The legal action taken by Microsoft reminds me of Ashton Tate, as far as using lawyers. Rather than help the community Ashton Tate hurt developers and destroyed itself with its business practices.

Come to think of it I do not recall Ashton Tate going after the "little guy".


>>> Time for Microsoft to listen to the people they have inside that *truly understand* how to address communities.
>>>
>>>What a shame...
>>
>>Personally, I do not think that Microsoft is interested in its customers – it is all about profits, visions, and computer experiences! I do not expect to see that behavior change.
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>Well, to be fair, even as Microsoft obviously has something like a company-wide strategy, tactics dramatically varies from group to group and from person to person. I know many groups at Microsoft that are extremely customer oriented, like Patterns & Practices, DPE and -as far as I saw- the CLR Team and several product groups. I find very annoying that this situation comes from the Visual Studio team. So far my experience has not been that.
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>But as many in the VFP community recalls, it is enough to anyone at Microsoft falling into the mistake of calling the lawyers to drive community things to hard-negotiation tactics that completely blur the final goal.
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>In this case, as I see it, the goal of the Express Editions is to get more and more people to try and use .NET for building small or amateur apps (with an audience spanning from high school kids to dentists). But amateur development doesn't mean you don't need ANY extension, or that this need justify buying a full product.
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>My take is that Microsoft should revise their strategy around Visual Studio and dev tools in general, not playing hard with the community (like neglecting NUnit with their own, an incompatible, unit testing framework), crippling free editions, and in general, limiting their view of VS extensions to a set of official partners. They could learn something from the Eclipse model in this sense (I hope the good, not the bad <s>).
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>Regards,