I predicted 11 years ago to my now employer that Linux would dominate the corporate market in 5 to 7 years. Boy was I wrong! While it is used where there are a bunch of geeks to keep it working (Facebook, Google, NOAA, Twitter). But those aren't our customers: they are folks with a small IT department, for the most part; and even when they have a big IT department, there are so many moving parts in what we do (retail inventory management, which means lots of users, barcode scanners, ticket printers for stock, etc.) that they'd often rather have them host with us. In this world, Microsoft is still top dog.

The shops that use Java don't buy programs: they write them for themselves. Which tells me that not only am I getting a set of tooling that pretty much sticks together and gets easier to use by the version, but also that I'm working on the OS used by my present and likely customers.

Hank

>My former employer tells the world:
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>"Microsoft's failures with the KIN phone (only two months on the market, less than 10,000 phones sold) are well-known to this community. Now the NY Times goes farther, quoting Tim O'Reilly: 'Microsoft is totally off the radar of the cool, hip, cutting-edge software developers.' Microsoft has acknowledged that they have lost young developers to the lures of free software. 'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,' acknowledged Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's business software group, in an interview last year. 'And then, when people, particularly younger people, wanted to build a start-up, and they were generally under-capitalized, the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them.' Microsoft's program to seed start-ups with its software for free requires the fledgling companies to meet certain guidelines and jump through hoops to receive software — while its free competitors simply allow anyone to download products off a website with the click of a button."
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>At first I was sort of offended. I guess I'm not hip still supporting VFP apps (but I also sell python apps). In fact I bet most of the VFP world is no longer hip.
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>FYI: Tim now claims he did not say "off the radar". I guess that means he did say the rest!
>
>Johnf