Microsoft’s forced generosity
Having lost the API war, Microsoft is now belatedly embracing conventional wisdom and is giving away a stripped down version of Visual Studio 2005 for free.
The continuing consolidation of partners and toolsets by the Eclipse Foundation, the huge popularity garnered last year by Ruby on Rails and the AJAX programming trope in general, as well as the inroads PHP and Open Source Java tools have been recently making in enterprise IT ( 1 , 2 ) probably had something to do with Microsoft’s decision, of course…
Although I fail to see why savvy cross-platform developers would want to sacrifice versatility, in addition to risking vendor lock, by programming in the .NET framework and switching to Visual Studio (instead of, say, using the Mono plugin for Eclipse), one can now install Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition piecemeal, over the web; provided, that is, that he or she is willing to go through the usual mandatory installation and update of prerequisite Windows components (sorry, no downloadable versions). A caveat, though: the Inquirer cautions that the free download offers might not be available in the future.
Microsoft is also now giving SQL Server 2005 Express Edition for free, probably in light of Oracle’s recent decision to offer a free version of it’s database; although with solid Open Source offerings from MySQL and PostgreSQL (which is now available in a native Windows version) making inroads in the RDBMS market for some time now, as well as the bright prospects foreseen for recently graduated Apache Derby, that’s hardly worth a mention.
As to the reason why Microsoft is being so generous all of a sudden, Joel Spolsky wrote, in June 2004:
Microsoft’s crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft’s monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft’s income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet.
With this and other grandiose gestures, such as the recent unveiling of it’s Shared Source licenses (not nessecarily Open Source, at least until they pass muster with the OSI), Microsoft is rather obviously making a last ditch attempt at luring developers towards it’s ageing and unpalatable crown jewel and away from Java and Open Source scripting language based web application development.
Update (10/11 2:45): On the other hand, Ray Ozzie‘s meteoric ascendance to chief technical honcho probably heralds some exciting times for the company, and perhaps the industry as a whole. Ozzie is hailed as a leading engineer – entrepreneur and a visionary, in large part because of his crusade to include strong cryptography in export versions of Lotus Notes, which allegedly played a key part in convincing the US government to loosen cryptography export controls. Leaked internal memos show that at least Ray is not above admitting Microsoft’s shorftalls in the protocols and services arena:
Mr Ozzie’s memo details where Microsoft has failed to become a leader in internet technologies it has pioneered in some cases. It has trailed in developing the AJAX group of tools that allow live and dynamic updates of Web pages, it has allowed Really Simple Syndication to become a dominant distribution method on the internet and Adobe’s Portable Document Format to become more prevalent than its Office products.
“We knew search would be important, but through Google’s focus they’ve gained a tremendously strong position,” he says. “While we’ve lead with great capabilities in Messenger and Communicator, it was Skype, not us, who made VoIP [internet phone calls] broadly popular and created a new category.”
Ozzie’s keynote presentation at Supernova 2004 gives some ideas about his out-of-the-box approaches to implementing distributed ICT infrastructures. Whether or not his leadership will be enough to coax Microsoft through a much needed paradigm shift remains to be seen.
Technorati tags: visual+studio, microsoft
