So asked the Joker with grudging respect after Batman ruined his (nefarious) fun in the Tim Burton Batman movie (around 1989).
I’m asking myself the same question about Microsoft. It seems all we hear about nowadays is Google–they’re the hot topic and the cool company. Isn’t Microsoft old and stodgy by now? Hasn’t Apple gained majority market share over them?
The answers to those questions are no and no.
Microsoft is still crushing Apple in market share; it’s still not even close nor will be in the forseeable future. Apple’s ads are better, and I love to watch them, but Macs are a small fraction of the computer market.
As far as stodgy, software developers know better. Microsoft makes the best software development tools in the world. Period. The only people who will challenge that obvious truth are fanatical Linux or Mac developers, and even then they will usually admit that debugging with Microsoft Visual Studio is better than with gdb.
Microsoft has taken another massive leap forward recently in the software development world by unveiling WPF, Visual Studio 2008, C# 3.0, and Silverlight.
I don’t have time to explain all those buzzwords, and readers of this blog for the most part would not care what they mean as far as details go, so I will summarize:
WPF is their new way of designing user interfaces and making it easy for developers and graphics/usability designers to collaborate, as well as connecting the user interface to the meat of the program in powerful ways.
Visual Studio 2008 is the latest edition of the premier software development tool in the world. It runs circles around the competition, which for the most part was humiliated by this tool in version 6.0 which they released 11 years ago.
C# is Microsoft’s Java + C++ programming language that offers more powerful features than either of those two languages. In version 3.0 they made it even more powerful. And this is coming from yours truly, a novice C# programmer and a professional C++ programmer of 7 years.
Silverlight is the Microsoft’s answer for the web and cross-platform (Linux, Mac). It allows developers to write code in C# and run it on the web! Think awesome games that can run in your browser and on all platforms. It’s not here yet, but it will be soon. Think rich internet apps that make Gmail look primitive. Those will come too.
He who controls the spice, controls the universe. Microsoft controls the software development spice, and they cannot be defeated by Google or anyone else until this dominance is broken. Right now, no one is even close, and in the ways that Microsoft has fallen behind Google and other companies in the past few years, they are catching up quickly.
Don’t get me wrong: Google is a great company. I own their stock. I switched my email to them. I look at my iGoogle homepage more frequently than any other with news, blog feeds, my stock portfolio, and Google calendar. It’s going to be an awesome battle, but I don’t see how they can top Microsoft with Microsoft’s courting of the people like me who write the software.
Ah, but as far as Web development is concerned you have one glaring omission: Adobe. Under the Flash Platform, they rule the roost as far as rich internet experiences. It’s the world’s most pervasive software platform reaching 99% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices. Nearly every online video you experience (i.e. YouTube) is delivered via streaming Flash media servers. As far as programming languages, check out ActionScript 3.0. It’s the powerful, OOP language of the Flash Player runtime based on ECMAScript.
Flash is no longer for cheesy intros and animations. It’s a serious software development platform. Check out Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR as examples of their developer tools and SDKs.
Flash has been in the market and under development for over 10 years. I don’t think Silverlight will ever be a contender given Microsoft’s poor track record with cross-platform initiatives.
It’s good to hear from you, Adam, and I’m glad that my post got a response from a developer who uses a competing company’s product.
For those who are not as familiar with the terminology, ECMAScript is the more official name for Javascript, which is one of the few programming languages that developers have been able to use in the web browser to create web applications.
Adobe (Macromedia) has indeed been in this space for a long time, and recently came out with something called AIR (formerly Apollo) which Microsoft Silverlight now directly competes with.
Microsoft knows something about beating entrenched competition, and you can bet Adobe is not resting on its laurels with its current developer marketshare in this area.
For example, Lotus 1-2-3 used to be the dominant spreadsheet app, Microsoft released Excel and it took years, but Excel wiped out Lotus. Wordperfect used to be the dominant word processing programming, before Word came around and dethroned it.
Apple always thought their operating system was superior to Windows, and at one time it certainly was, but Microsoft overthrew them through strategic decisions.
The .NET programming languages like C# and VB.NET are more powerful than Javascript, and now those languages can be used for the web(!), and with Microsoft’s partnership with Novell, the Moonlight effort will ensure that Silverlight is cross-platform even on the desktops of Linux and Mac.
Do they have a ways to go? Yes, and just because their technology is better doesn’t mean that they can win just through that. But, with millions of C#, VB.NET, and even C++ programmers in the world who can learn those languages, they are positioned well to take Adobe down.
Will they? I don’t know. They haven’t dethroned Google’s (or even Yahoo’s) search dominance. They missed the boat, as did Yahoo, with their hotmail and yahoo mail, letting Google come in with Gmail and eat their lunch.
So it will be a good battle to watch and participate in!
There are a small number of quicktime videos and audio online too… I now care because they are the only videos and audio that work on my ipod touch. What’s cool about the touch and iphone though is that when you click a youtube video that is flash, it opens it in the youtube app automatically.
Good discussion we have here. A few corrections:
First, ECMAScript is actually just a specification. JavaScript (Sun/Netscape), JScript (Microsoft), and ActionScript (Adobe) are a few examples of implementations thereof.
Second, Silverlight is actually competing with the Adobe Flash Player, not AIR. AIR was created to enable Web developers (those who know nothing about C++/C# but are well versed in ActionScript/HTML/AJAX) to create desktop applications. AIR is synonymous with the Java Runtime – you download it once and from there can run any AIR-based application. It’s really cool when you look into it. The thing has its own SQLite database and provides network-aware functionality among many other things. Check out who’s already using it at the AIR showcase.
I wouldn’t be too quick to write off the Mac OSX either. Last I heard the adoption rate of Windows Vista is still not particularly stellar, not to mention tests show it performs better on a dual-core Intel processor Mac than any other PC out there. I’m sure Vista will eventually become the dominant OS when users are *forced* to upgrade after XP is no longer offered, but many Web developers are already making “the switch” due to the reliability, performance, and overall better experience of OSX. I know the Web developer community is small in comparison to other software developers and the world in general, but it is one that is loyal to the products they use.
With all this being said, as a developer I tend to use the products that help me do my job well and will best serve my clients. I use a lot of Adobe’s products on a Microsoft OS (XP… no way I’m touching Vista
) along with a few open source solutions. Who knows, in five years I may be creating Silverlight content on a Mac. Having the ability to move between and try out all the available technical offerings is really cool.
I didn’t want to have to do this, but, Adam, I’m going to have to pull rank on you. See, I’m with the mattress police, and none of these mattresses have tags on them.
Firstly, Katie thinks that we’re “big silly computer nerds”.
To be completely technical, the standard is ECMA-262, implementations of which include Netscape and the Mozilla Foundation’s intepreter and Microsoft’s JScript 5.5. But the official name for the language according to the ECMA-262 standard is ECMAScript.
“But this awkward name [ECMAScript] is normally only used when making explicit reference to the standard. Technically, the name ‘Javascript’ refers only to the language implementations from Netscape and the Mozilla Foundation. In practice, however, everyone calls the language Javascript.”
– Javascript, The Definitive Guide 5th edition by David Flanagan.
So, we were both more or less right. ECMAScript sounds like something from Ghostbusters.
I understand what you are saying about Silverlight competing with the Adobe Flash Player. I agree, but by using Moonlight, the Mono implementation of Silverlight which will work on Linux (and probably Mac), it will be possible for Windows developers to write apps that run in the web browser or on the desktop on Linux, so in that sense it is similar to letting a web developer make a desktop app that runs on Windows or other platforms because both of these things have not until very recently been possible to do before, and both allow web or desktop developers to write software that runs on the web or desktop of any main operating system.
It is a new world!
i also agree with you that the competition can only be helpful. I am up for using whatever tools are best as well. Most of my development has been done on the desktop thus far, where Microsoft dev tools rule, but with the web and the desktop converging, who knows who will win that battle; perhaps it is best if no one does for competition’s sake, ensuring developers have options for the platform they want to use to develop.
This is the most technical discussion ever on the Vanguard!