The author doesn't understand the Microsoft world. Some points:

Under the section "Developer Taxonomy", he splits developers into three groups, "business analysists", "journeymen", and "conscientious". The business guys use Access and Excel. They actually have nothing to do with .Net, so why should he even care? He then goes on to say the conscientious developers, who work on their own time and care about code quality, UI, etc as opposed to the journeymen who work for large corporations doing enterprise apps. Well, guess what. I work for a large corporation and just about every developer here cares about code quality, UI, etc.

In the early stages of Microsoft's development of a successor to Windows XP, it looked like the software side of things might have taken a leap forward. Win32 would still be Win32, unfortunately, but the original XP successor (codenamed Longhorn) was going to provide a whole raft of functionality built using .NET. This would be coupled with radical changes in Explorer and the Windows shell to provide something much slicker and better-looking than XP offered. Early in the development of Longhorn, we saw demos of a new kind of application; applications built using the new Longhorn technology, with a consistent look and feel.

Except, as by now we all know, Longhorn never made it. Some new features were dropped completely, others were just scaled back, some were even ported to XP. Even when the underlying technology was kept, the good-looking, easy-to-write application development that was promoted never really materialized. Instead, what we got was Windows Vista.
Microsoft dropped all those .Net APIs that were originally going to be in Longhorn only after the developer community complained. Keeping them in would have caused a HUGE number of programs to not work and require MAJOR rewrites to get existing apps to run under Longhorn.

"Explorer and IE may look similar, but they're different codebases. The code to give that kind of no-menu window with an address bar and a search box and this and that, it's not shared between the two. It might have been at one time. But now it's not."
So, suppose multiple Microsoft apps did share the same codebase. Can you say, "DOJ"? If Microsoft was in trouble before, it would be even worse if they shared codebase more.

IMO, the whole article is nothing more than another angry guy that he has to learn something new because Microsoft changed things. What makes him thing Apple won't change things? They've done it before.


>The author has some interesting these to say about programmers and .Net. My guess is he likes Java. But in light of our recent discussions on .Net it might provide a little insight.
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>http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.ars/1
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>John