by Apple in 1977, on floppy disc as it was too late to be included in ROM in the first Apple release, and in Rom on Apple II plus in 1979 and all subsequent macs with ROM-based basic; this MS basic was essential to Apple's survival - Wozniak's Integer Basic was a pretty poor offering, fine for some uses of simple toys on which no-one wanted serious programing ability, but not really adequate to satisfy even the toy computer market, and was relegated to Floppy Disc from Apple II plus onwards, and stayed on Floppy disc on the Apple machines while Microsoft's code went into Apple's ROM. This ensured that people recognised that MS was a good (and cheap) source of compilers and interpreters, which was a view which Ms could have exploited. If MS had taken the same attitude to SQL Server as it had to Basic earlier on, we might have seen UNIX-based versions of SQL Server: of course, it may be that the terms of the Sybase deal precluded that. But so far as I'm aware none of MS C++, C#, and F# have been released other than on the windows platform, which suggests that the idea of spreading the expertise across platforms had died certainly before 2006 and equally certainly well before 2000 (when Gates moved from the CEO position to Chairman). So the "we are a software technology company" seems to have turned into "we are the windows company, and windows pays dividends" long before Gates retired from MS.
Tom