.NET and Python

[Steve Holden]

"Alex Martelli" <aleax at aleax.it> wrote in message
news:9nidl201j12 at enews1.newsguy.com...
> "Van Gale" <cgale1 at _remove_home.com> wrote in message
> news:l02n7.226503$%a.8841628 at news1.rdc1.sdca.home.com...
> >
> > "Alex Martelli" <aleax at aleax.it> wrote in message
> > news:9ni0fi0vq0 at enews1.newsguy.com...
> > > "Van Gale" <cgale1 at _remove_home.com> wrote in message
> > > news:g7%m7.226487$%a.8840828 at news1.rdc1.sdca.home.com...
> > >     ...
> > > > > I've looked into .NET and I hate to admit it, MS is
> > > > > become more right lately.
> > > >
> > > > Microsoft marketing literature and hype has *always* been right.
For
> > the
> > >
> > > I disagree: I find Microsoft's marketing abysmal in its field.  One
> >
> > Yeah, I didn't really express that well :)  I was really trying to say
> > something like with .NET, Microsoft is doing a good job of seeming
right.
> > That doesn't mean they actually are right (at this point).
>
> Oh, I see!  Well, I was surprised by the quality of the betas of
> the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET, considering they're
> betas -- the *rest* of the .NET "vision" strikes me as _very_
> dubious (no matter how well Passport is implemented, for example,
> the idea of a closed-source, single-point-of-failure service
> becoming crucial to the functioning of most or all of eCommerce
> strikes me as VERY bad from a technical viewpoint).
>
>
Yes, but it concurs well with Microsoft's approach to other technologies
where they missed the boat, the Internet being simply the largest and most
visible of those.

In the past Microsoft have used their size and wealth to buy technologies
they can't compete with, sometimes to integrate it with their own products
(e.g. FrontPage), sometimes to kill what would otherwise have been a
competitor.

Since they can't "buy" the Internet, they are proposing an entirely new
net-centric architecture which will ostensibly play with other platforms. If
the cross-platform support for .NET is as good as that for Internet Explorer
then I'll believe .NET is cross-platform when I see it.

Combine this with the usual smoke-and-mirrors injection from the marketing
depertments and you get the classic Microsoft FUD campaign. Those who are
heavily dependent on Microsoft architectures have to follow along as their
backwards compatibility is cut out from under them (Visual Basic, for
example, is being completely redefined as you know. This will make it a
better language, but as far as existing code is concerned it's as difficult
to port to some other language as it is from VB 6 to VB.NET).

I somehow doubt that all this is going to change the minds of the many shops
who *are* committed to Microsoft architectures. The fact that open source
products are more stable and better supported simply doesn't give them the
same warm fuzzy glow as being able to sign over huge chunks of their
corporate revenue stream for the dubious privilege of being able to call
Microsoft and have them say "fixed in next release".

Which, in the case of ODBC for example, turned out to be blatantly not true:
to miss some bugs in ODBC you have to migrate to OLEDB, which of course
turns out to be far less well supported cross-platform. This in turn is
because OLEDB was a set of marketing principles before it was ever a
technology.

So, having missed the emergence of the Internet as a crucial infrastructure
change, they are now trying to use their marketing muscle to surround it
with (in some cases) ill-thought-out proprietary technology. This will come
as no surprise to anybody who seriously read the Halloween documents, where
it was presaged as a strategy by suggestions that Microsoft make proprietary
extensions to open protocols as a way of retaining market share in the face
of the threat from Linux.

Would-be flamers please note: I am NOT saying that Microsoft have done
something they shouldn't from a business or a legal point of view: those are
different arguments. I'm simply saying that they have beaten even IBM at the
fear, uncertainty and doubt game. Were I a Microsoft stockholder I'd
probably be pleased. In the long term, though, I think that Microsoft
threaten their own survival by failing to embrace open systems rather than
seeing them as a threat to their markets. I doubt the DoJ anti-trust action
will be the last unless they change their ways, and nothing seems likey to
make them.

I sincerely doubt my, or anyone else's, ability to persuade Microsoft that
this is wisdom, and that they should listen to it!

regards
 Steve
--
http://www.holdenweb.com/