It's deja vu, all over again.

At the Director level (those are the guys with the budgets in most large corps), it's a matter of getting the most done with the budget you have. The mistake that can and often does happen is that unless you have a clear vision, you will sacrifice the future (having a stable of attractive languages that force each other to be better), in order to put your resources into the now (what are the biggest products), and end up losing customers (developers in this case).

It happens, as Jimmy Schementi said in his blogpost, in every large corp. It takes great leadership at the top to avoid that small-minded thinking, and MS clearly doesn't have it. How else could they have squandered 10 years of development on the Windows Mobile platform? And I'll bet each decision made sense in terms of allocating budget for now, rather than allocating for the future.

The same thing, allocating for now rather than the future, sunk the US car industry. Ford escaped because, at a critical juncture, a Ford heir took over the company, and forced it to look ahead. Of course, results were disappointing in the "now," and so he was forced out. But the products that saved their bacon came from his direction.

>>You can see my reaction on the Python list.
>>
>>....
>>
>>Having come from a very productive dynamic language (Visual FoxPro) that MS
>>first said could not be ported to .Net, and then when it obviously was
>>possible (in 2005) made no attempt to do so, I'm having a deja vu experience
>>all over again. I'll try not to be as cynical and sarcastic as last time,
>>but I'm having to hold my arm down (shades of Dr. Strangelove) and hold my
>>tongue to prevent shouting out "Middle Management Uber Alles!" (referencing
>>Jimmy's blog post).
>>
>>And so it goes...
>
>Amazingly, though, I also couldn't resist the same shadow in message #1476058... weird, isn't it? I mean, I did it before I saw your message.