Microsoft Is a Great/Terrible Enemy

Well - the basic point is true "Microsoft is a juggernaut, a terrible enemy to have.", quoted by Mozilla's Scott Collins.

But not for the reasons noted in the article, I prefer to think about how Guy Kawasaki looked at Microsoft (paraphrased):

Microsoft has the ability to turn on a dime. They missed the first Internet revolution - Gates changed the entire company to be internet-focused in less time than it took to release a new product.

Yes, Microsoft is an elephant - but it's an elephant that can turn faster than most mice and that is Microsoft's competitive advantage.

In truth, people would likely prefer IBM or some larger monolith as an enemy - a company that basically takes time to print out blank pages (intentionally left blank) instead of one who basically says "our goal is to beat the market out of whoever we compete with".

Now that's the "theory" of MS competitiveness - the reality of course gets you dealing with lawyers, license agreements and EULAs (enough people have complained about this that I'm not even going to comment anymore).

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

Comments

Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

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FoxInCloud Stats

FoxInCloud sent this link a while back about their statistics regarding visits to their site: http://foxincloud.com/blog/2017/12/27/VFP-community-lessons-from-foxincloud-site.html What's interesting here is the breakdown of people. Yes, I think it's understandable that the Fox community is getting older. Another factor is the growth of the mobile and web environments taking over development. These environments really do push people towards the newer non-SQL or free SQL/hosted environments but more towards hosted storage options like Amazon and Google. A tool like FoxInCloud that helps MOVE existing applications to the cloud inherently competes with those environments. But FoxInCloud also allows developers to extend their application further by giving them a starting point using Javascript and the basic CSS (such as Bootstrap). If you're not rebuilding your application from scratch, it's certainly a great step forward. FoxPro VFP

Programmers vs. Developers vs. Architects

I received an email this morning from Brandon Savage 's newsletter. Brandon's a PHP guru (works at Mozilla) but his newsletter and books have some great overall perspectives for developers of all languages. However, this last one (What's the difference between developers and architects?) kind of rubs me the wrong way. Either that, or I've just missed the natural inflation of job descriptions. (maybe, it's like the change in terminology between Garbage man and Waste Engineer or Secretary and Office Administrator) So maybe it's just me - but I think there's still a big difference between Programmer, Developer and then of course, architect. The key thing here is that every role has a different perspective and every one of those perspectives has value. The original MSF create roles like Product Manager, Program Manager, Developer, Tester, etc - so every concept may pigeon hole people into different roles. But the statements Brandon makes are often distinction

Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

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