Why Microsoft is Winning

[SinbadEV]

Dear Unemployed or Hobby Programmers, Students, Open Source Zealots or Other Idealists,

The reason everyone uses Microsoft software is because of the following:

http://msdn.microsoft.com

When your various kdes, gnomes, sdls, qts, gtks, sdks, flavours, comflicting licencing models and dependencies, package managers, factionalism etc manage to reach the level of unification and developer support Microsoft provides for free your idealism will finally be rewarded.

I'm not saying it's right... but when a company spends million of dollars a year developing documentation and tools expressly to make developing for their platform easier... it's hard to compete. Yes this makes it easier to produce bad software... but with hardware as powerful as it is today "bad" software works pretty much as well as great software... and in a cost/benefit analysis "good-enough but took a third as long to develop then actually good" is a lot more profitable.

As a metaphor let's take art.

An gifted artist can spend years studying and perfecting his craft then spend additional weeks or years perfecting his vision and creating a masterpiece... this is like a Linux developer.

Anyone can buy a good digital camera and produce a work of art that looks more like a bowl of fruit than that of the gifted artist... and 90% of the population will actually prefer the blown up photograph. This is like the Windows developers.

Now you are smarter... now go make Linux development easier.

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Know-it-All,

SinbadEV

[koshi]

I didn't know a moderator flame baiting in off-topic is ok. For your own sake I really hope that is what you are doing though.

[smoth]

this post confuses me and I am a fan of .net.

[SinbadEV]

I didn't know a moderator flame baiting in off-topic is ok. For your own sake I really hope that is what you are doing though.

It was not my intention to flame-bait... it may have have been fan-boi-baiting at worst... but mostly I figured this information out over the last few days myself and felt the need to share it in a situation isolated from the thread that lead to the line of reasoning that lead me to this conclusion.

this post confuses me and I am a fan of .net.

don't worry, it confuses me and I posted it.

to paraphrase: Microsoft is winning because they are supporting developers... and that Linux could gain significant ground if the barriers to entry, not for users but for developers, were removed.

EDIT/ALSO: I like metaphors.

[smoth]

the support comes at the cost of money for the support.

[Beherith]

I completely agree with koshi on this matter. This topic constitutes flamebait. Locked.