For a while there I thought that Microsoft was going to take everybody down with Visual Studio Team System. They'd take their superior IDE and debugging environment, add testing and fix their crappy version control system, and they'd own the world. "Nobody else will be able to deliver everything in one package," I thought. "They'll undercut everybody else until they own the landscape, and then they'll milk us like the clueless cows we are."
I even chose Perforce for a version control system. I looked at CVS and decided it was crap; Subversion was still not there, and everything else was just not good enough. "Microsoft uses Perforce," I thought, "and how wrong could they be?" (At that point I was still in fear and awe of Microsoft. Hell, I even thought Longhorn was going to rule the world.)
How different the world is suddenly. Yes, Microsoft has a beautiful IDE that permits you to smoothly debug Windows software. But who can afford to run web software on Windows? It is simply murder on a business model. And desktop software on Vista? Yeah, right. As a result, Team System is terribly quaint all of the sudden. Trac, Subversion (or Git if you're really cool), and BaseCamp are really all you need for web development, so why would you bother administering a SQL server database and a domain controller and an exchange server and a project server and a team system server and buying CALs for all of the above and along with the hardware to run it -- all for tens of thousands of dollars? And if you want to do truly distributed development between a core team, external contractors, or even (gasp) a wide community, Team System won't even do it. And there's the rub: that's the way software is built today.
Yesterday I saw an ad for Perforce: they're giving away a 2-user version, "No questions asked." Whoop-tee-doo, who cares. They can't even give that away. Microsoft versus Borland versus IBM was like a tyrannosaurus fighting a triceratops and a pterodactyl. It just doesn't matter.
2 comments:
There's possibly a sleeping giant in a company called Accurev both existing with and taking share from the likes of ClearCase. May make for an interesting wrinkle to your article.
Microsoft has lost credibility and respect. Their software and the way they control/manipulate the tech industry is just not ethical. Not to mention hurting/spying at the end consumer (us).
I am still using a PC- with the ever crappy/slow/crashing Vista on it.
This is my last piece of equipment using any Microsoft products. In a year or so, I will be moving into a more secure and reliable operating systems such as Macs and/or the wonderful and truly good-for-all(businesses and end-users) Ubuntu/Linux.
When I start using the internet, my homepage is Yahoo. If Yahoo, makes a deal with Microsoft, that will be the day I move away from Yahoo as well.
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